Three Ways to Capsize a Boat - Chris Stewart [55]
“Yup,” continued Tom. “Nineteen days and headwinds all the way.” Behind Tom we simpered modestly as one, but this statement failed to elicit a response. Then the man rose to his feet and held out his hand.
“Y’all welcome to Quirpon,” he enunciated.
Wobbling still, but wreathed in grins of jolly bonhomie, we clambered over one another in our eagerness to shake our fisherman’s hand. This was a big moment.
Tom continued: “I guess we’d better report our arrival to customs and immigration.”
Our man mulled this over for a bit, while we busied ourselves looking around at what we could see of Quirpon. It didn’t look like the sort of place that would have a customs and immigration: there was the jetty and a few sheds of a lowly sort, and a clapboard shack or two. In confirmation of which, our new friend said: “Ain’t no customs and ’magrayshun in Quirpon.” Then, by way of explanation: “Jus’ too darn small.”
“What do you suppose we should do, then?” asked Tom.
“There’s Wally Stocks down in Griguet; he’s a customs man. Maybe y’all should see him.”
“And how would we get to Griguet?” (pronounced “grigget”).
“Guess I’ll take y’all there in the pickup.”
And so we found ourselves speeding down the gravel road to Griguet—Tom, Ros, and Hannah in the cab with our new friend, who was called Eli Bridger, the rest of us heaped happily in the open back.
Later that afternoon we had tea with the Bridgers. Eli and his family lived in a little wooden house on the rocks on the edge of the bay of Griguet. From the kitchen where we sat warm as toast by the wood-fired cooking range, we could see the beautiful bay, shining blue, the surface unruffled, sheltered by the horns of low-lying land that almost met at the entrance.
Eli’s wife was called Lee-Anne and she was as talkative as he was taciturn. Her speciality was baking, and there we all sat laying waste a huge plate of sweet fairy cakes, light as a feather, that she had baked that afternoon. Ros and Hannah, who were more fastidious about these things than the rest of us, were taking a long, hot shower. The kitchen, smelling of tea and cakes and a hint of wood smoke, was the sweetest, coziest thing after the trackless wastes of the North Atlantic.
Later, sated with cake and awash with strong tea, I turned again to gaze at the beauty of the bay. To my horror it had completely disappeared. Where before there had been a glorious sheet of calm water, now I was looking at what looked like a scrapyard full of decomposing pickup trucks, rusty engine blocks, and heaps of assorted junk. It was hideous. What in the name of heaven had happened while I had been drinking my tea?
It transpired that the tide had gone out to reveal the arrangements made by the locals for mooring their boats. The custom was that, when your pickup truck died, you ran it into the bay at low tide and there, with a stout chain passed through the windows, it served as a mooring block for your boat. It was hard not to admire the good sense of it.
There’s not a great deal happens in Griguet, so, in contrast to our first impressions, our arrival and the few days we were there, caused quite a stir. We were adopted by the Bridgers, who were as generous and kind as folks can possibly be, and I suppose got a certain amount of kudos from the fact that we were always around at their place. They took us to Lanso Meadows—or L’Anse aux Méduses—where the Vikings, whose journey we had been following, had made their first settlement. There was a museum and the reconstruction of some of the turf-roofed longhouses. It was a bleak, wind-blasted spot, open to the ocean to the north, but I suppose that, to the Vikings, after many weeks tossed by storms across the sea in an open boat, even a settlement as comfortless as L’Anse aux Méduses would have seemed as cozy as Lee-Anne Bridger’s kitchen.
It was an odd thought, that this was the first settlement on the New World by Europeans, five hundred years before Cabot or Columbus made their more lasting marks. We