O Newfoundland
WHITCOMB, ROBERT
O Newfoundland The province where Edward Hopper's paintings come alive. by Robert Whitcomb Basque, French, Portuguese, English, and Irish folk started settling Newfoundland in the late 16th...
...Clearly, Finch, who lives in Massachusetts most of the time, is also smitten...
...The trick, as we go through life, is to just keep passing on the insults to the next available group...
...English West Country and Irish accents and diction (and in some Robert Whitcomb, editor of the editorial pages at the Providence Journal, is the coauthor of Cape Wind: Money, Celebrity, Class, Politics, and the Battle for Our Energy Future on Nantucket Sound...
...Partly as a result of the language, and of inhabitants' rough-hewn ways, Newfoundland has long been mocked by other Canadians, who are pleased to tell one "dumb Newfie'' joke after another, as people in the Northeast used (?) to tell "Canuck'' jokes about Quebecois...
...But then, as one young Newfie described her home to Finch: "This is the end of the world, y' know...
...And, Finch says, they maintain a "lateral'' sense of history and storytelling, wherein something that happened 150 years ago gets all jumbled with something that happened a decade ago...
...But Robert Finch is determined— in this lovely, frequently funny, and sometimes sad book of essays—to demonstrate the essential dignity of the islanders, in a work that recalls the Rockwell Kent classic N by E. The only main flaw is the lack of pictures, including maps of this mysterious region...
...Another overly budget-conscious publisher...
...but the ironic and often fatalistic population are the real subjects of this book, which holds out hope—for travel writers, anyway— that some places in the West can fend off, for a remarkably long time, the forces of commercial homogeniza-tion...
...Most of Newfoundland is forest, moor, lake, rocky headland, and even semi-tundra...
...Well prior to that, albeit briefly, came the Vikings...
...by Robert Whitcomb Basque, French, Portuguese, English, and Irish folk started settling Newfoundland in the late 16th century and started visiting (as fishermen) at least a hundred years before that...
...It's an astonishingly oral culture, and one so old that, in many places, the "native'' population succeeded the European one...
...Newfoundland seems to inhabit some sort of version of the 1930s or '40s...
...They hunt for moose and caribou, they mend, they fish for squid instead of cod, and, if need be, they go to work in the skyscrapers of Toronto or the oil sands of Alberta...
...They're damn good survivors, managing to hang on to their gritty culture, even as much of its economic basis—fishing—has collapsed...
...Finch says Hopper would have particularly loved the province's physically spectacular—if seemingly fire-trap—capital and major port, St...
...The Newfies, while "rustic'' and/or "quaint,'' aren't stupid...
...places a bit of French) created the province's sometimes incomprehensible dialect, including such delightful place names as Squid Tickle and such words as gallinippers...
...Despite the province's economic woes, the vast and eerie beauty of this cold and windy land, and the warmth of its extended families, still draw back its many economic exiles...
...Actually, Newfoundland still seems more a remote part of Europe than an adjunct of North America...
...John's...
...Still, most of the huge island remains unpopulated, and most of the "indigenous population'' is long gone...
...The inhabitants' lives are considerably more elemental than most Americans'—they have a lot less stuff—and their brightly colored frame houses from the outside (and inside, if you ignore the ubiquitous TV sets) evoke, as Finch notes, Edward Hopper paintings...
Vol. 13 • September 2007 • No. 1
