Eastport, 2005. And Before.

I've found some photos of a trip we made to Eastport two and a half years ago. Eastport is a beautiful little town in northeastern Newfoundland and when I was a kid, we used to go there to visit my father's aunt and uncles. While the only childhood pictures I have are in my head, they are as vivid as these more recent captures of a chilly July day at the beach with my sister and her family.

We used to stay with my father's Aunt Claire, an enormously warm and kind woman who had one blue and one brown eye. Her husband, Uncle Randall, grew potatoes and onions, which he once let me help pick. Only once, though; I think I somehow did some damage.

Eastport, 2005. This is not Aunt Claire's house, which was inland, and is now gone.

For a time, my father's grandmother lived with Aunt Claire and Uncle Randall -- I remember her as a little woman wearing black clothes in a rocking chair. The first time we visited, which may have been the only time while she was alive, she refused to believe my father was who he said he was. He had left Newfoundland more than 25 years before during World War Two, and had not been back often. She believed that he had died in the war.

Aunt Beatrice, who was developmentally delayed, also lived with them. I was afraid of her until my mother taught me not to be. Her analysis of the situation ("she's just a very big little girl") was certainly not sophisticated, but it made sense to me. Uncle Dick and his wife, whose name I forget, lived nearby in Traytown with their grandson Hillary. There was also Uncle Daws, who had a beautiful little Newfoundland pony that I longed to bundle up in a trailer, attach to the Plymouth, and bring home to Corner Brook. And there was also Uncle Heber, who was married to Aunt Darlene. What an incongruous name for a 70 year old woman.

Eastport was a strange place to me, a smooth, unfamiliar landscape. Eating sally suckers (or sheep sorrel), a grass with sour lemony-tasting leaves. Picking mussels; my father and his cousins eating them raw and getting sick over the side of the boat. My brother falling off a boat and nearly drowning. Dodging jellyfish stingers. Going out with my father to try and see where the large raptor we saw overhead nested, and whether it was an osprey or a bald eagle. American and mainland families on the beach (not the one with jellyfish). One of those families was Kelly's; her parents were part of the Eastport theatre festival that ran through the seventies. I have sometimes wondered whether we ever played on this beach at the same time:

July 2005: Note the fashion-forward barn jacket for bathing.



It's a good beach for picking. This day Kelly found some beautiful rocks and I found a devil's purse (the casing from skate eggs) that I still have, dried and sitting on the mantle. I also found a joint bone that I was sure was from a marine mammal but others felt was from someone's saltbeef dinner. I left it behind.



A good beach is full of surprises.


July 2005: Kelly and Doug.