You say that you’re leaving
Well that comes as no surprise
Still, I kind of like this feeling
Of being left behindThis ain’t nothing new to me
Well it’s just like going home
It’s kind of like those sunsets
That leave you feeling so stoned— “Hasn’t Hit Me Yet,” Blue Rodeo (1993)
That song really doesn’t have anything to do with this story (except that it’s Canadian). It’s more about my thoughts as I write this, five years after my partner of 29 years decided that what we’d had wasn’t worth keeping. Not that I blamed him then or can blame him now.
The last few days of this trip I’d been on new ground, not the places Chris and I had explored together 18 years before. But most of rest of the way I’d be hopscotching between places we’d visited back then. First, though, I had to cover the 250 miles of gravel road from Port Hope Simpson to Goose Bay, the longest stretch of numbered highway in North America without any services.
No towns. No gas stations.
No bathrooms.
These 250 miles were what I’d worried most about when planning the trip. Why I had a full-size spare tire filling up a big chunk of my luggage space. Before leaving Port Hope Simpson I stopped at the hotel to borrow one of the free satellite phones that the province makes available to drivers on the highway. “Oh, we lent the one we had yesterday.” Hmm. Either the satellite phone program is tragically underfunded or the drive isn’t really that difficult and the phones aren’t terribly essential. As it turned out, it really wasn’t such a big deal.
You’ve probably driven on unpaved roads. Going to a winery or to pick apples or cut down a Christmas tree. Horse farms on one side of the road, trees on the other so close you could touch them. Yeah, well, gravel highways are not like those charming country roads. They’re like real highways, fast and vast, but without stripes. Or pavement, of course. I typically have a lot of trouble staying awake while driving, but not while negotiating a gravel road at 50-60 mph. I hardly bothered to take any pictures because there wasn’t much in the way of scenery as the highway headed inland, and the last thing I wanted to do during my pee breaks was play with my camera while hanging out with the black flies. But it didn’t matter that there wasn’t much to look at, because the act of driving was engaging enough. The road looked to have been built with whatever rock was nearby, so the surface varied from fine and smooth (and dusty) to golf ball-sized rocks that were almost impossible to keep a straight line on — never a dull moment. So much of the road is about the road, as if they’d built a highway just so they could maintain a highway — frequent gravel pits, constant construction, and a couple of massive maintenance depots (with free WiFi that makes the trip feel a lot shorter). It seemed pretty obvious that unless the province was more interested in running a summer jobs program than a functioning highway it would have to pave the road pretty soon. And sure enough, paving the approach to Goose Bay has already begun.
As I got closer to Goose Bay I noticed a few changes: a few miles of pavement alternating with stretches of road that weren’t paved but were so solid and smooth that they felt like it (I think they oil the road here to keep the dust down); a huge increase in truck traffic; signs for Nalcor Energy everywhere; and clearings off the left side of the highway for a massive electrical transmission line that will stretch from a new dam at Muskrat Falls all the way to the Avalon Peninsula on the island of Newfoundland. Anyone who thinks hydro power is environmentally benign should remember the landscapes spoiled by power lines, the native hunting grounds flooded by reservoirs, and the migratory routes of fish and mammals destroyed to provide power for cities hundreds of miles away.
Route 510, the Labrador Coastal Drive, ends at Route 500, the original Trans-Labrador Highway, a few miles west of Happy Valley-Goose Bay (population: 7,552). Suddenly the adventure is over. Eighteen years ago Route 500 was a dirt track into the wilderness, but now it’s just regular old paved highway. Goose Bay was established as an air base during World War II, and it looks like they built the town in a hurry and never got around to finishing it. If I had seen a Tim Hortons I would have stopped, but I didn’t so I drove straight through to North West River, my destination for the evening. The 28 miles to North West River look weirdly normal; the bare and rocky land typical of most of Labrador changes to sandy soil, and the stunted spruce give way to broadleaf trees. It reminds me of driving through upstate New York.
North West River (population: 551) predates Goose Bay by two centuries. It has a storied past as a Hudson Bay Company post, Grenfell mission center, and debarkation point for famous expeditions by white men to discover lands the First Nations had known for thousands of years. As the oldest community in central Labrador, North West River is the perfect location for the Labrador Interpretation Centre, a branch of Newfoundland’s provincial museum that tells the stories of the four peoples that make up the region’s population: the Innu, an Amerindian people whose nearest reservation is just across the river; the most southern Inuit (a.k.a. Eskimo) population in the world; white settlers, largely from Newfoundland; and a unique Inuit-Metis culture descended from European traders and trappers and Inuit women. The excellent exhibits are so intent on doing justice to the distinctiveness of the four cultures that they fall short in demonstrating how the groups interacted and influenced each other’s development. Still, it’s a terrific museum and I imagine most visitors have it almost all to themselves, like I did.
After visiting the Interpretation Centre I walked part way up Sunday Hill for the views of Lake Melville and Grand Lake. North West River is the last outpost of civilization in this part of the world, and the vast views of wilderness from up on that hill are stunning and humbling.
The town’s home-grown Labrador Heritage Museum, down on the waterfront, features less modern multicultural scholarship but much more in the way of local history and charm. Occupying the last of the Hudson Bay Company store buildings, dating to 1923, it features a recreated company store, some charming motorized dioramas about life in Labrador, and, best of all for me, some astonishing artifacts from the famous Hubbard expeditions of 1903 and 1905, which departed from North West River. Read James West Davidson and John Rugge’s terrific Great Heart to get a feel for what these expeditions must have been like, and to put my whining about black flies in some perspective.
Having done what there is for tourists to do in NWR, I headed over to the Red Wine Bed & Breakfast, which was my favorite of all the places I stayed on my trip. Not just for the basics. Yes, the room was lovely and the breakfast was hearty and delicious, but this was also the one time on my trip when I felt pampered and connected with other people. There was no one there when I got there so I let myself in, but shortly afterwards the owner, Marlyce, arrived with the other guest, Paula, and the three of us struck up a great conversation while Paula made me some much-needed coffee. Paula was staying there for a week, without a car, and it seemed like she and Marlyce had become fast friends. There’s nowhere in North West River to get dinner, so it’s lucky that Marlyce is a great cook and will make dinner for a reasonable extra charge. I put in my order for salmon and set out for a walk on the beach and around the town.
Despite its history most of North West River doesn’t look very old — Labrador is not like New England, where old houses are revered; the weather is harsh and people are practical, so the homes are mostly pretty new and I think the museum might be the oldest building around. But the town has a lovely location and there’s a very pleasant feeling about the layout of the place. One of my strongest memories from visiting there 18 years ago was the road we walked to get to the beach, where the North West River Beach Festival was being held. Walking on that road again I could almost remember that time. Almost.
Back at the house Paula poured me some wine and I enjoyed a wonderful dinner on the deck in golden late day sunshine — yes, sunshine! Didn’t get much of that on my trip and I’m sure that contributed to my feeling of contentment. Marlyce’s salmon and the Cod at the Norseman in L’Anse Aux Meadows were the best meals I had on my trip, but I will remember that dinner as my happiest. “Oh wow, North West River,” I wrote in my journal a couple days later when I finally got back to it. Oh wow. I’m crying as I write this.
After a very long day I fell asleep early and got up at sunrise the next morning. I drove back up to the top of Sunday Hill, where I said goodbye to that place where I’d been before and wondered if I would ever return to. I also had time to walk back to the beach, where I ran into my new best buddy Paula, who convinced me to take my shoes off and feel the surprisingly warm water of Lake Melville on my feet. That was honestly one of those moments when I could say that even though so much had turned out wrong in my life, at least I had been able to put my feet in Lake Melville in the company of a charming woman from the Azores, via Quebec.
The rest of the trip really was just heading home. I gassed up in Goose Bay on my way back west on the Trans-Labrador, transformed from a primitive dirt track to a modern highway since the last time I’d been on it. One of my regrets from 18 years ago was not stopping to see Muskrat Falls on the way out of Goose Bay. There wasn’t much travel information about Labrador back then, so I didn’t know to look for it. This time around I saw the sign for the turn-off, only to discover that access is prohibited because of the dam construction. Another chunk of paradise encased in concrete.
So onward to the ironically named Churchill Falls, the only town on Route 500 between Goose Bay and Labrador City, and site of one of mankind’s greatest engineering marvels. I say the name is ironic because the Churchill Falls hydroelectric power plant diverts almost the entire flow of the Churchill River away from the falls into underground turbines. Built between 1967 and 1974, it was the largest engineering project ever undertaken in North America; according to Wikipedia it makes almost 1% of the world’s hydroelectric power. The Smallwood Reservoir that feeds Churchill Falls is twice the size of Rhode Island; contained behind 88 dykes instead of a single large dam like most reservoirs, it inundated vast areas of caribou habitat and ancestral Innu hunting grounds.
When Chris and I did this route in 1997 the 180 miles to Churchill Falls from Goose Bay were a slow, tough slog and we wanted to tour the power plant in the morning, so we stayed there, but this time it was just a safety stop for gas and some pictures. The company town itself houses just a few hundred people, down from thousands when the plant was under construction, so the place feels emptied out. But the company seems to take good care of its employees and especially their kids, if all the playgrounds, daycare facilities, and school crossings are any indication. Maybe parents with children make especially desirable employees.
A short distance past the town of Churchill Falls Route 500 crosses the Churchill River near the actual falls, or what’s left of them. The Bowdoin Canyon Nature Trail starts at a parking lot next to the bridge and offers a mostly gentle hike of less than a mile to an overlook where a plaque notes that the site, originally known as the Grand Falls of the Hamilton River, was “first visited” (by a white guy) in 1839. Oddly an expedition from Bowdoin College in Maine also claimed to have “discovered” the canyon that bears the college’s name on an expedition in 1891. But whatever; this used to be a hard place to get to but now it’s getting easier all the time. There are some gorgeous views of the canyon along the trail, but what really amazed me was the total lack of black flies. Maybe I was just lucky, or maybe the fancy new paved highway has chased them away. The last time I’d traveled that route the flies swarmed the car as soon as we stopped anywhere, and even with a head net on it was hard to last more than a few minutes in the open. Progress. I met a friendly group of motorcyclists from Maine at the overlook at the end of the trail. They jumped the railing to go a bit off the official trail for a better view of the falls but I decided not to. Unlike the bikers I had nobody in a sag wagon to tend to me if I screwed up.
Back at the highway I took some photos of the old cable car that crossed the river before the bridge went in. I know the bridge has been there at least since 1992 when Route 500 was completed, so why the heck are that wrecked cable car and the cable towers still there? I guess no one thought there was any reason to clean the mess up.
The rest of the drive was scenic but not really exciting, and I had a hard time staying alert — asphalt doesn’t focus the mind like gravel. Maybe I was jaded from so much driving already. I didn’t get a lot of pictures because the spots where I could pull over tended not to have the greatest views. Which is understandable — it’s an economic lifeline, not a national park, after all. A few signs of civilization start to appear about 40 miles outside the towns of Labrador City (population: 7,367) and Wabush (1,739)— a turn-off for a campground, a railroad crossing — so the transition from wilderness to city isn’t entirely abrupt, but still it’s peculiar to see this place with its Walmart and McDonalds and neighborhoods of artfully laid out streets in what would seem to be the epicenter of nowhere. If it weren’t for the enormous iron mine just outside Lab City the place might seem totally ordinary. I spent the night in Wabush, which lost its main employer when Wabush Mines closed last year in the face of declining global (i.e., Chinese) demand for steel. I was surprised to find my b&b, the Ptarmigan’s Nest, on a street of brand new and rather large and expensive looking houses. The b&b was another great find: a beautiful home, a charming hostess, and a wonderful breakfast.
This was my first night in a city of any size at all since I entered Canada 10 days before, so it was my first real chance meet a Canuck on a (ahem) gentlemen’s rendezvous site. I almost never hook up anymore at home, but when in Rome do the Romans, I always say (not really). If anyone still thinks that being gay is something associated with big cities and effete elites, they should meet this guy: a mine worker in Labrador City who realized in his 30’s that he “likes cock” and ended up divorced and with custody of a young child. Some gay lifestyle choice. Except for telling me that he likes to “make old guys happy” he was a sweet guy, plus he was hot as hell.
The next morning, after a stop for coffee and donuts at Tim Hortons (yes! finally!), I drove across the border into Quebec. Labrador City’s Quebecois counterpart, Fermont (literally “Iron Mountain”), is just a few miles away but a world apart. Lab City does a pretty good imitation of a regular North American town, but Fermont (population: 2,874) is a unique exercise in town planning specifically for a northern environment. A single building, 1.3 kilometers in length, houses almost all of the town’s commercial and municipal functions along with a large number of residences (and even a strip club), and it acts as a windscreen for the neighborhood on its leeward side. I thought it was pretty damn cool 18 years ago but now it’s showing its age. Like Churchill Falls, Fermont is strictly a company town, with some provincially subsidized housing thrown in; well ordered but unsettling.
After Fermont the pavement ends, and the nightmare that is Route 389 begins. Narrow, dusty, poorly maintained, and besieged by giant trucks, Route 389 winds right through the middle of the Mont Wright strip mining complex and crosses the mining company’s railroad about 12 times in the space of a few miles. The dust the big rigs throw up can blind you on any gravel road, but on a road as twisty and poorly graded as that one it’s not just a nuisance, it’s a menace. The experience could be fun in theory, but it’s not, at least not for me. It’s certainly memorable, though, as are the gigantic strip-mined mountains off in the distance. Quebec has committed to upgrade the highway, including a bypass around the Mont Wright mine, with completion anticipated around the end of the decade. It can’t come soon enough.
After 50 miles of gravel hell, pavement resumes at the site of the abandoned Fire Lake mine. The paved highway was built for the mine’s workers, who lived 55 miles to the south in a town called Gagnon. Lucky for travelers this road is still in decent shape even though the mine closed in the 80’s. There are still many miles of gravel farther south on 389, but they’re maintained to a more reasonable standard. One service Quebec provides on 389 that Newfoundland and Labrador doesn’t have on the Trans-Labrador is emergency phones at intervals along the route. The old phone booths look poetically improbable on the taiga.
Gagnon holds a special place in my heart and mind. Chris and I camped there on our way south in 1997, and I’ve long been captivated by the story of the bustling little frontier city that was completely dismantled when the mine closed down. A sign as you approach announces Site de l’Ancienne Ville de Gagnon. Eerily, the old streets of the town still showed up on my car’s GPS, even though they have long since been consumed by vegetation. Google Maps still shows the streets, too, their former paths ghostly traces in the satellite view. The curbs and sidewalks still survive on the main road, along with, astonishingly, a storm water system that still works — you can hear the water rushing below the sewer grates. Presumably it’s more cost-effective to maintain the old vaults than to dismantle them. It’s odd that I caught a photo of a sedan driving through Gagnon, because almost all the traffic on 389, as well as the unpaved part of the Trans-Labrador, consists of trucks, with a smattering of SUV’s and vans. You can certainly do it in a car, but I felt a lot safer having all-wheel drive and a few extra inches of ground clearance.
Eighteen years ago we camped uneasily in an informal campground that occupies a site between the highway and Lake Barbel. A light rain was falling and the place gave us the willies, so we slept inside the Jeep. It was easy to find the spot, looking pretty much as I remembered it, and it felt more than a little spooky to be back there. Several trailers lined the road down to the lake when I was there before, but only one unoccupied unit was there this time, on a prime spot by the lake.
The pavement used to end just past Gagnon but now it continues many miles beyond it. The landscape transforms rather quickly from scrubby taiga to lushly forested mountains as you drive south to the big attraction in these parts, the mammoth Daniel-Johnson dam, better known by its original name, Manic-5 (i.e., dam #5 on the Manicouagan River). Enormous like all of the engineering projects in this part of the world, Manic-5 is the largest multiple-arch buttress dam in the world, and driving on 389 as it skirts the dam’s monstrous buttresses is a profoundly disorienting experience. The tour here isn’t as cool as the one in Churchill Falls but the more accessible location — about 130 paved miles from Baie Comeau on the St. Lawrence — makes it quite popular. My original plan had been to spend the night somewhere on this highway — at Manic-5’s Motel de l’Energie or farther south at a campground near Manic-2, but as usual I had overestimated my travel times so I decided to press on all the way to the pretty whale-watching mecca of Tadoussac on the St. Lawrence, another 247 miles. Maybe the ghosts of 18 years ago were haunting me, or maybe I was just tired of this part of the world, but by this point in the trip another 5 hours of driving seemed like nothing, a small price to pay for getting out of here. I bought the obligatory J’ai survécu à la 389 (“I survived 389”) souvenir cap and pressed on.
Route 389 descends steeply as it approaches Baie Comeau, and despite the maniacally twisting route the guys driving the energy company pickup trucks take it at breakneck speeds, which is more than a little unnerving. There’s little indication that you’re approaching a sizable city until — BAM! — there you are, surrounded by fast food joints, shopping centers, and real gas stations that dispense grades other than regular.
Route 138 from Baie Comeau to Tadoussac is a charming, mostly relaxing drive along the river shore and through small towns, a pleasant contrast to surviving à la 389. I reached Tadoussac around sunset, 482 miles from where I started in Wabush that morning. Camping Tadoussac was familiar turf from the first Labrador drive and from my last unraveling road trip with Chris 5 years ago. The sites are tiny — I could barely squeeze my not-especially-large tent behind my not-especially-large car — and the fire rings are the worst known to man, but I liked being back there.
Thanks to the awful fire ring (literally an old truck wheel buried in the sand) it took me forever to start a campfire, but I was determined to enjoy my last night of camping and I finally managed. Somehow I ended up being just about the last person in the campground to go to sleep that night and one of the first to get up the next morning. First order of the day: catching the gorgeous morning view over Tadoussac, definitely the camground’s best amenity. Tadoussac exudes a tidy, almost New England-like charm despite its dramatic location on a fjord piercing the St. Lawrence, a combination that draws plenty of tourists, mostly from Quebec. It’s a very Francophone place, although the handicap of having little or no French is handled with a smile. I found a lovely (but far from solitary) hiking trail along the water that I’d never seen before, then did the customary walk around the town and the Hotel Tadoussac (famous for playing the title role in the film “The Hotel New Hampshire”). It was a beautiful day in a gorgeous little town but something felt off. Too many people. Memories.
I read once that the Saguenay River is considered the western boundary of the Labrador Peninsula, so crossing the fjord on the free ferry felt like saying goodbye to my Labrador adventure. From there it was only about 130 miles to Quebec City, which would leave me lots of time to explore the city that afternoon.
I’d been looking forward to Quebec all along, my first visit there since my 50th birthday, 7 years ago. I’d always loved it there. I found it charming and romantic. But I’d been wrong. Through my solitary, 57-year-old eyes the old city now looked like the world’s most elaborate lifestyle shopping center. Damn all those people having fun. Dulling the annoyance with beer only made me grumpier and the stairs between the lower and upper towns harder to climb. At least I had perfect weather that day.
My lodging for the night was an Airbnb rental in a neighborhood rarely seen by tourists. I’d been to Quebec several times but had never realized how the stark topological divide between upper and lower city extends beyond the historic district. Where I spent the night, down below, there were no trendy restaurants and English was barely known. The basement flat was eccentric, to say the least — old guitars and knickknacks abounding, and a sprawling layout I couldn’t quite get a handle on. Probably a fun place to spend a few days with a boyfriend.
And there’s the rub. The song “Hasn’t Hit Me Yet” is relevant to this story after all. Because I found, or rather confirmed, how experiences only feel real — they only really hit you — when you can share them with someone else. Without my ex, my beloved Quebec felt alienating, and even the great crazy drive through Labrador felt like an abstraction, not my own memory. Like the reality of my breakup five years ago, I don’t know if the trip will ever really hit me. That’s part of the motivation for sharing it in this blog, even though no one ever reads it.
The weather turned on me once again on my last morning in Canada. The rain poured on my walk to the neighborhood’s breakfast joint, where I scored a rare linguistic triumph of getting through the meal without begging the waitress to speak English (not sure she could have anyway). The drive to the US border was uneventful, and driving straight through Montreal without stopping, which might have felt sad, felt mostly numb. At the border crossing I ended up in a line that I swear moved an order of magnitude slower than the others, thanks to a border patrol agent who was giving America a pretty bad name. He seemed to want so badly to trip me up; his disappointment was palpable when he opened my cooler and found nothing but melted margarine and a stick of pepperoni. I wished US border agents could have even a tenth of the good nature of their Canadian counterparts, but even so I was surprisingly happy to be back home.
I wound down the trip with a two-night stay with my mom in Schenectady, a nice time to rest, catch up, watch HGTV, and eat at some of my favorite restaurants. Thanks, mom!
I’ll close with a few of the “good things” I scribbled in my last journal entry, which was in Tadoussac:
Subie Doo. You are a champ.
Journaling
Asphalt
People who are nice about language difficulties
A fire that finally lights
Being alive.
EPILOGUE: If you’ve read this travelogue from the beginning you may recall my anxiety about gas mileage, which continued to plague me for most of the trip. Drinking coffee on my mom’s front porch one morning I noticed Subie Doo was sitting with its nose up a little higher than its tail, and it dawned on me that by packing the monster spare tire and my heaviest gear all the way to the back, behind the rear axle, I may have tipped the balance of the car just enough to let the underside catch too much air and spoil the aerodynamics. It may have been coincidental, but after I repacked the car my mileage jumped by a few mpg on the last leg of the trip back to DC. I still need to find a place to store that damn tire so I can reclaim my luggage space. Other than my gripes about the gas mileage, the Subaru was a gem throughout the trip.
