David McFadden - An Innocent in Newfoundland: Even More Curious Rambles and Singular Encounters

North Sydney Gulf of St. Lawrence Port aux Basques Robinsons

T uesday, May 15. The ferry across the Gulf of St. Lawrence to Port aux Basques leaves at nine. Its a surreal dawn, with a fleet of four Lays Dorito potato-chip trucks waiting to get put aboard. We have three hours to wait. Im chatting with a fellow in the next car. Those trucks are empty, he says. We cant get any free samples.

Why are they going to Newfoundland empty? Is there a potato-chip plant over there?

No way! he says. Look. No plates. Somebody bought them, see? I dont know who. Maybe the newspaper. They could do a good job of delivering the news all around Newfoundland with a fleet of trucks like that.

Also at dockside: a small man sitting on a big motorcycle, and several stubby little tractor-trailer cabs without the trailer all with engines running. My cars turned off, but it seems as if its running, because its shaking along with all the surrounding engines. In fact so am I, but if I get out of the car, the noise and fumes will be worse. The ferrys moored at the dock a mere two hundred yards away, but we cant get aboard. We have to wait for the shuttle bus at 8:30 for safety reasons.

There are two ferries docked the Caribou, with its engines off, and the Smallwood, with black smoke belching from its smokestack. As I start getting steamed about all the unnecessary soot in the air, the smoke from the Smallwood thins out and wafts away. The truck drivers start turning their engines off. And I hear one driver yelling over to another: Dont be good, Peter. You gotta be bad.

Nova Scotia has different slogans for car plates Canadas Ocean Playground and for trucks Open for Business. But Newfoundland and Labrador have just one, and its a subtler one A World of Difference, a line worthy to be used when signing tourist-home guest books.

I managed only the briefest snooze on the new Caribou, named after its predecessor that was torpedoed by a German U-boat at 3:10 a.m. on October 14, 1942, with the loss of 137 lives, including those of Captain Ben Tavenor and his two teenage sons. I can offer no impressions of my first sight of Newfoundland, as impressions dont make much of an impression on weary souls. In retrospect, I shouldnt have been driving. After doing some shopping in the old seven-hilled former fishing village of Port aux Basques, I had to ask directions on three occasions before finding my way out of that miniature maze. I needed a full nights sleep, but only in a quiet place in the country.

Another hour and I found the perfect spot, called Kountry Korners, near the town of Robinsons, on the shore of St. Georges Bay, about forty miles northeast of Port aux Basques, way off the main road. There was a filling station, a garage, a convenience store, a large dining room, a large barroom, a large cook, a poolroom, a convenience store, and a dozen rooms upstairs, along with an indoor sauna and hot tub. Why indoors? They said they had plans to build an outdoor set-up as well for heartier folk like me.

I staggered to my room and was assailed by the strongest smell of solvents. A workman noticed me sniffing and offered an unsolicited apology for the fumes. It was some work they were doing on the hot tub.

So I tore off my clothes and threw myself in bed. The clock said 5:00 p.m. I closed my eyes. I opened them. The clock said 2:00 a.m. I closed them. I opened them. Clock said 2:00 p.m.