It was embarrassingly simple. All that was required was to meet the eyes of others and, as you did so, give a polite nod and say, “Good morning.” The Tswana have a better word for it. “Dumela,” they say. It’s a smooth word that slips out easily and means “I greet you for the first time today.”
For a while I was an actor with stage fright, worried I would flub my lines, too focused on how many people were in the audience. I felt exposed. In South Africa, most of the people who aren’t white are accustomed to living their lives in full view of others. Few own cars, so getting around means walking. Women carry their shopping home on their heads. Tired workers lie down in the park to take a nap. The public space is common ground, and ignoring one another would make it a lonely place. Instead, Mafikeng has the feel of an ad hoc carnival. The cheapest eats are on the sidewalk. Women set up portable kerosene stoves, and in the mornings they make vetkoeks, lumps of bread dough dropped into boiling oil. “‘Fat-cakes’ is what they are called,” a woman told me, patting her round thighs, “because they put fat here.”
I stopped being scared of walking down the street, and I got high on human interaction instead. Overwhelmingly, people returned my greetings with readiness, and I rarely experienced the hollow feeling that hits your stomach when you say hi to someone and they pretend not to hear. My greetings were returned with a grace I tried to emulate and an enthusiasm that could turn “Hi” into an hour of conversation. The end of apartheid did not mean the end of poverty, of course; the economy was struggling and the rand kept dropping. But though people were poor, a wealth of friendship and support was available on the street.
DAVID CAMPION
By the time our year was drawing to a close, I had also learned to squat. A side trip to the opposite edge of the Kalahari Desert had given me two months of life without chairs, an exercise that stretched my mind as well as my ass and gave me the ability to sink onto my haunches for long stretches at a time. Squatting is a polite gesture. It says, I’m interested in listening to what you have to say, I’m not going to rush away. It extends respect. The street looks different when you stop and sink down on your heels.
One morning I met the owner of a sidewalk beauty salon, a man named Micah in freshly pressed slacks and shirt who had arrived before seven that morning to claim his spot just around the corner from Station Road. He said that a man must look smart even when he has troubles, even when he has no money. He didn’t elaborate but offered an overturned paint tin on which I sat as we talked about how much Mafikeng had changed. Micah told me about a nearby town where whites still thought they were in control. He said, “There are bars there where I cannot go; I will get yelled at like a dog if I go there.”
My eyes scanned the street as we spoke. Posters in the windows of clothing stores offered credit cards to anyone who could sign their name. The crime rate was reflected in the uniformed guards standing with their big guns at shop doors. The BMW dreams of kids raised on American television rubbed shoulders with the homeless boys in bare feet who sniffed glue. The edgy aggression in the crowd bespoke a growing desperation about the economy. The pulse of the country was there in the street, the troubled past and the turmoil of the present mingling on a Saturday morning.
We had been talking for almost an hour when an ample nanny came along with two young girls in tow, one with blond curls, the other black braids. The day was getting hot. The woman stopped and bought the children bottles of strawberry milk from a nearby vendor. The little white girl and the little black girl squatted on the sidewalk to drink, looking around with calm regard at the dozen people in the immediate vicinity. A taxi roared past, horns hooted, the girls drank their milk, and we all watched. Grins broke out, glances were exchanged and, for a moment, everyone smiled at the future and dared to hope.
Sandra Shields has collaborated with her husband, photographer David Campion, for the past ten years. Their book, Where Fire Speaks: A Visit with the Himba, was published recently. They live in Vancouver.
Mother and daughter.
032Destination: Canada
WHERE THE BIRDS ARE
Katherine Govier
A pair of bald eagles are fishing over the harbour at Natashquan, Quebec. Red rock cliffs are laced with lime-green mosses under a milky sky. On deck, four French birders, so laden with gear I had taken them to be a film crew, stand shoulder-to-shoulder, elbows up at right angles, binoculars to eyes, silent, intense. One grunts. All drop elbows. Then the bearded one shouts in discovery. Elbows shoot up. Heads train to the right. Mass exhalation.
I sidle up. Raise my new Travelite Nikon V 8x 5.6 binoculars and look through—which end? The one with the label. Or the one bearing rubber protective eyepieces. Aha. A spectral forest appears in the lens: my eyelashes. I blink them out of the way. Porous grey wall turns out to be one of the steel pillars of the ship. I swear, dizzy with all this refocusing, try once more. Hey! For a fleeting few seconds, I capture the speck retreating to a clifftop.
The Four French Birders, or FFB as I call them, drop elbows, maintaining syn-chronicity. And at that moment, as if their communal sigh has propelled it, the bird takes spectacularly to wing again. Soars into my circle of eight times magnification, a visitation. The huge bird is suddenly mine, his curved beak, his white head feathers, his powerful broad wings, his predator’s intensity as great as that of the birders on deck. “Wow,” I say. The FFB do not acknowledge me.
I am a newcomer to birdwatching. Last night at 11:30 P.M., my daughter, my friend and I boarded the M. V. Nordik Express, at Havre St. Pierre, on the north shore of the Gulf of St. Lawrence. We are travelling east along the coast of Quebec, crossing into Labrador at Blanc-Sablon; then we’ll ferry over the Straits of Belle Isle to the northern tip of Newfoundland and travel down through “the Rock.” Our mission is to see the waterfowl that come here to nest in a landscape that has barely been touched since the Basque whalers departed.
The Nordik is a supply ship for the nine hundred kilometres of coastline guarded by rocky islands and deadly shoals. The shore is little more accessible today than it was five hundred years ago, when it was plied by sealing vessels and pirate ships. An ungraceful ship resembling a construction site, the Nordik inspired our trust as we watched it being loaded with goods for coastal communities not reachable by road—groceries, beds, lumber, and the dune buggies that the locals, or “coasters,” use for transport. Cars belonging to tourists bound for Labrador are individually crated and lifted on by crane.
Last night the mid-decks were crowded with the beautiful faces of the Montagnais Indians. The Nordik is their rue flottante; tireless children in BUM T-shirts camped out in the cafeteria and squealed as they played tag between decks. A contingent of Eddie Bauer-clad, ecologically sensitive-looking tourists appeared to be queasy as the grey waters slammed against the hull. Our cabin is tight for three. Only one person can stand at a time; the others go to the hall. My daughter was aghast at the tight accommodations. She registered her protest by retiring to the cafeteria to read the Newfoundland Labrador guidebook, where she searches for four-star hotels. “Don’t they have a Four Seasons?” she asks.
I wonder if I should have taken her birding. Most of her friends are off looking for boys. But she is above that sort of thing. I wanted an adventure. She was keen for that too. I wanted wilderness. She was a little guarded about the wilderness part. I wanted to see birds, and I thought she might want that too. As a sport, it sounded like a good thing to her, not too energetic. Now I wonder aloud if she’s interested at all in birds. “What do you mean, Mum?” she says to reassure me, while resolutely pulling shut the thick curtain on her lower bunk. “Yesterday I got quite close to those whatchamacallits.”
The “watchamacallits” may have been least sandpipers or they may have been golden plovers. We saw them yesterday on Île de la Fantôme in Mingan Archipelago National Park, at the edge of the water, a cluster of small, busy, long-legged birds, starting and stopping, pecking in the gleaming conjunction of sand with its ve
neer of water. They were brown, flecked with red, gold and black. They were indifferent to us and like pure electricity in their movements, tricks of light.
At dawn today we pulled into this exquisite harbour town, population one thousand, with its stunted trees and pink beach rocks with seaweed of a violent green growing in the cracks between. Natashquan is the birthplace of Gilles Vigneault (who wrote “Mon pays ce n’est pas un pays, c’est l’hiver”), but our visit coincides with the short window of summer, mid-August on a rare good day. Already, many of the migrating birds have gone south, leaving behind the hardy gulls, the Arctic terns, the guillemots. And the eagles. A hundred feet above us, they soar and circle, head down, scouring the water for prey, patient.
As we move beyond the harbour, we feel the buck and leap of the ship. The huge circle of the horizon and the flat sea water is like a sundial, our ship the compass blade setting direction. My daughter is miserable. She was unable to sleep in our wee cabin. She ate two sausages for breakfast and is now suffering mal de mer. The only Scrabble game is in French. We play but there are too many e’s and not enough y’s and I lose, which is a rare thing and gives no end of pleasure to my friend and Emily too. We go out on deck to get some air. Emily slumps down and talks about how she’d like a Jacuzzi bath. “How many more days are we going to be on this boat?” she says.
“Two.”
Forever.
My birdwatching progresses. By midday I can pretty much tell a tern from a gull. We stop at Kegaska, where, says my book, Acadians settled until they were (improbably) driven out by a plague of dolphins that ate up all the seals. The line of gulls on top of the fish-plant roof mirrors the line of birders on the deck of the boat, all evenly spaced, all with heads angled the same way.
We’re en route again. A coaster points out cormorants (“shags”) and guillemots. He shows me an island where, in the 1800s, there was a big Hudson’s Bay trading post, as if he’d seen it with his own eyes. Then you could see five hundred boats here in season; now we do not pass a single other craft. But as we enter the Strait of Belle Isle, the whales blow and breach all around. We rush from one side of the boat to the other with enough urgency to tip a less sturdy craft. The birds and the whales relentlessly squandered in the past are now so rare that people compete intensely for a glimpse.
The female of the FFBs speaks to me. “Are you seeing the same birds I am?” Probably not. They are seeing a storm petrel, which my friend has correctly identified. They are searching for its near-relation, the Wilson’s petrel. The difference is all in the black tail stripe, which on the one is straight and on the other slightly notched. I am merely seeing a small white and black thing tossing in the wind around our bow. But in a half-hour the bearded one of the FFB jubilantly announces that he (and he alone) has identified a Wilson’s petrel. There is much shouting and jumping around; and the three of their number who did not see the Wilson’s petrel depart looking seriously vexed.
We are off the boat and none too soon. Emily goes off to the local hotel for dinner by herself. Unfortunately we show up there too, because there is nowhere else. She pretends she doesn’t know us. We pass her later, walking jauntily home in the dark along the highway that cuts across the huge rock. It appears she just wants to meet Labrador on her own terms. She is further cheered when the next day, Norm and Gloria Letto, the hosts of our bed and breakfast, lend us their big red pickup truck. Emily sings in the open back as we tool along in a northeasterly direction. We stop at the L’Anse Amour lighthouse, name changed from the ghoulish original L’Anse aux Morts, which referred to the hundreds of shipwrecks that occurred in these treacherous straits. With fog 90 per cent of the time and storm the rest, and a current so strong it would pull you off course at a speed less than twelve knots, it was Russian roulette for sailors. But today is a perfect day. From the top of the lighthouse, we look down on the cove to see whales at play.
We go all the way up to Red Bay, Labrador. This is the end of the road. From here, you mush it. In a desolate yard, husky pups are tied up to individual stakes, howling, by a sign that reads Dogs for Sale. Yet in that weird Canadian way, in this forlorn spot there’s an elegant Parks Canada museum. We walk through the mist on a little island to an archaeological dig of a sixteenth-century whaling camp. The tiny flowers we see growing low on the ground are only found here and in Arctic tundra.
The next morning Norm announces that we have “a flat wind” blowing offshore. He will take us out to Perroquet Island in his twenty-two-foot fibreglass boat, to see the puffins. Gloria will stay home to preserve bakeapples, which are in season. The little berries are now so popular that a bylaw has been passed requiring pickers to get a licence. Gloria says this is because Newfoundlanders come and pick them before the berries are ripe, using scissors and “ruining it for everyone.” Scarce resources make for tense neighbours.
We hop into Norm’s outboard and head out into the frigid water. A fourth-generation fisherman forced into retirement by the cod moratorium, even Norm is excited to see how many thousands of puffins swoop and sputter over our heads. They are chubby birds carrying their colourful bills importantly before them. Flying seems to cost them much effort; they compose themselves in evenly spaced groups of four, or forty, like squadrons, and cross over our heads just feet above us.
“They comes from the north,” Norm says of the puffins. “They’s still young in the burrows because they’ve got a loaded bill. You don’t see the young fly until September.”
We land, and scramble up the rocks, which tumble over each other like giant tiles. The puffins abandon their burrows, but the black-backed gulls scream in outrage as we climb. We can see the openings to the puffin burrows in the grass, but we cannot see deep enough to spy the young; they hide from predators as far as four feet along the tunnel. When the prescient John James Audubon visited this island in 1833, he wrote that he could hear the cries of the young coming from underground, “like voices from the grave.”
Norm knows the birds of the region by their traditional names. On the way home he shows us “tinkers,” “turres,” “beachy birds” and “sanders.” “Tinkers” are razorbills and resemble the extinct great auk, a funny-looking black and white bird with a thick bill. “Turres” are the thick-billed and common murres, and the “beachy bird” is a least sandpiper. I note the difference between Norm’s sense of the birds, and that of the French birders. To the locals, the birds are practical, of use, part of land and season. To the birders, they are exotica, representatives of a fallen Eden. To we city dwellers, they are the foreign inhabitants of this big empty place, and we look to them with curiosity and a little longing.
WE LAND, AND SCRAMBLE UP THE ROCKS, WHICH TUMBLE OVER EACH OTHER LIKE GIANT TILES. THE PUFFINS ABANDON THEIR BURROWS, BUT THE BLACK-BACKED GULLS SCREAM IN OUTRAGE AS WE CLIMB.
When we board the ferry to cross over to Newfoundland, we see a man getting off with a knapsack and a determined look; he sets off up the hill to pick bakeapples. “I wonder if he’s aware of the legislation,” mutters Emily. I suggest she confiscate his scissors.
By the time we get through Gros Morne National Park, Emily has eaten cod tongues, danced to Celtic music and stopped asking for a Jacuzzi in her room. But she still thinks this is a weird holiday. While staying in the best hotel in St. John’s (Emily won), we meet John Pratt, the St. John’s lawyer and ornithologist. I ask him why we like to watch birds. His answer is that it is partly because we can. “They’re the most observable of animals,” he says. “Mammals had the luxury of being able to be afraid of humans. Birds don’t have that luxury, their lives are so hard.” They will stay to feed even if humans approach. But they are, though tantalizingly close, still unknowable. He talks about their reptilian coldness, their me-first-ness and their “driven intent to survive.” “What birds can do defies our ability to define it even now,” he says. “They are enigmatic.”
We end our trip with a visit to the famous gannet nursery at Cape St. Mary, Newfoundland. We set out on a high
cliffside trail where sheep have curled themselves inside little grassy hummocks. We’re heading for the flat-topped “sea stack,” an independent rock out of reach of land predators. The gannet is a graceful flyer with a six-foot wingspan. It can plunge-dive for fish, reaching speeds of one hundred kilometres an hour.
We hear it first, a rhythmic squawking over the sea. We smell it next. Then we see the breeding rock, alive with gannets, the great white adults flying on and off as their grey offspring merely stand and flap, training for flight. Experts claim 5,300 nesting pairs are here. Awestruck, I leave Emily sitting on a rock twenty feet from the stack and run back for film. When I return, she has braved the smell and the flies on this uncharacteristically still, hot day. Her binoculars lie on the rock beside her as she babbles excitedly about how she saw the gannets spread their tail feathers in order to slow their flight as they came in to land.
I tell her what I’ve read about how gannets mate for life (Imagine! In this day and age!). While nurturing young, they still engage in “sexual behaviour,” that is, nape-biting and preening. We watch them hook bills and try to push each other off the rock. We sit for ages looking for the behaviour called “sky pointing,” where one bird points her bill and her long neck skyward to signal to her airborne mate that she wishes to leave the nest to get food.
And we see it. “Look, look,” says Emily. The female points, and her mate returns to spell her off on the nest. We hug each other so as not to fall off our perch in the sun, with the sea calm beneath us and the frenzied nursery right before our eyes, and we think we see ourselves in the birds, or the birds in ourselves, and we are happy.
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