Somewhere between
5 July 2009
St John’s is a strange city.
Somewhere between small fishing village and major international port.
Somewhere between twee, brightly-painted, wooden toytown and concrete monolith.
Somewhere between sunny, warm, seaside holiday resort and a wall of dense, dank, deathly fog which rolls in through the harbour Narrows and over the hills with no warning.
The skyline is dominated by the Catholic basilica and The Rooms Provincial Art Gallery – the new religion of art. The steep slopes of the city are covered with houses and churches, The Benevolent Irish Society – a non-denominational charity set up to help ” Irishmen or people of Irish descent”. Non-denominational maybe… – and token ‘parks’ to celebrate the various other nations who helped create St John’s and were steamrollered over by the British and Irish. The harbour holds a few yachts and several enormous steel-hulled supply ships for the oilrigs, which are now the main employers since the cod have gone. The ships look fit to break through ice. They have to be.
To the north, the harbour is protected by Signal Hill. Remains of military barracks can still be seen, and during the summer actors recreate some of the battles fought over many years for possession of St John’s. The French and English spent many years fighting over the fishing rights – the French were pushed out to the west of the island, but never allowed to settle, and finally gave up their claim to that area in exchange for the islands of St Pierre et Miquelon which remain part of France to this day and lie just a few kilometres off the south coast of Newfoundland.
Signal Hill is also the site where Marconi received the first transatlantic wireless signal from Cornwall in 1901. They are very proud of this fact and there are large metal plaques up all over the hill to tell you about it, but it was only by chance that Marconi came here. Previous sites had been destroyed by storms and he chose Signal Hill at the last minute and told no-one about his experiment in case it didn’t work. In the end, and after losing various bits of equipment to the high winds, he succeeded in hearing the three dots of the Morse code for “S” across the Atlantic. Next time someone’s mobile goes off in a library, blame him.
Culturally, this place is as far away from western Canada as it is physically. It is actually nearer to Britain than Vancouver and feels it in every way. Locals speak with a strange accent somewhere between Canadian and Irish. (Cod Irish, maybe…) The culture is hard work and harder play, drinking is a major pastime and eating is done to keep out the cold. Out west there were salads and organic delis. Here there are cubes of deepfried pork fat with your codtongues and all-night bars.
I have really enjoyed the city, but I can’t wait to get out into the forest, to the quiet shores of Terra Nova, and to some smaller outport communities. And the capelin are due in any day.