Newfoundland: Codless and Charming
Author’s Note: Newfoundland: Codless and Charming was published originally in 2004 as a travel feature in the South China Morning Post (HK) and concerns my 2001 trip to Newfoundland, the first leg of a journey that led to a dozen years of travel & writing. Outside of freshening up some of the punctuation to clarify the Newfoundland dialogue, the article is as it appeared in the SCMP 20 years ago.
The first thing I saw was a cluster of foreboding rocks far in the distance. It was six AM and drizzling, and I was on the good ship MV Caribou, Newfoundland bound. I’d not slept not a wink on the overnight trip, and was distressed to see that the ship was heading at the sinister rockpile, full throttle. I brought this to the attention of the deckhand standing beside me, hands folded stoically behind his back.
“Why are we aiming for that pile rocks?”
“T’at pile a rocks is Newfoundland.”
It was soon light enough to make out the town of Port Aux Basques, which seemed not so much a town as a collection of buildings perched on stones jutting from the ocean; over to the left lay an ancient cemetery that had somehow been planted in the thin soil of a boulder half the size of a football field. Around this collection of coastal stone stretched a road built over thin wooden bridges. The boat docked, and after a long trip, I was on the place known lovingly by natives as “the Rock”
After a rough night at sea, I was in no mood to hitchhike, so I figured I’d get a room in town and head on the next morning. But Port Aux Basques isn’t really the sort of place where people with options hang out. Named by Portuguese fisherman in a bygone day when Portuguese fisherman went around naming places, PAB sits on the SW tip of the island, and is one of two places where ferries from the Mainland (as Continental Canada is known) come in. I headed into town hoping for a friendly reception at the nearest bed and breakfast.
“Check-ins 11, might be able to find you a room at ten.” Said the innkeeper, an old man whose bushy eyebrows stuck out past the brim of an old fisherman’s cap. It was just gone seven, so I walked around town until I found an open café on stilts hanging from one of the larger rocks out into the sea. Over an uninspired plate of ham, eggs and greasy mayonnaise, I pored over tales of economic woe mixed with recipes for seal-flipper pie in the local paper before heading back to the B&B for a nap.
In the afternoon, refreshed and ready, I decided to give the town another wander. There wasn’t much to see outside of the saltbox houses, a few stores, and a couple of hotels built to accommodate either tourists or people waiting for the next ferry out. PAB’s rugged beauty was seeped in an air of decay often found in places where whose salad days lie generation past. A dilapidated old restaurant had a sign boasting “Authentic Chinese Food,” Being an old China hand, I decided to stop in for dumplings.
The Ho family had immigrated to Newfoundland from Canton in the mid-seventies. Back then, cod was still king, and Newfoundland offered them more opportunity with less competition than they’d have had in Ontario or BC. But it was clear from the state of the restaurant that business wasn’t what it once was, and probably never would be again. The family, like many Newfoundlanders, had seen their fortunes evaporate into a salt-water and rum-tinged ether when the fisheries collapsed.
I was standing on the side of the road early the next morning, watching as one vehicle after another drove off the boat without a glance in my direction. I was beginning to contemplate pricier transport arrangements when a powder blue Chevy screeched to a gravel halt beside me.
“Aryea’murdrar’rapist then, b’ye?” Asked the driver, a thin woman with elfish features and wispy blond hair.
“Come again?” I answered
“My sister’s askin’ you if you’re a murderer or rapist.” Said the woman riding shotgun, her blond locks hanging over her eyes.
“um, neither.” I answered (quite truthfully).
“Then hop in b’ye…we don’t have all day!”
I crawled in the back seat, which was crammed with boxes, and sat with my pack in my lap.
“I’m Cece, and my sister here’s Stephanie. You’re lucky we picked you up, my son. Otherwise you’d be stuck here till tomorrow, nobody drives past here except folks comin’ off the ferry. Where you headin’?”
I told them that I planned to head up the Northern Peninsula to spend a couple of days exploring the Fjords of Grosse Morne Park and do a bit of sea kayaking in the Labrador straits. Later, I thought I would hitch to the northern tip to check out L’anse Aux Meadows, the ruins of an 11th century Viking settlement.
“Sounds like a fine plan, my son, but you really should come all the way to St. John’s wit’ us today… best party in Newfoundland startin’ tonight”
“What’s party’s that?” I asked, and they laughed like I’d told them I’d never heard of Santa.
“George Street Festival! T’ree days and nights of live bands, dancing, and drinking till your blind.” Answered Stephanie
“I…thought that was a typical Newfoundland weekend.” I said
“Yes, but with more bands…handsome boy like you is sure t’ meet a nice girl or t’ree.” Said Stephanie.
“Newfie gals like you come-from-aways.” added Cece.
I figured I could double back later.
So we drove north, on a road surrounded on both sides with intermittent green arctic meadows and high, rocky cliffs topped by sparse patches of grass on a stunningly beautiful road stretching from one corner of Newfoundland to the other. Route 1 meanders through hundreds of kilometers of beautiful, rugged, heavily forested land, punctuated occasionally by a small town, a truck stop, or a turn-off leading out onto the fjorded fingers of land jutting out into the cold North Atlantic. Outside of the cities and towns, Newfoundland is mostly free of any kind of suburban sprawl; along its craggy southern coast sit towns with double-digit populations, many of which are connected to the rest of the rock by semi-regular ferries that service the coast, weather permitting.
In the afternoon, we stopped for a picnic at the site memorial outside of Gander that marks the site of one of the American military’s worst peacetime air disasters; the 1985 crash of a chartered DC-8 which crashed into the cold, damp landscape while taking off from Gander airport, killing 248 US soldiers. Disaster plays an honored role in the Newfoundland; much of this lore concerns the propensity that ships over the centuries have had to capsize or be otherwise dashed against the island’s rocky shores. Many are the Newfie family that traces their ancestries to people who were heading for warmer climes, but crashed instead into the rock and decided to make a go of it there instead.
Except for a narrowly avoided disaster involving a near run in with a moose (“Moose is the biggest killer of Newfies,” Stephanie told me), we made good time, and were soon crossing over the narrow isthmus onto the Avalon Peninsula, on the easternmost edge of which lay St. John’s, and the promised drunken debauchery. A turnoff pointed to a scenic road around a cove that offered to bring us to towns the towns of Heart’s Delight, Old Pelican, and Dildo.
“What’s it like in Dildo?” I wondered
“Ah, it’s not as exciting as you might t’ink.” Said Cece
With the sun behind us, we crested the hill and descend into St. John’s. North America’s oldest — and Easternmost — city, built on a hill overlooking a lovely harbor once said to have teemed with Cod to the point where, according to the old salts, “you didn’t need a fishin’ pole back ten, b’ye — you could just slap t’e water with an oar and stun a few.” The city looked like something from an old Irish novel, filled with rows of three story flat-topped homes, each one painted a starkly different pastel color than it’s neighbor. One or two were painted black; these, I supposed, were the non-conformists in a city known for its non-conformity.
Cece and Stephanie let me out of the car in front of a Hostel and gave me their phone number. “If t’ey don’t got a bed for you, call. If t’ey do, come by the Duke of Duckworth at around ten, have some drinks.” I secured my bunk in a ten dollar a night dorm room where some hairy backpackers were either resting up for the coming festivities or sleeping off the previous night’s, and headed out for a wander.
Still, to early for the big party, I found myself in a little bistro on Duckworth Street, a place offering Newfoundland delicacies like mussels in butter, whole lobsters & fish and chips smothered in gravy. Still in travel mode, I had my map spread out in front of me when a waitress with long braided hair running down her back, a faraway gaze and a smile that nearly melted my heart came by to take my order.
“You come from away then, my son?” She asked, and I told her that I’d just hitchhiked from Maine.
“That’s some far away.” She noted, and I felt her eyes on me as she doodled dreamily on her order pad. “So…you plannin’ on going to George Street tonight?”
“I was thinking about it. Think I’d see you there?”
She smiled a surreptitious little smile. “You just might at that, my son.” And turned to put in my order.
Feeling suddenly warm, pleasant and most welcome, I folded up my map, thinking I might just stick around for a while after the party ended.
Postscript: I wound up spending six months in Newfoundland, which coincided with the events of 9/11/2001. But that’s another story, one told far better than I ever could in the hit musical Come From Away.
