Call me Quoyle: I left my heart in Newfoundland
Last year Kelly Dennett spent a week alone in a cabin by the sea, eating cod and drinking wine. Here is what happened.
The windows of the Fogo Island ferry were so salt-lashed that there was little for me to do but forgo a deep stare into the Labrador sea, and eavesdrop on conversations instead. Specifically, that of a heavily Newfinese-accented couple (think Irish-Canadian as a lilt, but, I swear, all I heard were Fargo-like twangs). From Newfoundland’s coast we were en route to the tiny, remote Fogo Island, population a hair over 2000. They, as it turned out, were off to a wedding the following day; me, to sit in a saltbox and stare at a cold, eerie expanse that in winter is home to icebergs and the northern lights (and in between little but a lone man commandeering a tinny on nightfall, and the odd seabird. But I’ll get to that).
The Newfies chatted as the boat lurched. The woman holding command of the conversation was tanned, despite Newfoundland’s summer being mild, not very sunny. Her husband bore a striking resemblance to her. They both wore identical gold bands, matching tan leather Birkenstocks, her toes painted a bright pink, his unpainted but trimmed, tidy. Both had brilliant white teeth. I imagined a quarter-acre section, annual holidays to Granada, two grown kids out of the house.
They chewed gum as the woman told the other guests that she had spent the previous day desperately searching all over Gander, a small, flat town some hours away, for a lemon tree at the last-minute request of the bride. I found this curious.
The conversation wore on. It had been many, many, years since they’d been to Fogo, she said. Some time ago a local woman who made it big in tech had built a futuristic inn, on stilts, on the island. I’d heard of it, seen pictures. Couldn’t afford to stay there. The proceeds helped the struggling local fishing community. “She invites all the locals to stay at least once,” someone with knowledge said.
The other wedding guests were intrigued, fascinated; they had never been to Fogo Island. At that, some nodded in understanding. Because if you look on a map, Fogo Island, an island off the coast of an island, is a bit like a crumb separated from a biscuit, a broken piece of ice shelf, a lone freckle, a speck on a map - you get the idea. From St John’s International Airport, it was an overnight drive to the ferry. The ferry would then take an hour. From my home in New Zealand six months earlier, I’d found a photo of a red boathouse on a rocky outcrop, learned it was taken at a place called Fogo Island in Newfoundland, and booked a ticket.
Newfoundland itself is just a small part of the Labrador Newfoundland province, on the eastern coast of Canada, so close to Europe I contemplated a hop across the pond to London. Their unique Canadian accent is owing to the 35,000 Irish immigrants who descended on Newfoundland in the 19th century, more in earlier years, lured by the promise of permanent employment in fishing industries. Between 1804 and 1815 in particular, to fish in Newfoundland was to be in a prosperous sector, with the population of St John’s inflating quickly as anglers took to the seas.
But at a good eight-hour flight from Vancouver, the more NZ-adjacent side of Canada, my sojourn piqued mild astonishment. “Why did you want to go there?” people asked. It was so far from chic Montreal, beautiful Vancouver and the impressive Rockies. Why go there?
Photos of Newfoundland promised swathes of unvarnished, unpeopled, rocky land with fishing villages decorated by brilliant saltboxes - the moniker given to Newfie homes for their resemblance to actual salt boxes, whereby the lid overreaches the sides. Typically a two-storey, tall, square thing often painted in bold colours, they are an almost necessary contrast to the Spruce tree-lined hills and grey, sharp rocky outcrops that earned Newfoundland its nickname, The Rock.
But I was also intrigued by its rich history - Vikings roamed its hills, the Titanic sunk not far away, the first wireless signal
was broadcast from a beauty spot at St John’s, and the Titan imploded off the coast shortly before I arrived. Locals had barely raised an eyebrow at the latter, a local told me - around these ways marine tragedies were a dime a dozen. Canada’s very first recorded shipwreck was at Newfoundland, and in other history nearby, in 1932, Amelia Earhart had taken off in what was the first solo female flight across the Atlantic. She had battled icy thunderstorms during the white-knuckle 15-hour flight to Ireland.
Famously, even if fictionally, in the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Shipping News, a widowed and grieving Quoyle heads there with his young children, led there by an enigmatic aunt to try and restore an old family saltbox. Timid, soft Quoyle inexplicably winds up working as a car-crash reporter for the local paper, a job reserved only for the thick-skinned, all the while the family’s cold saltbox threatens to blow away at any minute.
Author Annie Proulx cast Newfoundland as both a hardy character and a metaphor for Quoyle’s turmoil, but the location becomes a symbol of resilience. Everything feels frigid, hard; meals are caught, earned. The wind and sea lick your face. Newfoundlanders tied down their homes to stop them disappearing in the wind, crashing into the sea. In the earliest centuries, when the ice had thawed and their communities had dwindled and it was no longer practical to live on the farthest parts of the coast, residents would float their saltboxes on the water and move them to another outcrop, ready to start again. Like Quoyle, dropping life as they knew it.
When it came time to film the movie of the same name (featuring Kevin Spacey and Judi Dench), Proulx had reportedly baulked at the suggestion, reportedly by John Travolta, that crew could film in the closer, smaller, kind-of-similar but-really-not version of the Rock - Maine in the US. It had to be Newfoundland, she repeated. It had to be Newfoundland.
“Within 10 minutes of landing on the rock I knew that this was a tremendously important place for me,” she once said. “The more I saw the more I loved. I knew I wanted to write something about this place. And it's hard to explain – because it's not a loveable place. It's very harsh, the weather is cruel, you can hardly drive for a mile without having a moose get in your way…”
And so there was my vision; nowhere else like it. Newfoundland’s overwhelming sparseness, distances, craggy coastlines and unbeautiful fishing villages, its tragic history, its inhospitableness; my own anti Eat Pray Love.
I hadn’t gone directly to Fogo Island. A few days earlier I had landed in foggy St John’s, and was immediately stirred by the rows of jellybean houses, the cobblestones and the small Irish bars and pubs that played top-10 hits as streetlights warmed the largely empty main thoroughfare. A place that simultaneously felt like it was expecting something to happen, but nothing had ever happened there. My first dinner was expensive sushi at a place masquerading as an Asian fusion restaurant. Already I knew I didn’t want to leave.
The following day I drove to Trinity and Port Rexton, where in fact The Shipping News had eventually been filmed, arriving mainly by a wide highway where cars whipped past me at 130kph while I nervously kept to the 80kph limit, warned previously of the sudden appearance of moose. I thought about Quoyle covering his car crashes as I curved around narrow roads, then crunched on gravel for several kilometres, eventually reaching my Trinity cottage overlooking the sea. Curtains rustled in windows as I wandered to the pub by foot, taking photos of the Labrador sea as I went.
In contrast to postcard Trinity, though, Fogo Island was not all soft light and warm vibes, despite the twee locations named Seldom, Tilting, Deep Bay and Joe
Batts Arm. The day of the aforementioned wedding, at a local church, it was overcast and raining. Inexplicably, my cottage was piped with saltwater. And while Trinity’s pub served a bougie poutine, truffle cheese sandwiches and craft beer on tap, Fogo’s Cod Jigger restaurant was a bottled Coors and fried-cod-with-boiled-carrots affair. Also on the menu, cod burger. Cod fritter. Salted cod. Deep-fried cod. Panfried cod.
I quickly learned there was nothing to do. There were just a few walks on the island to complete, and only a dairy, a small supermarket, and some tiny artists’ studios to visit - the latter were largely empty, bar the talkative artist of the day who’d watch intensely as I pretended to examine quilts. The hikes around abandoned villages, the saltboxes long floated and gone, were worryingly quiet. I thought about bears even though it seemed unlikely there’d be a bear on tiny Fogo. Nonetheless, I’d run the last kilometre or so.
At Deep Bay I’d sit around and write, sit around and drink coffee, sit around and drink wine; grab from a bag of chips, look out the window. I’d sit around on the porch; rock the Adirondack chair backwards and forwards, backwards and forwards. I’d take selfies and delete them; stay up, into the night, watching Apple TV on my laptop, a lifeline to the outside world, balancing it on my knees in bed. One night the computer slipped off, smacking me in the face, splitting it open, bruising the bridge of my nose. As soon as the sun had fully set I’d turn the lounge, kitchen and bedroom lights off, turn the outside lights on. Peering through the curtains into the pitch black, I’d wonder who was there, before concluding it was highly likely the answer was: nobody. Not a single soul.
“The power has gone off at Aiden House in Deep Bay,” I write, rivetingly, days in. “There are signs in the house warning this could happen, and not to even try using the water if it does. This morning I woke to tourists standing at the top of the driveway, taking pictures.” I record eating a tin of peaches. I record hearing a ticking clock. I type to a friend that I think I hear someone moving around the neighbouring saltbox, even though it’s supposed to be vacant. My ears tingle at every creak. In the morning I notice the outdoor light is switched on. It wasn’t like that the day before.
Inexplicably, I find tissues everywhere
- some scattered near my car, some as far as an hour’s walk along a coast line, on tracks and on the road. “Symbolic meaning of tissues,” I Google. “Bad omen?”
On my second-to-last day I finally reached the fourth corner of the world, a highly-anticipated milestone on my Fogo Island trip, something I’d been referencing for days in my diary. Yet another rockface on Brimstone Head buffeted by strong winds, the climb up was supported by rope and iron, a tumble onto sharp rock highly likely. The site was well marked by the Flat Earth Society. I played the game. Here is the fourth corner of the world, I wrote on Facebook, to question marks and laughing faces. Bucket list tick.
Although on the morning I’m to depart Fogo Island I’m excited to leave for chic Montreal, and to have a conversation with someone new, maybe someone who isn’t about to serve me food or a pint, I accidentally miss the scheduled ferry back to the main island. There is nothing to do in the queue of cars at the ferry terminal while I wait for the next one, but flick through the pages of The Shipping News, and look out the window. Finally, on the return trip, there are no polished couples, not even a conversation. The cabin is cold.
Halfway through my return, a man approached me and asked if it was the ferry back to Farewell, or if was going to the Change Islands. I don’t know, I tell him honestly, I just queued and got on.
Back in St John’s a day later, preparing to board a flight to Montreal, I was regretful. I thought about missing the flight, staying in Newfoundland, joining a newspaper and writing The Shipping News, both in the newspaper sense and the Proulx sense.
A brief search of what it would cost to change my flight brought me back to reality. Now, I look at my brief travel diary, just 10 pages for a month-long trip, and I’m left with scrawled notes, brief jottings to remember the best parts: seeing the moose, Trinity, that walk to the pub, the saltboxes. The cod. On my last night I wrote, “I have unexpectedly come upon a little oasis in the middle of nowhere”. And then, I put my pen down.