Old Lost Land
Dear Smallwood:
“The man who wrote ‘The Ode to Newfoundland’ lived there,” my father used to tell me, pointing at Government House. The grounds of Government House, where all the governors of Newfoundland since 1824 have lived, back onto Circular Road, so I can see them from my bedroom window. For most of the year, no one sets foot on the grounds but gardeners and in winter no one at all. It always seems a strange sight, that vast, treeless, steppe-like field in the middle of the city, without so much as a dog’s footprints in the snow.
When I was a child, I was always asking my father, “How big is Newfoundland?” Using the map on the wall of his study, he would try to make me understand how big it was, try to give me some sense of how much more of it there was than I had seen so far in our horse-cab drives around the bay. “We’re here,” my father said, pointing at the tiny encircled 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 crackling expansively 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.” I could not imagine it. All I could imagine were the grounds of Government House going on forever. I have yet to see it.
The ode was written by Sir Cavendish Boyle, governor of Newfoundland from 1901-1904. When I was a child, I thought his first name was Surcavendish. It conjured up a man who lived alone, a man who was given, like me, to watching the grounds from his bedroom window, some brooding, gloom-savouring soul like myself in whose huge house there was never more than one light burning. I could not imagine him ever having done anything else, could not imagine any existence for him except sitting at that window, looking out, brooding over Newfoundland, endlessly writing the ode.
At night, with my face pressed to the window, I used to recite to myself my favourite verse. “When spreads thy cloak of shimm’ring white, at winter’s stern command, thro’ shortened day and star-lit night, we love thee, frozen land. We love thee, we love thee, we love thee, frozen land.” It was as if this had been written, not for all Newfoundlanders, but specifically for my father and me, the Fielding family anthem, as if this was our windswept, frozen land.
Though they are anthem-like, there is something indefinably sad about the words, resigned, regretful, as if Boyle imagined himself looking back from a time when Newfoundland had ceased to be. It is the sort of song you might write about a place as you were leaving it by boat, watching it slowly fade from view, a place you believed you would never see again. He was governor of Newfoundland for only a few years, so he must have written it in the knowledge that he was soon to leave.
Fall, Smallwood, another fall, and you leave tomorrow. And me? Soon to be at sea again? I feel as though I am at sea. Nova Scotia. New Scotland. New England. New York. New York again. Where the streets are so hemmed in by buildings they never see the sun. The old New World. Where my mother and my stepfather live, which you knew when you invited me along. Perhaps you do not really expect me to accept your invitation. What will you think or do if I turn up? Sometimes I have the feeling that I am appealing to qualities in you that you do not have, that the you I love is just someone I invented. I feel that, though you are younger than me by just one year, we are lifetimes apart. Ill at ease in your own world and in other worlds unwelcome. Mocked at in both. But you will not stop demanding to be let in, or looking for an overlooked, unlocked door. You are willing to risk or forsake everything to get what you want. Including me? How it spited me that it was you, you who embarrassed me in front of all the Townies, and especially in front of Prowse. There is always this awkwardness between us because of what happened at the Feild. Because of what you think happened. That day in the training centre. We never mention it, perhaps for my sake, perhaps for yours. I’m not sure if you’ve forgiven me, if you think my expulsion from Spencer and my getting you a job on the paper makes us even. When the others left, you stayed, and for the first time since we met you said my name. “Fielding.” More tenderly than you have said it since. I should have let you speak instead of asking you to leave. Whatever you had planned to say remains unsaid. I wonder, sometimes, if I should tell you everything. So much to risk. I don’t think I trust anyone that much.
I WAS TO LEAVE the next day. I walked up Signal Hill, from which you could see the whole city, though it was not St. John’s I looked at but the sea, crashing on the rocks at the base of the red sandstone cliffs. The hill was carpeted with unripe, red-and-yellow partridge berries. They needed almost no soil, grew on sod that was draped like a ragged carpet over rocks. The remains of gun batteries, crumbling fortifications and forgotten barracks lay everywhere. Down below were the charred ruins of a cholera hospital so hard to reach that it was never used except for smallpox patients, who never saw St. John’s, only the grotto of rock around them and the open sea.
It occurred to me, for the first time, that I might not come back.
The sea brought out such thoughts in me. My virtual non-existence in comparison with the eternal sea-scheme of things. I never felt so forlorn, so desolate as I did looking out across the trackless, forever-changing surface of the sea, which, though it registered the passage of time, was suggestive of no beginning and no end, as purposeless, as pointless as eternity.
I had never liked to think of myself as living on an island. I preferred to think of Newfoundland as landlocked in the middle of some otherwise empty continent, for though I had an islander’s scorn of the mainland, I could not stand the sea. I was morbidly drawn to read and re-read, as a child, an abridged version of Melville’s Moby Dick, a book that, though I kept going back to it, gave me nightmares. Ishmael’s notion that the sea had some sort of melancholy-dispelling power mystified me. Whenever it was a damp, drizzly November in my soul, the last thing I wanted to look at was the sea. It was not just drowning in it I was afraid of, but the sight of that vast, endless, life-excluding stretch of water. It reminded me of God, not the God of Miss Garrigus and the Bible, whose threats of eternal damnation I did not believe in, but Melville’s God, inscrutable, featureless, indifferent, as unimaginable as an eternity of time or an infinity of space, in comparison with which I was nothing. The sight of some little fishing boat heading out to sea like some void-bound soul made me, literally, seasick.
On the other hand, I was an islander. I thought of my father’s stint in Boston, where he had discovered the limits of a leash that up to that point he hadn’t even known he was wearing. I wondered if, like him, I would be so bewildered by the sheer unknowable, unencompassable size of the world that I would have to come back home. How could you say for certain where you were, where home left off and away began, if the earth that you were standing on went on forever, as it must have seemed to him, in all directions? For an islander, there had to be natural limits, gaps, demarcations, not just artificial ones on a map. Between us and them and here and there, there had to be a gulf.
I walked down the sea side of Signal Hill, following the steep and winding path that led to the Narrows. When I reached the pudding-stone, the wave-worn conglomerate of rock that marked the high water-line, I saw the Boot, the old wooden boot attached to the iron rod bored into the cliff with the name of Smallwood written on it, eerily glowing, swaying slightly back and forth in the wind. The Boot was like some flag, Smallwood the name of some long-reigning monarch or a family that had laid claim to the place two hundred years ago. The republic of Smallwood. “My God, Smallwood,” Reeves had said, “what are your parents trying to do, start their own country?”
But the Boot would not be the last thing I saw on leaving, for I planned to sail from Port aux Basques after, for the first time in my life, crossing Newfoundland by train. I relished the thought of a journey that would carry me farther and farther inland from the sea. I had no conception of what Newfoundland looked like outside a forty-mile radius of St. John’s.
As though I had contracted from my father an irrational fear of it, I dreamed about the old man’s Boot the night before I left. I was sailing out through the Narrows, alone on a boat of some kind, and there was the Boot, with my name on both sides of it, Smallwood, glowing in the dark. When I passed it, I turned to look back at it and only as it began to grow dim did I realize that I had cleared the Narrows and was drifting out to sea. I stood in the boat and called for help, but by then I had rounded the point and the Boot, my name and the harbour lights had vanished. It was so dark I could not make out the headlands. There was no wind and I could not even smell the sea. I could not feel the boat beneath me, or hear the slightest sound. I turned around and faced what I believed was seaward, but there was nothing there but darkness. I made to touch my arms to reassure myself of my existence, but it seemed that even my own body had disappeared. I tried to shout again for help, but could make no sound. I woke from this insensate darkness to the darkness of my room and felt my arms and legs and face, and said my name out loud.
I thought of Fielding, whom I had not heard from since that day when she had acted so strangely on the waterfront. I wondered if she had insisted on not seeing me the past two weeks because she knew she would not be going to New York. It seemed to me it might be her and not my imminent departure that had given rise to the dream.
As I lay there in the darkness in my boarding-house room, I imagined kissing her and taking off her clothes. I could not picture what she looked like, I knew only that she was naked and I was not. I could not imagine myself unclothed in front of anyone. I felt the buttons of my longjohns. My fantasy was having no physical effect. Up to that point, my sex life had been confined to racy postcards. Some woman, divan-reclined, legs crossed, a feather boa wound about herself. For her, an erection, like a chisel and a feverish half-hour of self-administration. For Fielding, nothing.
I had once, when I was eleven, happened on a man and a woman in the woods above the Brow. They were in a place we called the Spruces, where little light came through and the forest floor was thick with moss. It was a summer Sunday afternoon, overcast but warm, humid. There was hag hair hanging from the trees above the couple, strands and whiskers of it everywhere. The woman was faced full length away from me, unclothed, lying on her side on a blanket. All my mind would recall of her later, and recalled of her now, was her wide bare back, though I watched for so long I saw much more. All I could see of him were his hands, on her, though I could hear his voice and her laughing in a kind of teasing way each time he finished speaking. For a while, a shameful while, unable to resist, I watched, crouching down so they wouldn’t see me, watched and — even more, I think — listened, for I had been told of such things and seen pictures, but I had never heard such sounds. The strange commotion they made; the ever-intensifying sounds from the woman after the man climbed on top of her, so that she sank into the moss, almost out of sight. There was the sense of something secret, something awful, letting loose. It frightened me; it was hard to believe, listening to them, that they knew where this was going, that it wasn’t as new to them as it was to me; hard to believe that they hadn’t just discovered it by accident, setting into motion something that they were powerless to stop and that, for all they knew, would be the end of them, so panicked, so helpless did they sound. I had heard a boy at school say his parents did “it” every night, but I was sure he didn’t mean this.
I watched until they finished and then left. In memory, I was both drawn to it and repulsed by it, and ashamed of myself on both counts. I wondered what the implications of my ambivalence might be; if there might be something wrong with me.
I knew that my mother and father must have performed the act itself. My father had once said that if he merely threw his pants on her bed, my mother would get pregnant. But that they had never done that, that it had never been like that between them I was certain.
I had been awakened once or twice by the furtive and shortlived squeaking of their bedsprings in the middle of the night. And once, while returning from the outhouse, I had heard, above the barely squeaking springs, my mother sucking air through her clenched teeth as if my father were sticking her with pins. I had stood outside their door, transfixed. I heard my father shudder to a finish and my mother almost instantly afterwards saying, as if she was terrified he would fall asleep on top of her, “Get off me, Smallwood.” The bed squeaked momentarily as my father obliged her, and soon after there was snoring, not my mother’s, I was sure. I heard her murmur something in a plaintive, almost self-ironic tone, then all was silent.
That sound my mother made — I had been unable to rid myself of it. I could not look at a woman and not hear it, or imagine my mother in the darkness drawing air in through her teeth. The sound of air passing through my mother’s teeth, and the screams of the woman whose body by the weight of the man’s was pressed into the moss until all I could see was him, him obliterating her so that all that was left of her was sound, screams as if she was giving birth or being murdered.
I stopped rubbing my longjohns, then considered getting a postcard from my collection in my dresser drawer. The woman in the woods. It could not be that way for me. Somehow I knew it. Someone “over me” was always watching, and not for an instant could I forget it. Perhaps it could not be that way for any man, I wasn’t sure, and I had no intention of asking anyone. Nothing I had ever read in books enlightened me. On the one hand I envied her, that woman on the moss, wished I could be capable of such abandonment. But it was, I told myself, a carrot dangled by biology, the animal impulse to chase after which I must not give in to or it would mean my doom. I well understood my father’s horror of domesticity, of entrapment and confinement. The thought of nights in some fetid breeding bed while the products of other such nights lay listening in the next room or outside the door I found so revolting that I vowed I would never marry. My parents’ marriage was the only marriage I knew from the inside out. To me, their marriage was marriage. To live thus would be to forsake all destinies but the anxiety-ridden drudgery of caring for a horde of children. A pedestiny. I would never drag myself out of poverty if I got married, let alone achieve more than the limited success considered proper for the best of my kind by men like Reeves.
Trapped in a marriage, I would be driven mad by the casual assumption of privilege and preferment and innate superiority of “the quality,” if its effect on my father was anything to judge by. But unlike my father, I told myself, I was outraged by the “quality,” not only on my own behalf, but also on behalf of others. I saw no contradiction in wanting to achieve greatness through altruism. How else but through altruism could one be both virtuous and great?
Before I could make up my mind about the postcard, I fell back to sleep.
Besides what little clothing I had, I didn’t bring much with me except my oilcloth map of Newfoundland, a fishermen’s union pullover with its codfish-emblazoned badge, which I planned to wear while working at the Call, and my father’s History of Newfoundland.
My parents and brothers and sisters went with me to the railway station to say goodbye, and though they made quite a fuss, especially my mother and the girls (my father and the boys manfully shook hands with me and clapped me on the back), they were upstaged by the entire Jewish community of St. John’s, about whom I had written a laudatory feature in the Telegram two months before and who were surreally on hand to see me off, waving their black hats and weeping as if one of their number was leaving them for good.
Because of them and because of my oversized nose, many of my fellow passengers took me to be Jewish, a misconception I did nothing to discourage, since it made them less likely to sit with me, not because they had anything against the Jews, but simply because they doubted they could sustain a conversation for long with so exotic an individual. Normally, there is nothing I would rather do than talk, and I knew if I got started I might well talk all the way from St. John’s to Port aux Basques, oblivious to the landscape we were passing through. I would, many times in the future, spend cross-country train trips in just that manner; staying awake twenty-eight hours at a stretch, hardly noticing when one exhausted listener made way for the next, but on this trip I wanted to keep to myself and that, for the most part, is what I did.
The building of the railway had been one of the few great ventures in Newfoundland not connected with the fishery. Its primary purpose was not to link the scattered settlements around the coast, but to convey passengers and freight back and forth between the eastern and western seaports, St. John’s and Port aux Basques, to give Newfoundlanders access to both the ships that crossed the ocean to England and those that crossed the gulf to the mainland. Its route was not determined by the sea, nor was the sea visible at more than a few points along the way.
We started out from St. John’s just after sunrise. In two hours, we had crossed the Bog of Avalon, a sixty-mile stretch of barrens and rock scraped bare and strewn with boulders since the ice age. This gave way to a lonely, undifferentiated tract of bog and rolling hills devoid of trees because of forest fires that had burned away even the topsoil so that nothing would ever grow there again that was more than three feet high. It was September, but not so far into the month that the browning of the barrens had begun. An overcast day with a west wind that would keep the fog at bay. There was beauty everywhere, but it was the bleak beauty of sparsity, scarcity and stuntedness, with nothing left but what a thousand years ago had been the forest floor, a landscape clear-cut by nature that never would recover on its own. It was a beauty so elusive, so tantalizingly suggestive of something you could not quite put into words that it could drive you mad and, however much you loved it, make you want to get away from it and recall it from some city and content yourself with knowing it was there.
No one, not even aboriginals, had ever lived on this part of the island. It was impossible to speak of its history except in geological terms.
On one treeless, wind-levelled stretch of barrens, there were crater-like sink-holes of mud where the surface had collapsed. I saw an eastward-leaning stand of junipers, all bent at the same angle to the earth as though half-levelled by a single gust of wind.
Crossing the narrow isthmus of Avalon, I could for a time see ocean from both sides of the train. Fifty years later; after the train had ceased to run, travellers on the highway would be able to see from there the ruins of my refinery at Come by Chance; after it was mothballed, small amounts of crude oil would still be sent there for refining, so that, at night, you would be able to see the flame from the highest of the stacks from forty miles away.
Next came the Bog of Bonavista, and I began to think that Newfoundland would be nothing but a succession of bogs with clumps of storm-stunted spruce trees in between. We stopped at Gambo, the town where I was born and that I was really seeing for the first time, having been too young when I left to remember anything about it. Gambo was the one place in the 253 miles between Port Blandford on the east coast and Humbermouth on the west coast where the railway touched the shoreline, but it was not a fishing village, for the cod did not come that far up Bonavista Bay. It was a logging town and a coastal supply depot, boats sailing up Bonavista Bay to unload their cargo there, where it was then reloaded onto the train and transported inland to towns whose only link with the rest of the island was one of the world’s most primitive railways, a narrow-gauge track with spindle-thin rails on which the cars swayed about like sleds on ice.
Gambo was not much to look at, just a cluster of crude, garishly painted one-storey houses, log cabins and unbelievably primitive tar-paper shacks whose front yards were littered with a lifetime of debris: bottles, wooden crates, discarded clothing, broken barrels. I self-ashamedly thanked God we had forsaken the place and our lumber business there in favour of St. John’s. I saw the house where I was born — my mother had described its location and appearance to me. I will admit that it was one of the better houses within view, a white, blue-trimmed two-storeyed salt-and-pepper house with a gabled attic window that I could all too easily imagine myself looking out to sea from on a Sunday afternoon. I had fancied, before the trip began, that when we stopped in Gambo, I would proudly announce it to my fellow passengers as the place where I was born. But having seen it, I kept this information to myself and turned sideways in my seat, staring crimson-faced out the window and trying not to imagine the Smallwood that might have been, standing out there, staring in wonderment and longing at the train.
I saw from the windows of the train old men who I fancied had never travelled more than fifty miles from home, sitting side on to their windows, looking out. At the same time as I found the very sight of them oppressive and lived in horror of ending up that way myself — which I was for some reason well able to imagine, me in there looking out, ambitionless, untravelled and uneducated, watching the water break on the rocks in a pattern of foam I had so often seen it was imprinted on my brain — I envied them their apparent self-contentment and dilemma-less existence. For though their afflictions may have been many, irresolution and ambivalence were not among them.
I did not begin to feel better until mid-afternoon, when we crossed the Exploits River into central Newfoundland and the sudden change in the landscape revived my spirits. We travelled through a leafless forest of blazing-white birch trees, tall, schooner-mast-sized trees that went on and on until I could stand to look at them no longer.
I took out my map to see if I could fix exactly where we were. It struck me more forcefully than it ever had before that virtually the whole population lived on the coast, as if ready to abandon ship at a moment’s notice. The shore was nothing but a place to fish from, a place to moor a boat and sleep between days spent on the sea. Of the land, the great tract of possibility that lay behind them, beyond their own backyards, over the farthest hill that they could see from the windows of their houses, most Newfoundlanders knew next to nothing. Just as I, who knew nothing about it, feared the sea, though I believed my ignorance and fear to be more justified than theirs. I knew of grown men who hurried home from trouting or berry-picking in a panic as the sun was going down, for fear of being caught out after dark and led astray by fairies. My mother had often told me stories of people from Gambo who, fairy-led, were found weeks later at the end of a trail of clothing that in their trance, they had discarded. They had been led in a dance by fairies until they flopped down dead from sheer exhaustion, my mother believed, and no appeal to common sense or any amount of scorn could change her mind. Yet these same fairy-feeble men would go out on the sea at night in the worst weather to rescue a neighbour whose boat was going down. Here was all this land and they had not claimed an inch of it as theirs, preferring instead to daily risk their lives, hauling fish up from a sea that never would be theirs, and to kill seals walking on ice that could not, like land, be controlled or tamed.
I watched a group of loggers driving a large boom down the river, walking about with their pike-poles like the navigators of some massive raft. Even they preferred the water; they would rather ride the river than the train, though they acknowledged our whistle with a wave as we went by.
The aboriginals were gone. There was no one on the river now, besides the loggers, except guide-led sport fishermen from places like New York and Boston, and not even any of them past a certain point, just the river, which someone had once followed far enough to guess where it was headed and put that guess like gospel on a map. But no one knew where the river went. They knew where it began and where it flowed into the sea; what happened to it in between no one still alive could say.
We reached the town of Badger, where, in the one major departure from the route the highway would take years later; we kept on heading west through what, for the men who built the railway, must have been the most difficult stretch. There were so many hills the engineers had had no choice but to go straight through them. The train wound its way through cuts of rock so sheer and high you could not see the tops of them. Down the face of the rock ran little, spring-fed streams that sparkled in the sun, unseen except for the few minutes when the train was passing by.
There were rickety, gorge-spanning trestles, the gorges only thirty or forty feet wide but hundreds of feet deep. And there were ponds, lakes. When the train curved round some pond, I could see its whole length from my window. It began to rain, a sun-shower, and soon the stretch of rails ahead was gleaming, as was the rain-washed locomotive. I saw the conductor, the seamed, soot-blackened faces of the engineer and fireman and the smoke blown back mane-like above the cars. I saw other passengers in other cars unaware that I was watching them, and I felt as the people we passed along the tracks must have felt and saw myself as they must have, as impossibly remote from them as I was to the lives I had left behind and was headed towards, caught up in the dream of travel, the travel-trance that overtakes you when there are no familiar landmarks to remind you you are making progress, when it seems you have no destination and the landscape you are moving through goes on forever.
All along the line, every mile or so, were little shacks in which the section-men and their families lived what must have been strange and solitary lives. I saw the wives of section-men standing in their doorways watching as the train, the reason they lived where they did, fifty miles from the nearest town, moved past. I saw them standing with their children in their arms while their older children abandoned the tracks they played on to let the apparition of the train go by.
This is not an island, I told myself, but a landlocked country in the middle of an otherwise empty continent, a country hemmed in and cored by wilderness, and it is through this core that we are passing now, the unfoundland that will make us great someday.
It seemed strange to think that some of my fellow passengers were heading home, but some were; they had a different look about them, that half-resigned, half-expectant look of people soon to see familiar sights, familiar faces, the circumscribed geography of home. I did not want to think that anyone was heading home, or that the train was moving for any purpose but to take me, and only me, where I was going.
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 train went slowly upgrade for a hundred suspenseful miles, the passengers urging it on, knowing that if we stalled, we might be stranded there for days. We laughed and rocked forward and backward in our seats as if to coax the locomotive one more inch until, when we felt it make the crest, a great cheer went up and it seemed we were leaving home in earnest now, though one-third of our journey still remained.
Though I had vowed not to, I fell asleep again and awoke at dusk to see what appeared to be some kind of snow-plain, flatter even than the barrens, with only the occasional train-borne and bleary-eyed observer to confirm that it was real. It was not until I saw that the stumps of trees, dead two hundred years and petrified by age, formed a kind of barricade around it that I realized it was a frozen lake that we were passing, Deer Lake, the first I had ever set eyes on that was so wide you could not see the other side.
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 placid ponds; 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.
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 awake until the sun was up. Someone said we were thirty miles from Port aux Basques. I had stayed in the smoking car all night and not even made it to my complimentary berth, though in my Telegram article, I extolled its comfort and convenience as if I had not budged from it from St. John’s to Port aux Basques.
We were to cross the gulf by night and reach Cape Breton early in the morning.
I had intended to stand at the railing of the ship until I could no longer see the island. It seemed like the appropriately romantic thing to do.
I wished Fielding had come with me, though I knew she would have made some deflating remark that would have dispelled my mood.
I was pleased to discover, after about fifteen minutes, that all the other passengers had fled the cold and gone inside. I pulled up the hood of my raincoat and imagined what I must look like from in there, a lone hooded figure at the railing. But though I stood staring at it for what seemed like hours, the island got no smaller.
After a while, all but blue with cold, I went inside. And each time I went back out to see how much progress we had made, we seemed to have made none at all. The dark shape of the island was always there, as big as ever, as if we were towing it behind us.
I settled for standing at the window, looking out. When I saw the lights along the southwest coast, I thought of the fishermen’s broadcast that I used to listen to on the radio when I lived at home. It always concluded with an island-wide temperature round-up. Every evening, there was the same cold-shiver-inducing litany of place-names: Burgeo, Fortune, Funk Island, Hermitage.
I imagined myself looking out to sea at night from the window of a house in Hermitage. Hermitage. I wondered what lonely fog-bound soul had named it. It occurred to me that as Hermitage seemed to me now, so might Newfoundland seem from New York six months from now, an inconceivably backward and isolated place, my attraction to which I could neither account for nor resist. The whole island was a hermitage.
To leave or not to leave, and having left, to stay away or to go back home. I knew of Newfoundlanders who had gone to their graves without having settled the question, some who never left but were forever planning to and some who went away for good but were forever on the verge of going home. My father had left and come back, physically at least.
In the lounges, people sat listening to the radio until, about twenty miles out, the sound began to fade. There were groans of protest, but people kept listening as long as they could hear the faintest hint of sound through the static. Finally, when the signal vanished altogether there was a change in mood among the passengers, as if we were truly under way, as if our severance from land was now complete. The radio was left on, though, eerily blaring static as though it were some sort of sea sound.