The Walk

I TRIED TO CONVINCE MYSELF that I was ready to return, that only by leaving had I learned to live here. But I wondered if I, too, had reached the limits of a leash I had not until now even known I was wearing and was, like my father, coming home not because I wanted to, but because I was being pulled back, yanked back by the past. For a panicked while, I wondered if I had made a fatal, irreversible mistake in departing from New York the way I had. I could not go back there now, no matter what.

Something strange happened when we drew near to Port aux Basques. There had been a storm the night before, and though the sky was breaking, the easterly wind had not gone round. The clouds were still racing westward and the rock-face on the headlands was wet with rain.

It was as if I saw, for a fleeting second, the place as it had been while I was away, and as it would be after I was gone, separate from me, not coloured by my past or my perceptions, but strange and real as towns seem when you pass through them on your way to somewhere else, towns that you have never seen before but that seem remindful of some not-quite-remembered other life. A kind of hurt surged up in my throat, a sorrow that seemed to have no object and no cause, which I tried to swallow down but couldn’t. It was the old lost land that I was seeing, as if, like fog, the new found one had lifted. How long I stood there staring at it, I’m not sure, seconds or minutes. When I came out of whatever “it” was, the new found land was back and tears were streaming down my face. I looked around to see if anyone had noticed, but there was no one else on deck.

I had never seen the place that way when I lived there, not even when I was very young, and I somehow knew that I never would again, not if I went away for fifty years and came back for one last look before I died.

I lingered for a while at a boarding-house in Corner Brook, got a job freelancing for the local paper and helped start up a union at the paper mill, still feeling the pull of the mainland, knowing I was back for good but for some reason unable to undertake the last leg of my journey home, the train ride that would take me to St. John’s. Each night I resolved that the next day I would leave, and each morning I found some excuse to put off my departure. I did not know what I was looking for until it found me.

The sectionmen who maintained the cross-island railway had just got word of a coming pay cut and wanted to form a union in the hopes of having the cut rescinded. When they heard of my work with the union at the paper mill, they approached me and I agreed to help them.

I spent the next three days trying to figure out how I was going to organize seven hundred men who lived in section shacks strung out along the railway at one-mile intervals from St. John’s to Port aux Basques and all the branch lines in between. A meeting was impossible, as was getting their signatures on union cards by writing to them, since most of them could not read or write.

The only way I could think to do it was to walk the entire length of the railway, branch lines included, gathering signatures as I went. At first, it seemed out of the question. I doubted that I was physically up to walking more than twenty miles a day for three months. Some anti-unionists at the boarding-house had nicknamed me Skab, a shortened version of Skin-and-Bones (and, of course, the last thing any union organizer would want to be nicknamed), and what would be left of me after I walked seven hundred miles I tried not to imagine.

But the idea grew on me — the idea of a grand, momentous homecoming that would hint that my five years abroad had been full of just such adventures, walking in service of a noble cause from one side of the island to the other. I pictured the last few hundred feet of rails thronged by cheering crowds who, for weeks, had been tracking my progress in the papers and had come out to witness my long-heralded arrival at Riverhead station in St. John’s. My family and friends would be there, all except my doom-prognosticating, now-chastened father, whose absence would confirm that I had proved him wrong; that, having shown that unlike him I could make it on the mainland, I had come back home, my demons of self-doubt laid to rest for good, not because I had to, but because I wanted to, wanted selflessly to put my talents, which elsewhere could have made me rich and famous, to use in helping Newfoundland.

I took the train back to Port aux Basques and there began my walk, signing up sectionmen along the way, collecting from each of them fifty cents in membership fees. I set out in mid-August and had to make it to St. John’s by November 1, when the pay cut was to take effect.

I fancied I was walking the lone street in a company town called Sectionville, along which houses were laid out at one-mile intervals. The residents of Sectionville travelled their single, endless street using hand-pumped trolley cars by which I was frequently almost run over, so silently did they glide along the tracks and so oblivious was I, in my near-exhaustion, to what little sound they made.

It became an almost surreal sight after a while: married couples, pairs of men, pairs of boys and girls, sitting on their trolley cars, facing each other, see-sawing, pumping the handle up and down. I tried travelling by trolley-car myself but found that even with a partner, it was more tiring than walking. A few well-muscled sectionmen who could operate a trolley by themselves assured me I could be their passenger, but I declined, knowing what a puny, foolish-looking figure I would make sitting there looking at them while they did all the work. I told them that at any rate, it was better that I walked, for the longer my odyssey took, the more hardship and privation I endured, the more likely to sign up the sectionmen would be and the more embarrassed the railway would be.

I carried my suitcase on a stick slung over my shoulder: It bumped on my back with every stride until, about a week into the walk, one of the sectionmen fashioned me a shoulder harness like cigarette girls wore and I walked with my suitcase flat in front of me, and with a book laid open on it, which allowed me to read while I was walking.

My suitcase held seven weighty books, six of them readable, one of them not — my father’s copy of the judge’s History. I had purchased another History in New York, and this was the book I read most often.

I plodded wearily along, after a while no longer noticing the spectacular scenery, often near-delirious from hunger and exhaustion, reading, reading, retracing centuries of history until it seemed to me the judge’s whole book was written in the cryptic scrawl of his inscription to my father. I probably read the judge’s History twenty times. It began to seem that this, and not the walk, was the epic task that I had set myself, to read the history of my country non-stop, over and over until I had committed it, word for word, to memory, as Hines had done with the Bible, the one book that remained unopened in my suitcase.

I had bought a Bible in Corner Brook because I hoped my supposed religiosity would impress the sectionmen who fed me and let me spend the night in their shacks. It did, but, more important, it impressed their wives. When their wives went to my suitcase to get any clothes that needed washing, there was the Bible. That Bible, not one page of which I read along the way, kept many a sectionman who was otherwise inclined to do so from dismissing me as a Godless socialist and convinced them to sign up with the union. I told them and their wives that when I thought I could not take another step, I took out the Bible and was inspired by reading it to carry on.

“I could not have come this far without it,” I shamelessly said, at the same time recalling the many times I had been tempted to lighten my load by throwing it away.

I had often enough heard my mother quote passages from the Bible to be able to do so myself without ever having read them. I was often asked to say the grace over dinner as if I were some itinerant preacher who was only secondarily a union organizer.

How strange it was, that meandering town of Sectionville, the narrow stream of civilization that wound its way through the wilderness from one side of the island to the other, marked off in miles, each mile-post with its corresponding shack occupied by families driven to eccentricity by isolation.

They really were no more than shacks, clapboard shacks raised from the ground on posts, since it was either too rocky or too boggy to sink a proper foundation. Their flat roofs were waterproofed with black felt and gleaming tar, their one adornment a metal chimney pot, the cap of which could be closed or opened by pulling on a piece of rope beside the stove. No other kind of roof but a flat one would have stayed on for long, what with the wind. When a storm was coming, the sectionmen battened down their shacks like boats at sea, pulled to the solid shutters on the windows and the aptly named storm-doors, then lit the lamps, it being otherwise pitch dark inside even at midday. Many of the shacks were shored up on the sides by a palisade of saplings sunk obliquely into the ground, so the bottom halves of the shacks looked like the shells of teepees. If not for these “longers,” the shacks would have been blown off their posts the way boxcars often were from the tracks.

The method of gauging when it was safe to send a train was not a very scientific one. The sectionmen measured the force of a gale by how difficult it was to open their front doors against it. I saw this “test” performed more than once, a man bracing his shoulder against his half-open storm-door while wearing a calm, almost diagnostic expression. There was no scale of wind velocity per se. It was merely deemed to be either safe or unsafe to send a train.

Each shack had a little porch attached that led directly to the kitchen/sitting room, the centrepiece of which was the pot-bellied stove in which wood and coal brought in by the train were burned and on the floor around which, on paper spread out to catch it, lay a pool of soot. The section people made do with teapots with their spouts cracked off, cups without handles, cups made from tin cans and a loop of wire, chipped plates and saucers with spider webs of fault lines, chairs cobbled together from whatever could be scavenged, tables made of doors laid across two sawhorses, doorknobs still attached. For beds, there were makeshift bunks and hammocks fashioned from old fishing nets and sails, and armchairs and sofas made from crates and burlap sacks.

Between house and outhouse, washing lines were strung and on them, almost always horizontal in the gale, flapped underwear made from flour sacks, threadbare coveralls and shirts and bed-sheets so stitched and restitched they looked like ragged flags.

Some shacks were surrounded by a flock of squawking chickens that were kept for eggs until winter. There might be a horse, a single cow, a beagle for retrieving birds and rabbits.

Each night, I displaced children from their beds, and sometimes even couples, who would not hear of me sleeping on the floor. Word spread up the line that I was coming, as did word of my emaciation, so that it became the mission of the wives to shore me up with food. They seemed as eager to see if I was as wasted away as rumour had it as anything else, sizing me up as if to say my state of bedragglement was scandalous, as if my every ailment could be attributed to the neglect and ineptitude of all the wives to whose ministrations I had so far been subjected. “There’s not enough of you to bait a hook with, sir,” one woman told me outside of Springdale Junction. “We’re having trout, sir,” she said, as if she couldn’t imagine why her counterparts hadn’t thought of trout, as if this were a novel dish available nowhere in Newfoundland but at her house. She hinted that if I had been as well fed by all the others as I would be by her, I wouldn’t be the size I was.

“You’ve got to keep your strength up, sir,” she said when I protested that delicious as the dinner was, I could not eat another bite. Another bite of trout, I meant, for trout it had been almost every night since Port aux Basques. At her urging, I ate more and more.

That night I lay awake, stuffed to the point of insomnia with trout. In the morning, her husband took me under the armpits and, lifting me up, authoritatively declared that I weighed ninety-seven pounds, ten pounds less than his twelve-year-old boy. I was sent off, after a trout-and-eggs breakfast, with a trout and dole-bread sandwich lunch that hungry though I was by noon, I could not bear to eat, and threw away in favour of blueberries that I picked along the tracks. I felt guilty doing so, knowing how dearly come by the bread had been. It would not have mattered to them who I was; if I was walking the railroad to help them or just to pass the time, they would have treated me with the same unstinting kindness.

By the time I reached central Newfoundland, I was having a great deal of trouble with my feet, which were blistered and swollen, and it was now to healing my feet and mending my shoes that the wives devoted themselves. From the minute I entered a shack to the time I went to bed, I sat with my feet immersed in a washtub filled with some bizarre concoction, the occupants of one shack swearing by blueberry wine and partridge-berry jam as a cure for blisters, the occupants of the next night’s by something else.

My feet were buttered, smeared with turpentine and rubbed with diesel oil. I slept with my feet wrapped in poultices of every description, wrapped in bark: spruce bark, juniper bark, birchbark, pine bark.

One woman tied soapbar-like blocks of fat-back to the soles of my feet. Forgetting I was wearing them, I got up in the middle of the night to use the outhouse and lost my footing, landing with a crash on my backside to the delight of the two boys, who, because of me, were sleeping on the floor.

“Oh, my God, Mr. Smallwood is crippled,” the wife said, as if there lay before her a life of notoriety as the woman in whose house Mr. Smallwood had been crippled. “I’m all right,” I said, “I’m all right,” removing the fat-back from my feet as the two boys howled with laughter.

As I walked along the tracks, I thought of my cousin Walter’s boot-and-shoe shop, the rows and rows of gleaming boots and shoes. I thought about phoning Walter and asking him to send me several pairs, but as the only way of getting them to me would have been by train, I decided not to.

Near Gander, I was heartened when a sectionman showed me a copy of the Daily News, in which there was a small item about what I was doing and why. There was nothing in the Telegram, which did not surprise me. I had left Newfoundland five years before as a Telegram reporter and a non-paying guest of the Reid Railway, who wanted only that I sing the praises of train travel in return for my fare, and here I was now, walking the same tracks to organize a strike against the railway.

“So they know I’m coming,” I said.

“Oh, yes, sir,” he said. “They know you’re coming. It’s a great thing you’re doing, sir.”

Once a day, from then on, when I was passed by an eastward-bound or westward-bound passenger train, passengers who had heard of my cross-island walk waved to me, shouting encouragement or cheering ironically as if they thought I must be mad.

Walking the branch lines was the hardest part, having to detour from my eastward march to go down the length of some peninsula, and at the end, having to turn around and retrace my steps. It was all I could do to force myself to turn due east onto the Bonavista branch line, which began so tantalizingly close to what would be the last leg of my journey.

The country here looked as if it had been put through a strainer, sifted until all the soil was gone and there was nothing left but boulders, which were then strewn haphazardly in what had been a single, massive, shallow lake, creating ponds and intervening steppes of stone that at intervals were thinly coated with bog and here and there garnished with clumps of juniper and stunted spruce.

So undifferentiated was the landscape that if not for the section shacks, I would have lost all sense of movement. As it was, I had to make a conscious effort not to wander from the tracks, not to stay the course where the track turned and walk off aimlessly across the barrens straight into some pond.

And there was always the wind, a gale in my face making a sail of my shirt and pants, or a gale at my back against which I had to dig in my heels to keep from falling forward. I thought scornfully of the moors and heaths I had read about in books. They were nothing next to this. Any wind in which you could stand upright and not be lifted off your feet was nothing next to this.

The eastern side of the island was four hundred miles from the mainland and the wind blew here as it did anywhere in the North Atlantic four hundred miles from shore. The wind blew northwesterly across the island as if its effect on it were incidental to some larger, grander mission of destruction; as if it were on its way to a place where people were not so easily impressed; or as if it were blowing just to please itself, a land-oblivious, sea-generated wind that made it hard to believe sometimes that the whole island was not adrift.

At the Southern Bay stop, I came closest to the sea. Outside the moderately choppy inlet, the wind blew unimpeded and massive black waves went by at right angles to the shore, a perpetual storm of seaspray blowing from their crests. The water a hundred feet from shore looked as deep and rough as it would have had the island not been there at all. It was strange and spellbinding, that tandem of wind and water. Where the water stopped, the wind went overland until it met up again with water on the other side, each one, it seemed, driven on by the other. Everything was headed one way — clouds, wind, water, the waves so high the horizon was near and jagged, bobbing as if I was jumping up and down. I was sure the motion of the waves must extend right to the bottom, the whole ocean running like a river infinitely wide.

It was impossible not to personify the wind. The only pathetic fallacy involved was thinking you had any business being where you were. There was a section shack called Blow Me Down House, which made me realize just how wind-obsessed its occupants must be, trying to convince themselves that they were wryly resigned to the worst the wind could do, that it was just some benign rival of theirs that would appreciate their joke.

This wind was not part of a storm that, however powerful, would come and go. Storm winds blew from the east or from either side of east. It was an abiding, prevailing, self-sustaining wind; a side-effect of nothing. The purpose, the end of this wind, was simply to blow and go on blowing.

I looked up at the sky sometimes to watch the large low clouds that always accompanied the wind. They moved so fast it was hard not to do likewise, hard to plod reasonably along while overhead there was a stampede of cloud, hard not to wonder what the implications might be for me of all that volatility.

I was, I realized, inching ever closer to some sort of breakdown. I began to feel that hallucinations were imminent; I developed a kind of hallucination phobia, which I presumed was a prelude to the real thing. I was suddenly seized by the conviction that around the next bend, I would see my grandfather walking down the track towards me, my grandfather with his long, flowing, pocket-watch-obscuring beard come to meet me, to escort me somewhere I was certain I did not want to go.

I felt the urge to turn around and run, then told myself that whichever way I turned, I could not see behind me. I hurried along, looking over my shoulder, peering up the track, stumbling. I was certain that Hines was about to appear Hines in his strange outfit, his three-quarter-length black coat, his red, brass-buttoned vest. I wondered for the first time if, in his former life, he had been a train conductor. Hines coming down the track towards me with his Bible, in chastisement, held aloft. “Remember; man,” I thought I heard a voice say, “thou art a Newfoundlander and unto Newfoundland thou hast returned.” I ran, not on the track, but beside it on the crushed stone, my feet going out from under me. I heard myself sobbing, then laughing, or so I thought, for it was not me laughing but a child.

I saw her standing right in front of me, a little girl in a ragged burlap dress with her tattered shoes untied. She stopped laughing when she saw the expression on my face and stared sullenly at me. A forerunner of Hines perhaps. I heard another voice, distinctly unlike that of Hines, behind me.

“Where are you going in such a rush, sir? You look like you is runnin’ from an ’ive of bees.”

I turned around and there was a middle-aged man, not Hines, wearing only coveralls, his arms and shoulders bare, staring uncertainly at me and at times at the little girl as if he was still not sure if I posed a threat.

“I’m Joe Smallwood,” I said.

I was back in the world, theirs, mine, suddenly aware of how I must look to them.