“THEY MIGHT BE phasing out the train,” my father said, looking up from his paper one night in the fall of 1968. After Confederation, the railway had been taken over by Canadian National Railways, CNR, and now they were considering replacing the train with a less expensive fleet of buses.

Buses were an option because the first trans-island paved road had been completed in 1965. My father said the only reason people used the road was to see what pavement felt like and they would soon grow tired of it.

My father was one of many people who tried to save the train.

It was decided there would be a “trial period” from December of 1968 to May of 1969 during which both buses and trains would run across the island in a competition to see which would draw more patrons.

It was as if some feeble ghost of the referendum of 1948 had been revived. There was once again to be a kind of referendum. Patriotism would tackle pragmatism, the old Newfoundland the new Newfoundland, one last time. You could vote for the former by buying a train ticket, for the latter by buying a bus ticket. A Save the Train association was formed. There was talk it would be led by Peter Cashin. It was not.

The patriots soon had a slogan: Ride the Rails and Beat the Bus. Ads exhorting Newfoundlanders to do just that soon appeared in all the papers. The CNR countered that the price and duration of a cross-island bus ride were less than half those of the train.

My father told me that the train invoked pre-Confederate Newfoundland as nothing else could. The journey itself was as important, if not more so, than the destination. The train was designed to be lived in, not just ridden. You could not walk about on a bus as you could on a train. There was no bar on a bus. There were no tables spread with impeccably white and creased linen, no silver cutlery or crystal glasses, no one at your beck and call, happy to attend to your most eccentric needs.

The train was a reminder for my father of his first trip off the island in September of 1948. Each journey on it was a recapitulation of that one, when he had seen Newfoundland for the first time, just prior to leaving it for the first time. That trip had been for him a strange hybrid of arrival and departure, discovery and abandonment. He for some reason often brought it up when we were driving home from Ferryland, but when I asked him why, he would not tell me.

There was the circadian length of the trip. The island, as measured by the train, was almost exactly one day wide, twenty-four hours from coast to coast. One single Newfoundland-encompassing day. You departed and arrived at the same hour of the morning or the same hour of the evening. Or you did except when there were blockages along the line, when huge snowdrifts arced across the tracks and the train was stalled for days, as happened regularly on a northwest section of the line called the Gaff Topsails where, as the Pragmatists pointed out, it was not unusual for a passenger-filled train to be stranded for days, twenty unwalkable miles from the nearest settlement. The length of one memorable train trip had been more lunar than circadian, a group of travellers stalled in a train on the Gaff Topsails for twenty-six days. About a hundred times as many Newfoundlanders as it was possible for the train to hold claimed to have been on that run.

On the train you travelled by night, and the night always found you in the “core,” as my father called it, in the wild, unsettled middle of the island as far inland as you could go except on foot. The train was a moving hotel and the whole of Newfoundland went by outside your window; it was a restaurant on wheels with an ever-changing view, one kind of landscape giving way to another as if the island were composed of many countries. The dining and sleeping accommodations were, as trains go, luxurious.

What percentage of the train supporters had voted against Confederation in 1948 is impossible to say, but my father said that a large majority had. Unfortunately for them, it was announced before the “trial period” even started that according to a poll, Newfoundlanders preferred the bus to the train by five to one. Before the campaign to save it got off the ground, the train was doomed. The faster, cheaper buses that were setting out from St. John’s each morning were packed, while whole train cars that left from Riverhead Station were empty, pulled pointlessly along behind the few that were occupied. The loss of the train would be yet another of the foul fruits of Confederation. But father and the others clung to the notion that as soon as the novelty of the bus wore off, and as soon as the weather softened in the spring and there was no longer any possibility of being stranded on the tracks, the train would make up the gap. Or, as a compromise, the government would decide to run the train only from May to November.

There was talk for a while that all the Johnstons and the Everards would book passage on a final Christmas run the day after Boxing Day, from St. John’s to Port aux Basques and back. My father and Harold pitched it to the others, and there was talk of a grand expedition. But interest in the trip soon fell off when it was discovered how expensive it would be. The only such group trip across the island that we could have afforded would have been by bus. My older brothers were of an age when to travel with one’s parents was no longer an adventure. If not all of us were going, my mother could not go. Eva and Jim bowed out. Marg would not go unless my mother did. The Everards had never been that interested. The number of travellers dwindled gradually until there were just my father and me and Harold left, and then Harold had to cancel out because of work. That left only ten-year-old me and my father.

We started out from St. John’s just after sunrise on December 27, 1968. There was no snow on the east coast. The new highway roughly shadowed the railway tracks except for taking the short and easy way around most obstacles, and except for the elevated Gaff Topsails stretch, which the highway avoided altogether, instead forking up to Springdale on the coast, then down southwest again, more or less meeting up with the train tracks at Deer Lake.

We were sometimes able to see the highway from the train, and once, not far outside of St. John’s, we ran all but side by side with one of the Roadcruiser buses. I had been surprised at Riverhead Station to see how small the buses were. It was hard to imagine them posing any threat to the train, which stretched as far as I could see, the initials CNR repeated on each car until they became an indecipherable white blur.

But I found myself now treacherously rooting for that single silver bus. I was impressed by how much faster it was moving than we were. The bus looked like a sleek, wingless plane and, in comparison with the many-sectioned train, seemed so heroically singular, so self-sufficient. The highway itself seemed a marvel to me, its sides clear-cut of trees and bush, as did the strange sight of pavement in the woods, with those reassuringly artificial white lines down the middle that somehow made the wilderness less desolate. The weathered, wooden train, the wooden, black tarred ties, the rusting rails, the ancient railway bed along which trees had grown to full height since the line went through in 1898, the once-pink granite gravel now washed grey with age all seemed to blend in with the landscape, an unobtrusiveness that to some was one of its merits, though it did not seem so to me.

We remained side by side with the bus only because of the train’s length. People, my father not among them, crowded one side of the train to see it. Children stuck out their tongues at it, though what effect this had on its driver or its occupants we couldn’t tell, for its windows were tinted.

The railway and the road diverged, and the bus passed from view for several minutes, then was distantly visible, far ahead and to the right of us, turning sharply away from the railway track as if it were headed across a different island than we were, a more modern, train-excluding island. After it next passed from view, we did not see that bus again, though we came to within yards of the highway many times.

It was on this train trip that I finally crossed the Isthmus of Avalon. For a time on the isthmus, as when we drove in the car until forced back by the fog, we could see the ocean on either side. Then we plunged into the river of fog, and I was awed by the certainty that this time we would not turn round but would come out the other side, as if the train could do what our little car could not. We rumbled through the fog. I pressed my face to the window, just able to make out vague shapes and colours.

And then suddenly we hurtled out of Avalon into the mundane world. I imagined the view of someone watching from trackside as more and more of the train emerged from the tunnel of fog, some of it out, some of it still inside, my imaginary spectator wondering if the train would ever end, then seeing the car with me inside, my face pressed to the glass, looking for the first time on this the origin of grievous wounds.

It looked exactly like Avalon, but I had expected it would, had prepared myself for this illusion and was almost able to convince myself that we were now sub-Avalon, pre-Avalon, post-Avalon, lapsed in some way all the more sinister for being imperceptible. We were in the land of the baymen now, the land of the bush-borns.

For a while we travelled parallel to the highway again. Cars overtook us with embarrassing ease. Then a Roadcruiser bus.

“Look,” my father said, loud enough for the whole car to hear, “it’s that bloody bus again.”

“Not the same one,” a man sitting several seats ahead of us said, remaining face forward so that all we could see of him was the back of his head, a starched shirt collar, the shoulders of an impeccable new black suit. “That one left Riverhead two hours after we did. Caught up with us already.”

“It looks like a lunch bucket on wheels,” my father said, and many people let out snorts of derision.

“It may not look like much,” the man said, “but it gets you where you want to go faster than this train does.”

“Does it, now?” my father said. “Well, what are you doing on the train if you love the bus so much?”

“Never said I loved the bus,” the man said, still not turning round. “But we might as well face facts —”

A collective groan cut the man short. The need to “face facts” was the pro-bus argument, and they had heard it all before. My father asked the man again what he was doing on the train if he loved the bus so much.

“Never said I loved the bus,” the man said, as if he was implacably determined not to have words put in his mouth. “Taking one last ride for old times’ sake, like everybody else. We might just as well face facts —”

The woman beside him, whom I presumed was his wife, gave him a now-don’t-go-starting-something nudge with her shoulder. The man straightened up as if in silent defiance of her warning.

“Why might we just as well face facts?” my father said. “Could you tell me that? Why might we just as well face facts? If we all faced facts, there’d be no one left in Newfoundland. There’s nothing in the facts to keep us here.”

I knew from his tone of voice and his expression that he was one provocation away from launching into an attack on Joey Smallwood, the fixed referendum and Confederation. I half-hoped, half-dreaded, that the man would say something else. There was a nervous silence in the car.

“We’re a country of fact-facing bus-boomers,” my father said, grinning, looking out the window.

“A province,” the fact-facing bus-boomer said. “We’re a province now, not a country. Never were a country, really. If you know your history.” I heard in his voice a politeness that was meant to be transparently insincere, patronizing, the tone of someone who held in reserve a trump card he need never play. I could just see it. A riot on the train fought over a matter decided twenty years ago.

“I know my history,” my father said. “A province of progress, is that what we are?” “A province of progress” was one of Joey’s latest slogans.

“Better than a backward country,” the fact-facing bus-boomer said. It was all there now, just beneath the surface. His continuing to face forward while he spoke, showing us nothing but the back of his head was clearly getting to my father. He had no idea what my father looked like, nor did he care to know, the back of his head seemed to say.

“Is this what we’ll have to listen to, from here to Port aux Basques,” my father said, “a fact-facing, bus-booming, arse-kissing civil servant?” My father all but spat out the last two words as if thereby expressing his distaste for his own occupation with the federal Fisheries department and ridding himself of the self-contempt he had to live with every day.

“One last look for old times’ sake,” my father said. “Tell me, if your mother was going under for the third time, would you take one last look for old times’ sake? What am I saying — of course you would.”

I was sure the man would turn around now, but he didn’t. A purser whose CNR uniform lent him an authority that belied his skinny, almost puny frame and who must have heard my father came halfway up the stairs of the observation car, just to show himself, a tacit reminder that no troublemaking would be tolerated.

My father looked at the man across the aisle from us and both of them smiled and looked at the fact-facing bus-boomer, the back of whose neck was now a livid red. His wife was gripping his upper arm with both her hands, her head bobbing emphatically as if she were urgently whispering to him.

It was probably no coincidence that just before the train stopped at Gambo, the birthplace of Joey Smallwood, the bus-boomer and his wife got up and left the observation car, which they were able to do without turning round to face my father, the stairway that led down below being several rows in front of them. We only saw them briefly in profile as they went quickly down the steps. All I remember of them is that both were blushing so that they looked as if through years of marriage they had developed perfectly compatible complexions.

“We might as well face facts.” That was not just the argument for the bus. It had been the argument for Confederation. The confederates hadn’t argued for Canada per se because most Newfoundlanders knew nothing more about Canada than what little they had heard from Canadian servicemen stationed in St. John’s throughout the war. There had been far more Americans stationed there, a friendly occupation force that had poured money into Newfoundland, building military installations that had yet to be shut down. Wartime was looked back on by Newfoundlanders as the American era, years when they saw firsthand the swaggering largesse of the country to which thousands of their relatives had gone in search of jobs.

On the siding at Gambo, my father did not once look out the window. But neither did Gambo inspire him to hold forth as I thought it would. Perhaps if the bus-boomer had stayed…

My father sat in silence, engrossed, or pretending to be, in a book he’d brought along. Brooding, more likely. I had thought that by leaving, the bus-boomer had admitted defeat. But now I saw that he had not, that he had left because he had no need to argue: for the bus, for Smallwood, for Confederation, for anything. It was on this my father was brooding, on the smirk implicit in the man’s every word.

We won, we won and nothing you can say can change that fact, and nothing makes victory sweeter than the enduring bitterness of men like you. That was the meaning of their disdainful march from the observation car.

Sometime in the afternoon, I dozed off and did not wake up until we were approaching the Gaff Topsails, a steep-sloped tract of wilderness, the highest point on the line and the place where delays were most likely in the winter when the tracks were blocked by snow. The tracks along the Topsails were not only elevated but flat, so even when it wasn’t snowing all that was needed to bury the tracks was wind, which blew into drifts snow that was already on the ground.

On this day, the tracks were open, but barely. The previous train had cut a trench between snow walls, which got higher as we moved into the Topsails until we could see nothing from either side of the train except sheer cliffs of snow mere inches from the windows. After that, even in the observation car, we could only tell how much deeper the trench was getting by how much darker it became in the train, for snow drifted across the top of the trench, blocking out the sky.

Finally, the train began to slow down. “Snow on the tracks,” my father said. We could not see the snow on the tracks, but we soon felt the train nudge into it. We jolted forward slightly in our seats. Once the cowcatcher had edged into the snowdrift, the engineer increased the throttle. A great grinding noise began from the front of the train and moved down the length of it; soon the floor of our car was vibrating. We moved along at two or three miles an hour at most, though the locomotive roared as if we were going at full speed.

The train continued in this fashion for a while, then slowed more as we began to go upgrade. We made excruciatingly suspenseful progress for about three miles, the passengers urging the train on, knowing that if we stalled we might be stranded for days. We laughed and rocked forward in our seats as if to coax the locomotive one more inch, and then one more until at last we felt it make the crest and a great cheer went up.

Going downgrade was much easier, though we could not go at regular speed, for there were drifts across the tracks that might have derailed us had we crashed through them too fast. Every so often, as we hit one, we lurched forward in our seats, everyone shouting “Whoa!” and watching as the exploding snow went flying past our windows.

In one way, we were crossing Newfoundland at the worst possible time, during the season of least light, a week past the day of least light. About half of the island we didn’t see at all, and some of it we saw at twilight, from four to six in the afternoon, from six to eight in the morning. But you hadn’t really seen Newfoundland, my father had told me before we set out, until you had seen it in winter from the train.

In the course of our journey westward, we saw the sun rise and set and rise again. The journey began and ended at sunrise. We went from light to dark to light again. And regardless of what time of year it was, we would have travelled through some part of the core in darkness. The core was the vast basin that lay within the bowl of the coastal mountains beyond which, before the train, almost no one had set foot. And you always passed through the core of the core in the middle of the night whether you travelled in June or in December.

It was easy to imagine, impossible not to, that the core was always dark, that on this middle wilderness the sun never rose and the most it ever had by way of light it got on those rare nights when the sky was clear and the moon was full.

We were surrounded from without by a wilderness of water and from within by one of land, an expansive assertion of land about which, before the train went through, next to nothing was known, had been seen by no one, not even by aboriginals who lived within a few miles of the coast, no one except a few people such as William Cormack. My father, who loved planting misconceptions in my head, told me the core was named after Cormack.

To prepare for our trip, I had read Cormack’s account of his walk across the island. In 1822, at the age of twenty-six, he walked from Trinity Bay on the east coast to Bay St. George on the west coast. He set out on September 5, accompanied by a Micmac named Joe Sylvester, and completed his walk on November 4, then wrote his Narrative of a Journey Across the Island of Newfoundland, the Only One Ever Performed by a European. By European, he meant someone of European descent, for Cormack, though Old World educated, was New World born, having grown up in St. John’s and gone to university in Scotland.

He was a solitary soul who before setting out wrote that it was a comfort to him to know that “no one would be injured by my annihilation.” It seemed a heart-rendingly pathetic thing to say about yourself. I could not imagine a man more profoundly alone than the one who had written that.

He called the core the Terra Incognita, the unknown land. Before Cormack’s walk, there were fantastic stories about its inhabitants, stories about a race of giant aboriginals and strange animals of a sort that lived nowhere else on earth but Newfoundland.

Cormack, though he discovered no such marvels, found most of what he saw beyond his powers of description. “In vain were associations,” he wrote, “in vain did the eyes wander for the cattle, the cottage and the flocks.” This landscape for which he searched in vain was not even that of coastal Newfoundland but that of England, or more precisely the England of books, which formed his image of “home.” All Cormack could do was catalogue what he saw. He attempted an exhaustive geological and botanical catalogue, recording in his journal every rock and form of plant life, half his journal consisting of italicized Latin.

To keep himself sane, to make the landscape seem less alien, to remind himself that the outside world still existed and that he would return to it someday, Cormack named lakes and mountains after people he had gone to school with, old college mates, old teachers. Some of what he had seen was gone now, such as the “dense, unbroken pine, an ocean of undulating forest” that covered the first twenty miles of his trip. Cormack had seen the “pine-clad hills” of which Boyle wrote in “The Ode to Newfoundland,” but most of the pine was gone, cut down or burnt.

In the latter part of his walk, Cormack had wound up delirious, alternating between despair of ever reaching his destination and delusions of invincibility, during which he hoped the walk would last forever. He had stood atop some knob of rock and caught what he thought was his first sight of the Gulf of St. Lawrence, the western sea of Newfoundland, and told Joe Sylvester that they would not stop walking until they reached it, which he was sure they could do within a day.

A week later they made it to the shore — not of the Gulf but of a lake the size of a small sea. They had encountered many lakes, and rather than walk around them, they sailed across on makeshift rafts, weaving spruce boughs into sails, the two of them so exhausted they would rather risk drowning than add ten or twenty miles to their walk. They sat for hours on the shores of lakes, waiting for an east wind, which is not generally a good wind for sailing since it almost always brings bad weather, but they cared only that the wind was headed for the west as they were. They put out onto the lakes on their rafts and let the wind blow them to the other side.

They clung to or lashed themselves to the trunks of their spruce-tree masts, rising and falling on the waves that washed over them and their supplies, Sylvester screaming in the middle of each crossing that Cormack would never again coax him across a lake in such a manner. They left a trail of these little spruce-bough sail rafts behind them on the shores of lakes across the width of Newfoundland.

When they finally did sight the real sea, they kept walking after dark, Cormack running blindly through the woods, sliding down the sides of the Lewis Hills. They arrived at Bay St. George at one in the morning, able only to hear the Gulf, whose limitless expanse Cormack had so looked forward to surveying with triumph. He had thought they would reach the coast by sunrise but this time had overestimated the distance. There was nothing at the end of their journey but darkness, out into which Cormack threw beach rocks and heard but did not see the splash they made.

That was what I remembered best from the narrative — Cormack and his mystified Micmac guide sliding down the west-coast hills in the middle of the night, by doing which, he said, “We found ourselves with whole bones but many bruises.” The next day he reflected in his notebook: “All was now, however, accomplished, and I hailed the glance of the sea as home and as the parent of everything dear.”

Landsman though he was, he was as happy to see the ocean as Cabot had been to sight land. Cabot’s voyage from Dorset in England to Cape Bonavista in Newfoundland had taken thirty-five days. Cormack’s walk had taken sixty. Though he lived to the age of seventy-two, he undertook no further such expeditions and never did fully recover from that one.

We passed through a long stretch where there was more water than land, where more of the land lay underwater than did not, though it was all fresh water, rivers, pools, ponds, lakes. It was as if some great reservoir was slowly drying up, strands of bog and rock appearing in what had been the reservoir’s more shallow parts. The rail line zigzagged across this stretch, following the land unless a body of water was sufficiently narrow that a trestle could be built across it. There was nothing as far as the eye could see in any direction but flat white frozen lakes and, barely distinguishable from them by the unevenness of their terrain and the occasional dark gash of green, the bogs and barrens, with here and there a tolt that ten thousand years ago had been an island rising from the water like some observation tower.

Then we passed into a landscape that was like a lake bed from which the water had receded altogether, an expansive, flat-bottomed bed of a lake that looked as though it had been uniformly three feet deep, nothing but rubble and jagged shards of granite.

And this became the pattern. Every so often, a new, entirely different, geography would assert itself. We came upon a desert of black peat bog on which there was no snow, though there was snow all around it, as if a deluge of water ten miles wide had splashed down. Here and there the peat bog had collapsed of its own weight, its soggy crust caved in to form a great crater of peat, a black bog hole that was warmer than the air so that steam issued up from it like smoke. You could tell from these peat pits that underneath its topmost layer, the whole bog was like this, a steaming black muck too loose to support the roots of even the smallest of trees.

Each part made you forget the others existed. In the middle of each landscape, you couldn’t help thinking that it stretched endlessly in all directions, that this was the island’s prevailing terrain and all else was anomalous.

My father had wanted me to see all this. How much land there was, how like a country Newfoundland was in its dimensions and variousness. In the days leading up to the trip, I had many times asked him, “How big is Newfoundland?” Using the map on the kitchen wall, he tried to make me understand how big it was, tried to give me some sense of how much more of it there was than I had seen so far in our drives around the bay.

“We’re here,” my father said, pointing at the tiny star that stood for St. John’s. “Now last Sunday, when we went out for our drive, we went this far.” He moved his finger in a circle about an inch across. Then he moved his hand slowly over the rest of the map. The paper crackled beneath his fingers. “Newfoundland is this much bigger than that,” he said, making the motion with his hand again. “All this is Newfoundland, but it’s not all like St. John’s. Almost all of it is empty. No one lives there. No one’s ever seen most of it.”

It was an island, yes, but I had been fooled by that fact into thinking of the land as an insignificant interruption of a sea so huge that by comparison the land did not exist. There were regions of it that even the train did not come near, peninsulas along which not even branch lines had been built, the Great Northern Peninsula for instance, along the two-hundred-mile stretch of which there was neither road nor railway. It had taken the robust Cormack those sixty days of continuous walking to reach the west coast, and he had not come within a hundred miles of the Great Northern Peninsula.

The point of this journey was to get me away from the sea so that when I went back to living within two miles of it, I would know the land was there, land whose capacity to inspire wonder in all those who beheld it was in no way diminished by its being coloured the colour of Canada on maps.

How many of the outporters who had voted for Confederation, my father asked me, had had any sense of the land, the scope and shape of it, the massive fact of it? Fishermen went far enough from shore to see some of the land assuming shapes and lines, a series of capes or a small peninsula, perhaps, with headlands soon fading to a blue blur on either side, the amorphous, nebulous elsewhere whose existence was less real to them than that of the moon or the sun. They had conceived of Newfoundland as a ribbon of rock, a coast without a core, a rim with water outside and nothing, a void, inside. And stranded on this thin rim they lived, the Terra Incognita at their backs and the sea before them. For many of them, Newfoundland had not even been a coast but a discrete shard of rock, their own little cove or bay, inlet or island. They had had no idea when they cast their votes what they were voting for or what they were renouncing. They had not known there was a country, for they had never seen it or even spoken to anyone who had. What lay beyond the farthest limits of their travels and their eyesight was just a rumour, a region of fancy and conjecture. And what was true of space was true of time. What was true of geography was true of history. In how many homes or even classrooms was there a copy of Prowse’s History of Newfoundland? Time was local, personal and even then less enduring than their experience of space, the circumscribed geography of “home.” Smallwood had said that for him the main purpose of Confederation was to undo this isolation, but of course it only made it worse. For if people could not conceive of the whole of Newfoundland, how could they form any conception of a place the size of Canada?

When it was very late and the car was dark and almost empty and most of those still in it were asleep, I looked out the window at what, at that hour, I could see of Newfoundland, dark shapes of hills and trees, a glimpse, when the moon was out, of distant ice-caught ponds. The towns in the interior, though they tended to be larger than the coastal fishing towns, each one depending on some single industry like mining or pulp and paper, were few and far between. These were new towns, settlements of this century, in some cases post-confederate, lived in by people who had moved in from the coast or from small islands off the coast. But even in the core there were a few small, unaccountably located towns a hundred miles apart, nothing more than clumps of houses really, all with their porch lights on, but otherwise unlit, occupied by people who, though it passed by every night, rarely saw or even heard the train. People left over from towns built up round industries of Smallwood’s that had already failed.

From Corner Brook, we followed the Long Range Mountains southwest to Stephenville Crossing, going downstream along the black, cliff-channelled Humber River. Sometime early in the morning, I fell asleep again and did not wake until the sun was up. Someone said we were thirty miles from Port aux Basques.

Until the ride back from Port aux Basques, we had a day to kill. There was not much more to do in Port aux Basques, especially without a car, than watch the ferries come and go. That is what we did, after we spent the night in the Holiday Inn that had been built for Come Home Year and had not been filled to capacity since.

Port aux Basques harbour had been dredged and redredged and hacked out of rock to accommodate the huge Gulf ferries after 1949. It looked like a quarry at high tide and at low tide like a reservoir that had been all but drained of water, the high water line ringing the harbour basin, a white salt stain on the rocks, strands of kelp hanging down from it into the water like dark green climbing ropes.

My father pointed out to me an island, on the leeward side of which, he said, Basque fishermen after whom the town was named used to lie in wait in their boats for schools of whales. He told me of the sealing vessel Southern Cross, which in April of 1914, while trying to make it back from the ice floes laden down with seventeen thousand whitecoat baby seals, sank with the loss of 170 men. No trace of her or her crew was ever found, despite the fact that she got near enough to home to be spotted momentarily by the telegrapher at Port aux Basques. The Southern Cross that almost made it and yet no trace of which was found. What a typically Newfoundland disaster that seemed to be, the ship that almost made it but that didn’t for reasons no one was able to explain.

Everything ended or, depending on your point of view, began in Port aux Basques: the highway, the railway, the Gulf run. In between the sudden, short-lived euphoria of arrivals and departures, the place was desolately empty. The port was for leaving and arriving, not for staying in. No one who could help it, no one who knew boredom when they saw it coming, spent the night in Port aux Basques.

My father found the whole concept of the car ferry hilarious, cars driving into and out of the holds of boats. The Gulf run from Argentia, near St. John’s, had only recently begun and he had yet to go there, so this was a first for him, as was everything for me.

We watched a ferry arrive, churning up half the harbour, turning the green water white as it described a slow circle, then backing up to the dock and dropping its massive metal door, which doubled as a ramp.

“It’s like the troop ships at Normandy,” my father said. The port was a beachhead for tourists who poured off the troop-ship-like ferries in cars and trailers and transport trucks. Cars driven by motorists who you could not help thinking had been behind the wheel since the ferry left North Sydney and seemed to know exactly where to go sped off. They left Newfoundland the same way, like an invasion force withdrawing with almost comic haste, its mission either accomplished or abandoned as hopeless. The whole thing seemed portentous of some mass evacuation.

We watched as hundreds of cars assembled on a parking lot the size of several football fields waiting to drive onto the Gulf ferry. Some had out-of-province licence plates — Canadian, American — but most bore the plates of Newfoundland.

Every day of the summers since the road went through in ’65, hundreds of Newfoundlanders drove to Port aux Basques, took the ferry to the mainland, then spent their vacations enjoying the previously unheard of luxury of endless driving, endless space. The number of car owners increased threefold after 1965. Air travel was still, for most people, too expensive or too exotic. With the road, and without the train, Newfoundland was suddenly transformed from a country where it was pointless to have a car to a country where you could not get by without one. “Going for drives” became the rage, the way it had in other parts of the world in the 1920s.

Several lanes were reserved for transport trucks, which lined up in convoys and were always the first on and the first off any ferry. I had heard there was not enough room on many parts of the highway for two transport trucks to pass without one relieving the other of its sideview mirror. Only a few people boarded the ferry the old-fashioned way, walking on, some bus passengers, some backpacking students who had hitchhiked across the island. “The boat used to dock side-on,” my father said scornfully, “not stern-on like that. There used to be a gangplank.”

Every day for years these melodramas of departure and arrival had been going on without my knowledge. I had been nowhere. I had never been this far west before. On the island. In the world. Children half my age looked out at me from the windows of the cars that went on board the ferry, travel complacent five-year-olds to whom I was sure my unworldliness was obvious.

I decided that when I left the island for the first time, it would be by boat. It would be appropriate, the first time, to watch the land slowly fade from view. I looked out to where the ferry was headed, but there was no more sign of land than there was when you looked out to sea from the Gaze at Ferryland.

Only according to the map was Canada closer than Ireland and England. Places I had never been and could not see were all impossibly far away, nebulously elsewhere. My father saw me looking wonder-struck. It must have occurred to him that this was the first time I had ever set eyes on the Gulf of St. Lawrence. “It looks just the same on the other side,” he said. “For a while, anyway.”

I nodded as if I had assumed this to be the case. But I did not really believe it. Crossing the stream of fog on the isthmus of Avalon was momentous enough for now. This other crossing I was contemplating I could not imagine. The other side of this Gulf was remoter than the moon, on which men had just landed and which I had seen with my own eyes countless times. Only on TV and in photographs had I ever seen the world alleged to exist beyond the shores of Newfoundland. I had read about it in books, but any book not set in Newfoundland was to me a work of fiction. Anywhere but Newfoundland was to me as fabled a place as the New World must have been to Cabot or Columbus.

“We should drive here sometime, Dad,” I said. “All of us. Or we could leave from Argentia. Take the ferry across. On your holidays.”

“Sure,” he said. “Sure, we’ll do that soon.”

A man told my father that some people had taken the bus from St. John’s to Port aux Basques so they could take the train back to St. John’s. And people from Port aux Basques and from other places between there and St. John’s planned to take the train to St. John’s, then go home by bus. My father could not understand this. You were either for the bus or for the train. You could not have it both ways.

“They’re all a crowd of fact-facing bus-boomers,” my father said.

There were not many purists like us who boarded the train that morning, but what few there were were easy to spot because of how travel-weary they looked, about to begin their second crossing of Newfoundland in two days.

It was clear from the outset that there would be no sleeping on this trip. Nor was anyone likely to complain about the noise. It was as if invitations had been sent out to a train-borne talent contest.

Two old men in coveralls got on board wearing accordions but otherwise without luggage. A fiddler warmed up on the platform. “Or at least I hope he’s warming up,” my father said. He wondered if it was all some sort of celebration got up by the government.

A man boarded with a set of spoons hanging from his belt. Another fellow step-danced as if to a tune that no one else could hear, standing ramrod straight, arms rigidly at his sides, moving about among the people on the platform who paid him a disconcerting lack of attention. He was very trim, well-dressed except he had no jacket, just a shirt and vest and slacks and gleaming black shoes. My father said he was either performing some sort of send-off for the train or was completely mad. Luggage was generally scarce. Some people carried nothing but bottles of rum tokenly disguised in paper bags. Others toted impossible-to-disguise cases of beer.

“We couldn’t save her, so we might as well give her a proper send-off,” one beer-laden man said, as if to disarm the conductor as he handed him his ticket. Drinking was permitted almost everywhere, in the observation car, the smoking car, the dining car, coach.

“I wouldn’t want to have your head this time tomorrow,” the conductor said, shaking his own head but grinning. I had seen two bottles of Royal Reserve rye whisky in my father’s suitcase.

We stowed our luggage in our berth, then went where everyone else was going, to the observation car. Most of the people who had got on board did not have berths. They were travelling coach, probably unable to afford a berth but in any case with no need for one on this occasion, for they had no intention of even spending time by themselves, let alone sleeping.

The purser was cheered when he broke out two bottles of Champagne. On every run from now until the last one in the spring, my father said, there would be Champagne. A token of mollification. I foresaw a long twenty-four hours for children and other non-drinkers. There were not many children. There would be little for me to do but watch the grown-ups.

The step dancer eventually got on the train. Now that he had stopped dancing, people took notice of him and called him by name, Walter.

“Not much room to scuff in here, Walter,” one man said.

“He don’t need much room,” a woman said. Walter said nothing, just smiled, as if in humble acknowledgment of fame. Nor did it seem that anyone expected him to speak.

The accordionists came up the steps to the observation car. They were so alike that they must have been brothers. They began to play, making a sound like a hundred car horns blowing in raucous celebration of a wedding. No one else seemed to mind. No one paid much attention to die scenery or the blue sky and white clouds visible through the glass roof. A singalong was soon under way, of Newfoundland songs, though there was not a railway song among them or one in which the word “train” was even mentioned.

I kept my eye on Walter. He sat near the circular staircase that led up to the observation car, beside the accordionists. He did not move a muscle. There was nothing to indicate that he was keeping time with the music or even remotely aware of his surroundings. Then he stood up and, as if in a trance, began to dance as he had on the platform, as if driven to do so by some force he was helpless to resist, though he was so stiff that all of him except his feet did seem to be resisting. He looked nonplussed but composed, as if, though it was a longstanding mystery to him why his feet behaved the way they did, he knew he had no choice but to wait for them to stop. He went up and down between the aisle while everyone clapped along.

Soon others were dancing, as many as the limited space would permit. Glasses were abandoned, temporarily or not, all over the place. I poured the contents of a couple into an almost-empty Coke bottle and proceeded to get drunk for the first time in my life. My father saw what I was up to but said nothing. His main concern was not that I was drinking but that my mother not find out.

Having downed most of the contents of my Coke bottle at the rate that I normally consumed Coke, I felt as though I might be sick. I kept perfectly still, concentrating on not being sick, convinced that unless everyone around me kept perfectly still and concentrated on my not becoming sick, I was doomed.

Luckily for me, sleep came first. I passed out in a chair by the window. When I woke up hours later, the party, accordion driven, was still going strong. People looked out the windows, but only to see where we were, to revel in how much of the journey still remained. Time was being measured solely in terms of space. The party would last for 638 miles, and so far we had travelled only 160.

A mummers’ troupe was on the train, though we in the observation car did not realize this until we heard a voice from the bottom of the stairs say “Mummers allowed in?” and another “Any Christmas here?”

“Mummers!” someone shouted.

From below the observation car, there was an explosion of sound from which we had not even begun to recover when there came climbing up the stairs like some invasion force a troupe of mummers, all wearing costumes that disguised not only their identities but their genders, the lead one holding above his/her head with both hands a suitcase-size radio that was cranked up to what must have been full volume and playing some sort of frenzied raucous jig.

The other mummers, perhaps ten or twelve of them, fell in behind him/her single file, half-jogging, half-shaking, each using to deafening effect some sort of noisemaker — one was playing on his/her hip a set of spoons, another had what looked something like but wasn’t quite a tambourine, another had on his/her arm a shield-like drum and was beating it with both ends of what appeared to be a pepper grinder; another was not so much playing as blowing into a mouth organ in a way that sounded like the random honking of a flock of geese; another was rattling on the end of a stick or whip what was supposed to be, and for all I know may well have been, a bladder full of peas.

The noise of their instruments combined with that blasting from the radio to make such a din that people from the rest of the train came up to see what was going on.

“Oh look, it’s the mummers,” one of the women said and ran back down the stairs, presumably to spread the news.

Though I doubted there was anyone on the train who would have recognized them, the mummers spoke ingressively — that is, while breathing in — as mummers visiting the houses of people they knew did in order to disguise their voices. Their every word was a hoarse croaking gasping inhalation.

I had never seen mummers before. There hadn’t been much mummering done in or around St. John’s for a long time. It had been outlawed there since the 1860s, as it had been on the entire Avalon Peninsula, largely because one Isaac Mercer had been set upon and murdered by a troupe of mummers on December 28, 1860, in Bay Roberts, a town not far from St. John’s.

Because mummers went from house to house bumming booze or wandered with bottles in hand through the streets, becoming progressively more drunk and less inhibited, their jaunts sometimes ended in fistfights. And mummering was in some places a time-honoured way of getting revenge for past grievances by using the disguise to beat the living daylights out of enemies. Religious rivals went at each other, Catholics preying on Protestants and vice versa.

There had been plenty of mummering in Ferryland when my father was growing up, despite the law that had been passed against it and despite the parish priest’s condemnation. The priest, every Christmas, denounced mummering as blasphemous, pornographic and obscene. Mummers were depraved, he said. While dancing with mummers, people would “feel them up” to determine what sex they were. In which case, he said, you not only had men groping women and vice versa, but men groping men and women groping women. And this was a tradition people thought was worth reviving? “Have nothing to do with mummering,” he said.

The members of this troupe wore homemade masks, veils of lace or net curtains, or pillowcases or stockings pulled tightly over their faces, tied at the throat with twine. Some had wigs and false beards, and what little that showed of their faces was painted black.

There was a mummer with a middle leg so long that it dragged the ground, an opaque stocking stuffed with socks that he/she kept stepping on and tripping.

There was a “Horse-chops” too, who was “riding” a hobby-horse made of a stick with the figure of a horse’s head on top, a head that had moveable jaws with nails for teeth that he/she snapped at people’s noses, ingressively laughing when they pulled back, half-terrified, half-amused.

They sang ingressively an old song that the accordion brothers knew. It was, I found out later, called, “The Terra Novean Exile’s Song”: “How oft some of us here tonight/Have seen the mummers out/As thro’ the fields by pale moon light/They came with merry shout/In costumes quaint with mask or paint.”

Eventually, the lead mummer held out a hand to a woman who without the least hesitation accepted, and the two of them, arms linked, began what was obviously not the first such dance for either of them. The other mummers followed suit.

I was approached by a mummer wearing a red dress with black polka dots over green slacks tucked into knee-high rubber boots; for a mask it wore a pillow slip, with eyeholes but no mouth, tied at the neck with green twine, a pair of woollen mitts, a large blue floppy hat with a fringe of flowers. There was so much padding underneath the dress I couldn’t have come within a hundred pounds of guessing the person’s weight, and over the dress was an enormous stuffed bra and an equally enormous rosette-embroidered pair of panties. “Give us a dance?” I shook my head, which ached. I felt queasy. I was hung over, though I didn’t know it.

I knew it was supposed to be all in fun, but there was something about mummering itself I didn’t like, something I would not have liked had I been living in a time when mummering was commonplace. Partly it was the mummers themselves; there was something of the bully about them. It was an uneasy feeling, to be forced to take part in something so one-sided, to be at such a disadvantage — the mummers were anonymous, uninhibited, aggressive, because you couldn’t see their faces, while there you were for all to see.

The mummer wearing the middle leg that hung down almost to the floor danced over to my father, that leg lewdly swinging, and held out an arm to him. Smiling and trying not to look the least bit disconcerted, he shook his head. It soon became clear, however, that refusal was unacceptable. The mummer grabbed his middle leg with both hands and, raising it, made as if to knight my father with it, laying it first on one shoulder, then the other.

“I wants a dance,” he/she said ingressively. “What’s the matter? Townies don’t dance?”

“I’m no townie,” my father said. “What’s your name?”

“It’s not time yet for guessin’ names,” the mummer said.

“It’s time to dance,” and this time with the middle leg bopped my father on the head.

“I’m not in the mood for dancing,” my father said. “You lot aren’t planning to keep this up all the way to the other side of the country, are you?”

The mummer put his face to within inches of my father’s and, speaking ingressively, said, “It’s not a country, it’s a province. It never was a country. If you know your history.”

My father made a lunge for him, but several other mummers intervened and hustled away the one who by his words had revealed himself to be the fact-facing bus-boomer.

“Downstairs,” one of them said ingressively. “We’re going downstairs now. Time to visit somewhere else. Somewhere we’ll be more welcome.” The mummers, accompanied by the makeshift band and many of the occupants of the observation car, departed as abruptly as they had arrived, though for a long time afterwards we could still hear them down below.

My father sat brooding again, looking out the window for a while. It had been comical, his lunging for the middle-leg-wearing fact-facing bus-boomer, though it did not seem so now. Those passengers still in the car darted a glance at him from time to time.

He got up and told me to stay put until he got back — he was going to take a short nap in our berth. I thought he might be going off in search of the fact-facing bus-boomer, but he went the other way. We never saw the bus-boomer, mummered up or otherwise, again.

My father came back about an hour later and rejoined me in the seat. “Were you going to beat him up?” I said.

My father laughed. His mood was much improved and I could tell why just from looking at him.

“No,” he said, “I wasn’t going to beat him up.” But he laughed as if he was picturing the fact-facing, bus-booming mummer thrashed, his costume in a state of extreme dishevelment.

When night came, he fell silent again, staring out into the darkness. We had something to eat in the dining car, then went back to our berth.

I climbed into bed. He turned off the light and sat by the window, facing me, a glass in one hand that he rested on his leg. “You go to sleep,” he said. “I’ll wake you when the sun comes up and we’ll have breakfast in the dining car. Don’t tell your mother what happened, all right?”

I nodded. “Where will we be when the sun comes up?” I said.

He took his schedule from his pocket and squinted at it in the darkness. “Whitbourne Junction,” he said.

“Tell me a ghost story,” I said.

He shook his head. “You’ll have bad dreams.”

“No I won’t,” I said.

He told me about the Great Eastern. The first underwater transatlantic telegraph cable had been brought ashore at Heart’s Content, Newfoundland, on July 27, 1866. For the purpose of laying the cable between Valenica, Ireland and Heart’s Content, a telegraph company owner named Cyrus Field had purchased what in the 1860s was the largest ship in the world, a debt-inducing white elephant called the Great Eastern, which had been designed and built by the famous engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel.

The Great Eastern was seven hundred feet long, drew fifty feet of water and had the capacity to carry four thousand passengers. It was built at Millwood, London, to transport immigrants to Australia and British troops to India. There hung on the wall of our living room a sketch of the Great Eastern that, in dim light, looked like a city skyline, all masts and sails and a calliope of smokestacks, a massive paddlewheel at the stern.

The Great Eastern was dogged by misfortune from the very start. The first attempt to launch it failed and resulted in great damage to the ship. Once launched, it brought grief to everyone involved with it.

Its bad luck was said to have been caused by a jinx placed on it during its construction when a rumour spread that two men were trapped somewhere between the hulls. Isambard Kingdom Brunel refused to tear apart his ship merely on the basis of a rumour, and so the hulls were sealed.

The rumours of faint tappings heard from within persisted throughout the life of the ship. These rumours scared off passengers afraid of hearing ghosts or afraid of being on board when God got round to exacting his revenge, or afraid of the bad luck that was said to hang for life on anyone who had anything to do with Brunel’s floating masterpiece. Mystics predicted its every voyage would be its last. The sinking of the Great Eastern was foreseen a thousand times but never happened.

A failure as a passenger ship, its one great success was the laying of the transatlantic cable. It carried the three thousand miles of cable in its hold, played it out foot by foot until the last of it was sunk in a protective trench on the floor of the harbour at Heart’s Content.

In 1887 the Great Eastern was sold for scrap. It took two years to dismantle it; in 1889 the skeletons not of two men, but of a man and a boy, a father and his twelve-year-old son, were found sealed between the hulls.

“Is that true?” I said.

“No,” my father said. “No. It’s just a story.” But I knew from how he spoke that it was true.

He told me to imagine the Great Eastern as it hove to in sight of Newfoundland, still bound to Ireland by that cable that played out from the stern like some fishing line, as if it had trolled the Atlantic without success for some creature of the deep.

“They could have reeled the Great Eastern in from Ireland,” my father said. “Or once the cable was ashore, we could have reeled in Ireland from Newfoundland.”

Newfoundland and Ireland physically linked, tethered, bound together by a cable that, to this day, lies buried on the ocean floor. Was this not something marvellous? he said. But I would not be put off.

For how long had the man and his son remained alive? I asked. My father said they had survived for years by eating rats that like them had been trapped between the hulls and by licking condensation from the walls. I knew he was hoping that by making this joke, he would fool me into thinking the whole thing had been made up. I kept asking questions.

Why was their entrapment, their entombment, just a rumour and not a fact? Why was their disappearance not evidence enough of where they were?

“It’s just a story,” my father said.

What would they have talked about once they gave up hope of being rescued? Were they found side by side or far apart? Had they been able to hear sounds from outside? Probably, since people outside had been able to hear them tapping on the hull. Muffled sounds. A world away. Did they die while the ship was still being built, before it was even launched, or after it was launched?

“That’s enough questions, Wayne,” my father said. “You asked me for a story, so I made one up.”

I put the questions to myself instead. What must it have been like in there, between the hulls? There would have been no light, or almost none. Dark, silent, with only each other to talk to and only each other to hear. It seemed at once terrifying and absurd, the two of them trapped between the hulls of that great ship while work on the exterior continued or while the Great Eastern was under sail.

The Great Eastern and its hull-haunting ghosts, the bones of a man and his son still clothed, their boots still on their bony feet. A father and his son. What a strange companionship their last days must have been. Companionship. Ship companions.

I lay awake for a long time, watching my father as he looked out the window and filled and refilled his glass with rye and ginger ale. The train rumbled along, swaying on the narrow gauge. We were passing through the core. Through the window, even though our car was dark, I could see only what the locomotive light eight cars ahead revealed, a short stretch of tracks, the reflection of the light as we crossed a stretch of open water. In the observation car it had been chilly, but underneath the blankets it was warm.

I fell asleep and sometime later was wakened by his voice. I was about to admit to him that I had been asleep when I realized he was not talking to me.

He spoke, inaudibly, paused as if to let someone reply, then spoke again. His voice was low. Some of what he said I could not make out. He drank, his head tipped back, eyes closed as though he was engrossed in this attempt to drain his glass. He poured another drink.

“Dad?” I said.

Startled, he froze in the act of raising his glass to his mouth. He lowered his arm.

“Thought you were asleep,” he said.

“Who were you talking to?” I said.

“No one,” he said. “There’s no one here but you and me.”

“What happened on the beach?” I said.

“What do you mean? Whatever I said, I said it in my sleep.”

“You weren’t asleep,” I said, but he said nothing.

“I heard you and Harold once. At the Come Home Year party.”

“I don’t know what you think you heard. Just two men who had too much to drink, that’s all. Go back to sleep now. No more questions.”

I nodded off to the sound of him gulping from the glass. When I woke up in the morning he was still there in the chair, eyes closed, his head to one side and thrown back against the cushion, the glass, and the whisky and the ginger-ale bottles all scattered on the floor about his chair, all empty. He stayed that way until I woke him when we pulled into the station at St. John’s.

One night, a few weeks later, presumably to wrench myself from a dream, though I remembered none of it, I threw myself right out of bed, out of the top bunk, and in the darkness struck my head on the bedpost of the other top bunk, cutting myself above the eye. I let out such a shriek that my parents heard me. They came running and, turning on the light, found me lying on the floor, blood streaming down one side of my face, my three terrified brothers sitting up with their backs against the wall as if I had attacked them in their sleep.