THE FIRST THING I REMEMBER is drowning.
My mother had taken me swimming at what Newfoundlanders call “the beach.” This is not what the average person would imagine when they picture a beach. There is no golden sand. Emerald water does not dance along the shoreline. Bronzed and toned bodies do not lounge on beach blankets, hiding flirtatious glances under designer sunglasses.
This is not what the Beach Boys sang about. This is more like a beach in the “Allied troop carriers landed on the beaches of Normandy despite the poor weather conditions” sense. In fact, most of my childhood memories seem like black-and-white war footage. The sky is always grey. There’s a lot of shaking and someone is always yelling, “Move! Move! Move!”
When you’re walking on a Newfoundland beach you have to keep an eye out for any large rocks you might accidentally step on. It’s difficult because the large rocks are usually hidden under thousands of smaller, sharper rocks. If you’re lucky you can avoid them by hopping from broken beer bottles to broken pop bottles, tacking left and right around the dozens of pale white bodies lying back to sunbathe and rub their bleeding feet. A Newfoundland sunbather is a sight to behold. It’s best to use protective eyewear. Directly looking at a Newfoundland sunbather can result in snow blindness. I myself am so pale that my skin takes on an almost translucent appearance. It’s known that Newfoundlanders have big hearts. We know this because on the beach you can actually see them beating through our pale skin. Imagine a jellyfish that has somehow swallowed a large fish and chips.
Keep in mind that these people have chosen to swim in the North Atlantic. This is the water the Titanic sunk in. Remember the scene in the movie where Rose is floating on the door and Jack, his hair streaked with icicles, slips below the frigid water into the darkness? Same water. Consider that these are the same beaches that blue whales wash up onto as they die. This is where the largest creatures on earth decide to commit suicide. And yet wave after wave of doughy, cadaverous swimmers playfully dive in and say, “Water’s not so bad today! I can feel my legs!”
Now back to drowning. It actually wasn’t the cold water that almost got me. Nor was it the powerful Labrador current that drags icebergs down from the Arctic. No, it was something much more dangerous. It was that all-consuming, ever-present Newfoundland danger: conversation.
I was three years old and in awe of the sights and sounds. Up until this point, I had led a fairly sheltered life. I grew up about five kilometres from anything. My father was a newsman at VOCM radio in St. John’s. He tried valiantly to fill small-town news with big-city excitement. A typical Mike Critch news report would go:
Late last night, early this morning, a moose was struck on the Trans-Canada Highway. The sex of the moose has not yet been released. Two men were killed, one seriously. Mike Critch for the VOCM news service.
We lived next to the radio station, which was next to a four-lane highway that led into the Trans-Canada. My early childhood was like the first level of the video game Frogger. And there were no other children for miles. The closest thing to other kids for me to play with were the used car salesmen in their plaid suits at the lots down the road.
Halloween was a lonely time. I was a sad sight walking along the Trans-Canada in my plastic C-3PO costume from Woolco. Not that you’d know I even wore a costume under the snowsuit I had to wear to protect me from the snowdrifts along the highway.
LITTLE ME: Trick or Treat.
USED CAR SALESMAN: Hey, Mark, what are you supposed to be?
A robot in a snowsuit?
LITTLE ME: Something like that.
USED CAR SALESMAN: You’re a weird kid. Look, I don’t got no candy. How about a pack of Halls and a handful of Rothman’s?
LITTLE ME: Sounds good.
I once thought for a moment that I’d seen another child, but he turned out to be a midget wrestler who went by the name “Little Beaver.” He’d come to the station to promote a wrestling match. He had a Mohawk, wore a three-piece suit, and smoked a cigar that was almost as big as he was. I thought, “That is the toughest kid I have ever seen.”
But now, here among the rocks of the beach, there were more kids than I’d ever seen before. Half of them seemed tough enough to last a round or two with Little Beaver, but even still, I was drawn to them. My mother, on the other hand, was drawn into a conversation. That was not hard to do. My father worked at a radio station. My mother was a radio station. She was a news-gathering machine who could spit out gossip at a machine-gun pace. To engage my mother in conversation was to face a barrage of gossip-loaded ammunition.
STRANGER: How are you today, ma’am?
MOM: OhI’mGood. Yes,HowAreYouNow,MyDear? MyGodIHeardAllAboutYourMother. Shockin’Isn’tIt? You’reMarjorieChafe’sSon, Aren’tYa? Yes,MyGod. AndHerFullUpWithTheCancer. OfCourseSheSmokedAllHerLifeButSoDidYourFather. HardToSayIfItWasHerSmokeOrHisSmokeGotHerBut,Sure,YouSmokeTooSoCouldHaveBeenYou,IS’pose. DiedOfAHatTrick. First,Second,AndThirdHandSmoke. MyGod,SomeShockin’.
STRANGER: Do you want fries with that?
My mother had noticed someone she thought might look like someone she thought she knew, and that was enough for her to risk the death-defying journey over the jagged rocks in search of information. I was left to follow the siren call of the ocean and the children being tossed on the waves like seagulls waiting out a storm.
I started to walk directly into the water. The cold didn’t affect me. I was a husky child with a good layer of heat-protective blubber around me. I was made for this. The water came up to my knees and I walked on. It came up to my navel and forward I marched. Then I felt the strangest sensation. The rocks beneath my feet had given way to sand. It felt glorious. Smooth, soft, and grainy. It reminded me of the few moments of barefoot wonder I’d experienced standing in the cat’s litter box before my mother told me to “GetOutOfThatNowBeforeISkinsYa! ForGodSakes,B’y,TheCat’sArseWasInThat!”
I looked over at the children, watching them frolic, and wondered, “How can I be a part of that?” Surely they would notice me and ask me to play with them, like kids did on Sesame Street? We’d sing some song about “the letter C” or something. Maybe they’d like some Halls or some Rothman’s? All I had to do was wait.
I remember looking up at a cliff and seeing the Newfoundland flag. Not the red, blue, and gold flag designed by the famous artist Christopher Pratt. No, I mean the true Newfoundland flag: a plastic grocery bag caught in a tree. Then my gaze shifted to two kids, a boy and girl floating by in a tire. They sat on it, their feet dangling into the water through the centre. It looked like everything that childhood should be. I continued on. The water came up to my neck. The children on the tire laughed together as they spun lazily. I stepped closer, hypnotized by their joy.
The water slipped over my head. I didn’t realize that the ground was on a slope. I’d never been in deep water before and assumed I could just keep walking.
I’d never thought about breathing until that moment. I remember thinking, “Oh, right. I have to breathe.” Try as I might, I couldn’t get my head above the water. I looked back to shore and could just barely make out the image of my mother interrogating a couple about their exact lineage. Nobody knew I was there. I kept going.
With every step I took, I could feel a great weight pressing down inside me. I was walking farther but going deeper. I looked up, confused. I caught sight of the tire children. They were floating above me, still laughing. I reached for a pink Minnie Mouse sandal on the surface, just over my head. With the strength of a panicked child, I pulled her foot toward me with all my might. Next, I latched on to the Six Million Dollar Man sneaker of the boy. “He kept his sneakers on,” I thought. “He doesn’t even know there’s sand here. I should tell him to take them off and feel it squish between his toes. That’ll be a good ice-breaker.”
I pulled them down. I could feel the panic leave my body and transfer into theirs. I grabbed their tire, sending them splashing into the cold water. Exhausted, I lay on the improvised float like a walrus on a rock and sunned myself. It was nice to have friends my own age.
My mother rushed into the water. “MyGod,Mark! That’sNotNiceThat’sTheLittleBoy’sTireNotYours! WhatASinHe’sCryingNow! I’mSorry! IDon’tKnowWhat’sGottenIntoHimNow,HeWasInTheCat’sLitterBoxLastWeek!”
Even to this day, I can’t swim. I nearly drowned a second time when I was twelve. That time was in a pool. I was trying to impress a girl and was too embarrassed to admit I couldn’t swim. I thought I could just stay in the shallow end, but the pool had a concave floor and I kept sliding to the deeper centre. The more I splashed, the harder everyone laughed. “Oh, look! Critch is pretending to drown. Hilarious!”
I had just managed to come up for a breath when a kid threw a float toward me to add to the jubilation. It hit me in the nose, knocking the wind from me and causing a spiderweb of crimson blood to float upward to the surface as I sank to the bottom like a stone. The air had left my lungs, taking any primal desire for survival with it. The pain of the struggle gave in to what can only be described as a good buzz. I lay on the bottom, looking up and thinking, “It was a short life but it was good.” I flashed back to the earlier time at the beach, but there were no tires here. I suddenly felt quite warm, as though I’d peed my pants. The water took on a golden hue, but it wasn’t urine. It was as if someone was swiping through Instagram filters to find the perfect look for #DrownedKid.
It was at that moment that the girl I was trying to impress jumped in to save me, removing any hint of testosterone from my newly pubescent body. I pushed her away. I wanted to tell her that she didn’t understand. It was nice here. It was warm and peaceful, and I looked good with this filter. She pulled me to the surface and my lungs burned as I coughed up water. The object of my affection looked down at me with a mix of pity and disdain. It reminded me of the faces on the statues of the saints at school. They seemed to be saying, “I’m here for you, but you’re kind of annoying.”
I still can’t swim, but I’ve never been afraid of the water. As a Newfoundlander, I guess that shouldn’t be too surprising. For over five hundred years, Newfoundlanders have pulled a living out of the unforgiving North Atlantic. First they went after the cod, but then the cod disappeared. I assume, like all Newfoundlanders, that the cod simply went off to Alberta to look for work because the arse was out of the cod fishery. Then there was the seal hunt. But when that became the cause célèbre de rigueur for fading American film stars and newly married Beatles, the seal hunt went the way of the dodo. And as any Newfoundlander can tell you, dodos were delicious.
There was money to be made at the shrimp fishery, but climate change has made the water too warm for shrimp and they’ve shagged off, too. If the waters off Newfoundland aren’t too warm for icebergs, I can’t see how they’d be too warm for shrimp. I wonder if the shrimp are staying away in protest against the seal hunt. But who needs the fishery when you have oil? And we had that. Offshore oil fields and oil rigs and oily politicians who spent the oil revenues and didn’t see the drop in oil prices coming because they had oil in their eyes. Newfoundland must be the only place on earth that went broke because it discovered oil.
Newfoundlanders have always taken from the sea. But she takes back. Fishermen are forever lost at sea. Sealers are found frozen to death on ice pans, clutching each other in prayer like macabre ice sculptures. Eighty-four men drowned in a sinking oil rig on Valentine’s Day 1982. Newfoundland is an island and is as much surrounded by death as it is water. An old song sung in bars here goes “And everyone here should get down on one knee, thank God we’re surrounded by water,” while another song warns, “Your heart would ache for all their sake if you were standing nigh; to see them drowning one by one, and no relief being nigh.”
Most Newfoundland fishermen can’t swim. Why bother? If you fall into the cold North Atlantic you have mere minutes to live. And if there was a chance of surviving, someone might try to jump in and save you. You’d be putting them out and you wouldn’t want to do that! No, you’d die of embarrassment. So it’s best not to bother anyone and just drown. Wouldn’t want to be too uppity.
The real Newfoundland is not like the award-winning tourism ads. I’ve lived here all my life and I’ve never stood on a cliff with the sun splitting the rocks as two whales breach in a choreographed ballet while some little red-headed girl plays the fiddle for me. I have, however, stood in a five-foot snow drift in the month of May while two nimrods drive by in a beat-up Camaro, Great Big Sea blaring out the window, throwing Tim Hortons cups at me and giving me the finger. But they don’t make hooked rugs with that on them.
Newfoundland is both a simple place and a complex one. The people are warm and friendly but their humour is sharp and biting. Newfoundland is always walking the line between prosperity and poverty. The people who live here are forced to go away for work, but they would never leave. This place is not black and white. It is as grey as the sky above it, the water around it, and the fog that links the two. It takes and it gives, just like the surrounding ocean. Sink or swim: it will make of you what it wants.