Sunshine or no

Newfoundland's rugged landscape, fiords, people prove irresistable, even on a dark day

Author: By Steve Cohen, Globe Correspondent

Date: SUNDAY, August 16, 1998

Page: M9

Section: Travel

I was standing with the self-deprecating Newfoundlander beside a dark, flat-topped mountain called Gros Morne, watching a trio of moose. Several hundred yards distant, five caribou grazed, white humps I would have mistaken for rocks without a guide to correct me. A bald eagle wheeled overhead. It was early October. The 700-square-mile Gros Morne National Park, named for the 2,644-foot mountainous rock in the middle of Newfoundland's west coast, appeared otherwise deserted.

I crept closer to the moose, angling for a photo in the dim light. Gros Morne means ``gloomy hill in French.'' It filled the background, looking about as bright as a blackboard. The moose, three of 125,000, comprising the highest concentration of live Bullwinkles anywhere, eyed me. They were perhaps 20 yards away.

``That's close enough,'' warned Tsang. ``If one puts his ears down, get to the car, fast.''

I'd heard the horror stories. Up here, gangly 1,200-pound moose routinely contend with cars. The cars usually loses.

``The temperature is 5 below Celsius (18 degrees Fahrenheit),'' reported the skipper of the Western Brook Pond boat tour earlier that afternoon, while the sun of my Newfoundland experience uncharacteristically shone for an hour or so. Unfortunately, its warmth didn't penetrate very far into the narrow reaches of the pond. The name could be another Newfie joke. This pond is 10 miles long. It's really an inland freshwater fiord, 540 feet deep and kept in cold shadows by towering 2,000-foot-high, waterfall-laced cliffs.

At least, I thought gratefully, it wasn't raining.

Moose, caribou, and fiords are rare in North America. Yet these are not considered the most wondrous of the wonders of Gros Morne. The most unusual aspect of the park is a geological feature called the Tablelands. Similar in luster to the treeless hump of Gros Morne, the Tablelands once were below the ocean floor. They were accorded the highest levels of international environmental protection in 1987 as a World Heritage Site, noted for their enduring value to humanity by the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization. The designation puts the Tablelands on a par with Yellowstone and the Pyramids.

Two-thousand-foot high slabs of the upthrust crust of the inner earth, known as mantle rock, make up the flat gray, lifeless outcrops. To experts, these unusual rocks lend credence to hard-to-prove scientific theories of plate tectonics. This is the constant, slow shifting of huge continent-sized masses, called plates, under the surface of the earth. ``The geological history of North America is visible in Newfoundland,'' said Tsang, as we walked a short trail.

Every rock at this extreme northern tip of the Appalachian Mountains seemed to contain a fossil from an ancient inland sea.

Signs of more recent life in this little visited and lightly populated area were almost harder to find. According to Tsang, undiscovered Newfoundland is ``one of the most exotic wilderness areas in North America.''

I was beginning to agree. It certainly felt remote. And I was pleasantly surprised that utter solitude could be found so near to population centers in the Northeast.

My personal, unscientific theory about why Newfoundland has remained exotic and not overexposed is because of the weather. It's glorious of when the sun shines, but that occurs, charitably speaking, rarely. Otherwise, it's one of the most wickedly exposed seacoasts anywhere, an attraction in itself, if you ask me.

``You should have been here all summer,'' said Delilah Reid, the fantastically talented baker and chef at Sugar Hill Inn, a spotlessly clean, cozy, oak and cedar B & B in Norris Point, as she handed me a brimming bowl of moose stew, surrounded by slabs of fresh baked bread. (The moose, a rarity -- bring your lunch to Newfoundland if you don't like seafood -- tasted like gamy beef. ``The weather was beautiful just about all of July.''

Not much of a summer, I thought to myself, chewing seriously on moose, imagining icebergs, whales, and other summery floating things beneath blue skies.

At this time of year, I could barely see tiny wood frame fishing villages scattered throughout the park, obscured as they were by rain and ground-hugging clouds. In most of Canada's other national parks, residents have been relocated. Within Gros Morne, several communities, such as Norris Point and Trout River, which farther south and close to the Tablelands, have been allowed to remain intact.

They're characteristic of modest villages found throughout western Newfoundland. The interior of the island has never been developed. It's practically uninhabited, with few roads. Tiny outposts are strung along every cove and inlet, offering anything resembling protection from the rugged surf. Rickety piers or driveways contain towers of wooden or wire frame lobster pots.

``It's so beautiful here,'' said Tracy Oldford, a native Newfoundlander from St. John's, the island's largest city. She was a guest at the Sugar Hill Inn, with her husband, Todd. ``It's like we're the only ones in the world.''

``We were kayaking in St. Paul's Inlet and we came across 30 dolphins,'' said Todd, grinning. ``They wanted to play. I had to beat the paddle on the side of the kayak to keep them away.''

``Doesn't the dark weather bother you? The rain? How do you Newfoundlanders still smile without seeing the sun?'' I asked.

``It's the quietness we enjoy,'' Tracy said simply. ``We've lived elsewhere in Canada, in Halifax, Toronto, and on Prince Edward Island. There's nowhere else like this.''

``We were in and out of the rain all day,'' Todd said. ``It didn't bother me. Seals followed us wherever we went.''

Statistics corroborate that while few people are moving here, very few Newfies, who generally have learned to tolerate but not encourage the use of the not always kindly meant abbreviation, are leaving Newfoundland.

Every other Newfoundlander I met claimed to love it, too. ``I'm sorry; I said it would be clear weather,'' the friendly clerk said, apologizing profusely, when I returned my rental car. ``We call it clear weather if it's not raining,'' she added, laughing.

Perhaps it's all this water that chiseled the faces of some of the local people I saw, like private Grand Canyons. I imagined that many squinting, 60-year-old men were only 40, aging Popeyes, but with cigarettes, not pipes, dangling from puckered lips. Some of the women might have been weathered kin to the Cabbage Patch doll, a tough, blue-eyed, Scotch-Irish one.

A tidy cemetery occupies a prominent sites in each little town in western Newfoundland. Infants and shipwreck victims are too easily found among white crosses.

Cod, the historic lifeblood of Newfoundland's coves and harbors, were once so plentiful in these waters that they impeded shipping. Eighty-pound cod were not uncommon. In this decade, commercial cod fisheries have closed due to over-fishing. Centuries-old lifestyles ended, which is why resilient, thick-skinned Newfies, like Mark Tsang, and Vince and Marina McCarthy who own the Sugar Hill Inn, are not joking at all about staking their futures on tourists discovering this unique part of the world.