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An Auspicious Meeting
Friends from the Rock
M. Williams, June 2005 After rattling and bumping our way back down the mountain, we flipped a coin to decide our new
direction. Tails said we headed west and, to our delight, we discovered a campground right at the roadway. No more treks through the bush with Goliath. Deo Gratias.Sitting outside the quaint little general store was
a large, brawny-armed, white-haired fellow smoking a cigarette and peering calmly at us as we pulled in. He didn't turn a hair, just told us to "park 'er dere by da lake now, luh, and come up". A fellow Newfoundlander!
I translated the nine hundred words a minute directive for the co-pilot |
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"Seen ya down da road", he tells us later. "Figured we'd be seein' ya." We told him our story. He shook his head, chewed a fingernail and
picked up the telephone.We shrugged at each other and waited. Within ten minutes vehicles began to pull up outside, and a compliment of fellow Newfies emerged, all of whom had to hear our story first hand, and all
of whom had varying degrees of unintelligible vocabulary to throw at Dignamland. |
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The last to arrive was a bearded Cape Bretoner, a Newfie adoptee with a booming voice and a take-charge manner. And take charge he did.
Seems this fellow, Harold, owned a logging operation, the same one responsible for the warning signage posted up near our land. He peered at our map, and he too shook his head. Yes, he told us, we'd had the right road.
In fact, he'd once owned the land we had purchased--knew exactly where it was. He herded us into his jeep, and off up the mountain we went...again. Nothing had changed. The 'road' was still as we left it, the black
flies were still starving. But this time we did actually get a glimpse of our 25 useless acres. The promised water source had dried up, the "hardwood forest" of the catalogue description had been logged years
ago, and the road, Harold informed us as we bumped along, had been delisted some years past as well. Our dream breathed its last then and there, and we headed back in a funk, dirty, beaten and suddenly very tired. Now
we surelywere in Fate's fickle hands, and Murphy really was running the show. We had, however, met the folks who were to be our saviours--"skipper" Lanny and Harold the honorary Newfie; we just didn't know it yet
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