Driving from St. John�s to St. Lawrence - up the Trans Canada over the tip of Placentia Bay and dribbling down from the town of Goobies along the Eastern edge of the Burin Peninsula - can really stretch your notions of time and duration. Twenty minutes stretches to forty, forty to ninety, and ninety minutes droops like a strand of taffy into the airless abyss of five hours. The secret to stretching out time is to drive through a landscape that offers you nothing. No clues, no landmarks, no gas stations or towns: just scabby hills lichened over with the green of wilted mint, rusted tan slabs of rock shoved out of bog, brimming ponds that seem held in place by surface tension only. Occasionally a worn mountain swings into view, streaked with four-foot pines and greenish-brown moss. Vertical swaths look like clearcut until you look closely and realize that no tree ever grew on that rock face. The whole area feels so blasted and used-up that you think it�s got to be our fault. We must have touched down a couple of hundred years ago, chewed it up, shat out some toxic waste and took off when the birds started growing superfluous beaks. I mean, how could nature be so neglectful of its own estate? And then you realize that you�re driving through nature�s untended back lot, the unwatered, unseeded, browned-out patch. You take it in, numbed by the sameness, watching for moose, which appear to be the only animal capable of surviving out here. You get the sense that this is time�s vacation spot, the place where time comes to slow down and relax a bit. You get that sense with every mile of scab and scrape and stunt that goes by: something old, something incredibly old here, repeating, repeating, repeating.

The scenery changes, though, once you get out of the car, which is what we were here to do: get out of the car and move around, talk to people, and film it all. We were going to St. Lawrence to interview the few residents who remembered a disaster that happened here in 1942, when the U.S.S. Pollux and U.S.S. Truxtun lost their way in a February storm and grounded themselves off the cliffs of St. Lawrence. The Truxtun ended up in Chambers Cove, an aptly named trick of erosion that formed a neat crescent of 300 foot cliff and a small ridge of beach. As the ship broke up, fuel oil thick as tar spilled out into the cove and covered the water. Most of the men who tried to swim through the freezing, choppy water died of suffocation when they hit the slick of oil. Sixty years later you can still see a tidal line of fuel oil on the base of the cliff. That detail was so titillating to me that I decided to go out with Steve the Camera Man and get some shots of it. To get there, though, we had to drive twenty minutes out of St. Lawrence over a rutted and pocked dirt road, and then hike twenty minutes with our gear on a trail cut through gravel, moss and bog. And we arrived at the most extraordinary landscape I have ever seen.

It�s remarkably easy to describe an ugly landscape, even an unbroken, unchanging expanse. Ugliness thrives on crowding and minute detail, a fractal repulsiveness that repeats and renews itself with each inspection. Beautiful landscapes, on the other hand, are all about mind-crushing swoops and dives of the sublime. We had emerged from a scrubby forest onto what can only be called a vista, a gigantic spit of tawny grassland that soared from a gentle bowl up to those high cliffs. It looked as if someone had chopped off a chunk of veldt from Africa and hauled it across the Atlantic. We hiked along the beaches on the western side of the spit and then crossed over to the cliffs on the eastern edge. The ground was spongy and soft, the grass slick. Several times I slid on the unresisting grass, and once Steve simply tumbled over, a hidden root or tussock having caught his foot. The cliffs themselves, slate grey and mottled orange, were so ridiculously National Geographic that we felt vaguely ashamed to be filming them as a backdrop for a human disaster. On one face a waterfall tumbled neatly down a 250 foot drop. After a few minutes we decided to pretend we were National Geographic journalists. It was easy; you could stand at the height of land and swing around 360 degrees without seeing a single sign of human habitation. No cars, no houses, no power lines. Only this: an aluminum-coloured sea with patches of silver light advancing towards land. Red cliffs with waves breaking up their length and sometimes over their crests. Quivering mounds of seafoam drifting through the air. Descending stretches of grassland, patches of that weird stunted forest, and in the distance, the shapes of cropped mountains.

You can only keep up the impression for so long, though. Another look betrays the trace of humanity. Old lines of stone that marked property back in the 1800s, occasional signposts (no signs � the town removes them after Labour Day), the marks of an All Terrain Vehicle in the hillside, and off to the north, a track cut through the trees. But damn, it�s better than seeing another bloated SUV, like a fat silver slug, everywhere you look. And I knew that I could sit out there for days and not see another human being until May. That detail only struck me as a potential problem when Steve and I were filming at a spot known as The Pinnacle, a little tuft of grass and rock jutting out from the highest point of Chambers Cove. You could barely stand without your legs turning to water from the vertigo. We crouched down and set up the camera. Steve turned to me and said, �Did you just make that thump?� �What thump?� �There was a thump in the ground. I could feel it�. We figured it may have been a big wave hitting the base of the cliff. A few minutes later I was taking a picture of Steve filming when I felt it in the soles of my feet: a deep thump that seemed to come from somewhere inside the rock. It felt as if someone had stomped their foot hard on the ground. It felt as if hundreds of tones of eroding rock had plugged our body weight into a physics equation. It felt as if we were about to get dropped into the Atlantic Ocean. We retreated to the trail. It was an unnerving moment. It was even more unnerving than talking to a woman only a few days beforehand about how her father-in-law had shot her husband in front of her eight year old son. I�ll talk about that one later.

parode - exode