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October 2009 issue	In this issue Table of Contents Feature: Northern Peninsula Feature: Under one roof Feature: Irish moss The Inside Story Editor’s Notebook Reverberations À la carte Mosaic

Lobster traps that survived late pack ice are stacked in a field. Photo: Ned Pratt

Feature story Route 430 revisited Sidebar: Fiords and fortunes                  Making the Tablelands Photo Gallery: Cryptic coast Map: Cow Head to Cape Onion More … Mountain bikes & nomads Explore the peninsula’s parks and communities Culture Vulture Check out the Rock’s best new music, films & books Photo Club: Field Report Faces of Newfoundland

Before I leave Norris Point, Sexton points out that businesses in the town are lucky: every kilometre up the Northern Peninsula, there are fewer tourists to provide an economic buffer. I soon see first-hand the truth of her words. Near Rocky Harbour, for example, sits a failed fun park, its water slide abandoned and weeds sprouting up through the narrow, rusting track of a missing children’s ride.

But I also come across signs of trust. Here and there on the roadside of Route 430 are huge stacks of firewood, cut and left to dry in the round, and unmarked gardens dug deep into peat bog and fenced with either long spruce poles or simple posts and string. Neither the firewood nor the produce from the gardens — mostly root crops like potatoes and beets — will be collected by anyone except their owners.

Making the Tablelands Geologist Dr. Elliott Burden can see Western Europe from his office window. The thing is, he lives and works in St. Johns, Newfoundland. It’s almost like looking in a mirror, Burden says. To the untrained eye, Eastern Newfoundland bears a striking resemblance to the rocky shores of England and Wales. The difference in Newfoundland is you can effectively drive from the British Isles to North America in just a few hours — geologically speaking, of course. “In the east you see classic sedimentary rocks, like the sandstone and red shale of the upper tip of the Appalachian Mountains” Burden says. “Traveling west you come across the volcanic and metamorphic rocks of the central portion of the island, and in the west you see the limestone and deeper-water shale of North America.” Visitors to Newfoundland come to experience the province’s incredible geologic variety, be it through hiking, climbing, or watching the landscape from a car window. The transition is spectacular, Burden says. About 400 million years ago three sections of the Earth’s surface were brought together here via continental drift — a slow but powerful process that pushes mountains skyward, pools oceans and tears major landmasses apart like a sculptor. But this diverse rocky composition isn’t precisely what makes Newfoundland unique or spectacular to behold. After all, most of the Eastern Seaboard of North America reflects this varied geologic history. “The difference is that here glaciation has stripped everything down to the bare rock,” Burden says. “Most everywhere else, these geologic features are covered with thick forests.” During recent ice ages northern glaciers grinded much Newfoundland’s soil away or pushed it into the ocean while swaths of mainland North America were spared this violence. “Glaciation has rendered this place spectacular,” Burden says. Thanks to this rare set of circumstances, modern Newfoundland is a geologic gem, attracting tourists, photographers and Earth scientists from around the world to behold its beauty and document just what makes it possible. by Dan Ray (Photo courtesy Newfoundland and Labrador Tourism / Barrett and MacKay)

Up the coast and 16 kilometres off Route 430, I arrive at New Ferolle, a town with one long wharf, a fish-processing plant and a crescent of small houses arranged around a wide bay, its verges white with crushed coral.

The fish plant used to be owned by Cliff Doyle, a local fish buyer and a bundle of energy. I meet Doyle in his office, a two-storey building with blue siding. He stands about five-foot-eight; across his barrel chest, he wears a black-patterned shirt emblazoned with white pineapples. Doyle can remember the days before Route 430 connected his community overland with the rest of the island.

“You wanted to go out of here, you had to go by boat or in the wintertime, by dog team or horse,” he says. “We really were isolated from the rest of Newfoundland — let’s not talk about the rest of Canada.”

The ground floor of Doyle’s building is a storeroom crammed with equipment, scales and freezers; upstairs are cramped offices and a boardroom. A fax machine clicks to life several times, even though it’s Sunday evening. Doyle wants to meet on a Sunday because this is caplin season and the office is busy any other day. Caplin are a springtime ocean the coast, though you would not necessarily know it. Doyle helps me see past the facade.

“You go along the Northern Peninsula, and you look at all the lovely homes, but if you go and knock on a lot of these doors, there’s nobody home,” he says. “The lovely homes are there, but they’re summer homes. They are homes of people who live in Ontario or Alberta, not because they want to but because they have to.”

He himself decamps to northern Alberta with his wife each winter, where the work is steady and well paid, and returns to New Ferolle each spring.

“I was born here, my family’s here, I know the rocks, I know the trees, I know the ocean. It’s a part of you that never leaves you. When you’re working in the far north in Alberta in minus-35 weather, you know it’s a great job and the pay is super, but every morning when you go to work, you still think about Newfoundland. And you wonder why things can’t be different in Newfoundland.”

The memories of place are powerful, indeed. Right near the New Ferolle turnoff on Route 430 is a 3.4-kilometre boardwalk that winds through scrub spruce and peat barrens and ends on the shore of St. Margaret Bay. There, in an open field of wavering buttercups, is an Alice in Wonderland scene: a collection of dollhouses, hip-high and brightly painted in yellows, reds and blues. The houses have small doors that open on snap hinges. In each one is a small white table with two chairs and upstairs, a single bed with white-painted wire springs. It is unnervingly like strolling into a faerie community. In fact, the houses are dotted around the field on the spots where real houses used to stand in a community called Godfrey’s Cove, on the edge of the bay.

This was the winter home for New Ferolle. The fishing town was too exposed to harsh weather, so all residents would pack up and move to Godfrey’s Cove every fall. Once there, the men cut pulpwood through the winter for the Bowater plant in Corner Brook. The move, usually in November, was simply called “moving in the bay.”

“The winter wood industry here was very big,” says Doyle. “There was no unemployment insurance. There was no welfare. The welfare was something like six cents a day per child, so you know what you could buy with that. If people didn’t work some way to get cash, they didn’t live.”

Doyle’s words carry a mixture of fondness and frustration. “I sometimes despise what goes on in this area. Love turns to hate. You love the area so much that the only way you can live with yourself is to hate the area and move on. You get to a point where you say in your heart, ‘This place has nothing to offer me anymore.’”

When the snow comes this year, Doyle will do his own version of “moving in the bay,” just as his forefathers did. Except that now, his winter work is thousands of kilometres away, in the oil patch, far from New Ferolle and a Northern Peninsula he is finding he can neither love nor leave.