Baltimore's Mansion (8 page)

On the siding at Gambo, my father did not once look out the window. But neither did Gambo inspire him to hold forth as I thought it would. Perhaps if the bus-boomer had stayed…

My father sat in silence, engrossed, or pretending to be, in a book he'd brought along. Brooding, more likely. I had thought that by leaving, the bus-boomer had admitted defeat. But now I saw that he had not, that he had left because he had no need to argue: for the bus, for Smallwood, for Confederation, for anything. It was on this my father was brooding, on the smirk implicit in the man's every word.

We won, we won and nothing you can say can change that fact, and nothing makes victory sweeter than the enduring bitterness of men like you. That was the meaning of their disdainful march from the observation car.

Sometime in the afternoon, I dozed off and did not wake up until we were approaching the Gaff Topsails, a steep-sloped tract of wilderness, the highest point on the line and the place where delays were most likely in the winter when the tracks were blocked by snow. The tracks along the Topsails were not only elevated but flat, so even when it wasn't snowing all that was needed to bury the tracks was wind, which blew into drifts snow that was already on the ground.

On this day, the tracks were open, but barely. The previous train had cut a trench between snow walls, which got higher as we moved into the Topsails until we could see
nothing from either side of the train except sheer cliffs of snow mere inches from the windows. After that, even in the observation car, we could only tell how much deeper the trench was getting by how much darker it became in the train, for snow drifted across the top of the trench, blocking out the sky.

Finally, the train began to slow down. “Snow on the tracks,” my father said. We could not see the snow on the tracks, but we soon felt the train nudge into it. We jolted forward slightly in our seats. Once the cowcatcher had edged into the snowdrift, the engineer increased the throttle. A great grinding noise began from the front of the train and moved down the length of it; soon the floor of our car was vibrating. We moved along at two or three miles an hour at most, though the locomotive roared as if we were going at full speed.

The train continued in this fashion for a while, then slowed more as we began to go upgrade. We made excruciatingly suspenseful progress for about three miles, the passengers urging the train on, knowing that if we stalled we might be stranded for days. We laughed and rocked forward in our seats as if to coax the locomotive one more inch, and then one more until at last we felt it make the crest and a great cheer went up.

Going downgrade was much easier, though we could not go at regular speed, for there were drifts across the tracks that might have derailed us had we crashed through them too fast. Every so often, as we hit one, we lurched forward in our seats, everyone shouting “Whoa!” and watching as the exploding snow went flying past our windows.

In one way, we were crossing Newfoundland at the worst possible time, during the season of least light, a week past the day of least light. About half of the island we didn't see at all,
and some of it we saw at twilight, from four to six in the afternoon, from six to eight in the morning. But you hadn't really seen Newfoundland, my father had told me before we set out, until you had seen it in winter from the train.

In the course of our journey westward, we saw the sun rise and set and rise again. The journey began and ended at sunrise. We went from light to dark to light again. And regardless of what time of year it was, we would have travelled through some part of the core in darkness. The core was the vast basin that lay within the bowl of the coastal mountains beyond which, before the train, almost no one had set foot. And you always passed through the core of the core in the middle of the night whether you travelled in June or in December.

It was easy to imagine, impossible not to, that the core was always dark, that on this middle wilderness the sun
never
rose and the most it ever had by way of light it got on those rare nights when the sky was clear and the moon was full.

We were surrounded from without by a wilderness of water and from within by one of land, an expansive assertion of land about which, before the train went through, next to nothing was known, had been seen by no one, not even by aboriginals who lived within a few miles of the coast, no one except a few people such as William Cormack. My father, who loved planting misconceptions in my head, told me the core was named after Cormack.

To prepare for our trip, I had read Cormack's account of his walk across the island. In 1822, at the age of twenty-six, he walked from Trinity Bay on the east coast to Bay St. George on the west coast. He set out on September 5, accompanied by a Micmac named Joe Sylvester, and completed his walk on
November 4, then wrote his
Narrative of a Journey Across the Island of Newfoundland, the Only One Ever Performed by a European.
By European, he meant someone of European descent, for Cormack, though Old World educated, was New World born, having grown up in St. John's and gone to university in Scotland.

He was a solitary soul who before setting out wrote that it was a comfort to him to know that “no one would be injured by my annihilation.” It seemed a heart-rendingly pathetic thing to say about yourself. I could not imagine a man more profoundly alone than the one who had written that.

He called the core the Terra Incognita, the unknown land. Before Cormack's walk, there were fantastic stories about its inhabitants, stories about a race of giant aboriginals and strange animals of a sort that lived nowhere else on earth but Newfoundland.

Cormack, though he discovered no such marvels, found most of what he saw beyond his powers of description. “In vain were associations,” he wrote, “in vain did the eyes wander for the cattle, the cottage and the flocks.” This landscape for which he searched in vain was not even that of
coastal
Newfoundland but that of England, or more precisely the England of books, which formed his image of “home.” All Cormack could do was catalogue what he saw. He attempted an exhaustive geological and botanical catalogue, recording in his journal every rock and form of plant life, half his journal consisting of italicized Latin.

To keep himself sane, to make the landscape seem less alien, to remind himself that the outside world still existed and that he would return to it someday, Cormack named lakes
and mountains after people he had gone to school with, old college mates, old teachers. Some of what he had seen was gone now, such as the “dense, unbroken pine, an ocean of undulating forest” that covered the first twenty miles of his trip. Cormack had seen the “pine-clad hills” of which Boyle wrote in “The Ode to Newfoundland,” but most of the pine was gone, cut down or burnt.

In the latter part of his walk, Cormack had wound up delirious, alternating between despair of ever reaching his destination and delusions of invincibility, during which he hoped the walk would last forever. He had stood atop some knob of rock and caught what he thought was his first sight of the Gulf of St. Lawrence, the western sea of Newfoundland, and told Joe Sylvester that they would not stop walking until they reached it, which he was sure they could do within a day.

A week later they made it to the shore — not of the Gulf but of a lake the size of a small sea. They had encountered many lakes, and rather than walk around them, they sailed across on makeshift rafts, weaving spruce boughs into sails, the two of them so exhausted they would rather risk drowning than add ten or twenty miles to their walk. They sat for hours on the shores of lakes, waiting for an east wind, which is not generally a good wind for sailing since it almost always brings bad weather, but they cared only that the wind was headed for the west as they were. They put out onto the lakes on their rafts and let the wind blow them to the other side.

They clung to or lashed themselves to the trunks of their spruce-tree masts, rising and falling on the waves that washed over them and their supplies, Sylvester screaming in the middle of each crossing that Cormack would never again coax him
across a lake in such a manner. They left a trail of these little spruce-bough sail rafts behind them on the shores of lakes across the width of Newfoundland.

When they finally did sight the real sea, they kept walking after dark, Cormack running blindly through the woods, sliding down the sides of the Lewis Hills. They arrived at Bay St. George at one in the morning, able only to hear the Gulf, whose limitless expanse Cormack had so looked forward to surveying with triumph. He had thought they would reach the coast by sunrise but this time had overestimated the distance. There was nothing at the end of their journey but darkness, out into which Cormack threw beach rocks and heard but did not see the splash they made.

That was what I remembered best from the narrative — Cormack and his mystified Micmac guide sliding down the west-coast hills in the middle of the night, by doing which, he said, “We found ourselves with whole bones but many bruises.” The next day he reflected in his notebook: “All was now, however, accomplished, and I hailed the glance of the sea as home and as the parent of everything dear.”

Landsman though he was, he was as happy to see the ocean as Cabot had been to sight land. Cabot's voyage from Dorset in England to Cape Bonavista in Newfoundland had taken thirty-five days. Cormack's walk had taken sixty. Though he lived to the age of seventy-two, he undertook no further such expeditions and never did fully recover from that one.

We passed through a long stretch where there was more water than land, where more of the land lay underwater than did not, though it was all fresh water, rivers, pools, ponds, lakes. It was as if some great reservoir was slowly drying up,
strands of bog and rock appearing in what had been the reservoir's more shallow parts. The rail line zigzagged across this stretch, following the land unless a body of water was sufficiently narrow that a trestle could be built across it. There was nothing as far as the eye could see in any direction but flat white frozen lakes and, barely distinguishable from them by the unevenness of their terrain and the occasional dark gash of green, the bogs and barrens, with here and there a tolt that ten thousand years ago had been an island rising from the water like some observation tower.

Then we passed into a landscape that was like a lake bed from which the water had receded altogether, an expansive, flat-bottomed bed of a lake that looked as though it had been uniformly three feet deep, nothing but rubble and jagged shards of granite.

And this became the pattern. Every so often, a new, entirely different, geography would assert itself. We came upon a desert of black peat bog on which there was no snow, though there was snow all around it, as if a deluge of water ten miles wide had splashed down. Here and there the peat bog had collapsed of its own weight, its soggy crust caved in to form a great crater of peat, a black bog hole that was warmer than the air so that steam issued up from it like smoke. You could tell from these peat pits that underneath its topmost layer, the whole bog was like this, a steaming black muck too loose to support the roots of even the smallest of trees.

Each part made you forget the others existed. In the middle of each landscape, you couldn't help thinking that it stretched endlessly in all directions, that this was the island's prevailing terrain and all else was anomalous.

My father had wanted me to see all this. How much land there was, how like a country Newfoundland was in its dimensions and variousness. In the days leading up to the trip, I had many times asked him, “How big is Newfoundland?” Using the map on the kitchen wall, he tried to make me understand how big it was, tried to give me some sense of how much more of it there was than I had seen so far in our drives around the bay.

“We're here,” my father said, pointing at the tiny star that stood for St. John's. “Now last Sunday, when we went out for our drive, we went this far.” He moved his finger in a circle about an inch across. Then he moved his hand slowly over the rest of the map. The paper crackled beneath his fingers. “Newfoundland is this much bigger than that,” he said, making the motion with his hand again. “All this is Newfoundland, but it's not all like St. John's. Almost all of it is empty. No one lives there. No one's ever seen most of it.”

It was an island, yes, but I had been fooled by that fact into thinking of the land as an insignificant interruption of a sea so huge that by comparison the land did not exist. There were regions of it that even the train did not come near, peninsulas along which not even branch lines had been built, the Great Northern Peninsula for instance, along the two-hundred-mile stretch of which there was neither road nor railway. It had taken the robust Cormack those sixty days of continuous walking to reach the west coast, and he had not come within a hundred miles of the Great Northern Peninsula.

The point of this journey was to get me away from the sea so that when I went back to living within two miles of it, I would know the land was there, land whose capacity to inspire
wonder in all those who beheld it was in no way diminished by its being coloured the colour of Canada on maps.

How many of the outporters who had voted for Confederation, my father asked me, had had any sense of the land, the scope and shape of it, the massive fact of it? Fishermen went far enough from shore to see some of the land assuming shapes and lines, a series of capes or a small peninsula, perhaps, with headlands soon fading to a blue blur on either side, the amorphous, nebulous elsewhere whose existence was less real to them than that of the moon or the sun. They had conceived of Newfoundland as a ribbon of rock, a coast without a core, a rim with water outside and nothing, a void, inside. And stranded on this thin rim they lived, the Terra Incognita at their backs and the sea before them. For many of them, Newfoundland had not even been a coast but a discrete shard of rock, their own little cove or bay, inlet or island. They had had no idea when they cast their votes what they were voting for or what they were renouncing. They had not known there was a country, for they had never seen it or even spoken to anyone who had. What lay beyond the farthest limits of their travels and their eyesight was just a rumour, a region of fancy and conjecture. And what was true of space was true of time. What was true of geography was true of history. In how many homes or even classrooms was there a copy of Prowse's
History of Newfoundland?
Time was local, personal and even then less enduring than their experience of space, the circumscribed geography of “home.” Smallwood had said that for him the main purpose of Confederation was to undo this isolation, but of course it only made it worse. For if people could not conceive of the whole of Newfoundland, how could they form any conception of a place the size of Canada?