We see caribou at Port au Choix, icebergs at Twillingate, and puffins at Elliston en route to Saint John’s.
We’d reached the northern tip of Newfoundland and now it was time to start making our way back south and across the island to Saint John’s, and not a moment too soon. The bugs were bad! Like the night before, no one wanted to cook, so we headed into Raleigh again in search of food. Unfortunately, the restaurant we had in mind didn’t open until 11:00, but we were referred to an RV park that did an early greasy breakfast for a song. By this time it was late morning and we were no further south with no reservation for the night.
When things look bleak, it’s never a bad idea to go to the local Tim Horton’s. There, you can get a coffee for $2 and free WIFI to sort yourself out. I found a B & B about halfway down the coast, made an executive decision, phoned, and made a reservation for the night. I knew we were essentially losing a day from our tentative schedule, but sometimes you just have to adjust your schedule to fit your circumstances.
Jeannie’s Sunrise B & B turned out to be a real treat. The room we got actually did have a view out over the ocean to the east, so we would wake to the sunrise (and get an earlier start). Jeannie also suggested we take a ride after dinner over to the lighthouse. We said we were nervous about riding after dark but she reassured us the ride across the cape is open with excellent visibility and she was right. On our way to the lighthouse, I spotted two caribou grazing a short distance from the road.
It doesn’t get any better than this. Seriously, I think it was the highlight of the entire tour for me. Marilyn was eager to get over to the lighthouse in the hope of seeing a moose if not another ocean sunset, but I couldn’t help doubling back for a second look.
I don’t know why I was so taken by them. Maybe it’s because they are so elusive, like the singular chaste girl at college who was the object of every guy’s wet dream, or the rare motorbike or book you’ve been searching for your entire life. I know I’ll be in trouble for those comparisons but the point I’m trying to make is that rarity increases value and desire. In this case, you have to get pretty far north to have a hope of seeing caribou, and then you have to be lucky to be there at a certain time of the year and a certain time of the day. When all these factors align, you just hope their expert skills of camouflage don’t lead to you driving right past, which most people did. And it’s in the hope of capturing something of that rarity that leads us to making the mistake of reaching for our phones or cameras instead of soaking in the encounter with every drop of attention we have, so it can plant and root in memory, maybe grow into a poem, or some other art. I’m thinking here of Canadian poet Don McKay’s term poetic attention, “a sort of readiness, a species of longing which is without desire to possess” (“Baler Twine,” Vis à Vis, Gaspereau Press).
Motionless, they move just beyond the ridge-line, half hidden, as if wading knee deep in rocky scrub land. In the fading light, it’s a wonder I saw them at all, 100 meters off the road, but there’s definitely something there, two figures, one clearly larger and leading the other. I grab the monocular and see through the lens now how expert they are at camouflage. Their tawny hides are a shade darker than shadow, and the mottled white of their underbellies looks just like lichen. Even the antlers, antennas receiving the last of the light, could be sun-bleached branches scattered on the ground. Heads down, they don’t see us, tourists to their world of wilderness. I should have known this moment cannot be captured except in memory but want more—a shot, a boast, a post. I take the camera and step forward, but when I lift it to my eye I see that now we are the ones observed, strange creatures standing at the edge of their attention.
Copyright © 2023 by Kevin Bushell
The next day we went in search of icebergs. We’d heard that Twillingate was the place to see them, but since it was July, we didn’t hold out much hope. We got an early start and rode the rest of the west coast back down through Rocky Harbour to Deer Lake, picked up the Trans Canada Highway, rode that all the way to the 340 east of Grand Falls Windsor, then headed north as far as we could, which turned out to be a place called Dildo Run Provincial Park just east of Virgin Arm. The comments section below is open for your worst jokes.
After dinner, I wandered up to the gate with a pipe in search of a pannier sticker, which they gave for free to anyone who completed a survey. Today you can’t take a piss in a public washroom without being asked to complete a survey and as a rule I do not do surveys, ever. I know that they are just an underhanded way to get your contact info so someone can target market to you, all in the guise of providing “helpful advertising.” I don’t need any help with my shopping, thank you very much; if anything, I need help not shopping. But in this case, with a pannier sticker as the prize, I plugged my nose and did it. As a secondary prize, I struck up a conversation with two local staff members, and talking with locals is always interesting. I learned that one had grown up at Jane and Finch in Toronto, perhaps the most dangerous neighbourhood in Canada. When I asked how he survived the gang violence, he said, “See these shoes?” and modelled his gleaming white runners. “I learned to run fast.”
I heard how both had left Newfoundland earlier in their lives to make an income, first to Toronto to build the Gardiner Expressway and the CN Tower, then to Fort McMurray during the oil boom, splitting their time between two provinces thousands of miles apart. I’m more familiar with the diaspora of my second-generation immigrant students, so it was interesting to hear of their experiences living in two cultures created by national migration. If I remember correctly, one said he would fly back and forth every six weeks to see family. It reminded me of a movie I’d seen recently set in Belfast about a similar sacrifice made by one family whose father was forced to seek work in England. I suppose the conflict between living where you want to and where you have to is nothing new, especially here in Canada where the rural areas are beautiful and the urban ones so . . . not beautiful. I just didn’t think people split their lives in half like this, or that it was even feasible, but that they either stuck it out at an economic cost, or made the difficult move at an emotional one. I was happy that both my acquaintances, later in life, had managed to find employment with ParksNL.
The next day we rode up into Twillingate, the unofficial capital of Iceberg Alley, and beyond onto North Twillingate Island, which is picturesque and worth visiting just to see the colourful clapboard buildings and to climb up to the lighthouse and look out over the ocean. It’s here that icebergs that have broken off of glaciers in Greenland drift by, drawn by sea currents. The best time to view them is April and May so we were late but still able to see some bergy bits (that’s a real term) and growlers. If their size wasn’t super impressive, their colour certainly was.
After a night at Terra Nova National Park, we were within a day’s ride from Saint John’s but decided to head up to Elliston on the Bonavista peninsula. We’d been told by a birder friend that it’s the best place to view Puffins. I have to admit that I don’t quite get the appeal of puffins, despite what I just said above about rarity. Maybe it’s because they are such crappy flyers, struggling into the air by flapping their hearts out (up to 400 times per minute), or maybe it’s their creepy faces, giving them the nickname “clowns of the sea.”
But we went, because we were in Newfoundland, and it’s the unwritten law to see puffins when here, like how you have to see a production of The Nutcracker at Christmas and the movie The Sound of Music at least once a year to maintain marital bliss. In the end, however, I’m glad we did. Bonavista literally means “beautiful view” and the ride around the peninsula was special. The puffins were pretty neat too.
Elliston has another claim to fame. It is also the root cellar capital of the world, according to NL tourism. I didn’t know there was a root cellar capital or who decides such things, but I found the little structures quaint in a Hobbit-like way and the idea interesting. These cold storage facilities keep vegetables cool in the summer and prevent freezing in the winter, so essentially the earth regulates the temperature. I can’t keep mice out of my back porch so am curious how half of the produce doesn’t get spoiled by vermin. The doors, stonework, and sky make for some picturesque photos.
Our treasure hunt across the northern peninsulas was coming to a close, yet ironically, although we were not searching for it, the best discovery was yet to come. Earlier in the day, during a rest stop at a coffee shop, I overheard a staff member say she liked a place called Trinity. I figured if a local likes it, it must be good, so despite Marilyn’s concerns about the time and getting into Saint John’s late, I made another executive decision and pulled off the 230 when I saw signs for Trinity. The ride in from the highway was pretty and the village even better. We stopped at the Dock Marina Restaurant and Gallery. Now Marilyn was no longer complaining about the time but wondering aloud how we might be able to retire here. We ended up buying some artwork as a souvenir and shipping it home.
It was getting late and we still had a three-hour ride to our hotel in Saint John’s. Yes, we were splurging on a hotel this night. I could say that we were enjoying ourselves so much that we decided to loosen the purse-strings, but the truth is that we misjudged accommodations in Saint John’s. We’d made reservations all up the east coast, thinking that the remoteness might make it difficult to secure campsites, and deduced that there would be no shortage of cheap accommodations in the city. In fact, Saint John’s is very busy during the tourist months of summer. We would “have to” take a night at the exquisite Alt Hotel on Water Street. I didn’t mind. It had been a lot of riding and we’d be getting in after dark. The room, with its electric blinds and view of the harbour, was a welcome treat, and the staff didn’t seem to mind us tromping through the lobby in our muddy gear.
In the next post, we hit the town, meet up with friends, and ride the southern peninsulas.
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