Beyond romance (Portugal Cove, NL)

Alternative Routes
Blog posting #10
BriarpatchMagazine.com

by Shayna Stock, with photography by Dominique Fenton

Ed Belzer and his grandson Joe tilling the garden.

We city-folk, myself included, tend to romanticize rural life. As we visit these communities, and see them for a brief moment through our outsiders’ eyes, it’s easy to continue this tendency. We probably don’t see a lot of the trials and struggles, conflict, tension, and difficulties inevitably associated with sharing our lives with others.

Our last few postings have been quite optimistic, portraying the communities we have visited in a positive light. Our experiences have all been very encouraging, due to the simple fact that each one represents some kind of alternative to mainstream individualism. But I want to avoid leaving you with an overly idealistic sense of what it is like to live in community.

It was a hot sweaty day, and I was harvesting spinach on an organic farm in Portugal Cove. I was reminded of my travels, in other parts of the world, and how I have been awe-struck at the image of a woman with long, braided hair, the end of her deep purple sari floating in the breeze, surrounded by a broad field of green. Or how I marveled at a group of fisherfolk hauling in their nets in perfect rhythm. There’s even a hint of magic in the image of a Canadian farmer pulling a plough behind a tractor or a team of horses, through a seemingly endless yellow field.

As I scanned the rows of spinach and wiped sweat from my brow, I realized the careless naivety couched in these moments of awe. While I had marveled at these images of beauty and attempted to capture them forever in a 4×6 to share with my friends, I had overlooked (and therefore ignorantly undermined) the essentiality of their work.

It’s easy to lose sight of the functionality of these every-day acts, to forget that these people are doing this, not for our entertainment, or so we can decorate our living room walls with their image, but for their own survival.

Just like it’s easy, when we are only with these communities for a brief moment in time, to see only the positive aspects of community life. It’s easy to romanticize about living in an environment where love and sharing and mutual support abound, and conflict is rare or absent or easily resolved by sharing our feelings with others.

Common sense tells us that real life is never this rosy; and we must remember as we move through these communities that we will never get the full picture in just a few days.

Our intention throughout this journey is not to idolize these communities any more than it is to display their faults; rather, we hope merely to illuminate alternative possibilities to the individualistic society in which most of us live.

Shayna and Dominique are traveling across Canada in search of community, and sharing what they find with Briarpatch readers. Read their introduction to the project here.