From Newfoundland, July 15

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L’Anse aux Meadows

3:45 p.m.


Behind the low reach of a peninsula, the head of an island peers, shaped like the crusty top of a soufflé fresh from the oven, before the exhale of steam and the slow collapse. There’s a breeze here, in the lea of a green pannabode house, while out front, the wind blusters, flags stick straight out as if pinned to a board. The sun is shining, though, with thin sheets of cloud that pretty up the sky, a welcome change from the storm of the drive up, fog thick with rain.

I’m sitting on a bench on a long, green-painted veranda, a white railing between me and tall grass spotted with alder scrub, buttercups, a few bushes whose names I don’t know. Beyond the grass, a thicket of probably the scrubby balsam fir we’ve been seeing near the sea, recognizable by the deep blue stress cones on the outer edges. The growing tips of these trees are brown, as if the weather is just too harsh for the extremities – the shrubbery grows thick rather than tall, clustering around itself like wintering penguins, giving shelter to birds who twit invisibly.

Here I have finally begun to feel the edges of inner movement – something like spiritual connection to place – that I travel for. Newfoundland has not snatched me up as some places do. I’ve been trying to figure out why that is, and the only thing I can surmise is that it is the sense of people’s imprint on an environment that makes the deepest impression on me. This land is more land than people, by far, and much of it is a nondescript land, miles and miles of struggling forest, black spruce, scrub. The west is best, barren almost like the west of Ireland, rock ridges cradling peat bogs, green velvet rolling landscape, not a tree to be found – or not what I would rightfully call a tree. Coming out onto the L’Anse aux Meadows peninsula, I began to feel some attachment, at last.

Norsemen landed here some 1000 years ago, and settled, building sod houses whose remains can still be seen. It’s easy to believe they saw a land much like the land I’m looking at; well, certainly the landforms would be the same, though climate changes through the centuries would likely mean they’d have seen quite different vegetation. Hard to say; maybe the interpretive centre will shed some light. The Norse came in a time of warming climate, came by accident, apparently (they kept records,) while trying to reach Greenland from Iceland. They must have been taken by these sheltered coves, the fertile soil, and of course the fish-laden waters. There would have been plenty to assure their survival here. Winters, I think, must have been dreadful, but they were northern people accustomed to harsh winters. The woman who showed us into our room said they don’t get a lot of snow, but the wind can be bitter, and the bay freezes over all the way out to the island.

L’Anse aux Meadows is a village as well as an historical site. It is typical of Newfoundland villages, consisting of a loose grouping of white box houses, vinyl-sided and characterless. Even in the larger towns, there is a randomness. A paved curving main street typically parallels the waterfront, bordered by wide gravel or dirt edges, driveways off the pavement into here a postoffice, there a shrimp plant, on the left a shack called the R and B Market, on the right the Anchor Restaurant, then a house or two or a boarded-up shed, then another market, a crab shack, a school with a large lot lined with yellow busses. I have yet to see a town with any kind of town centre, public space, or even a block of shops. Even St. John’s, though it definitely has a commercial centre, lacks parks, sculpture, public hanging-out spaces. I’ve never been to such a place before, and I think this lack is part of why I haven’t connected to the settlements here. Nova Scotia’s towns have an order to them, an aesthetic, but in Newfoundland, it’s all business, it seems – build as is convenient and hang the look of the thing.

We spent last night in Port aux Choix, another wind-scraped peninsula 200 kilometers south of here. The site has been occupied for some 2500 years, originally by ancient Indians, then by successive Eskimo groups, long before the Europeans came. We hiked to what is known as Philip’s Garden, an archeological site so rich in artifacts one archeologist said you could dig a spade full of dirt anywhere and find in it two dozen fragments of bone or flint. One house they excavated gave up some 35,000 bone fragments; this was how they were able to recreate the history of the spot.

Port aux Choix, like L’Anse aux Meadows, is nestled in the middle of three bays, perfect shelter for a fishing fleet, ancient or modern. At the visitor’s center in Port aux Choix, the stories of individuals were featured. There was a table of biographies – interviews with oldtimers – collected by the curator and typed up into clear plastic duotangs with photographs taped to the front. The language is colloquial, in the words of the interviewees, and in them I could hear their voices, telling of marriages and moving to town when the only way in was by boat, how one mother couldn’t get out to visit an ailing son, in hospital with tuberculosis in St. Anthony’s, for 15 months. The woman at the front desk said fully a third of the people portrayed in those duotangs have passed on now, even though the interviews were only done in 2005 or so. The curator has caught living history, just in time; typos and all, these are priceless documents.

Also in the centre was a display case describing the burning of a 65-foot longline fishing boat. It had been built in 1980 by a man named Kennedy, at the request of his friend. The boat had made the news before, being the first of a number of large longliners coming out of Port aux Choix and marking the beginning of a new prosperity for the region. She caught fire in the middle of the night, and all the townsfolk showed up throughout the next day to pay their respects, such is the connection of the people to their boats. The newspaper article (in the Northern Pen, I believe, out of St. Anthony’s and quite likely the inspiration for “The Shipping News”,) quoted Paul Watson of Greenpeace as saying that boats don’t catch fire by themselves in the middle of the night and that whoever did this was a hero in his eyes. The article said that Mr. Watson would be unlikely to find any doors open to him in this community. I had to wonder what he was thinking – did he assume this was a sealing boat, situated as it was in the Labrador Strait? And had he ever actually visited this community or others like it, to understand what I can only call the heart of the culture? I would like to look into this incident, to find out Watson’s perspective. To me, the article(s) poignantly told the story of people who live by the sea, out of the sea, who know her yields and her demands better than any conservationist theorist ever could. The industries here do not seem to me to be anything nearly big enough to cause the collapse of any fishery. It is clear that Newfoundlanders blame that on offshore fisheries, the foreigners allowed to fish mercilessly far off the Grand Banks, so that there is nothing left for the inshore fishermen. The blame for that situation, of course, lies with the Federal Government and their international agreements. And in placing that blame, Newfoundlanders again sound like any close-to-the-lander I’ve ever talked to – it’s all the Government’s fault, always. The truth lies somewhere between opposing points of view, I would guess. Getting close to the people who depend on these resources, however, tends to put me on their side.

That's it, isn't it? It's all about connection.




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