Here, on the steep shores of the cold Atlantic, even the birds are different. There are always seagulls, and in a few months there will be puffins, and there can be these birds because the waters teem with life. Life fills these rich, cold, waters, where the Labrador current and the warm Gulf Stream meet. The latitude means that often icebergs and whales inhabit the same waters, and the cold water means that everything is preserved: shipwrecks, icebergs, and animals from both currents, both northern and southern.
So the birds and whales and fisherman gather, on top and underneath these cold blue waves that are just darker then the skies.
Against this background, with Saint John’s behind us, we hiked to Fort Amherst the other day, an old battlement, pillbox, and lighthouse, placed right at the mouth of this harbor that has served many different purposes over the years. Across the bay St. John’s houses stack, color on top of color against the rocky coast.
And the boys ran, almost slipping on the ice left over from the foot of snow that fell a couple days ago, occasionally happy, occasionally stopping to cry about the winds. It is a good fifty degrees colder than anything they have ever known before, and it fills their ears with a temperature they did not know existed.
From the landing below the lighthouse we see the other fingers of the Avalon peninsula, stretching out into the water just as far, parts of the same land over the same water, the seagulls gliding in between.
Newfoundland is shaped like a splatter of paint against a canvas, a heap of rock and earth thrown against the water, resulting in rough edges of rocky coasts and unmanageable, sprawling peninsulas. Even the Avalon peninsula, where we are, has its own peninsulas, until, especially with the marshes and lakes on the interior, it is hard to find a solid center. It is a heavy splash of rocks and cliffs, thrown hard enough that all the edges started crumbling. This is made even more apparent by the ice that dots the already jagged coasts. The ice comes down from the north as a cold white puzzle, until, especially in northern Newfoundland, the water is visible only as dark channels between the ice.
The line between the water and land is thin here as well; icicles higher than our heads hang from cliffs, ships line the edges of the harbor, and the seagulls just below the clouds don’t seem to care which they are over. “Shhhh, Mom,” says Lincoln as we walk, “do you hear them? The seagulls?”
Here, in 1810, the first lighthouse in Newfoundland was built, to guard the Narrows. But that is not when this place became important. Before that, a fort was established in 1655, created to withstand pirates. Today, the new lighthouse doesn’t serve such an auspicious occupation, but more recently, below the lighthouse are the gun emplacements and pillboxes built in World War II to defend against the German U-boats. The harbor entrance was also barricaded with steel mesh in order to keep any enemy submarines from entering.
I can’t imagine that blocking an underwater entrance to a harbor with steel mesh is ever an easy task, but it must have been easier here, with an entrance only 200 feet wide. Even such a small harbor feels crowded when faced with such an entrance, and we watch a boat churning through, out to the North Atlantic, dead center in the entrance.
As we stand on the peninsula, we look to our left to Signal Hill, straight across on the other peninsula, and to the right we see Cape Spear, jutting just farther out into the water and the most Eastern point in North America. And in between, the blue, and we run along it as if back to the safety of the harbor, away from the pirates and the U-boats, the lighthouse standing guard behind us, as if to watch us safely home.
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