Scene
from Baltimore's Mansion · by Wayne Johnston · set at The Gaze, Ferryland
“An iceberg hundreds of feet high and bearing an undeniable likeness to the Blessed Virgin Mary appeared off St. John's harbour. As word of the apparition spread, thousands of people flocked to Signal Hill to get a glimpse of it. An ever-growing flotilla of fishing boats escorted it along the southern shore as it passed Petty Harbour, Bay Bulls, Tors Cove, Ferryland, where my father's grandparents and his father, Charlie, who was twelve, saw it from a rise of land known as the Gaze.”
Johnston's memoir is rooted in Ferryland; this opening sweeps the Southern Shore and lands at the family's specific vantage, the Gaze.
Wayne Johnston, Baltimore's Mansion (Knopf Canada, 1999), excerpt on CBC Books — source
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • Winner of the Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-Fiction • Finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award and CBC Canada Reads • From the acclaimed author of Jennie’s Boy and The Colony of Unrequited Dreams, Wayne Johnston's luminous Newfoundland memoir is a story of fathers and sons, exile and belonging, and reimagined national history—told with familial intimacy and the grandeur of myth. source
