From time to time the interior of Newfoundland—a place of monochrome boreal forest, of limited resource, of long straight roads to elsewhere—opens itself up to enquiry.
It is a fitful business. There was a railway once, now closed; there are bits of industry– lumber mills, or pulp and paper mills; there has been some mining of zinc-lead-copper ore around the town of Buchans, and there used to be a smelting works; and there are small communities dotted around.
And there is an international airport.
Gander International Airport (YQX) was built in the late 1930s not as a destination but as a staging post for onward transatlantic travel. It lies both along the great-circle route to Europe, and along the old Newfoundland railway, which had cut across and somewhat opened up the interior of the island from the end of the nineteenth century.
Before the airport came, there was only forest and wetland, watchful caribou, and the occasional locomotive. Sometimes airmen and women–Charles Lindbergh; Amelia Earhart—used the flat land hereabouts as jumping off points for intrepid crossings which would make the newspapers. Singular flights.
In 1935, a small survey team under instruction from the British and Dominion governments identified a patch of land which was both flat and relatively fog-free and within months, construction work began on an airport. By the time it was finished in 1938, the airport had four runways, administrative buildings and hangers, a power station, a post office and a movie theatre. It was a place of mad ambition, and was for a while the largest (but not the busiest) airport in the world.
By the end of World War II, Gander had shuttled innumerable Canadian and US bombers eastward across the ocean. Facilities were added: dormitories, barracks, mess halls, a bakery, a laundry, warehouses. A place had been rapidly conjured from nothing.
When the various militaries—Canadian, British, American—withdrew from the airport at the end of the war, they left the bones and half of the logic of a town. People, facilities. And the town somehow took hold, and grew.
...
In the decade and a half which followed the war, as international air travel became possible, the airport developed into an important hub; and then, as jet airliners rapidly improved their range, it as suddenly dropped from the map. In that brief window, however, money was lavished on the latest modern design; the International Departures hall was opened in 1959 by Queen Elizabeth, a testament to mid-century, Jaques Tatiesque elegance and barminess, with furniture by Charles and Ray Eames and Arne Jacobsen, a mural by Kenneth Lochhead, and Mondrianesque floor tiles. There are still swivel chairs in front of the mirror in the ladies washroom.
And so it remains now, barely used, preserved in the aspic of time, a movie set with no actors.
The actors used to come. There are photographs dotting the walls of the airport of the celebrities who laid over here, took a drink in the airport bar while their planes refuelled, with locals who would drop by to see who was in town. The Beatles made their first stop here on the way to the USA in 1965, Frank Sinatra got told not to jump the line at the bar, Marilyn Monroe, Prince Philip, and Bob Hope all passed through.
When the airport fell off the transatlantic map, it remained for a while an important stop-over on the route from Cuba to Moscow. Gander is apparently where Fidel Castro first saw snow, and went tobogganing on Christmas Eve 1972.
...
My brother and I reach Gander by following the route, more or less, of the now-defunct Newfoundland narrow-gauge railway. The railway was constructed between 1881 and 1898, and stretched across the island from the capital St. John’s, cut through the empty drip drip drip of the green-black unpeopled forest of its interior (the aboriginal Beothuk inhabitants extinct since 1827), and then worked its way south and west to Port au Basque, where the steamship ferry line ran to North Sydney in Nova Scotia. The mainland.
Branch lines linked up with the mining settlement in Buchans, via Buchans Junction, and the coast here and there. The railway ceased all operations on 1st October, 1988, after the completion of the Trans-Canada Highway in 1965. Now there is just the long straight slightly undulating road, the signs warning of caribou, the lumber trucks. Much of the roadbed of the railway can be walked, a ghost track. And still, there is the ghost airport.
...
Port au Basque is where my brother and I come in. We spend a couple of nights around Gros Morne, the first very wet, the second blissful and benign, and then head to St. John's. En route, we drop in on a deserted Gander Airport.
The town now is a real town of some twelve thousand inhabitants, a town of diners and restaurants and small businesses. People are rooted here, live their lives, depart and return.
Its airport, meanwhile, waits for you in the forest like an apparition—a ghostly setting which only flickers into concrete presence when you wander its empty halls.
Or when a plane lands. In 2001, in the hours following the attacks on the Twin Towers in New York City, thirty-eight planes were routed to Gander. The airport, and the town, suddenly had new purpose. The crisis was addressed, the community pulled together. Seven thousand international passengers from ninety-five countries stayed for five days.
And then left.
Today, as my brother and I float in a mild daze along the empty corridors and through the underwater lounges, as though through the ballrooms of the Titanic, no more flights are scheduled for arrival or departure. I do not remember musak, but feel there must have been musak. Underwater musak. The gates are shut, there is nowhere to buy a ticket. We peer down into the departures lounge through plate glass. The clock on the wall shows Moscow time. Someone is cleaning the floor, somewhere. Ready, for when the next moment comes.
