From Ferry to Lark Harbour and Bottle Cove, Day 18
The photo of us, standing sturdy on the rocks of Bottle Cove, wind tangling my hair and glasses, sun squinting into our eyes captures our first day on Newfoundland. Around us, both Appalachian Mountains and rocks of ocean crust reach for the sky. If I was a poet or a geologist, I’d use words like allochthon, ophiolite, mélange.
The height and drafts and cold—and our arrival!—made us giddy.
It is not a selfie—rare, because we are usually alone—but a photo captured by another couple perched on the edge. I gladly traded the solitude for the distance of the photographer and an image that records us swallowed by beauty.
Later, around the corner, we found a riot of orange and blue boats, berthed between Bara Point and Little Port.
We ate traditional cod au gratin at Myrtles on the Bay in Lark Harbour, then camped at the Bottle Cove beach, the sun descending behind the headland, marked “Trail’s End” by Captain James Cook in 1776.
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At the end of this day, in the fading light, I finished reading The Dog Stars by Peter Heller. I will forever remember Hig going into the mountains to fish and hugging a tree, the feel of the bark, the smells of vanilla and butterscotch, and then:
“I always fished a stretch of woods that had not died, or that was coming back. I set down the pack and breathed the smell of running water, of cold stone, of fir and spruce, like the sachets my mother used to keep in a sock drawer. I breathed and thanked something that was not exactly God, something that was still here.”
It is a poetic thriller, oddly about a flu pandemic that kills most of the world, set very near my hometown nestled in foothills, of grief and loneliness and our innate human desire to connect and live, no matter what we’ve been through, of the fleeting nature of happiness and grief, how life will always, over and over, feel both.
It is a book to savor at the sentence level and will leave you long thinking about life and surrounding beauty.
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