Cape St. Mary's

Abstract

3 Bob Finch At six thirty a.m. Penny and I start out by car from St. John’s toward Cape St. Mary’s, home of the largest gannet colony in Newfoundland and the southernmost gannet breeding colony in the world. The day begins in darkness and continues in rain, not a promising start. We swing off the Trans Canada Highway (TCH) on route 100 just past the Whitbourne turnoff and continue down the long, empty stretch of highway to Freshwater. In Placentia we stop for breakfast at Harold’s Hotel, a place that looks as if it has remained stuck in the 1950s. At the counter is a sports trophy naming Harold “Freshman of the Year l973–74,” and also a light-box projecting a color photo of the town, which we turn on to get the attention of someone in the kitchen. A jukebox in the dining room has the usual mixture of current hits and old country and western standards. After breakfast we begin the long and spectacular drive down the coast road from Placentia to St. Bride’s, a distance of some forty-six kilometers, through a series of steep picturesque stream valleys, or barachois (pronounced, and sometimes spelled, “barasways”), all ending in impounded coves. There are small villages or sometimes only a single house at each of these stream outlets. Penny and I went to high school together in West Virginia, and we remark how much these villages resemble a seacoast version of the hollows and mountain towns of Appalachia. Most of the houses are one-story contemporary ranches painted in the usual Newfoundland fashion with two or three tones of bright boat paint, primary and secondary colors, often in distinct bands around the house. Penny explains to me the mortgage approval system in Newfoundland, which accounts for so much of the homogeneity Cape St. Mary's 4 Ecotone: reimagining place 4 of contemporary outport architecture. The Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC, a Crown corporation) must approve each house plan before the lender banks give a mortgage. They provide a limited range of approved house plans—fifty or so—or you can submit your own. But since the CMHC plans are free, buddy says, why should I pay to get my own? Most of these government-provided plans are ranch-style houses from the 1950s, a happenstance that has, over the past several decades,transformedthetraditionalarchitectureofmostNewfoundland outports into early versions of Levittown as painted by Mondrian. At St. Bride’s the last town before the turnoff to Cape St. Mary’s, the preferred color combination for houses seemed to be brilliant orange and green. Several young people stand by the roadside or next to barns on this Sunday morning with nowhere to go, nothing to do. There is an undistinguished motel in the town called the Bird Motel, but no sign or other indication of where the bird sanctuary itself is. As with so much of Newfoundland, including St. John’s, it is a place where one must know where something is in order to find it. Americans do not function well without signs. In fact, on some level we do not believe we are actually in a place—a city, a store, a national park—unless there is a sign to tell us so. The road out of St. Bride’s, shown on the official Provincial Highway Map as “scheduled to be paved” two years ago, soon turns to gravel. The landscape becomes flat, treeless, boulderless, and grassy. We see no cars, but at one point a huge, stuffed, toy bear is propped up against the road, as though hitchhiking. Since leaving Placentia, we have only passed a dozen cars and no hitchhikers (this being a risky activity in most of Newfoundland, where, except for the TCH, traffic is usually so sparse that one risks being stranded out in the middle of nowhere for an indeterminate period). After three of four kilometers we spot a single, small, white sign with “Bird Sanctuary” printed on one side only. From the turnoff it is some twelve kilometers to the lighthouse at the Cape along a potholed onelane dirt road. Paralleling the road is a single power...