Islands in the Stream

01 Aug 2011

The thought of Canada conjures up images of stunningly beautiful terrain that stretches into infinity. But for native BRUCE SACH, connecting with his roots came from journeying to the country’s many remote islands.

A charming island village on the east coast of Newfoundland comes complete with fairy-tale houses and wide open spaces.

When I was growing up in western Canada in the early ’70s, my geography class was shown a film detailing the exploits of 16th-century French explorer Jacques Cartier. Two images remain vividly entrenched in my mind. On one Canadian island, the bird life was so prevalent that Cartier and his men killed over a thousand birds – possibly gulls – in one outing. They were shown wading through throngs of defenceless birds. The second image was of a walrus, a New World creature that no European had ever seen previously.

Little did I expect that years later, visiting the islands of Canada would help me connect with my country’s geography and its true essence. A hardy population – whether you think of the physical topography, the arduous annual migrations the birds here undertake, or the lengths that immigrants went to get here in centuries past – they have blended to create a truly new mosaic. Crammed into second- and third-class steerage, newcomers to Canada often had to struggle with sickness and possible death before having to cope with a completely new and sometimes austere land.

Canada is the world’s second largest country and best known as a huge slab of land that takes hours to traverse by air, rail or road. But it is also composed of countless islands, some of the most spectacular of which are tucked away in extremely hard-to-reach places that few Canadians are even aware of. Ironically, visiting these isolated islands was my way of connecting to the land and its true spirit. I knew that I had to visit both eastern and northern Canada to understand my own western Canadian stomping grounds.

Most of the islands I journeyed to were near Canada’s largest province, Quebec. Located in eastern Canada, this place – about the size of Iran and a bit smaller than Mexico – lies between Hudson Bay and the Atlantic Ocean. It was first visited by the Jacques Cartier that I remember from that geography lesson years ago.

My journey began in Newfoundland, Canada’s eastern-most province.

Newfoundland

Newfoundlanders, whose province is affectionately known as The Rock, are a hardy lot. Locals speak with an Irish brogue and have spent centuries fishing out of tiny outports with fiendishly clever and exotic names like Heart’s Desire, Come by Chance and Thimble Tickle Bay.

Its human population has never been huge (barely half a million today, on an island almost as large as California), as The Rock offers precious little farmland. Not surprisingly, huge protected bird colonies still flourish. It was a good hike on an unmarked footpath to the bird sanctuary, and around us, tens of thousands of northern gannets screeched and hooted, totally submerging a seaside cliff in feathers and wings at Cape St Mary’s. The stench of the birds, however, was such that one needed merely to follow one’s nose to locate the rookery.

Newfoundland is Canada’s eastern-most province.

Later, from sea kayaks in Witless Bay (yes, that’s its name!), we spotted the nesting territory of the comical-looking puffin, a maritime bird intimately associated with Newfoundland, as the province’s official bird. But for all its exoticness, Newfoundland was just too tame. You can drive almost everywhere – although car crashes with moose are frequent and often fatal – and I chomped at the bit to see wilder and more isolated areas.