I used to have a big, very tattered antique map of Canada on my bedroom wall, hung opposite the door so it was the first thing you saw when you came in. It was bigger than the window it was beside, and it had all the places I'd lived circled in black ink: Vancouver, Toronto, Oakville, Edmonton, Lethbridge, Regina. I'd gotten it second- or third-hand and the people who owned it before had done the same thing, circling places that were notable for some reason, except in blue and red: Lumsden, Montreal, Moncton, Chicoutimi, Ottawa, Calgary, St. John's. Some of them are drawn in by hand, their locations approximate, because the map predates their existence.
There is no date on it, but it was made before 1905 because Saskatchewan and Alberta, which joined confederation that year, don't appear on it as provinces; instead it shows them as districts that lie close to the American border, with Assiniboia and Athabasca above them. Most of the north is entirely unmapped; coastlines of islands in the Beaufort Sea are drawn in uncertain dotted lines, and sometimes disappear entirely, to pick up again hundreds of kilometres away.
Newfoundland was still a British colony in 1905, not a part of Canada nor close to becoming one like the districts in the west. On the map, the dominion of Canada and the territories that it's about to swallow are centred on the page; but Newfoundland juts over the right-hand edge of the solid black line that marks off the margins, like something inconsequential and superfluous. For all the placenames and landmarks drawn in, the mapmaker could just as well have left the island entirely blank with a note beside it saying that here be dragons.
That was years and years ago and I hadn't thought about it in a long time until last August, when I wanted somewhere far away where I could disappear for a little while, away from a relationship that was only getting more harmful as it developed. Geographically, Newfoundland is the furthest away from my hometown you can get without crossing international borders. I didn't have a passport and I needed to leave quickly.
So I borrowed six hundred dollars and took the map (just in case) and went to St. John's.
St. John's is not like anywhere else that I have ever been. The streets are narrow and winding and tilt at crazy angles downhill toward the harbour, and when I drove I felt like I was either missing too much or well on my way to getting lost, so I left the rental car in the hotel parking lot and walked instead.
I was there for a week, which was not long enough to heal the broken heart I was nursing but was all the time I had before I needed to be in Halifax for school. For the entire week it rained, and it was glorious; for the entire week I wore sweaters and gloves and a toque and was still cold, the sort of cold that reminds you that your limbs are all still attached, and that was glorious, too.
When I am lonely I tend to actively seek out strangers to talk with and get to know, and St. John's was very kind to me. I brought coffee to locked-out CBC employees on Duckworth Street and in return was regaled with stories about radio broadcasting, and was bought pints of Guinness by Newfoundlanders who thought it was hilarious that I had escaped one hopelessly impoverished province only to end up in another. During the day I wandered around the city with these newfound and temporary friends; at night I drank until I slept, then woke at dawn a few hours later to start again.
Nowhere to be, no-one to meet, and no plans about what to do. It was the most refreshing holiday I've ever had.
Cape Spear is not very far south of St. John's, and it is the easternmost point of North America. It isn't on my elderly map, which as it happens shows that the easternmost point is Cape Race, not Cape Spear; but that's a trick of projection, not a fact of geography. East of Cape Spear there is nothing but the ocean for thousands and thousands of kilometres.
It's mile zero of the entire country. That might not be a big deal to you or to anyone else, but it is to me. Most of my childhood was spent on long car trips across western Canada that sometimes ended up on the west coast of Vancouver Island, which is the exact opposite end of the country from Newfoundland. I had always, always wanted to see the other side.
So on a Thursday I reclaimed my rental car at 4am from a baffled valet who couldn't understand why I would be excited about going somewhere at an ungodly hour of the morning in the pouring rain, and drove to Cape Spear to wait for the sun to rise.
All of the coast of Newfoundland that I saw is rocky and forbidding. I used to swim in the Pacific, shedding clothes to dive in off boulders on sandy beaches in the dead of night, but I wouldn't want to try that here. Even in August the water is frigid, and I would rather admire the jagged rocks from a distance. Cape Spear is one of probably hundreds of thousands of rocky outcroppings; it just happens to be a bit more easterly than the others. You can hear the waves crashing against the rocks from further away than you'd expect.
Of course it was deserted in the rain and so early in the morning, but that made it better; no-one to see me slip and fall on the stairs built into the hill more than once, no-one to look at me oddly when I stepped closer to the edge of the cliff than was wise, no-one to watch me grinning like an idiot thinking how neat it feels to be teetering on the edge of a continent. (And it does feel neat.)
It was too wet to see very much. The ocean vanished into the fog maybe thirty metres from the cliff's edge, the background noise from the waves was deafening, and I can only assume that the sun rose because the horizon was also obscured by fog; all that happened was a lightening of the cloud cover, and the rain let up into a drizzle, and then it was finished.
I went back to my hotel soaked to the skin, teeth chattering and fingers red and swollen from the cold, feeling light-hearted for the first time in months.
Since then I have been trying to write the city a love letter, in the same way that Wings of Desire is a love letter to Berlin. So far I have met with no success. How do you put into words the gift of a second chance at being able to trust people? I am slowly learning how to forget being hurt, and how to love again; I can't even put into words what a relief that is, let alone express what it means to me.
It means enough that I marked off one last city on my map—Halifax—and then left it with an antique store owner in St. John's who was more bemused by it than gratified. It's a good start. | 
