Image: Marilyn Bellamy |
Excerpted from Summers in Squid Tickle: A Newfoundland Odyssey by Robert Finch:
After five days of driving and a hundred-mile ferry crossing, I’ve arrived at my destination in the village of Burnside, a tiny outport tucked deep into the inner recesses of Bonavista Bay on the island’s northeast coast, one of the oldest-settled and longest-fished areas in Newfoundland. The landscape is one of low ridges and archipelagos of rocky islands. These hills are the last outpost of the once-mighty and ancient Appalachian range that stretches from northeast Alabama to the tip of Newfoundland’s Northern Peninsula, the ground-down essence of the continent. Here at the edge of the sea, they appear low and half submerged, like the backs of giant black whales frozen in the act of sounding.Though no longer lofty, at close range these mountains are still impressive and assertive, rising in sheer cliffs hundreds of feet high above the beating surf, bare rock capped by a thin layer of soil and long grassy turf, spilling dozens of small cascades over and down narrow ravines into the sea.I arrived in Burnside heartsick and heartsore, full of guilt and a pain I could find no release from. I had shattered one life and had not yet built another. I was far from home, and yet felt I had no home. I was in a liminal state of being—in Joseph Campbell’s phrase, “between dreams”—though it felt more like a nightmare than a dream. In other words, I was totally unfit to open myself up to a new place and a new set of people.Although I had barely arrived here, I felt it was nearly time to go, and I had done nothing.Yet I knew I had to go, had to get away and try to heal myself in a new place, an unfamiliar world, where the old ghosts could not follow me, or if they did, might become lost in new surroundings. Newfoundland seemed like a good place to go.Burnside is a small coastal village, or outport, with perhaps forty or fifty year-round residents, down from three hundred and fifty a generation ago. I’m staying in the western part of the town, which was traditionally known as Squid Tickle. Like many of the names in Newfoundland that strike the visitor as humorous or quaint, Squid Tickle is straightforwardly descriptive. In the center of the town there is a narrow water passage, or “tickle,” separating the Burnside mainland from Squid Island. In the old days there used to be heavy runs of squid in the tickle in late summer, which the local residents gathered and dried.The house I am staying in belongs to Mark and Fraser Carpenter, two friends who had left Cape Cod and immigrated to Newfoundland eight years ago. In a staggering burst of sustained energy, they built the house themselves in four months, from October to January, living in a camper in the back of a Mazda pickup truck. They worked from sunup to sundown, and when they woke up in the morning their sleeping bags were frozen solid with their sweat.Over the next seven years they operated a tour boat business in the nearby Terra Nova National Park. Last year they sold the business and were now on a voyage into Arctic waters on the Joshua, a forty-foot sloop whose steel hull they had welded themselves in their driveway and hauled on log rollers down the dirt streets of the town to the harbor. Their enterprise and capacity for work had given them almost legendary status in the town. They generously offered me the use of their house while they were gone.The house is a modest one-and-a-half-story Cape set on pilings with a crawl space enclosed by boards, built of native spruce and pine lumber that Mark and Fraser cut from the nearby islands. Its Cape Cod design, uncommon here in Newfoundland, immediately gave me a sense of familiarity and some comfort in strange surroundings.When I first arrived, I literally had to burrow into the house. Since winter gales here will pry open even locked doors, Mark and Fraser had nailed shut their front door and all the windows from inside when they left, exiting through a trapdoor in the pantry and then stacking the crawl space with several cords of “junks”—cut-up spruce and birch stove logs. It took me nearly two hours to toss out enough wood to make a tunnel through which I could crawl to reach the hatch. When I did and poked my head up like a groundhog into the dim kitchen, I found a sweet house, tightly built, with homemade curtains pinned shut across the windows, painted wainscoting, and maps of all kinds covering the walls
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