Naomi Harris Uncovers The Real Canada Part 8
Newfoundland, the final frontier.
Where does the time go? When I began this trip it was still spring (though it felt like winter) and now it’s already the first day of fall though here in the Maritimes it felt like summer barely arrived. Got to love summer time in Canada!
I am currently in PEI, the last province on my hit list and sadly it’s going to get the short end of the stick as I’m tired and ready to go home. The days are getting shorter, my back is getting sorer plus I have a dog that needs to be shipped to me from Winnipeg next week and a 3-pawed rescue kitten I have to pick up in New Brunswick on my way back home.
I thought I would dedicate this post to Newfoundland as it took so long to get to her and boy was she unique. Sadly I only spent 2 weeks on the island and didn’t get to Labrador at all but gosh this province is just too big. There’s one main highway, the Trans-Canada, that runs from one end of the province up through to St. John’s and then to get to all the small little fishing villages you need to take off shoots up through the various peninsulas. In other words it’s very tricky and time consuming to visit and be prepared to do a lot of driving.
The English first landed on Newfoundland in 1497 (though the Norse stayed briefly some nearly 500 years earlier) yet it’s the youngest of the Canadian provinces having only joined Confederation in 1949. That said I’d say its people are also the most unique compared to the rest of Canada. Accents vary depending on where you are on the Rock (as Newfie’s affectionately call their island) often resembling something you’d expect to hear in the UK or a pirate ship instead of Canada. Expressions are also colourful and you often need a pocket dictionary to decipher the code. But one thing you won’t be hard pressed for is the generosity and genuine kindness of the people and the warmth they extend out to you.
Part of its charm probably stems from the fact that most villages were isolated with no roads or electricity until the late 60s and early 70s. If you wanted to visit your neighbor in the next town or go to the store you had to go by boat or dog sled in the wintertime. That’s why people are so self-sufficient making all their own food and clothes; you didn’t jump in your car to buy a loaf of bread, you baked it.
In the village of L’Anse aux Meadows, where Viking settlement ruins were discovered in 1960 by Norwegian explorer Dr. Helge Ingstad and his wife, archaeologist Anne Stine Ingstad, you had to get to the village by boat. Dr. Ingstad of course was ecstatic about his discovery but was also saddened as he knew he was seeing the end of an era. People here survived by hard work and perseverance but once the inevitable roads came in this way of life would soon cease to exist. Boats and dog sleds were replaced by cars and ski-dos and then once the cod industry was more or less shut down there was nothing to keep the youth in these villages. This isn’t unique to L’Anse aux Meadows but is occurring throughout Newfoundland with these wonderful little villages becoming ghost towns as the next generations have left to get work in the big cities of Canada or in the oil industry in Alberta and Saskatchewan. In fact the Canadian government also helped produce many of these ghost towns when they determined where they were going to build roads to and provide electricity for back in the 60s and 70s. If they decided they didn’t think it was worth the while they removed entire communities in a resettlement project. Today I fear much of the charm of the province is a few decades away from disappearing.
Nature is abundant in Newfoundland. Of course there is the wonderful Gros Morne National Park complete with forests, beaches, desert like terrain and even a glacial lake and Terre Nova National Park but really much of the island is gorgeous. The combination of rocky terrain and boggy areas is not be ideal for large scale farming so most people tend to have a little garden along the highway or some stretch of good land to grow enough food for their families relying on canning for the winter time. Wild berries like blueberry and bake apple are bountiful across the island and most people pick in their own secret spots. Many also rely on wood for heating their homes and will go into the Crown forests to cut their own. The concept of ownership isn’t as resolute, fences aren’t put up to keep each other out or mark territory rather as a defense to moose (moose were introduced to the island in 1904 with 4 animals, today it is estimated there are somewhere in the 140,000 – 200,000 range). In Bonavista they have a communal pasture where sheep, goats, cows and horses are free to graze without worry that someone might nick them.
And of course there’s the seaside, miles and miles of it. Depending on the season you can see whales, seals and puffins. This year I was also fortunate enough to have been in Newfoundland during a spectacle of icebergs. Iceberg season on the island is generally in May and June ending sometime in early July. This year in mid September the bergs were still plentiful with new ones rolling in every day, Twillingate being a hot bed of them. A great deal of this is due to the massive glacier piece that broke off from Greenland and made it’s way down to Newfoundland. I spoke with an iceberg tour guide what he thought this all meant and he said that if this is a one off occurrence, well then we were lucky to witness something even the old timers say they have never seen before but if this happens again next summer then we need to start getting worried.
My biggest regret of this trip is that I didn’t spend more time in Newfoundland. She’s complex and only begins to fully let you in once you’ve been there a while. Take it slow, listen to the locals especially the old timers and appreciate the uniqueness of this great province. And I’ll close this in classic Newfie style: Be Careful of the Moose.
