August 28
After an overnight with rain and low clouds but favorable NE winds, we anchored in a place called Punchbowl in time for supper and a brief walk ashore. Picture a perfectly round cove about 1/4 mile across with a small entrance, surrounded by gently sloping treeless hills, so that there’s relentless wind but no sea. Sprinkled along the shoreline are numerous abandoned gray shacks, heaved at comic cartoon-like angles by frost. The largest feature is a substantial wharf, also abandoned but still perfectly vertical. Tim was last here in 1998, so he knows the story of this place. In the eighties there were a fish plant and hotel here. Newfoundlanders would come up here in the summer, stay in the shacks, fish from small boats, and sell their catch to the fish plant for processing. The government built the wharf, and a few years later cod fishing collapsed and they closed everything down. When Tim came by in 1998, the fish plant and the hotel were still there but the locals had already started scavenging. Now nothing is left but the wharf and the weathered gray particleboard shacks.
Such is the story of many Newfoundland and Labrador outports — small remote fishing settlements with no road access. A basic element of this coastal culture for more than 200 years, they have been systematically depopulated by a “resettlement” policy to make it easier to provide schools, health care, and other services. The end of cod fishing finished them off for good. If you have any interest in this, read “Galore” by Michael Crummey — well researched historical fiction. It’s a great book.
The coast here is endless rounded barren islands, brutally exposed, giving a feeling of places farther north. The outer faces of the shoreline are typically bare, scoured by ice from twenty to forty feet vertically. Tim says the sea ice is driven up into great piles by the wind. Above that level every square inch has vegetation. That’s the magic of this landscape: the rock surfaces are an exquisite patchworks of lichens; the exposed crevasses are moss-filled; and once they produce a bit a soil (carbon drawn from the air!), in come the crowberries and other creeping plants to complete the dense patchwork. No bare earth, no sand, no gravel. The mosses and low plants form a soft resilient cushion that gives beneath the feet, making walking a sensual delight.
Finally, it cleared tonight and the wind dropped. We had a glimpse of Venus at sunset. The stars were brilliant. Tomorrow an early start to avoid battling the building south wind.
