PhilPaine.com

Strom­ness is a pleas­ing lit­tle har­bour with many grey stone build­ing climb­ing a steep hill. Smack in the mid­dle, how­ev­er, is a hideous glass box, an exam­ple of just the kind of esthet­ic crime I com­plained about in the last post. The main com­mer­cial street is a nar­row , wind­ing lane, paved with flag­stones, and hemmed in by most­ly eigh­teenth and nine­teenth cen­tu­ry hous­es. Pedes­tri­ans share it, anar­chi­cal­ly, with auto­mo­biles. Most parts only have room for a car going in one direc­tion, but there are occa­sion­al wider spots where oncom­ing traf­fic can nego­ti­ate precedence.

The Strom­ness Muse­um con­tains an amaz­ing dis­play of Cana­di­an arti­facts, includ­ing per­son­al poses­sions of the explor­er John Rae (his bead­ed tobac­co pouch alone would fetch a for­tune among Cana­di­an col­lec­tors), and numer­ous arti­facts of the fur trade. It is intel­li­gent­ly and info­ma­tive­ly dis­played. I thumbed through some of their archival doc­u­ments. Each is like a phone­book on any Cree or Metis com­mu­ni­ty in Cana­da, where Orca­di­an names like Flett, Bal­en­dine, Drev­er, Lin­klater or Isbis­ter are com­mon. There’s a par­tic­u­lar­ly mov­ing dis­play on the life of a boy born to an Orkney­man and an Innu­it moth­er on the Unga­va Penin­su­la of north­ern Que­bec, who was sent to Orkney for gram­mar school. He was appar­ent­ly a very pop­u­lar boy in Orkney, but he returned to Cana­da upon grad­u­at­ing, and fin­ished his life in the Arctic.