The Strangers' Gallery

by Paul Bowdring

  “We witnessed,” he wrote, “the phenomenon of the very great transparency of the sea which it assumes here during the time of change of wind from West to East. The fishes and their haunts amongst the rocks and luxuriant weeds at the bottom were seen to a fearful depth.”

  After the boat finally dropped them off at the end of the Sound—a long, deep reach of sea—close to what is now the community of Milton, he watched it disappear “into the gloomy gut.”

  “An abyss of difficulties,” he wrote, “instantly sprang up in the imagination between the point where we stood and the civilized world we had just quitted, as well as between us and the centre of the Terra Incognita.”

  But he quickly left these gloomy thoughts behind and, two months later, on the first of November, after crossing the fearful terrain of the unknown interior—about two hundred miles as the crow flies—and finally seeing the ocean again, from the summit of a snowy ridge, he “hailed the glance of the sea as home, and as the parent of everything dear.”

  He did not stay on the west coast for very long, however. After a two-week rest he was off again, “on foot to the southward along the sea shore…in hopes, by walking and boating, to reach Fortune Bay, a distance of upwards of two hundred miles, before all the vessels for the season had sailed for Europe.” About a month later, he reached “the Bay of Despair” and stayed at the establishment of the famous fish merchants Newman and Company, where he “learnt with satisfaction that the last ship for England this season from this coast was to sail within a few days from another of their establishments in Fortune Bay.” But it was almost two weeks before he boarded his ship, the Duck, and set sail for England, perhaps because it was the Christmas season. In the meantime, he experienced the “delight of being restored again to society, which was enjoyed with the gentlemen and families of the mercantile establishments at the Bay of Despair and Fortune Bay.”

  Not to mention the fact that other restoratives may have come into play, even for a dour Scot like Cormack. The Newman Company was more famous for port wine than fish. Cormack didn’t leave Fortune until after Christmas, on the twenty-eighth of December. He arrived in Dartmouth, England, on the tenth of February, 1823, a sea voyage of six weeks in the North Atlantic at the very worst time of the year; but, strangely, the normally loquacious Cormack gives no details at all about the trip.

  Sunrise announced that adieu was to be taken for a time to the routine habits of civilization…Fancy carried us swiftly across the Island.

  We left St. John’s early in the morning, and by midday were halfway across the Island. Anton was driving—and driving fast. He loved “the open road,” he said, though he hated cars, hated city driving. Indeed, this was the first time he’d driven a car in the whole eight months he’d been in St. John’s. He missed his truck, he said, missed “the feel of the gears,” and was glad that the old Tercel was a standard. Though he was an experienced truck driver, and I had complete faith in him, he was a bit too fond of a heart-stopping manoeuvre that he called “double de-clutching”—or maybe he meant “de double clutching”—which he executed when he had to accelerate or slow down quickly, either when tearing past a string of house trailers or tractor trailers on a two-lane highway or pulling up short in the middle of an attempt and squeezing in front of an angry driver. He seldom pulled up short, however, and on a couple of occasions when overtaking on a section of four-lane highway, at the point where the inside lane ended and big white capital letters on the pavement commanded him to YIELD, he double de-clutched right on past at 145 kilometres an hour, as the car shook, rattled, and almost rolled.

  Anton seemed to love the open road and the feel of the gears so much, in fact, that we’d already sped past—as the tercel flies, so to speak—the Road to the Cape and the Road to the Isles, at the ends of which was the gannet of the south and the Nightingale of the North, respectively. My mention of both the Cape St. Mary’s gannetry on the Cape Shore and Madame Toulinguet’s reliquary in Twillingate had elicited a double demurral, by way of de double murmur, but not a word.

  We were now only a few miles from Grand Falls, in the centre of the Island. At Jumper’s Brook, just before the turnoff to the south coast, we didn’t jump, but hesitated, pulled in at an Irving service station and restaurant for a close look at the map, especially at the long, long road that dropped like a plumb line straight down through the dead centre of the Island, through the “mocking emptiness” of the lonely wild interior, the “monotonous sublime,” which had “bludgeoned” William Cormack’s delicate sensibility more than a century and a half ago.

  There was not a single town on the entire route, in fact, until you reached the head of “Bay d’Espoir,” as it’s bilingually printed on the map, or Bay Despair, as we call it, a wondrously unique linguistic reversal that passed beyond mere sound and sense and probably said more about the Newfoundland psyche than most of us would care to admit. It had an ancient ring to it, the weight of a proverb, or an old story, something of the bold simplicity and persistence of “Burn your boats,” Smallwood’s now proverbial exhortation. It was perhaps the more transparent ur-lament behind the Newfoundland proverb that had caused the Reverend Julian Moreton so much bewilderment.

  A mid-nineteenth-century Church of England missionary for the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, the Reverend Moreton was bewildered not only by the peculiar character and strange habits of Newfoundlanders, but also by their enigmatic proverbs. One in particular caused him great consternation. In his 1863 memoir, he says: “There was a proverb more often used than any other, of which I must either believe it spoilt by misquotation or else confess myself too dull to perceive its force: ‘We must live in hopes, supposing we die in despair.’”

  I noticed on the map that the first town on the road to Bay d’Espoir was actually called Head of Bay d’Espoir. I pictured a giant bowed head in a pair of large calloused hands, weeping inconsolably above the granite cliffs, salty tears draining into the despairing sea. Unexpectedly, Anton was taken with the idea of heading straight for it, and then on to Hermitage in Hermitage Bay, where it looked as if we could get a ferry to Burgeo and the Sandbanks Provincial Park, a nesting site, he said, of the piping plover. I’m ashamed to say, though, that I lacked the enthusiastic and adventurous spirit of Mr. Cormack, though we had a map, a car, and a paved road on which to drive it. So, when the waitress—Marjorie, her name tag read—arrived and informed us that not only was there no town along that entire one-hundred-mile stretch of road, but not a single service station either, and that we could “go in the back way” on a brand new road, not on our map, that went straight to Burgeo from the west coast, avoiding the boat trip as well as the more desolate road, our minds were easily made up.

  Marjorie pointed the new road out to us on a new map. Coincidentally, it began at the head of St. George’s Bay, where Cormack had come out of the woods, ending his arduous two-hundred-mile trek. The road ran past Silver Pond, Cormack’s Lake, through the Long Range Mountains, the Annieopsquotch Mountains, the Blue Hills of Couteau, right down to the doorstep of the piping plover.

  “The Blue Hills of Couteau,” Anton whispered to himself. He seemed to like the sound of that. Most of the country we had driven through on the tch was just woods and rock and water, bog and barrens—savannas, Cormack had called them. He had imagined Newfoundlanders, like some nomadic African tribesmen, herding caribou on the savannas. Anton wanted to see some mountains, real mountains. He saw Newfoundland as the mirror image of his own country, which was a big basin, more than half of it reclaimed, below sea level, ready to fill up again as the inevitable effects of global warming took their toll.

  In Holland, Anton said, there were only hills, the highest being just over a thousand feet, but this, and others, were proudly called mountains. If his country had been blessed with real mountains, he said, the Germans would not have found it so easy to occupy the place. A real war of resistance, a guerilla war, cou
ld have been waged, and the enemy might have been driven out. But in one of the smallest, flattest, and most well organized countries in the world, the occupying forces had an easy time of it. One or two battalions had done the job.

  It was after two o’clock, and we still hadn’t had lunch. Having made our decision to continue west instead of detouring south, we relaxed and took a closer look at the menu. There were the usual burgers, fish and chips, and fried chicken, but in the “All Day Breakfast” lineup Anton spotted an item called “Turr Omelette,” something I can’t remember even my old turr-mad, grad-school acquaintance, Squires, having in his repertoire. Just a playful, imaginative way to get surplus game down the throats of tourists or Hollywood film crews, perhaps, or something you might serve to Newfoundland caribou herdsmen after a hard day on the savannas.

  Anton assumed that the omelette was made with seabird eggs, but the waitress, when she returned with her pad and pencil, explained with a kind smile:

  “Oh no, sir. Hens’ eggs, with turr meat on the inside, like a cheese omelette.”

  “Ahhh,” Anton said, and I wasn’t sure if he was relieved or displeased. He did have a great appetite for Newfoundland cuisine, especially fish, almost anything you laid in front of him. He decided against the turr omelette, however; he went for the safer fish and chips, and I did as well. I ordered lemon pie afterward to cut the grease. While I was eating it, Anton retrieved a newspaper that someone had left at the next table and began to skim through it in his usual fashion, from back to front, then returned to a few items his mind had filed away. I watched him over the rim of my glasses as I ate.

  I am not a traveller. I’m sedentary and reclusive by temperament, lazy as well, and am most content at home with a coffee and a book—Long Walks in France, perhaps, or Sailing Through China. I could count the number of trips I’ve taken in my life—by car, bus, train, boat, and plane—on two hands for sure, if not on one. Every time I have set out, as sure as buds in May and frost in June, in some place not far away—sometimes even the place I’m leaving or the one I’m going to—planes are falling out of the sky, trains flying off tracks, buses plunging into mountain gorges, or boats sinking with all hands lost. And it’s always the same type of carrier, as they call it, as the one I’m about to entrust my life to. Today, sure enough, it was a car on a highway.

  “Look at this,” Anton said, pushing right under my nose the daily chronicle of travel carnage that I had vowed to avoid reading while travelling.

  “Road opens up swallowing man,” said a headline under International News, adding a whole new dimension to the concept of “the open road.”

  In the early morning darkness on a road in Maryland, a lone driver had plunged to his death into a twenty-foot-deep, forty-foot-wide sinkhole that opened up in the middle of a highway. The image of Cormack’s vision before his trip came back to me: a great transparent sinkhole in the ocean, a vision of the fearful depths of Trinity Bay. The depths of Bay d’Espoir, if he had chanced to witness those while staying at Newman and Company, might have been even more fearful. Though it may be the smallest of our most well known bays, it is thought to be the deepest—half a mile deep.

  “Sinkholes can occur,” the story said, “when rainwater dissolves limestone or marble bedrock, creating underground caves that grow until the material above collapses.”

  The vehicle, with dead body, had been lifted out with a crane, the huge hole filled with rocks, the road paved over and reopened by evening, almost as if the incident had never happened.

  “If you can’t depend on marble bedrock,” I said to Anton, handing him back the newspaper, “what can you depend on?”

  “Not even no tornadoes in Newfoundland,” he said, laughing and turning the pages of the paper, searching for something else. He had, very early on, picked up on our habit of ironically cataloguing the negative wonders of our salubrious clime, but had only recently adopted it as his stock response to the polite, oft-asked question, “So, how do you like it here?”

  “I love it,” he would reply. “No tornadoes, typhoons, earthquakes, volcanoes…” And he’d go on to add dangerous flora and fauna, real and imaginary, to the list: “No snakes, triffids, poison ivy, Cyclops, killer bees, grizzly bears, alligators…”

  He pushed the paper under my nose again and tapped his finger on the table next to another traveller’s tale.

  “Dust devil hits car on tch,” I read under provincial news.

  A man driving between Badger and Grand Falls had encountered what he described as a “miniature tornado” heading straight down the road toward his car. “It was unnerving,” he said. “A beautiful day, we were just driving along and all of a sudden, out of the blue, there was this little twister. It went right over the top of the car and the noise was deafening. I guess I was just in the wrong place at the wrong time,” he added, a statement that seemed right for him, but would have been the understatement of the year for the man from Maryland, had he survived.

  A spokesman for the weather office in nearby Gander had speculated that it was a rare wind phenomenon known as a “dust devil.”

  When the waitress returned with our bill, she spotted the headline.

  “That was just down the road here,” she said, “around this time Saturday, between Rushy Pond and Thunder Brook. You shoulda seen the car. The paint was chipped right off and the windshield was all splintered. He stopped in here on his way home.

  “Last year my father ran into a moose…or under a moose, he figures. He was in a little car, a Pinto. He didn’t see it first or last. It was about nine o’clock in the evening, just after dark, and he heard something whoosh over the roof of the car. The windshield cracked and sort of caved in. He pulled over to the side and got out of the car but he didn’t see a thing. Nothing. He wasn’t hurt, but his eyes were all sore and he had to drive all the way home with his head out through the window because he couldn’t see at all through the windshield. The next morning he saw that the car was all scratched up, just like that other one. And there was hair caught in the wipers and the antenna and the mirror. He figures he went right underneath the moose. His eyes were full of bits of glass that the doctor had to take out with tweezers. He must have been at it for two weeks or more. The glass damaged the nerves in his eyes so he can’t keep his lids open. The muscles won’t work, and the insurance won’t pay him a thing.”

  “Holy Christ,” Anton said, uncharacteristically.

  I became aware of my head moving incredulously back and forth.

  She just stood there for a moment looking at us sympathetically, as if we were the ones who’d had all the trouble, and was thoughtful enough not to say, “Have a nice trip.” She simply lifted her tray of dirty dishes ever so slightly and said, “Bye-bye.”

  The Indian idea of a road is to Europeans little else than a problem of reaching a distant place alive.

  Anton drove on, but not as fast, I noticed. He abandoned de double clutching, or double de-clutching, or whatever it was, along with double- triple- and quadruple-passing. I now had an extra hand to do things with, as I was no longer permanently clutching the overhead passenger handgrip. I peeled a large orange, which we shared. We didn’t speak much, listened to a tape of his favourite harpist, Andreas Wollenweider, over and over. It was a big sound for a harp—an electric one, perhaps. I did a lot of thinking and watching and waiting. Images of sinkholes, moose, and dust devils were still swirling around in my head, pictures that assumed a certain repetitive pattern as the Tercel droned on down the highway. A sinkhole would appear and a moose would climb out of it and then transform itself into a dust devil with a diamond-headed tail that would drill another sinkhole in the pavement into which it would sink and then reappear as a moose a few miles farther down the road. But after a brief stop for gas and a sandwich at another Irving restaurant in Deer Lake, we arrived at what we thought was Cormack, on the outskirts of Gros Morne National Park, just before dark, non
e the worse for worry and wear.

  We stopped at a service station and convenience store and asked the man at the counter about the cabins on the hillside at the back. “All full,” he said. We inquired about other accommodations and found out that we had bypassed the Cormack turnoff and were now in Wiltondale. Not that it mattered, for he also owned the cabins in Cormack and they were full as well. He offered to let us have his family cabin, which was not being used. It was on a pond nearby, he said, just off the main road. It was hard to find, though, so his son Eldred would lead us back to it in his truck.

  In a pickup that looked as muscle-bound as he did—both bodies seemed suspended above their frames—Eldred lifted off into the night with us in pursuit. We drove a few miles back the way we had come and found him stopped on the shoulder just before a side road. Anton pulled in behind the truck and then followed it onto a gravel road that was narrow, deeply potholed, dusty, and unlit. Alder branches scraped the car as we swerved in an attempt to miss sinkhole-sized potholes, but dropped into others just as deep. Clouds of dust from the truck made it difficult to see and breathe.

  After a few miles of this, the truck stopped suddenly in the middle of the road. When the dust cleared, Anton rolled down his window and I saw another truck in the ditch on the other side. A man with a thick orange beard and matching peak cap looked suspiciously in our direction, but made no attempt to hide his bottle of beer, propped precariously upon the steering wheel.

  “You all right?” I heard Eldred shout through his cab window.

  “I’ll feel better when the tow-truck comes,” a high-pitched voice replied.

  A few miles farther on, Eldred stopped in the middle of the road again, this time with his right signal flashing, then turned and seemed to drop right off the edge of the road. We followed, cautiously, and found ourselves going down a steep rutted laneway covered with fine sand instead of gravel, so steep and rutted and sandy, in fact, that I thought we’d never get back up—if, indeed, we succeeded in getting down. Though it was steep, however, the laneway was mercifully short, and the traction on the sandy surface was surprisingly good.