Newfoundland Sketches

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by Scott Minar

 

            In the summer of 1976, I worked on various rooftops at The Cleveland Clinic. I remember watching cement trucks throttle up and down crowded streets below as I was sitting on a ledge dangling my feet,  taking a break from moving angiograms — nitrate films in huge, metal drums we were taking off of rooftop storage. Nitrate decomposition not only destroys the recording: it gives off a flammable gas that causes other problems. In my city where a river infamously caught on fire in the 1970s, we grew sensitive to surprise ignition. I thought many afternoons doing that work how pictures of people’s hearts seemed to be suffering the same fate as their biological counterparts. Those huge, awkward trucks always fascinated me. Inside of them, a giant Archimedean screw and its slow-turning drum weren’t moving cement very quickly or very well—but they stopped it from hardening and becoming  the concrete it was meant  to be. It’s an odd metaphor, but I sometimes think we’re inside that drum now—a compartment of time and circumstance turning sloth-like toward something more solid and stable. This is our hope anyway. 

            Much later, in 2008, when my father-in-law Sam was dying of congestive heart failure in the last week or two of his life, I had two revelations. The first was the thought that I was not watching him die—I was watching him live. From his hospital bed at the time, I heard him tell his daughter, my wife Roberta, “Go home honey. You look tired.” Having spent considerable time in a hospital bed myself, I knew how lonely the experience is, how desperate we can become for a little company. Yet he could bear anything for her, even the devout loneliness of that room. Sam was a federal agent and as tough as they come—but his heart held something I wasn’t expecting, a quality I didn’t possess myself then. The second revelation I had was an awareness of the principle he was demonstrating: that It is the job of the living to live. None of us are ever really dying until we are. Up until that point it is our work, our first directive to live as well as we can. Like most of us, I’ve been working on myself in the middle of this pandemic. It has forced us all inward, for many probably farther than we have ever been before. Growing up in Cleveland, I became a believer in the magic of place, the geography and culture of a moment. But there was another province that had a powerful effect on me in other ways. Because I was moved so strongly by it, Newfoundland has been on my mind lately. Its stories come rushing back at me, for various reasons and just when I need them.

 

            In late August of 1988, we flew from Hopkins Airport in Cleveland through Toronto Pearson, eventually landing in a rather modest airfield in St. John’s, Newfoundland. Looking at the new terrain through a jet window, we were surprised at the stunted pine trees along the runways, the rocky moonscape around us. An odd green shale scattered across the landscape. After settling into the tiny, one-room apartment we’d rented during a scouting trip earlier that summer, we made our way to the graduate student bar downtown. Robin was a doctoral student and University Fellow at Memorial University of Newfoundland, or “MUN” as the locals call it. Her new department secretary mentioned this as a good place to go for a beer and some social time. Stepping out of our cab, we found a quaint, homey pub on the first floor of an elegant rowhouse on Merrymeeting Road. This was my first time living outside of the U.S. and things seemed very strange to me, as if we had stepped backward in time, outside of familiar things. We thought St. John’s probably looked the way San Francisco must have in the 19th century: small, close streets transecting two or three wider roads and forming a grid across a steep incline rising out of the sheltered, deep-water harbor the city is famous for. The houses looked like something out of an old travel calendar photo—wooden structures in reds, aquas, blues, slates, whites, and forest greens popping inside a camera’s lens.  

            The modestly lit pub had a kind of Dickensian look—simple and full of old-world charm. There were only two other people there when we arrived, so we soon struck up a conversation with one of them. A companionable and interesting woman, Hannah sat comfortably elbowing a beer at the bar....