Hospital-based adventuring…

We are still in St. John’s, still camped out at the hospital, perhaps for another week. Anouk is definitely recovering, but the healing process is slow. Certainly, most of the burn is healing, but there are a couple spots where the skin is taking its time to regenerate. The good news is the doctors are fairly certain that healing is progressing well enough to prevent the need for skin grafting, probably. And so we wait. Meanwhile, as you know our little girl, Anouk smiles and giggles her way through the day, playing "coucou" (peek-a-boo) behind the curtain, wandering down the hall to meet every human in sight (new ones she pretends to be shy for about 10 seconds), and crying only at dressing-change times when, of course, it hurts. She amazes me. She’s also working really hard on sounds, trying hard to say "t-t-t-t" (short for tigre=tiger) and "ch-ch-ch" (short for chien=dog, though she is also working on "d-d-d" for dog, being the bilingual baby!)

So how about Newfoundland? What’s it like? With the doctor’s get-out-of-jail-free-day-passes, we’ve resumed the exploration that we are after. Yesterday it was Bowring Park (a lovely urban park with flower beds in full spring bloom, and a duck pond that is clearly the meeting ground for all young parents with corn and bread-tossing kids). A few days before, it was a hike with Anouk snoozing away in the soft pack on my back through the Battery (a neighborhood of St. John’s where the tiny homes are stacked up the cliff like nesting birds on ledges) and around Signal Hill. Signal Hill is visible from anywhere in the city (this is actually true, we can even see it when biking out of the campground). It was the center for communicating to the city about any sea-going vessel approaching the harbour; depending on the time in history, it might have been the enemy or the men returning from the seal hunt. A few days before, we visited the Rooms on a rainy day (it is a capital offence in Newfoundland to do anything indoors when the sun is shining). The Rooms is an architecturally remarkable museum designed on the model of traditional fishing rooms, family owned structures on the waterfront used for fishing and fish processing up until the cod moratorium in 1992.

The traditional cod fishery is a central theme in almost any tourist venture, or any public event, or anything at all in Newfoundland. How could it not be? It is the central theme of life in Newfoundland. And it is gone. Locals tell us there are still fish out there, they sometimes catch them for their personal consumption, and there are some small scale openings, but the commercial fishery on the scale of yesteryear will never come back. That, at long last, appears to be the dire consensus of the scientists and managers who just a few short years ago, still clung to the belief that the moratorium need only be temporary. Not so.

The rippleffect on society was, and by all appearances still is, catastrophic. Just yesterday I read in the paper about yet another outport closing up shop for good, most residents had moved out (outmigration from the province is on the order of 50% of the population of individual outports, I was told recently by a researcher at MUN, Memorial University of Newfoundland). There is one shining economic light and that is oil. The city of St. John’s, ironically, is actually booming. We see evidence of this every day as we navigate the traffic-heavy streets and wander the downtown region (which by the way, downtown St. John’s is fabulous, more on that another day…). The juxtaposition between an urban, booming oil economy and devastated tiny rural villages is jarring, at least to this visitor who probes perhaps a bit deeper than most tourists on account of this thing called sabbatical research.

On the topic of research, my project is in full swing and I am loving it. Rich and I have settled into a rhythm of taking turns taking care of Anouk at the hospital; not so great for having any quality time together unless we are off on pass, but great for both of us to have time to get lots of work done. And thus, I have now conducted more than half a dozen informal interviews with folks representing the slate of human ecological perspectives: Department of Tourism, a high-end tour operator/conservation professional, Nature Conservancy Canada, Heritage Newfoundland and Labrador, and several researchers at MUN. I’ve also found the groove for how to seek good info from the folks we encounter at museums and stores and even the hospital, some of whom I am forthright in stating the purpose of my research, and some I just let conversation flow. I am attempting to write lots, though finding the time between hospital stays is a challenge, but I have begun to make use of a voice recorder Sea Grant sent me off with, and I am finding that my journal keeping habit is morphing to computer-based rather than notebook-based...it just goes faster.

A few of you, our friends and family, have cautiously, concernedly, asked: are we going to tough it out up there in the far north, or find care for Anouk back home? Right now, we are in a holding pattern. I will admit that sometimes it feels a bit lonely to be so far from all of you as we deal with this event in our lives, but Anouk is doing well. She is well cared for here. We trust this health care system. And Rich and I are accustomed, as you know, to being far from home on long adventures. We are taking it one day at a time but my guess is that we are here for the duration, assuming Anouk continues to be the trooper she is. Anyone want to come visit?