Come From Away: Welcome to the Rock

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Copyright © 2019 by Irene Sankoff and David Hein

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LCCN: 2019937851

ISBNs: 978-0-316-42222-2 (paper over board), 978-0-316-42221-5 (ebook)

Printed in the United States of America

WORZALLA

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Prayer of St. Francis

Dedicated to Mrs. Frances Tracy. © 1967, OCP, 5536 NE Hassalo Street, Portland, OR 97213.

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CHAPTER ONE

BEFORE

It is an island that has welcomed come-from-aways as far back as the time before clocks.

In a gallery in The Rooms, the Provincial Museum of Newfoundland and Labrador, there’s a display that sums up what contact with come-from-aways means to the province’s cultural character:

“Contact” is one of the most powerful agents of cultural change. Contact-driven cultural change had occurred many times in Newfoundland and Labrador, as resident cultures and new arrivals met and adapted to each other’s presence. The ensuing relations between the newcomers and those who were already “home” have had long-lasting effects on both.

Perhaps it is whimsical to suggest that one of the reasons that Newfoundlanders and Labradorians—these robust residents of the North Atlantic—are so good at contact with folks from across the ocean is that they were once part of the same continent. When the tectonic plates shifted after three hundred million years, North America tore itself away from Europe and Africa and started floating east, it took some of the Old World with it like a memento for its long voyage.

There is a massive continental shelf offshore of the province that provided a fertile—and unmatched—breeding ground for codfish. It turned Newfoundland and Labrador into a piscine breadbasket that had sustained its own populace for millennia and provided an important staple for cultures as far-reaching as Portugal, Spain, the West Indies, and West Africa. It also transformed Newfoundland and Labrador into a very attractive place for all varieties of visitors.

When the ice retreated after the last ice age, indigenous groups started to move in, drawn, no doubt, to the swarms of sustenance. A small but vibrant and peripatetic aboriginal people called the Beothuk inhabited the island for millennia. More than a thousand years ago, the first European come-from-aways were intrepid Norse travelers who sailed to “the Rock”; driven by exploration and survival rather than by conquest, these hearty visitors vanished seemingly as unpredictably as they arrived. Half a century later, a fleet with more pecuniary interests sailed around the rocky island. A Venetian merchant and sailor with the Anglicized name of John Cabot traveled from the English sea town of Bristol in 1497 to the coast of Newfoundland, the farthest point east on the North American continent; in fact, it was he who dubbed it “New-Founde-Lande.” His ship made landfall at Cape Bonavista on the island’s northeast coast—probably 115 kilometers (about seventy miles), as the crow flies, from Gander. Most historians concur that Cabot and his crew never made direct contact with the Beothuk people, but what Cabot did encounter was codfish—and lots of it: “[swarms of ] fish,” as he reported, “which can be taken not only with the net, but in baskets let down with a stone.”

By the time the sixteenth century vanished into the history books, French and Portuguese sailors and fishermen joined British settlers on the island—which had been named a British colony—diversifying its European influence. Also, by that point in time, the European sailors and traders would have encountered the tribal successors to the Beothuk, the Mi’kmaq (on the west coast of the island) and, much later, the Innu people, communities that continued the harvesting of the natural resources of the island. Contact between indigenous groups and the European traders over these resources often ended tragically; it was a universe increasingly swirling with different nationalities and agendas in that heady, avaricious, and often mercenary time. Newfoundland became a frequent pawn in the European wars of conquest in the eighteenth century, but by 1763, this scrappy, rugged island with its copious and enticing waters, became a colony of British Canada; 144 years later, Newfoundland and Labrador achieved dominion status as a self-governing part of the British Commonwealth.

Along with mining and forestry, the fishing industry, begot of the island’s geology idiosyncrasies, was not only the heartbeat of its economy, but also of its culture. Dotted along the zigzagging coastline were hundreds of outports—small, tightly knit communities, whose economy was based on fishing, fisheries, or other commerce, such as seal-hunting and, beginning in the early-twentieth century, whaling. The courageous seamen who risked death to harvest the water’s bounty have been the bedrock of the island’s traditions, music, language, crafts, and its moral compass; there seemed to be no recipe that a fresh hunk of cod couldn’t make better.

The geographic isolation of the island of Newfoundland is often a metaphor for its strong, independent streak. Skepticism of the larger Canadian government and society—the world of “mainlanders”—is braided into Newfoundland’s DNA. With the Second World War, though, Newfoundland and Labrador were brought into greater contact with the United States and the rest of the globe; this was a determinate tipping point. Vigorously prodded by Joseph Smallwood, a local politician born in Gambo, a majority of Newfoundlanders and Labradorians agreed to join the Canadian Confederation, and on March 31, 1949, with the slim margin of a referendum, became Canadian citizens. Among those in the hard-won majority, the Confederation was felt to be a necessary step to improve infrastructure, utilities, and resources, but there are still those on the Rock who bewail the loss of an independent spirit, and the homogenization of tradition that was brought along by Confederation with Canada.

In the twenty-first century, Newfoundland and Labrador is a vibrant province with over half a million inhabitants stretched across the seventy thousand square miles (111,000 km) of the island. Its capital, St. John’s, on the east coast, is a bustling and charming town, with idiosyncratic Victorian architecture, vertiginous streets, and colorful facades perched over a craggy and breathtaking harbor. Following a cod moratorium in July 1992, when the Canadian government imposed a halt to cod fishery along the country’s east coast, putting a dead stop to a way of life half-a-millennium old, fishing now takes up only about 12 percent of its economy, but oil and gas resources and a robust tourist industry have grown to contribute mightily to the local economy.

Yet, its contradictions are baked into its existence; along with the burgeoning cosmopolitanism of St. John’s, one can drive through the small towns of Goobies, Cupids, Cow Head, Heart’s Delight-Islington, and, yes, Dildo. The waters are still bounteous, but as Newfoundland and Labrador comedian, Mark Critch put it, “Our soil is as deep and fertile as a tray of kitty litter.” Even its time zone is personal and idiosyncratic: Newfoundland and Labrador have their own time zone, which deviates from the regular standard time zone scheme by a half-hour—“That’s 10:00 tonight on Canadian television, 10:30 in Newfoundland”—and ninety minutes later than Eastern Standard Time. It’s a point of local pride; a 1963 resolution to bring the time zone in line with the rest of the world was roundly defeated.

Contradiction is character: a story goes that when a local zoning proposal for a video arcade went out, the petitions came back equally for and against, and both sides had the same signatures. Apparently, no one wanted to hurt his neighbor’s feelings. As journalist Jim DeFede put it, “Their willingness to help others is arguably the single most important trait that defines them as Newfoundlanders. Today, it is an identity they cling to, in part, because it is something that cannot be taken away from them.”

Perhaps kindness is the best attribute to manage the omnipresent struggle between life and death that has informed every aspect of life in Newfoundland and Labrador for millennia. Newfoundlanders and Labradorians are at the tail end of an often-destructive hurricane system and also in the middle of what’s called Iceberg Alley (the first distress call from the Titanic was received south of St. John’s at Cape Race and the ocean liner sank 425 miles southeast of Newfoundland in 1912). They are a people who have witnessed and been ravaged by numerous catastrophes of the sea and air—and yet welcome the new day, and all that it brings, with open arms. Chris Oravec, a guide at the awe-inspiring Gros Morne National Park said, “The real lesson of Newfoundland is how tenacious life is. Life really, really wants to hang on.”

On the island of Newfoundland, tribulation and triumph have been locked in mortal combat for thousands of years. Nature has thrown everything in its merciless bag of tricks at the settlers of this place—and yet, it has survived; more than that, it has endured and prospered. Being an islander is a choice and a calling at the same time. As Gander’s former mayor, Claude Elliott put it: “It’s our culture, it’s our way of life. We live on an island where most of the time the weather is harsh and we survive by helping each other. If someone in the community was in need, everyone came forward to help and that’s passed down from generation to generation.”

Welcome to the Rock.

LIBRETTO

Welcome to

THE ROCK

A bodhran beats a fast rhythm.

CLAUDE

On the northeast tip of North America, on an island called Newfoundland, there’s an airport—it used to be one of the biggest airports in the world. And next to it, is a town called Gander.

OZ

There’s a two-person police department.

BEULAH

An elementary school.

BONNIE

An SPCA.

JANICE

A local TV station.