by Lori Weber
“Just your kind of place, I bet?”
“Oh, yeah, for sure. You look like you’d fit in all right, but not a bay boy like me.”
“Not a what boy?”
“A bay boy. From around the bay, like I am. If I wants to, I can lay the local accent on though, make’em all laugh,” Jim says, sounding more like the taxi driver all of a sudden. I can’t help but chuckle again, in spite of not wanting to, which seems to make him happy.
We turn left and keep walking, leaving downtown behind.
“The harbour’s down there,” Jim says, pointing down the bottom of the hill.
We can’t see much of it from here, just one ship, a fishing vessel, I think, judging by all the nets hanging off it. No sign of the cruise ship, which is what I’d really like to see. And possibly get inside, to stow away in.
“What’s that?” I ask, pointing to a heap of something piled up at the far end of the harbour.
“That’s salt chips. This street’s called “Hill O’Chips.” We take things literal around here. But wait to see how icy these streets get in winter,” Jim says.
“I might not be here then,” I respond. “I mean, I might be leaving soon.”
“Oh, really? That’s not what Robbie told us. He said you were here for a year, same length of time he’ll be away.”
“Well, Robbie kind of got it right. Except, it’s my parents who are staying, not me.”
“And where are you going?”
“I’m going back to Montreal.”
“Oh, is that where you’re from? Robbie didn’t know for sure. And what’re you going to do? Go back on your own?”
“If I can, yeah. At least, I’m going to try. Somehow.”
“Ouch. You haven’t even been here a full day and you already want to leave? Newfoundland doesn’t usually have that effect on people. So, what—are you thinking of jumping aboard a container ship?”
“Could I really do that?”
Jim starts to laugh. “You could try it, I guess, but it would be pretty dangerous. If it was easy, more people’d be doing it, don’t you think, to save on airfare?”
“Very funny.” I guess it was pretty dumb of me to take him seriously. He obviously doesn’t think I’m serious about going back home alone. Neither do my parents.
We start to climb a steep street, past more colourful row houses. I’m really regretting wearing my heavy black boots. They’re not the easiest things to walk in.
“What about the cruise ships?” I ask.
“Stow away on a cruise ship? Are you cracked? They’re even harder to get near.”
“Not stow away. Work on one. They must need hundreds of employees, those things.”
“Sure they do, but not from here. They got everything they need by the time they get here. And they’re all American anyway. The tourists come here for two things: whales and icebergs. They come in, see a few of each, drink some screech, maybe kiss a rubber cod or two in one of the pubs, listen to some fiddle music, then they’re gone. That ship we saw last night’s probably left already, heading across to Bermuda or something.”
I feel myself deflating. It’s not going to be easy getting out of here. Not unless I can get the money together for a plane ticket, and that could take forever. My parents’ idea of allowance is ten dollars a week for pocket money, which isn’t even enough for a movie and popcorn, if I were going to do such a thing.
Further along, past where the houses have ended, we come to a little lake. Jim stops. “So, how do you like it?” he asks.
“Like what?”
“Our lake.” A sign by the road says Deadman’s Pond.
“Is this what you brought me to see?”
“Sure. Don’t you like it?
“Oh, yeah. It’s fantastic. Almost as good as Niagara Falls,” I say. Deadman’s Pond is just an oval of blackish water. I wonder if it got its name from someone who was forced to do something against his will, like climb a mountain or kiss a fish, and decided to jump in and drown instead. “I thought you said we might see whales. I doubt there’s even a fish in this pond.”
“No, but there are lots of skeletons, on account of all the people who got hung up on top. They’d roll the bodies down the hill afterwards.”
“Are you kidding me?”
“Of course not. Dead serious. Anyway, Deadman’s Pond is just the appetizer. The real treat is at the top of the hill.”
We continue to trudge upwards, passing something called the Geo Centre on our left, its parking lot full of cars and tour buses. Jim tells me his science class got to help out with setting up some of the displays a few years ago, when it opened. “It’s pretty amazing,” he says, “if you like rocks, which I do.”
Right now, I don’t know what I like. I’m in too much pain. I can feel my heels scraping against the leather, building up a couple of good blisters. I’m not used to walking this far, especially in these boots. And this hill is so steep. I wish he’d warned me. Jim’s up ahead, coaching me along.
“Come on, girl, you can do it,” he says. “We’re almost at the top. Keep working those calves.” He pumps his legs in an exaggerated way, like some maniac aerobics instructor, trying to make me laugh. But I don’t. I just plunk myself down on a boulder by the side of the road.
“What’s so great up there anyway? Can’t I just look from here? There’s a bit of a view.” The horseshoe of downtown St. John’s is partly visible behind me, the colourful houses dotting the hill that climbs away from the water, like blocks of Lego.
Jim comes down and joins me. “Okay, we’ll take a break. I guess I forgot that not everyone climbs this hill every day.”
“You actually do this every day?” I ask. “Are you seriously deranged?”
“Okay, not every day, but when I can. It’s hard in winter, though—sheet of ice sometimes.”
“Well, I don’t need to worry about that,” I say. “I’ll be gone, remember?”
“Oh, sure, so you said. Is it my deodorant or something?” Jims says. Then he actually lifts his arm, sticks his nose in his armpit and inhales. “Nope, not me … Wait a minute. Maybe it’s the other one.” Then he lifts his other arm and does the same thing again, only this time he chokes and gasps and actually rolls off the rock onto the grass. He holds his stomach and continues writhing, as though he’s been struck with acute appendicitis.
I can’t help it. It is pretty funny. Before I know it, I’m laughing out loud. I don’t even try to hold it in.
“Ah-hah! I caught you. Committing a cardinal sin. That’ll be ten, no, twenty, Hail Mary s—by the way, are you Catholic?—for giving in to the temptation of humour. Don’t you know where humour can lead you? Before you know it, you might actually start to feel good. And then, worse—you could actually find yourself … happy.” Jim is actually standing now, delivering his insane speech in a dramatic voice, his arms flying out around him like a TV evangelist. People in cars driving up to the summit are looking at him. They don’t know whether to be concerned or amused.
“Oh, my God, is something wrong with you?” I hiss, tugging on his shirt to get him to sit. He makes himself go all floppy and raggedy, like the scarecrow in The Wizard of Oz. I can almost hear his bones hit the boulder as he crashes.
“Is something wrong with me? You’re walking around in black jeans and black jacket and high black boots in summer, and you’re worried about what people are going to think about me? Aren’t you urban gothy types supposed to be immune to public opinion?” This time Jim puts on a pretty authentic English accent.
“For your information, I am not goth. That’s something completely different.”
“I know. That’s why I said ‘gothy,’ remember? You’re more witchy, I guess. Hey, if you had a broomstick, you could fly us up.”
“Sorry. I left it at Robbie’s.” It’s not the first time I’ve been compared to a witch. Ewan’s friends would sometimes creep around to the back of the house and peek in the windows to see me. Ewan told me they wanted to see if I wa
s brewing potions.
“Well, we either sit here all day or get up to the good stuff. What do you say?” Jim stands up and stretches out his hand toward me. I reach out and grab it, letting him pull me up.
“Okay,” I shrug. “If we’re going to climb this hill, let’s get it over with. The sooner we get up, the sooner we get down. Right?” Then I take off at breakneck speed, pumping up the side of the road so fast in my clumpy boots, Jim actually has to run to keep up.
Around a few more bends, a stone tower becomes visible, looking like the chopped-off turret of a castle. It sits past the end of a long parking lot that is packed with cars. People are standing around, pointing off in all directions as they take in the view, the wind whipping their hair, cameras and windbreakers. Jim guides me to the left side and points down.
“Well, this is it,” he says. His voice is full of pride, as though he’s somehow personally responsible for what I’m about to see.
“This is what? Where are we?”
“Signal Hill. The most famous spot in St. John’s. Didn’t you guess?”
“I suppose I should have, but I’m not very good with directions and landmarks and that kind of thing.” In fact, I completely suck at them, probably because I deliberately try to block out where I am most of the time.
“Well, that’s Cabot Tower, over there.” Jim points to the stone structure behind us. “And that’s the Atlantic Ocean,” he says, pointing right.
As I look out, I feel the breath, or whatever breath I have left after that climb, gush out of my lungs, leaving me dizzy. Stretching below me are rocky hills that undulate toward the water, the reddish rock topped in parts with grass and moss. Beyond the rock lies the ocean, stretching forever, with no end in sight. The water is actually blue, the way postcard oceans always are. It’s not that I’ve never seen an ocean before. When we lived in the Okanagan Valley we made several trips to the Pacific coast, and that was impressive. But this is different, somehow. It’s an odd mixture of rough and pretty all at once. Soft and hard. Yin and yang and all that.
“So, what do you think, city girl?” Jim asks.
“It’s … awesome,” I say.
“I knew you’d think so,” Jim responds. “That’s where we’re headed now.” He points to a narrow path that winds down over the hills. From here, the path seems to go on forever, over boulders, through patches of vegetation, and, at times, turning into wooden stairs that must be bolted into the rock. People hiking at the bottom, near the water, look an inch tall.
I know I should protest. I should roll my eyes and stamp my boots and absolutely refuse. But the strange thing is this—I want to do it. I want to climb down closer to this amazing shore. I want to do it more than I’ve wanted to do anything since I was yanked away from Montreal three years ago. Much more than I wanted to taste caribou, or ride a gondola up the Rockies, or witness the explosion of grain elevators. But I can’t let Jim know that. I can just see that grin blossoming into a full-fledged gloat. An I-told-you-so gloat. The kind my parents might give me, along with a mini-lecture about never counting something out before trying it,’cause you never know, yadda yadda …
“Whatever. Might as well get it over with,” I say, swinging my legs over the parking lot barrier and planting my boots on the other side. As I stand there, looking down, I realize that my blisters have stopped hurting.
•
WE DESCEND FOR what seems like miles, down the path, which meanders over rock or through the spongy vegetation but is, at times, vertical. The air is crisp and breezy and smells of salty ocean. Seabirds caw and screech as they soar and dip through the air around us. At one point, we look across a cove of black water to a peninsula, the tip of which is the exact same shape as a dinosaur’s head. The pitted rock in the middle of the head, surrounded by wrinkles, looks just like its eye. Jim tells me we’re looking down into Cuckolds Cove.
Farther along, Jim asks if I want to stop for a while, so we sit on a bed of grass and ferns, and just stare out at the ocean. I feel like I’m perched at the tip of the world, like I could just lean forward and plunk myself off the edge, into the Atlantic.
“Do you realize that we’re actually closer to Ireland than to British Columbia right now?” Jim says.
“Wow. Are you serious? I used to live in BC.”
“No kidding,” Jim says, turning back to stare out at the water. “Lucky.”
I think about that word for a minute. I could argue with him, but it would be too hard to get into, so I just focus on the view. I think about how all of Canada, its thousands of miles, lies behind me. I picture the provinces I’ve lived in floating away like ice floes, leaving me blissfully disconnected. I almost feel light and free for the first time in ages, kind of like the birds soaring high above the water.
We sit there for a long time, just staring out. Even Jim is quiet, for a change. I can almost feel the intensity of his stare beside me. His dark eyes are glassy, like marbles. I suddenly have an urge to ask him some questions, about where he comes from and everything, but I don’t want to intrude. He seems so into his thoughts.
“Guess how old the rock that we’re sitting on is?” Jim asks suddenly.
“I don’t know? Fifty thousand years?”
Jim smiles. “Fifty thousand? That’s like newborn to these rocks. Try five hundred million.” Jim taps the ground below him as he says this, as if to test for strength. “There’s rocks near here that date back to the Precambrian period.”
“The what period?”
“Precambrian. Haven’t you ever heard of it?”
I shake my head. “The word is familiar, but I have no idea what it means.”
“Yeah, well, not many people do. But I’m really into rocks, especially fossils. I’ve got a big collection from right here around St. John’s, thanks to Mr. Wells, our science teacher. He’s also a rock geek. His first name is Pierre, the French word for ‘stone,’’cause his mother’s Acadian. I always wonder if that’s what gave him the idea to go into geology. He’s taken us on field trips all over the Avalon, and this summer he might take a group of us over to Horton Bluffs in Nova Scotia. We fund-raised for the trip all year, but I’m still waiting to hear. It’ll be completely awesome if we do go. I’ve been wanting to go there for ages now. It’s world-famous. Well, in geology circles anyway.”
Jim sounds so excited. I wonder what it would be like to have such a strong interest in something. So far, I haven’t developed a passion for anything, except getting home again.
“Sounds good,” I say.
“Yeah, well, we’ll see. It’s just a first step for me. I want to be a geologist when I grow up. I want to go to all the hot rock spots in the world and search for fossils.”
“Why fossils?”
“There’s something so amazing about finding a message from the past etched in stone. You can piece together the evolution of our species from those messages or figure out when the first skeletal creatures appeared in Newfoundland. There’s so much neat stuff, like many people don’t know that the Avalon Peninsula, where St. John’s is, was once part of a chain of volcanic islands that were strung along the coast of a huge super-continent, back in the Late Proterozoic period. Then, three hundred million years later, it used to be part of a large continental plate called Pangaea. It shared the plate with parts of Europe and Africa. Isn’t that cool? I mean, who would think we were once connected to somewhere as different as Africa?”
“Wow. You sure know a lot about it.”
“Not as much as I want to. I want to go to Africa one day, to study their rocks, too. But I’m not sure if I’ll make it. I’ve only been off the island of Newfoundland once in my life, when I was really young, two years old. My parents took me and my older brothers to visit my mom’s cousin in Toronto. But I don’t remember a single thing.”
I suppose now wouldn’t be the best time to tell him that I’ve been to every province in Canada. Not only that, but I’ve been to Europe, too—twice.
Jim points o
ut some little grey slivers in the distance that he says are boats. We sit there long enough to watch them grow in size and actually sail off to our right, into the harbour. One is a tall sailboat, built out of wood, like in the olden days. Jim tells me it’s a tour boat.
“This place is like being home, on top of Mary’s Hill,” Jim says, softly. “My brothers used to take me up there all the time to throw rocks and watch the whales.”
“Are your brothers here, too?” I ask.
“No. I haven’t seen them for three years. They’re in Alberta with my father. They’re probably muscular oilmen now, with twenty-inch biceps from wrapping those thick chains around drill bits. When I spoke to them last Christmas, they said I should come out and join them. They said it would put hair on my chest. Then they both cracked up. I know they didn’t mean nothing by it, though. They’ve been teasing me all my life,’cause I always have my head in a book about rocks or the earth or something. They said they spend a lot of their time blasting through rock, so it would be right up my alley.”
“So you haven’t seen your father for three years either?”
“Even longer. He went out west five years ago. He came back at Christmas the first year, but after that he always said he had to work. He’s up in the oil sands now, in northern Alberta. He says he can make double time working through the holidays, but I know there’s more than that keeping him there. My brothers didn’t come home last Christmas either. My mother wasn’t too happy about it. She thinks we should all be together at least once a year. I think so, too, but you can’t tell my brothers what to do, or my father.”
“How come you didn’t all move to Alberta?”
“My father wanted us to, but my mother wouldn’t go. She said she’d rather die poor at home than rich in a strange place.”
I stare out at the ocean, thinking about Jim’s mother, determined never to leave the place she was born, even if it meant seeing half her family go away. That must have been hard.
“Does your mother work, too?”
“She used to, when the fish plant was still running. That’s been closed a decade now. She used to slice and gut—she could do thirty cod a minute in her prime. Now she knits sweaters with Newfoundland scenes on them, like whales or fishing boats, row houses—the kind of stuff tourists love.”
