My grandfather owned six pairs of rubber boots. He owned hip waders, snowshoes, and knives to skin rabbits, and he only lived an hour and a half north of Toronto. As my grandfather, he did not need six pairs of rubber boots, or hip waders, or snowshoes, or knives to skin rabbits, but as a young boy growing up in a small cove settled in the belly of Newfoundland, he did.
I never lived in Newfoundland, nor was I raised by people who had. I do not have stories, as my mother does, of fighting over fish eyes at the dinner table, or of smelling skinned and salted rabbits hanging in the basement. I do not have a strong connection to the places from which my ancestors came, and so I do not know where I truly belong. I do not have this identity with which to define myself. I do not dress, talk, or act like a Newfoundlander: something I discovered by traveling to Newfoundland. My mother loves to travel and my father doesn’t work in the summer and so one morning in August, 2010, they and my older brother (then 14) and I (then 12) packed up our minivan and headed as far east as the continent would allow.
We drove through Newfoundland over the course of three days, each more cloudy and weighed down with rain than the one before. To me, it was beautiful weather. The cool, fat drops of water would fill the sky all at once and then collapse seamlessly into the thundering ocean waves. As the sky filled with water, the misty line between the formerly empty air and the surface of the ocean would blur and disappear. My family and I watched from inside the car as the rain would start and stop as if on a whim pleasing to the rain itself, and when my parents were feeling particularly romantic towards the land we would park and get out. Walking on the beaches in the rain became just as exciting as swimming in the salt water itself.
We stopped, once, far into the evening, at an empty beach with sand so permeated with the tide it was as soft as the breeze. We were on our way to see a show at the Black Tickle (Newfoundlanders come up with the best names), and had just arrived in the town in which it was located, Cow Head (again, my point), a little over an hour early. My father stopped the car on the side of the road and we all stumbled down a grassy hill and onto this expansive beach. Of course, it was empty except for us, due to the ‘poor’ weather I found myself thoroughly enjoying. The chilled ocean tide woke up my muscles, lethargic from a long day of sitting. The crashing of the steely blue waves was a fine melody hummed to me by the voices of old sailors and seaside wives through the wind. Driftwood, in the hands of my family, became pirate ships and pioneer canoes. Our stories about shipwrecks and stranded damsels made us laugh so hard our throats hurt. Well into the evening we wove fanciful tales as tightly as our family itself was woven.
That night at the Black Tickle we sat at a table near the small, centre stage (all the tables were within spitting distance of the performers, though the show was too good to spit at, and too funny to close one’s mouth for long enough to spit, anyway). We ordered coca colas (perhaps not very Newfoundland-ish of us) and we stomped along to the age-old songs the actors sang (riotously Newfoundland-ish).
On arrival in St. John’s, we were welcomed into my great aunt and great uncle’s house, where I stayed in a room containing a bed with rough wooden bedposts and pictures of wooden cabins in wooden picture frames hanging on baby-blue walls. The living room of their house was painted a deep navy, with a thin wood chair rail running parallel to the crown moulding. Every surface of the sitting area was covered in a decorative layer of wicker. After the beach and now this, to me much of the province appeared to be made up of various shades of blue and various forms of wood. I thought perhaps this was what my heart was made of, too.
My great uncle told us stories all night of my grandfather and his brothers as children, playing knights and kings on the throne-shaped rock in the back woods, going sailing, and catching rabbits and fish for supper. Newfoundland children are raised by cold, blue waves, and abundant rocks. I had been raised by designated green spaces, heavy traffic, and the concrete cityscape. But I knew that I had also been raised at my grandfather’s house an hour and a half away from Toronto, on the boat in the lake, in my grandfather’s knit wool socks (the only thing he knew how to knit; he could do gloves, but they would have a heel). I had thought Newfoundland would be my obvious roots, but I could not sleep without the sounds of traffic and we had to drive forty-five minutes to the nearest fast-food restaurant. As much as I loved the countryside and the seaside, I loved the city, too.
My grandfather grew up in a small cove at the bottom of Newfoundland called Pool’s Cove. We had traveled to his home province for the purpose of seeing the town he grew up in, but we only had a day left for our vacation. In order to get into Pool’s Cove, we would have to pull off of the highway where an exit turns into a dirt road that we would have to follow straight down for two hours. Once we got to Pool’s Cove, we realized, there would be nothing for us. The town is still there, but the house he grew up in is not, and the throne-shaped rock is overgrown with weeds and young trees. The things that made Pool’s Cove my grandfather’s town are no longer there, and neither is he. The things that made Newfoundland his home no longer exist there. When he left, he took with him his rubber boots, his boat, and his knives to skin rabbits. He left behind the rain-filled skies, the crashing waves, and all that blue, wood, and rock.
My grandfather left his hometown and settled down an hour and a half north of my house in Toronto. He knit wool socks for me, sang me age-old songs, and gifted me small driftwood sculptures he whittled with his knives. Toronto was home for me, but his house, in his arms, was home too. Every house I grew up in was home. Newfoundland was also home. I do not belong to any one place, I belong to the people who love me and whom I love, and I belong to myself.