In Saint Anthony, Newfoundland, in the summer of '72, man named Sherlock gave me a ride and took me to his parents' home. He was about my age and talked in a flaky voice. I told him that my ambition was to become a famous songwriter, He listened to a cassette of my songs and said, "You're ambition is just a pipe dream"
I tried to dissuade him with fanatical persistence and said, "Listen to this one song, It's called One Son."
"I dare say I like it," Sherlock said at last.
I hitch hiked back to the cove. Before I arrived there I looked at the remains of the Viking settlements. Standing on the shores in an area that had been unchanged for centuries. I looked out at the bay just as it would have been when the Vikings first landed. I felt the experience was timeless.
As I walked amid the houses at Flower's Cove I noticed they seemed to have sprung up at random like wild flowers. But actually each house faced the center of the bay. Beneath the gray evening sky the cove in the distance turned a thin sliver of silver. Calm pockets of water were strewn about from a recent storm. My guitar in my green canvas trapper Nelson backpack was sticking above my head like the dragon on the prow of a Viking ship. My instrument was inside the impromptu case which I had constructed from an old raincoat. I had taken one sleeve off a raincoat and attached it where a neck would be and used the other arm for a handle.
A group of about a half dozen kids gathered around and asked me where I was from. I said that I was from Toronto, and that I was traveling around the world. I told each, and every child their age, exactly, to the half year.
I made my way to Harold's house. I had stayed there a few days before and he told me to stop in on the way back. Harold gave me a taste of hard tack, and warned me that I wouldn't like it. He was right. Then I helped Harold carry a large piece of plywood across a windy field to a shed. We passed a derelict car along the way, with parts strewn about. Often I passed abandoned automobiles and felt they were making a junkyard out of heaven. After twenty five years the cars and the rust seemed to blend with the soil. I was sitting talking to Harold my friend John Franklin knocked on the door. He had found the message that I had left at the Viking ruins. The next morning we took the ferry to Labrador. That evening the rusty jalopy of the sun drove into the junkyard of the horizon, somewhere beyond the Straights of Belle Isle.
When we walked around the out port, people would watch us from window to window, like fishes in a goldfish bowl. Many of the cottages were quaint; one was shaped in an octagon. A family took us home for dinner and kept telling me to play another ditty. We went to the tavern and drank some Brador. I talked to a Lady beside the jukebox; she became the inspiration for the song Lady of Labrador. There was a small white frame church, and John and I sat and I played some harmonica, which made a little dog howl. John and I hitchhiked along the forty miles of road, the road that connected the few towns that weren't outports. Along the way we would run into strangers who knew who we were, for the word had spread quickly that two boys from Toronto were traveling around. "All Labrador knows you are here."
One night we ended up in the middle of a forest, and made a shelter out of branches, pulled our sleeping bags over our heads, but still got eaten alive by the mosquitoes. Just down the road there was an empty loggers cabin that we could have slept in. We finally got a ride to the end of the road, and the people took us in for tea. Every house that we went to had pictures of John F Kennedy on the wall. When we got to the end of the road it disappeared into someone's back yard. There was a dock, and below the dock shining on the bottom were dozens of shiny fish heads. John walked about twenty yards into the fog and disappeared. He would walk forwards and backwards playing around with disappearance in the fog. And then we turned around and went back to where we had come from.
LADY OF LABRADOR
Past the worn down mountains
I traveled for many hours
Along a gravel road of fog
To a place where dandelions
Are called flowers
Where the water is fresh with salmon
Wild horses and cattle run free
A fisherman gave me a lift
And took me home for tea
And took me home for tea
His wife cooked a dinner with bake apples
And cream from their cow
She talked of all the olden days
When the fish were more
Plentiful than now
I stood for a while on the dock
And listened to the waves on the shore
Where the wives had waited in sorrow
In the songs of old folklore
In the songs of old folklore
O Lady of Labrador
I adore your rugged rustic charm
I hope the outside world
Doesn't cause your outport and harm
Their daughter helped with the mission
That's where she could be found
With the children behind the church
On a hill that overlooked the town
I could see they really had something
It struck me with the dawn
I left them with a prayer
To long linger on
To long linger on
O Lady of Labrador...
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