WHEN I WAS six, I believed what my parents and all my aunts and uncles wished were true, that the Avalon Peninsula, “the Avalon” we called it, was itself a country. It is joined to the main island of Newfoundland by an isthmus so narrow that, while standing in the middle of it, you can see the ocean from both sides. My father said we should dig a canal through the isthmus and declare our independence. He felt this way because of something darkly called “the referendum.” I knew nothing more about it than its name. When I asked him, he said it meant, “We used to be a country, but we’re not one any more.”

The Avalon. The nuns told us that one of the first New World colonists, England’s secretary of state, Lord Baltimore, called the colony he founded in the 1620s “Avalon” because of a legend according to which St. Joseph of Arimathea introduced Christianity to Britain in a place called Avalon in Somersetshire. But they did not tell us how that first Avalon had got its name.

They did not tell us that in one of the Arthurian legends Avalon was the name of an island somewhere to the west of England where King Arthur sailed to be healed of his wounds. I found this out by reading Malory’s Morte d’Arthur, a copy of which was found among the possessions of Aunt Freda, my father’s sister, who grew up in Ferryland, acquired a master of arts in English literature and died of cancer when she was forty-three.

There were many parallels between my world and the one portrayed in the book, parallels that Freda herself seemed to have noted, for there were little checkmarks in the margins. It so happened that my father’s first name was Arthur and his second Reginald, which I was told meant “King.” I’m sure these coincidences meant more to me than they did to Freda; but Freda — perhaps for personal reasons that I was too young to appreciate — had put a checkmark by what was to become my favourite part of Morte d’Arthur.

It was the part in which the dying King declares: “… I will into the vale of Avilion to heal me of my grievous wound; and if thou hear never more of me, then pray ye for my soul.”

Then Sir Bedivere puts the wounded Arthur on board a barge “with many fair ladies in it, and among them all was a queen, and all they had black hoods, and all they wept and shrieked when they saw King Arthur.”

The two images, the image of the Virgin Berg and that of the barge with its cargo of hooded queens, merged in my mind to form various hybrid images. I pictured an iceberg with not one but several massive statues, the hooded queens surrounding the Virgin who reared up above them. Sometimes there were just the hooded queens, human sized, and they appeared from out of the fog not on a wooden barge but on a pan of ice, as if they had been set adrift against their will. Sometimes on the pan of ice the hooded queen, unaccompanied by her attendants, stood with her arms folded on her breast in mimicry of the queen of heaven in the photograph.

An arrow pointed from the word “Avilion” to a note my aunt had written in the margin: “Avalon, the Celtic abode of the blessed. An island paradise in the western seas where King Arthur and the other heroes of the Arthurian legends went when they were dying. In one legend, the ‘Isle of Apples’ to which the dying Arthur was taken.”

I understand now why the nuns traced the derivation of Avalon no further back than St. Joseph of Arimathea, for this Isle of Apples sounds very much like a pagan Garden of Eden. Another note in my aunt’s book read: “Over the years, the legend of Avalon was modified and the location of Avalon was changed. By the thirteenth century, it was believed to be Glastonbury in Somerset, where, according to legend, Joseph of Arimathea, escaping from persecution in his homeland, built the first Christian church in England. So it was that Baltimore, a follower of the legend, chose ‘Avalon’ as the name for his Roman Catholic colony at Ferryland.”

Poor Baltimore. He thought it was a heavenly haven he was going to when he set sail with his family in the late 1620s, a colony created at his command and now ready to receive him. But I did not think of him then as poor Baltimore but as Baltimore, “a follower of a legend,” which it seemed to me was a great thing to be, no matter what the legend was, all the more so when it was that of Arthur and Avalon.

So there were two Avalons, the Avalon where we lived and the Avalon to which, like King Arthur, we would travel when we died.

Perhaps once a summer, for the first few summers after I started school, we drove as far as the isthmus but never past it. It was almost always foggy there. Owing to the narrowness of that strip of land, the wind was onshore regardless of which way it was blowing, and fog was almost always racing across the isthmus from one direction or the other. It was a place of confluence, turbulence. It was for the same reason always cold there; at the narrowest point of the isthmus, a trench of glacial rubble like the long-dried-up bed of some ancient river ran from sea to sea, a trench strewn with boulders and jagged shards of granite. The rest was bedrock. Over it in some places was laid a mat of root-woven sod on which dwarf spruce and alders somehow grew, their roots like tentacles, enclosing rocks, four and five feet of them exposed between the mat of sod on the boulder and the ground beneath it into which the roots were sunk.

I could always tell when we were nearing the isthmus, for on sunny days it became foggy, and on foggy days so much more foggy that all the world except the inside of the car was blotted out. Although it was no more than a few miles deep, as soon as we drove into the fog we turned around, as if we could no more go farther than if the road had been washed out. We did not have any agreed-upon point of return, for the depth of that sea-spanning stream of fog varied.

The Isthmus of Avalon. The isthmus. It was the edge of the known world, and looked it. The word itself evoked the place. Or the place had inspired the word. Like the word, the isthmus seemed to have been fashioned out of mist, a sibilant, lisping mist, an “I” with “mist” on either side.

In Morte d’Arthur Avalon is the place of death. I knew that when Arthur said he was going to Avalon “to heal me of my grievous wound,” he meant that he was going to a place beyond life, an afterlife, from which he would not return. But I did not think of him as having died or experienced “death” as that concept had been explained to me at school. Heaven, hell, purgatory, limbo, Arthur had not gone to one of these afterlives; he had gone to Avalon, where he was healed. I believed, inasmuch as I was able to think it through, that though we did not live in the mythical Avalon itself, we lived in a place thought by Baltimore to be so much like it, so favoured as to be worthy of bearing its name. In the same way, although I knew that my father was not Malory’s King Arthur, I thought of him as a man whose name set him apart, Arthur Reginald, a King-like, Arthur-like man among mere knights or even lesser beings who had never been a child, a man who had simply “arrived” among us and, because of his Arthur-like qualities, had been given Arthur’s name and title.

I had the vague notion that we turned around when we did so as not to cross over into the place where my father would receive a “grievous wound” and go from there to the mythical Avalon where, though healed, he would be apart from us. I thought that beyond the stream of fog lay not Avalon but another afterworld where the grievous wounds of people who had died remained unhealed, the Arthurian equivalent of hell or purgatory. It was, among other things, the lair of “the Baymen,” a tribe by which, as I would soon be told, our independence was undone, an inscrutably sinister domain.

The rest of the island beyond the Avalon lay in outer darkness, beyond the uncrossable mist, unknown except in the lore of scorn, the place of the fearsomely dense people known as the baymen, who in the distant past had inflicted upon us a “grievous wound.” It would be years before I understood the nature of that wound: on July 22, 1948, in a referendum ordered by Britain, in which the choices were independence or confederation with Canada, Newfoundlanders voted by the barest of margins for confederation. On the Avalon, the vote was two to one for independence, and outside the Avalon two to one for Canada. “Forgive them Lord, they know not what they did,” my father said.