I went to the marina at Saint-Michel-de-Bellechasse today, downstream from Lévis, and took a photo of Grosse Île distorted by the effect called Fata Morgana or Morgan the Fairy, a superior mirage visible in a narrow band right above the horizon. I have often seen this looming effect at sea in the Arctic. Objects at the horizon, or even below the horizon, appear far taller than they really are; objects at the horizon (for example, icebergs or ships) subtly change shape before your very eyes, and may even flip upside down and dip below the horizon, only to reappear again.
Today, Grosse Île was floating above the surface, and ever so slowly breaking up into pieces. The photo I took with my 4K cellphone camera looked a bit strange, so I touched it up, adding a water colour effect.
I find Fata Morgana is like memory generally. What we remember is subject to mirage-like effects, to distortion, when we focus on something to the exclusion of everything else in our minds.
Grosse Île was the quarantine island for mid-19th-century immigrants, like some of my ancestors from Scotland and England who came to Quebec in the 1830s and 1840s. Many people were quarantined on the island, when epidemics of cholera and typhus broke out on their coffin ships; many died at Grosse Île because they were quarantined there, and forced to remain at close quarters with very sick people.
My Scottish great-great-grandfather was convinced he would die if he stayed put, so he and his first cousin, with whom he was travelling, dove into the sea at Grosse Île, and managed to hitch a ride from a local fisherman right up to Quebec City, from where they took a steamboat up to Montreal. Fortunately, they were disease-free. They must have witnessed fellow passengers on their coffin ship dying left and right during their crossing of the Atlantic.
Then, once safely ashore, came the long wait as my great-great-grandfather built up enough savings to support a family in Lower Canada, and invited his Bonnie lying over the Ocean (my great-great-grandmother) to join him in the New World. It must have been nerve-wracking to wait for her to sail from Scotland on another coffin ship, to survive the Atlantic crossing, and then to defy death during the quarantine at Grosse Île.