There’s No Place Like the Rock

by Laird Roberts

“That’s New-fun-lann. If you’re goin’ta be tellin’ people about it ya out’a at least be able ta pronounce it right,” I was told when I made the mistake of asking about “New-found-land.”

When you leave a place there is always some memory of it stronger than any other, and that place becomes a catalyst, a jumping off point, for everything else you’ve experienced there. For me that place in Newfoundland is Cape Speer.

It’s my last morning in Newfoundland. It’s early, hours before the first light. There are no stars and no moon. The darkness is complete except for the sweeping beam of a lighthouse on the seaward edge of a rocky cape.

“I’d like to photograph the sun coming up over the sea,” I had asked.

“You’ll be wantin’ to go to Cape Speer then. That’s as far east as you can get in North America. You’ll be the first person on the continent to see the sunrise.”

In the dark I make my way up a footpath to a great cliff overlooking the sea. There is a hard cold wind off the land that prophesies of winter. I sit out of the wind beneath a small rock cove and wait for morning. From below I can hear waves breaking over the rocks. The thunder of it comes up out of the darkness like the icy breath of a great beast. I pull my jacket tight against the cold that seems to penetrate to my bones. Newfoundland is a hard place. The people here brag about the bad weather.

“It’ll ne’er be the same 20 minutes from now or 20 miles from where you’re at,” they say. And they tell of the wind in the winter so fierce it has blown trains off their tracks, of storms that wrecked as many as 30 ships, and of drifted snow so deep it buries houses.

Newfoundland, according to legend, was even discovered because of the bad weather, when, just a little before the year 1000, a Viking captain was blown off course by a violent storm. The Vikings later explored and even established a colony on Newfoundland. The ruins of it can still be seen at L’Anse-Aux Meadows on the northwestern coast. Just after the year 1000 the colony was abandoned. No one knows why the Vikings left, but one fisherman I talked to speculates that “the weather was just too hard for them.”

In 1497 when John Cabot claimed discovery of the “new found lande” it was the fishing that impressed him, not the land. “The sea there is swarming with fish, which can be taken, not only with a net but in baskets let down with a stone.” Most of the island’s present population are descendants of the European fishermen that followed Cabot’s report. Those first fishermen clung to the rock-walled rim of ocean wherever they could find room for their small, frame homes and shelter for their boats. They were hard, self-sufficient, and, most of all, stubborn. They had to be to survive.

Those who weren’t brave enough or strong enough to work the sea were looked down on and called “angishores” (hang-a-shores). Over centuries the ones who couldn’t handle the climate left or died.

“To shift to some other warmer climate of this new world, where the winters be shorter and lesse vigorous,” was Lord George Calvert’s plea to the English King after a short stay in Newfoundland.

The ways of surviving the hard climate on the rocky island were passed down from generation to generation. “The people here are steeped in tradition,” says Bob Richards, the branch president in Corner Brook. “‘What’s good enough for me father is good enough for me.’ If your family has been Catholic for as far back as anyone can remember, for generations and generations, it’s very hard to break with tradition. When we decided to be baptized we felt strongly it was right, but it was still a hard decision. We knew of others who were disowned by their families and who had lost friends when they joined the Church. As it turned out, it wasn’t that way with us. Our friends, the ones who were really our friends, stayed with us; and our families, although they were upset, got used to the idea after a while. We’ve never regretted what we did. We gained much more than we ever lost.”

It was late fall and cold outside. There was a frost. We were in the Richards’s living room. A fire in the fireplace cast warm soft light into the room. Brother Richards was playing an album of Newfoundland folk music on a small record player. The music has the rhythm and sound of Irish folk music. Two of his children were by the fire doing their homework. He sat in a high-backed rocker.

“I think,” he said, “it’s hardest for the youth here. There just aren’t enough members to have all the programs we should, and we don’t have as many activities as we’d like. They have to stand on their own, but they’re up to it. I just can’t say enough good about them. People that aren’t members notice something different in them, something good. We’ve had people become interested in the Church just from the example they set.”

Brother Richards explained that all the schools in Newfoundland are state-supported parochial schools. All the young Mormons, like all the students in Newfoundland, attend either a Catholic or Protestant school. Because they have to stand up for what they believe, because they have to fight for it, the Church becomes an important part of their lives. “I don’t know where I’d be without the Church,” says Mae Wilkins, 17, of St. John’s. “I love it with all my heart and soul. Everybody knows I’m a member. They know what we believe, and they watch what we do. You get a little bit of rib about it, but when you get down to it the ones who are really your friends respect you for it.”

“A girl I knew in school,” Nadine Hobbs, also of St. John’s says, “a friend of mine, came up to me and said, ‘You’re a Mormon aren’t you?’ I told her I was. She said, ‘I thought so. I’ve noticed there was something different about you, something very nice. Your missionaries knocked on our door last week and I let them in because I wanted to find out what it was.’”

Although members of the Church in Newfoundland are scattered (some of them like Charlie Ingram and his wife drive over a hundred miles on Sunday), they rely on each other for support.

“If I missed one Sunday,” Gail Mosher of Corner Brooks says, “I’d have the whole branch on me doorstep as soon as Church was out. They’d be wantin’ to know if something was wrong. That’s a great feeling.”

Gail became interested in the Church after seeing several of the “Home Front” public service messages on television.

“There came a point in my life when I asked myself, ‘Who am I and what do I want out of life,’” explains Gail. “I’d gone to every church here, but there was always something missing. Then I saw one of the ‘Home Front’ commercials on the telly. It was about families. There was an address at the end of the message. They sent me a pamphlet on genealogy, but it just whetted my appetite. There was so much more I wanted to know. So I wrote again. This time a whole box of books and pamphlets came. On the back of the pamphlets was an address and a phone number. The first thing I asked was where the Mormon chapel was. I haven’t missed a time since. It’s such a good thing. Being baptized was the best thing I’ve ever done.”

Gail has been called to serve a mission in Denmark.

Kelly Quinton, 16, of Corner Brook, tells of being asked by her teacher to give a report on Mormonism and answer questions from the class afterward.

“We hadn’t been members very long then, and I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to answer all of their questions, but there was nothing anyone asked I couldn’t answer. My teacher later told me she was impressed by how much I knew about my religion and of how strongly I felt about it.”

Kelly’s mother told me that every morning at 5:00 A.M. they can see the light come on in Kelly’s room as she does her home-study seminary. And when Kelly was given the job of Church organist there were many mornings, before the first light, even when there was fresh snow and the temperature was well below zero, that she would walk a mile down to the church to practice the music for the coming Sunday.

The light comes slow over Cape Speer, a spreading ivory fan glowing on the horizon. Fishermen in the bays around the island scull their dories out to the cod beds. Sea gulls hang in the air above the great waves that crash onto the rocks of the Cape.

Everything else I’ve experienced in Newfoundland comes back to mind—I can see Kelly Quinton with the stars still bright and her breath steaming up in the cold air walking down to the church to practice the organ, and I’m with Brother Ingram in Arnold’s Cove sitting at his table eating boiled salt cod and new potatoes, listening to him tell about the days when he was first mate on one of the last commercial sailing schooners.

“She was loaded with coal, and when we were out to sea she caught fire in a terrible storm and we had to abandon her. We flagged down another ship, and they sent out their lifeboats to pick us up. The sea was wild. The swells were over 40 and 50 feet high. The only way into the lifeboats was to stand on the railing and swallow dive into the boat where the men from the other ship held their arms up high to cushion the 40- and 50-foot drop. Being the first mate I had to go first to set the way for the other men.”

And I remember walking out into the vast barrens, up to my waist in the thick lichen and blueberry and cranberry brush, so beautiful under the leaden sky, the rain coming softly. I feel my heart beating faster. I see again the small coastal villages on Monday with laundry flapping in the clean, cold wind coming in off the sea. I hear George Spurrel, a cab driver in St. John’s and the seminary teacher in the branch there, saying to me, “There’s no place like the Rock. That’s what we affectionately call it, ‘The Rock.’ You can’t dig down more than four feet anywhere on the island without hitting bedrock. It’s nothing but a big rock in the ocean, but still, it’s as grand a place as there is in all creation.”

The sun rises over the great curve of the ocean; pools of light, like gold coins, appear on the water. It is as fine a sunrise as I’ve ever seen. With the great expanse of the living sea, the wind moving the clouds overhead and blowing across treeless granite hills, it isn’t hard to feel the beauty and the joy of creation. George Spurrel is right. “There’s no place like the Rock.”

Photography by Laird Roberts

Newfoundland is a cold, windswept island, and the members of the Church there are scattered far and wide on its rocky shores. But the challenges of the land breed a certain strength.

Young Mormons, like all students in Newfoundland, attend either a Catholic or a Protestant school. Because they have to stand up for what they believe, the Church becomes an important part of their lives.

Jeffrey Davidson, a deacon in St. John’s, sticks with his little sister Alison. The weather may be chilly, but the beauty of the rugged landscape warms the heart.