Labrador coast

As we found in Newfoundland, so we found in Labrador. Museums were shut, sites closed, and cafes had signs that read "closed for the season" placed there last September.

We could not go inside it (closed), but the 2nd largest lighthouse in Atlantic Canada is wonderful in the strange light of this mid-June afternoon. It's rare to see a lightkeeper's house attached to the lighthouse, and the cunning blending of shingles was much appreciated.

Nicely blended shingles

look up, look way up!

What surprised us was the beautiful, pink sandy beaches everywhere. Unfortunately it was too cold and windy to enjoy them except from the window of the car.

One site we did get out of the car to brave the wind was a little pile of rocks among the sand dunes, right by the side of the road. 

Saying this unique mound was an understated monument is an understatement. A simple plaque indicates that this is the single oldest burial mound in the entire new world!

A small boy was buried here about 7,500 years ago. Of the first peoples to settle in this area, the Maritime Archaic, he was only discovered in 1973, when archaeologists asked if there was anything interesting in the area and a local showed him this mound of rocks. Where would this place be without its elder citizens who know something is unusual but just live near it without curiosity?

The boy was found to have been covered with red ochre, and buried with weapons and, poignantly, a toy bone whistle. Fires had been lit of either side of his body. Was he the son of someone important? Were all children buried with this much care and ceremony? Or were children and adults treated the same? No one knows.

At the time, he would have been buried only a few metres from the sea, but with that glacier that had started receding at that time and lifting the land, the grave is now almost a kilometre away from the shore. The sandy soil seems to have preserved the grave extremely well. After it was excavated and studied, it was replaced.

seashore distant from the grave

The Maritime Archaic peoples gradually moved north, but by 4,000 years ago they started to disappear, and were gone entirely less than a thousand years later.  

Labrador has the oldest rock in the world. Almost 4 billion years old to be clear. Its sedimentary rocks contain the oldest known evidence of life anywhere on earth. In the south here, it is undulating mounds that look flat from a distance, and contain water and plants that can bear being under snow and ice for months every year. Its beautiful and terrible, and I am glad I am heading back to a warm bed and breakfast. 

Old rock

water.....

....and snow

 

Still, these big open spaces, barren and yet teeming with life, home to drifts of snow and caribou, inhospitable to humans and yet supporting communities, inaccessible but for one lonely road occasionally or via boats able to brave the ice and currents of the open Atlantic, they speak to me. Even the Vikings left this place largely alone, and master French mariner Jacques Cartier said "I believe this is the land God gave to Cain." 

I felt the same way after visiting Canada's high north - Inuvik, Aklavik, etc. - and I wish I could spend a little more time in Labrador.