Some remains of abandoned Newfoundland fishing communities succumb to the wild, while others turn up in villages where residents resettled.

BY WAYNE CURTIS

Kevin Toope leads me to a hillside meadow on a sunny summer's day and points to an open knob of land rising like a newel post at the mouth of a small island’s long and narrow harbor. "That’s where my great-great-grandfather wanted to be buried," he tells me. "Buried standing up, so he could watch the ships come and go." Alas, the knob proved to be solid rock, which is to say utterly resistant to unorthodox burial requests. So Toope’s forebear was instead buried (lying down) behind the church.

We set out in search of him, making our way around a tumbled mess of sun-bleached boards; a fragment of wall pierced by a Gothic window offers the sole clue that this was once a church. Clattering through shattered bits of slate roof tiles that litter the ground, Toope disappears into an alder thicket. Moments later he calls out, "Here he is."

I follow into the brush and find Toope crouched next to the lichen-encrusted remains of a toppled picket fence. He’s pulled aside branches to reveal an ornate headstone. "James Toop," he reads. (An inattentive minister endowed Kevin’s branch of the family with an unrequested e.) "Died 1890. 79 years old."

We alighted here on the island of Ireland’s Eye after a half-hour’s ride by charter boat from the village of New Bonaventure on the Bonavista Peninsula, which reaches northeast from Canada’s island of Newfoundland. Ireland’s Eye was settled as a fishing station in the 18th century. By the 20th century, the three-mile-long island was home to about 400 residents in four communities; the boat dropped us off at what had been the largest of them, also called Ireland’s Eye, a town of about 150 people huddled on a well-protected harbor. It’s also where Kevin Toope was born, and it’s the town his parents left behind in 1954, when Kevin was two years old. In 1965 the last of the families on Ireland’s Eye boarded boats and sailed away, leaving the place to the spruce and ravens.

Thirty-six years later, the spruce haven’t yet fully reclaimed their domain, and rustling meadows still surround the harbor’s hilly margins, lending the effect of a coliseum.

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