A note from Newfoundland

April. How did that happen?! I can’t quite believe I let a quarter of the year slip by without so much as a hello. I apologise.

I’m not entirely sure what cycle or season my life runs to at the moment. I dropped John back at the airport this morning after his ten days home. Perhaps my cycle would be time with, time without John, except the time without so outweighs the time with, he’s more like a holiday season.

This cycle is simply my first quarter year in a new home and it is closing up as I make a trip back to Scotland next week.

So John left on 2nd January to finish up for 3 weeks in Gabon. Ha ha ha ha. I was full of the optimism of a new year, new start, new place, new house and in his absence painted it from top to bottom, every piece of it, except the downstairs loo which retains the 15 year old pink gloss that once covered everything.

Sobaka (and me!)

Of course John didn’t make it back for the end of January, or even the end of February, but I still renovated at a speed to make it a surprise for him, just in case he did drop in at any moment. Thankfully John is very happy with all my efforts because I wasn’t going to offer to cover them all up again.

The January and February DIY blitz were offset with finishing work for Shell, shovelling large quantities of snow on a regular basis and getting set up for life here; register with the bank, social security, medical care, buy a car, pay the shocking fee to insure it. As a foreigner they treated me as a brand new, never been on the road before, 16 year old and insured me as such. Let’s just say my car insurance could have bought me 2 flights home and I hadn’t budgeted for it at all.  I do have a great number plate though. It starts HOH. I’m waiting for the day I’m parked next to the one starting HUM.

I have to admit winter driving in St John’s in winter is a bit of an adventure, even after all the cross-State hauls I did for Trent in that clapped out excuse of a van called Clifford. Perhaps they are right about the insurance. Between the barely there road markings, pot holes, ice, bizarre junctions, disappearing lanes, incomprehensible signage and hills to challenge even the seasoned ‘hill start in a manual’ driver, it does at times feel not too far removed from Kampala except I’ve not yet had a goat walk out in front of me.

St John's

Once I got done with Shell I took a week and went ‘around the bay’ to the cabins for some country living and to get inspired to write the content for John’s website. I’ve been having great difficulty concentrating and getting anything done that needs more than 5 minutes mental effort and thought the change of scene might help. I’d assumed I’d burnt out on paint fumes, and while the scene change did kick start the writing, my immigration medical turned up I’m a bit anaemic which made more sense of the fact I’ve been feeling too of my energy has gone to kicking my own butt into gear over the last few months. At least it is super easy to deal with. Otherwise I’m all extremely well and with 6 vials of blood, pee tests and X-rays between the immigration medical and the screening I got for signing up with a new doctor, all maladies, potential and apparent should have been uncovered by now. I love my new doctor. He’s from Congo, has a great smile and a lovely singing French African lilt.

I find snow helps in meeting new people and making friends as the neighbourhood is out with shovels and snowblowers and we all struggle to get a footing on the uncleared pavements. I had a reminder of how small the world is when I called in a furniture order and heard a familiar accent. “You sound like you are from my part of the world”. And so we narrowed it down; Aberdeen, Aberdeenshire, Auchenblae, Drumtochty Glen, next door neighbours for 4 years. She lived in the house at the end of the road through my isolated valley. We drove past each other every day, knew each other’s dogs and houses, had even met a few times in the woods and here we both are living in St John’s for the long haul. It’s good to have someone around who has already made all the same goofy mistakes and shares the same gripes about Canada.

I also had a reminder of how to behave in small communities. Some of you may recall I wrote a blog about a maniac middle aged instructor I had in a spin class here last year. Well I went to a Bruce Springsteen tribute concert with my neighbours and the spin instructor was one of our group. Her husband is a motorbiking buddy and old friend of the neighbours. I asked her if there are any cycling clubs in town and she replied “I don’t do clubs”. What can I say? She’s from Quebec.

Climbing Signal Hill in St John's - where Marconi's first radio transmission was received

My neighbours have been so good to me I joked I’d better start paying them rent I spend so much time over at their house. Their oldest son is finishing his Masters in Music which is a highly competitive course to get into here;  they only accept 12 people a year. He is phenomenal. I’ve watched him play in chamber orchestras to rock bands now. I said I’m a fully paid up Gregory groupie I’ve been to watch him so many times. Most memorable by far though was a concert in the back room of a stunning old downtown home. It was an improv band and they played everything from looping snippets of radio recordings, to didgeridoo, to bass saxophone in a psychedelic surfer style . I felt pretty spaced out. I probably wouldn’t have listened to 2 minutes if it had been on CD but watching it live, and watching them make it all up in front of you, and just play with sound and noise and rhythm and let each other cruise in and out of centre stage was really awesome dude.  It is hard to put across how important and how everywhere music is in this place. To be good here, is to be really good.

My first trip back around the bay reconfirmed for me that this is a good place for me. I explored miles of trails and longed for skis, snowmachine and dogs, in any combination! The ponds were all frozen solid and so one Wednesday morning, which for months had been my weekly call into a project for Shell, listening into progress reports from around the world, I found myself instead huddled behind a quad bike, listening to tall tales while 3 old boys of the village caught sprats through the ice. The juxtaposition in my mind was really stark and I could only smile that there are all sorts of clever and all sorts of experienced and all sorts of education out there. I was trying to tell them where I’d been walking to, which I found to be pretty difficult without a map and without any knowledge of what the local landmarks are called and so I ended up providing all kinds of comedy as I attempted to describe which tree, bend, rock and bit of ice I meant versus any other. I had to get back to St John’s though because however many hours I was walking was not compensating for Frances amazing baking and generous portions.

Good thought - The Battery, St John's

Cafe plans are still very much alive. John and I went back again just last week. We have run aground momentarily, because the application for the land was rejected. We fall outside of the planned “infill/development” zone for the municipality. A very serious young woman told us these planning regulations are in place to prevent urban sprawl. John and I stayed silence lest we set each other off. ‘Around the bay’ anywhere in Newfoundland is as rural as it gets. Most areas didn’t get electricity or running water until the 60s and everything was pretty much made, grown or bartered. Alberta, Halifax and St John’s have claimed nearly all the younger people so the villages are dying and rural areas depopulating fast. The chances of urban sprawl in a region where you can buy a 3 bedroom house in good living order for less than $60,000 is pretty remote at this moment. However, the policy is the policy so we went back around the bay to see if we could figure out where else it could sit. The trouble is, the designated planning zone is pretty much a half mile band around the hamlet. The land is either vertical hill or already owned. Many families had 9, 10, 11 children all of whom inherited a plot. As one local said, cut down one tree and you’ll soon see people lining up to claim the land, so crown land is really our only option.

All is far from lost though. Newfoundland is so big and there are so few planners that really they haven’t much of a clue what’s on the ground locally. They’d initially rejected the land for John’s cabins because the area was listed as a municipal dump on their maps. Hadn’t been in use for over 60 years but the maps had never caught up. Likewise, the town boundaries for Tickle Cove were reworked 10 years ago and the sign post for the boundary moved a mile up the road, so our land now sits inside the town limits. We’ve put in a request that the infill zone be changed to reflect the ‘new’ boundary. I’ll let you know, but if this site doesn’t work, we’ll probably build it on the beach in front of John’s boat shed, on his land and take the red tape out of the process.

The coast at King's Cove lighthouse

It seems that nearly everywhere Spring is being experienced as wildly fluctuating temperatures, but not here. St John’s has been consistently below zero throughout! The snow has thawed and we were down to grass and mushy leftovers, but supplies of the white stuff were restocked on Saturday when we got a late dump of 36cm. There has been plenty of sunshine though and I got my warmth as I made a trip to catch up with my parents who were in Washington DC for a week.

I had an very early flight and the first signal of how the day would go was that my taxi didn’t turn up. When he did get to my door, I had an adventure getting to the car. The predicted freezing rain had just started, coating everything in black ice and making it literally impossible to walk. Eventually I was forced to walk in my socks to get enough traction to move forward to the car. It was hilarious. The taxi driver and I were in giggles sliding about trying to put my case in the trunk.  

My early start turned into a long day. I was 8 hours in St John’s airport watching the windows glaze over with ice that only thickened and thickened until nothing could be seen from them at all. At last I was actually in an igloo in Newfoundland. I read my entire trashy travel novel before leaving the departure lounge and was acutely aware the whole time that my bed was a mere 15 minutes away. Of course I long missed my connection in Toronto but luckily hand luggage only let me scoot onto the last flight by the skin of my teeth and by nightfall I was watching the waves of Virginia Beach from the warm balcony of my hotel room.

Still winter

Washington DC was spectacular. We were incredibly lucky. Not only was it unusually warm, but we got there at the height of the cherry blossom, and on the 100^th anniversary year of the Japanese give to the people of America. It was a surreal few days in among the suits and tourists and greenery, but Washington looked absolutely at its best.

Unsurprisingly, it was snowing when I got back to St John’s. “Where to?” asked the taxi driver. “Kilbride, Sinnott Place”. “Ah yes” he said “where the house burnt down”.  Oh god, I thought, what did I leave on?

In the few days I was gone, the house 2 doors up burned right to the ground and as the flames went out the gossip got hotter. The long and short of it is the house was supposedly undergoing renovations, but has been for years and they bred Shiatsu dogs. I never heard, or saw, dogs or people because the owners were living elsewhere and the dogs were never walked so the house must have been a mess. The fire department said there was so much debris inside the house they couldn’t get in to fight the fire. 12 dogs died in the blaze. People are asking whether the puppy farm was legal and if the fire was an insurance job among other tattle about the owners. About as much left of the house as their reputation anyway.

While we don’t have sunshine or spring bulbs, we do have spectacle. When we caught sight of the sea driving up to Bonavista John said “look at the ice”. I saw this startling shimmer on the horizon and told him it was just a fog bank, which was kinda dumb, given I don’t live here and he does. As we turned again I saw it was indeed a massive ice floe. I just hadn’t anticipated the scale of it at all, miles of it, filling the entire horizon of the sea, the pack from Labrador drifting south and cooling what would have been our spring back to winter.

Labrador ice floe moving in

The early icebergs are already settling onto the western coastlines and we had a great day just travelling between villages spotting them. I also tried to fall into a root cellar in the ‘root cellar capital of the world’ in Elliston, but that’s another story.

Elliston - root cellar capital of the world

Sometimes you see tiny spots of black, seals on the ice. Frances said there was a polar bear came ashore about 10 miles from the cabins one year and she wouldn’t be surprised if one wandered by her kitchen window sometime. It’s like a bizarre Canadian postcode lottery – which town gets the mad, hungry polar bear this year?! I’m not kidding. One man woke up to a Ursus maritimus in his kitchen last week.

John, Sobaka and my first Newfoundland iceberg!

The icebergs are so beautiful and as inexplicably mesmerising to view as cloud watching.  The silent visitors constantly morph as your aspect to them changes and they hold such intense colours that you feel they have carried the very sunshine and secrets of Labrador inside them.

Ice floe just south of entrance to St John's harbour

We took advantage of some blue skies to watch the new dog along the coast. Sobaka, which is Russian, for dog, is now 4 months old and gaining confident, agility and some training. He loves to walk the shorelines which is just as well as there will be lots of days of it ahead for him.

Sobaka watching a squall coming over Elliston

By sheer coincidence, as my John was raised in Nova Scotia, he shares exactly the same name as the first governor of Newfoundland - John Martin Guy. So we went to Cupids where Mr Guy landed from after his voyage from Bristol and climbed the headland and took photos of John standing under his statute and tributes and streets named after him. I think he rather liked the idea of his own statute.

John Guy Place & monument

So that’s about all my news. I’ve got a roast chicken I need to get out the oven soon but I’ve been enjoying the dietary changes Newfoundland has to offer. Lobster and eggs for breakfast, moose sausages for lunch, salted cod hash for tea. Not every night, but all of the above have been consumed in the last week and enjoyed most thoroughly.

See some of you next week!