Baltimore's Mansion

by Wayne Johnston

  Cormack, though he discovered no such marvels, found most of what he saw beyond his powers of description. “In vain were associations,” he wrote, “in vain did the eyes wander for the cattle, the cottage and the flocks.” This landscape for which he searched in vain was not even that of coastal Newfoundland but that of England, or more precisely the England of books, which formed his image of “home.” All Cormack could do was catalogue what he saw. He attempted an exhaustive geological and botanical catalogue, recording in his journal every rock and form of plant life, half his journal consisting of italicized Latin.

  To keep himself sane, to make the landscape seem less alien, to remind himself that the outside world still existed and that he would return to it someday, Cormack named lakes and mountains after people he had gone to school with, old college mates, old teachers. Some of what he had seen was gone now, such as the “dense, unbroken pine, an ocean of undulating forest” that covered the first twenty miles of his trip. Cormack had seen the “pine-clad hills” of which Boyle wrote in “The Ode to Newfoundland,” but most of the pine was gone, cut down or burnt.

  In the latter part of his walk, Cormack had wound up delirious, alternating between despair of ever reaching his destination and delusions of invincibility, during which he hoped the walk would last forever. He had stood atop some knob of rock and caught what he thought was his first sight of the Gulf of St. Lawrence, the western sea of Newfoundland, and told Joe Sylvester that they would not stop walking until they reached it, which he was sure they could do within a day.

  A week later they made it to the shore — not of the Gulf but of a lake the size of a small sea. They had encountered many lakes, and rather than walk around them, they sailed across on makeshift rafts, weaving spruce boughs into sails, the two of them so exhausted they would rather risk drowning than add ten or twenty miles to their walk. They sat for hours on the shores of lakes, waiting for an east wind, which is not generally a good wind for sailing since it almost always brings bad weather, but they cared only that the wind was headed for the west as they were. They put out onto the lakes on their rafts and let the wind blow them to the other side.

  They clung to or lashed themselves to the trunks of their spruce-tree masts, rising and falling on the waves that washed over them and their supplies, Sylvester screaming in the middle of each crossing that Cormack would never again coax him across a lake in such a manner. They left a trail of these little spruce-bough sail rafts behind them on the shores of lakes across the width of Newfoundland.

  When they finally did sight the real sea, they kept walking after dark, Cormack running blindly through the woods, sliding down the sides of the Lewis Hills. They arrived at Bay St. George at one in the morning, able only to hear the Gulf, whose limitless expanse Cormack had so looked forward to surveying with triumph. He had thought they would reach the coast by sunrise but this time had overestimated the distance. There was nothing at the end of their journey but darkness, out into which Cormack threw beach rocks and heard but did not see the splash they made.

  That was what I remembered best from the narrative — Cormack and his mystified Micmac guide sliding down the west-coast hills in the middle of the night, by doing which, he said, “We found ourselves with whole bones but many bruises.” The next day he reflected in his notebook: “All was now, however, accomplished, and I hailed the glance of the sea as home and as the parent of everything dear.”

  Landsman though he was, he was as happy to see the ocean as Cabot had been to sight land. Cabot’s voyage from Dorset in England to Cape Bonavista in Newfoundland had taken thirty-five days. Cormack’s walk had taken sixty. Though he lived to the age of seventy-two, he undertook no further such expeditions and never did fully recover from that one.

  We passed through a long stretch where there was more water than land, where more of the land lay underwater than did not, though it was all fresh water, rivers, pools, ponds, lakes. It was as if some great reservoir was slowly drying up, strands of bog and rock appearing in what had been the reservoir’s more shallow parts. The rail line zigzagged across this stretch, following the land unless a body of water was sufficiently narrow that a trestle could be built across it. There was nothing as far as the eye could see in any direction but flat white frozen lakes and, barely distinguishable from them by the unevenness of their terrain and the occasional dark gash of green, the bogs and barrens, with here and there a tolt that ten thousand years ago had been an island rising from the water like some observation tower.

  Then we passed into a landscape that was like a lake bed from which the water had receded altogether, an expansive, flat-bottomed bed of a lake that looked as though it had been uniformly three feet deep, nothing but rubble and jagged shards of granite.

  And this became the pattern. Every so often, a new, entirely different, geography would assert itself. We came upon a desert of black peat bog on which there was no snow, though there was snow all around it, as if a deluge of water ten miles wide had splashed down. Here and there the peat bog had collapsed of its own weight, its soggy crust caved in to form a great crater of peat, a black bog hole that was warmer than the air so that steam issued up from it like smoke. You could tell from these peat pits that underneath its topmost layer, the whole bog was like this, a steaming black muck too loose to support the roots of even the smallest of trees.

  Each part made you forget the others existed. In the middle of each landscape, you couldn’t help thinking that it stretched endlessly in all directions, that this was the island’s prevailing terrain and all else was anomalous.

  My father had wanted me to see all this. How much land there was, how like a country Newfoundland was in its dimensions and variousness. In the days leading up to the trip, I had many times asked him, “How big is Newfoundland?” Using the map on the kitchen wall, he tried to make me understand how big it was, tried to give me some sense of how much more of it there was than I had seen so far in our drives around the bay.

  “We’re here,” my father said, pointing at the tiny star that stood for St. John’s. “Now last Sunday, when we went out for our drive, we went this far.” He moved his finger in a circle about an inch across. Then he moved his hand slowly over the rest of the map. The paper crackled beneath his fingers. “Newfoundland is this much bigger than that,” he said, making the motion with his hand again. “All this is Newfoundland, but it’s not all like St. John’s. Almost all of it is empty. No one lives there. No one’s ever seen most of it.”

  It was an island, yes, but I had been fooled by that fact into thinking of the land as an insignificant interruption of a sea so huge that by comparison the land did not exist. There were regions of it that even the train did not come near, peninsulas along which not even branch lines had been built, the Great Northern Peninsula for instance, along the two-hundred-mile stretch of which there was neither road nor railway. It had taken the robust Cormack those sixty days of continuous walking to reach the west coast, and he had not come within a hundred miles of the Great Northern Peninsula.

  The point of this journey was to get me away from the sea so that when I went back to living within two miles of it, I would know the land was there, land whose capacity to inspire wonder in all those who beheld it was in no way diminished by its being coloured the colour of Canada on maps.

  How many of the outporters who had voted for Confederation, my father asked me, had had any sense of the land, the scope and shape of it, the massive fact of it? Fishermen went far enough from shore to see some of the land assuming shapes and lines, a series of capes or a small peninsula, perhaps, with headlands soon fading to a blue blur on either side, the amorphous, nebulous elsewhere whose existence was less real to them than that of the moon or the sun. They had conceived of Newfoundland as a ribbon of rock, a coast without a core, a rim with water outside and nothing, a void, inside. And stranded on this thin rim they lived, the Terra Incognita at their backs and the sea before them. For many of them, Newfoundland had not even been a
coast but a discrete shard of rock, their own little cove or bay, inlet or island. They had had no idea when they cast their votes what they were voting for or what they were renouncing. They had not known there was a country, for they had never seen it or even spoken to anyone who had. What lay beyond the farthest limits of their travels and their eyesight was just a rumour, a region of fancy and conjecture. And what was true of space was true of time. What was true of geography was true of history. In how many homes or even classrooms was there a copy of Prowse’s History of Newfoundland? Time was local, personal and even then less enduring than their experience of space, the circumscribed geography of “home.” Smallwood had said that for him the main purpose of Confederation was to undo this isolation, but of course it only made it worse. For if people could not conceive of the whole of Newfoundland, how could they form any conception of a place the size of Canada?

  When it was very late and the car was dark and almost empty and most of those still in it were asleep, I looked out the window at what, at that hour, I could see of Newfoundland, dark shapes of hills and trees, a glimpse, when the moon was out, of distant ice-caught ponds. The towns in the interior, though they tended to be larger than the coastal fishing towns, each one depending on some single industry like mining or pulp and paper, were few and far between. These were new towns, settlements of this century, in some cases post-confederate, lived in by people who had moved in from the coast or from small islands off the coast. But even in the core there were a few small, unaccountably located towns a hundred miles apart, nothing more than clumps of houses really, all with their porch lights on, but otherwise unlit, occupied by people who, though it passed by every night, rarely saw or even heard the train. People left over from towns built up round industries of Smallwood’s that had already failed.

  From Corner Brook, we followed the Long Range Mountains southwest to Stephenville Crossing, going downstream along the black, cliff-channelled Humber River. Sometime early in the morning, I fell asleep again and did not wake until the sun was up. Someone said we were thirty miles from Port aux Basques.

  Until the ride back from Port aux Basques, we had a day to kill. There was not much more to do in Port aux Basques, especially without a car, than watch the ferries come and go. That is what we did, after we spent the night in the Holiday Inn that had been built for Come Home Year and had not been filled to capacity since.

  Port aux Basques harbour had been dredged and redredged and hacked out of rock to accommodate the huge Gulf ferries after 1949. It looked like a quarry at high tide and at low tide like a reservoir that had been all but drained of water, the high water line ringing the harbour basin, a white salt stain on the rocks, strands of kelp hanging down from it into the water like dark green climbing ropes.

  My father pointed out to me an island, on the leeward side of which, he said, Basque fishermen after whom the town was named used to lie in wait in their boats for schools of whales. He told me of the sealing vessel Southern Cross, which in April of 1914, while trying to make it back from the ice floes laden down with seventeen thousand whitecoat baby seals, sank with the loss of 170 men. No trace of her or her crew was ever found, despite the fact that she got near enough to home to be spotted momentarily by the telegrapher at Port aux Basques. The Southern Cross that almost made it and yet no trace of which was found. What a typically Newfoundland disaster that seemed to be, the ship that almost made it but that didn’t for reasons no one was able to explain.

  Everything ended or, depending on your point of view, began in Port aux Basques: the highway, the railway, the Gulf run. In between the sudden, short-lived euphoria of arrivals and departures, the place was desolately empty. The port was for leaving and arriving, not for staying in. No one who could help it, no one who knew boredom when they saw it coming, spent the night in Port aux Basques.

  My father found the whole concept of the car ferry hilarious, cars driving into and out of the holds of boats. The Gulf run from Argentia, near St. John’s, had only recently begun and he had yet to go there, so this was a first for him, as was everything for me.

  We watched a ferry arrive, churning up half the harbour, turning the green water white as it described a slow circle, then backing up to the dock and dropping its massive metal door, which doubled as a ramp.

  “It’s like the troop ships at Normandy,” my father said. The port was a beachhead for tourists who poured off the troop-ship-like ferries in cars and trailers and transport trucks. Cars driven by motorists who you could not help thinking had been behind the wheel since the ferry left North Sydney and seemed to know exactly where to go sped off. They left Newfoundland the same way, like an invasion force withdrawing with almost comic haste, its mission either accomplished or abandoned as hopeless. The whole thing seemed portentous of some mass evacuation.

  We watched as hundreds of cars assembled on a parking lot the size of several football fields waiting to drive onto the Gulf ferry. Some had out-of-province licence plates — Canadian, American — but most bore the plates of Newfoundland.

  Every day of the summers since the road went through in ’65, hundreds of Newfoundlanders drove to Port aux Basques, took the ferry to the mainland, then spent their vacations enjoying the previously unheard of luxury of endless driving, endless space. The number of car owners increased threefold after 1965. Air travel was still, for most people, too expensive or too exotic. With the road, and without the train, Newfoundland was suddenly transformed from a country where it was pointless to have a car to a country where you could not get by without one. “Going for drives” became the rage, the way it had in other parts of the world in the 1920s.

  Several lanes were reserved for transport trucks, which lined up in convoys and were always the first on and the first off any ferry. I had heard there was not enough room on many parts of the highway for two transport trucks to pass without one relieving the other of its sideview mirror. Only a few people boarded the ferry the old-fashioned way, walking on, some bus passengers, some backpacking students who had hitchhiked across the island. “The boat used to dock side-on,” my father said scornfully, “not stern-on like that. There used to be a gangplank.”

  Every day for years these melodramas of departure and arrival had been going on without my knowledge. I had been nowhere. I had never been this far west before. On the island. In the world. Children half my age looked out at me from the windows of the cars that went on board the ferry, travel complacent five-year-olds to whom I was sure my unworldliness was obvious.

  I decided that when I left the island for the first time, it would be by boat. It would be appropriate, the first time, to watch the land slowly fade from view. I looked out to where the ferry was headed, but there was no more sign of land than there was when you looked out to sea from the Gaze at Ferryland.

  Only according to the map was Canada closer than Ireland and England. Places I had never been and could not see were all impossibly far away, nebulously elsewhere. My father saw me looking wonder-struck. It must have occurred to him that this was the first time I had ever set eyes on the Gulf of St. Lawrence. “It looks just the same on the other side,” he said. “For a while, anyway.”

  I nodded as if I had assumed this to be the case. But I did not really believe it. Crossing the stream of fog on the isthmus of Avalon was momentous enough for now. This other crossing I was contemplating I could not imagine. The other side of this Gulf was remoter than the moon, on which men had just landed and which I had seen with my own eyes countless times. Only on TV and in photographs had I ever seen the world alleged to exist beyond the shores of Newfoundland. I had read about it in books, but any book not set in Newfoundland was to me a work of fiction. Anywhere but Newfoundland was to me as fabled a place as the New World must have been to Cabot or Columbus.

  “We should drive here sometime, Dad,” I said. “All of us. Or we could leave from Argentia. Take the ferry across. On your holidays.”

  “Sure,” he said. “Sure, we’ll do that soon.�
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  A man told my father that some people had taken the bus from St. John’s to Port aux Basques so they could take the train back to St. John’s. And people from Port aux Basques and from other places between there and St. John’s planned to take the train to St. John’s, then go home by bus. My father could not understand this. You were either for the bus or for the train. You could not have it both ways.

  “They’re all a crowd of fact-facing bus-boomers,” my father said.

  There were not many purists like us who boarded the train that morning, but what few there were were easy to spot because of how travel-weary they looked, about to begin their second crossing of Newfoundland in two days.

  It was clear from the outset that there would be no sleeping on this trip. Nor was anyone likely to complain about the noise. It was as if invitations had been sent out to a train-borne talent contest.

  Two old men in coveralls got on board wearing accordions but otherwise without luggage. A fiddler warmed up on the platform. “Or at least I hope he’s warming up,” my father said. He wondered if it was all some sort of celebration got up by the government.

  A man boarded with a set of spoons hanging from his belt. Another fellow step-danced as if to a tune that no one else could hear, standing ramrod straight, arms rigidly at his sides, moving about among the people on the platform who paid him a disconcerting lack of attention. He was very trim, well-dressed except he had no jacket, just a shirt and vest and slacks and gleaming black shoes. My father said he was either performing some sort of send-off for the train or was completely mad. Luggage was generally scarce. Some people carried nothing but bottles of rum tokenly disguised in paper bags. Others toted impossible-to-disguise cases of beer.

  “We couldn’t save her, so we might as well give her a proper send-off,” one beer-laden man said, as if to disarm the conductor as he handed him his ticket. Drinking was permitted almost everywhere, in the observation car, the smoking car, the dining car, coach.