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Newfoundland: A Mirage of Wilderness
| Article
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20280 |
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Section : |
LIFE
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| Issue
Date : |
7 / 1992 |
4,107 Words |
| Author
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Richard Bangs
Richard Bangs is the author of Island Gods, Whitewater
Adventure, and Riding the Dragon's Back, which won the
Lowell Thomas Award for the best travel book of 1989. He
is the founder of SOBEK Expeditions, an international
travel-adventure company, which has become part of Mt.
Travel-SOBEK. |
It is impossible not to confront the Janus nature of this land. Its rivers run clean and clear; its air spins with the breath of honeysuckle. Its forbidding interior is a land without litter. Its craggy edges and joints are lodged with deeply religious Protestants and Roman Catholics renowned for their charity and moral excellence. On a sunny day, the place seems like heaven.
Yet the incessant storms, the frigid waters, have snuffed countless lives, and a pall of violence forever hangs. The people are children of their beloved enemy the sea, and they move with the rhythm of the natural world. They are optimistic fatalists, a thick-skinned and gentle stock who exterminated the Beothuk Indians, hunted the great auk (a penguin) to extinction, and brought the pilot whale to the brink. For 450 years their economic mainstay was a seemingly inexhaustible supply of salt fish. Now the stock has been reduced (by outsiders) to a slim fraction of that of the glory days. Not long ago, chief livelihoods included clubbing young seals to death. Presently they include mining, damming wild rivers, and felling trees. Despite these intrusions into the wilderness, few places survive with such environmental integrity and harmony; yet the urban-based environmentalists of the planet have painted this island as a house for ecobandits.
Those who live in Newfoundland call it the Rock and the Granite Planet. The explorer Jacques Cartier christened it "the land God gave to Cain." None does the tenth-largest island justice. Canada's Newfoundland is much more than a slate stopper thrust into the bell mouth of the Gulf of St. Lawrence.
Since Newfoundland is of the sea, presenting a slashed and convoluted coast to the Big Pond, a favored Newfie name for the Atlantic, I felt there could be no better way to explore its foreshore--its coves, bights, inlets, reaches, runs, and fjords,--than by sea kayak. So it was I found myself with Canadian Canoe Adventures, traveling an old land that some insist has yet to be found.
Our weeklong sojourn started on Friday the thirteenth on Random Island. The first thing Jim Price, our guide, did was go through our gear and winnow out 75 percent to be left behind. "This is not a cruise or a raft trip," his eyes crinkled at the corners as he spoke. Besides, I later discovered, he wanted as much space as possible to pack his Margie's cooking, and for good reason.
When I was properly shaken down to a single change of clothes, I
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