Fogo Island

We spent a whole day on Fogo Island today and it is a very unique place. I can't get over the landscape. It is one of the most barren places that I have been to in Canada. The glaciers 11000 years ago scraped the majority of the earth off the island leaving much of the island as simply rock. There are only scraggly stunted trees growing on the island. People were drawn to the island for fishing.

This morning we travelled to Tilting another community on the island for a walking tour with Al. Cheryl 's friend Camille had done this tour a couple years ago and loved it. We met Al at the community centre and another couple who were originally from BC but lived in London Ontario my birthplace. Al took us on a 4.5 km walk of Tilting. He talked a little about the history of Tilting but the tour was mainly about his life growing up in Tilting. Born in 1950 and growing up in the 50s and 60s his life was very similar to that of his ancestors. There had been no electricity and the road into Tilting had not been built. He grew up in a saltbox house with 9 siblings and a fisherman father. The house was freezing in the winter. His responsibility had been to start the fire each morning and maintain the water supply in the kitchen. We walked by where he would bring the horse each morning to get the water from a well. He showed us his uncle's house and fishing sheds and described how they would gut, salt and dry the fish just like their ancestors had done. Tilting had been favored with a very small amount of topsoil where the family had a small plot of land for growing vegetables. Potatoes, turnips, carrots and cabbages. He described how they would use caplan-a minnow type fish and cod entrails and kelp to fortify the soil. We visited the family vegetable patch just outside of town. It didn't look like anything should grow there.He showed us where the family 's root cellars had been and how effective the root cellars were at keeping their vegetables cool in the summer and warm in the winter. We checked out the ponds were he had learned to swim and another nearby pond where he had learned to skate. Tilting had been settled by Irish Catholics from southeast Ireland 200 years ago. Of course being Irish Catholics we visited where his ancestors felt that Banshees and fairies had lived interestingly beside the abandoned Protestant cemetery. I have just finished reading Baltimore Mansion by Wayne Johnston. The book is a memoir. His family was very anti Confederacy. I asked Al about Tilting. Tilting had been Confederacy partly because as Irish Catholics they wanted to escape British colonial rule. Al personally thought that Confederacy had been good for Newfoundland. We kept waking. He told us how when he was 14 a ship unannounced in the harbor for TB screening. Mantoux skin tests some X-rays. The ship left but the following summer returned and took those citizens with positive X-rays away to a sanatorium in St Johns for a year. It took the heath agency a whole year to read and act on the x-ray results. Talk about poor turn around time. We finished our walk with Al. We went back to his shed or what they call a stage here in Nfld and he played us some Newfie songs on his guitar. It was very cute.

We did another 2 short hikes on the drive back from Tilting both to the coast. There are lots of small cemeteries on the island. There have been people living here for 250 years and the people who lived here died early from disease or accidents. Many of the graveyards were in poor repair. We stopped in Seldom at a Foodland to buy some more groceries. The first time I have been in a grocery store where there is a sink at the entrance to wash your hands. A very good idea. We returned to our Saltbox house on the ocean and chilled out with a memorizing view of the ocean.

We had an early supper as we decided an evening hike was in order. One can only be memorized by the ocean for so long. It had been a beautiful warm sunny day on Fogo however just as we were eating, the temperature dropped, it became windy and it got very foggy. For a while it didn't seem that a hike would be possible. The fog cleared of but it was now cold cloudy and windy. We decided to head anyhow and do the lions den hike by Fargo. Listed at 5.2 km it took us a long the coast where 4 different out ports had been located until the 1950s. There were signs boards with pictures of what the communities looked like but even with these pictures it was tough to image people living on the exposed North coast of Fogo island being exposed to the wind and the elements. It must have been terrible. On our way back from we were inland from the coast but it was still incredibly cold and windy. Every time we hike through boggy areas we see incredibly beautiful flowers including pitcher plants with red globular flowers, irises and orchids. We have definitely nailed wild flower season. We even saw a wild rose.
At the end of the hike there were plaques commemorating the site of a Marconi wireless station which operated from 1911 to 1933 and could receive messages from 500 km away. At this site which was very high above the town the wind was just howling.Read more