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It started in the new year. We drove to Little Rapids and I shovelled snow off the pond, hungover, and just lay there next to the aluminum shovel and watched her white leather skates flash in the sunlight. This was after my brother parked his truck on blocks, broke up with her and lit out from Newfoundland for Alberta.

In spring I drove Donna down to Bottle Cove and tested the pans of ice, jumping from floe to floe - copying she called it. In summer we kayaked around Shelbert Island in the Humber River without life jackets and had bonfires on the beach at Benoit's Cove and shone the headlights of my father's Toyota on the shore when the capelin rolled in at 2 in the morning.

Yes, Donna was my brother's girlfriend. But he had broken up with her and bought a flight to Fort McMurray to lay fuses and she loved him so much. She had come into our bedroom - the one I shared with my brother - when he ended it with her over Christmas. I was watching hockey on the small black-and-white TV, with a bag of roast chicken chips. She sat on the floor with me and wiped away her tears and put her arm around me and I gave her a good hug and she ate my chips. She was wearing a white sweater with red sequins sewn into it and the chip crumbs clung to it. She had beautiful skin and she was bigger than me - she was 20. I was only 17.

My brother had a one-way plane ticket for Edmonton and that winter after class I picked Donna up at the herring plant in Curling. We did things along the shore. She liked to snowshoe, and we ice-fished and used a small axe with a red handle to chop the hole in the pond. We gutted little cold trout and cooked them on a camp stove in a canvas tent her father left in the woods out by Harry's River. We steered an Elan 16 down the old rail line. It did not hold the two of us, so often I just ran along behind as she spun the track at full throttle. When my father stopped letting me drive his car I bought a new red plastic gas can and sawed it in half and screwed two silver hinges to it.

I made a lunch box out of it and stood on the highway with my thumb out and people assumed I was broken down.

And I was broken down. I couldn't stop thinking about Donna. She was my first love, the woman I lost my virginity to, and she was distracted and liked to laugh and was game for anything that came up. So often she was off with other people and I had to wait for her. When spring came she hauled a black and gold Honda Nighthawk out of her father's shed and drove us to the marina in Curling where they had a 26-foot fibreglass boat and we jumped aboard the My 4 Daughters and filled the tank with stove oil - cheaper than diesel oil - and pointed her bow out to Weeball Island, where her father was from. The island is abandoned now and we left a case of beer in the water and barbecued shish kebobs of beef and bell peppers and ate off paper plates that we burned in the embers. White rice. We slept in a little room of her father's old house, the only room that did not leak, and in the mornings we pushed a plywood dory her grandmother had built off the sandy point to jig for cod.

It was good to look back on the town you lived in. It gave you some perspective. You realized you could easily leave it, the way my brother had. That something will be waiting for you once you leave, something you had never imagined.

Once we slung a net across Harry's River and in the morning hauled three salmon out of the net. That shocked me, as I am a law-abiding fisherman and I knew my father would not approve of poaching. But what was a couple of salmon when you're with a girl like this? All summer Donna worked with her father who did not have a trade but painted houses and installed well liners. He worked from sun-up until midnight. I asked him when he slept and he said, "Michael, there's all winter to sleep."

What was romantic about it? Donna had a little lisp. I liked looking at her tongue. I enjoyed her mouth so much. She had this fine hair down from her navel and she was self-conscious about it. I was glad she had it because I'm sure it was one of the reasons my brother broke up with her - he had an idea of airbrushed beauty. He often discussed his perfect woman while we lay in our bunk beds listening to Chris De Burgh's Spanish Train and Other Stories. But what about Donna, I said. Donna's going to get fat, he said. And that struck me as a hard and salient fact, and it worried me, that all the beauty in the world could be ground down by emphatic, cruel statements like that.

Now this. And yet I knew my relationship with Donna belonged to the dream world, though it was beached on a shoreline of realism. That gave me an edge, I thought. I would love the surfaces even when the surfaces changed, because they were grounded in truths of beauty.

It was not just Donna though, it was her family - an old storied family on the west coast of Newfoundland. Her family was my entry into rural life. I wasn't born in Newfoundland and had felt I was outside the main industry that was going on in this island - this was before I realized that practically everyone feels outside the main industry of modern living. Donna helped me find a thread through it.

In case I haven't pointed it out, let me tell you that Donna was very sensual. She was, of course, getting over my brother. I could tell, even though I was mad for her, that she was sort of working my brother out of her system. And perhaps I was, too, working out the bad impression my brother had made on me - a new way to see the world.

My mother knew what was going on.

I was packing a lunch in my gas can one day and she said, "Are you in love, Michael?"

"Yes," I said. And then, realizing that my mother must have some experience with these matters, asked, "When do you know you're in love?"

"Love makes you better," she said. "When you're infatuated, your work suffers."

I hadn't realized there was a distinction between infatuation and love. Yes, of course, I was infatuated. I was painting houses that summer, and ripping off old clapboard with a drawbar. My partner was the son of a Pentecostal minister. He introduced me to his girlfriend and he was going to marry her. This convinced life stunned me. I had no idea what I was going to do. I just knew that I enjoyed shoving a flask of Silk Tassel down my jeans and driving to Mount Moriah to pick up Donna and end up at the brook with a pellet gun and some tin cans. I knew this was doomed love: My brother will touch down in Deer Lake with his red box of tools and wave a socket wrench at my skull. This time would end. It did not matter, the specifics or the repercussions, I did not try to imagine too precisely the event. I just understood my love for Donna was short-lived, that Donna would grow out of it, or my brother would return.

As it turned out I did the leaving. I left that fall for university, and of course the edges of my world map expanded. I don't know where Donna is now. Donna was part of the old map, a map whose every contour I loved.

Michael Winter is the author of The Architects Are Here, The Big Why and This All Happened.

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