Baltimore's Mansion by Wayne Johnston Page B

asked me, had had any sense of the land, the scope and shape of it, the massive fact of it? Fishermen went far enough from shore to see some of the land assuming shapes and lines, a series of capes or a small peninsula, perhaps, with headlands soon fading to a blue blur on either side, the amorphous, nebulous elsewhere whose existence was less real to them than that of the moon or the sun. They had conceived of Newfoundland as a ribbon of rock, a coast without a core, a rim with water outside and nothing, a void, inside. And stranded on this thin rim they lived, the Terra Incognita at their backs and the sea before them. For many of them, Newfoundland had not even been a coast but a discrete shard of rock, their own little cove or bay, inlet or island. They had had no idea when they cast their votes what they were voting for or what they were renouncing. They had not known there was a country, for they had never seen it or even spoken to anyone who had. What lay beyond the farthest limits of their travels and their eyesight was just a rumour, a region of fancy and conjecture. And what was true of space was true of time. What was true of geography was true of history. In how many homes or even classrooms was there a copy of Prowse’s
History of Newfoundland?
Time was local, personal and even then less enduring than their experience of space, the circumscribed geography of “home.” Smallwood had said that for him the main purpose of Confederation was to undo this isolation, but of course it only made it worse. For if people could not conceive of the whole of Newfoundland, how could they form any conception of a place the size of Canada?
    When it was very late and the car was dark and almost empty and most of those still in it were asleep, I looked out the window at what, at that hour, I could see of Newfoundland, dark shapes of hills and trees, a glimpse, when the moon was out, of distant ice-caught ponds. The towns in the interior, though they tended to be larger than the coastal fishing towns, each one depending on some single industry like mining or pulp and paper, were few and far between. These were new towns, settlements of this century, in some cases post-confederate, lived in by people who had moved in from the coast or from small islands off the coast. But even in the core there were a few small, unaccountably located towns a hundred miles apart, nothing more than clumps of houses really, all with their porch lights on, but otherwise unlit, occupied by people who, though it passed by every night, rarely saw or even heard the train. People left over from towns built up round industries of Smallwood’s that had already failed.
    From Corner Brook, we followed the Long Range Mountains southwest to Stephenville Crossing, going downstream along the black, cliff-channelled Humber River. Sometime early in the morning, I fell asleep again and did not wake until the sun was up. Someone said we were thirty miles from Port aux Basques.
    Until the ride back from Port aux Basques, we had a day to kill. There was not much more to do in Port aux Basques, especially without a car, than watch the ferries come and go. That is what we did, after we spent the night in the Holiday Inn that had been built for Come Home Year and had not been filled to capacity since.
    Port aux Basques harbour had been dredged and redredged and hacked out of rock to accommodate the huge Gulf ferries after 1949. It looked like a quarry at high tide and at low tide like a reservoir that had been all but drained of water, the high water line ringing the harbour basin, a white salt stain on the rocks, strands of kelp hanging down from it into the water like dark green climbing ropes.
    My father pointed out to me an island, on the leeward side of which, he said, Basque fishermen after whom the town was named used to lie in wait in their boats for schools of whales. He told me of the sealing vessel
Southern Cross,
which in April of 1914, while trying