September 2001
by Barry Stagg
A trip across the breadth of the island in July is a joy while at the same time revealing sober testimony to the hardness of a life many times removed from the urban comforts of Upper Canada. Of course, not all lives in the province are hard or even particularly purposeful . The managers and helpers on the white collar government tab are a class apart in Newfoundland as elsewhere in this country. Just drive the starved out asphalt of central Newfoundland's share of the Trans-Canada Highway and see the unhealthy contrast to the bountiful construction boom of ever greater St. John's. Brother Randy in Pouch Cove clued us in to the 'Roads for Rails' boom that builds interchanges for the shiny, happy commuters of the capital and forgets about the yellow lines on the run through to Hall's Bay.
The comforts of serial home buying in the suburbs of town are an awful opposite to the debris floating in Bonavista Bay that represents the end of three crab fishermen's lives lost at sea. Those are the polar ends of a Newfoundland where the company town crowd will get to plan their own funerals. Fishermen- men and women- get up at four o'clock and make a hard living from an unforgiving sea.
It is not possible to be mild and accommodating about the differences between two distinct ways of life: Those who effect a bourgeois air of accomplishment over their ability to secure office jobs better described as socialist sinecures and the rest of the people who ask only for a fair crack at the resources of a place naturally blessed with plenty and just as unnaturally raped of its birthright by smug managers and clever slieveens. Management pays well and by the whims of some of the more unfair gods, it gets you a Mississauga castle in the middle of Nowhere Cove, Newfoundland. Sleep tight, you loyal servants and meanwhile may some more merciful deity bless and keep the truly worthy and needy little boats of Newfoundland.
A risk in any effort like this is that it all starts to sound like some sombre eulogy . With that in mind, it is timely to remember a tale, perhaps even true but certainly just, related to this listener in the rugged little town of Elliston. It seems that the local citizenry were making strenuous efforts to finish off a community project funded ever so grudgingly by the good commissars of Ottawa. Inevitably, the local member of parliament showed up to claim credit and the requisite photographic evidence. One of his lackeys inquired innocently about a proper place for the sartorially attired bigwig to stand for his picture taking. A rascal pointed out a clear patch of that sort of sword grass known to many who travel the bogs of the province. The right honourable gentleman stepped right up and promptly sank to his calves in the best black bog mud Elliston had to offer. Black polished shoes met marshy essence of Newfoundland in one glorious if perhaps apocryphal moment. The author of this event or fable, if you prefer, must be given credit for using the best tool known to Newfoundlanders- the ever resourceful, inventive Newfoundland mind.
For some Newfoundlanders, the best tools for their livelihood are a government paid job and a smug blindness to the fake, hothouse economy that creates a virtual suburbia for them wrapped around the impoverishment of their neighbours. For others, the tools are still self reliance, a set of renaissance peasant skills and a stoic faith that the chains of Newfoundland's nasty little command economy will pass on into oblivion. Few hold any belief that any Northern Moses will come out of the flock of office boys and office girls orbiting around the statutory holiday calendars. The best source for such a twenty first century version of Sir William Coaker is still that hardy bunch of hewers of wood and drawers of water.