The Houses That Sailed Away

For a stretch of years in the middle of the last century, if you lived on the right part of the Newfoundland coast, you could look out at the water and see a house go by.

Not a wrecked house, not debris. A whole house, upright, floating, moving under tow behind a fishing boat, with somebody’s curtains still in the windows. People winched their homes down to the shoreline, got them onto barrels or logs or simply into the water, and towed them along the coast — sometimes over the sea ice — to wherever they were now supposed to live. It is one of the strangest and most quietly devastating images this country has produced, and almost nobody outside the province knows it exists, and it happened, on a large scale, on purpose, because the government asked.

I think about those houses a lot, because they are the truest picture I know of a particular kind of grief — the kind you feel not when someone leaves a place, but when the place is moved out from under the people.

What happened

Between 1954 and 1975, the governments of Newfoundland — first the province, then the province and Ottawa together — ran a series of programs to empty the outports. The small, scattered fishing communities on the coves and islands and reaches of that enormous coastline were, the reasoning went, too small and too remote to serve. You could not economically bring electricity and roads and schools and doctors to a settlement of two hundred people at the end of a bay. So you would bring the people to the services instead. You would consolidate them into fewer, larger “growth centres,” and the future would be modern and diversified and sensible.

By the time it wound down, around three hundred communities had been abandoned and roughly thirty thousand people moved. That is not a footnote. That is the deliberate erasure, in a single generation, of hundreds of places that had names and graveyards and their own way of saying things.

And the machinery of it was, in its way, worse than force, because it wore the face of consensus. In the early program a community could only be resettled if every single household agreed to go. Which sounds fair, democratic even, until you are the one family of ten who wants to stay, and the departure grant only comes if everyone leaves, and so your neighbours — your friends, your cousins — come to your door, week after week, to ask when you are going to sign, because they cannot get their own money until you do. It was not a soldier who moved those families. It was the arithmetic, and the pressure of the people they loved, and the slow understanding that a place cannot survive as a place once the school and the store and the priest have gone. You do not have to be forced out of a community. You only have to be the last one in it.

You can float a house; you cannot float a fishing ground

Here is the part the sensible planners on the mainland never quite costed, because it does not appear on a ledger.

When those families floated their houses to the growth centres, they brought the walls. They could not bring the thing that made the walls a living. A fisherman’s house on a particular cove is not a house that happens to be near the water; it is one working part of a machine that also includes the exact fishing grounds his father showed him, the stage where he split the fish, the wharf, the specific knowledge of that specific water accumulated over a hundred years and passed down like an heirloom. You can tow the house to a new bay. The fish are not in the new bay. The grounds do not come. The knowledge, suddenly, is about nowhere. People arrived in the growth centres with their homes intact and their entire way of making a life left behind in the water, and the promised jobs in the promised modern economy very often were not there, and they were paid a few hundred dollars for the disruption and nothing at all for the drowned grounds and the lost trade, because those things had no line on the form.

The people who lived through it describe the feeling, again and again, in the same words, and the words are not economic. They say it felt like a death. Like mourning someone. And that is exactly right, because that is exactly what it was — a bereavement, at the scale of a whole community, for a place that was still, technically, right there behind you as the boat pulled away, getting smaller.

Grief with no grave and no villain

What makes it a specifically modern, specifically gothic grief is that it has no grave and no villain, and the human mind does not know what to do with a loss it cannot locate.

There is no monster in this story. Nobody twirled a moustache. The people who designed resettlement were not cruel; they were, if anything, well-meaning, armed with reports and genuine concern about children growing up without schools. That is what makes it unbearable rather than merely sad — that it was done sensibly, on paper, for good reasons, and it hollowed out a culture anyway. And there is no grave, because the places did not die so much as get vacated; they are still out there, the resettled communities, reachable now only by boat: a scatter of foundations in the long grass, a fenced graveyard someone still comes back to tend, a chimney standing where a kitchen was, on a shoreline that no longer has a name anyone uses. Ghost villages, people call them, and they are not wrong, but the word makes it sound more picturesque than it is. A ghost village is not haunted by the dead. It is haunted by the fact that nothing happened to it. Everyone simply left, because they were asked, and the place has been sitting there ever since, waiting.

What the water keeps

The novelist Michael Crummey wrote a whole book — Sweetland — about a man who refuses to leave a resettling island, who will not sign, who stays after everyone else has gone, and I will not spoil it except to say that it understands the thing at the centre of all this, which is that a place is not a location. A place is an agreement among people to keep a location alive by living in it, and when the people go, the agreement lapses, and what is left is just geography, holding the shape of a life the way a chair holds the shape of a body for a moment after you stand up.

I do not want to romanticize it, and the temptation to romanticize it is enormous, because a house floating on the sea is a beautiful and terrible image and it wants to be a metaphor. But those were real families, and the loss was real, and the fishing grounds are still empty, and some of the people who were moved as children have spent the rest of their lives homesick for a town that no longer exists in any form they can visit. Keep that ahead of the beauty. The beauty is real too, but it belongs to us, watching from the future. The grief belonged to them, and they carried it, in their intact and pointless houses, across water that would not give the fish back, to a modern life that had a school in it and everything else missing.