The Strangers' Gallery

by Paul Bowdring

  At the bottom, we found ourselves at a house that looked as if it had been sawed in two, with the steeply sloped half-roof side facing us, and the sheer vertical side facing a pond. There was a strong smell of fish in the air. Eldred went inside and turned on the lights, while Anton and I stumbled about the yard, stretching our arms and legs.

  “Everything you need is in there,” Eldred said when he came back out. “There’s even a few groceries left in the fridge. Some beer, too. Help yourself to that. Some salt fish from Rocky Harbour. I bought some drinkin’ water from the spring behind the store. You can’t drink the water here. Don’t forget that. The beer tastes better, anyway. Tap water’s from the pond. We’re at the bottom of a hill, with lots of cabins up above. Run-off from septic tanks is the problem. We’re goin’ to put in an artesian well this summer. That’ll solve it, I hope. No problem washing in it, but give yourself a good scrub with the towel to get the itchmites off. Sometimes they stick to your skin, but there shouldn’t be too many o’ them this time of year. How long you fellas plan to stay?”

  “Maybe two days?” I said, looking at Anton, who just shrugged.

  “Right on, b’y. Here’s the key. If you need anything, let me know. There’s no phone here, by the way. You got to drive down to the store.”

  Eldred got in the truck and tore up the hill with sand spouting from his wheels like water. When he reached the gravel road and roared away, clouds of dust drifted up into the moonlight above the trees. After the sound of the truck died away, everything felt heavily quiet. We brought our bags inside, then walked out through the sliding door at the back and discovered where the smell of fish was coming from. Huge salt fish, like white pelts in the moonlight, were spread out to dry on a long bench and wide railing that ran around the perimeter of a wide deck wrapped around three sides of the house. The pond reflected the lights of other cabins on the dark sloped hill on the other side. The sky was clear, but the stars were indistinct. I could hear the distant drone of a plane, miles overhead.

  “I’m beat,” I said. “I’m going to bed. I’m so tired I can hardly speak.”

  Anton nodded. “What a place,” he said. “The middle of nowhere.”

  I yawned. “We’ll see where it is in the morning.”

  The interior broke in sublimity before us…The imagination hovers in the distance…until it is lost.

  We were up at seven. After showering and scrubbing ourselves hard with our towels to make sure there were no itchmites hitched to our flesh, we poached the eggs and toasted the stale white bread left in the fridge. Anton was a great poacher, turning out perfect semi-firm eggs every time. There were also No Name tea bags and instant coffee and an unopened can of Carnation milk. We boiled the blackened and rusty kettle with water Eldred had left us in recycled plastic bottles with washed-out labels.

  For some reason, the fish didn’t smell half as strong in the daylight as it did in the dark. We ate a leisurely breakfast on a dazzlingly white plastic table out on the deck in the sun, gazing through our sunglasses past the makeshift fishing stage at the morning mist on the still pond, a clear stretch near the shoreline glistening in the sun. Far beyond the pond was a long range of deep-blue mountains. Though it was very early in the morning, as Anton sat slumped in his chair with his elbow on the table, his knuckles at his temple and his thumb hooked under one of his high cheekbones, his mind took a techno-philosophical turn. He observed that the blue mountains were not really blue.

  “I love the blue mountains,” he said. “I always want to go there, to get lost in there, never to come out, but now when I look at them I know too much. I always think, You can never go into the blue mountains, only see them from where you are. If you go there, they will be brown or grey, or maybe green, if you’re lucky, if they are covered with trees, and the next mountains in the distance will be blue. They are always beyond—over the rainbow!

  “It is a trick of the light. In the northern lands, where the air is more dense, distant mountains are always blue. But it is only the colour of the air, the colour of the distance between us and the mountains, a distance we can never cross. The blue light gets lost in the denseness of the air, and in the deep water, before it reaches us. That is why, too, the sea and the sky are blue. Like Mr. Gombrich says in The Story of Art, ‘There really is no such thing as Art. There are only artists,’ so, perhaps, he would also say, ‘There really is no such thing as blue mountains. There are only artists who paint them.’ And dreamers like me who like to gaze at them. ‘We like gazing upon blue. It draws us after it,’ said Goethe, in his Theory of Colours.

  “And Mr. Harnett, too, whose eyes are fixed on them. He believes your country still exists, a blue country somewhere in the distant blue mountains. He can see it, but he can’t go there. His ship of state has sailed away. The Blue Peter is its flag, not the Pink, White and Green. This he cannot accept, he cannot understand. His heart is his passport, it is still valid, it has not expired. He wears it, as you say, on his sleeve.”

  Blue or not, the mountains we were looking at, I guessed, were part of the Long Range Mountains, which were part of the Appalachians, and were twenty times older than the Rockies, I’d read somewhere. In one of Fernald’s books, I believe, perhaps the one in which he’d expounded his nunatak theory, which I’d made a point of researching after Anton had first mentioned it. Relic species of plants, such as the Burnt Cape cinquefoil, had supposedly survived interminable glaciation on some of these ice-free mountain peaks, like resistance fighters surviving their country’s occupation.

  I went inside to get the new map the waitress had given us, to see if I could locate the Long Range Mountains. It showed not only the mountains but their altitudes as well. True to their name, they stretched the entire length of the west coast of the Island. The widely scattered peaks were mostly unnamed, however, just a series of black dots and altitude numbers—a long range of mountains, but a short range of appellations.

  There was, of course, Gros Morne—Big Gloomy, as some guidebooks translated it—rising up right in the centre of the park, and also one called Gros Pate—Big Baldy, perhaps—farther up the coast. At over two and a half thousand feet, Gros Morne, after which the park was named, was the highest mountain in the park and the second-highest on the Island. The highest elevation in Newfoundland was not called a mountain, though, but a hill, Lewis Hill, just south of Corner Brook, only a few feet higher than Gros Morne. And the pond our cabin was on, whose name Eldred hadn’t mentioned, seemed to stretch miles back into the woods. Anywhere else it would be called a lake, perhaps a Great Lake, even an inland sea.

  I showed Anton the long line of mountains on the map, and he removed a stub of pencil from his shirt pocket and began to draw a connect-the-black-dots line that ran parallel to the shore and the road along the very rim of the shore—the Straight Shore, as it was called, as there was hardly a cove, harbour, or anchorage along the entire length of it. There was a Straight Shore on the northeast coast as well, but not half as straight or long as this one. Indeed, the road looked so straight and sure, from Gros Morne Park to L’Anse aux Meadows, that Anton was actually licking his lips as he pored over the map, no doubt entertaining a truck driver’s fearless fantasy of a double de-clutching, freewheeling ride on an endless highway, the wide blue ocean on one side and an endless vista of blue mountains on the other. He even found one actually called Blue Mountain, about halfway up the coast, a generic cartographic illusion just for him.

  “Have you seen the Norse site at L’Anse aux Meadows?” he asked. “Vinland,” he added, with an odd smile. He had never shown much interest in so-called historic sites before.

  “No, I haven’t, I’m ashamed to admit,” I said.

  “Can we go there?” he asked.

  “If you like.”

  “Today we rest. We will leave tomorrow.”

  “What about Cormack?” I asked.

  “I will go there this afternoon,�
� he said. “I will go alone.”

  “Of course,” I replied.

  The western territory is entirely primitive…Obstacles of every kind were dispelled and despised.

  Later in the morning, we decided to go for a walk around the pond, but when we went down to the water we discovered that there was no beach to speak of. There were trees and large rocks right down to the water’s edge, and it was practically impossible to make any headway. We climbed back up the steep incline and began walking along the narrow gravel road. We thought it might go right around the pond, though it became much narrower, barely a single lane, as we got farther into the woods. There were cabins above and below the road, and those on the lower side all had steep sandy driveways like our own. Every so often a car or truck went by and covered us with dust.

  About two miles down the road, we saw a house on the upper hillside that was half tarpaper shack and half log cabin. A lot of land had been cleared for growing vegetables, though it looked as if nothing had been planted this spring. It appeared, in fact, as if last year’s harvest had been left to rot. Large ghostlike stalks still covered the furrowed ground, draped over the long ridges of soil like fallen soldiers in trenches. And in the middle of this fallow field was an iconic structure that confounded Anton more than anything he’d seen in all his time in Newfoundland. It severely tested his iconographic skills, honed as they were in the rarefied air of art history rather than political history. To be fair, though, this was history of a dark and fugitive kind.

  From a distance the thing looked like a telephone pole with a flag on top. As we got closer, however, the pole looked more like a gibbet or a cross. The flag was the Red Ensign, with the Union Jack in the upper left-hand quadrant and the Badge of Newfoundland in the fly. Below the flag was a long crossbar. Two strands of rope were hanging from the ends of it, and, at the bottom, they were connected to a seat. Opposite this, nailed to the front of the pole, was a handwritten sign.

  If it had been a cross, I thought, the sign would have said, “Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews,” or “INRI” in the mysterious Latin inscription, the mocking sign Pontius Pilate had fastened to the cross of Jesus. As a child, I’d always thought (I’d been misinformed about this) that INRI meant “I have suffered.” This was not a cross, however (not in the literal sense, at least), but a swing, a single-post swing, and the sign said, in large, white, cursive letters, NEWFIE SWING.

  Taking nature as our guide, it might be said that this was a cultural icon of another species, a new order, perhaps even a new domain. Newfoundland Renaissance Gothic, or Backwoods Noir, out here in the outharbours, the outponds. Material culture, as my colleagues the Folklore archivists call it. Nothing immaterial about it. A solid-wood device designed for suffering, for crucifixion of a kind, for smashing your stupid Newfie face to pieces if you had muscles in your legs like a black bear or a jackrabbit and could push off hard and high enough. Perhaps there was a place for an I HAVE SUFFERED sign after all.

  “We love the place, O Lord. Forgive us but we do.” These immortal words from the Gospel According to Brendan “Miles” Harnett sprang to mind, his blasphemous reworking of the opening lines of the first Newfoundland hymn, which he’d used as his text one evening for a sermon at the Travers.

  I thought we were no more than ten miles from the main road, but we must have made our way into the terra incognita, into a heart of darkness all our own. In a review I’d read recently in the tls, the writer had used most of his allotted space not to discuss the book at hand (I forget what it was) but to advance the thesis that, one hundred years after Heart of Darkness, the metaphorical journey into said heart, including the one being made by the writer of the book he was writing off, was now just a literary cliché.

  Critick, come hither, and behold! Tread lightly upon this trope.

  Ten years ago, when I was attending a two-week professional development workshop in Ottawa, a few of us took a weekend trip to Montreal. At St. Joseph’s Oratory we beheld a real heart of darkness, discreetly lit up for our viewing pleasure. The actual flesh-and-blood heart of the beloved Brother André, the recently beatified founder of the oratory, was on permanent display in a small glass case set into a wall. Needless to say, it was a strange and awe-inspiring, if sickening, sight.

  But perhaps it was no more strange and sickening than what was now before our eyes. As I stood on the gravel road with a stranger, a foreigner, at my side, and a very dark heart himself, a mixture of impulses and emotions welled up in me, not the least of which was the desire to run. Anton’s face darkened and he furrowed his brow. I felt I was looking at my reflection. An exercise in swing theory was obviously underway. He was bringing all his iconographic skills to bear on this strange object before his eyes, like the featureless monolith in 2001, but nonetheless mysterious for being feature-full. Icebergs, puffins and whales, tulips, windmills and wooden shoes were iconographic child’s play compared to this.

  “What is it?” Anton asked blankly, his odd instinctive emphases sounding perfectly correct.

  I think I knew the answer, but I didn’t speak. Perhaps I couldn’t speak, for it all made me exceedingly gloomy. Dispel and despise, I thought. Dispel and despise. I was feeling overheated, overcome, thinking, if not speaking, in tongues, moved by a spirit not my own.

  “Burn your swings!” I heard myself say. It sounded like some spontaneous Harnettian injunction, one that might replace the proverbial Smallwoodian one. Even to my own ears, however, I sounded like a missionary to foreign parts, a moral anthropologist among the bush-born, a foreigner, an other, in my native land.

  I was glad that, instead of asking another unanswerable question, Anton simply jumped over the ditch, climbed over the fence into the fallow field, and installed himself in the enigmatic device, apparently intent on replacing theory with practice. Will it work in theory? He tested it lightly and carefully at first, then pushed himself off more forcefully, higher and higher, his sneakered feet smacking into the single post, the sound echoing loudly in the stillness of the woods—perhaps the first Newfie swing demonstration ever performed by a European.

  What is it? I thought, as I watched him like a protective father hovering on the edge of a playground. Better to let some unbiased, fresh-faced future archivist or folklorist or archeologist answer that, someone coming upon this cultural artifact—this plaything, this totem and taboo, this icon or sign—a thousand years hence, in the unforgiving archives of the peat bogs. I had to be careful, I had to watch it; we did not have a history, as they say, the country of Newfoundland and me. I who had been nourished, sedated, inoculated at the generous teat of Confederation against the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of our country’s long history, against a reoccurrence of history’s bad dreams; I who had eaten only of the honey-sweet fruit of the lotus flower and grown up, innocent and inert, in Canada’s Happy Province; I who had been immersed, if not reborn, in Baie d’Espoir, though Bay Despair still issued from my lips.

  No, we did not have a history, this former country and me—not Terre-Neuve but Terre-Vieille. The fatherland bequeathed to me was only a shadow of the one that Miles had lost. The past itself was terra incognita, and though I’d had my own indigenous patriot guide, an abyss of difficulties had sprung up in my mind, in my imagination, between the point where I stood and the centre of the terra incognita. Like William Cormack, I too had been schooled for pastoral.

  I left Anton with his swing and went on ahead, his childlike, gleeful yip-yips echoing behind me, from the pond below, from the spruce-clad hills above. I walked on down the dusty road, farther into the woods, around the pond, wherever the road was leading. It came to a sudden halt about a half mile ahead, in a roundabout circling an island of alder with a real utility pole in the centre. The overhead wires ended with the road.

  In the afternoon, Anton drove to Cormack, about ten miles down the main road, back the way we had come. I spent the time, three hours or more, making not
es about our trip. I filled more than half of one of the hardback notebooks I’d packed. Anton came back looking tired and gloomy, and didn’t say a word about what he’d found. I thought it was better not to ask—I just kept on writing. Slumped in a chair, head hung, he sat out on the deck by himself, sucking on one of the Jockey Clubs that had been left in the fridge. Perhaps his gloomy gaze took in the mocking face of the pond, troubled now by a stiff evening breeze, or the sublimely mocking gravitas of the illusory blue mountains.

  The song of a female and her contentment in this remote and secluded spot exhibited the strange diversity there is in human nature.

  The road up the coast the next day led us through thick fog almost all the way to L’Anse aux Meadows. Anton said it was like a road along the top of the dykes that protected his country from the North Sea. We saw no blue mountains at all, and what we saw of the sea was grey.

  Just past St. Lunaire-Griquet, a few miles from the Norse site, when darkness had thickened the fog to the point where even high beams were useless—were worse than useless, in fact, for the fog seemed to reflect this more intense light right back into our faces—two of the world’s worst and weariest housekeepers found what the owner called a housekeeping cabin, on another pond, a very small one this time, which we were told we could walk around in ten minutes. The fridge and cupboards in this cabin were bare, however, so in the morning, after walking around the pond three times, we drove into St. Lunaire-Griquet to find a restaurant.

  A young woman in a black leather jacket, black jeans, and workboots was picketing a restaurant called the Stage Head, half of which, as the name implied, was set on posts, or shores, and built right out over the water. Behind her, flashing feebly in the window in the early morning light, an aquamarine neon sign said, “Seafood.” Though we could no longer land, split, gut, and fillet cod (commercially, that is; there was a so-called food fishery each year), it wasn’t the only fish in the sea. We might have danced the last head-guts-and-sound-bone waltz out there on the real stagehead floor, but tourists could be taught to dance with any walleyed wallflower species. This could be anything, from squidcakes to stewed turbot to curried haddock, whatever made the less-favoured substitutes more palatable.