west uptowner

This picture brings back all sorts of memories of coming into strange harbours in the middle of the night . . . making port was always cool, trying to sort out the lights on the chart from the background noise of the city, staying alert for the dark loom of land or unlit buoys or guys in little fishing boats without lights. It was always best sailing, without the white noise of an engine propelling us deaf towards the unknown. Silence just worked better.

Walking down the hill three blocks to the harbour in St. John's was stepping from a small city calm to the fresh salt air that smelled of movement and the possibilities of other places.

If we all want stability so much why does movement feel so good?

# posted by trev @ 1:15 p.m. 0 comments

Just got back from two weeks in Newfoundland and Labrador... I'm not so much exhausted as kind of blank. It wasn't as spiritually overwhelming as I was hoping -- what place ever is -- but I think the speed of our tour kept me too busy to really take in these places. Well, despite that I did a lot of walking around and took in quite a bit of Labrador and the Rock on the way.

Tours are inevitably unbalanced gifts: you get to travel to amazing places you'd never bring yourself to, yet you rarely get much time to really see them. Your focus must be primarily on the job that brought you there, and that means everything extra-curricular must begin and end in under six or eight hours.

That said, if you push it a little, those hours can count for a lot.

What really touched me when I was there is how thin the soil is, how harsh the climate, and yet how vibrant the people are who live there. It's amazing that they all have the guts and will to make these isolated places so warm.

# posted by trev @ 3:42 p.m. 0 comments