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Newfoundland and Labrador

There’s no sign on the Trans-Canada Highway that marks its start, or its end, in Newfoundland. Sure, there’s a sign and a stylized map on the sidewalk outside St. John’s City Hall that calls itself “Km 0,” but the Trans-Canada itself was moved away years ago. When the highway was opened in 1962, it was routed through the downtowns of many of the cities it connected because merchants wanted the business from the visitors it would bring. Heavy trucks started using the wider, better-built road, and those local merchants quickly changed their minds. Now, the official highway usually bypasses the city and St. John’s is no different. That’s why, today, the Trans-Canada officially begins beside the municipal dump on the outskirts of town. Maybe that’s also why there’s no sign.

Peter and I drove to a boat ramp that drops into Quidi Vidi Gut, the harbour on the north edge of St. John’s, and jostled with too many tourists at the wharf for too few parking spaces. There’s a craft brewery there and a few souvenir stores and the whole area is very quaint, with brightly coloured wooden buildings at the base of the low cliffs. Fortunately, nobody had a boat or wanted to park in the ocean itself, so I backed the Lexus into the cold water for the official start of our long journey west. It was early June, and we were wearing sweaters and jackets for the single-digit chill. At the last minute, I scooped some salt water into a plastic bottle to carry to the Pacific and then we drove into the mist to nearby Quidi Vidi Lake.

This seemed the right place to begin the actual highway drive. The official Trans-Canada was moved out to the ring road in the 1990s and that four-lane highway was extended east to the edge of the Robin Hood Bay Regional Waste Management Facility in 1999. There, the 7,700-kilometre national icon ends without notice under a bridge. A regular two-lane industrial road continues on for four dismal kilometres to a hard stop at the lake.

I would be writing stories along the way for the Globe and Mail, and shot a phone video at the lake decrying the lack of a sign. I’m not alone. On Google Maps, there’s a locator pin and a few reviews that feel the same way. “Put up a sign please would like the satisfaction of acknowledging I came to the end of the road lol,” wrote A Maze the previous year. The eloquently named arseface2k wrote that “they have a whole park set up for where Terry Fox started his run and not even a measly sign for this, which you could argue is more important.” And a guy named Joe Caines wrote: “Am I there?? Did I make it?? Guess we will never know. Over 7000 km. Nothing. So much history of our country is connected to this hiway. Well, when I get there again, in June, I’m bringing my own spray paint, make my own plaque.”

He’s right that a huge part of Canada’s history is tied in some way to the Trans-Canada Highway. For postwar Newfoundlanders, the federal government used the promise of a highway as an enticement for Confederation: it agreed to pay the costs of the Newfoundland Railway that already crossed the island, and to pay the entire cost of a reliable, regular ferry route to link the island at Port aux Basques with the mainland. More important, Newfoundlanders knew that if and when a Trans-Canada Highway should be built, the Feds would pay for a significant portion of its construction. This was a big deal: at almost 1,000 kilometres, it would be the second-longest stretch of any province, after Ontario. Not that Newfoundlanders really cared about the rest of Canada.

“The majority of people here in Newfoundland just think of it as a road across the island,” Lloyd Adams told me at his home in Whitbourne. “But I would think that those people have probably never been off the island.”

I met Lloyd in 2012 and sat down with him and his wife, Audrey, on their 48th wedding anniversary to talk about the Trans-Canada. He was fresh out of high school in 1953 when he landed a job as a surveyor’s assistant for the new highway, earning $105 per month for holding a tape measure and plotting points on rudimentary maps. His team of a half-dozen men slept in tents and were in the bush for weeks at a time with no generators, no ATVs, no power saws. They worked from a camp, and when they completed five kilometres of surveying, they broke camp and moved it to the next new start, pressing across the island. They had the better job, too. Another team of a half-dozen men swung the axes that cleared the way.

The beginning of the new road to be constructed was at the corner of Stamps Lane and Freshwater Road in St. John’s, about three kilometres from the city hall, back when there was just a farm and a couple of houses at the intersection. They headed west from there. “Back then, what we were really doing was pioneering,” said Lloyd. “I don’t think I realized the challenges of the things we did, because it was just a job. We were in canvas tents, and the bathroom was a two-holer in the back.”

They pushed on, five kilometres at a time, one of a number of crews doing the same job across the new province. Ponds were drained and muskegs filled for the road to run across, and more often than not, all the heavy work was done with picks and spades for the extra employment it created. Gravel trucks backed into a quarry to be hand-loaded by pairs of men with shovels. And when they were done in the late 1950s, and the road was finally complete from St. John’s to Port aux Basques — avoiding out-of-the-way Labrador, of course — few people appreciated the physical effort it took.

Edward McCourt, an author and professor at the University of Saskatchewan, drove the length of the highway with his wife, Margaret, in 1963, the year after the Trans-Canada Highway was declared fully open. In Newfoundland, two-thirds of it was still unpaved.

“A wonderful road,” he was told by a truck driver at a coffee stop. “The lots in St. John’s is full of cars folks like you drove over from Port aux Basques and didn’t figure was worth driving back. A wonderful, wonderful road.”

McCourt’s account of the journey in his book The Road Across Canada is perceptive and graphic and hard to imagine today:

Rock-fills lightly coated with sand or gravel (the kind of road bed that keeps a man vibrating steadily for hours after he has stopped driving); dense clouds of dust hanging over the road for miles, through which monstrous trucks and cats (lights ablaze and visible through the dust for ten feet) bore down upon us with terrifying speed; roller-coaster forest trails hardly more than one-way tracks; blind hills and paralyzing right-angle curves — these were the orthodox hazards of the unpaved sections of the Trans-Canada Highway in Newfoundland.

Premier Joey Smallwood, who had brought the province into Confederation in 1949 and negotiated every facet of its integration within Canada, was well aware of the embarrassment of the Trans-Canada Highway and in no hurry to improve it. There was now a ferry service paid for by the Feds to bring goods to and from the island, and a railway bankrolled by the Feds to carry them wherever they needed to go. If any improvements were made to the Trans-Canada, the province would have to pay half the cost, and canny Joey just pleaded poverty. Schools were more important, he said. Hospitals were more important. Prime Minister John Diefenbaker would just have to wait for his glorious highway while everything else took priority. When the Trans-Canada was declared open in 1962 at Rogers Pass — at the national ceremony, not the cheeky B.C. one — there was a convoy of politicians from across the country but no one from Newfoundland. Joey didn’t want to pay 50/50 for the highway, and neither he nor Diefenbaker would blink.

It took a new governing party and a new prime minister to get things moving again, with a new deal in which Ottawa agreed to pay 90 percent of the cost of completing the highway to a high-quality, national standard. The country would mark its centenary in 1967, and Prime Minister Lester Pearson wanted everything ready for that showcase to the world. McCourt saw regular road signs that declared: We’ll finish the drive in ’65, Port Aux Basques to St. John’s, thanks to Lester B. Pearson, and when the money started flowing in soon after, the curves were straightened, the road was widened, and the asphalt went down. It took a couple of years, but the Trans-Canada Highway would finally be complete.

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The road was wide and smooth for Peter and me as we drove west. The landscape seemed empty, with low trees and pond-spattered fields all the more desolate for the low-lying cloud that kept obscuring the horizon. There was rock right beneath the stubby grass, and erratic boulders were scattered about where they’d been moved by ancient ice. Quarries scraped out hillsides beside the road. You can graze sheep here, but that’s about it. There were rarely houses, except in the few communities down by the coast. Sometimes, you could see the ocean off to the left or right — St. John’s is on a large peninsula attached to the bulk of the island by a strip of land less than 10 kilometres wide — but the sea was grey that day, the wind cruel.

I remembered a comment Lloyd Adams had made just before I left his house in Whitbourne. “It was tough land to work on,” he said as I’d put on my shoes, ready to head out to drive to the other side of the country. “These days, you don’t even notice when you’re speeding past. Now we have a four-lane highway and it only takes 45 minutes to get to Walmart. I guess that’s progress.”

The highway is constantly upgraded, and the government announced a $306 million project in 2023 to add lanes to it at some of its narrower points. Much of the Trans-Canada on the island is still just one lane in each direction, with roads and driveways leading off it, and the ultimate plan is to make it two lanes in each direction with a wide centre median. This is known as “twinning,” and it’s the safest kind of road because it’s almost impossible for vehicles to drive head-on into each other. If they lose control and leave the road, they have to make it across the centre median before they can smash into oncoming traffic, which is the deadliest of crashes. Or, in government-speak in its press release, “Twinning the Trans-Canada here will lead to safer communities and better movement of goods across the island. That means spending less time on the road, and more time with your family.”

I was spending less time with my family and more time with Peter, and now that we were headed west, we were starting to bug each other. I like to drive at the speed of traffic, which in most of Canada means about 10 or even 20 percent above the speed limit, but Peter was used to driving in the United Kingdom where enforcement is much stricter and speed cameras are everywhere. When I drove, he constantly flexed his right foot against an imaginary brake; when he drove, I regularly nodded for him to get a move on. I was, at least, bringing him around to the idea of sipping coffee from a cup while driving — or a tea in his case, which he was used to drinking before setting out to keep both hands free for the wheel. That’s a good idea in crowded London or Liverpool, but irrelevant on the Trans-Canada and only wastes time skulking over tables at coffee shops.

Actually, I think he was also a little nervous for all the signs that put the fear of God into drivers about moose on the roads. They’re a very real danger in Newfoundland where people are killed every year in collisions. A standard greeting after any arrival on the highway is: “See any moose?” Back in 2012, the province spent $1.5 million on a couple of sections of “moose radar” that used roadside infrared sensor beams to detect large animals wandering onto the highway, then flashed warning lights at motorists for three minutes over a sign that read: Moose on Highway when Lights are Flashing. It didn’t work, of course, and was pulled down after a few years. Sometimes, moose wandered back into the woods, and drivers didn’t see them and assumed the lights were faulty; other times, moose grazed beside the road longer than three minutes and the lights went out while they were still there; most of the time, the sensors couldn’t cope with the weather. In Newfoundland, the climate gets blamed for many things. Drivers learned to never believe the lights.

However, if the sensors had been installed on the central stretch of the Trans-Canada between Gander and Norris Arm, it might have helped Michelle Higgins when she drove to work on the morning of May 7, 2012. She hit and killed a full-grown moose that crushed her car with the impact and rolled its roof off as if it were a sardine tin, but she carried on driving in such shock that her brain didn’t register the collision. It wasn’t until she reached her workplace in Gander, 40 kilometres away, that she realized what had happened.

“I remember getting out of the car,” she told me a month later when I stopped at her home on my first Trans-Canada drive. “I remember my co-worker coming up and putting her arm around me, and asked me if I was okay, and I kind of looked at her and asked, ‘Well, why wouldn’t I be?’ And she said, ‘Michelle, you’re bleeding.’ She said, ‘Look at your car — were you in an accident?’ I said, ‘No, I wasn’t in an accident.’ And she asked, ‘Did you hit a moose?’ I said, ‘No, I never even seen a moose, let alone hit one.’ She said, ‘Look at your car,’ and when I turned around and looked at my car, I couldn’t believe it.”

I stopped at her home again in the Lexus, just to check in. She was on her back deck and told me she still had no recollection of the collision that broke two bones in her neck. She’d been worried back then that when she next saw a moose, the memories might return and overwhelm her, but she’d seen moose since and — nothing.

Michelle wanted to tell me, though, that she wasn’t alone. Three years after her collision, on a road on Newfoundland’s northern peninsula near the tiny community of Conche, a man hit a moose while driving his son’s car and carried on driving home without realizing what had happened.

“The moose come out of nowhere, quick — I never even had time hardly to see him, and next thing I know he was on top of the car,” Stephen Bromley told the CBC later that week. “I didn’t know nothing after that and just kept on driving, kept on going, and I figured I found it a bit cold, like, getting cool, so I figured the air-conditioning was on, so I turned that down, so I kept on going.”

Another driver saw him and flagged him down. “I said, ‘Stop! Stop!’” Tom Canning told the same CBC journalist. “He pulled over, and I said, ‘My lord, Skipper — what happened to you?’ He said, ‘I don’t know.’ I didn’t know who the man was, but when he spoke, I knew it was Steve because I liked to buy fish from him. I said, ‘Steve! Man, you’ve got no roof on your car! And the windshield is gone!’ He was in one terrible mess. He was buried in moose manure and his face was covered totally by blood.”

The CBC contacted Michelle that week to tell her of the second collision and asked for a comment. “They said, ‘We interviewed him, and he said that he never, ever believed your story,’” she told me. “Him and his dad were sitting out on the front porch when the story was aired and they said, ‘That’s crazy. There’s no way that happened.’ And I said, ‘Well, I’m glad he finally believed me, but it was a hard way to learn.’”

A few months later, he contacted her to ask for advice about the dizziness he was still feeling, and they became friends on Facebook; several years after that, they arranged to meet for a coffee when they were both visiting Deer Lake. “Him and I met, we talked, and we’ve been together now three years,” she told me. “I said, ‘It’s a hard way for God to bring us together, isn’t it?’”

It wasn’t love at first sight — Conche is a very small community, and “I didn’t expect him to look the way he looked,” she said, “but then I realized, this was the Conche look, and I finally got him wearing normal clothes now. He wore all these baggy pants. I says to him, ‘You walk around a corner, your pants is going that way and you’re going this way.’”

She still lived at Norris Arm and he still lived 400 kilometres away at Conche, but the plan was to spend winters together at her home and summers at his. “It’s a beautiful spot,” she said, and showed me photos on her phone. One was of the view across the bay in an evening, with multicoloured lights from the fish plant reflected in the water. “I says, this is my retirement spot. When you sit in his living room and you’re looking at the fish plant, it’s just unreal. Down there, it’s a whole new world.”

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The first cars to officially drive across Newfoundland were in a posse of five Land Rovers in 1958; they made the journey from St. John’s to Port aux Basques on Lloyd Adams’s new highway, with Premier Joey Smallwood himself at the wheel of the lead vehicle. Their four-wheel drive was handy on what McCourt later described as “an endless succession of iron-surfaced washboard, gaping potholes, and naked rock — a shoulder-twisting, neck-snapping, dust-shrouded horror.” That was five years later, when the circus had to cancel its planned visit to St. John’s because the highway bridges couldn’t support the weight of the elephants in their trailers; they would have had to walk separately across the dozens of river crossings.

It took until November 27, 1965, for the final stretch of highway to be paved in Newfoundland, and to celebrate, Joey Smallwood arranged another official drive for the following summer. This time, it was two separate convoys, one leaving St. John’s with Premier Smallwood and the other leaving Port aux Basques with Prime Minister Pearson, and they met in the centre of the island at the road’s halfway point near Grand Falls. Along the route, signs declared: We finished this drive in ’65, thanks to Mr. Pearson. A 20-metre column was built on a hill overlooking the highway, made of red granite brought in from Smallwood’s hometown of Gambo and fashioned by stonemasons from Quebec. An air show flew overhead, and the two politicians shook hands and congratulated each other on a job well done. The hollow pillar was named “Pearson’s Peak,” and a granite plaque on it let everyone know that “this shaft was unveiled by the Prime Minister Rt. Hon. Lester B. Pearson on July 12, 1966, to mark the official opening of the Trans-Canada Highway in Newfoundland.” And then everyone went home and that was that.

The monument was spruced up the next year with lights and an illuminated maple leaf plaque to mark Canada’s centenary, but there was nothing Pearson’s Peak had an illuminated maple leaf added in 1967 to mark Canada’s centenary. else there and it became just a place for young people to park their cars and drink beer and make out. Pieces of rock started falling off, and it was closed to the public with a heavy steel gate across its access road. Finally, in 1997, it was pulled down. The plaque and the maple leaf disappeared. I went looking for it in 2012 and eventually found an empty, unheralded site surrounded by trees with a driveway of cracked pavement leading up from the road.

“It seemed to me to be a waste of money,” Ron Barrington told me at his home in Badger when I searched for it again in 2023. He’d been a labourer on the project, pouring the concrete and managing the scaffolding for the stonemasons. “It was probably only a couple of hundred thousand dollars, but that was a lot of money at the time. I finished work the day before it was opened, but I never went back on the day. Afterward, we used to hang out there and drink beer and stuff, but it was a garbage dump, people bringing in beer and leaving a mess. When they pulled it down, nobody really missed it.”

That wasn’t quite true. Terry Best missed it.

“As young kids, because so many older kids drank there, we would collect beer bottles thrown over the bank,” he told me over the phone from his home in Windsor, Ontario. “My fondest memories were getting to hang with some of the older kids there, and because it was a free space, a public space, it didn’t matter what your age was. You couldn’t be excluded at Pearson’s Peak.”

Terry was from down the road at Buchans Junction, and in 2002, he bought the empty site of Pearson’s Peak from the government. “It was just there for the taking, and I don’t think anybody else ever considered it haveable. It was considered valueless.” His plan was to build a four-bedroom lodge on the property that would have a huge chimney that mimicked the original monument, but then his health deteriorated and his children had no interest in the place, so he put it up for sale two weeks before I drove by in 2023. He was asking $29,000.

His realtor, Darryl Butt, met us there and showed me the land. A Skamper trailer was parked at the top, used by a friend of Terry’s, but no one was home. Blackflies swarmed everywhere. A battered lawn chair sat next to a makeshift table outside the trailer door, looking across at a low stub of concrete in the centre of a gravel circle overrun by twiggy bushes. This was the concrete base that once supported the mighty pillar, 65 feet of granite to mark the 65th year of the century when the highway was completed. Now, there was just a red birdhouse sitting on it, the only splash of colour aside from the green of the fir trees. Darryl pushed his way through the branches and sat on the stub for a photo, smiling for the camera, while I swatted at bugs and Peter escaped to the closed-window sanctuary of the Lexus.

“It’s zoned commercial, so whatever goes here’s got to be something tourist-related,” said Darryl. “You’ve got the location and you’ve got the view, and the Trail is just down by the Trans-Canada.” The former railway line, decommissioned after the construction of the highway, is now a hiking and cycling trail that runs across the island. “And normally, we’ve got the best weather in Newfoundland.”

It was probably going to be a tough sell because of the requirement for tourism, he acknowledged, though an Airbnb might get around it. So far nobody had shown an interest because of its connection to the monument. Ron’s cynical words seemed to ring true, that it had been a political glad-hander and a waste of money. When Darryl left, I joined Peter in the filtered air of the Lexus, and we drove away without looking back.