Thursday, May 27, 2010

Colinet Island, St. Mary's Bay

In the summer of 1999, I took a trip on a small boat across the waters of St. Mary’s Bay. We landed at a place called Reginaville, where Felix, the boat’s owner, tossed our gear out onto the beach and said goodbye. Above the beach were soft grassy fields with the cracked concrete foundations of houses scattered around, and we set up camp, our home for the next 4 days on Great Colinet Island.

This was my Gold Qualifying journey for the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award Program, and it was one of the first trips that made me think about the changing ways people have lived in Newfoundland and Labrador. Colinet Island was once home to a few hundred people who made their living mostly from the cod fishery. But the residents made the decision to resettle in 1960.

Resettlement refers to the programs, funded by the provincial and federal governments, which provided various levels of support and encouragement to residents of small communities to leave for larger centres. The rationale was simple. People wanted services – schools, medical care, roads – and Newfoundland’s isolated, scattered population made providing those services prohibitively expensive. So, from 1954 to 1975, the government supported (or coerced, depending on your perspective) the removal of about 30,000 people from isolated coastal communities to larger towns, completely vacating about 300 communities.

Resettlement is almost a dirty word in Newfoundland, linked with ideas of government abandonment of rural communities and the forced removal of thousands of people from their homes. The true picture of resettlement, of course, is much more complicated. Many of the residents felt forced to leave, betrayed by government and their neighbours. Many were happy to move their families to where they had better opportunities for education and employment.

Whatever the feelings of the residents of resettled communities, 4 days on Colinet Island showed me that Reginaville and Mosquito (the two abandoned communities) were once somebody’s home. There are house foundations and chimneys, and the remains of fish plants on the beaches were the residents would once have gone to work. The Reginaville church is identifiable by its front steps, and the church in Mosquito had collapsed, leaving a pile of wooden siding, tarpaper, stained glass and bird nests.

Overgrown headstones in Reginaville cemetery.

The graveyards are perhaps the most interesting places on the island. It’s possible to reconstruct entire families, but I always ask more questions. How did Francis Power die at the age of 17? What was John Linehan doing in Brooklyn, New York when he died?

In his fine play about resettlement “West Moon,” Al Pittman suggested that forgetting the dead was worse than death itself. I’m not sure that’s true – it’s human nature to move on. But there is something sad in about these abandoned places, and something comforting in knowing that they are visited by people from time to time.

Most of these resettled communities are difficult to reach, but there are some that are relatively easily accessible. La Manche on the Southern Shore is only a 30 minute drive and 20 minute walk from St. John’s. Kerley’s Harbour and British Harbour, on the Bonavista Peninsula near the Random Passage film set, are also fairly accessible.

You can see more pictures of Colinet Island here, courtesy of the Maritime History Archive.

P.S. I wish I had more pictures of Colinet Island. This trip was before the days of digital cameras, and looking through my old photo albums really made me realize how much easier to is to record your trips when you can preview your shots and you’re not limited by film exposures.


Monday, May 17, 2010

Welcome to Dead Man's Bay


I have been an avid hiker for most of my life, although for the first 18 years, I didn’t know it. I just thought everybody played in the woods. When I moved to St. John’s to attend Memorial University, I learned differently. I found out that hiking and camping was something not everyone did. Some would look at you funny when you told them you were spending three days in the woods. I could almost see questions like “But where do you plug in your Xbox?” going through their heads.

People travel for a lot of reasons: to relax, to explore the world, to learn about other people and places, or just from a feeling of restlessness that they can’t seem to escape. Outdoor pursuits are the same: people walk, hike, camp, bike, canoe and kayak for all kinds of reasons: to stay in shape, for the adventure, for love of the outdoors. But I wonder: how often do people stop to think about the history of the places that their hiking or kayaking trips are taking them?

I’ve always been fascinated by the past, by the chance to learn something about the people who came before us, and whenever a hiking trail takes me past an old rock wall or a crumbling house foundation I can’t help but wonder who built it. What did they grow in their gardens? What meals were prepared on the stove, whose chimney now stands in the field, home to a family of birds? Who walked these trails before us, with our Gore-Tex boots and expensive backpacks?

I think learning about the past is the only way to truly appreciate the present, to understand how places and people have come to be what they are. I also think you more fully appreciate the meaning of the places and landscapes you’re traveling through if you understand their history.Most travelers would agree when talking about the great cities of the world or ancient monuments. But the forests and oceans are no different.

Think about the importance of walking trails to the inhabitants of the Southern Shore before there were roads, and the East Coast Trail becomes more meaningful. The D’Iberville Trail only makes sense if you know who D’Iberville was, and what he used the trail for. If you consider that not so long ago the sea was the highway and not a barrier, then kayaking in Trinity can be a very different experience.

Welcome to Dead Man’s Bay, a blog about hiking and history in Newfoundland and Labrador.