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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

Visitors to the World Heritage Site are shown around by "Viking" Mike Sexton, better knonwn as Bjorn the Beautiful. 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

Route 430 ends at St. Anthony, a busy, self-sufficient town tucked into a cleft in high stone hills. The town was the headquarters of Sir Wilfred Grenfell’s mission: Grenfell arrived in 1892 to start a medical mission and the town ended up as a centre for everything from cottage industry to education. Now, St. Anthony’s economy is driven by the squat, flat-ended fishing boats that regularly sail up to the town’s fish plant.

I meet Sexton as he arrives at the site in a bright red 2000 Hyundai with a coconut-scented, tree-shaped car deodorizer hanging from his rear-view mirror. “Not bad for a disposable car,” he grins, dressed from head to foot in full Viking regalia, car keys in his hand. Sexton has spent a decade as Bjorn the Beautiful, chief Viking at the L’Anse aux Meadows Viking re-enactment. He lives an hour away in Goose Cove and makes the daily trip in his full outfit. “I got dressed this morning at home,” he says, “apart from me Viking boots.”

Down at the rebuilt hamlet, Sexton slides into character, flirting with female tourists. He tells one to hold the sword over her head and aim for the knees. “It’s designed to hack,” he says, then adds, “I bet no one ever told you that you look good with a sword.”

It is cool in the sod huts where the Vikings are making pea soup today, and there is a steady run of tourists. Up in the staff locker room, Sexton is candid about how much he knew when he first worked as a Viking: “When I started here, I thought they had horns on their helmets.” But he is a quick study. You have to be in a place this tenuously linked to the rest of the world.

Like many Northern Peninsula residents, Sexton is a jack of all trades. His list of jobs is long. “Carpentry, roofing, electrical, working on waterlines, sewer, whatever. I’ve done trail work, off-loading shrimp and crab … I stay away from plastering. I hate plastering.

“Growing up on the peninsula,” he says, “you turn your hand at whatever you can turn your hand at, and when opportunity knocks, you take that opportunity.”

After the Vikings left, Basque whalers sailed up and down the Northern Peninsula coast, and then the English, Irish and French established thriving fishing stations. Sexton knows all about that history: Goose Cove is located on the site of fishing stations used by the French, and when he’s busy working in his vegetable garden, he still digs up nails from that time.

Before he was a Viking and before the cod fishery failed, Sexton was a fisherman too. And he misses fishing — sometimes. “Days when you look out on that water, on a beautiful day, definitely. But days when it’s a northeast wind and rain and you still have to go on the water? No, I don’t miss that.”

Of the prospects for the fishery in the years ahead, he says hopefully, “I think the fishery’s going to come back. Talking to local people, there’s a good sign of it. Maybe some of the youngsters that are here now might not be forced to go away after all and will get back into the fishery. I can see it coming back.”

The big question, however, is whether or not there will be young people around to run the fishery. The population statistics tell part of the story. Between 2001 and 2006, Port au Choix shrank by 11.6 percent, Hawke’s Bay by 12.1 percent and St. Anthony, the largest town on the peninsula, by 9.3 percent.

The Northern Peninsula is already running short of people to work in the fishing industry. Cliff Doyle, for example, has not been able to find anyone to staff his Eddies Cove fish station. He has to pay someone to drive from New Ferolle, close to 85 kilometres away, every day to work there. Up and down the peninsula, it is hard not to notice that almost all the entry-level jobs — waitresses and gas station attendants and convenience store clerks — are filled by people well into their forties or older.

As I steer the car south, back down Route 430, I replay in my mind what Doyle was saying a few days before: “The more people leave, the more people will leave. All the young people are gone. The people working here are all 5 to 10 years from retirement. How can you build an industry around people who have five years to retirement?”

Sadly, this is not a new story for the Northern Peninsula. The region has seen boom-and-bust cycles for many generations, though perhaps not as severe as what is being experienced today. Adding insult to injury, the recent recession has forced lobster prices to 30-year lows, a disaster for the lobster fishery.

An optimist will say that, through all the ups and downs, residents of the Northern Peninsula have always looked after themselves. After all, their connection to the rest of Newfoundland did not come until 1962, the year Route 430 opened, so they have a long history of living in isolation.

As Marina Sexton, Cliff Doyle and Mike Sexton have shown me, that self-reliance breeds plenty of inventiveness. Ultimately, it will have to be that inventiveness, and the continued cajoling of Bjorn the Beautiful, that will see them through.

Russell Wangersky is editor of the St. John’s newspaper The Telegram and author of two books. Photographer Ned Pratt lives in St. John’s.