Wednesday, July 11, 2012


It was nearing the end of April, and my first day of driving across the isle of Newfoundland had been uneventful, with sunny – yes, sunny – skies and dry roads, something no one expected. I reached Corner Brook having encountered a minimum of traffic, something which was expected. The ferry website revealed that the nightly crossing had been cancelled due to high winds. I hoped the dawn would bring better weather and retired early in anticipation of driving the remaining 216 km to the marine terminal by 9am the next day.

I was approaching the terminal in Port aux Basques Saturday morning, having driven 200 of those 216 km, when an automated message informed me that the morning crossing also had been cancelled. Ahead, a truck had been forced off the road (but not rolled over) by the classic Wreckhouse area winds, so I stopped and bowed to the inevitability of the North Atlantic. I returned to Corner Brook and spent most of the day drowsing in my truck in the WalMart parking lot, and walking around the mall when I needed to step out of the truck (the same harsh, frigid wind which was keeping the ferries docked also made outdoor strolling unpleasant). I finally prevailed upon a fellow LESA (Landscape Ecology and Spatial Analysis) labber, Stacey, and her landlord/roommate, Isabelle, a school chum of Yolanda’s, for a place to stay that evening. Thanks, ladies.

I rose early yet again on Sunday and struck out for the Port aux Basques terminal. The weather front had passed through and the ferries were running. Because of the cancellations over the last few days, my morning crossing was almost empty; even though I was pretty far back in the boarding queue, I parked one row back from the front/unloading door of the ship. The ship’s crew said the evening crossing was scheduled to be full, but there were plenty of empty seats and berths for my cruise.

When the ferry finally lurched into motion, I went out on the deck and watched Newfoundland’s harsh south coastline retreat rapidly into the snowy distance. The Long Range mountains and the south barrens looked rugged and inviting in a challenging sort of way. It is the landscape of Random Passage and The Shipping News and reflects the singularly brutal introductory narrative by which millions of people have come to know Newfoundland. They are taught about the austerity and little else. It would take too long to contrast the stories of lonely, isolated and backward outport life with my academic, multinational, pseudo-cosmopolitan experiences in St. John’s over the last two years. I’ve come to believe that we’ve struggled, all of us who’ve lived and laughed and loved and learned on The Rock, but in very, very different ways.

After a mildly unpleasant sensation experienced while assisting Emily ‘Captain Cod’ Zimmerman in her statistically-driven gadiform-jigging duties, I feared that I might get seasick on the passage, given the whitecaps and swells. After wolfing down a really crappy sandwich, however, the huge ship promptly rocked me to sleep. I snoozed in the viewing lounge facing out over the Cabot Straight, under a sign which explained in four languages that no one was allowed to sleep in the lounge. Over the six-hour ride, almost everyone in the room was asleep at some point. Some slept soundly, snoring, while others, like me, woke and quickly returned to sleep whenever a strong wave hit the hull and sent spray high into the air, splashing against the large observation windows, seven decks above the water.

Within four hours, Cape Breton had replaced the horizon featureless horizon of the North Atlantic on starboard. Two hours later, with little fanfare and considerably less shouting, gesturing, exhaust fumes and general complexity than my last superferry deboarding (February 2010), I set foot on the mainland of North America for the first time in over two years.

For those years, the bulk of the continent had been so near and yet so far, in terms of mail service and politics and shopping and weather, that my sudden transition from the Rock to the Rest of the World seemed a little surreal. Unlike other MUN students, I had not flown home from St. John’s for holidays or concerts; I still have no idea how they afforded all that travel while I went into debt buying groceries and spark plugs. The sensation of arriving in a new world was intensified as I stopped at a small road-side motel and paid $40 for a room. My 6-hour stay in a Corner Brook Holiday Inn cost $150.

I arrived at the international border crossing in the hamlet of Houlton, Maine, armed with itemized lists of my belongings and protracted explanations as to where I’d been for the last two years. Unlike my entry into Canada, the DHS border guard simply asked me where I was born, where I was going, and if I was bringing anything into the country that I didn’t have when I left it. As one might guess, I hadn’t done a lot of shopping for durable goods as a grad student, and the few expensive things I’d bought were all shipped from the US anyway. As I looked at him, broad-chested, buffed, crewcut and wearing military-style BDU clothing and flak gear, I thought about:

(a) joking that 30% of my truck was now comprised of Canadian auto parts; or

(b) explaining that the RNC, the RCMP and the CBSA had been surprisingly effective - for competing federal agencies, I mean - in their conspired efforts to confiscate and destroy my Marlin .22 rifle

but in the end I bowed to expediency and simply said ‘no’. He gave me a perfunctory 'welcome home' and waved me through.

Home? I thought. Personally speaking, that’s a much more complicated concept than it was even just a few years ago. In the name of road-numbed half-consciousness, I shrugged off the pending introspection and prepared myself for the loud, aggressive onslaught of NE US traffic. This preparation neglected the fact that I was still in northern Maine. The roads of Maine where hemmed in by timber on either side – dark forests brimming with moose, and in that way they continued the trend of the roads on which I’d been since I left Regina Place. But as I left the coast, the Maine sun revealed itself in a blue sky and soon the bulk of the northern terminus of the AT and that storied outdoorsperson’s mecha, Katahdin, appeared. I’m no Main-ah, but it was a beautiful area.

The rest of the trip was characterized by linking numerous interstate highways together to take me on my southeasterly course, in the process avoiding New York city, Philly, Washington, D.C and New Jersey entirely. I passed through so many states that I had trouble keeping track of which jurisdiction I was in at any given time. The traffic did get heavy at times, but remained surprisingly well-mannered. I stayed in cheap motels along the way, slowly reminding my body what beds feel like.

After skimming north of the most thickly-populated areas of my homeland, I met my boss at the BP (that’s not a BP station; it is the BP which serves as my main social outlet - Britney, Amanda and that friendly old guy - and main source of last-minute groceries, batteries, morning pastries and gas). Then I proceeded to wind along the narrow mountain road which led to the secluded and historically significant valley simply called Cataloochee. I pulled into the ranger station and introduced myself to my flatmates and neighbors: elk, pileated woodpeckers, two species of mice, a toad or two, quite a few turkeys, and a few bears.

While my arrival in the Cataloochee Valley was not celebrated (the mice may have even complained), it did mark the end of my 2700-mile odyssey, including as it did long hours, complex intersections and signage, variable road conditions, exhaustion, delicate negotiations with all manner of large, fast-moving tractor-trailer rigs, rain, fog and night driving. Naturally, my first assignment for GRSM was to click through a three-hour DOI online training about safe/defensive driving.