(Rouyn-Noranda) Where are we here? “In paradise,” replies Richard Desjardins, seated in the kitchen of his “camp”, one Sunday afternoon in May. “It’s my own paradise, in the woods, not far from Rouyn, in the middle of the boreal forest. I came here 70 years ago. »
Some call the monster cottage with double garage and 12-seater spa where they lounge in the summer a “camp.” Richard Desjardins’ camp is a real camp, built at the end of a winding forest road like a roller coaster, with trees on either side.
Inside, the bare minimum: a bed, a table, a chair covered with a white towel on which sits a guitar, with which the owner of the place writes songs that will perhaps one day result in a new album, there has hope. Toilet reading: a dog-eared copy of The Settler’s Book or How to Settle on Land for Almost Nothing.
And at the back of the room, a door opening onto a quay, which itself overlooks Lake Vaudray, which itself opens onto eternity.
Richard Desjardins was 6 years old when his father, a forestry operations superintendent, took his entire family into this wood so dense that after a first day there, the boy, now 76 years old, had not yet noticed that behind all its trees hide one of the most beautiful lakes in Abitibi.
The aspiring singer still knows nothing about the secrets of wood. Because despite what his legendary defense of the forest might lead you to believe, Richard Desjardins could not have grown up in an environment more different from this immaculate nature.
His childhood home was located, “below the smoke,” about 500 yards from the copper mine around which Noranda was founded. Where the Horne Foundry is still located, that of the arsenic emissions because of which Rouyn-Noranda often slips into the news.
However, it was only around forty years later, “around 1993, 1994”, that his awareness of the precariousness of our forests was born, the first bud of what would lead in 1999 to the creation of the shock documentary L’ Boreal Error, which is celebrating its 25th anniversary.
One day, her father invites her to come and see with his own eyes what is going on not far away, five or six kilometers from the camp, where a harvester is felling everything in its path. “It was as if they were building an international airport,” Desjardins did not forget, still stunned. “There was nothing left. »
It will eventually attract the attention of the man behind the machine. “I remember it very well,” he says with his eye for detail that kills. “He had his headphones on, and when he took them off, it was playing Led Zeppelin on board. » Not from Desjardins.
“Just to tell you that at the bottom of the hill there is a stream and you are going into it,” Richard will warn him. “It’s one of the most important streams that feeds the lake where I have my camp. » Relentlessly nonchalant response from the man behind the machine: “Well, I’ll know when I’m in it. » Anger intact in Desjardins’ eyes. “In my head, the fire burned. » But not the same kind of fire as in Un beau grand slow.
A quarter of a century later, the victories of Action boréale, the organization founded in the wake of the documentary, are real: the proportion of protected areas in Abitibi-Témiscamingue increased from 0.6% in 2000 to 9.4% in 2015.
But its co-founder calls for vigilance and, as a man not unaware of the obliterating power of words, observes that “taking a stem”, as we prefer to say today, is still cutting down a tree. “Forest companies, if they could harvest the entire Abitibi forest in one night with the same machine, they wouldn’t bother. »
Richard Desjardins was 14 or 15 years old when one evening, at the college where he was studying, a big visit arrived: Monique Leyrac. “She started singing and I fell under her spell. A state of shock,” he recalls.
Since then, Richard Desjardins has certainly written at least a few tunes of this caliber, including several contained on Tu m’aimes-tu? (1990), his masterpiece second album which has just received a vinyl reissue.
Among the big caliber of this legendary record: Nataq, a crossing of continents in the form of an epic poem and in alexandrines. How many hours at work to clear so much beauty? About three years. What about The Good Guy? Only four days of work. Richard laughs. “The most popular ones, which make me a living, were written in one go. »
As for the title song, Desjardins harvested the raw material by simply listening. “‘Do you love me?’ a guy wouldn’t say that back in the day,” he recalls. A man considered the love of a woman as something that went without saying.
“But I heard it a lot. It was in the same way that I collected my stock, listening to the world talk, and I realized how a man could fall in love with a woman without asking her too many questions. I said to myself: OK, I’m going to go all out, he’s going to ask questions: “Why do you love me moé? You might like another one!” That’s the question. And it is universal. »