The New Found Lande

North, north, ever further north.  The bus hurtles on, the road lies straight and flat between the grey sea and the sullen land.  Snow still lies on the steady slopes of June.  Onward, onward, in droning imitation of those obsessed explorers straining towards the pole.  From one end of the New Found Lande to the other, in one overcast, chilly day.  There is a strange, sad song in this fierce, frontier place.  It is sad, soft, whispered - a rhythmic chant of galley oars and unfurling sails.  And in the background, barely heard, the litany of an even older people, flitting amongst the shadows under the spruce trees.

Susanna is from Maine and has come to Newfoundland for the first time this summer, between years of her public health degree.  She is going as far as Rocky Harbour and Gros Morne National Park. She is small, attractive and has an enormous backpack. We laugh together about how obviously foreign we both look in this place.

When we realise that we have to catch different buses, disappointment flickers across both our faces.  It has been nice chatting and laughing together in the bus terminal, thrown together by our otherness.  All the best for your travels, then the newly woven thread is snapped off and becomes a memory of beauty and nothing more.  Time's relentless harrying pushes me out the door and onto the bus, into the north.

Darkness comes slowly, almost unnoticed under the grey-clouded sky.  Another stop at another gas station in a silent, lightless, wooden town.  Then onward again, into a northern night.

There are those of us for whom movement is the natural state, as much as sedentary lack of mobility is natural for others.  Travel, always leaving and arriving and leaving again, opens for some a door to ecstasy, to a sense of being alive and at one with self, earth, universe that is utterly intoxicating.  And with it, the bitter taste of loneliness, which, when chewed and swallowed, fills the senses with a strange, melancholy joy, a fierce, shining oneness.  Travel, always moving, flooding the senses, burns the wick more quickly, fills time with more than it can really hold, ages the traveller beyond his or her years, brings at the same time a weariness and a hunger.  A hunger for movement, animation, proof of life.  So onward, into the night ...