MOUNTAIN LIFE - Blue Mountains | Spring 2019

SPRING 2019 ML BLUE 37 rocky beach far below. Up close, the staircase looks more like a ladder nailed to the rock. And had the builders attached newer stairs to the weathered, ancient set of predecessor stairs visible underneath? Stepping down slowly, I keep my arm tight to the railing and try not to picture the stairs collapsing, throwing me out into space and onto the jagged rocks below. (I see the grim headline the next day: “ Stairs collapse beneath tourist… Injuries severe. ”) But the stairs do not budge as I climb down and then stroll along the beach, which is backed by a hulking grey-black cliff. (Humber Zone geology, according to the extremely detailed Geological Map of Newfoundland available at nr.gov.nl.ca , is characterized by: stratified rock of the Cambrian to middle Ordovician period: including sandstone, shale, chert, volcanic and metamorphic types.) After I climb back up the stairs, I encounter Joe Park, who is about to climb down. I had met Joe earlier during our tour of the tiny outport of Brake’s Cove just a kilometre or so to the west, where he was born. It turns out these stairs are a shortcut for residents to walk at low tide along the beach and up the headland between Brake’s and Cox’s Cove. In 1966 when Joe was 25 the government resettled him and his family and the 15 other families to the larger, road-accessible Cox’s Cove. Brake’s is not a ghost town, however, and the pale-pastel or whitewashed buildings serve as cottages and fishing sheds. Led by Joe and other former cove dwellers, our tour takes us up a hill above the beach where, amid the spruce and fir trees sheltering us from the salt breeze, lie two cemeteries. One is fenced and maintained, and the other isn’t: washed out and damaged in a flood untold years ago, this older cemetery continues to erode into the sea below and is almost indistinguishable from the forest reclaiming it. In the old cemetery I can make out several headstones lying recessed in the grassy soil—including those of the cove’s eponymous Brakes, Joe’s ancestors, who were part English and part Mi’kmaq. One stone marks the resting place of Benjamin Brake, Joe’s great-grandfather. According to Joe, Benjamin spent several years in Even with the decline of the fishery and the emptying of outports like Brake’s Cove, life today on the “French Shore” seems enviable in many ways.