THE NEWFOUNDLAND QUARTERLY :: ONLINE EXCLUSIVES
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Online Exclusive for #431 (b) I'm out on deck watching the fog-shrouded rocks of Port aux Basques assume their shapes as the ship begins her swing in towards the wharf. A fellow passenger asks me, "Are you visiting, or coming home?" I hesitate a moment. "Both, I guess," I say, feeling a bit foollish - but his smile tells me he understands. Like so many, I am a child of the diaspora. My father was born in Grand Bank, but came to Canada as a baby, and after that made it back only occasionally. Despite his enduring passion for his native land, I myself never set foot on Newfoundland's rocky soil until I was well into adulthood. I just hadn't realized there was a whole country out there waiting for me to love it. The welcome I received on that first trip back with Dad in 1983 overwhelmed me. It was more than just the legendary hospitality of Newfoundlanders; it was almost as if I wasn't "from away" at all. So I was also puzzled. Why would people who had never met me, who barely even knew my father, welcome me "home" so warmly? It was more than twenty years before I understood. We were fixing up the old cabin we had bought overlooking a tiny cove no longer lined by flakes and stages. Two young men had been working on a new roof, insulation, siding. That morning only one of them came. "Where's Gus?" I asked. "He's packing," I was told. "He's leaving for Alberta on Sunday." Just like that. As far as I knew, Gus hadn't even been thinking about leaving. I knew he'd been waiting, doing small carpentry jobs to tide him through the crisis in the crab fishery, hoping to fish again. He had told me he'd never been farther west than Corner Brook, and had no desire to leave. Now I realized I had missed the signals. He was heading west, and neither he nor anyone else knew when - or whether - he'd be back. It made me think: what if he doesn't ever come home again to live? What if he marries out there, has a family, just manages to get home for short visits once in a while? What if, years later, one of his grown-up kids finally makes the trip herself, to touch her roots, to trace the memories in her DNA and learn the stories her father told of "this marvellous terrible place"? Wouldn't she be welcomed home as Gus himself would be? Wouldn't she be embraced the same way, as if her father had come home through her? "For her ways are in my bloodstream," says the poet. Those of us who feel that call come back to Newfoundland to continue the circle. Back to Online Exclusives main page. |
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