Baltimore's Mansion by Wayne Johnston

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 lakesand 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 himacross 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