In 1941 they took Uncle Tom’s berry patch and turned it into an enormous airport. Until then, Uncle Tom had sailed here from his home each year in his boat, like his ancestors had for many generations, to pick the bakeapple berries, red berries, blueberries, cherry berries, crow berries... But, despite being a floodplain (or perhaps because it was a floodplain), it was the only flat land around. So Goose Bay was created. After the war it was used for NATO training, and each country built their own sets of barracks. The airport was the third biggest in Canada.
The civilian town of Happy Valley grew alongside, and the two were merged into one town. Because it’s a floodplain, the town is built on sand, and is extremely flat. People still pick lots of berries (someone told me she had picked 48 gallons of bakeapple berries so far this season).
But because it’s flat, and everything is far apart, it’s not photogenic, or maybe difficult to get to any photogenic parts. I took no photos. You need to imagine it.
Instead, I took a photo from the plane of the gulf of St. Lawrence, and several of Labrador.
The next morning I took the ferry up the coast to Nain and back, so the other photos are of the start of that trip.
The next posts are about each of the towns I saw on the way. They are all Inuit towns in the Inuit self governing area along the coast, and none of the towns has road access.
No comments:
Post a Comment