Driving through Newfoundland and Rainbows

After a summer perched in my Seaside Blue Happiness Cottage beside the bay, I’ve suddenly started driving. Last week I drove down the Salmonier Line to St. Catherine’s Academy to do my first Ghost Presentation of the season. True to my experience of Newfoundland, it was different than anywhere else! I had consulted maps and Google, but the school suddenly presented itself to me, around a corner on top of a hill. A big school, Kindergarten to Grade 12, with two friendly teenagers in the office who offered to help me lug my stuff to the library. Then my host, Brenda Nolan, arrived with her entire Grade 6 class (about 6 kids I think) to offer me more assistance, so I felt very well taken care of. The kids were responsive and very well behaved, and begged for the Silky ghost to reappear at the end of the presentation. Which she did!

Since then I’ve been in and out of St. John’s to visit Bishop Feild School, which is more than 150 years old and is tucked away on another hill in downtown St. John’s. This was not easy to get to: with the one-way streets and dead ends, I kept circling for about 15 minutes. I could see cars parked by the school but no way in! It was like an impregnable castle… but eventually after I spoke to the school secretary on my cellphone, she revealed where the entrance was… down an impossibly narrow street from another level of the city.

I loved the school: it has big old staircases and cavernous arches leading down to the basement. The library had big tall windows and a huge fireplace. The kids were enthusiastic and chatty and surprisingly fearless: they voted most of my most frightening stories at only a one-skull scariness level. Even my Old Hag story,which usually results in a show of hands for three-skulls worth of spookiness, had them nonchalently voting one skull. I guess living in haunted downtown St. John’s, they’ve seen worse!

The day I drove to St. John’s the sun came out and then the rain swept in and then the sun came out again and then it rained. I love the drive up and down the ribbony highways, with the barrens spreading out ahead of me, and the other cars chugging along through miles and miles of space and sky.

I came back to my little cottage and have been walking to the lighthouse in the mornings, climbing over the wrecked boardwalk (a souvenir of Hurricane Igor), and counting rainbows. This year I have been surprised by all the rainbows in the bay. One seems to start at the same point of land across the water from me. They are often a complete arc, right across the bay, and sometimes the colours are piercingly vivid, but by the time I run to get my camera, they fade.

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