Alone together in Newfoundland

Finding spontaneous community among travellers

BRENDAN CATHCART

“I’m just going to get off the boat and see what happens!” I must have said that to everyone I knew when asked about where I was going to stay and how I was going to get around while travelling east for a month. Somewhere in between Nova Scotia and Newfoundland and Labrador, in the middle of the night, the sunshine and kittens in those words lost footing and slipped silently off the starboard deck into the black Atlantic.

Stepping off the ferry at 5 a.m., cold and alone in overcast Port aux Basques, N.L., the only thing I wanted to do was turn around and get back on the ferry. The idea of being an intrepid and fearlessly independent traveller sounded exciting to me before I left Winnipeg three weeks earlier, but now, I repeat: cold and alone, I was realizing that saying the words “intrepid” and “fearlessly independent” was more immediately gratifying than trying to be them. Having no food, no destination, no plan and no sleep, I groaned at my stupidity and uninformed optimism.

Within 20 minutes the ferry station cleared out and my heart declared bitter hatred for all those freshly absent people smiling in warm cars with loved ones. The station attendant told me that a bus heading north would be coming through around 8 a.m., so I decided to go and meet the one other groggy, disoriented person in the station, standing in front of the cafeteria doors waiting for it to open. Until eggs and toast went into our bodies we mostly tottered on our heels, sighed heavily and looked like corpses, but we did manage to introduce ourselves and pass some time back and forth between us.

Topics we tossed around: the army, drums, the Bad Plus, jogging at 2 a.m., girlfriends/wives in different cities, eating cheese on an empty stomach.

It didn’t matter what we were talking about, just that we were talking and not thinking about how terrible we felt. He assured me that the bus did in fact lead to places where there are beds and more food. My confidence level skyrocketed immediately from rickety to steady; nowhere near buoyant, but I took whatever I could get.

Heading north a couple hours later on Viking Bus Lines to nowhere in particular, a Scandinavian tongue near the front mouthed the word “hostel” and it floated back to me on a fluffy cloud. I lurched. “Hostel? Did you just say hostel? I didn’t know there were any hostels in Newfoundland. What hostel? Can I come with you to this hostel?” And that was that, me and Anna Marie — 41, from Denmark were best friends, inseparable companions, for the rest of the trip.

How it happened so that she didn’t recoil in fear and pepper-spray my eager neediness is on par with 1930s humorist Robert Benchley’s mystification at the process of building bridges: “There is a man in India, so they tell me, who throws a rope up into the air and then climbs up it, which is evidently the principle of bridge building.”

Thinking we could do fine without them, both Anna Marie and I had intentionally uprooted ourselves from our communities, then were surprised to discover that before we knew it our instincts had done the job of seeking out replacements in the same way we mysteriously find ourselves standing in front of an open refrigerator every four to six hours.

After hitchhiking in the rain with only $2.17 in change between us because our hostel landlord had ditched us to go party in a different town before taking us to an ATM like he had promised, having a fire by the ocean at 2 a.m. in Sally’s Cove because there was quite literally not a single other thing to do, getting soaked by ice-cold spray crashing over the front of the boat in the fjord at Gros Morne National Park, singing “Sonny’s Dream” together at a pub in Rocky Harbour after we stopped being able to count the beers we had drank, and sleeping in Norris point with only three other people in an enormous old hospital converted into a heritage house, Anna Marie and I were nearly family.

Only when I got back on the ferry five days later did I remember again that I was cold and alone, but it didn’t matter to me this time. I knew that as long as there were travellers on the road, rails or ocean, there were people needing people and, to them, director Werner Herzog’s strange words would make perfect sense. “‘Together,’” he said to his friend Lotte Eisner after travelling by foot across Germany to convince her not to die, “‘we shall boil fire and stop fish.’ Then she looked at me and smiled very delicately, and since she knew that I was someone on foot and therefore unprotected, she understood me.”