Today has been the kind of day that our sabbatical was designed for! We are halfway through a week of base-camping at the Elliston municipal campground on the shores of the North Atlantic in northeastern Newfoundland. This campground is definitely an undiscovered paradise, and hopefully my mentioning it by name in this blog won’t change that! Elliston is just east of Bonavista, the town that Rich mentioned last week where we were warmly welcomed by the Todd's and their parents who are life-long Newfoundlanders. I had heard of Elliston as the Root Cellar Capital of the World. What the heck that means I’ll get to in a minute….
First, let me tell you that before we came here, Elliston was described to me by an economic development guy in St. John’s as a prime example of a town that has successfully zeroed in on tourism as a way to help offset the trauma of the cod collapse. He had a story about how the CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corp.) once mentioned Elliston as yet another outport shutting down due to economic collapse driven by the fisheries crisis. Apparently, CBC highlighted the town council’s economically driven decision to turn off the street lights as a symbol of the beginning of the end for outports in Newfoundland – kinda like we in Maine talk about the island communities facing the beginning of the end when the school or post office shuts down. Apparently, the people of Elliston would have none of it. I am still learning the details but soon enough, a community association called Tourism Elliston was formed and things clearly turned around.
Don’t get me wrong.... Though we do have a waterfront view, this is no mecca for the mass tourism type looking for sea, sun, and sex. There IS a beach, an extremely rare commodity in these parts, but from what I can see, the water is so cold that only screeching teenage girls venture in just to prove they can. But Rich and I, academic tourists that we are, love this town by the sea. It is wildlife and history and tea with the locals that keeps our bike wheels rolling! Elliston folks have figured out that they have two really unique things that visitors might enjoy. Root cellars is one of those things and they have well over a hundred that you can visit. Root cellars are just what they sound like: a cellar where you store your root vegetables. Only this isn’t just that spider-filled corner in the unfinished part of your basement. The Elliston root cellars are rooms built up and into the side of a hill. Local rock and mud is used to hold everything together, and a door (looking much like what I imagine Bilbo Baggins’ door might look like, wooden and on a metal hinge) marks the entry into the cellar. If you are standing above the cellar, you have no idea it is under you, as the roof is just part of the hillside. Inside, you find a squeaky clean dirt floor (no that doesn’t have to be an oxymoron) and temperature that stays cool and unfrozen year round. Potatoes, turnips, carrots, beets, and other root vegetables are kept year round. Cabbage gets canned before root-cellar-storage but the rest is secured in wooden bins.
Now this all may not sound like the world’s most intriguing thing to visit but root cellars, I now believe, are so interesting! The Elliston root cellars dot the landscape in this town and their simple presence gives you a flavor of the town’s history. Very cool, and very cool idea on the part of the local entrepreneurial sorts to capture me and my tourist dollars by inviting me to visit their creepy crawley dark places… People sure are crafty in Newfoundland!
I mentioned there are two things Elliston is famous for, and that other is Puffins. I’ll write about that another day, or maybe Rich already has? Guess I better check our own blog…
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