‘If you're extra lucky, you'll get yourselves invited to a kitchen party,” Terri told us in the days leading up to our Newfoundland vacation. “Friends and neighbours get together and play instruments and sing and tell stories and drink. That's the real deal out there.”
Terri, a close friend who grew up in Gander but now lives down the street in British Columbia, had just “screeched in” my wife and me in her living room. Following tradition, we downed a shot of cheap rum. Then we kissed a frozen salmon – our West Coast stand-in for the cod that's usually pulled out for the ceremony that makes “come from aways” honorary locals.
So we necked with a fish. We had been anointed pseudo-locals. We even had certificates to prove it, downloaded from the Internet. But we knew we were Newfies on paper only. And, like a growing number of travellers, we wanted that real deal.
Along with the 490,000 other visitors that head to Newfoundland every year, we were attracted to a place that seemed largely untouched by the crushing effects of mass tourism. This was a province of genuine outport communities – effectively cut off from one another by fierce winters and a harsh interior of scrubland and ponds known simply as the Barrens, but famous for hospitality and openness.
Or maybe we had seen too many glossy brochures. Because the Newfie dialect can be as impenetrable as the landscape. Then there are the mannerisms: Men greet one another with a quick left-to-right sideways nod that can seem cryptic to outsiders. Which leaves even the most intrepid travellers stranded just on the edge of the authentic – among the locals, but always apart from them.
Until, that is, Ken Sooley came along. His company, CapeRace Cultural Adventures – the only one of its kind in Canada – offers what a gag certificate cannot: Admission to the inner circles of outport communities up and down Newfoundland's eastern shore, and the chance to have an uncanned, unpredictable experience of place.
“We're providing a brand-new concept in experiential travel,” the 46-year-old says. “We have designed a way for people to become integrated into three local communities, and each has a different take on the Newfoundland lifestyle.”
And, yes, that lifestyle does include kitchen parties. In fact, by the end of our 10-day trip, which kicked off in St. John's before taking us to the villages of Heart's Delight and Bonavista, we had not only tracked one down. We had done one better. We had hosted one – complete with an old guy crooning fishermen's ballads out of a ragged coil-bound notebook.
The cold North Atlantic is just a stone's throw from the front porch of the “Thomas Mouland House.”
Like many of the houses Sooley owns, it is as authentic as the community it stands in. It was named for the previous owner, who was involved in the great sealing disaster of 1914 – when 78 sealers were inadvertently abandoned on the ice floes to perish slowly in a blizzard.
The closest we come to those perilous floes is the “bergy bit” that Sooley has stashed in the freezer. He recovered the microwave-oven-sized piece of ice by the beach in Bonavista some months prior, and it has become a routine on my visit here to chip off a few chunks and drop them in my tumbler of screech.
I am joined by Lloyd – our designated contact and the key to Sooley's success. Like the kind of on-the-ground “fixers” reporters hire to get the inside scoop in far-flung places, he connects his clients with locals.
