Me, Newfoundland, and Solitude

Wayne talks about the solitude that both he and his home province experience, and what it tells you about both of them (us) — 

SOURCES 

 ¦ “Corner Brook,” Wikipedia, 2025, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corner_Brook ¦ 

 ¦ “St. John's, Newfoundland and Labrador,” Wikipedia, 2025, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._John%27s,_Newfoundland_and_Labrador ¦  

 ¦ Statistics Canada, 1971 Census of Canada: Population, 1973, https://publications.gc.ca/collections/collection_2017/statcan/CS92-708-1971.pdf ¦ 

Transcript

Hi, I’m Wayne Jones. Welcome to Newfoundland Boy, a podcast about the Canadian province of Newfoundland. This is episode 43: “Me, Newfoundland, and Solitude.”

I grew up in the 1960s and ’70s in what was then the second-biggest (and actually the only other) city in Newfoundland other than the capital of St. John’s. That was Corner Brook. To provide some perspective, Corner Brook and St. John’s are on opposites of the island of Newfoundland, St. John’s very easterly and with a harbour that leads right out into the Atlantic Ocean, and Corner Brook, about 700 km to the west, on the Bay of Islands leading out to the Gulf of St. Lawrence.

The population of Corner Brook in 1971 was about 26,000 and the population of St. John’s was about 88,000. The population of Corner Brook now is 19,000 (that’s a decline of 27%) and of St. John’s is 111,000 (an increase of 26%). Note that both these populations are only for the cities proper and do not include the metropolitan areas around them.

I grew up raised by a single mother, which was much more of a rarity than it is now, and especially in a small city like Corner Brook. My father seemed from photos I still have to have been pretty happy with family life in the first few years on the lives of my mother and my year-younger brother, but it was the Christmas of either 1962 or 1963 that he decided to abandon us in order to spend the holiday with the girlfriend he had gotten pregnant. I was 4, my brother was 3, and my mother was 25 and unemployed. This constituted in effect his initiation of a separation which ultimately led to a divorce many years later.

It was a heinous and selfish thing for him to do, and he aggravated the following years of the situation by not being regular in his payments of child support ($250 a month then), which he could easily afford, but apparently he wasn’t organized or cognizant enough to realize that a woman now earning minimum wage working as a waitress at Woolworths just might need that money pretty urgently. But my mother, who is a stellar money manager and budgeter, even today at the ripe age of 87, managed it through two or three decades of his undependability to raise sons who eventually went on to successful professional careers.

We never called it that back then, but I was an introvert. At first, I “didn’t mind” being by myself, and as I got older I could see the value in it and even started to seek it out, even need it. I’m 65 now (though I could easily be mistaken for 64 and a half) and I cherish solitude and absolutely require it in my life in order to keep functioning as a calm and peaceful person.

Just in passing … many people have inaccurate stereotypical views of introverts. We are not hermits. We don’t like to spend all our time alone. We are not all shy. I love being with people, though admittedly I prefer one-on-one conversations or small groups. Not a fan of large parties where I don’t know anyone and especially where there’s loud music and half the room is drunk. This will be common knowledge to most introverts, but the big difference, to put it in car terms, is what is the fuel that fills you up so that you can start again the next morning? Introverts need litres of solitude or alone time; extroverts get filled up when they are actually with some or in a large group. (I myself require the most expensive premium-grade gas that they sell at the pumps, just like my Audi.)

I was shy as a kid, and by “kid” I mean from the pre-teen years and definitely on through being a teenager. I had friends who liked me at school, but I noticeably didn’t hang out with them or go illegally drinking. I spent a lot of time at home, necessarily with my mother, who also didn’t go out much. (And by the way, the effects of that, both positive and negative, are more than I can get into right here.) I never developed that habit, for better or worse, of feeling a part of any group. I felt like and was an observer. I did things with my life, and was an academic overachiever in school, but I was always watching others, and that habit only developed over the decades, and I’m pretty sure I have become more astute at analyzing what I am seeing. My intuition is good. My gut feeling is good.

And as I was lolling in bed about 8 this morning, I thought for the first time about the analogy of this with Newfoundland. Or, to put it more clearly: Newfoundland is a small island province, separated from the rest of Canada geographically, and—not to stretch this comparison so that it’s ridiculous or absurd—in a sense it “spends a lot of time by itself.” I wasn’t sure how to answer the question of whether Newfies visit mainlanders more than the opposite in a proper social scientific way, so when I asked Google’s AI service, Gemini, about this, its summary was:

While definitive data is not available, the available evidence points to a higher per capita travel rate from Newfoundlanders to mainland Canada. The strong motivation of visiting family, coupled with a need to travel for certain services, creates a consistent and frequent travel pattern for many Newfoundlanders. In contrast, travel to Newfoundland from the rest of Canada is generally much less frequent and largely driven by leisure and personal connections.

That might explain some of the characteristics and behaviour that I’ve noticed in some of the people I’ve met since I moved back to Newfoundland from Ottawa in the fall of 2023. One is a kind of pride or confidence in their apartness, a feeling that they are close to their true home and they might never leave. Along with that can sometimes (only sometimes) come the behaviour I talked about in episode 40 of this podcast: a kind of defensiveness, perhaps activated by insecurity, and sometimes manifesting in unfriendliness toward the interloper or outright criticism.

Another characteristic is a kind of “softness” (I can’t come up with a better word), but in the best sense of that word. It relates to the typical laid-back feeling in Newfoundland, the slower pace of life, the friendliness that makes someone say hello to you as you’re just walking on the street. I had an experience with my (now new) mechanic a couple of weeks ago that just amazed me. I had been taking my car (a 2013 year model, which is about 72 in people years) to the dealership, who had told me they had noticed a hole in my muffler which would cost $3,500 to replace. I took it to this new mechanic and he showed me the stethoscope-like device that his mechanic had used to try to find a hole, and had found nothing. In the end, and only after some convincing on my part, he fixed an even teenier hole, and charged me—are you sitting down as I am about to quote to you a very small number?—$60 for the whole thing. Add to that the fact that he had a hearty laugh like Falstaff.

So I think I will leave it there. I could add a few other comparisons (like both me and Newfoundland prefer the colour blue), but I’ll end by saying that this big decision about changing mechanics came near the end of about a month when I’ve been pondering big changes in my life (should I move to Edmonton?), but also when a few other tinier changes were made (I now have a new go-to handyman, who also happens to be an Anglican minister).

Thanks for listening. If you enjoy the show, consider giving me a like or adding a comment. And please join me again next Saturday.