The Colony of Unrequited Dreams (45 page)

As I walked along, I felt the ice rise beneath my feet, felt myself being lifted and then lowered and then lifted again. I discovered that it was possible while walking on the ice to become seasick. One second you were walking uphill, the next downhill. The water below moved shorewards but the ice did not; you rose to a crest on the ice, then felt and saw that crest move on ahead of you while another swell began beneath your feet. It was like walking on the skin of a massive animal.

Jumping to shore, dismounting the ice, was an art in itself. It was in many places pushed up onto the rocks, so although it was easy, once you were on the rim ice, to step ashore, getting onto the rim ice was something else. There was often a fissure between the rim ice and the pack ice through which, at the arrival of a wave onshore, sea water bubbled up. It took a certain knack to time your step — and a step was all it was, not a jump, if you knew what you were doing — from the shorewards-heaving pack ice to the rim ice, a knack that I never did get, so I always waited until someone on land saw me standing there, forlornly, incongruously.

When I made my inept leap with my distinctive flourish of self-abandonment, all but resigned to being swallowed up in the fissure, falling the moment it opened its green sea-water-frothing mouth to take me in, the men on land would grab me. As the wave of ice I should have used to launch myself to safety passed beneath my feet, I would lose my nerve, jump too late, just as the water bubbled up, and would wind up all but running on the spot, the slick wet ice beneath my feet, before I was yanked ashore, toes dragging on the ice behind me. “We got ya, sir, we got ya,” the men said, politely trying not to laugh.

In oil-lamp-lit houses that reminded me of living on the Brow, I was given to eat dearly come by tins of ham or generic “meat,” treats reserved for visitors, to put in front of whom the salted or, even worse, fresh fish the others had to settle for would have been the height of bad manners. How I longed to have what they were having and what they thought they were sparing me the hardship of having to eat; how I longed to gorge myself on damper dogs fried in oil or fat dumplings in a boiling pot of codfish stew.

Not that they “gorged” themselves. Even of fish, salted or fresh, there was precious little. These people in whose houses I nightly increased by one the number of plates that must be filled were verging on starvation. Because the merchants could not afford to give them credit for their fish, most of the fishermen did not have the wherewithal even to catch enough to feed themselves and their
families. They had no diesel oil for their engines, no tools or wood to repair their codtraps or their boats, no canvas for their sails, no twine to make new nets, their old ones having frayed to bits of string that now were used for mending socks or making mitts.

Everyone had the same breakfast, boiled duff, which was flour and water cooked in a bag then left until it hardened like a biscuit. The only way to get it down was to eat it smothered with molasses, which there seemed to be no shortage of. They sent me off in the morning with what they called a sealer’s lunch, hard bread so hard you did not so much chew it as gnaw on it and thereby got the soothing illusion that you were eating something. They also gave me chunks of fried salt pork that when it froze in my pocket or rucksack became so brittle it snapped off like toffee. It was unbelievably salty and every so often I got down on my hands and knees to drink from pools of water on the ice.

One day, when there was not a breath of wind and no sign that any might be in the offing and it was therefore possible for those whose dories were still seaworthy and whose coves were not iced in to row out to the fishing grounds, I went out at the invitation of a fishermen before sunrise to handline for cod. I faced him in the boat as he took the oars and, with his eyes averted from mine, looking out across the water, rowed for hours without changing his pace or his expression. He was, he told me later, keeping his eyes fixed on some landmark, but landmark or not I’m sure he would have looked the other way. I had yet to have someone look me in the eye for long, as if to do so would have been an impertinence.

After reaching his destination and dropping anchor, he slumped over exhausted, head down so that I couldn’t see his face. The sun was coming up now, the first pale light of dawn was in the east and in the sky a silent seagull rose and fell.

After a few minutes, the passing of which we both pretended not to notice, the fisherman rose wordlessly and took out from
beneath the prow a wooden spool of fishing line. There was perhaps a hundred feet of line, but only about every tenth knot was fitted with a hook. The sea was as calm as it ever gets, with the dory rising on tidal swells a hundred feet apart and not a crest in sight. The water was impenetrably black and strewn with dark green kelp, the air what he called green, meaning fresh, though to me it was pungent with the smell of brine.

We lowered the hooks and smoked in silence until he deemed it was time to haul them in again. He knelt nearest to the gunnel and I knelt beside him. The line that had slid so easily into the water was unbelievably heavy. The two of us tugging with all our might took in at most three feet before I had to rest. He nodded, straining to pick up the sudden slack. “I finds it better not to stop,” he said, as if to rest or stop was just a matter of personal preference and to do the latter nothing I should be ashamed of. “Jus’ tell me when yer gonna stop, sir, so’s I won’t let go the line.” His teeth clamped on his cigarette, he went on pulling. I joined him every few minutes, taking breathers in between. Of the ten hooks, seven of them bore codfish that he said weighed between fifteen and twenty pounds and that we, mostly he, had dragged up through a hundred feet of water. When the last of the line was in the boat, he lay back against the prow, chest heaving. I looked at him lying there, eyes closed, in his tattered watch cap and layers of bedraggled clothing, the palms of his gloves worn through, his hands rope-burnt and bleeding, the butt of a burnt-out cigarette between his lips. And now he had to row us back. I had expended the energy of a day’s walk in about an hour; he, in the past few hours and the few to come, about five times that.

The farther from the ice-free part of the coast I travelled, the more eccentric became the people I encountered. In many places, I could barely understand what was being said to me, and barely make myself understood. On one little island, a man hand-pumping water into a wash-pot in his porch informed me in explanatory tones:
“For now we dips the bucket right into the well.” Since he was clearly not dipping a bucket, but was using a pump, I was mystified as to what he meant, not realizing until hours later that by “for now,” he meant “ ’fore now” — before now, in the past. He had, as far as I could tell, no other way of referring to the past except by this phrase, which to me meant the present.

On another island I was told, until I could no longer stand not knowing what it meant, that I looked like my night had been nothing but a “dwall” from start to finish. “What’s a dwall?” I said to the man in whose house I was waiting out a storm, which earned me a long look. After an explanation largely consisting of other words I did not know, I was able to discover that to “dwall” was to spend a night neither asleep nor awake but somewhere in between. I at last had a single word to describe how I almost always slept.

I dwalled every night on mattresses that consisted of “brin bags,” tightly meshed potato sacks filled with woodshavings or hay. I preferred the woodshavings to hay, which made the bedrooms smell like the stalls where they kept their horses.

There was, of course, no electricity in any of the houses, no running water, no heat other than what the single woodstove in the kitchen could produce. In a few houses there were fireplaces, but they went unused for lack of coal or scarcity of wood. Many of the little islands had long since been denuded of whatever trees had once grown on them, and their residents had to set out like hunting parties across the frozen bays in search of wood on horse-drawn sleds on which I often hitched a ride, shielding myself against the chips of ice thrown up by the horses’ hob-nailed hooves.

Often there were no schools. There might be a small church in which the most prominent citizen each Sunday morning spoke some sort of service. Perhaps there would be a visit or two a year from some missionary minister or doctor. They had never seen an automobile, a train, a motorized vehicle of any kind except a boat. They had travelled farther from their houses by sea than by land, and even then only as far as their fishing grounds, their longest land
journey being the two-hundred-foot-long horse path that wound its way among the houses and the rocks.

I had been prepared for resistance to the idea of unionizing from people who led such a solitary, atomized existence. What I had not realized was how cut off from the world in both space and time these people were. Most of them did not understand or even have a word for the concept of government. Had never heard of Sir Richard Squires. Did not know there had taken place any change in our status as a country. Had only the most rudimentary understanding of what a country was. And at the same time were destitute beyond anything I imagined when I first set out. And these were the people I had thought to unionize, organize? I was able to get across only the notion that I had come to try to help them. But as I had with me none of the forms of “help” they were familiar with — no supply boat, no medicine, no clerical collar — they regarded me as something of a crackpot, showing up from out of nowhere empty-handed but apparently convinced that my mere presence among them would somewhow improve their lot. Yet if I had told the head of any household that from now on I would live with him, he would have assured me I was welcome.

It would take more than unions, and more than anything the Commission of Government might be inclined to do, to save these people. I felt ridiculous, useless, little more than an itinerant beggar, a deluded townie who fancied he had come to help them and who without them would not have made it through one night.

In bed, on overcast nights, there was a darkness so absolute that I lit matches just to assure myself that I could still see. It was hard to believe in the existence of St. John’s, let alone New York, while confined to such a place.

On moonlit nights, the glow from the ice and snow was such that you could see for miles along the coast or out to sea, everything looking as it might have after days of freezing rain. Somewhere out there, there was water; somewhere out of sight the sea began, the ice-field formed its own coastline, and along that line,
when the moon was out, light and darkness met, the light ending so abruptly it was as though beyond the ice lay not water but the emptiness of space, the edge of the world, if a man were to fall off which he would fall forever.

On clear nights, when there was no moon, the sky was more star-filled than dark. The light seemed to be shining down upon us through some threadbare fabric.

Always, at night, the darkness making it more noticeable, there was the sound of the sea, each place with its distinctive sea sounds; in the rare open harbours there was the clattering of beach rocks and chunks of ice as a wave withdrew, or if there was no beach, the din of breakers crashing in a pattern that was constantly repeated on the rocks below the house.

In the iced-in harbours, during the coldest nights, when there was not enough room for the expansion of the ice between islands that might be miles apart, fault lines formed. I could hear, as I lay in bed, the ice-fields grind together and boom as fault lines two miles long were created in mere seconds. Sometimes the booms were faint at first, the sound becoming louder as the crack in the ice drew near to the house, or fading into silence, depending on which way the fault was headed. If it grew louder, I would wait for it to pass the house like a roaring train, wait for it to pass and then recede. Some of the fault lines travelled more or less straight towards the house. I lay there, imagining that bearing down on me was a horizontal lightning bolt that would strike the house to pieces. There would be a final, deafening boom when the fault ran through the rim ice that coated the first twenty yards or so of shore, then the sound of shards and chunks of ice raining down upon the house.

And there was the strange sound, too, when the tides were changing, of the water beneath the ice, a low rumbling as though from underground and vibrations that made the windows rattle.

One night I heard a rumbling that I thought must be an avalanche, for it came from behind the house. I jumped up in a panic,
only to be assured by a young man dressed like me in longjohns and staring out the back window that “it’s the Lapoile ‘erd, that’s all, sir. Nuttin’ to get all worked up about.” His parents obviously concurred, for they were still in bed.

He may not have been “all worked up,” but he was watching them nonetheless, watching them pass by his house on their way down to the ice, the Lapoile herd of caribou that he said always came by this time of year. I did like him and stood there with my hands and face pressed against the glass. All I could see at first was a torrent of shadows, but soon I could make out some slower-moving caribou. They were smaller than I had thought they would be, three or four feet high, each with racks of antlers so large and many-pointed they seemed head-heavy, barely able to look up to see where they were going.

“Where are they headed?” I said.

“Northeast,” he said. “Back ‘ome to the barrens for the summer. Lookin’ for food.”

“Do you hunt them?” I said.

“We got all we can use out in de smokehouse,” he said. “Not everybody got a gun and even less got bullets. Black bears gets more of them than we do.”

Codfish, now caribou. Rather than subject me to which they had served me tinned bologna.

All night long they passed the house, between the house and other houses, a deafening stampede that made even a dwall impossible. In the morning, when I got up, they were still going by. They stretched as far as I could see along the coast, between the rim ice and the rafted ice, a stream of antlers and moulting, shaggy, whitegrey rumps, winding its way along the base of the headlands, bound for the first fiord or riverbank that it could follow north.