Greetings from Newfoundland, August 25, 2002
(See photos at the bottom).
Canada. Trees and lakes. Trees and lakes. Trees and lakes. But mostly trees, trees, trees. One of my earliest recollections as a child was riding in a car with my parents and my brother in my native Minnesota and saying, "Are we there yet?"
"Look at the scenery," my parents would say. "Isn't it beautiful!"
"What scenery?" my brother and I would ask. "It's just more trees and lakes." Minnesota has 10,000 lakes and a gazillion trees.
Now that I'm older, I appreciate trees and lakes much more fully, though I'm not really sure how I gained that appreciation.
So, what inspired me to come to Newfoundland? Last year?s movie "The Shipping News" showed some of the rugged coastline scenery and included some quirky characters with funny accents that made the place seem intriguing. Another reason, however, has had me wanting to visit the place for many years, ever since I was a child.
Almost exactly 1000 years ago, the first Europeans to arrive in America, Norse men and women under the leadership of Leif Erickson established a settlement in an area they called Vinland at the far northern tip of what later became known as Newfoundland. The site, called L'Anse Aux Meadows, is the only authenticated evidence of Norse landing in North America.
Coming here has been something of a pilgrimage for me, being partly of Norse heritage myself and due to inspiration planted in me ever since grade school. As the site appears today, it is little more than some excavated sod-covered mounds, some replica sod buildings, plus a cast of characters in Viking garb to make the place come alive. Although the ruins are not much to look at, the history and the mystery of the place, most of which has been gathered through educated guessing and dead reckoning, is still fascinating to contemplate. The journal entries of Leif Erickson, plus 800-year-old writings called the Vinland Sagas that had been passed down for nearly 200 years by word of mouth helped to pinpoint the location. In spite of the name Vinland, grapes never grew this far north, although evidence of some nuts found at the site that normally grow where grapes grow in New Brunswick and New England, indicate that this site was probably just a stopover point to places further south.
We know from archaeological evidence that human populations spread both eastward and westward from their origins in Africa, with those who headed eastward across Asia and the Americas, of course, spreading over vastly greater distances than those who ran into the barrier of the Atlantic Ocean. East met west for the very first time when the Norse encountered the Beothuk Indians (the last of whom died in 1829) on the eastern coast of Canada 1000 years ago. A monument to this first encounter is at L'Anse Aux Meadows, and the national park here was the very first among many to be declared by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site.
Hitchhiking was not part of my original plan for this trip, but sometimes,
the bus just doesn't go where I want to go. After a couple
instances of what seemed to be incredible luck, getting rides almost
instantly, I just kept right on hitching, catching a dozen rides over three
days. Often, I didn't even have to hold out my thumb. Just
hold up a map and look as if you're trying to get somewhere, and people
will sometimes pause to offer assistance. Other than one 45-minute
wait along a lonely road in southern Labrador, most of the rides came within
a few minutes. They were interesting folks too -- an enforcement
officer who monitored fish catches, a family travelling from Toronto with
a large recreational vehicle, a surveyor and his companion who like me
was also a cartographer, and even a couple who had just come from their
wedding the day before.
29 collisions with moose so far this year, a highway sign reports on the north-south highway. That averages about one per week. My bus driver had to slam on his breaks three times to avoid hitting a moose in the night hours, and the third time spooked him enough to finally slow down and not worry that he was running behind schedule. Moose are not native to Newfoundland, but were introduced a century ago and are certainly flourishing now. Parts of the island now have some of the highest concentrations of moose in the world.
Also in high concentration, particularly in Labrador, are the dreaded and relentless black flies. Thankfully, the wind was blowing strongly the day I was hitching in Labrador or I would have been eaten to shreds. As it is, I have numerous bumps on my head under my hair where it was not possible to apply bug repellent, and my experience is that it takes weeks for these to go away. One woman I met who had been out kayaking had a face swollen like a grapefruit from black fly bites. Many people wear bug suits that completely cover themselves from head to toe.
The coast of Labrador is largely isolated from the rest of Canada since the only way to reach it is by ferry. That will be changing in the coming years when its one road will finally be connected to Quebec. In the meantime, from a traveller?s perspective, the place still benefits from its relative isolation and quaintness. The population remains low, and people from one small village to the next seem to know everybody (or are related to everybody) along the coast, except for when the occasional stranger like me passes through. For example, I stayed at Barney's Bed and Breakfast, hosted by a warm but slightly cantankerous lady named Mary. The following day, while hitchhiking up the coast, I was picked up by one of her nephews in another town. Later that day, on the way back down the coast, a driver picked me up and introduced himself as being a Barney too. It was Mary's son.
There was a bumper harvest of cod one year in the early 1990s, but even the cod fishermen themselves were complaining that the waters surrounding Newfoundland were being overfished. The following year told the story. The decline in the fish catch was so precipitous that, for example, a crew from one community who had come in with a record catch the previous year came back with hardly enough to fill a barrel the next. The Canadian government immediately slapped a moratorium on all cod fishing in 1992 and have tightly regulated it ever since. Whole communities built around cod fishing shut down. Many folks left Newfoundland looking for work wherever they could find it and were typically obliged to switch occupations. Some headed to job-rich areas in places such as Alberta, where the oil industry was booming.
The towns left behind are still recovering. Many have turned their homes into Bed and Breakfasts. Others have retrained themselves for other things. The local joke is that they now have an oversupply of hairstylists, since many women, in an effort to help support their families, tended to follow the same paths. It also seems that nearly everybody is trying to supplement their incomes by selling homemade jams made from handpicked partridge berries and ocean berries that grow wild. Some complain that while the Canadian government has been generous in providing assistance to other troubled industries, they have done next to nothing to assist cod fishermen and their families to get retrained.
There is now a yearly quota for cod. Licenses are sold that run into the hundreds of thousands of dollars. Unfortunately, the way the law is written, it has a tendency to pit neighbor against neighbor, which sometimes results in some rather hostile feelings in some communities. Once a quota is filled, perhaps by one crew getting some big catches, no one else is permitted to catch any fish for the rest of that year.
The good news for this region is that tourism is booming. Although the rest of Canada has had a decline in international visitors this year (surprising, given the favorable exchange rate for the U.S. dollar), the number of foreign visitors to Newfoundland is way up. One could point to its exposure from films such as "The Shipping News", but Newfoundlanders can also point with pride to the attention they got when literally thousands of families here opened their doors to host people whose flights crossing from Europe to the States were stranded last September 11th. The reputation for hospitality here was already well deserved, but that event put several asterisks on it. 60 Minutes and other programs featured stories about it.
A stay at the hostel in St. Johns is just $10 U.S. per night, including
an English muffin, coffee and tea. These days, it's about $1.50
Canadian to one U.S. dollar. A 15% General Service Tax (GST),
known affectionately locally as the "Gouge and Screw Tax", is tacked on
to just about everything, but U.S. citizens and other foreign travellers
can keep their receipts and send them to the Canadian government for a
full refund, which they'll receive in two or three months.
The easternmost point of North America is at Cape Spear in Newfoundland.
It's one of those places that geographers like me get
excited about for no other reason than what mountaineers express in
their dictum -- "because it's there". The easternmost point of this.
The northernmost point of that. Who cares? It's kind of like
meteorologists getting excited about weather stats or baseball
enthusiasts and their stats. I am like a kid collecting baseball
cards, and by coming here, I just got another prized one.
Icebergs float along the coast of Newfoundland, sometimes even well into August. People tell me that they saw a few burgs as recently as a week before I came, but I haven't managed to see any.
A couple folks made mention of the time a wayward polar bear floated into St. Johns harbor on an iceberg. They had to sedate the creature and send him back to his northerly habitat rather than let him run havoc through the streets of St. Johns.
Speaking of running havoc through the streets of St. Johns, the nightlife here is quite lively. There are probably more watering holes per capita than most places I've ever been. A local tradition is to get "screeched in", an initiation ceremony that involves a shot of some local concoction and the reciting of some Newf'landeese that sounds indecipherable when you first hear it from a fast talking local. Then they give you a certificate recognising you as an honorary Newfy.
Whales are visible from the coastline at Signal Hill, which is just a click up the road, walking distance from downtown St. Johns. Signal Hill is the site of the final decisive battle between the British and the French in 1762, which helped to establish the language we now speak, although it would take the American Revolution, some years later, to help establish our dialect, rather than settle on the Queen's English. Signal Hill is also where Marconi received the first radio signal from across the Atlantic just over 100 years ago.
The people have been extraordinarily friendly here, in greater measure than anywhere else I've been in North America. Meanwhile, the scenery has been great (including those trees and lakes), and the weather has been incredibly cooperative, although there is a blistering gale happening as I've been typing this while sitting warm and cozy at the hostel. Tomorrow, I will make my way by ferry back to Nova Scotia.
Thanks for reading.
Deano
Here are some photos:
A fijord in Gros Morne National Park
http://deanoman.com/maritime14.JPG
Cape Spear, most easterly point in North America
http://deanoman.com/maritime65.JPG
Dean hitching on the Labrador coast
http://deanoman.com/maritime42.JPG
Labrador scenery
http://deanoman.com/maritime38.JPG
http://deanoman.com/maritime12.JPG
Replica Viking housing at L'Anse Aux Meadows, World Heritage Site
http://deanoman.com/maritime07.JPG
