ST. JOHN’S – The fog is so thick that I can barely see the harbour. It’s just before noon on Leah and I’s last day in Newfoundland, and we’re standing on top of Signal Hill, staring out at St. John’s with her dad, Hugh, and her uncles, Robert and Tim. Overnight, a damp cloud rolled in off the Atlantic, smothering the city in a white static that has persisted through this morning’s cliffside hike. Two hundred years ago, British soldiers scaled the rocks to capture Newfoundland from the French. So far, our walk has been much easier; nothing but the static and the sound of a fog horn from nearby Cape Speare.
Earlier in the week, Leah and I drove our rented Camry west and then north to the area near Trinity Bay, to hike the famous Skerwink Trail. It was 20°C and sunny as we pulled into the trail’s parking lot—Newfoundland’s version of a heat wave. As we set out along the elephant path, waves roared against the cliffside. Just offshore, sea stacks stood solemnly in the Atlantic. I’ve told myself that this is what Newfoundland looks like. Ominous, rugged, majestic. At times, the land here seems completely inhospitable. The soil is acidic, the forests are dense, the climate is harsh. As we drove, Leah noticed the telephone poles lining the highway were braced with piles of rocks.
“For the Nor’easters,” she said.
The last time she visited The Rock, she was fourteen and listening to The Smiths. Now she’s 32 and listening to The Smiths, with her fiancé. It almost seems like a cruel joke; that time should pass the same for people on The Rock as it does for those off of it. That the seconds pass whether everyone’s together or not.
At home, people wondered how we settled on Newfoundland. “Do you have family out there?” they asked (as if you need to provide blood and urine to get some fi and chi). What I couldn’t tell them was that Leah’s uncle Michael died of cancer on Boxing Day. They weren’t especially close, but that was a matter of geography. St. John’s and Edmonton are separated by more than 4,000 kilometers and a connecting flight in Toronto, Montreal, or Halifax. It is easier and cheaper to cross the Atlantic and go to London than it is to come here. Most Canadians will never visit. But we wanted to go. Even before Michael was sick, we wanted to go. His passing was just the final push we needed.
And so this morning we woke up and we climbed Signal Hill with three of his brothers. I can’t see it through the fog, but the house that Hugh and his siblings grew up in sits across the water on Southside Road. Leah’s uncle Chris lives there now, with his partner, Joan, baking tea biscuits and watching the Blue Jays. After the hike, Hugh says we’ll drive over to that house and have a cup of tea. The brothers will talk about growing up by the train tracks, the jobs that took them away from St. John’s, and the lives that brought them back. Later tonight Leah and I will get screeched in at the same place Bourdain went to and become honourary Newfies. We’ll step out of the bar into a fog so deep it seems the city itself is disappearing. So that I feel myself missing these people and this place before we’ve even left.
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