Flags of Newfoundland

Newfoundland has two flags, one that looks like a modified Union Jack, the other that looks like a slightly faded Irish Flag.

The first looks like this:



This is the official Newfie flag, and it was designed in 1980. It's got all the nice explanations - white is for snow and ice, blue is for the sea, red is for "human effort" and gold is "confidence." It's funny (strange) that the first two are for these very tangible things and the second two are for entirely abstract feel-goodisms. They aren't even really Newfie, in my mind. The red should be for humorous surliness and the gold for funny-talkin' hospitality.

The other, much older, flag is called the 'native flag':



This one was adopted by a bunch of Irish-Newfies in the late 1800s in St. John's. Both are flown around the island; for a long time, I thought that the native flag was an Irish flag.

I'm in St. John's at the moment, a really lovely little city situated on a bay, with an improbably hilly downtown populated by narrow, brightly-painted houses, mostly in various stages of disrepair and slantedness. It's a great walking city, with paths and hills all over, and nowhere a straight road. Everything winds around, connected by steeps stairs and alleyways. There's a big hill with a lookout, called Signal Hill because it was the location of the first transatlantic wireless signal; it looks over the bay and the narrow, hill-flanked entrance to the bay, and then out to the sea beyond. The easternmost place in North America is in view, Cape Spear. The whole city feels like it's the end of the world, even though it's got all of life's luxuries, like Indian food and libraries. The city is cold and smells of salt, and trees are uprooted here and there from the recent visit of Igor, and the houses can't keep their paint on for long. The wind blows constantly, and the light is gray; abandoned buildings downtown are boarded up and falling over, their paint coming off in huge chunks. It feels old.

I like it.

Losers of the cold war

When the Soviet Union broke up, the support systems of millions of people dissolved overnight. For some, this was positive. There was no more secret police; but there was no more functioning police force at all. The thugs in St. Petersburg and Moscow could murder old ladies for their apartments. There was no more oppressive bureaucracy; but there was no functioning bureaucracy at all. The kleptocrats took over entire countries as their fiefdoms, bringing feudalism back to people who had left it less than a century earlier.

In Kyrgyzstan, the Russians escaped as quickly as they could with the fall of the Soviet Union, but some of the old people had no families in Russia, and so they stayed. They had apartments, maybe, or furniture. But they no pensions. Or bank accounts. And they lost their apartments, one by one, or froze to death in them because they could not afford to heat them.

I was walking with my boyfriend, S, past an old Russian woman holding a bouquet she'd found tossed in the garbage. She was trying to sell the old flowers, their edges brown and curled. S gave her 200 som, about 5 dollars, for them, probably 100 times what she was expecting, and she smiled and said spaceba, spaceba; thank you, thank you.

A dinner in Pasadena. Pasadena, Newfoundland.

Newfie dinner for 11:
* steak
* salmon
* rice and peas
* green salad
* grapes/walnuts/sour cream/cream cheese heavenness
* sweet potatoes
* roasted potatoes
* pasta salad
* garlic bread
* vanilla cake
* mousse, 3 kinds: bakeapple, chocolate, raspberry
* dark chocolate and coconut squares

The dinner was for a visiting Irish singer/songwriter/storyteller and peace activist, Tommy Sands and his kids. It was in Pasadena, NL, with some of his fellow musicians. After dinner, we sat in the living room with instruments in every other hand (certainly not mine) and the musicians played Irish and Newfie-Irish songs. Tommy told stories about his friends, including John Hume, who helped forge the 1994 ceasefire and the Good Friday peace agreement.

There was storytelling and jokes, and then I drove home, slowly, careful to avoid suicidal moose.

The cemeteries of Newfoundland

On the way to Gander, to attend a wood pellet conference (!), I talked with W. about his hometown, Gambo. Gambo, a Catholic town, is adjacent to Dark Cove, a Protestant town. They're "only separated by a sign," but each has its own schools, effectively creating a segregated community based on religion.

We passed a cemetery in a tiny town. There were three signs delineating the graves: Catholic, Anglican, Pentecostal. Apparently the Pentecostals came in the 1970s, and "converted half the middle of Newfoundland." Now the schools have a relic of this past, with separate schools for each little community.

The churches are lovely, little, white structures, almost identical except for the signs out front. The cemeteries are sometimes adjacent, but sometimes orphaned, outside of town or hidden away in the woods. Now I need to find the cemeteries of the resettled communities that line the island.

The road to Gander does not connect communities but draws a seemingly arbitrary line meandering around the island, with spurs off the road going to communities clustered around coves and nearby islands. The road (Highway 1) does go through Grand Falls, which had its pulp and paper mill close two years ago, and it goes through Stephenville, which had a mill closure several years prior to that. It also goes through Corner Brook, with the only remaining pulp and paper mill on the island. It connects the forestry communities.

Random notes on the 3 pulp and paper mill towns of NL:
Grand Falls: The town of Grand Falls built its mill in 1908. Well, Abitibi built the mill. Grand Falls was the town built around the mill, and we drove through it today to look at the empty mill. The town was built for managers and it has neat houses. The neighboring town of Windsor apparently housed the workers and is more ramshackle and poor. When the mill at Grand Falls was built, it was situated next to the hydro power plant; the processed pulp and paper was then trucked (or moved by railroad, initially) to the port at the coast, 20 miles away.

Corner Brook: One of the older forestry communities, the mill was built by Bowater in the 1920s after the technology of power lines had become available (common?) and so the mill was not located next to the power plant but next to the port. The power plant is at Deer Lake, a ways away.

Stephenville: An old U.S. military community with streets named after states. Labrador Linerboard built a mill there in the 1970s, with a business model as follows: import wood from Labrador (the mainland) and mill it on Newfoundland. Apparently, it was a bad business model and the mill closed after only a few years. It was then bought by Abitibi-Bowater (then just Abitibi, I think), which converted the mill to pulp and paper and operated it until recently.

I asked W. about employment in Stephenville and Grand Falls-Windsor since the mill closures and he said the towns were doing okay. I was surprised, and he said "well, the men all commute to Alberta." That's right, they commute to Alberta. Fort McMurray is a town of Newfoundlanders in the northern reaches of Alberta; the workers have moved from obsolete, isolated resource communities to a resource community of the modern era. I doubt for long. W. said that the services of the town - the hospitals, the schools, even the Tim Hortons - were having trouble keeping up with the growth. A classic boom town.

Good thing we've learned so much. What but good could come from a boom town?

On the frustrations of the arbitrary distinction between economic and social considerations

And so, in reading a document recently, the authors threw up (pun intended) all kinds of unnecessary walls between "economic" and "social" considerations. Their pleas for integrative research were somewhat mired by the discrete research silos, which had all industry concerns under economic, and all community concerns under social. This places economic concerns pretty squarely under a category I'd like to name "motivated by profit" and social concerns under a category I'll call "motivated by employment." That's a better categorization: profit vs. employment. Because they're antagonistic like that.

This reminds me of something my friend L and I were talking about. Both of us are social scientists, and so both of us are frequently subjected to the metaphor of the three-legged sustainability stool. Like sustainability is held up by three parts: economic, ecological, and social. We liked to call it the steaming stool of sustainability, or just "steaming stool" for short. Every time I read something about sustainability or somebody's tell me about it, and they're going on about ecological... social... economic... my eyes glaze over and I picture something really gross and I am, at least internally, giggling uncontrollably.

Because I am a social scientist, which means that I like people.

People are so nice, it makes your heart hurt

In checking up on some forest industry stats for a paper on central Oregon, I called a lady at a mill. We got to talking, and pretty soon we were just chatting away, about FSC certification and wood exports and the importance of jobs on a reservation, and she said: "keep my number so if you're back in the area, you can come down to the mill and we'll give you a tour."

I don't know why people behave this way. I mean, logically, people don't need to be friendly in day-to-day dealings. But so many have this inherent curiosity about each other that translates to something like empathy; perhaps this cannot be explained through the logic of economics or psychology, but only through the logic of sociology, which sees mutual benefit in such actions.

I now have a SIN (Social Insurance Number, naturally), although I'm still counted as male in Canada. I have a note scrawled somewhere about returning to the SIN office once I get my sex changed. It might be easier, anyway.