Doyle - A Newfoundlander in Canada

T here once was a boy who lived in a tiny fishing village on an island in the middle of the ocean. That boy was me. And there on the old new bridge separating the Catholic and Protestant sides of Petty Harbour, I daydreamed about what else might be waiting for me over the tall hills surrounding my tiny home.

I would lie awake at night in the modest bedroom I shared with my brother, Bernie, and wonder aloud, as he muttered sleepy responses.

How dark does it get in the desert?

Real dark, probably. Go to sleep.

Is a skyscraper taller than Boones Head?

Dont know. Never saw one. Go to sleep, please.

Can you drive from New York to Los Angeles?

Yes, saw it on TV. Go to friggin sleep.

How far is that?

Dont know. Shut up and go to sleep.

Denny said there are mountains so high in India that you can look down on a plane. Is that true?

Yep.

So how far away is Vancouver?

Dont know. Im asleep.

I confess that as a very young fella I spent an equal amount of time thinking about Dublin and Hollywood as I did about Toronto or Vancouver. To me, they were all the same, faraway places that I had little, if any, chance of ever seeing in person. I was probably supposed to be more familiar with Calgary than Lisbon, but I wasnt. I had met lots of people from Portugal, as the White Fleet often summered off the rocks in Petty Harbour buying excess fish from the locals, but I dont think Id ever met anyone from Alberta.

For a while what country I was part of was not entirely clear to me. Most of the older people in Petty Harbour said we were still part of the country of Newfoundland and therefore I was a Newfoundlander. My mom and teachers said we were a part of Canada and therefore I was a Canadian. I was certainly happy with either one. Standing on the bridge in Petty Harbour, I could have been part of Canada, China, Poland, or South Africa and it would not have made one pinch of difference to my day-to-day. They all seemed equally distant and fantastical to me.

But the truth, of course, is that my mom and teachers were right. I was a Canadian. The Dominion of Newfoundland joined the country of Canada in 1949, when both my parents were well into their childhoods, and though I rarely think of myself as such, I am a first-generation Canadian. Though unlike other first-generation Canadians, my parents never left anywhere and arrived anywhere else. So here we all were supposedly in a new country. A new country we knew very little about and one that probably knew very little about us.