The Strangers' Gallery (35 page)

Halfway down the long line of parked vehicles in front of the supermarket, he stopped behind a long, tall, black vehicle with opaque windows, like a two-storey hearse. It was a Chevrolet Suburban, licence plate number a provocative HAA 463, with its engine idling. A despicable two and a half kilometres to the litre, Anton said, only half what the manufacturers claimed, which was bad enough. On its ample bumper he placed his first sticker:
I'm changing the climate. Ask me how.
He was standing back to admire it when a door burst open, cracking the sealed black surface of the cab like a lid lifting up off a coffin. A large outraged Lazarus, a man who matched the size of his vehicle, jumped out, rushed to the back, took one look at Anton's handiwork and said, charmingly, “What the fuck do you think you're doing?”

Before Anton had a chance to reply, the front of his T-shirt, which said
Imagine
, was reduced to a large fistful of cloth, and he was pulled forward and either head-butted or body-bounced, or both, bumper stickers flying as he hit the pavement. His assailant pulled himself menacingly erect, hands on his hips, and expanded his chest as if to proudly display the logo on his own T-shirt—to deliver another message, perhaps—in response to Anton's bumper sticker.
Bull Arm,
it said, the Trinity Bay construction site of the huge Hibernia drill rig that we'd been hearing so much about.

Anton decided—wisely, I thought—not to get up, so the man turned away, bent down to examine the bumper sticker more closely, furrowed his brow, and tried half-heartedly to peel it off. Anton, now in a sitting position with his arms shoring him up, looked on nervously but attentively. The front of his T-shirt was still in a knot, but there was no blood on his face, or any other sign of a wound.

The man turned and looked at Anton again. “You fucking defaced my
veecal
,” he said.

He turned and saw me and raised his eyebrows, as if I'd been invisible before. Coward that I am, I was standing well to the side, and had decided to stay there unless things really got out of hand. I had never been in a fight in my life, and, at my age, and with this enraged beast as my first opponent, I didn't think it would be a good time to start.

“Are you with him?” he asked.

“Michael Lowe,” I exhaled, tentatively extending my hand, but thankful for the chance to intervene. “This is Anton Aalders, from Holland.”

Anton was on his feet now, but he kept his distance, his face still registering alarm.

“He vandalized my veecal,” he said to me. “I'm gonna have you charged!” he shouted at Anton.

“I charge you with assault,” Anton said, as if he were a policeman making an arrest.

I half expected him to assault Anton again, but he just looked at him fiercely. His cellphone rang. He removed it from a sort of holster attached to his belt.

“Yeah,” he said flatly, then listened attentively, looking toward the Dominion supermarket windows. On the wall above the windows I noticed for the first time the ragged black graffiti—
And Life shall have no
—spray-painted above the Dominion sign. I wondered if this was just an isolated literary prank or part of the wider ongoing protest against the blanket supermarketing of St. John's: on sports fields, in memorial parks, in historic buildings, on the forlorn, abandoned sites of orphanage crimes, anywhere and everywhere they could fit one in. Anton had taken part in an anti-supermarket protest himself. A huge cloth banner with the words “Supermarket Opening Soon” had been draped across the front of the Colonial Building. Secured with rope to all six Ionic columns, it blocked the main entrance. Police were called to remove it and disperse the protesters.

“The dark ones with the spongy centres,” I heard Anton's assailant say, and his face took on a warmer cast. “And don't forget the Deet.”

When he replaced the phone, his face hardened again and his eyes narrowed. Neither one of us had moved an inch.

“I'm gonna have you charged,” he repeated. “I want your name and address. You're gonna be hearing from the police or my lawyer.”

I gave him our names again, and our address and phone number, and he entered the information into his newfangled phone as if he were making a call.

“What's
your
name?” Anton said bravely as he was doing this. When he finished, he took a few steps in Anton's direction.

“Dick,” he said harshly, glaring at him. Never had a so-called Christian name sounded more un-Christian. “Parsons,” he added, with extra plosive power.

“I got your licence number,” Anton said, pushing his luck.

“Shove it up your arse,” said Dick, turning to go, and he brushed so close to me as he went past I could still smell his Old Spice aftershave half an hour later.

That evening, instead of packing, I began
preparing my testimony. If I were called into court to testify, and it looked as if I would be, to bear witness to what had happened to Anton in the Square, I vowed I wouldn't make the mistake I'd made the first time I'd innocently wandered in.

In March I'd gone to court to contest, to
protest,
a forty-five-dollar ticket for parking overnight on the street in front of my house. I'd prepared a high-minded, a high-principled, case, had been beating the bushes for weeks on the high moral ground. I would speak with the vehemence, the passion, of a Miles Harnett. My themes, besides innocence, were ignorance, lack of intent, extenuating circumstances, mercy, justice…

Judge Gradgrind presiding: “Not themes, but facts. In this court, we want nothing but facts, sir; nothing but facts. A man in your profession should be acquainted with facts. Are you the owner of a blue Toyota Tercel hatchback, licence plate number BAD 123?”

“Yes, your Honour.”

“Was this vehicle parked overnight on the street on December 4, 1995, between the hours of 1 a.m. and 7 a.m.?”

“Yes, your Honour.”

“Is this a photograph of your vehicle, your house, and your street?”

“Yes, yes, yes, your Honour.”

“Well, my good man, you are in contravention of city ordnance number SJ918431294617. No parking on the street from December 1 to March 31 in order to facilitate snow removal.”

“Even when there is no snow on the street, your Honour, and no forecast of snow, and, therefore, it follows as the night the day, no need to remove said snow?”

“Yes, yes, yes. Irrelevant, out of order, bordering on contempt, respectively. Guilty as charged. Next case.”

No, I wouldn't make that mistake again. What kind of an archivist was I, anyway? I hadn't even looked in THE FILES, at the transcripts of similar cases, investigated technicalities, precedents, loopholes, flaws in the laws. I'm changing my testimony. Ask me how.

This time, if asked to give evidence, I would dispense with excuses and motives and high-minded pleas and principles and fall back on my humble stock-in-trade: documents—texts, if you will—facts, words. In the end, we are left only with words
.
In this case, though, quite a few words: in enamel, chrome, ink, and paint; on metal, cloth, paper, and wood; words moulded, etched, printed, and painted; spoken and written down before their sounds vanished into the air. Though Anton himself, the ex-archivist, was undoubtedly on the side of the deconstructionists, who decried this fact fetish, this document fetish, this word fetish, this worship of false gods in the “cult of the archive,” I would, nevertheless, be on his side, for it seemed to be the cult of the court as well.

My mind had recorded a number of facts: the name of Anton's assailant, Dick Parsons, which we'd both written down; the name of his vehicle, Chevrolet Suburban; its licence plate number, HAA 463; and the
Bull Arm
logo on the attacker's T-shirt.
This seemed to be the sort of evidence my previous interrogator had been looking for, but it was such a bare paltry exhibit that another part of my mind, ignoring recent history, immediately began to extrapolate from it a stirring defence of Anton's ideals, his noble obsession with saving his country and the world from environmental disaster. Is that not important, your Honour? Not only had the huge idling vehicle provoked him, I submitted, but also its laughing licence plate. The bull-necked attacker's
Bull Arm
T-shirt, though sea-blue, had made him see red. The graffiti above the Dominion sign had inspired and emboldened him. The benign bumper sticker—
I'm changing the climate. Ask me how
—was surely only an invitation to civic engagement and moral responsibility. Is that not important, your Honour?

As it turned out, luckily for both of us, I'm sure, we didn't have to go to court after all, though we spent an anxious weekend waiting for a knock on the door. We heard nothing more from Dick Parsons, his lawyer, or the police.

Anton was too upset to leave on Saturday or Sunday, but was feeling much better by Monday. So, on the final day of the Victoria Day weekend, when every other Townie was returning to St. John's from the ponds and rivers and woods of the Newfoundland interior, another European and his native-of-Newfoundland guide set off in the wake of the first European to
walk
across it almost two centuries before—a very cold wake, indeed. I was no Joseph Sylvester, however. I had only
driven
, or been driven, across the Island, and only once since we (almost) finished the drive in '65. In the spring of 1981, in the back of a commodious rented van, with a surprisingly fun-loving
fonds
of archivists, I had gone out to a regional conference in Corner Brook. This time it would be a humble hatchback Tercel, though newly tuned up and equipped with four new high-performance tires—Pirellis, on Anton the experienced truck driver's advice.

We set off in search of the piping plover, the Burnt Cape cinquefoil, the Nightingale of the North—all the rare and wild and distant things that Anton now spoke of instead of his father, and that it seemed we might be more likely to find. Our tentative destination, though—theoretical, if you will, more overdue west than due west—was the far-flung, west-coast town of Cormack.

20.
NARRATIVE OF A JOURNEY

A proverb, one might say, is a ruin which stands on the site of

an old story and in which a moral twines about a happening like

ivy around a wall.

—Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller”

T
he proper season
had arrived in which to set off…Uncertainty of result waved over my determination.

Before beginning his journey across the Island with Joseph Sylvester, William Cormack had “tried his fidelity” by taking a brisk, warm-up hike from St. John's to Placentia and circling back to town by way of Trinity Bay and Conception Bay, a distance of about 150 miles. Then they sailed from St. John's to Bonaventure, on the west side of Trinity Bay. On his passage down Trinity Bay to Smith Sound, about 6 miles southwest of Bonaventure, Cormack witnessed an unnerving sight, which he might have read as a premonition.

“We witnessed,” he wrote, “the phenomenon of the very great transparency of the sea which it assumes here during the
time of change
of wind from West to East. The fishes and their haunts amongst the rocks and luxuriant weeds at the bottom were seen to a fearful depth.”

After the boat finally dropped them off at the end of the Sound—a long, deep reach of sea—close to what is now the community of Milton, he watched it disappear “into the gloomy gut.”

“An abyss of difficulties,” he wrote, “instantly sprang up in the imagination between the point where we stood and the civilized world we had just quitted, as well as between us and the centre of the
Terra Incognita
.”

But he quickly left these gloomy thoughts behind and, two months later, on the first of November, after crossing the fearful terrain of the unknown interior—about two hundred miles as the crow flies—and finally seeing the ocean again, from the summit of a snowy ridge, he “hailed the glance of the sea as home, and as the parent of everything dear.”

He did not stay on the west coast for very long, however. After a two-week rest he was off again, “on foot to the southward along the sea shore…in hopes, by walking and boating, to reach Fortune Bay, a distance of upwards of two hundred miles, before all the vessels for the season had sailed for Europe.” About a month later, he reached “the Bay of Despair” and stayed at the establishment of the famous fish merchants Newman and Company, where he “learnt with satisfaction that the last ship for England this season from this coast was to sail within a few days from another of their establishments in Fortune Bay.” But it was almost two weeks before he boarded his ship, the
Duck
, and set sail for England, perhaps because it was the Christmas season. In the meantime, he experienced the “delight of being restored again to society, which was enjoyed with the gentlemen and families of the mercantile establishments at the Bay of Despair and Fortune Bay.”

Not to mention the fact that other restoratives may have come into play, even for a dour Scot like Cormack. The Newman Company was more famous for port wine than fish. Cormack didn't leave Fortune until after Christmas, on the twenty-eighth of December. He arrived in Dartmouth, England, on the tenth of February, 1823, a sea voyage of six weeks in the North Atlantic at the very worst time of the year; but, strangely, the normally loquacious Cormack gives no details at all about the trip.

Sunrise announced that adieu was to be taken for a time to the routine habits of civilization…Fancy carried us swiftly across the Island.

We left St. John's early in the morning, and by midday were halfway across the Island. Anton was driving—and driving fast. He loved “the open road,” he said, though he hated cars, hated city driving. Indeed, this was the first time he'd driven a car in the whole eight months he'd been in St. John's. He missed his truck, he said, missed “the feel of the gears,” and was glad that the old Tercel was a standard. Though he was an experienced truck driver, and I had complete faith in him, he was a bit too fond of a heart-stopping manoeuvre that he called “double de-clutching”
—
or maybe he meant “de double clutching”
—
which he executed when he had to accelerate or slow down quickly, either when tearing past a string of house trailers or tractor trailers on a two-lane highway or pulling up short in the middle of an attempt and squeezing in front of an angry driver. He seldom pulled up short, however, and on a couple of occasions when overtaking on a section of four-lane highway, at the point where the inside lane ended and big white capital letters on the pavement commanded him to YIELD, he double de-clutched right on past at 145 kilometres an hour, as the car shook, rattled, and almost rolled.

Anton seemed to love the open road and the feel of the gears so much, in fact, that we'd already sped past—as the tercel flies, so to speak—the Road to the Cape and the Road to the Isles, at the ends of which was the gannet of the south and the Nightingale of the North, respectively. My mention of both the Cape St. Mary's gannetry on the Cape Shore and Madame Toulinguet's reliquary in Twillingate had elicited a double demurral, by way of de double murmur, but not a word.

We were now only a few miles from Grand Falls, in the centre of the Island. At Jumper's Brook, just before the turnoff to the south coast, we didn't jump, but hesitated, pulled in at an Irving service station and restaurant for a close look at the map, especially at the long, long road that dropped like a plumb line straight down through the dead centre of the Island, through the “mocking emptiness” of the lonely wild interior, the “monotonous sublime,” which had “bludgeoned” William Cormack's delicate sensibility more than a century and a half ago.

There was not a single town on the entire route, in fact, until you reached the head of “Bay d'Espoir,” as it's bilingually printed on the map, or Bay Despair, as we call it, a wondrously unique linguistic reversal that passed beyond mere sound and sense and probably said more about the Newfoundland psyche than most of us would care to admit. It had an ancient ring to it, the weight of a proverb, or an old story, something of the bold simplicity and persistence of “Burn your boats,” Smallwood's now proverbial exhortation. It was perhaps the more transparent
ur
-lament behind the Newfoundland proverb that had caused the Reverend Julian Moreton so much bewilderment.

A mid-nineteenth-century Church of England missionary for the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, the Reverend Moreton was bewildered not only by the peculiar character and strange habits of Newfoundlanders, but also by their enigmatic proverbs. One in particular caused him great consternation. In his 1863 memoir, he says: “There was a proverb more often used than any other, of which I must either believe it spoilt by misquotation or else confess myself too dull to perceive its force: ‘We must live in hopes, supposing we die in despair.'”

I noticed on the map that the first town on the road to Bay d'Espoir was actually called
Head
of Bay d'Espoir. I pictured a giant bowed head in a pair of large calloused hands, weeping inconsolably above the granite cliffs, salty tears draining into the despairing sea. Unexpectedly, Anton was taken with the idea of heading straight for it, and then on to Hermitage in Hermitage Bay, where it looked as if we could get a ferry to Burgeo and the Sandbanks Provincial Park, a nesting site, he said, of the piping plover. I'm ashamed to say, though, that I lacked the enthusiastic and adventurous spirit of Mr. Cormack, though we had a map, a car, and a paved road on which to drive it. So, when the waitress—Marjorie, her name tag read—arrived and informed us that not only was there no town along that entire one-hundred-mile stretch of road, but not a single service station either, and that we could “go in the back way” on a brand new road, not on our map, that went straight to Burgeo from the west coast, avoiding the boat trip as well as the more desolate road, our minds were easily made up.

Marjorie pointed the new road out to us on a new map. Coincidentally, it began at the head of St. George's Bay, where Cormack had come out of the woods, ending his arduous two-hundred-mile trek. The road ran past Silver Pond, Cormack's Lake, through the Long Range Mountains, the Annieopsquotch Mountains, the Blue Hills of Couteau, right down to the doorstep of the piping plover.

“The Blue Hills of Couteau,” Anton whispered to himself. He seemed to like the sound of that. Most of the country we had driven through on the tch was just woods and rock and water, bog and barrens—savannas, Cormack had called them. He had imagined Newfoundlanders, like some nomadic African tribesmen, herding caribou on the savannas. Anton wanted to see some mountains, real mountains. He saw Newfoundland as the mirror image of his own country, which was a big basin, more than half of it reclaimed, below sea level, ready to fill up again as the inevitable effects of global warming took their toll.

In Holland, Anton said, there were only hills, the highest being just over a thousand feet, but this, and others, were proudly called mountains. If his country had been blessed with real mountains, he said, the Germans would not have found it so easy to occupy the place. A real war of resistance, a guerilla war, could have been waged, and the enemy might have been driven out. But in one of the smallest, flattest, and most well organized countries in the world, the occupying forces had an easy time of it. One or two battalions had done the job.

It was after two o'clock, and we still hadn't had lunch. Having made our decision to continue west instead of detouring south, we relaxed and took a closer look at the menu. There were the usual burgers, fish and chips, and fried chicken, but in the “All Day Breakfast” lineup Anton spotted an item called “Turr Omelette,” something I can't remember even my old turr-mad, grad-school acquaintance, Squires, having in his repertoire. Just a playful, imaginative way to get surplus game down the throats of tourists or Hollywood film crews, perhaps, or something you might serve to Newfoundland caribou herdsmen after a hard day on the savannas.

Anton assumed that the omelette was made with seabird eggs, but the waitress, when she returned with her pad and pencil, explained with a kind smile:

“Oh no, sir. Hens' eggs, with turr meat on the inside, like a cheese omelette.”

“Ahhh,” Anton said, and I wasn't sure if he was relieved or displeased. He did have a great appetite for Newfoundland cuisine, especially fish, almost anything you laid in front of him. He decided against the turr omelette, however; he went for the safer fish and chips, and I did as well. I ordered lemon pie afterward to cut the grease. While I was eating it, Anton retrieved a newspaper that someone had left at the next table and began to skim through it in his usual fashion, from back to front, then returned to a few items his mind had filed away. I watched him over the rim of my glasses as I ate.

I am not a traveller. I'm sedentary and reclusive by temperament, lazy as well, and am most content at home with a coffee and a book—
Long Walks in France
, perhaps, or
Sailing Through China
. I could count the number of trips I've taken in my life—by car, bus, train, boat, and plane—on two hands for sure, if not on one. Every time I have set out, as sure as buds in May and frost in June, in some place not far away—sometimes even the place I'm leaving or the one I'm going to—planes are falling out of the sky, trains flying off tracks, buses plunging into mountain gorges, or boats sinking with all hands lost. And it's always the same type of
carrier,
as they call it, as the one I'm about to entrust my life to. Today, sure enough, it was a car on a highway.

“Look at this,” Anton said, pushing right under my nose the daily chronicle of travel carnage that I had vowed to avoid reading while travelling.

“Road opens up swallowing man,” said a headline under International News, adding a whole new dimension to the concept of “the open road.”

In the early morning darkness on a road in Maryland, a lone driver had plunged to his death into a twenty-foot-deep, forty-foot-wide sinkhole that opened up in the middle of a highway. The image of Cormack's vision before his trip came back to me: a great transparent sinkhole in the ocean, a vision of the fearful depths of Trinity Bay. The depths of Bay d'Espoir, if he had chanced to witness those while staying at Newman and Company, might have been even more fearful. Though it may be the smallest of our most well known bays, it is thought to be the deepest—half a mile deep.

“Sinkholes can occur,” the story said, “when rainwater dissolves limestone or marble bedrock, creating underground caves that grow until the material above collapses.”

The vehicle, with dead body, had been lifted out with a crane, the huge hole filled with rocks, the road paved over and reopened by evening, almost as if the incident had never happened.

“If you can't depend on marble bedrock,” I said to Anton, handing him back the newspaper, “what can you depend on?”

“Not even no tornadoes in Newfoundland,” he said, laughing and turning the pages of the paper, searching for something else. He had, very early on, picked up on our habit of ironically cataloguing the negative wonders of our salubrious clime, but had only recently adopted it as his stock response to the polite, oft-asked question, “So, how do you like it here?”

“I love it,” he would reply. “No tornadoes, typhoons, earthquakes, volcanoes…” And he'd go on to add dangerous flora and fauna, real and imaginary, to the list: “No snakes, triffids, poison ivy, Cyclops, killer bees, grizzly bears, alligators…”

He pushed the paper under my nose again and tapped his finger on the table next to another traveller's tale.

“Dust devil hits car on tch,” I read under provincial news.

A man driving between Badger and Grand Falls had encountered what he described as a “miniature tornado” heading straight down the road toward his car. “It was unnerving,” he said. “A beautiful day, we were just driving along and all of a sudden, out of the blue, there was this little twister. It went right over the top of the car and the noise was deafening. I guess I was just in the wrong place at the wrong time,” he added, a statement that seemed right for him, but would have been the understatement of the year for the man from Maryland, had he survived.