Newfoundland: A Place Apart : Lost in Time and Space, a Pristine Island Rich in Stark Beauty and Warm Hearts : By Land, B&Bs; and Afternoon Tea

Bella Hodge’s telephone has rung more often than usual since this year of international jitters began. Mrs. Hodge operates Valhalla Lodge, a hospitality home located between Gunner’s Cove and Griquet, near the tip of Newfoundland’s Northern Peninsula. There, the peninsula faces Labrador on the west side and England on the east. Mrs. Hodge’s guest-room windows look toward the south coast of England, to home counties that many Newfoundlanders’ ancestors left (along with Ireland) to come to this sea-scoured island.

“Of course you can’t see England from here, but it’s out there,” she says. Easier to see are icebergs gliding past like ghost schooners and silvery schools of herring illuminated by moonlight. The sound of whales breathing their primeval, rainbow-misted sighs can now and then be heard close to shore. What cannot be heard is the sound of the Persian Gulf War, which seems very distant indeed. Gunner’s Cove doesn’t have cable TV, and the only newspaper, the weekly Northern Pen, gives much of its space to the grocery specials and the state of the Newfoundland fishery.

This is among the most isolated locations in Canada’s easternmost, most isolated province. And, Mrs. Hodge and other Newfoundland hosts are learning, isolation is just what many Americans are seeking as they plan their 1991 vacation travels.

“Oh, it’s a dangerous world out there today, isn’t it?” says Marg Kuta, whose Cape Cod Inn at the mid-island town of Gander is receiving early reservation requests from Europe as well as the United States. “But Newfoundland is as peaceful as ever. Oh, yes, yes, yes, it is.”

“Nobody’s going to waste a bomb on Newfoundland, now, are they?” says Elizabeth Gibbons with a laugh. Gibbons operates Caribou House, a bed and breakfast at Port-aux-Basques on the south coast. With typically wry humor, she says the only danger tourists face is that of meeting one of Newfoundland’s 70,000 moose if they will insist on driving fast after dark.

Newf’n’LAND, they call it. It’s the smaller part of the province of Newfoundland--which also encompasses mainland Labrador--where in some areas the human population is spread thinner than the moose population.

Closer to Italy than it is to western Canada, the island is so far from its neighbors that it has its own time zone. Like many things about Newfoundland, island time is a bit quirky, differing from neighboring time zones by 30 minutes instead of the usual 60. Not even Labrador shares Newfoundland time.

For me, going on Newfoundland time means not just setting my watch ahead, but setting my internal clock back about a century. Newfoundland remains a place of profound natural beauty, unspoiled by development. Like characters out of the film “Local Hero,” whose locale looked a lot like Newfoundland, people here are tough, independent, kind and quick to make humor out of hardship.

The local weather offers plenty of subject matter for jokers. In summer, the days are generally crisp as early autumn in New England, with light as sharp as a hayfield scythe.

“Glorious weather,” I observed to Nelson Ploughman, a fisherman I met on my first visit to Newfoundland.

“Come back in January and pass your opinion,” he said. “You might think different then.”

Newfies can handle winter’s cold, Nelson said. “It’s the heat we can’t take. It got up to 80 last year at Port au Choix and we all went under the bed looking for shade. When we fellows think it’s hot enough for a T-shirt, the tourists come out in their parkas.”

Over centuries of isolation, Newfoundlanders developed their own peculiar vocabulary. A combination of antique and modern English, Irish words and phrases, and borrowings from the Innit people, it is delicious fodder for language scholars.

Island English offers a scoff (Newfoundland for feast) of words to describe weather conditions. Mauzy is misty. Lourd is dark and gloomy. Frore is frozen. Sish is ice broken into particles by the surf, and slob is newly frozen ice.

Most weather words apply to the winter months when not only is there sish and slob to contend with, but wind as well. The wind blows so hard across Newfoundland that it can hit 120 m.p.h. and blow tractor-trailer trucks off the highway, as it has this winter.

Offshore, it can whip up dreadful storms. Travelers who step into one of the island’s prim village churches are likely to see reminders of that fact in the form of memorials to men lost at sea: “To John Gent, who was lost with all the crew in the boat Dove in a gale of wind on the 6th and 7th of November 1835 on her way from St. John’s to Catalina.”

When I met Nelson Ploughman in the mid-1970s, the highway up the Northern Peninsula had only recently been paved. Television had come only three years earlier. “The farthest my father has ever been on land is about 50 miles,” the young fisherman told me. He said his father had owned the last dog team in Port au Choix, before snowmobiles arrived to take over their task.

Perhaps because of Newfoundland’s geographical isolation and well-developed regional outlook, mainland Canadians have developed a rich tradition of their own: making fun of Newfoundlanders via a steady stream of Newfie jokes. For example: “Two Newfies went out hunting and shot a moose. They grabbed it by the tail and started pulling it back to their truck. A man came along and watched them for a while, then said, ‘Why don’t you pull it by the antlers? It would be a lot easier.’ So the Newfies went around to the other end and started pulling it by the antlers. After a while, one said to the other, ‘You know, that guy was right. We’re going a lot faster now.’ ‘Yes,’ said the second one, ‘but we’re getting farther and farther away from the truck.’ ”

So prodigious is the output of humor that Newfie jokes are now compiled in books. But like the Poles, who found themselves in a similar position, Newfoundlanders tell the jokes on themselves and show the world a stalwart self-confidence.

Newfoundland began to change dramatically in 1966, when the Trans Canada Highway was completed across the middle of the island. The 565-mile-long TCH, as it’s universally called, has opened up the province to discovery by tourists.

The best way to see Newfoundland is by car. You can bring one with you on the ferry from Nova Scotia or rent one at the airport in St. John’s or Stephenville, entry points for Air Canada flights. The TCH is the essential main road, but the best of Newfoundland lies--as it always has--past the turnoffs leading to places called Jerry’s Nose, Joe Batt’s Arm, Leading Tickle, Dildo, and the like.

Newfoundland’s curious place names were inspired by geographical features, history or the mood the landscape evoked in the town fathers. Heart’s Content is close to Heart’s Desire and Heart’s Delight. My friend Marg told me that Keels is where John Cabot cleaned the keel of his boat, and that Fairhaven’s name was changed from Famished Gut.

Whatever their names, the island’s coastal villages are the place to find old-time Newfoundland. Here, higgledy-piggledy tumbles of fishing tilts (docks), shingled sheds and foresquare houses ring the edges of the coves like wrack after a storm. Down the back roads, children rush to meet you out of fields tangled in wild lupines and daisies. On a rocky beach, old men sit yarning among upturned boats at sunset, their long rubber boots with the folded tops outstretched to catch the warmth.

Village shops offer island work: hand-carved boats, smocks hand-woven of wool the colors of the sea and the lupines, hooked rugs, the heavy fishermen’s sweaters called ganseys (from Guernsey). Elsewhere, a traveler may crunch down a path, fall into a chat and find herself invited inside a cottage for tea in an eggshell china cup. Maybe even raspberry tea and lemon cream biscuit. As my other friend named Marg would say, “Oh, my dear, ‘twould be so good you wouldn’t call the king your uncle”--meaning you’d be on top of the world.

You’ll also need to turn off of the TCH to attend any of the local festivals held throughout the island in summer. A Newfie festival is a combination of scoff, bazaar, concert and dance. Hear fiddlers play wild, sad reels they learned from their grandfathers and beautiful red-haired girls sing about lost ships and faithless lovers.

Allow at least two weeks to tour the entire New York state-size island, from the 1,000-year-old Viking site at L’Anse Aux Meadows to the bird sanctuaries of Witless Bay. If you have only a week, choose either the wild Great Northern Peninsula or use St. John’s, the oldest city in North America, as a base for day-trips around the Avalon Peninsula.

The Northern Peninsula. The reason Valhalla Lodge is at the tip of the Great Northern Peninsula is that L’Anse Aux Meadows is there, too. L’Anse Aux Meadows, site of the first settlement by Europeans in North America, is a national historic park and a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Archeologists have determined that a curious set of overgrown ridges first studied in 1960 are the remains of 11th-Century Norse buildings. Today, visitors can tour full-scale replicas of the Norse-era structures and examine the sod house remains.

L’Anse Aux Meadows is some 300 miles up the peninsula from the TCH, near the end of Route 430. The road, now completely paved, is among the most beautiful stretches of road in North America. Mountain-edged fiords, high seacliffs, fishing villages and fog-veiled beaches appear and fall behind as you travel. There are little towns where you can buy fish to grill on a rocky beach and Canadian beer to go with it.

At Port au Choix, another national historic park is at the site of a burial ground of the Maritime Archaic Indians who lived along this coast 8,000 years ago.

At Point Riche near Port au Choix, a lovely lighthouse on a gentle rock-terraced headland offers a fine place to walk in salt air beside the Gulf of St. Lawrence.

Between River of Ponds and Rocky Harbour, Route 430 fits the shore as comfortably as an old gansey fits a fisherman. Here, the scenery is innocently, tenderly picturesque, filled with fences made of old fishing nets, hillocks of lobster pots, and drifts of yellow-and-green nets and lines tossed across the beach. Daniel’s Harbour, Cow Head and Sally’s Cove are the names on the map.

Like L’Anse Aux Meadows, Gros Morne National Park, which lies just inland from the coast here, is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. It offers five campgrounds, salmon fishing, clamming beaches, a restored lighthouse, tidal pools, spots for watching birds and harbor seals, and mountain hiking trails, all in one spectacular package. And there are no traffic jams.

St. John’s on the Avalon. Across the island from the Great Northern Peninsula lies St. John’s. The capital of Newfoundland is wrapped around a harbor frequented by ships from all over the world. The port has changed from the days when the holds were filled with fish, but remains fascinatingly busy.

The city is quiet, historic, with reminders of the long English presence in such buildings as the Georgian Commissariat House on King’s Bridge Road. Restored to its 1820 appearance inside and out, the house was formerly the home and office of the British Commissary General.

St. John’s, the easternmost city in North America, is on the four-lobed Avalon Peninsula. The Avalon hangs by a tail from the burly body of Newfoundland.

Because it is the part of Newfoundland closest to Europe, the Avalon was settled early. In the sounds, bays, coves, runs and other shimmering bits of sheltered water where today’s “come-from-aways” (visitors) see beauty, the come-from-aways of the 1600s saw fish. There they dropped their killicks (anchors) to become the Avalon’s first livyers (from “live-heres”). The wooden boats of their descendants still move among the dumpling rocks and channel markers of Avalon’s waterways, crewed by islanders whose speech holds echoes of a Kerry or Dorset they’ve never seen.

Besides St. John’s, the Avalon has scores of toy-block villages hugging the sides of Trinity, Conception, Placentia and St. Mary’s Bays, and lining the Atlantic shore from Petty Harbor to Mistaken Point. Although the long years of isolation are over, the sense of place is still strong. “Were you born here?” I asked a woman I met two years ago in St. Jones Within. “Oh, no, m’dear,” she said, firmly as if she were a Floridian just visiting in Omaha, “I was born t’other side of t’arm.” Southwest Arm that is, a channel that separates St. Jones Within from Butter Cove.

The Witless Bay Islands Ecological Reserve south of St. John’s consists of three islands where hundreds of thousands of puffins, kittiewakes, murres and storm petrels flock in summer. Local boatman can get you close enough to see the birds covering the cliffs like a fleece coat.

Cape St. Mary’s Ecological Reserve on the Avalon’s southwestern lobe offers an astonishing experience. A series of unpaved roads leads finally to a lighthouse and a walk that overlooks Bird Rock, the second largest nesting site for gannets in North America. The birds are subject matter for spectacular photographs, as is the cape beyond.

More than 5,000 woodland caribou live on the Avalon, most at the vast Avalon Wilderness Reserve. The reserve is open only by permit, but the caribou can often be seen in the glacial barrens near Route 10.

Like the Great Northern Peninsula, the Avalon is just one piece of Newfoundland, where peninsulas are as plentiful as petals on a daisy and islands are scattered like pollen. There’s ferry service to Change Islands, one island with a plural name, and Fogo, all weathered houses, stick fences, fishing nets and oilskins hanging on the wash line. Harder to reach are outport islands such as Merasheen, King’s Island, Long Island, Great Seal Island, Red Island and Jean de Gaunt in Placentia Bay.

It’s unlikely that even the livyers have seen it all. But one thing’s sure--no matter which part of Newfoundland you explore during this year of war and worry, wherever you go on this hospitable island, from Salmon Rock to Gull Harbor, you’ll find safe harbor.