the tablelands
The Tablelands, in Western Newfoundland’s Gros Morne National Park, are an abrupt, almost-rude, interruption of the park’s lush, coastal landscape. Only a few kilometres away from the ocean, and abutting the “Green Gardens” trails, which look like pictures I’ve seen of New Zealand, where flocks of sheep graze all summer long, the Tablelands look like someone plopped a piece of Arizona to the least Arizona-like place in North America.
I assumed The Tablelands earned their evocative name because the tops of their low mountaintops are so flat, and so is the sparse terrain surrounding them. Not so. The name is less whimsical than it is straightforwardly geological, as the entire “land,” where nothing at all can grow, is a part of the fallout of the spitting of the ancient supercontinent, Pangea. The rude Martian interruption is owing to the fact that the earth’s mantle or “table” has been violently set on top of what would usually be topsoil.
As I’m hiking through the table lands, carrying my three-year-old, whose hearty resolve to hike one kilometre for each of her three years has fled her, it occurs to me, how small, cosmically speaking, our margins for error are when we’re thinking about the ecological preconditions for human life. I’m grateful for topsoil. Then I’m confronting the fact that I am one of those people who is grateful for topsoil, who might very tediously lecture you about soil erosion.
There are some plants in the tablelands. Things can grow where incidental gravel has been transported from road and trail construction; opportunistic lichens and pitcher plants get by on topsoil from the mainland, some ice age mineral deposits, and the abundant insect life you get everywhere in summer in Canada.
As we follow the trail, my father-in-law, Vince, a dutiful Opa but more relevantly an ecologist who has taught geology to would-be science teachers, points out the effects of frost polygons on the stones that litter the subarctic steppe. Sure enough, the rocks are not haphazardly strewn, but form a series of undeniable, if messy, circles. In wintertime, as the groundwater freezes, it expands, driving rocks up through the surface of the ground and very slowly tossing stones into loose, though undeniably uniform, circles—well, polygons. They’re distributed chaotically, but the iterations will always result in the same rough patterns.
There are far more dramatic examples of the phenomenon in other parts of the world, but this is the first time I’ve seen ready examples of “periglacial stone formations” in person. It’s the same phenomenon that places mysterious new rocks in your garden each spring, a belated answer to my question to my wife the year before, as I dug and dug: “didn’t we do this last year?”
Now, in the Tablelands, the landscape, already otherworldly, looks like some alien intelligence is sending us messages with patterns of rocks. But there are no real patterns here, only accidents of water and stone, with no soil to conceal them. It is, of course, interesting, that the same patterns appear here in Gros Morne as on actual Mars.
But still, I can’t help thinking about the slow motion and the patterns created by freezing. My mind, the vagrant, can’t settle for accidents. “Freezing” is supposed to keep things standing still—things are frozen when they don’t work. The worst thing my computer can do is to freeze. If you freeze, it means you’re not thinking. Yet, there’s evidence of the sly movement of freezing everywhere. Things, animals, people get set in motion by freezing and thawing. All over Newfoundland I can’t stop seeing it: St. Anthony, Newfoundland, famous for its dramatic spring icebergs, an arctic hare with its brown summer coat at our campsite; the very last patches of snow from the last winter clinging tenaciously through an August heatwave (read: 20*C and mostly sunny), a close-captioned documentary about the polar vortex on mute in a restaurant, and now the weird, glacial motion of the stones in the Tablelands.
Our Parks Canada interpreter—a self-described “arts person,” who has become a professional science communicator—explains how the passes between the mountains in the Tableland have been carved out by successive ice ages. She gives the children droppers to investigate the different colours of digestive fluids from the insectivorous ferns. She tells me this government job allows her to remain a performer—she had ambitions to be an actor, but wanted to live closer to her parents. She doesn’t need to tell me there are no theatres in rural western Newfoundland. In winter, she tells me, this same sparseness makes it the Tablelands a choice destination for snowmobilers and snowshoers, who can pass over the snow, knowing there’s nothing waiting underneath to endanger them, and where snow is reliable and abundant. People have started coming north on vacation, looking for winter, undoing a pattern of migration in the opposite direction for the opposite reason that has been stable since the last ice age. Scattered and rearranged.
When I get back to our campsite I start reading Robert Moor’s On Trails—one of those books that actually earns the superlatives on its jacket— and, to my considerable surprise, he opens with reflections, far more elegant than anything I could muster, on the same hike I just finished.