Volume 04, Number 12
Travel
Newfoundland in a two-door coupe
By Kyle McKillop
We were in our fifth week of driving. Our fifth week of being three men trapped together in a two-door Civic. Our fifth week of eating cheap penne cooked on a camp stove every night. Our fifth week of beard-growing contests. The inevitable fights had already begun, about everything from music selection to rest stops to whether icebergs were visible from the shore or whether they would only appear gray like the horizon, but the brawls were always relieved by a steady supply of snacks and a sense of adventuring into the unknown.
Going coast to coast in a car is a rite of passage in Canada, but few make it as far as Newfoundland, which is separated from the mainland by a seven-hour ferry ride. We'd dipped our feet in the Pacific, at Mile Zero of the Trans-Canada Highway in Victoria, our home, and we were determined to get to the end of the highway in St. John's. Nothing could stop us, not the snow in our first days on the Prairies, not the swarms of black flies in the backwoods of Quebec, not the freezing rain on the Gaspé Peninsula or the fog so thick it would knock you flat for looking at it wrong, not the torrential rains in New Brunswick…. Only eccentrics, lovers of agony, and ignorant westerners try to camp in Canada in May, but we couldn't stop yet, and Newfoundland wasn't going to be any worse than the rest of the country.
After the over-night ferry to Port-Aux-Basques at the west end of the island, we spent a night in the gorgeous Gros Morne National Park, full of moose and amazing vistas, and so rich in geological history that it was made a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1987. Although they were only introduced a hundred years ago, moose are a common sight on the island. They pose beside the Trans- Canada Highway like ungainly modernist sculptures on rolling-pin legs, and their enormous size and dramatic shape fits well with Newfoundland's spectacular beauty. My only preconceptions consisted of the words "fishing village" and "cod," I never expected this windswept and rugged land. Pines struggle up wherever they can compete with the hard breeze or the healthy alders. The mountains sit grimly along the coast, small but formidable.
The villages, on the other hand, are pretty and friendly places, with low-slung white clapboard buildings or mobile homes clustered closely on scrub-covered hills. In one long day, we drove across the island to St. John's, the capital of Newfoundland, and camped close to the city in Pippy Park. In town, we searched for 45 minutes before finding the small monument marking the other end of Highway 1. A little marker showed with an arrow the direction we came from, reading "Victoria 5097 km" as the crow flies; somehow, we had managed to turn that distance into 10,000 kilometres, as the Marc drives. Then, in that eastern-most city in North America, we found a place to get ourselves screeched in. We tested the screech, a local variant of rum, then kissed a cod and became honorary Newfoundlanders before scurrying back to our tent to hide from the cold.
The next evening we were camping in Newfoundland's oldest national park, Terra Nova, when Marc and Tom decided to use the payphone down the road. I stayed in the empty campground to read at the picnic table beside our tent.
It wasn't until they drove away that I realized that the light cast by the lantern was really very small. And, I suddenly realized, I was stuck in the middle of nowhere and probably surrounded by thousands of moose, wild birds, and lurking carnivorous night beasts. Worse, I was the only human being left in the park, and the tiny mantle burning inside the lantern was the only thing between me and perfect darkness. Of course, that mantle was also very fragile and probably wasn't going to be much help when the wolves came for me.
I tried singing spirituals to lift my spirits, but I only know two and they weren't going to last long enough to hold off the wolves until the guys returned. To make things worse, somewhere in the distance I could hear a crazed high-pitched whining, which could have been either moose in mating pandemonium, traffic whipping along Canada's fabled Highway 1, or, wolves saying grace. My state of mind did not improve when I heard twigs snapping in the bushes across the picnic table. "It's only a squirrel," I tried to reassure myself, then briefly imagined fortifying the table with firewood. Instead, I switched to singing early 90s dance pop. Maybe the wolves would let me live as long as the show lasted, but regardless, shrieking has always made me feel better.
By the time Marc and Tom returned from their phone calls, I was a sweaty wreck, my back carefully positioned against the wall of the tent and Marc's hatchet within reach. They could only laugh at me and roll their eyes. "Wolves have been extinct on Newfoundland for decades," said Marc, who knows a lot about these things, "and I'm sure the moose would have been gentle with you. You probably just heard those rabbits we saw earlier."
Sheepishly, I agreed, and the guys laughed at me again. Carefully, so as not to startle me, they pulled out the maps and began to plan the long journey home. In the morning, between moose sightings and bursts of rain, we drove back towards the ferry landing at Portaux- Basques. Behind us was St. John's and the end of the road, and ahead of us was another six days of driving across the continent. We threw Kings of Leon in the CD player and rolled on towards home.