Friday, June 19

Diane

This morning we drove up the coast to Keels to see the Devil’s Footprints. It’s supposed to look like marks from cloven hooves in the stone. As far as I was concerned, this was something like the experience of seeing the Tidal Bore and the Reversing Falls when I was a kid. Not at all as advertised. The Devil’s Footprints were circular holes in the rock, as if someone had used a biscuit cutter to take out a section about 6″ across and 3″ or 4″ deep. The weirdest part was that some of them were arrayed in a very straight line across the face of the rocky outcrop.

Keels was another one of the many very small hamlets we saw–houses sometimes closer together that they seemed to need to be and other times just sprinkled over the rocks near the water. It was very pretty, but you’d better really enjoy the person you’re living with because there aren’t many other people around.

Back in Bonavista, we decided to visit the Mockbeggar Plantation before getting our lunch. The administrator/guide told us that a plantation was anything that was a large-scale commercial venture, in this case the cod fishery, which was an extremely important part of life in all of coastal Newfoundland until cod fishing was suspended in 1992 because of collapsing cod populations due to overfishing. The house had been restored to1939 when one family moved in. The sons remembered just how the place was furnished and helped the provincial historic site people install appropriate linoleum and wallpapers that they recognized and knew had been in the house. They also provided a great deal of the original furniture. They had William Morris and a great Art Nouveau paper. Nice.

More fish chowder and huge sandwiches for lunch, some of which were served on inch-thick slices of tree, complete with the bark on the edges. We ate at our own house at supper time, figuring we needed a bit of a change from all this fish!