Newfoundland Sketches

In Newfoundland I found how wholesome and bright a people might be and took some of that light home with me.

 
In the summer of 1976, I worked on various rooftops at the Cleveland Clinic. I remember watching cement trucks chug up and down rattled streets below as I was sitting on a ledge, dangling my feet and taking a break from moving angiograms. These were actual nitrate films in huge drums we were taking off rooftop storage. Nitrate film decomposition not only destroys the recording, it gives off a flammable gas that can cause other problems. In my town where a river famously caught fire in the 1970s, we were sensitive to unexpected ignition. I thought at the time that pictures of people’s hearts seemed to be suffering the same fate as the hearts themselves. Those mammoth trucks I was watching always fascinated me. That massive Archimedean screw and its slow-turning drum weren’t moving cement very quickly or very well—but they stopped it from becoming hard and solid, the concrete it was destined to be. It’s an odd metaphor, but I think we’re inside that drum now—a compartment of time and circumstance turning sloth-like toward something more solid and stable. This is our hope anyway.

Much later, in 2008, when my father-in-law Sam was dying of congestive heart failure in the last week or two of his life, I had two revelations. The first was the thought that I was not watching him die—I was watching him live. From his hospital bed at that time, I heard him say to his daughter, my wife Robin, “Go home honey. You look tired.” Having spent considerable time in a hospital bed myself, I knew how lonely the experience is, how desperate we are sometimes for a little company. Yet he could bear anything for her, even the loneliness of that room. Sam was a federal agent and as tough as they come—but his heart held something I wasn’t expecting, a quality I didn’t possess myself then. The second revelation I had was an awareness of the principle he was demonstrating: that It is the job of the living to live. None of us are ever really dying until we are. Up until that point it is our work, our primary directive to live as well as we can. Like all of us, I’ve been working on myself in the middle of this pandemic. It has forced us to go inward, and for many probably farther than we have ever been before. Growing up in Cleveland, I became a strong believer in the magic of place, the geography and culture of a moment. But there was another province that had a powerful effect on me in other ways. Because I was hit so strongly by it, Newfoundland has been on my mind lately. Its stories come rushing back at me sometimes, for various reasons and when I need them.

This was my first time living outside of the U.S. and things seemed very strange to me, as if we had stepped backward in time, outside of familiar things.

In late August of 1988, we flew from Hopkins Airport in Cleveland through Toronto Pearson, eventually landing in a rather modest airfield in St. John’s, Newfoundland. Looking at the new terrain through a jet window, we were surprised at the stunted pine trees along the runways, the rocky moonscape around us. An odd green shale scattered across the landscape. After settling into the tiny, one-room apartment we’d rented during a scouting trip earlier that summer, we made our way to the graduate student bar downtown. Robin was a doctoral student and University Fellow at Memorial University of Newfoundland, or “MUN” as the locals call it. Her new department secretary mentioned this as a good place to go for a beer and some social time. Stepping out of our cab, we found a quaint, homey pub on the first floor of an elegant rowhouse on Merrymeeting Road. This was my first time living outside of the U.S. and things seemed very strange to me, as if we had stepped backward in time, outside of familiar things. We thought St. John’s probably looked the way San Francisco must have in the 19th century: small, close streets transecting two or three wider roads and forming a grid across a steep incline rising out of the sheltered, deep-water harbor the city is famous for. The houses looked like something out of an old travel calendar photo—wooden structures in reds, aquas, blues, slates, whites, and forest greens popping inside a camera’s lens.

The modestly lit pub had a kind of Dickensian look—simple and full of old-world charm. There were only two other people there when we arrived, so we soon struck up a conversation with one of them. A companionable and interesting woman, Hannah sat comfortably elbowing a beer at the bar. She told us she was a doctoral student from Scotland studying geology. When I naively asked why she chose Memorial University, a little surprised, she said that Newfoundland was a great place to study rocks! She asked how we liked the island so far, and I mentioned it was good to be out of Appalachia after living in Southern Ohio for so long. With another puzzled look, she said, “But you aren’t out of it! It’s the same mountain range running all the way up here.” I thought about that for a bit. The reasons behind my attitude at that time were mostly personal. I was raised in a large city among people of diverse ethnic and religious backgrounds. I found Southern Ohio culture too provincial. Typical of the Appalachia I had come to know, poverty and ecological destruction became like a sad song I couldn’t quite get out of my head. I realized later, years after our time in St. John’s, that my views of Southern Ohio were myopic. I was only seeing part of a picture that was much larger and more beautiful than I imagined. I began to see the Canadian mountain range as Hannah saw it. The hills in Ohio and the massive cliffs dropping into the wild North Atlantic in St. John’s were at opposite ends of a line you could follow on a map with relative ease. My dreams of living in this exotic new country had been replaced by a geological continuity now plain to see. When we asked her about the green shale at the airport, she told us it was found nowhere else in the world. She called it Newfoundland shale. We could easily see now why any geologist would love this place. The terrain told Hannah stories we could glimpse and appreciate without fully understanding them, as if the angled strata of a rocky seacoast awash with waves and sunlight were a kind of script waiting for us to read and become part of its play.

In his excellent book The Iambics of Newfoundland, journalist Robert Finch shares a version of this story. A young man from Newfoundland is hitchhiking his way across the midwestern United States, probably Kansas or Iowa. On a freeway with his thumb out, he is stopped by a highway patrol officer who promptly tells him, “You can’t hitchhike on the freeway here.”

To which he replies, “Well, I appear t’ be doin’ it!”

When I read this line, I could hear the voice behind it so clearly. It’s a good, but brief example of what Finch probably means by iambics. There is a lilting upward in Newfoundland speech that charms and surprises. It has that effect often seen in good standup comedy where some absurdity is brought to a crescendo through loudness, syllabic emphasis, and rhythm. People who can imitate a good Newfoundlander accent are a delight at parties and small gatherings. The iambic here would be in appear. A Newfoundlander would pronounce this with a strong accent on the second half of the word. This phrasing and pronunciation signal that the patrol officer is, contrary to her or his own assessment, missing something obvious: that hitchhiking can be done on the freeway here because someone is obviously “doin’ it.” The boldness of this traveler is typical of Newfoundlanders as we knew them. They are fearless and, paradoxically, have great respect for much of what we would call authority. Yet the traveler here clearly does not know what the trooper means by “can’t.” There is so much freedom in things like this on the hitchhiker’s massive and sparsely populated island, the idea of banning hitchhiking—a necessary thing where he comes from—seems absurd to him. To us this may appear disorderly and naïve, but to him it would be a matter of necessity or survival, thus his confusion. His delivery of the line would have been so charming to a good listener it would have been impossible to take offense. Newfoundlanders are at ease and usually know how to put others at ease as well. Their delivery and style of speech are wondrous.

Overall, Finch’s story is as good, poignant, and accurate a description of Newfoundland character as any I have heard. Newfoundlanders are generous and brave, almost to a fault. They are portrayed in Canadian humor as naïve and strange yokels, but in truth they are far from naïve and certainly not yokels. The only strangeness we found there is how remarkable they are as human beings, and how unexpected.

An oath is both irreverence and empathy in typical Newfoundlander fashion.

I’ve told this story before. We are at a restaurant called the Blue Door, and it is our first night out to dinner in Newfoundland. Our new friends Joann Dobbins, an instructor at the university, and Gren McGonegal, a local public television producer, are telling us tales about Newfoundlanders. Joann was born and raised here, her father a local industrialist. Gren is a mainlander from Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario. He refers us to the Newfoundland-produced music show in which local musicians play folk instruments and sing while wearing hip waders and work clothing. The lyrics to Newfoundland’s best-known folk song go like this:

I’se The B’y that builds the boat and
I’se The B’y that sails her and
I’se The B’y that catches the fish and
Brings ’em home to Liza

I tell Gren that just that afternoon I saw two people rowing out in an aluminum dinghy on the North Atlantic below the enormous cliffs of Signal Hill (Signal Hill National Historic Site). I ask what the hell those people are doing in such a small boat on those rough seas, and he tells me they’re fishing. “That’s nothing!” he adds. “I’ve seen those guys row so far out to sea, you can’t see them anymore!” He sips from a heated snifter of Grand Marnier, something he ordered for the whole table. “And that’s not the worst part,” he says. “None of them can swim!” We have been watching Gren inhale pipe smoke all evening as if he were smoking a cigarette, which he also often does. There are five pewter rings bought in Detroit on his fingers and thumb from visits to blues clubs there, something he loves. Joann tells us the waters around Newfoundland are too cold for swimming, and there are few indoor pools on the island. When Gren finishes his sip of Grand Marnier, he delivers the coup de grace. “And they’re all in hip waders…! You know what happens to people when they fall out of a boat in hip waders!”

Gren and Joann often mention the Newfoundland substitute for profanity to us. A Newfoundlander hitting his or her thumb with a hammer will, instead of swearing in the usual way, “Take an oath.” The oath always contains the phrase “Holy Lord liftin’ sweet sufferin’ Jesus!” but may include various, often graphic descriptors of Christ’s condition or torment. The inventiveness of any added descriptors was, we were told, a thing to behold. One might hear, for example, upon the striking of a thumb with that hammer, “Holy Lord liftin’ sweet suffering dying-up-on-the-cross bloody Jesus!” In the same way that an otherwise polite or reserved person here might swear under sharp pain, a Newfoundlander utters this graphic phrase instead. I’ve puzzled over the phenomenon for years, probably because as a student of language I am amazed by its inventiveness, its utility, and its color. I’ve decided that an oath is both irreverence and empathy in typical Newfoundlander fashion. It’s as if the sufferer from the hammer blow is in some proximity to that of the savior. When shouted in a Newfoundlander accent, taking an oath can be, not surprisingly, very funny. But it may also be heard as clever rhetoric and wry humor from a people living under survivalist conditions with great skill and effectiveness.

It is almost impossible perhaps for an American to imagine the wondrous collision of cultures here, but that just makes the story more dazzling.

One of the local news stories we heard came very quickly after we began our residence in Newfoundland. Over drinks at the Duke of Duckworth, a pleasant public house on Duckworth Street near the harbor downtown, Gren and Joann told us the story of the “unsinkable” oil platform, the Ocean Ranger, stationed 186 miles offshore, east of St. John’s. The North Atlantic has some of the roughest seas on the planet, and though the platform was built to ride waves as large as 110 feet, it succumbed to those that were a mere 65 during winds exceeding 100 knots. This was probably due to an accident, a broken window letting seawater through to the interior. The usual lightheartedness that Joann and Gren display when talking with us about Newfoundland’s exaggerated nature was not evident now. We felt the heaviness of their grief and wonder at the engineering mistake—the detail of a single fragile opening capable of letting seawater in to take down an “unsinkable” oil platform nearly 200 miles away from land and safety. Eighty-six people, the crew on that rig, died of drowning caused by hypothermia in those unbearably frigid waters, and by the time the rescue helicopters arrived the next morning after the storm abated, there was nothing to be done. I’ve never seen or heard the word unsinkable again without irony. It wove a stark lesson in the safety of a warm pub on the island’s shore.

In the recent and wildly successful Broadway play, Come From Away, the central plot involves 38 planes ordered to emergency landings in Gander, Newfoundland, about 335 kilometers or 203 miles from St. John’s. Although the passengers don’t know why they have been diverted, it turns out that this is September 11, 2001. Airspace up and down the East Coast of the United States has been closed for reasons we know too well. In the dark, familiar comfort of crushed velvet seats at a Broadway theater in New York City, audience members can see what was obvious to us that year in Newfoundland. Those who were at the center of that tragedy where dust and falling bodies could choke with equal ferocity witness, for a moment, what happened far up the coast in Gander. The play’s stranded passengers are slowly shown what is happening back home, and the horror of it is balanced, perhaps calmed by the kindness the island’s people share with their visitors or “come from away’s.” Based on a true story and often using the actual names of travelers and locals who lived through it, Come From Away weaves the tale of a pilgrimage through terror at a distance while winding its characters through Newfoundland’s unique features and qualities as a province. In one scene, travelers are treated to Screech Rum—an infamous drink there—then named Honorary Newfoundlanders in the attempt to ease their misery and sorrow. In the world outside of the play, the people of Gander fed and housed 7,000 stranded airline passengers that week. Yet, this is not the first time Newfoundlanders have rescued Americans and other internationals with such deep humanity.

I read a story not long ago about an American engineer from Georgia who donated a large sum of money to build a playground at a school in St. Lawrence, Newfoundland on the Burin Peninsula west of St. John’s, near St. Pierre and Miquelon, two islands still owned by France and considered French territory. Lanier Phillips was rescued from a wrecked Navy transport near St. Lawrence during World War II. People from the nearby Newfoundland mining town rappelled down sheer cliffs and stepped into the cold seawater to help collect bodies and get the living out of it onto relatively dry land. The survivors had to be pulled up those same cliffs with ropes in order to reach safety. Two hundred sailors died—only 189 survived. Phillips grew up in Georgia in the 1920s and 30s and was in fear of his life… from his rescuers. He had known only cruelty and prejudice at the hands of white people. The Newfoundlander woman washing oil off his body assumed it had gone into his pores. She had never seen a Black person before. When he told her who he was, she treated him as no white person had ever done—she completely ignored the fact, washed his body, and stayed with him throughout the night until he was rescued in the morning.

Phillips went on to become a civil engineer, the first SONAR technician in U.S. naval history, and a marcher with Martin Luther King, Jr. in Birmingham. Once, during that long night in Newfoundland, Phillips woke in the dark to find the woman nursing him in bed, putting an extra blanket around his shoulders and tucking him in. He said to her, “Is this heaven?” Surprised, she answered, “No! Why would you think that?” He never told her, but it was the first time he had ever been touched by a white woman. It is almost impossible perhaps for an American to imagine the wondrous collision of cultures here, but that just makes the story more dazzling.

We discover after arriving here that Newfoundlanders are very interested in Americans and generally tend to like us, probably quite a bit more than we deserve.

The driver is the oldest we have seen so far, probably in his late 60s driving a Gulliver’s cab around the harbor downtown. Robin and I ride in taxis a lot in St. John’s. Very few people own cars on an island where gas prices are so high—but cabs are easy to find. One afternoon we are taking a ride from one end of downtown to the other. The ride takes about 15 minutes, and the driver talks constantly. When we get out of the taxi, Robin says, “Wow, I’m so glad you got what he was saying! I didn’t understand a word of it.” I confess that I didn’t either. I was just responding in a way I thought was friendly, hoping my responses made sense. When we ask Joann later whether our driver was speaking English or not, she says, “Yes! He’s probably from a fishing village around the bay. It’s probably a Scottish dialect. Some of the people from those villages still speak the same English they used hundreds of years ago.” Around the bay is Newfoundlander-speak for the entire coast of Newfoundland itself, an island about the size of Texas with a provincial population of little more than 500,000 souls. Goose Cove, which is 988 miles away from St. John’s, would still be just “around the bay.”

One of the more fascinating things that Gren tells us involves what he calls the Newfoundland “Parliament.” We discover after arriving here that Newfoundlanders are very interested in Americans and generally tend to like us, probably quite a bit more than we deserve. They find Americans intriguing. When Robin does well on a quiz in her graduate seminar, her professor makes sure to say, “I shall alert Mr. Bush!” referring to George H.W., who has just been elected back home. While talking politics with our friends, Gren blurts out that he has seen fistfights in the Newfoundland “Parliament.” Joann tells us this is the Newfoundland and Labrador House of Commons. As a TV producer, Gren finds the situation hilarious. It fits the eccentricity he sees in the locals. We already think Newfoundlanders are delightful. The provincial palette in St. John’s features fish and brewies (reconstituted dried fish and ship-ready hard bread), caribou liver pâté, seal flipper sandwiches (inedible), and Screech Rum (the word screech apparently refers to “moonshine” or any cheap liquor). All autumn and winter precipitation are horizontal. It makes walking around the island either very easy or hard depending upon one’s direction. Despite this, we sometimes see Newfoundlanders running in shorts and T-shirts while we shuffle back and forth from our small apartment to campus in Arctic-level down coats from a local Woolworth’s store at the Avalon Mall, half a mile from where we live.      

When Gren mentions the fights, we think he’s joking—but it turns out he isn’t. An Internet search even now brings up story after story of recent altercations in legislative bodies in the U.K., Turkey, Ukraine, Canada, Kuwait, Uganda, South Korea, and more. One resource lists 48 countries where fights have broken out. Students of American history will remember Pennsylvania Representative Galusha A. Grow and the brawl that erupted in the United States Congress in 1858. Grow said afterward, “Although the sight of brawling politicians is incongruous with a legislature’s stately image, its occupants, like in any other workplace, are still prone to stress and anger.” The incident allegedly had an ugly start and a humorous ending. Apparently, Grow was attacked by Laurence M. Keitt of South Carolina, who literally went for Grow’s throat in an argument over slavery, causing a brawl between Northerners and Southerners in the House Chamber. Its ending occurs when a wild punch from Washburn (Wisconsin) displaced the wig of Barksdale (Tennessee), causing both sides to break out in laughter, which apparently stopped the fight. This sounds happier than an ending to a melee like this probably was, but who knows.

The story leads us to the apparent conclusion that legislators are people who will eventually decide their differences can’t overwhelm their humanity or their sense of community and patriotism. When I was thinking the other day about what brought Gren’s story to mind, I realized it was probably because of how things stand in our government today. If the end to our 19th century fistfight story is accurate, it demonstrates a critical principle: Americans need to love our country more than we hate or fear each other. Similar advice is often given to divorcing couples: “You have to love your children more than you hate each other.” As sharp political observers have pointed out recently about internal strife in the U.S., the best way for an enemy—internal or external—to defeat us is not necessarily to lift a finger, but simply encourage us to fight ourselves. It’s as sobering and eye-opening a thought as any I can think of right now, an idea I’m sure must be in Sun Tzu, The Art of War. One thing that continues to fascinate me about our Newfoundland friends is how badly we need a bit of their character here and now.

I was joking with some American friends the other day as I said, “I prefer it when someone knows me before they hate me.” I asked Gren and Joann once if it was safe for Robin to walk in downtown St. John’s at night alone. They immediately answered, “Absolutely! Yes!” On the entire island of Newfoundland, Joann told us, there might be one killing per year. As sad as that event is, can we even begin to imagine such an absence of violence here?

Robin and I came to see how such benign attitudes probably started and grew there—because there is no survival without them, without each other, everyone leaning in hard.

I look out at the small cove of faces, my Newfoundlander students looking up at me from their desks. I love them already—their innocence and sharpness as thinkers and writers. On this campus of about 18,000 students, there is only one young woman with spiky, platinum blonde hair. On the campus we just left in Ohio, there are probably hundreds like her. We learn to appreciate Newfoundlanders, their mix of social conservativism and liberal politics. But Robin and I admire this young woman brave enough to channel a British rock star. On this island of strange things rising out of or surviving the sea and still other remarkable occurrences on land, it doesn’t seem surprising at all.

 

I recently read a story about two Texans driving 150 miles to confront worshippers at a mosque, probably over a misguided understanding of global politics and/or religion. Two men came out to meet them. These were also native Texans who happened to be Muslims. The two parties had an argument punctuated by the Muslim Longhorns noticing loaded rifle racks in the others’ pickup truck, and saying, “We’ve got guns too. You want us to go get them?” Miraculously, the Christian Texans did not want them to do that.

Instead, they started listening as they talked to each other. Eventually they decided to continue what was now a conversation at a local Dairy Queen where things miraculously resolved amicably. The two misguided Texans who drove armed to the mosque left with a better understanding of the people they thought to confront. It was a small miracle. As remarkable as this might sound as a theory or aspiration, it happened. The power of spending time with others we have come to distrust or fear can be an unexpected balm for hatred, unwarranted suspicion, and anger. It’s impossible to overstate the need for such healing in our country and our world now. We have to get closer because we need each other—something Newfoundlanders have always known. It explains, in part, why they are so generous with strangers washed up or redirected to their shores and their airports. Robin and I came to see how such benign attitudes probably started and grew there—because there is no survival without them, without each other, everyone leaning in hard.

Back in Ohio, it is February in 2022. Our political and social reality has become as bitter and cold as a Labrador winter. What we haven’t learned however—not yet—is how to survive together in such a virtual climate. If it is the job of the living to live well because out time here is short, then we are wasting it in epic fashion. It’s as if our sense of community has been cast adrift and is floating on its own somewhere in the North Atlantic. In St. John’s, where the weather or the sea can always kill you, but a person almost never would, you value each other more. You value love in the communal sense, for its humanity. You value friendship, kindness, a warm cab, and great liquor as much as you ever will. A fireside seat staged in a pub looks as good or better as the one in your home, a gift on an autumn or winter night. But the people there—the people serving, the people inside—are better still and more valuable. That great Canadian global traveler and scientist Wade Davis tells the story of prisoners in a Cambodian death camp breaking into a Buddhist chant aimed at the guards and soldiers there. The chant goes, Hatred only breeds hatred. Only by love is it cured. This is an ancient and eternal law. It’s easily one of the smartest things I’ve ever heard. If anything can save the world, this might do it.

What we call a heavy heart probably burns easiest, and we are the most content or happy when we think ours are light.

Our hearts are being filmed now in a way, and their measure is being taken, their health evaluated. What I learned on that rooftop in Cleveland is that if you want something, you have to work for it, and you have to put your heart into that work. Otherwise, it’s just a job, just a way of wasting time before the end of the day, whichever day that happens to be. I was moving angiograms because they were a fire hazard and the pictures needed to be preserved. Such a simple job, but it felt good, as if I were doing something meaningful in a city with so many struggles, many of which still exist. Those nitrate films stand in stark contrast to the kinds of images we consume throughout the day now. Some of these come from places in the heart that have gone dark and can’t be photographed anymore. But we feel those places when they are brought out into the light. We know that there is something wrong or that there are too many things wrong, and we aren’t sure of the source. But the wise have always told us the answer to that always starts by looking within ourselves. At the Temple of Apollo at Delphi it is written in stone, has been standing there for a long time: “Know thyself.” Is it possible that an entire country can not know itself? History teaches us that it is. And when our pictures become so dark, when they corrupt and threatened to burst into flames, we need to get busy with that knowledge and the hard practice of getting to know ourselves as we truly are.

I once heard a colleague remark, “Just because we need an answer doesn’t mean there is one.” Observations like this are results of a refined intelligence. The problem with intellect though is that there are no stop signs in it or to it. I think my colleague’s observation is sometimes true. But I also believe that just because a problem is complex, does not mean that it can’t be solved. Solving complex problems is often among the best things we do. Let’s start here: The blanket and convenient anonymity, the opportunity and capacity for deceptiveness, and the absence of responsibility on a social media platform have become as dangerous to us as 100-foot waves are to an oil platform, and they are more subtle.

In “The Try-Works,” one of the most memorable chapters in Herman Melville’s famous sea-faring novel Moby Dick, he warns us, “Look not too long in the face of the fire, O Man!” Maybe the fire is now a computer, a phone, or a tablet and the way we use it, a different kind of flickering light than the one on the deck of the Pequod melting whale blubber at open sea. Melville feared and warned against the capacity for a human being to be mesmerized or dazzled by something associated with what he would’ve understood as evil or some corruption of the soul. At least in a social sense or inside the sociopolitical world, our use of social media and computers as singular sources of information, truth, and news seems to have a similar capacity. Like fire, images and information on a computer screen can be dazzling and perhaps, so it would seem, blinding and corrupting in some ways too. But this is where we put in the work, where we make and pour the cement we will need to walk on, for the road forward to wherever it is we are going from here. What we call a heavy heart probably burns easiest, and we are the most content or happy when we think ours are light.

In Newfoundland I found how wholesome and bright a people might be and took some of that light home with me. I have it still. I wish with all my heart that we find our way back to that place too.