Baltimore's Mansion by Wayne Johnston Page A

from that one.
    We passed through a long stretch where there was more water than land, where more of the land lay underwater than did not, though it was all fresh water, rivers, pools, ponds, lakes. It was as if some great reservoir was slowly drying up,strands of bog and rock appearing in what had been the reservoir’s more shallow parts. The rail line zigzagged across this stretch, following the land unless a body of water was sufficiently narrow that a trestle could be built across it. There was nothing as far as the eye could see in any direction but flat white frozen lakes and, barely distinguishable from them by the unevenness of their terrain and the occasional dark gash of green, the bogs and barrens, with here and there a tolt that ten thousand years ago had been an island rising from the water like some observation tower.
    Then we passed into a landscape that was like a lake bed from which the water had receded altogether, an expansive, flat-bottomed bed of a lake that looked as though it had been uniformly three feet deep, nothing but rubble and jagged shards of granite.
    And this became the pattern. Every so often, a new, entirely different, geography would assert itself. We came upon a desert of black peat bog on which there was no snow, though there was snow all around it, as if a deluge of water ten miles wide had splashed down. Here and there the peat bog had collapsed of its own weight, its soggy crust caved in to form a great crater of peat, a black bog hole that was warmer than the air so that steam issued up from it like smoke. You could tell from these peat pits that underneath its topmost layer, the whole bog was like this, a steaming black muck too loose to support the roots of even the smallest of trees.
    Each part made you forget the others existed. In the middle of each landscape, you couldn’t help thinking that it stretched endlessly in all directions, that this was the island’s prevailing terrain and all else was anomalous.
    My father had wanted me to see all this. How much land there was, how like a country Newfoundland was in its dimensions and variousness. In the days leading up to the trip, I had many times asked him, “How big is Newfoundland?” Using the map on the kitchen wall, he tried to make me understand how big it was, tried to give me some sense of how much more of it there was than I had seen so far in our drives around the bay.
    â€œWe’re here,” my father said, pointing at the tiny star that stood for St. John’s. “Now last Sunday, when we went out for our drive, we went this far.” He moved his finger in a circle about an inch across. Then he moved his hand slowly over the rest of the map. The paper crackled beneath his fingers. “Newfoundland is this much bigger than that,” he said, making the motion with his hand again. “All this is Newfoundland, but it’s not all like St. John’s. Almost all of it is empty. No one lives there. No one’s ever seen most of it.”
    It was an island, yes, but I had been fooled by that fact into thinking of the land as an insignificant interruption of a sea so huge that by comparison the land did not exist. There were regions of it that even the train did not come near, peninsulas along which not even branch lines had been built, the Great Northern Peninsula for instance, along the two-hundred-mile stretch of which there was neither road nor railway. It had taken the robust Cormack those sixty days of continuous walking to reach the west coast, and he had not come within a hundred miles of the Great Northern Peninsula.
    The point of this journey was to get me away from the sea so that when I went back to living within two miles of it, I would know the land was there, land whose capacity to inspirewonder in all those who beheld it was in no way diminished by its being coloured the colour of Canada on maps.
    How many of the outporters who had voted for Confederation, my father