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National Geographic : 1974 Jan
Contents
The government is trying nowadays to bring some of the more backward settlements into the 20th century. It is impractical to pro vide for every far-flung outport such ameni ties as paved roads, electricity, and schools (teachers receive "isolation bonuses" for serving in such places)-not to mention rec reational and cultural facilities. So, with the help of the Department of Regional and Eco nomic Expansion, the province is attempting to gather the populations of scattered out ports into centralized communities. I visited the village of Come By Chance on the Isthmus of Avalon, where the program is moving the fisher families who used to live on a sprinkle of islets in upper Placentia Bay even moving their old houses on barges. The notion is that these families will benefit from the modern conveniences ashore, while their menfolk can give up the chancy trade of fishing to become steady-salaried workers in Come By Chance's oil refineries, which proc ess Middle East petroleum. But I found that this notion is not greeted with wild enthusiasm by all the families con cerned. They'd like to enjoy the "citified life," right enough, but they're not too keen on be coming angishores, and numbers of them have refused to budge from their islets. As one official told me, "The resettlement centers are like heaven. Everybody wants to go there, but not just yet." Of all the newfangled novelties that have affected the Newfoundlanders' traditional ways, the automobile has been the most rap turously embraced. I was astonished, when I first arrived, to see so many cars that were so gleaming new. Then I found an explanation: Newfoundland has had a paved road all the way across the island only since 1965-its extension of the Trans-Canada Highway. Before then, vehicles could get from St. John's in the east to Port aux Basques in the west only by being hoisted onto railroad flatcars. The 547-mile journey took a day and a half. As for travel elsewhere in the interior, "No more'n a few years ago," a man in a hamlet told me, "my sister took sick in th' dead o' win ter, and we 'ad to get 'er to 'ospital in Grand Falls. By dogsled we took 'er, a 'undered and twenty mile over snow, through a night and a day. But she was saved, thanks be." So the automobile arrived with a rush. In 1960, five years before the cross-island high way's completion, motor vehicle registrations totaled 61,000. In 1973, eight years after the highway opened, registrations were around 145,000, more than double, and the increase was mostly in private cars. For the first time Newfoundlanders can travel their own island with ease. On the highway they drive from coast to coast in less than twelve hours (and, by the way, with out glimpsing a single billboard), or stop to swim, cook out, or camp in parks adjoining the road on an average of every 30 miles. The island has 15 recreational beaches, 46 provin cial parks that range from six to 5,000 acres, and two vast national parks-Terra Nova in the east and Gros Morne in the west. Dirt Roads Lure the Adventurous The new highway has accelerated a branch ing out of access roads that reach into almost every corner of the island except the still trackless south coast. Many of these roads are dirt, chokingly dusty in dry weather, mud pudding in the wet. Any road is a nightmare to negotiate in one of Newfoundland's dense white fogs. But at least the roads exist now and they didn't before. For example, to get to St. Anthony, the island's northernmost town, I endured 270 miles of washboarded, tooth-loosening gravel road up the Northern Peninsula. But before 1962, I couldn't have got there at all except by coastal steamer or bush plane. Besides being a good place to view icebergs offshore in midsummer, St. Anthony is no table as headquarters of the Grenfell mission, whose four hospitals and 14 nursing stations tend the health of outporters along the 2,000 miles of northern shores and the boondock dwellers, including Eskimos, on the coasts of Labrador. The mission, supported by govern ment and private funds, also promotes edu cational services and cottage industries. While the chief output of the modern 170 bed hospital at St. Anthony is some ten babies a week, it can also handle any emer gency short of open-heart surgery. Just a few miles north is L'Anse aux Mea dows-the grassy cape where, a thousand years ago, the Vikings set a colony called Vinland.* I found little to see there but the foundation outlines of their longhouses, em ber pits, and saunas-and the dreary sur rounding flatlands of cold and windswept muskeg. It made me wonder why, if the *"Vinland Ruins Prove Vikings Found the New World" appeared in the November 1964 GEOGRAPHIC. Nenltfoundland Trusts in the Sea 135
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