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It takes quite a bit to impress around here.

Sure, the dawn might look like a fire grate sitting on the horizon off this most eastern tip of North America - 52 degrees 37 minutes west, for those scoring by GPS -and there's even a bright yellow nail clipping of a moon still sitting high above the silver Atlantic.

But if you want to catch people's attention, it has to be pretty special. Think of poor William Woodfine back in the late 1800s, lost for two nights when fog moved in on the sealing grounds, afraid to ditch his tow of four pelts and finding himself on a shrinking ice pan until, finally, he went down but somehow managed to turn his pelts into a raft, which he rode to another ice floe and then drifted into the safety of nearby Petty Harbour.

And if you think fame gets much notice, try Petty Harbour itself, where the network anchors come to do their election stand-ups and where they've made so many movies that the locals themselves have become celebrities of a sort.

Take Jerry Doyle standing over there with that great big flapping Canadian flag on his shoulder.

The retired firefighter was even once in a movie, Orca, that they filmed here a generation ago with the likes of Richard Harris and Bo Derek.

"The whale supposedly bit off Bo Derek's leg," he says matter-of-factly. "And a firefighter went to rescue her. Well, that was me. Only it wasn't her, see, they finished up the movie in Malta and bought my clothes and took them over there and some other guy wore them for that scene."

They take things in stride around Cape Spear. Even the little graveyard at Blackhead will tell you that - one old marker saying "In love I lived, in grief I died, / I asked for rum, but was denied." What, then, could bring a crowd out before dawn with the wind whipping in off the ocean and a flaming sunrise unlikely in the churlish month of November? What could have brought out the organizers in their somewhat garish uniforms high-fiving each other just because the sun does what it does every day - rises? And what could have brought out Jerry Doyle, near movie star, standing there waving his big Canadian flag back and forth in honour of a funny-looking metre-long barbecue lighter?

"It seemed like the right thing to do," he says.

The one taking the first torch of the day - and the one that would light the eastern corner of a relay that over the coming winter will slowly make its way West - said she found the experience "surreal" and there may be no better word for it.

It may appear that the crowds are cheering those who carry the torch - in this case, 38-year-old Sherry White, a Newfoundland and Labrador filmmaker, handing off to 39-year-old Donna O'Grady, a St. John's energy worker - but celebrity here belongs to the torch itself.

They cheer its lighting; they cheer its progress; they line up to be photographed with it, to touch it, almost as if it has some magical quality, some healing ability - and perhaps at times it does.

The citizens of this country are a curious people who usually think of themselves as Canadian as a second thought, sometimes an afterthought. Here they are Newfoundlanders first and foremost. In the near distance they are Maritimers and Down Easterners and Cape Bretoners and a dozen other designations. The torch has already passed by northerners and will eventually make its way to Quebeckers and westerners and West Coasters. Yet with rare exception, it will pass Canadians first - at least for as long as the glow lasts.

Just watch the faces watching the torch being rowed across Petty Harbour by the Windsor boys, Matthew and Sean, while their father Jim steers.

To a dumb mainlander's question about how a torch can be "run" in a tiny dory, Jim Windsor says it's not an issue: "When we're running when the wind's like this, we call it 'jogging.' " Just take a discreet glance at that elderly woman in downtown St. John's, the one openly weeping as nothing but a manufactured lighter passes by.

Just talk to the first torch bearer of the day, Sherry White, who thinks it's almost mystical the way she came to this flame. The St. John's filmmaker had been interviewing female hockey players such as Hayley Wickenheiser about a possible film involving the women's gold medal at Salt Lake City in 2002. She leaves Monday for a film festival in Turin, Italy, site of the women's successful defence of that gold medal. And then out of the blue the provincial government asks her if she would carry the Olympic torch past this heritage site in recognition of the importance of the arts in Newfoundland and Labrador.

She is as far away to the east as it is possible to get from the 2010 Games, yet she now feels absolutely "connected." As they all do here, on a day when Jerry Doyle says waving a huge Canadian flag pinned to a staff just seems "the right thing to do."

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LIGHT BRIGADE

DAYS 15, 16 & 17

Channel-Port aux Basques

Corner Brook

Grand Falls-Windsor

Clarenville

St. John's

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Globe and Mail journalists will follow the Olympic Torch Relay every step of the way, painting a compelling portrait of Canada as they go.

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