The Strangers' Gallery (36 page)

A spokesman for the weather office in nearby Gander had speculated that it was a rare wind phenomenon known as a “dust devil.”

When the waitress returned with our bill, she spotted the headline.

“That was just down the road here,” she said, “around this time Saturday, between Rushy Pond and Thunder Brook. You shoulda seen the car. The paint was chipped right off and the windshield was all splintered. He stopped in here on his way home.

“Last year my father ran into a moose…or under a moose, he figures. He was in a little car, a Pinto. He didn't see it first or last. It was about nine o'clock in the evening, just after dark, and he heard something
whoosh
over the roof of the car. The windshield cracked and sort of caved in. He pulled over to the side and got out of the car but he didn't see a thing. Nothing. He wasn't hurt, but his eyes were all sore and he had to drive all the way home with his head out through the window because he couldn't see at all through the windshield. The next morning he saw that the car was all scratched up, just like that other one. And there was hair caught in the wipers and the antenna and the mirror. He figures he went right underneath the moose. His eyes were full of bits of glass that the doctor had to take out with tweezers. He must have been at it for two weeks or more. The glass damaged the nerves in his eyes so he can't keep his lids open. The muscles won't work, and the insurance won't pay him a thing.”

“Holy Christ,” Anton said, uncharacteristically.

I became aware of my head moving incredulously back and forth.

She just stood there for a moment looking at us sympathetically, as if we were the ones who'd had all the trouble, and was thoughtful enough not to say, “Have a nice trip.” She simply lifted her tray of dirty dishes ever so slightly and said, “Bye-bye.”

The Indian idea of a road is to Europeans little else than a problem of
reaching
a distant place alive.

Anton drove on, but not as fast, I noticed. He abandoned de double clutching
,
or double de-clutching, or whatever it was, along with double- triple- and quadruple-passing. I now had an extra hand to do things with, as I was no longer permanently clutching the overhead passenger handgrip. I peeled a large orange, which we shared. We didn't speak much, listened to a tape of his favourite harpist, Andreas Wollenweider, over and over. It was a big sound for a harp—an electric one, perhaps. I did a lot of thinking and watching and waiting. Images of sinkholes, moose, and dust devils were still swirling around in my head, pictures that assumed a certain repetitive pattern as the Tercel droned on down the highway. A sinkhole would appear and a moose would climb out of it and then transform itself into a dust devil with a diamond-headed tail that would drill another sinkhole in the pavement into which it would sink and then reappear as a moose a few miles farther down the road. But after a brief stop for gas and a sandwich at another Irving restaurant in Deer Lake, we arrived at what we thought was Cormack, on the outskirts of Gros Morne National Park, just before dark, none the worse for worry and wear.

We stopped at a service station and convenience store and asked the man at the counter about the cabins on the hillside at the back. “All full,” he said. We inquired about other accommodations and found out that we had bypassed the Cormack turnoff and were now in Wiltondale. Not that it mattered, for he also owned the cabins in Cormack and they were full as well. He offered to let us have his family cabin, which was not being used. It was on a pond nearby, he said, just off the main road. It was hard to find, though, so his son Eldred would lead us back to it in his truck.

In a pickup that looked as muscle-bound as he did—both bodies seemed suspended above their frames—Eldred lifted off into the night with us in pursuit. We drove a few miles back the way we had come and found him stopped on the shoulder just before a side road. Anton pulled in behind the truck and then followed it onto a gravel road that was narrow, deeply potholed, dusty, and unlit. Alder branches scraped the car as we swerved in an attempt to miss sinkhole-sized potholes, but dropped into others just as deep. Clouds of dust from the truck made it difficult to see and breathe.

After a few miles of this, the truck stopped suddenly in the middle of the road. When the dust cleared, Anton rolled down his window and I saw another truck in the ditch on the other side. A man with a thick orange beard and matching peak cap looked suspiciously in our direction, but made no attempt to hide his bottle of beer, propped precariously upon the steering wheel.

“You all right?” I heard Eldred shout through his cab window.

“I'll feel better when the tow-truck comes,” a high-pitched voice replied.

A few miles farther on, Eldred stopped in the middle of the road again, this time with his right signal flashing, then turned and seemed to drop right off the edge of the road. We followed, cautiously, and found ourselves going down a steep rutted laneway covered with fine sand instead of gravel, so steep and rutted and sandy, in fact, that I thought we'd never get back up—if, indeed, we succeeded in getting down. Though it was steep, however, the laneway was mercifully short, and the traction on the sandy surface was surprisingly good.

At the bottom, we found ourselves at a house that looked as if it had been sawed in two, with the steeply sloped half-roof side facing us, and the sheer vertical side facing a pond. There was a strong smell of fish in the air. Eldred went inside and turned on the lights, while Anton and I stumbled about the yard, stretching our arms and legs.

“Everything you need is in there,” Eldred said when he came back out. “There's even a few groceries left in the fridge. Some beer, too. Help yourself to that. Some salt fish from Rocky Harbour. I bought some drinkin' water from the spring behind the store. You can't drink the water here. Don't forget that. The beer tastes better, anyway. Tap water's from the pond. We're at the bottom of a hill, with lots of cabins up above. Run-off from septic tanks is the problem. We're goin' to put in an artesian well this summer. That'll solve it, I hope. No problem washing in it, but give yourself a good scrub with the towel to get the itchmites off. Sometimes they stick to your skin, but there shouldn't be too many o' them this time of year. How long you fellas plan to stay?”

“Maybe two days?” I said, looking at Anton, who just shrugged.

“Right on, b'y. Here's the key. If you need anything, let me know. There's no phone here, by the way. You got to drive down to the store.”

Eldred got in the truck and tore up the hill with sand spouting from his wheels like water. When he reached the gravel road and roared away, clouds of dust drifted up into the moonlight above the trees. After the sound of the truck died away, everything felt heavily quiet. We brought our bags inside, then walked out through the sliding door at the back and discovered where the smell of fish was coming from. Huge salt fish, like white pelts in the moonlight, were spread out to dry on a long bench and wide railing that ran around the perimeter of a wide deck wrapped around three sides of the house. The pond reflected the lights of other cabins on the dark sloped hill on the other side. The sky was clear, but the stars were indistinct. I could hear the distant drone of a plane, miles overhead.

“I'm beat,” I said. “I'm going to bed. I'm so tired I can hardly speak.”

Anton nodded. “What a place,” he said. “The middle of nowhere.”

I yawned. “We'll see where it is in the morning.”

The interior broke in sublimity before us
…
The imagination hovers in the distance…until it is lost.

We were up at seven. After showering and scrubbing ourselves hard with our towels to make sure there were no itchmites hitched to our flesh, we poached the eggs and toasted the stale white bread left in the fridge. Anton was a great poacher, turning out perfect semi-firm eggs every time. There were also No Name tea bags and instant coffee and an unopened can of Carnation milk. We boiled the blackened and rusty kettle with water Eldred had left us in recycled plastic bottles with washed-out labels.

For some reason, the fish didn't smell half as strong in the daylight as it did in the dark. We ate a leisurely breakfast on a dazzlingly white plastic table out on the deck in the sun, gazing through our sunglasses past the makeshift fishing stage at the morning mist on the still pond, a clear stretch near the shoreline glistening in the sun. Far beyond the pond was a long range of deep-blue mountains. Though it was very early in the morning, as Anton sat slumped in his chair with his elbow on the table, his knuckles at his temple and his thumb hooked under one of his high cheekbones, his mind took a techno-philosophical turn. He observed that the blue mountains were not really blue.

“I love the blue mountains,” he said. “I always want to go there, to get lost in there, never to come out, but now when I look at them I know too much. I always think, You can never go into the blue mountains, only see them from where you are. If you go there, they will be brown or grey, or maybe green, if you're lucky, if they are covered with trees, and the next mountains in the distance will be blue. They are always beyond—over the rainbow!

“It is a trick of the light. In the northern lands, where the air is more dense, distant mountains are always blue. But it is only the colour of the air, the colour of the distance between us and the mountains, a distance we can never cross. The blue light gets lost in the denseness of the air, and in the deep water, before it reaches us. That is why, too, the sea and the sky are blue. Like Mr. Gombrich says in
The Story of Art
, ‘There really is no such thing as Art. There are only artists,' so, perhaps, he would also say, ‘There really is no such thing as blue mountains. There are only artists who paint them.' And dreamers like me who like to gaze at them. ‘We like gazing upon blue. It draws us after it,' said Goethe, in his
Theory of Colours
.

“And Mr. Harnett, too, whose eyes are fixed on them. He believes your country still exists, a blue country somewhere in the distant blue mountains. He can see it, but he can't go there. His ship of state has sailed away. The Blue Peter is its flag, not the Pink, White and Green. This he cannot accept, he cannot understand. His heart is his passport, it is still valid, it has not expired. He wears it, as you say, on his sleeve.”

Blue or not, the mountains we were looking at, I guessed, were part of the Long Range Mountains, which were part of the Appalachians, and were twenty times older than the Rockies, I'd read somewhere. In one of Fernald's books, I believe, perhaps the one in which he'd expounded his
nunatak
theory, which I'd made a point of researching after Anton had first mentioned it.
Relic species of plants, such as the Burnt Cape cinquefoil, had supposedly survived interminable glaciation on some of these ice-free mountain peaks, like resistance fighters surviving their country's occupation.

I went inside to get the new map the waitress had given us, to see if I could locate the Long Range Mountains. It showed not only the mountains but their altitudes as well. True to their name, they stretched the entire length of the west coast of the Island. The widely scattered peaks were mostly unnamed, however, just a series of black dots and altitude numbers—a long range of mountains, but a short range of appellations.

There was, of course, Gros Morne—Big Gloomy, as some guidebooks translated it—rising up right in the centre of the park, and also one called Gros Pate—Big Baldy, perhaps—farther up the coast. At over two and a half thousand feet, Gros Morne, after which the park was named, was the highest mountain in the park and the second-highest on the Island. The highest elevation in Newfoundland was not called a mountain, though, but a hill, Lewis Hill, just south of Corner Brook, only a few feet higher than Gros Morne. And the
pond
our cabin was on, whose name Eldred hadn't mentioned, seemed to stretch miles back into the woods. Anywhere else it would be called a lake, perhaps a Great Lake, even an inland sea.

I showed Anton the long line of mountains on the map, and he removed a stub of pencil from his shirt pocket and began to draw a connect-the-black-dots line that ran parallel to the shore and the road along the very rim of the shore—the Straight Shore, as it was called, as there was hardly a cove, harbour, or anchorage along the entire length of it. There was a Straight Shore on the northeast coast as well, but not half as straight or long as this one. Indeed, the road looked so straight and sure, from Gros Morne Park to L'Anse aux Meadows, that Anton was actually licking his lips as he pored over the map, no doubt entertaining a truck driver's fearless fantasy of a double de-clutching, freewheeling ride on an endless highway, the wide blue ocean on one side and an endless vista of blue mountains on the other. He even found one actually called Blue Mountain, about halfway up the coast, a generic cartographic illusion just for him.

“Have you seen the Norse site at L'Anse aux Meadows?”
he asked. “Vinland,” he added, with an odd smile. He had never shown much interest in so-called historic sites before.

“No, I haven't, I'm ashamed to admit,” I said.

“Can we go there?” he asked.

“If you like.”

“Today we rest. We will leave tomorrow.”

“What about Cormack?” I asked.

“I will go there this afternoon,” he said. “I will go alone.”

“Of course,” I replied.

The western territory is entirely primitive…Obstacles of every kind were dispelled and despised.

Later in the morning, we decided to go for a walk around the pond, but when we went down to the water we discovered that there was no beach to speak of. There were trees and large rocks right down to the water's edge, and it was practically impossible to make any headway. We climbed back up the steep incline and began walking along the narrow gravel road. We thought it might go right around the pond, though it became much narrower, barely a single lane, as we got farther into the woods. There were cabins above and below the road, and those on the lower side all had steep sandy driveways like our own. Every so often a car or truck went by and covered us with dust.