Newfoundland - life on a rock
"Carved by the ice and loved by the sea"
"Carved by the ice and loved by the sea"
Ancient granite unworn by the winds towering still sharp above placid lakes, thick sheets of silvered slate lining the highway, fields of sea floor rusted iron boulders strewn across high valleys. A land of rock barely covered by topsoil. White barked trees barely holding on or blown into a chaotic silver fretwork. Plentiful ponds mirrored and lifeless, coloured by peat and iron, dispersed amongst the topology without heed of levels or natural drainage.
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Fresh ancient-water icebergs pass-by cragged headlands, three years since calving off Greenland. Close-to, their curvaceous crystal blue-white water worn siren sensuality is well-known, but their sounds are new and add to the awe, rumbling hollow like ancient church bells, clunking as treasured stones of some eastern religion, deep throated croaking as the concrete-hard ice cracks and dissolves in a 1C sea.
The sheltering rock along the coast visited by birds with mysterious calls, amusing puffins, powerful sea eagles, lone gulls and preening cormorants. Each, like the people, making their living from the sea.
The sheltering rock along the coast visited by birds with mysterious calls, amusing puffins, powerful sea eagles, lone gulls and preening cormorants. Each, like the people, making their living from the sea.
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Life is lived precariously on the crust that once rose through the earth’s layers to form this barren rock in the ocean.
The Beothuk, 1C arrivals, the source of the ‘Red Indian’ nomenclature, pasted in ochre by religion and against the summer biting, a people wiped out in 300 years by the white man’s need, greed, weaponry and tuberculosis. The land’s support for the displaced Beothuk insufficient when pushed inland and away from the coast - and so came the famine.
It can be barely understood how the white men who first came here might have felt, a first timid and yet uncompromising step onto a new land, a land that held hope of new circumstances but little opportunity. These are a people who over generations and through need have learned forbearance of their extreme circumstances, mutual support, common labour and a generosity of spirit, each being so necessary to existence.
The Beothuk, 1C arrivals, the source of the ‘Red Indian’ nomenclature, pasted in ochre by religion and against the summer biting, a people wiped out in 300 years by the white man’s need, greed, weaponry and tuberculosis. The land’s support for the displaced Beothuk insufficient when pushed inland and away from the coast - and so came the famine.
It can be barely understood how the white men who first came here might have felt, a first timid and yet uncompromising step onto a new land, a land that held hope of new circumstances but little opportunity. These are a people who over generations and through need have learned forbearance of their extreme circumstances, mutual support, common labour and a generosity of spirit, each being so necessary to existence.
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Their Irish forefathers remain richly present in the local music, in the songs of the sea journeys from another land, in the soft warm lilt in their voices, in the rich rusted hair of the strong limbed men and the pallid, willowy girls. But like the white barked trees, these people are barely rooted to the rock, like the birds they are precariously poised on the edges of the land, more closely related to the sea. Their harbours are decorated with multicoloured shiplap buildings structured in seasoned timber like their boats, poised on but not founded in the land, houses loosely arranged about the protruding rock that still determines where they may and may not build, settlements fringed by boardwalk protected marsh and springing moss between tightly spaced trees, rotting log steps scrambling up crevasses to wild sea lookouts, stone lighthouses propped on promontories, stone beaches decorated with driftwood, and rusting, wave washed steel left from another boat or car wreck, weather worn memories of impermanence and passing time.
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The planes from Europe that once touched down for fuel now overfly the island, a brief period of bustling modernity and welcome income now past. There remains seasonal onshore tourism, Canadians now visiting their extremities in lieu of their newly demanding neighbour, and the servicing of an offshore oil industry soon destined to decline. And the trawlers, leaving late and returning early, already the seas depleted by overfishing, the lobster pots less plentiful providers
May 2026
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