Port-Au-Choix & Cow Head

In the last week or so I’ve been busy doing what I came here to do, enjoy Newfoundland. As the three theatre reviews posted since my last entry would suggest I got to partake of Cow Head’s Gros Morne Theatre Fest. I may not get invited into the lives of Newfoundlanders but at least I can do so vicariously.

On Saturday June 5th I walked up to check out downtown Port-Au-Choix. The town has two gas stations--the ubiquitous Irving and a Western with a coffeeshop that is the town meetingplace. There’s a general store in town, a pharmacy, Riffs clothing store, and marine hardware wholesaler. The fish plant stands at one end of the harbour, the motel with dining room and bar, a second restaurant fronted by a ship’s prow, and the two churches. Sunday evening the portly priest at Saint Thomas Beckett Anglican Church thanked God for the fish plant’s licence and played 12-string guitar for the singing of hymns.

The RV Park beside Cow Head’s Seabreeze B&B is a parking lot overswept by Atlantic gales run by a couple from Edmonton. To get to the stoney beach one must cross the armour stone in place to protect the narrow paved road. At low tide Shallow Bay lives up to its name. Behind the town loom the still snowy mountains of Gros Morne. How one feels about the place depends upon the weather--either wind-driven rain, howling gales that let in the occasional patch of sunlight, or calmer warming trends that bring with them fog banks off the Strait. Clouds of some sort or other usually figure in all pictures of the place. Whatever the weather when there is fish to be caught the fishermen drive out the sandbar to Cow Head Harbour and put out to sea.

At the National Park’s Shallow Bay Campground one can walk the portions of the beach not closed for tern nesting, examine the well-kept pioneer cemetery that marks a former outport, or walk the Mail Road over which couriers with dog teams took the mail all the way to Saint Anthony 200 miles distant up the Great Northern Peninsula until the road was built. Here that road passes through the middle of a dense black spruce forest with open patches marking former homesteads. I walked a few miles of it in the fog. Taking the road along the sandbar one reaches the government wharf and a few wind blasted fisherman’s homes. There too are the Catholic and Anglican Cemeteries, a playing field and amphitheatre. A hiking trail leads to the top of ‘the big hill’ and at the look-off one gets a view of the town with a honking big communication tower in the foreground. Continuing on the trail one reaches the rusting circular steel ‘old lighthouse’ and an off-trail leads to the point where a stone was once thought to resemble a cow’s head.

By-passed by the new highway the town no longer supports a gas station though there are repair shops, a marine wholesaler, post office where people come to get there mail from their post box, 185-room motel, dining hall and bars, the supermarket, and the general store that sells everything from rented movies, nails and brass screws by the pound, groceries, Sears outlet, licences, lotto tickets, liquor, and tombstones. At Saint Mary the Virgin Anglican Church a midi-player provided music for hymn singing on Sunday. It’s the only church in town. The town rings Shallow Bay with the Long Range Academy and rec centre at the south end of town amid more prosperous looking homes. A few other eateries complete the picture and the warehouse theatre stands amid the motel complex in what appears to be a symbiotic relationship. I attended the three plays reviewed below and an evening of outport songs.

On a windy but sunny Friday I drove down to Western Brook and made the 2 mile hike to the dock at Western Pond that gives access to the land-locked fjord. Two thousand two hundred-foot sheer cliffs hem in five hundred seventy feet of the purest water known to man. The cliff faces are green with birch trees that cling to the soil-less rock faces. Waterfalls cascade over the heights above. One has to see it to believe it.

Yesterday, Monday June 14th I pulled up stakes and drove south through the town of Saint Paul and over the steep mountains of Gros Morne to Deer Lake; stopped for gas; and headed east through forested hills on Highway One, the Trans Canada Highway. No moose today but plenty of road repairs, the highway alternated between recently paved sections and bumpy older patches. Steam shovels clearing the ditches to prevent washouts seemed to be the order of the day. At Grand Falls/Windsor I pulled into Sangor Memorial Park on the Exploits River where the sun laying into the valley made things hot and brought out the first insects I’ve met in Newfoundland. The rain started next day. Aside from the mill which once owned the town salmon fishing draws people to the place which was home to Mary March, Newfoundland’s last Beothuk and one Gordon Pinsent.