The ends—and beginnings—of the Earth

Newfoundland is like Iceland 15 years ago; everyone wants to know why

Proper pronunciation is important; it will help you blend when you travel, because it signals that, while you may be an obvious foreigner, you are at least paying attention and making an effort. This is a fairly obvious principle when you’re traveling in a country where the inhabitants speak an unfamiliar language, but traveling in a country where English is spoken—differently—can present a minefield of quirks.

Before I get back to this point, let me say a few words about my long absence from this newsletter. I believe it was Douglas Adams who wrote that the purpose of time is to keep everything from happening at once. Well, for a few months running, time utterly failed me. Everything began happening simultaneously, one project, adventure, or calamity layering on the next, until my bank account dwindled, my hair began falling out in handfuls, and my car spent a month in the shop while I lived with my appliances in my dining room. I traveled, yes, but I also lost a cousin, I renovated my kitchen, and my car was struck by a motorcycle (both of us were uninjured, thank heaven, though our vehicles were not). I took very little time off work, and I just did not have the spoons to put out a newsletter. I hope you will forgive me; I have a lot to say now, all saved up. The kitchen is almost perfect, the car is fixed, and life has gone back to what passes for normal. For now, at least.

Anyway, Canadians speak English mostly like we do, except they have that weird British habit of pronouncing random proper names oddly. For example, the delightful brewery in the photo at top, Quidi Vidi Brewing Co. It’s located in the gated Quidi Vidi enclave of the city of St. John’s, the only really big town in Newfoundland. Do not read that previous sentence out loud until you read this one: Quidi Vidi is pronounced “Kiddie Viddie,” and Newfoundland is pronounced, roughly, “NewfndLAND.” (The natives actually pronounce it sort of like “NewfLAND,” but you don’t want to sound like you’re either making fun or trying to pass.)

The brewery makes a beer called Iceberg using water from actual icebergs, icebergs being one of Newfoundland’s big tourist draws (the other is whales). I went in late August and early September, which is the wrong time of year for both of those attractions (I saw one whale, briefly, at a distance and zero icebergs), but I thoroughly enjoyed everything I saw and did except for the one day of filthy weather and the cold I caught after getting soaked to the skin. It is a huge, beautiful, and mostly pristine and rustic island, with friendly, funny people, great music, and some astonishing geology, and yet when I told people where I’d gone, almost every one responded, “Why?”

Well, to be honest, the short answer is twofold: one of my favorite bands, Great Big Sea, is made up almost entirely of Newfoundlanders; and September 11th. You will likely recall that, on September 11, 2001, all air traffic into and out of the United States was abruptly halted. Flights over the Atlantic Ocean, flying between U.S. and Western European cities, tend to follow a path not actually across the middle of the ocean but, because of the curvature of the Earth, roughly from Ireland to near Iceland, skirting Greenland and then Labrador and Newfoundland, and then down through Quebec and into U.S. airspace. (In “A Hard Day’s Night,” John Lennon is asked by a reporter, “How did you find America?” and he responds, “Turn left at Greenland.” Look at this on a globe and it makes total sense; look at this on a flat map and it looks blah blah Mercator projection blah blah here’s where Flat Earthers really show they don’t get out much.) Anyway, dozens of planes were grounded in Gander, Newfoundland, which has splendid runway infrastructure thanks to a long history as an airbase.

The baffled, frightened, frustrated passengers weren’t initially told why they had been effectively kidnapped, and they were stuck in Gander for the better part of a week and not allowed to access their checked luggage. Gander is not a big town. But the locals organized a herculean housing, feeding, clothing and health project, and even found time to entertain the “plane people.” A wonderful musical was written about this humanitarian triumph amid unimaginable terror and tragedy called “Come From Away.” Seeing that show reminded me how terrific the people of Gander were on that occasion, so I was sure to include a stop in Gander on my trip. More about that in a later newsletter, and about getting “Screeched in,” which is now also a tourist draw.

Perhaps one of the best reasons to visit Newfoundland was one I didn’t even anticipate when I booked the trip: Americans haven’t discovered it yet. (I bet you needed to look at a map to remind yourself where it even is.) It’s a little tricky to get to, just because it’s remote: You can drive up through Nova Scotia and take a ferry, or you can fly Air Canada and connect through one of the big cities, as I did. There aren’t a lot of chain hotels; I stayed almost exclusively in guest houses/B&Bs and pubs. If you leave St. John’s, you’ll have to rent a car, and you’ll find that things tend to be very far apart (somewhat painful with gas as pricey as it is in Canada). Nearly all of my fellow guests at breakfast were Canadians, and they all seemed slightly startled to meet someone who’d come all the way from America.

But isn’t this partly why we travel—to be among different people, see how they live, and hear what they think? It can be comforting in a very strange place to hear an American accent, but I don’t need that in Canada. I felt foreign, but never unwelcome. The pubs and breweries were always friendly, and the beer was glorious, possibly because, iceberg gimmickry notwithstanding, Newfoundland is extremely wet. The mountainous interior is riddled with ponds and streams, so brewers have had ready access to good fresh water for generations. The above photo is of Port Rexton Brewing, about three hours from St. John’s.

I didn’t go to Newfoundland for the beer, but beer aficionados would have plenty of brew to explore there. I planned this trip to be a whirlwind overview, because the island is very big and it’s hard to know what you’re going to love and what you’re going to find a bit sparse until you get your boots on the ground. I definitely want to go back, because the sheer mileage kept me from checking out whole swaths of it, including L’Anse Aux Meadows, a Viking settlement and UNESCO World Heritage Site. I made it out to the plate-tectonics Rosetta Stone that is Gros Morne National Park (attention francophones: they pronounce the “s”), but I had only one day to spend there, and that was the day the cold, drenching remnants of a hurricane hit, so I owe the wet coast—excuse me, the west coast—of Newfoundland another visit.

I had just a couple of nights in St. John’s, where tourists are more plentiful because it’s a cruise ship port and George Street tries its best to be the Bourbon Street of the Maritimes (and yes, that is a note of distaste showing between the lines), and I would absolutely go back there, too. It’s a British-style city, with more of a topographical maze of cowpaths than a rectilinear street grid, so driving (even on the right side of the road) is a bit more exciting than is ideal, but it’s also beautiful, with its streets sloping sharply down to the busy harbor. The pubs are full of good music (especially if you like Celtic-flavored bands), and there’s lots of good seafood to be had.

I saw puffins on Cape Bonavista, reputed to be the point of first landfall for John Cabot (not his real name), a Venetian explorer who crossed the Atlantic in 1497 trying to get to Asia and must have been quite put out to find North America still in the way that close to the pole. I saw rainbows and the Earth’s mantle at Gros Morne. I spent some time in Twillingate (another good brewery there, Split Rock) and visited the nearby attractions, Auk Island Winery, where I learned the heartbreaking story of the Great Auk and sampled wines made from everything except grapes, and the Durrell Museum, which I may get a whole newsletter out of because it was fascinating far beyond what I expected from a small community museum—and sells great local crafts!

When I got to Gander, a production of “Come From Away” was actually being performed in town, which would have been wonderful to see—but the whole run had also been sold out forever. Which is fair enough, given the awesomeness of seeing a show about the people of Gander among the people of Gander, although the young people of the town—pretty much anyone under the age of about 28 or 30—do not actually remember what happened. I spoke to such a young woman at the North Atlantic Aviation Museum in Gander—another museum that was far more interesting than I expected. When grateful Americans ask her what they should do and see while in Gander, she admitted, “I tell them, ‘you should really go somewhere else. There’s not that much to see here.’”

She wasn’t wrong about Gander, but her point was that Newfoundland is a pretty breathtaking place, and if you’re willing to get in the car for a couple of hours, you can see things you’ll never forget. Newfoundlanders are like a lot of people who live in remote, inhospitable places where the weather, wildlife, and/or elements are routinely trying to kill them; they have a strong sense of community, a tradition of hospitality, and a quirky sense of humor. You hear it in conversations and see it on billboards and even in place names.

Which brings me to one final brewery. Like Port Rexton Brewing, it has a main brewery in a remote town and a retail store in St. John’s, because that’s where the people are. It is named after the town in which it stands. I can’t believe I didn’t get there, because people travel hundreds of miles to get a t-shirt from this brewery. But knowing that many people who know only one thing about Newfoundland know that name, I did take a picture of the St. John’s storefront. Obviously, I’ll have to visit the brewery when I go back. I mean, it’s like I went all the way to the Vatican and didn’t get a selfie with the pope.