Isle of Poop (and the occasional bird)

I learned an interesting lesson this trip: that some of my shortcoming are not just my own—they’re cultural shortcomings, maybe even genetic. For example, take my sense of direction, which is for shit. I know that. Everyone who knows me knows that. But what I found surprising and reassuring was that this trait extends not just to my entire family, but to the entire province of Newfoundland. We Newfies and Newfie spawn learn how to get from point A to point B through shear repetition. (When we first moved to Ottawa, I only figured out how to get to Costco after the fourteenth time Sarah directed me there). Well, the province of Newfoundland has embraced this to the point they don’t really bother with road signs anymore. Outside of major highways, only about one in five roads have signage of any kind. Making this worse is that these roads change names every forty years or so, and then no one ever bothers to learn the new name. This makes Newfie directions ever so reliable.

This lesson was hammered home on the Saturday when we planned to go on a whale watching trip in Bay Bulls. The directions we received sent us awry not once but at two different junctures. If it was just me in the car, I would have curled up in a ball at the side of the road and just waited for death. Luckily, Sarah’s big brain and superior sense of direction got us back on track (bonus points for her enduring my dad’s completely groundless, endlessly repeated insistence that she was leading us the wrong way).

The whale watching excursion was run by a company called Gatherall’s. It was on a decent-sized boat, the crew was funny and smart, and they do screech-ins upon request (and payment). My mom hates boats (also can’t swim, also grew up on an island), but decided to tough it out for us. This proved to be a bad idea. The first half was fine. Water was calm, boat was steady, and we saw at least two dozen humpbacks breaching—one of them even did this whole waving its tail in farewell thing at us. Then the captain decided to give’r on the way to Puffin Island, and the boat skipped pretty goddamn roughly along the water. I was green by the time we got there, and Mom had pressed her feet against the bench in front of her locking her body rigidly in place. Puffin Island was a bit of a letdown. There were five seagulls for every puffin, and five piles of shit for every seagull. We were also too far away to really see anything, but puffin-wise it wasn’t a total bust. Back in humpback territory, we saw a ton of them flying close to the boat, so outside of the turbulent waters part, it was well worth the trip.

From there, we drove out to Cape Spear, which just so happens to be the absolute eastern-most part of North America. Beautiful view. Intensely windy, though, and probably the hottest wind felt in my life (probably not a typical Cape Spear feature; it was a scorcher of a day). We strolled around the battery and up to the lighthouse, saw a few more whales (although farther away than when we were on the boat), and then we headed back to Upper Gullies.

That night, we were invited to a family BBQ. There we found drunkenness, relatively little debauchery, and I ate ninety-eight pounds of steak.