When I hit upon the idea of an annual summer walkabout, some years ago, I came up with a List. I mostly travel off of Lists, after all — such as the challenge to visit all 50 states, or all 63 national parks, or all 30 Major League baseball stadiums, with an added bonus round of a NPBL and Koshien game in Japan. A good list brings you places you might not otherwise go, which can be the best of wandering. And it gives you a launch point for planning; don’t know where to go? Just look up all the places on your list right now and see where you catch a deal.
Therefore I had a summer walkabout list — places with good hiking and nature and terrible cell reception — brought me to the Maritimes and Gaspésie a few years ago, the Pacific Northwest, the Canadian Rockies, and finally to Alaska. But this summer, my list ran out. I hadn’t done much to think beyond it, either. I tossed around something further afield — Scotland! Scandinavia? But eventually costs and narrow planning times made me think I should stay closer. I landed on knocking off another Canadian province, which would put me at 7 out of the 10. And so I went up to Newfoundland.
I knew half of nothing about the place going in. It was remote and “way up there” which are usually pluses in my book. The pictures seemed pretty, and it had a pair of national parks on each side of the island. There’s a funny leftover bit of France just off the southeastern end, too. That seemed enough to occupy me for a journey, so off I went.
YOU CAN’T GET THERE
The classic Mainer like is “You can’t get there from here.” The unspoken coda justifies it: “If you don’t know where you’re goin’, you don’t belong where you are.” A nomadic New Englander is nearly a self-contradiction; we were the people presented with 400 years of free land and open opportunity to the west, and decided “Nah.” New Englanders with wanderlust became Oregonians a while ago. And that means we don’t share the Western impulse to just jump in the car and drive ten hours to go on vacation someplace. We end up going to the same snippet of shoreline over and over, throughout our childhoods.
So I’m always a bit surprised when I try to go to someplace I think of as foreign and distant, and it only takes me half a day to arrive. It wasn’t actually all that tough for me to get there. Flying was pricey, and renting a car was pricier still. But I could drive to the ferry launch in North Sydney, Nova Scotia, in either one very long day or two shorter ones. I divided it in two, staying at Saint John, NB at the midpoint. I’d been to Saint John before, and there were a couple good restaurants worth hitting up again.
There’s a short ferry and a long one; the short one is 7 hours to Port aux Basques, on the nearest southwestern tip of Newfoundland. The long ferry runs 14 hours, bringing you overnight to Argentia, a few hours drive from St John’s and most of the population on the southeast part of the island. The correct way to do my trip would be to take the long ferry on one leg, and then drive around the island and end up at the other one for the return. Since I’m an idiot and didn’t know much about Newfoundland, I booked things on the wrong dates to make that happen, and ended up doing a long unnecessary backtrack drive. And I have to say, as much as I usually love driving through breathtaking remote locations — the Richardson Highway last summer in Alaska was the bomb — the interior drive through Newfoundland ain’t it. This island is a place of stunning coasts, and for the most part the drive misses them. I caught up on audiobooks.
The ferryboat was a bit dated but comfy. You can reserve a cabin, or sit out in a reserved section of seating — a waste of time if you’re not overnight, I think. The unreserved seating was wide open. There’s a restaurant on board, and a little cafe — both have limited choices because you’re on a boat, but they weren’t half bad. The bar was fully stocked. And on the way back, the weather was glorious, so I sat on the roof sundeck and read. I love boat rides; if this one took off nearer to me, I might just book it round trip and get work done by a window. There’s no wifi; for me a plus. Unfortunately, I did get decent cell signal most of the way.
TERRAIN and Terroir
Much of the Northeast looks superficially the same; big forests with maple, birch, pine and so on spread everywhere, while the coastlines tend to rock and cold water. Driving through Massachusetts sometimes makes you feel you’re in deserted territory; we grow our woods right up to the highways, and so conceal our population centers. You sometimes can only tell you’re in a rather densely populated part of the country by the number of cars, not the city spread around you. And so when you go to the sparser bits, in Maine or New Brunswick, the difference doesn’t immediately register.
But you know you’ve tripped over a border when you arrive on Newfoundland. We’re now far enough north that there aren’t many leafy trees left. Huge areas are the open plains and meadows of the subarctic. In Vermont, a tree will grow just about anywhere; here they have to be more choosy about their spots. The weather here is too cold, and the geology often too forbidding. Newfoundland is essentially a big fist of rock that was scoured and sanded by glaciers an eyeblink of geologic time ago. Therefore, the topsoil that lays atop that rock is often far too thin for tree roots.
What you end up with is grasses and mosses and low plants for miles. In these areas, telephone poles are held up by boxes filled with stones, because even humans can’t dig far enough. The water betrays it too. Rivers haven’t had enough time to dig channels here, and the rock resists them more than soil would. Because it cannot easily flow, the water stays put where it falls, in local hollows that form thousands of tiny ponds and lakes that fill the horizon as punctuation amid the green. There’s some amazing fishing to be had here.
And there’s some amazing fish to be had when eating. The trouble is, there’s not much else to be had, either. The thin population combined with limited land based growth and a whole lot of Irish heritage mean the menus tend to be predictable. Would you like to try the fish and chips? We’re also offering a special today, which is fish and chips. You can also get a side of fish, or a side of chips, if you would like?
I exaggerate somewhat, but there was a sameness to the cuisine, especially outside of St John’s population center. I can’t blame them; the people here spread thin, and the island is very far from the source of most ingredients. Food is therefore expensive here, unless it’s very local, where it then turns startlingly cheap. A lobster rolls can be had for about twenty bucks, but even a New Englander eventually gets sick of them. I found myself willing to pay a hundred dollars for an order of pad thai.
But sometimes the food selection was suddenly, violently not ordinary. One restaurant served me a pastry full of moose, which I tried and enjoyed. Another’s menu apologized in both English and Mi’kmawi’simk that they were fresh out of pulled bear that day, but would I like to try the rabbit stew? I sent a silent prayer of thanks to my very-distant Mik’maq ancestors that it wasn’t more fish & chips, and ordered it. It was great.
Newfoundland would not be a great place to be a vegetarian. As much as endless fish and chips can be tough, I can’t imagine three weeks eating mostly “and chips”.
NAMING THINGS
Newfoundland is amazing at naming. One of the first spots you encounter after leaving Port aux Basques is the Wreck House, a stretch of highway on an open plain between the ocean and the enclosing mountains that produces incredible winds, capable of sending a cargo truck or an RV sailing off the road. In these parts, street and traffic signs are backed with thick plywood to prevent the wind from ripping them off their poles.
There’s also Fogo Island, named by Portuguese fishermen for their word for fire, shared with the Brazilian restaurant chain. Fogo Island contains the towns of Seldom, Little Seldom, Tilting, and Joe Batt’s Arm. I’m not sure where the rest of Joe Batt ended up. Its shores are slashed with tickles, which are very narrow channels of water between two rocks. You get to Fogo with a little ferry, where you only pay on the way out; they give you the return trip for free. It also has an artist in residence program, where the artists live for a time in these little white Scandinavian austere structures plopped in dramatic places, far from roads or others. They have an inn and gallery; the inn is absurdly expensive, but also fills up, so they’re doing something right.
South of Fogo Island you find Happy Adventure; at first I thought it just the name of the touring company that brought me out to see whales & puffins, but no, the tour was named after the town itself. I also drove through towns called Heart’s Content, Come By Chance, Witless Bay, and Conception Bay. I stopped by Blow Me Down Provincial Park on a day that wasn’t at all windy. The North Arm features Cow Head, and the place with a self-defeating label: Nameless Cove.
Roads and streets showed less effort; they were often enough just named for whoever owned the house on that road. “Conner’s Road” next to “Miles’ Road” next to “Patrick’s Lane” and so on. I did hike the Damnable Trail; it was quite lovely. Apparently that name is a corruption; some pirates were trying to sneak past the British, but someone aboard accidentally hit the ship’s bell, which told the Brits where they were. The pirate captain’s cry of “Damn that bell!” was shortened to name the area, and the trail; or so the tale goes.
This is Canada, which means we must also pay homage to Francophones even if we’re thousands of miles from the nearest native French speakers. As most of my ancestry comes from those priggish French speakers, I say: damn right you will. But the Francophonie is actually there, too. There’s a whole dialect of French local to the Burin peninsula, which stems more from Breton and Norman French than Paris-proper. St Pierre et Miquelon are still part of France proper, just off Burin’s coast. And a smattering of Acadians ended up on the western coast after the British expelled them from Nova Scotia; their names for things remain everywhere there.
The Acadians get into the naming action first from hilarious mandatory translations of national park features in a half-assed way. Dick’s Brook became “Ruisseau Dick’s.” It’s not as good as French Lake in Cape Breton that gets stunning rendered as Lac French, as if the French language does not have a word for… “French.” The west coast is dotted with barachoises, little coastal lagoons cut off from the ocean by a sandbar. But the real French home run is that more famous of the national parks is named in French. Gros Morne was named after its largest mountain, the last outpost of the Long Range and the northern terminus of the same range as the ancient Appalachians. The park’s guidebooks render Gros Morne in English as “the Great Solemn One.” I prefer my translation: “Big Fat Grouchy.”
But even Fat Grouchy is not the champion. The island’s unquestioned nomenclature superstar is the town of Dildo. Yes, Dildo. And they really lean in: the coffee shop and the brewery both do a brisk business on shirts and mugs. People stop and take pictures in front of the Welcome to Dildo sign on the road in. There’s even a copy of the Hollywood sign perched in the hills across the harbor, which was donated by Jimmy Kimmel after he joked about the name on his show. Apparently the town’s name derives from the small pegs carved into a dory boat to hold the oars in place, not from the other device.
YOU WILL CHAT
One of the many ways Americans can puzzle Parisians is chit-chat; we’re liable to just talk to strangers about nothing, without any intention or expectation of a lasting connection. However, depending on time and place and context, there’s usually some friction. You don’t chit chat at somber occasions. Or if there’s a big age gap; high schoolers or college age people will almost never talk to older folks unless addressed first, and end it as fast as they can. It varies with geography too; there’s more in the Midwest, and less in the Northeast. We mostly don’t think about it, but there’s rules, and a little bit of a decision to be made whether you’ll chat with a stranger or not.
Newfoundland has no such rules. The friction factor for chit-chat is permanently set to zero there. If you are in someone’s presence, no matter the context, you will have a conversation with them. It will be pleasant, friendly and often interesting. They will learn where you are from, what brings you to Newfoundland, and oh if you like hiking there’s a truly great trail just over a ways. And if the person is older and female, you will be addressed as Darling, Luv, or Dear. Drivers and pedestrians even wave to each other as they pass.
I often maintain a quiet bubble; I’ll chat with people if they start it, but I won’t often start it myself. I do go out of my way to be nice to service people, who get a lot of crap from others and don’t deserve it. But overall, I prefer to people watch, or reflect. But on Newfoundland, these people turned me into a raging extrovert out of habit. Since leaving, I’ve started chatting with just about everyone as I returned through Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Maine, and only after I got The Look a few times did I realize I was doing it. I’ve had to temper it since returning to Boston, for fear someone would have me committed.
That chitchat in Newfoundland will always be kind. However, it will not always be understood. The local accent sounds like you took a half dozen randomly selected counties of Ireland, especially Wexford, and ran them through a blender for a century. Demographically, that’s more or less what happened. The local greeting is “Whattya at?” The correct response? “This is it.” “What’s after happening now?” means “What just happened?” Your parents are Mudder and Fadder. I once had to figure out a reply to “Quite some marnin’ we’re having this marnin’.” Like most regional accents, older folks have the strongest ones. One hotel host of mine cheerfully told me all kinds of things for a good ten minutes. I spent the monologue hoping none of it was important, because I caught one word out of three.
The one thing you will not hear from the locals is the Canadian “eh?” at the end of a sentence. However, there were enough other Canadians that I caught myself telling a family from Toronto wheezing their way up a long hike “You only have a little more to go, eh?” It’s important to realize when you’re in danger of going native, and take steps. But overall, there’s not very much overlap between Newfoundland and Canada in any number of ways; the province did not join the Confederation in 1870, but instead held out until 1949. They spent the years between as a British dominion, and then tried independence, until debts from World War I and the Great Depression ended that. They went back to the UK. But the British were reluctant to just assume Newfoundland’s debts like that. “You have to figure out a real answer in the next few years!” But then a massive distraction broke out in Europe, in the form of another world war. So the can was kicked down the road for another dozen years; and Newfoundland ended up playing a critical role defending the Atlantic shipping routes.
After the war, various parties wanted to stay in Britian, or declare independence again, or even join the US. But after an only partly shady referendum campaign, a majority decided to finally sign up with Canada. But that historical separation does still tell . If you look at a map, it seems to fit in just fine with the shape of Canada, but St John’s and its peninsula contains the lion’s share of the population. In a lot of senses, Newfoundland faces away from Canada, towards the Atlantic, and Ireland and Scotland beyond.
A final note: it’s New-found-LAND. Not New Finland.
THE WEATHER
In most of the US, and the world beyond, if you tell folks you’re from Boston, they picture you in a full fur jacket, mushing a dog-drawn sled across a frozen harbor or something like that. In Newfoundland, folks will ask you what living in the steaming tropics is like. All is relative. I had my car’s oil changed up there. At first, they tried to register my plates as Albertan, since their plates’ color scheme is similar to Massachusetts. After that got sorted, the mechanics told me they’d never seen a five year old car with so little rust.
The average summer temperature hovers around 60-70 degrees. One day it hit 75, and the locals could not stop complaining about the scorching, terrible heat. I did not pack, and did not miss, shorts on the entire trip. I also got unusually nice weather; the island normally serves up dour rainy days. They did happen, but for the most part it politely worked around my itinerary, and rained in places I’d just left or had yet to be. So instead I just got big blue skies full of low gentle northern light from a sun that never got too high overhead.
THE HALF HOUR
Nerds like order. We are attracted to anomalies, but also repelled by them. I found out I can make nerds twitch by arguing the advantages of the imperial measurement system over metric. It’s simple: when one is doing math in your head, a base 12 measurement is infinitely simpler than a base 10. If you have to space two windows evenly on a wall, dividing the number of feet into thirds between is a lot easier with feet than meters. The outward rationality of the metric system is only useful in a lab setting, which is where the meter and liter were created. Who cares if the number of feet in a mile is a weird, hard to remember number? When’s the last time you saw a distance measured in miles and need to know how many feet that was?
Nerds hate that there’s a good point buried there. Hate it. It’s funny; try it sometime.
You can also horrify such a nerd by telling them that Newfoundland’s time zone is `30 minutes offset from the Atlantic time zone. How dare they! Did they do that just to be difficult? They have a reputation for that type of personality, up there. After all, they didn’t join Canada for a long time.
But there’s also good reason here too. The idea of time zones in North America was the invention of railroad companies. Before trains, most towns kept time by the sun. You can determine local noon by the moment when the sun is highest in the sky; a sextant can make that measurement simple. Any port town then would have lots of sextants around. And since nobody had terribly accurate time keeping devices, and travel was slow, it did not matter that each town’s clocks were just a bit off from each other. When you traveled, you reset your pocket watch to the local church bells each day, and carried on — which was a thing you had to do anyway, even if you never moved.
But then large steam engines running on narrow constrained tracks shortened the time between towns. Suddenly, timing mattered a great deal, as two trains found out the hard way. One day, a train coming from Providence to Worcester was run by a conductor using Providence time, while another headed the opposite route running on Worcester time, just 8 minutes off. If they’d used the same watch, one train would have been on a siding while the other passed. But that 8 minute difference instead produced a head on collision, with many passengers killed as a result.
Train companies had viewed the competing definitions of “noon” as a nuisance up to that point. Now, it was a menace. So they invented time zones: as far as the train company was concerned, each quarter of the USA, or each fifth of Canada, was now on the same time regardless of local noon, and that was the time that train schedules were written in. It’s no coincidence that train stations always have a giant clock set atop their main entrance; folks had to know what railroad time was or miss their train.
The convenience of that shared time in an age of telegraphs and trains proved popular, and the population as a whole, and finally the governments, shifted to using railroad time instead of local noon. We’ve been tinkering with them ever since, but that’s where the concept came from.
But Newfoundland did not have any continental rail line running through it, not then or since. An island-wide network of rail was only completed in 1898; it finally shut down in 1988, but certainly didn’t cross the enormous distances to the mainland. And they weren’t even part of Canada yet, and wouldn’t be for decades. So, local St John’s noon prevailed throughout the island, and that happens to be nearly exactly 30 minutes offset from Atlantic Time.
It doesn’t hurt much For the most part, transit around the island and to anywhere else was done by boat; and unlike with a train, causing a head-on collision in boats involves some real active stupidity on the part of the captains. The island’s connection to the rest of the world remains largely seaborne. In fact, Newfoundland worried about the viability of their ferry connection to Canada so much, the treaty of their accession guarantees that the Canadian federal government will sustain the service. That promise in turn was incorporated into the Canadian constitution, when it was repatriated from the British.
THE BEST OF nature
Gosh, there’s so much to say about the outdoors here. Gros Morne is a spectacular national park, up there with the best of them. It’s better still for being so hard to reach; there’s a comfortable sense of camaraderie among the pilgrims there, unlike the type of park where half those present view it as a backdrop to their budding careers as influencers. The park is wrapped around a huge fjord, with other glacial lakes and more. There’s a shoreline called the Green Gardens that looks like an Edenic fairyland of lush life; and then not ten miles away you can hike the Tablelands, a barren and stark area whose soil chemistry forbids most plants, making you think you’ve stepped onto the surface of Mars.
Terra Nova National Park is not so outwardly appealing. But it’s the other type of park — less about the geology and more about the ecology. Here you find a park that’s about what lives in it. Puffins and whales and dolphins in the harbor, and animals and birds and bears and yes, the invasive moose throughout the forest. I find you can appreciate parks that are about their geology in a few days, even if you know you’re missing a lot. Parks that are about their ecology take months to appreciate, and alas I had two days.
And then on Avalon itself, you find plains to the horizon, a bird colony with thousands of residents, whales playing offshore, and eagles going for casual strolls. You can walk to the easternmost point in North America, and watch the cold Arctic light play on the waters here before anywhere else.
WAIT WHAT ABOUT-
Newfoundland and Labrador together are about 90% of the land area of California, with 1.5% of the population. It’s a massive place, with a very thin road network that does not reach vast swathes of hinterland. Initially I wanted to see it all — I checked an itinerary that brought me all the way up the Northern Arm to L’Anse aux Meadows, where the signs of the old Viking settlement were found. I looked at the ferry to get into Labrador, which makes Newfoundland seem overpopulated. I explored what it would take to visit Torngat Mountains, on the very northern tip of Labrador. The photos were stunning. But, so was the price tag.
But I realized that type of trip would involve me spending almost all of it in the car, not out in the air. So I cut it short, to the greatest hits. I didn’t get to see the Northern Arm, or the Burin Peninsula, or those little bits of France. But that’s alright. A place like this deserves a repeat, and so you have to leave things for that to justify itself.
I returned to an actual heatwave, 100 degrees and full humidity in Boston. It only lasted two days, like heat waves do here. But I was ready to pack the car and turn around.