The Strangers' Gallery (43 page)

“I got other people complaining, tried to organize them, get them to join the ffawu. They let me go. There's no work up here. They got complete control. They do what they like, pay what they like. They have to fly fish in here because they closed the plant. I'm told our mha owns this place. It's packed six months of the year. This is tourism central. You been down to the site?”

I hadn't expected her to stop. Her question took me by surprise.

“You mean, L'Anse aux Meadows?” I said.

“Yeah, the Norse site.”

“No, we still haven't had breakfast,” I said.

“What's it like?” Anton asked.

“It's great,” she said, nonchalantly. “Very authentic, very low-key, very mystical. But the people who come here are disappointed with it. They drive a thousand miles with a wagonload of kids. They want a circus…Disneyland…Vikings killing one another with hatchets. Now if you want to see a
real
mystical place, go out to the Cape, Burnt Cape. Where you from, anyway? You're not from here.”

“Holland, for me,” Anton said. “My friend Michael is from St. John's.”

“Clarice, from Quirpon,” she said, reaching out her hand.

Anton took it in both of his. “Anton,” he said. “We'll go to the café.”

“Are you sure? I don't want to interfere.”

“No, you come with us. Is that okay, Michael, if we go there?”

“Sure, that's fine with me.”

Clarice's paintings were on the walls of Clarice's Coffee and Crafts. No relation, she said. There were landscapes and seascapes of Burnt Cape, which looked like a stark and uninviting spot. Only minimally representational, however. Dark, verging on the monochromatic, except for some white and yellow star-points of light. There were large paintings of wildflowers and stunted trees. The lights in the landscapes were cinquefoil, she said, and encaustic was the technique she used. Pigments mixed in boiling beeswax.

“There's two or three dozen rare plants out there,” she said, “and more than three hundred altogether, including about a dozen cinquefoil, one not found anywhere else in the world. It survived the last ice age. A Harvard botanist discovered it in 1925. Why they want to grow out there, I don't know, perhaps for the same reason I want to paint out there. It has the shortest growing season and the lowest temperatures on the Island. And of course there's no soil. It's a desert, really, very exposed, very high, with a lot of wind. An Arctic desert. But it's beautiful, too. About a third of it tuckamore, trees flat as mats. What it is really is one big limestone rock, and there are limestone caves—ovens, they're called. Not sure why. They might have been used as kilns to make lime for fertilizer and outhouses.”

“Fernald,” I said. “Was Fernald the Harvard botanist you mentioned?”

“That's right. You heard of him? What do you do, anyway?”

“I'm an archivist,” I said, “and Anton—you're not going to believe this—has come all the way from Holland to see that cinquefoil you were talking about.”

“You're kiddin' me.”

“Well, that's what he told me when he came.”

Anton was in his element. He spent a long time looking at the paintings while Clarice and I sat and drank our coffee and ate homemade tea buns and partridgeberry jam. Anton's coffee sat and cooled.

“Did you go to the new art school?” I asked Clarice.

“I started a BFA a few years ago. I was in the theatre program for a while, then I switched to art. I left in my second year, it was a waste of time. None of those teachers were real artists.”

“But teachers don't have to be artists, do they? You don't have to be an artist to teach someone how to paint.”

“No one can teach you how to paint. That's what I believe. I do all my painting out on the Cape. What does your friend…Anton…What does he do?”

“He used to be an archivist, too, and an art historian, and a town planner. He drives a truck now, most of the time, when he's back home.”

“How long's he been here?”

“Since last September.”

“That's a long time. What's he doing here? Not just looking for flowers.”

“No, he's looking for other things as well. Birds. The piping plover.”

“I saw some plovers down the coast last summer. At Broom Point, I think it was.”

“I love that flower,” Anton said, pointing to a painting on the wall as he sat down to his cold coffee and tea buns. “It looks like an octopus or a giant squid. How big is it, in life?”

“That's the Burnt Cape cinquefoil,
Potentilla usticapensis Fernaldii
,” she said, authoritatively. “The Cape is the only place on earth it grows. I painted it big to show its strength. It's a dwarf, really, with creamy white flowers. They grow at the end of trailing stems, three or four inches long. Scale of one inch to a foot in the painting.”

Clarice took us out to Burnt Cape in her pickup. We drove through the town of Raleigh, past the Burnt Cape Information Centre (we certainly didn't need to visit that), past the sign for Cape Onion, then rounded Raleigh harbour at the foot of Ha Ha Bay, a “false bay,” Clarice said, that tricked mariners into thinking they were sailing into the larger bay alongside it. We followed the shore road on the opposite side for a mile or so, then turned sharp left and drove straight up a barren rocky hillside. The road was no more than a one-lane track, barely distinguishable from the rest of the terrain, and I wondered what we'd do if we passed someone driving back. We climbed right to the top of the hill, then drove toward the northern end and stopped in a gravel-pit cul-de-sac that Clarice called the parking lot. Though it had been clear and warm in Ha Ha Bay below, up here (ha ha) it was cold and windy and the fog was rolling in.

Clarice hadn't advised us to take sweaters, caps, scarves, and gloves, and the chill damp air penetrated our thin jackets and pants, suitable for a July garden party in a snug cove, but not for a place as exposed as this. At least we weren't wearing shorts. Clarice looked warm enough in her leather jacket, jeans, and cap. I thought about the ovens she had mentioned earlier, and found myself whispering the word. Just the sound of it made me feel warmer. I wanted to ask her how close they were, but before I knew it she was gone, shouting something over her shoulder about “the lower shelf,” and heading toward some big broad rocks close to the water. She led us right out to the most northerly point; then we climbed a cliff to “the upper shelf,” a bald tableland completely enshrouded in fog. We followed closely behind Clarice, hoping she knew where she was going, as we couldn't see the proverbial hand in front of us. Strangely enough, there wasn't a lot of wind at this higher elevation, but there was wind chill. Anton's face had that bluish white cast, and I'm sure mine did as well, that could be seen on sunny winter days in the hidden hollows of snowdrifts, a light-effect that never failed to intrigue him when we were out walking.

We seemed to be climbing even higher, into a chill black-and-white world, and the fog began to look even whiter—perhaps it was more cloud than fog—when, quite unexpectedly, we were back where we started, and had to slide down a long shaley slope. At the bottom, spread out before us like a feast for a hypothermally half-blinded man, was a banquet tableland of wildflowers. We had to take Clarice's word, though, that it was spread out before us; we had to get nose and eyes right down in the gravel to see what was there.

Clarice identified elegant pussytoes, velvet bells, yellow rockets, the northern paintbrush, the bottlebrush, the cuckoo flower, enchanter's nightshade, the fairy slipper orchid, the frog orchid, and several varieties of cinquefoil, including, of course, the Burnt Cape cinquefoil. Its flowers were incredibly tiny. Indeed, the whole plant was completely inconspicuous, and very hard to distinguish from the other varieties of cinquefoil she pointed out, about a dozen of which grew in these parts.

Something about the way it extended its small arms out over the rocks reminded me of Elaine's Christmas cactus, the only flower she had left me. With its multitudinous tendrils hanging over the edge of a self-standing wicker basket, it exuded fierce, pinkish red, lotus-like blossoms from every tendril tip each Christmas season. Perhaps it was the floral version of the fauna getting down on their knees in the stable to honour the miraculous birth. No longer a wild desert flower, this cactus sat in its warm basket like a neutered cat, soaking up sunlight from the window in the fall and heat from the old-fashioned radiator in winter, accepting a weekly watering and “plant food” as its due, and once a year producing a profusion of flowers that we used to think of as a Christmas present for us.

In contrast, here was this forsaken dwarf with its thin arms reaching out, as if for help, hugging the ground, its tiny five-point flowers like shrunken hands at the tips, living in a place worse than a desert, for it was a cold desert, existing on nothing but rock and water and whatever sunlight penetrated the fog. No wonder, as a group, these plants were called
Potentilla
.

Back in the parking lot, distinguishable from the rest of the landscape only by the fact that Clarice's truck was parked there, Anton made a not-so-surprising discovery as he was about to open the pickup door. Right at his feet—he had almost stepped on it—was a cinquefoil, and not the snowy, silvery, shrubby, three-toothed, or any of the other lesser varieties that Clarice had pointed out, but the real rare thing,
Potentilla usticapensis Fernaldii
. To our great surprise, in spite of the signs we had seen forbidding the collection of plants or rocks or fossils on this ecological reserve, Anton picked it without hesitation; or, to be more accurate, he rooted it out, which was not an easy task, despite the fact that it didn't seem to have any soil to grow in. He put it in the Styrofoam coffee cup he had brought with him from the restaurant, justifying his illegal act with the excuse that it would surely be tramped on or run over by a vehicle if he left it there. Clarice and I just stood there smiling at him, our faces still red from the chill wind and fog, and perhaps from a feeling of complicity as well, and Anton smiled, innocently, right back at us.

Like his spiritual forefather Bjarni Herjolfsson, who had sailed to Greenland from Iceland in search of his father but got lost in the fog and ended up within spitting distance of the forbidding coast of Newfoundland, Anton also decided, in a manner of speaking, not to go ashore. Though we were only a few miles from L'Anse aux Meadows—Vinland, as some believe, where Bjarni's countrymen finally did go ashore about fifteen years later—after our trip to Burnt Cape, Anton seemed to have no interest in going there anymore. He said he preferred just to imagine the place. Vinland, he said, was just a land of the imagination, anyway, like Fairyland or Shangri-La, a New World Greenland or New Founde Lande, even an Old World Fatherland. Netherlands all—“blue mountain lands.”

But perhaps he was now eager to be somewhere else. In Clarice's bed, I guessed, and she seemed to have an eye for him as well.

So, being the magnanimous and sexually fulfilled creature that I was, I left them to their urgent desires, professing an equally urgent archival desire to see the L'Anse aux Meadows bog archive, a National Historic Site, UNESCO's first World Heritage Site. After lunch back at Clarice's Coffee and Crafts, they dropped me off at the car in the Stage Head parking lot. Then they drove to Clarice's house in Quirpon for sex, and I drove on to L'Anse aux Meadows for professional development. The site was as she had described it, as it had been
interpreted
by Parks Canada for visitors, authentic and low-key—yes, even mystical, in the sense that it inspired a certain low-key awe. It was shrouded not just in fog but in mystery.

I'd read in the paper that the upcoming Viking millennium celebrations would feature a flotilla of Norse long ships (warships) and
knarrs,
larger ships used for trade and exploration, coming around Cape Bauld from the west, from Norway, Holland, Sweden, Iceland, and Greenland. From o'er the Sea of Darkness, they would enter Epaves Bay and come ashore at L'Anse aux Meadows. Ocean conditions hadn't changed in a thousand years, the article said, though these ships would have diesel engines and radar to help them navigate through heavy seas and ice, through darkness, fog, and freezing spray, against strong winds, currents, and tides. If they'd entered the bay the day I was there, come out of the fog that shrouded L'Anse aux Meadows, no doubt the sight would have
brazed—
to use one of Anton's rare but not inappropriate malapropisms—the hair upon the back of my neck.

At a convenience store on the road back to our cabin in St. Lunaire-Griquet, I picked up a ham sandwich, a litre of milk, and a large, dark-red, five-point apple whose scent brought back memories of childhood Christmases, when we would always find one at the bottom of our stockings. No doubt it was Mother who had always put it there. With regard to nutrition, though, or what she called “nourishment,” she had gone well beyond the proverbial apple a day; she was in the avant-garde for her time, and had branched out into flowers as well as fruit. While “antioxidants” and “free radicals” may not have been part of her amateur dietician's vocabulary, she knew instinctively that cranberries, partridgeberries, blackberries, and blueberries—which I even liked—had more than their God-given share of nourishment. And while the ubiquitous cod liver oil (not to mention Brick's Tasteless) may have been the bane of most schoolchildren, and we all drank—yes, drank—our share of that, until someone was clever, or compassionate, enough to seal it in edible plastic capsules, it was the notorious rosehip jelly that had been the bane of the Family Lowe, of the young lives of Hubert, Raymond, and me. Mother knew the location of every wild and cultivated rose bush within walking distance of our house, and we consumed so much rosehip jelly over the course of a winter that you'd think we were ignorant sailors prone to scurvy, from living only on hardtack and salt fish, instead of obedient angishores eating our fruit and vegetables every day.