The Colony of Unrequited Dreams

by Wayne Johnston

  If I hear one more Newfoundlander whining about the “suspension of democracy,” about how, now that we have given it up, we will never get our independence back — well, let me make a suggestion. All those Newfoundlanders who don’t like it should take their passports and their X-ray plates and emigrate to Canada. Only British know-how can get us out of this mess, for which we have no one to blame except ourselves.

  Fielding’s Condensed

  History of Newfoundland

  Chapter Twenty-One:

  THE AXE, THE FOX AND THE WOLF

  Newfoundland misses its chance to right the blunder of responsible government when a referendum on Confederation with Canada is held in 1869.

  One of the strongest supporters of the confederate cause is David Smallwood, prominent citizen of Greenspond, Bonavista Bay, population sixty-three.

  Smallwood flies the confederate banner from his house. A crowd gathers.

  Smallwood states the case for Confederation. The crowd listens, mesmerized by his eloquence and the axe that he keeps swinging back and forth.

  Confederation is defeated, largely because of a demented merchant named Charles Fox Bennett, who circumnavigates the island, in every port repeating:

  Our face towards Britain, our back to the gulf,

  Come near at your peril, Canadian wolf.

  Many believe it is divine retribution when Bennett is struck down seventeen years later at the age of ninety.

  Consummation Comes

  WITH THE Commission of Government in power, I could not stand to be around St. John’s. I decided I would try to start up a fishermen’s union along the south and southwest coasts of Newfoundland. It would mean going to places that could not be reached except by boat, and not even by boat in the winter, when the ice-field floated south and ice and land fused together like two halves of a jigsaw puzzle. From that point on, I would have to walk, unaccompanied. Winter would be the best time of the year to go, for most of the fishermen would not be fishing, and meeting with them and organizing them would be, if not easy, at least possible.

  Using money I borrowed from people sympathetic to the labour cause, I hired an old thirty-eight-foot one-masted schooner with an eight-horsepower motor and a crew of one, a retired fishing skipper named Andrews from the southwest coast, who assured me he would go only as far on this expedition of mine as his schooner could, so I had best decide before we set out if I could manage the rest of it by myself. I assured him I could and told him of my walk across the island. “That ya have yer land legs I don’t doubt,” he said. “But those don’t look like sea legs to me.”

  We set out from St. John’s after Christmas. Within a day, Andrews resigned himself to the fact that he had not a first mate but a passenger who would be no help to him no matter how painstakingly he explained to him what to do. Because of the motor, Andrews was able to take an occasional break from his struggles with the sails and rigging while I stayed below trying to fool my body into believing that it was not at sea.

  I had seen hundreds of men like Andrews on the waterfront years ago, men who in their old age had not softened, men who by their forties had achieved their final form. He would climb the rope ladder in the roughest of weather to the top of the mast and, with one hand on it, lean out and scan the sea ahead for obstacles. He was about my height, but much stockier, and dressed in what I can only describe as a full-body butcher’s apron, a begrimed white leather raincoat with a hood he never used, going bareheaded no matter what the weather.

  We sailed for several days, putting in at harbours on the south coast at night, there being no unionizing to do until we were well past the halfway point of the coast.

  Andrews took me to the community of Garia, abandoned since 1873 when the entire population of two hundred left en masse for Anticosti Island. He took in with a sweep of his arm the grey houses hunched together in the snow, their roofs saddle-backed, windows gone, doors hanging on a single hinge or likewise gone; houses built on the site of other houses of which now there was little trace, perhaps some rotting, fallen fence posts, the sunken pilings of some old foundation that lifted the house so high off the ground that a man could crawl beneath it.

  “My father came from here,” said Andrews. “There used to be two hundred people here. A lively place it was one time.” The day would come when, because of me, there would be hundreds of such places around Newfoundland, abandoned islands and coastal settlements, ghost ports whose populations had been forcibly transferred to employment centres.

  There were many reasons why the people lived where they did on the south coast, Andrews explained. The small islands, for instance. There was another country around the coast of Newfoundland, a country of islands, a circumscribing archipelago of satellite republics, bound together only by their residents’ tacit agreement not to interfere with one another. Before the invention of the engine made it possible to do so, the only way to reach the fishing grounds was to live offshore on little islands that lay within a shorter, less arduous and treacherous row or sail of the deep water. And far from civilization, there was little or no competition for the fish.

  Between stops, we stood on the bow of the schooner, regarding the somehow oppressively spectacular scenery, the houses in their drearily bright and cheerful, state-of-the-universe-denying colours, the fiord-like inlets, the pink-sunset sea, the pewter-coloured water of the harbours in the dusk, the light on the hillsides fading like a fire burning down. As always, I felt obliged to say or do something commensurately profound, but could think of nothing.

  Andrews told me that if we sailed straight south from where we were, we would miss South America by several hundred miles, never so much as come within sight of it but bypass it altogether and eventually come up against ice at the other end of the world. “Nothing that way but water,” he said, as if our facing in a direction in which there lay no land until you reached the edge of the Antarctic ice-field summed up perfectly how he felt at that moment.

  We sailed sometimes within a few hundred feet of shore, looking up at great ramparts of granite and sandstone, sheer cliff faces of islands that rose abruptly from the sea, as if large pieces of the main island had broken off like icebergs from a black glacier, never-melting bergs of rock. We passed between these islands and the larger one, facing the latter, the headlands of which were even higher and so sheer that in most places not even birds could find a spot to perch. If you were so close to the cliff that you could not see the top, you were too close, Andrews said, for there were undertows that this boat, even with its little engine at full throttle, could not escape.

  It was hard to believe Newfoundland was an island and not the edge of some continent, for it extended as far as the eye could see to east and west, the headlands showing no signs of attenuation; a massive assertion of land, sea’s end, the outer limit of all the water in the world, a great, looming, sky-obliterating chunk of rock.

  I did not see until I was almost upon them the first fissures in the cliffs, the first real fiords, which were a mile or two miles wide at the mouth, sunless corridors of stone so well sheltered from most winds that they were calm, glacial green, like the water in streams above the timberline, a deep opaque green five hundred fathoms deep. These fiords meandered inland, gradually narrowing, the cliffs slowly sloping down on either side to where a stream or river poured into the sea.

  We sailed up some of these fiords, all the way up to where, on river plains, lay communities whose wharves and fishing stages from a distance could not be distinguished as such, they looked so much like driftwood on the beach. Only when we were very close to it did the “driftwood” resolve into artificial shapes, as did the houses on the slope behind them. The only things well kept in these places were the headstones in the cemeteries, stones that, like so much else, had been brought in by boat from St. John’s or some other part of the world that the people whose resting places were marked by them had never seen. Three-century-old cemeteries. How startling, how incongruously opulent the green-ve
ined marble monuments seemed, the tablets, pillars, columns, angels, stark stone crosses and bronze crucifixes among the shabby huts and shacks. Some marked burial plots for so long left untended that only the tips of the monuments showed above the scrub and snow.

  There was a point on one beach where you could see all the way down the fiord to the sea, a jagged line of light between the cliffs, a lightning-bolt’s width, a bolt caught as though in a photograph. As we headed back down the fiord towards the sea, the bolt of light widened slightly each time we took a turn until it suddenly spread outward like the flash from some explosion and we were in the world again.

  Churches were visible for miles offshore. They were built on the highest points of land. Their three-spired façades, two of equal height flanking a taller one that bore a cross, made them look like Pentecostal doves, giant, once white, now grey birds perched where fishermen could see them while they worked and use them for navigation aids while they rowed back home.

  At last I began my “unionizing,” a grand word for it as it turned out. Not even Andrews, who had spent most of his life on the southwest coast, could believe the places I insisted that we visit. On one tiny island there lived a dozen people in one house, a single extended family, only three of whom were fishermen. I could not make them understand what a union was. The population of another island had dwindled down to one, a man who might have been anywhere from fifty to eighty and who, it was clear by the state of his wharf, had not fished for years.

  Often we were far enough out from shore that I could see into more than one bay at a time. I sized them up, trying to decide which of them looked most promising. The settlements in the farthest recesses of the bays looked as if they were hiding from each other. The houses were perched at staggered altitudes on steeply sloping cliffs, often shored up by stilts where no foundations could be dug.

  One day I pointed to a scattering of houses on the main island and told Andrews to head there. He complied, shaking his head. To get there, we had to navigate a set of reefs, the upcrops of which he told me were called Hit or Miss Point and Nervous Rocks. By the time we had passed between them, I had decided I would just as soon spend the rest of my life in this tiny place as navigate those reefs again.

  At the sight of an unfamiliar person in their harbour, people came running from their houses. They ran, it turned out, because to the first person to shake my hand would go the privilege of serving us a cup of tea or putting us up for the night. I was greeted with open-hearted bemusement, welcomed into a home where my insistence on talking unions and politics was viewed as a forgivable, though not to be encouraged, shortcoming. Of course they would join my union, they said, seeming embarrassed, as if it impugned their hospitality for me to have to ask them for anything. But it turned out they had no money for union dues, nor for anything else.

  As the winter wore on, the islands of bare rock were vastly outnumbered by those of ice. Any colour but white was incongruous among the growlers, bergy bits and icebergs, as if the rock and not the ice were only passing through. Most of the coastal towns looked like base camps for expeditionaries who had long since moved on to somewhere else, box-like houses, a cluster of buildings like provisions stacked on some ice-surrounded point of land.

  The cliffs became what Andrews called snot-faced, coated in places with sea-water-green ice. What the rest of the year was a trickle of water down a cliff face had by increments throughout the winter become a frozen torrent, a freshet of ice layered lava-like with a sheen of running water on the top.

  When finally Andrews spotted the ice-field in the distance, he put in at the nearest port. “If I were you, sir,” he said, “I’d turn back now. I wouldn’t walk this coast in winter for the king himself, let alone for unions.” He gave me a pouch of oatmeal and raisins, which he assured me I would be glad to have before too long.

  I bade him goodbye and the next day, telling myself that as long as I knew which way land lay, I would not end up like the men of the S.S. Newfoundland, I set off along the shore until I reached the ice. On the map I had prepared before leaving, virtually every community was highlighted by an x. Most of the place names were French, though their inhabitants did not pronounce them as the French would have. It was a long time since people of French ancestry had fished here. French ships had been confined to fishing the northeast coast by the terms of the first French shore treaty in 1713. The French had never lived here, only fished here in the summer, then gone home. But the names they gave the coves and bays and islands remained, their meanings unknown now to the people who spoke them every day. Rencontre. Isle aux Morts, Deadman’s Island. It was pronounced Ilomart. Grand Bruit. Big Bear. Cinq Cerf. Margaree. Rose Blanche. Harbour le Cou. Petites. Lapoile. Bay le Moine. Bay de Vieux.

  The walking was treacherous, especially near the shore, where the ice tended to accumulate first and where there were the most pressure ridges, rafted ice layered vertically in jagged crags created when two opposing pans had met, neither yielding, so there was nowhere for the ice to go but up. I sometimes had to walk for miles just to find a way between the ridges.

  There was always open water far out from shore, and the waves from without carried on beneath the ice, the surface of which exactly mimicked that of the water beneath it, rolling, swelling, cresting, troughing, for the ice was not like lake or pond ice, not a solid sheet from shore to shore, but pans of ice from elsewhere that had packed together. Walking on it was about the closest thing to walking on water that you could get. It was like riding a vessel that took on the shape of the water. I could see the water move beneath the ice like limbs beneath a blanket.

  As I walked along, I felt the ice rise beneath my feet, felt myself being lifted and then lowered and then lifted again. I discovered that it was possible while walking on the ice to become seasick. One second you were walking uphill, the next downhill. The water below moved shorewards but the ice did not; you rose to a crest on the ice, then felt and saw that crest move on ahead of you while another swell began beneath your feet. It was like walking on the skin of a massive animal.

  Jumping to shore, dismounting the ice, was an art in itself. It was in many places pushed up onto the rocks, so although it was easy, once you were on the rim ice, to step ashore, getting onto the rim ice was something else. There was often a fissure between the rim ice and the pack ice through which, at the arrival of a wave onshore, sea water bubbled up. It took a certain knack to time your step — and a step was all it was, not a jump, if you knew what you were doing — from the shorewards-heaving pack ice to the rim ice, a knack that I never did get, so I always waited until someone on land saw me standing there, forlornly, incongruously.

  When I made my inept leap with my distinctive flourish of self-abandonment, all but resigned to being swallowed up in the fissure, falling the moment it opened its green sea-water-frothing mouth to take me in, the men on land would grab me. As the wave of ice I should have used to launch myself to safety passed beneath my feet, I would lose my nerve, jump too late, just as the water bubbled up, and would wind up all but running on the spot, the slick wet ice beneath my feet, before I was yanked ashore, toes dragging on the ice behind me. “We got ya, sir, we got ya,” the men said, politely trying not to laugh.

  In oil-lamp-lit houses that reminded me of living on the Brow, I was given to eat dearly come by tins of ham or generic “meat,” treats reserved for visitors, to put in front of whom the salted or, even worse, fresh fish the others had to settle for would have been the height of bad manners. How I longed to have what they were having and what they thought they were sparing me the hardship of having to eat; how I longed to gorge myself on damper dogs fried in oil or fat dumplings in a boiling pot of codfish stew.

  Not that they “gorged” themselves. Even of fish, salted or fresh, there was precious little. These people in whose houses I nightly increased by one the number of plates that must be filled were verging on starvation. Because the merchants could not afford to give them credit for their fish, most o
f the fishermen did not have the wherewithal even to catch enough to feed themselves and their families. They had no diesel oil for their engines, no tools or wood to repair their codtraps or their boats, no canvas for their sails, no twine to make new nets, their old ones having frayed to bits of string that now were used for mending socks or making mitts.

  Everyone had the same breakfast, boiled duff, which was flour and water cooked in a bag then left until it hardened like a biscuit. The only way to get it down was to eat it smothered with molasses, which there seemed to be no shortage of. They sent me off in the morning with what they called a sealer’s lunch, hard bread so hard you did not so much chew it as gnaw on it and thereby got the soothing illusion that you were eating something. They also gave me chunks of fried salt pork that when it froze in my pocket or rucksack became so brittle it snapped off like toffee. It was unbelievably salty and every so often I got down on my hands and knees to drink from pools of water on the ice.

  One day, when there was not a breath of wind and no sign that any might be in the offing and it was therefore possible for those whose dories were still seaworthy and whose coves were not iced in to row out to the fishing grounds, I went out at the invitation of a fishermen before sunrise to handline for cod. I faced him in the boat as he took the oars and, with his eyes averted from mine, looking out across the water, rowed for hours without changing his pace or his expression. He was, he told me later, keeping his eyes fixed on some landmark, but landmark or not I’m sure he would have looked the other way. I had yet to have someone look me in the eye for long, as if to do so would have been an impertinence.

  After reaching his destination and dropping anchor, he slumped over exhausted, head down so that I couldn’t see his face. The sun was coming up now, the first pale light of dawn was in the east and in the sky a silent seagull rose and fell.