Tales to Be Retold

It was winter 1983, and I was in Burin, on the south coast of Newfoundland, working on a story for the CBC, when it struck me, more or less out of the blue: Hey, you were born here. The actual location of my birth was what they called a “cottage hospital,” part of a system of small medical facilities scattered across the island, established when Newfoundland was struggling to survive during the 1930s, near bankruptcy, with democratic government suspended.

My parents had been living in a small town called St. Lawrence, about thirty kilometres away by water. Other than by walking across rough country, that was the only way to get there. My mother, probably uneasy because there was a raging epidemic of tuberculosis at the time and no doctor in St. Lawrence, decided to board a coastal boat and sail for Burin to deliver her first-born. I’m told that a few days later, my father, an itinerant hard-rock miner, and a buddy walked the daunting distance over the boggy...