Best Kind

After I moved to Newfoundland in the 1990s to work for the CBC, my friend Ray, born in Bear Cove Point but living in “town,” as they call St. John’s, drove us up the Southern Shore to see what the island looked like for real. What I noticed first off was that the trees were bent, as were the houses, in the same direction. As for the trees, Ray explained, “That’s how God made them.” As for the houses, it may have been an optical illusion or a metaphor: they were planted, like the people, with a shoulder against the elements, both natural and anthropogenic. Newfoundland culture, I would soon learn, is like this too: a product of forces mostly invisible to those of us from away (I left the province in 1997). It leans into the wind.

“One is up against this enormous legacy called Newfoundland culture,” Noreen Golfman wrote in these pages in 2008, “a limitless term that is intimately connected to at least four centuries of white settlement.” The island (Labrador too) has...