Road trip: New. Found. Land.

Dark tickles and good food in a happy place

land. sea. sky. icebergs.

I had made plans to go up to Newfoundland over and over and canceled them so many times that it became a joke among my friends. “Oh, I suppose any day now you’re off to NewfoundLAND,” they would say, giving it the preferred Canadian pronunciation. Well, she who laughs last, ha-ha, gets there in the end and so it was that, just before the summer solstice a few years ago, I found myself winging my way up to Deer Lake in the western part of the island. That’s where Canada’s transcontinental (in a manner of speaking) Highway One intersects with Route 430, which meanders up the western shore of the Great Northern Peninsula. At Deer Lake airport I picked up a rental car and two friends who had flown in to meet me, and headed up that same Route 430, the only road north.

We were bound for the Viking settlement, l’Anse aux Meadows (Lancie Meadows, we learned to say, using the Newfoundland pronunciation), six hours away at the top of the peninsula, looking out across the Labrador Sea. Rain sheeted across the coastal highway, windy gusts rocked our little rental car, and then the sun burst through scudding clouds and lit the waves that beat against the shoreline. Newfoundland is the origin of “If you don’t like the weather, just wait a bit.” Haunting in its wind-swept beauty, it’s a land of rocky barrens and shallow soils, scrub forests of conifers, bent and twisted against the wind, of muskeg, peat bogs and marshy ponds, low dune lands to the northwest, tumbled rocks and precipitous cliffs to the southeast, vast unpopulated stretches of moor in between, spectacular vistas, and moose everywhere. “Be very careful driving,” Newfoundland friends warned, “especially at dusk and dawn when the moose are out.” (In the event, we only saw three in two weeks but not from lack of trying.)

The ice began to accumulate as we moved north and approached the Strait of Belle Isle that separates Newfoundland from Labrador, huge, misshapen blocks of pack ice that shifted like giant, alabaster playing cards on the water’s surface. On the horizon we spotted the first icebergs—not the giants of picture postcards, these were more like what Newfoundlanders call “growlers” or “bergy bits,” which are even smaller.  Still, in June, with the pack ice omnipresent, I can’t stop thinking about those Vikings setting sail in their open boats across the Labrador Sea. L’Anse aux Meadows is the only archeologically verified Norse site in North America; here the small group of adventurers, sailing west from Greenland, spent a few seasons around the year 1000 CE, setting up sturdy, thatched shelters, smelting bog iron to craft nails and tools, fishing, hunting game, repairing ships and gear, and exploring south, possibly even as far as present-day New Brunswick.

9 p.m., June 18, L’Anse aux Meadowes

Just to set the historical context, that was around the time the Normans invaded England, 400 years before Columbus set sail.

Just as l’Anse aux Meadows was the start of European settlement in North America it was also the start of our two-week land cruise across this great island. From there we turned south, and then east to Twillingate and Fogo Island, then south again to Cape St. Mary’s where millions of seabirds congregate on the spectacular cliffs of Bird Rock, and finally to St. John’s, Newfoundland’s lively, surprisingly urbane capitol.

But why Newfoundland?

Anyone who grew up as I did on the shores of the north Atlantic understands the passions stirred by that great, dark, slate-colored, roiling sea—a passion for horizons, a passion for distant islands, a passion for getting out to the edge. And Newfoundland is decidedly edgy. In Maine we think of it as the far north, so it comes as a shock to discover that it is in fact well south of most of the British Isles. Still, Newfoundland is remote and mysterious, with a long and troubled history and a present situation that is deeply instructive for those who care about the environment and what we humans are doing to the oceans on which our lives depend.