Clarice took us out to Burnt Cape in her pickup. We drove through the town of Raleigh, past the Burnt Cape Information Centre (we certainly didn’t need to visit that), past the sign for Cape Onion, then rounded Raleigh harbour at the foot of Ha Ha Bay, a “false bay,” Clarice said, that tricked mariners into thinking they were sailing into the larger bay alongside it. We followed the shore road on the opposite side for a mile or so, then turned sharp left and drove straight up a barren rocky hillside. The road was no more than a one-lane track, barely distinguishable from the rest of the terrain, and I wondered what we’d do if we passed someone driving back. We climbed right to the top of the hill, then drove toward the northern end and stopped in a gravel-pit cul-de-sac that Clarice called the parking lot. Though it had been clear and warm in Ha Ha Bay below, up here (ha ha) it was cold and windy and the fog was rolling in.
Clarice hadn’t advised us to take sweaters, caps, scarves, and gloves, and the chill damp air penetrated our thin jackets and pants, suitable for a July garden party in a snug cove, but not for a place as exposed as this. At least we weren’t wearing shorts. Clarice looked warm enough in her leather jacket, jeans, and cap. I thought about the ovens she had mentioned earlier, and found myself whispering the word. Just the sound of it made me feel warmer. I wanted to ask her how close they were, but before I knew it she was gone, shouting something over her shoulder about “the lower shelf,” and heading toward some big broad rocks close to the water. She led us right out to the most northerly point; then we climbed a cliff to “the upper shelf,” a bald tableland completely enshrouded in fog. We followed closely behind Clarice, hoping she knew where she was going, as we couldn’t see the proverbial hand in front of us. Strangely enough, there wasn’t a lot of wind at this higher elevation, but there was wind chill. Anton’s face had that bluish white cast, and I’m sure mine did as well, that could be seen on sunny winter days in the hidden hollows of snowdrifts, a light-effect that never failed to intrigue him when we were out walking.
We seemed to be climbing even higher, into a chill black-and-white world, and the fog began to look even whiter—perhaps it was more cloud than fog—when, quite unexpectedly, we were back where we started, and had to slide down a long shaley slope. At the bottom, spread out before us like a feast for a hypothermally half-blinded man, was a banquet tableland of wildflowers. We had to take Clarice’s word, though, that it was spread out before us; we had to get nose and eyes right down in the gravel to see what was there.
Clarice identified elegant pussytoes, velvet bells, yellow rockets, the northern paintbrush, the bottlebrush, the cuckoo flower, enchanter’s nightshade, the fairy slipper orchid, the frog orchid, and several varieties of cinquefoil, including, of course, the Burnt Cape cinquefoil. Its flowers were incredibly tiny. Indeed, the whole plant was completely inconspicuous, and very hard to distinguish from the other varieties of cinquefoil she pointed out, about a dozen of which grew in these parts.
Something about the way it extended its small arms out over the rocks reminded me of Elaine’s Christmas cactus, the only flower she had left me. With its multitudinous tendrils hanging over the edge of a self-standing wicker basket, it exuded fierce, pinkish red, lotus-like blossoms from every tendril tip each Christmas season. Perhaps it was the floral version of the fauna getting down on their knees in the stable to honour the miraculous birth. No longer a wild desert flower, this cactus sat in its warm basket like a neutered cat, soaking up sunlight from the window in the fall and heat from the old-fashioned radiator in winter, accepting a weekly watering and “plant food” as its due, and once a year producing a profusion of flowers that we used to think of as a Christmas present for us.
In contrast, here was this forsaken dwarf with its thin arms reaching out, as if for help, hugging the ground, its tiny five-point flowers like shrunken hands at the tips, living in a place worse than a desert, for it was a cold desert, existing on nothing but rock and water and whatever sunlight penetrated the fog. No wonder, as a group, these plants were called Potentilla.
Back in the parking lot, distinguishable from the rest of the landscape only by the fact that Clarice’s truck was parked there, Anton made a not-so-surprising discovery as he was about to open the pickup door. Right at his feet—he had almost stepped on it—was a cinquefoil, and not the snowy, silvery, shrubby, three-toothed, or any of the other lesser varieties that Clarice had pointed out, but the real rare thing, Potentilla usticapensis Fernaldii. To our great surprise, in spite of the signs we had seen forbidding the collection of plants or rocks or fossils on this ecological reserve, Anton picked it without hesitation; or, to be more accurate, he rooted it out, which was not an easy task, despite the fact that it didn’t seem to have any soil to grow in. He put it in the Styrofoam coffee cup he had brought with him from the restaurant, justifying his illegal act with the excuse that it would surely be tramped on or run over by a vehicle if he left it there. Clarice and I just stood there smiling at him, our faces still red from the chill wind and fog, and perhaps from a feeling of complicity as well, and Anton smiled, innocently, right back at us.
Like his spiritual forefather Bjarni Herjolfsson, who had sailed to Greenland from Iceland in search of his father but got lost in the fog and ended up within spitting distance of the forbidding coast of Newfoundland, Anton also decided, in a manner of speaking, not to go ashore. Though we were only a few miles from L’Anse aux Meadows—Vinland, as some believe, where Bjarni’s countrymen finally did go ashore about fifteen years later—after our trip to Burnt Cape, Anton seemed to have no interest in going there anymore. He said he preferred just to imagine the place. Vinland, he said, was just a land of the imagination, anyway, like Fairyland or Shangri-La, a New World Greenland or New Founde Lande, even an Old World Fatherland. Netherlands all—“blue mountain lands.”
But perhaps he was now eager to be somewhere else. In Clarice’s bed, I guessed, and she seemed to have an eye for him as well.
So, being the magnanimous and sexually fulfilled creature that I was, I left them to their urgent desires, professing an equally urgent archival desire to see the L’Anse aux Meadows bog archive, a National Historic Site, UNESCO’s first World Heritage Site. After lunch back at Clarice’s Coffee and Crafts, they dropped me off at the car in the Stage Head parking lot. Then they drove to Clarice’s house in Quirpon for sex, and I drove on to L’Anse aux Meadows for professional development. The site was as she had described it, as it had been interpreted by Parks Canada for visitors, authentic and low-key—yes, even mystical, in the sense that it inspired a certain low-key awe. It was shrouded not just in fog but in mystery.
I’d read in the paper that the upcoming Viking millennium celebrations would feature a flotilla of Norse long ships (warships) and knarrs, larger ships used for trade and exploration, coming around Cape Bauld from the west, from Norway, Holland, Sweden, Iceland, and Greenland. From o’er the Sea of Darkness, they would enter Epaves Bay and come ashore at L’Anse aux Meadows. Ocean conditions hadn’t changed in a thousand years, the article said, though these ships would have diesel engines and radar to help them navigate through heavy seas and ice, through darkness, fog, and freezing spray, against strong winds, currents, and tides. If they’d entered the bay the day I was there, come out of the fog that shrouded L’Anse aux Meadows, no doubt the sight would have brazed—to use one of Anton’s rare but not inappropriate malapropisms—the hair upon the back of my neck.
At a convenience store on the road back to our cabin in St. Lunaire-Griquet, I picked up a ham sandwich, a litre of milk, and a large, dark-red, five-point apple whose scent brought back memories of childhood Christmases, when we would always find one at the bottom of our stockings. No doubt it was Mother who had always put it there. With regard to nutrition, though, or what she called “nourishment,” she had gone well beyond the proverbial apple a day; she was in the avant-garde for her time, and had branched out into flowers as well as fruit. While “antioxidants” an
d “free radicals” may not have been part of her amateur dietician’s vocabulary, she knew instinctively that cranberries, partridgeberries, blackberries, and blueberries—which I even liked—had more than their God-given share of nourishment. And while the ubiquitous cod liver oil (not to mention Brick’s Tasteless) may have been the bane of most schoolchildren, and we all drank—yes, drank—our share of that, until someone was clever, or compassionate, enough to seal it in edible plastic capsules, it was the notorious rosehip jelly that had been the bane of the Family Lowe, of the young lives of Hubert, Raymond, and me. Mother knew the location of every wild and cultivated rose bush within walking distance of our house, and we consumed so much rosehip jelly over the course of a winter that you’d think we were ignorant sailors prone to scurvy, from living only on hardtack and salt fish, instead of obedient angishores eating our fruit and vegetables every day.
On top of the apple in the bottom of the Christmas stocking, as always, were my father’s chocolate bars, a confectioner’s dozen, all different, from his wholesale supply. I can remember the name, the look, the taste, of every one of them: Cherry Blossom, Crispy Crunch, Mars Bar, Sweet Marie. Perhaps Mother herself was stuffing the chocolate bars in the stockings. By the time I was three or four years old—from what I was able to glean, long ago, from Mother, a most reluctant archival donor, and from Hubert’s fondly bitter recollections—my father had all but abandoned our hearth and home for his other family’s. He was spending longer and longer periods away on his salesman’s expeditions, and sometimes would not even come home for Christmas, though he might have made a point of leaving the chocolate bars behind.
“Probably caught in a storm,” I remember her saying one Christmas Eve, most inauspiciously, as it turned out.
In the housekeeping cabin there were tea bags and packets of the ubiquitous Mother Parker’s coffee on the kitchen counter next to the kettle and the coffee pot, the only sustenance provided for the housekeepers. But there was the physical comfort of a La-Z-Boy chair, along with a Lazy Susan on top of a table beside it, these thoughtful trappings perhaps excusing the hyperbole of “luxurious accommodations” in the tourist brochure. I had no condiments for the Lazy Susan, but I placed my apple on it and, every so often, lazily spun it around. It seemed to relax me, to help me think.
I finished one notebook and started another, wrote late into the night, into the early hours of the morning. When I finally got to bed, it was almost three-thirty, and I immediately began to have bad thoughts. Down, wanton, down! About Anton and Clarice, probably still up and at it; about Anton and his horny girlfriend Marieke, on top for hours, though that sounded more like work than sex; about Anton and the lovely Miranda. Anton still sowing his wild seed at fifty! Down, wanton! I had drunk a lot of Mother Parker’s coffee, and I lay awake for a long time thinking about Miranda.
It may be noticed that on the west coast of Newfoundland, there is neither Scotchman, Irishman, nor rat to be met with…Neither reptile nor serpent of any kind had yet fallen under our notice.
In the morning, Clarice dropped Anton off at the cabin even before I woke up. The slam of a car door and the peel of tires on pavement had awakened me, in fact, and my first thought was that they’d had a spat. All Anton said, however, was that Clarice had, as he put it, “an appointment with her mother,” evoking for me the image of a woman whose fierceness of purpose perhaps outmatched her daughter’s.
We stopped at Broom Point on our way down the coast, where Clarice said she’d seen the piping plover. Though there was a bit of early morning fog, after Port au Choix there was sunshine all the way, plus blue skies, blue seas, and, yes, blue mountains. We picked up some sandwiches at a convenience store in Cow Head, then drove on to St. Paul’s, just past which was the turnoff to Broom Point, and what one of our tourist leaflets called “the flower-filled coastal meadow overlooking the brook.” Thanks to Clarice, Anton now had the rare flora and fauna bug, if I may put it that way, in earnest.
From the Broom Point parking lot, however, we set off on the wrong trail and found ourselves overlooking not a brook but a small sandy beach. It turned out to be exactly what we were looking for. On our way down the hillside path we passed a sign that said Sandy Cove Cemetery and found a small graveyard, enclosed by a peeling white picket fence, in the lee of a cliff. Anton went on down to the beach, but I opened the gate and went inside to take a look. It was a cemetery filled with the graves of children who had died a hundred years ago, when diseases such as diphtheria and cholera had ravaged isolated places such as this, where there was not even a nurse to tend the sick. The small graves were marked with simple white wooden crosses; all the children had died before they were six years old.
I thought of Callimachus, our ancient muse, known by most of our library colleagues as the cataloguer of the great Alexandrian library, though I had known him as a poet, proponent of the short poem and denouncer of epics, before I discovered that he was also a librarian. Unfortunately, the head librarian at the Alexandrian library, Apollonius of Rhodes, was a dedicated writer of epics, and must have watched Callimachus’s cataloguing work with a wary eye. One of Callimachus’s short poems—“epigrams,” he called them—is surely the most moving epitaph ever written, two lines on the death of a child:
His father Philip laid here the twelve-year-old boy
Nikoteles: his dearest hope.
The great Alexandrian library had contained half a million “volumes” of papyrus and vellum scrolls ordered into a catalogue of one hundred and twenty rolls. The Alexandrian customs officers of the time seized all books from ships passing through the port; copies were made for the library and then the books were returned. Cataloguing was then a noble profession. There are Egyptian catalogues, and catalogues of catalogues, dating to 2000 BC. The ancient Sumerians, whose language dates to perhaps 4000 BC, referred to cataloguers as “ordainers of the universe.” The universe ordained by Callimachus burned to the ground in AD 641, about nine hundred years after his death, every book in that immortal library lost. What kind of epitaph would he have written, I wonder, if he had seen his cherished library perish and his life’s work go up in flames?
We ate our lunch on the beach in the sun, sitting back against a large warm rock. Afterward, I nearly drifted off to sleep, lulled by the almost balmy breeze and the rhythmic sound of the sea on the stones. In the midst of my reverie, Anton jumped up and hissed poetically. “List,” he said, and began walking slowly, in tiptoe fashion, along the sloping shore, as if the beach rocks were eggshells. After walking about fifty feet, he froze completely for several minutes, then tiptoed back past me, whispering intently, “Plover! Plover! A piping plover!”
He disappeared up the hillside. I didn’t know where he was going. I listened, as I’d been told, and above the sound of the wind and the waves, I could hear the piping of some peculiar bird. It was unlike any birdsong I’d ever heard, a plaintive sound, soft and melodious, but once I’d heard it, I didn’t have to strain to hear it again. As mournful and clear as a funeral bell, it might have been tolling the sad notes of its own numbered days. I thought of the small white crosses on the bare windswept hill facing the sea, and heard the stilled voices of dead children, like the voices that echo in the still air through the long twilight of a summer night, voices of children heard but not seen, faraway voices that reached you as you sat on the verandah with your solitary companions, your brandy and book, voices that were, for me, the very essence, the promise, the dream, of summer, as well as its underlying sadness.
Anton came running back with his binoculars and camera, but after searching the beach for fifteen minutes or more, he saw no further sign of the piping plover. According to his “Hinterland Who’s Who,” sightings of individual birds had been reported, but nesting adult pairs had never been seen this far up the west coast, though a nesting site had been confirmed on the northeast coast at Cape Freels. I was able to confirm only that I had heard the call of a bird I had never
heard before. Anton was convinced, though, that he had seen it, and he catalogued the features as if making his case.
“About the size of a robin,” he said. “A black stripe across the forehead, a black neckband, orange legs, a short orange beak. It was pretending to be hurt, dragging its wing across the sand. They do that to lead enemies away from the nest.”
He sat down on the sand and stared out to sea, looking so dejected he might have begun to drag one of his own limbs across the sand to garner sympathy.
“Plover on toast,” he said, with great resignation, as if this were the worst possible thing he could think of at that moment. “Special of the Day a hundred years ago. Like your turr omelette today. They may be looking for a turr a hundred years from now.”
I felt defensive, and might have launched into an irrational defence of the whole turr-gunning, omelette-stuffing race, but we heard a high-pitched sound high above us and looked up to see a flash of white in the bright blue air.
“There it is,” Anton shouted, pointing his finger at the sky.
The bird was at least a hundred feet above us, and for five minutes or more, with that persistent mournful cry, it put on a display of slow-motion aerial ballet that would put the famed Snowbirds to shame. For the whole time, Anton stood silent and motionless with his head bent back, looking through his miniature binoculars, so intent on extracting every ounce of birdwatching pleasure from this rare sighting that he never once thought of offering them to me.
“Ah, shit!” he exclaimed suddenly, as the plover abandoned our stretch of beach and flew off around a rocky headland to another. “The male’s mating display,” he said, dropping his binoculars to his chest and swivelling his head to get the kinks out of his neck. “Establishing a territory and attracting a mate,” he added, sounding as if he were mimicking his guidebook. “Likely the female I saw on the beach. Or maybe he’s the one I saw on the beach. Hard to tell the two apart, even with binoculars. But male or female, it’s a piping plover for sure.”
The Strangers' Gallery Page 39