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nightdog_barksSunny and much cooler. Finished reading Theatre of Fish, which is far and away one of the very best travel/social history books I've read in a while. John Gimlette is just an amazingly talented writer, and I'm more than ready to order every one of his other books. Theatre gets an A+ from me, and I've copied out another lovely excerpt beneath the cut ...
[Gimlette has returned to Newfoundland after a sojourn in Labrador, where he most recently encountered a bear]
Back in Newfoundland, the sensation of being edible soon began to fade.
At first, it was replaced by the cold seep of anticlimax, more to do with leaving Labrador than returning to The Rock. But then, gradually, I began to warm to a new wilderness: lower, smoother, dimpled with ponds and tufted in waist-high forest. Almost every feature had been planed away by the blasts that crashed across the straits from Labrador, and the tip of this great thumb of rock had been so ruthlessly roasted that it was now known as Burnt Cape, and had spawned its own mutants like dwarf hawksbeard and the Burnt Cape cinque-foil.
But the inhabitants of the Great Northern Peninsula didn't seem to think anything of this ferocity. They expected nature to be boisterous, and were always rebuilding their homes. In St. Juliens I talked to a woman whose only complaint was that she was woken each morning by the whales. Another time, I met a couple carrying buckets of dirt and gravel to the graveyard, off to re-bury their forebears after the winter.
Roads had only been scraped into the interior in the last five years. Instead of traffic they'd brought vegetables. Long queues of carrots and cabbages now marched along the verges into the barrens. I hired a car and followed a long slash of radishes for about twenty miles, until it ended in a gardener.
"By jammy, it's warm in here," he said, as if he'd never been inland before, until being carried here on a wave of mutant radishes.
What about the moose, I wondered? Moose were now the gargoyles leering from every corner of my day -- luggage-faced, ugly, skinny-arsed, bog-squelching oafs. They loved the road, not just for the car-wrecking, but for the vegetables it brought. Now every other moose in Canada lived in Newfoundland, and on the Great Northern Peninsula they were eight to the acre. Once, said the gardener, the Mounties used to try and stop us poaching them.
"But now it's moose pie every night," he said. "With radishes."
"Are they dangerous?" I asked.
"Oh my jumpin', my son, dey'd give yous a good butt in de ruttin' season! And dey rolls around in deir own piss till dey's proper hummy."
That night, a moose came over to investigate my anxiety. I was sleeping on the edge of Pistolet Bay, and woke to a powerful stench. Peering upwards through the tent fabric, I could make out a huge shaggy silhouette looking down at me. I was being evaluated again, by a couple of pounds of brain set in seven hundred pounds of muscle and girder. The decision seemed to take ages but eventually I was assessed as inedible or not worth the fight, and the moose farted and lurched off down the beach.
So. Yes. Two enthusiastic thumbs up, and on to the mountains with Wade Davis' Into the Silence.
[Gimlette has returned to Newfoundland after a sojourn in Labrador, where he most recently encountered a bear]
Back in Newfoundland, the sensation of being edible soon began to fade.
At first, it was replaced by the cold seep of anticlimax, more to do with leaving Labrador than returning to The Rock. But then, gradually, I began to warm to a new wilderness: lower, smoother, dimpled with ponds and tufted in waist-high forest. Almost every feature had been planed away by the blasts that crashed across the straits from Labrador, and the tip of this great thumb of rock had been so ruthlessly roasted that it was now known as Burnt Cape, and had spawned its own mutants like dwarf hawksbeard and the Burnt Cape cinque-foil.
But the inhabitants of the Great Northern Peninsula didn't seem to think anything of this ferocity. They expected nature to be boisterous, and were always rebuilding their homes. In St. Juliens I talked to a woman whose only complaint was that she was woken each morning by the whales. Another time, I met a couple carrying buckets of dirt and gravel to the graveyard, off to re-bury their forebears after the winter.
Roads had only been scraped into the interior in the last five years. Instead of traffic they'd brought vegetables. Long queues of carrots and cabbages now marched along the verges into the barrens. I hired a car and followed a long slash of radishes for about twenty miles, until it ended in a gardener.
"By jammy, it's warm in here," he said, as if he'd never been inland before, until being carried here on a wave of mutant radishes.
What about the moose, I wondered? Moose were now the gargoyles leering from every corner of my day -- luggage-faced, ugly, skinny-arsed, bog-squelching oafs. They loved the road, not just for the car-wrecking, but for the vegetables it brought. Now every other moose in Canada lived in Newfoundland, and on the Great Northern Peninsula they were eight to the acre. Once, said the gardener, the Mounties used to try and stop us poaching them.
"But now it's moose pie every night," he said. "With radishes."
"Are they dangerous?" I asked.
"Oh my jumpin', my son, dey'd give yous a good butt in de ruttin' season! And dey rolls around in deir own piss till dey's proper hummy."
That night, a moose came over to investigate my anxiety. I was sleeping on the edge of Pistolet Bay, and woke to a powerful stench. Peering upwards through the tent fabric, I could make out a huge shaggy silhouette looking down at me. I was being evaluated again, by a couple of pounds of brain set in seven hundred pounds of muscle and girder. The decision seemed to take ages but eventually I was assessed as inedible or not worth the fight, and the moose farted and lurched off down the beach.
So. Yes. Two enthusiastic thumbs up, and on to the mountains with Wade Davis' Into the Silence.
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Date: 2012-01-21 08:07 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-01-21 08:43 pm (UTC)I do think Mark Kurlansky's book Cod would be an excellent companion-piece for this.
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Date: 2012-01-21 09:44 pm (UTC)http://blogcritics.org/books/article/book-review-beauty-tips-from-moose/
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Date: 2012-01-21 10:54 pm (UTC)