Hare Bay, Newfoundland

Hare Bay, Newfoundland is a modest village set in front of a great rock promontory. This is everything I love to paint, and I set to it with a will, trying to capture as much as I could before we lost our light.

A local woman—born in this village and now sunk well into middle age without having ever left—stopped to chat. This is unusual in Canada, where people seem more reticent to interrupt strangers. She was of modest mien and unselfconscious about her lack of teeth. In the waning light, I saw a mink swim toward shore. She and Mary tried to find it, but it was too fleet for them.

There seemed to be more cars than usual. “Everyone here goes to church on Sunday evening,” she told us. As we left town, we noticed that each church was indeed lighted and full of people. Living in rural Newfoundland, they have much to be thankful for.

In 2016, my daughter Mary and I set off across Alaska and Canada on a Great White North Adventure, which you can read about starting here. We arrived in Anchorage at the beginning of September and got home in mid-October. In retrospect, it might have made more sense to do this during the summer, since Alaska and Canada threw a mess of strange weather at us.