I LEFT BY boat, as I had vowed I would when I first saw the Gulf when I was ten. The sight of Newfoundland slowly receding reminded me of something. I could not think what until we were several miles offshore. It was not what I had anticipated I would think about as I was leaving. I’d imagined a Stephen Dedalus—like sense of expectation and adventure, standing like Joyce’s hero at the rail, open-armed for new lands and new experience, casting off the nets that for so long had held me back. Instead, it was the “resettlers” I thought about.

This was how the island must have looked to those Newfoundlanders whom the government resettled from remote islands to population centres in the sixties. This must have been what they had seen when they looked out their windows, this horizon-obscuring chunk of rock on which they had never set foot and vowed they never would.

It was not what most of them had seen while they made the final crossing to the “mainland,” for they sailed away with their eyes on their islands and their backs to Newfoundland and did not turn around until they disembarked. Most of them had to be coaxed from boats that in some cases had been moored for hours to wharves and fishing stages. I would probably have done the same thing if it was possible to see Newfoundland from the ferry all the way to Nova Scotia.

A great-uncle of mine who was born in Ferryland at some point visited Woody Island, got married there and never left it until the people of Woody Island were resettled in 1968 to Arnold’s Cove. We went out to Arnold’s Cove to see him and his family land like immigrants on the shore of Newfoundland and to see their house floated across the bay on a raft buoyed up by oil drums.

We were not the only ones there. It was a summer weekend pastime for people to drive out around the bay and see houses floated in from the offshore islands. There were a couple of dozen people, some with binoculars, staring out to sea as if waiting for some annual event of nature. Woody Island was too far away to differentiate one house from another. There were merely clumps of colours near the shore. I saw a wedge of green detach itself like an iceberg from a glacier, then a great eruption of white water. “Whoa,” a man looking through binoculars said. We would not have been surprised had we been told the house had sunk, but soon we saw the green again.

While my parents and my aunts and uncles went down to the wharf to welcome my all-but-mythical great-uncle and his never-before-glimpsed relatives, my brothers and I climbed the hill to get a better view of the houses as they came, towed by tugs and motorboats, across the bay. The houses tilted forward slightly in spite of the oil drums. The front of the rafts dipped below the water, and waves lapped at the windowless storm doors, the houses plowing a wide slow wake, pushing rounded swells in front of them, a small fleet of square-hulled ships. I expected to see people inside them, leaning out the windows, expected the front doors to open and people to peer out to see how close to shore they were. But the houses were just shells. You could see right through them, the sunlit empty rooms, bare walls.

The owners escorted their houses in skiffs piled high with everything they owned, loads of precariously balanced furniture, cardboard boxes of belongings, the skiffs riding so low that their gunwales barely cleared the water, their engines putt-putting just fast enough to keep from stalling.

I had heard that in mid-crossing some houses, made top-heavy by their chimneys and their roofs, caved in, or, the upper storeys tilting too far forward, broke in half. My great-uncle’s house made it to Arnold’s Cove without mishap and was winched up a slipway to a flatbed truck.

But one woman, one of his sisters-in-law I think it was, refused to get out of the boat when it moored at the wharf. Wearing a nylon scarf tightly tied beneath her chin, a bulky overcoat, lime green slacks and a pair of rubber kneeboots, she sat staring out across the bay. People on the wharf tried to coax her out of the boat, but, her back to Arnold’s Cove, her eyes on Woody Island, she shook her head. Finally two men climbed down into the boat and she let herself be led to the ladder. When she stepped onto the wharf, she covered her face with her hands, shaking her head when two women put their arms around her, as if she would not be consoled.

I wondered how long I would last in the place where I was headed if from there I could still see Newfoundland, and knew that I could not go back, not ever. I thought of the stories my father had told me, the moral of which, until now, I had taken to be that outporters were hopelessly set in their ways, hopelessly old-fashioned and opposed to change.

When he was travelling the south coast on the Belle Bay, he saw houses being moved. Each house was blessed by a priest or a minister before being launched. The priest walked about the empty rooms and sprinkled holy water with a sceptre that he dipped from time to time in a little silver bucket. Fighting water with water. It was hoped that these drops that spattered on the floors and on the walls and on the windows would keep out the sea.

The houses, and the rafts to which they were bound, went down the slips like boats being launched. A great cheer rose when, after the suspense of the initial plunge and the bobbing up and down, a house floated upright and the swell that might have swamped it subsided. A seaworthy house.

The closest thing to a crowd that you could get in places that size gathered for each launching. The whole thing seemed to my father foredoomed by the desire of these people to take their houses with them when they could have opted to have a new house built free of charge on a site of their own choosing. They would rather risk sinking it than leave it behind. So how then would they live without what they could not help but leave behind—the view they had had all their lives from its windows? Opening the same door as they had before they moved, looking out the same window, they would never stop expecting to see what they used to see outside.

The resettlers took with them their flagpoles and their painted beach rocks, their clothesline posts and barrels for burning trash. They took with them, so they could litter their new yards with them, objects that had lain about their old yards for decades, punctured buoys, laddered fishing nets and broken lobster traps.

Many people moved to places from which they could see their old homes a few miles of water away. This did not relieve their homesickness, of course, but only made it worse. It was difficult even for the men who had often seen their island from a distance, seen it resolve into shapes and lines as they looked back at it while they were heading out to sea, seen it as, from their boats that lay anchored, they handlined for cod. They looked up and there it was, their island. But for many of the women who had never or only rarely been off their island in their lives, the sudden shift in perspective was too profound. They might as well have been marooned astronauts looking back at the moon from planet Earth.

My father told me that a church while being relocated sprang a leak and sank and still lay at the bottom of the sea, and that its bell could still be heard, a muffled submarine sound that went faintly out across the bay when the tides were running or when the sea was rough.

He said that houses sinking were cut loose to keep them from dragging under the boats that were towing them. Some, set adrift but only half submerged, floated out to sea where, looming suddenly out of the fog as if they had been wrenched by tidal waves from their foundations, they scared the life out of fishermen, nudging against their boats and then moving on as if they were being navigated from below the waterline by someone looking out the kitchen window.

There flashed through my mind the image of our bungalow on Petty Harbour Road attached by a tow line to the ferry, my parents at the windows smiling and waving at me. It seemed so absurd I almost laughed out loud.

Knowing I would lose sight of Newfoundland eventually, I did not stand at the rail. Instead I sat facing away from it for as long as I was able to resist the urge to look. And when finally I did look, it was gone.