Jiggin' cod and jackin' moose; why Newfoundland will always survive

I’m an English-as-second-language guy to begin with, so it took time to appreciate the nuances of the language. But in the seventy years since I got off the boat, I’ve lived on the East Coast, the West Coast, and a few spots in between, and I gotta say nothing comes close to the story-telling culture of the Maritimes. I would have to put the Newfs at the top of the heap. I spent two years in the Irving Shipyard in Saint John, working cheek-by-jowl with guys from all over the maritimes. My first few months at the yard were spent outfitting the engine bay on the HMCS Vancouver. As an aside, the Vancouver was referred to as “the love boat” after a couple of British electricians were allegedly caught in a pants-off moment. Anyway, I’m down there with about a dozen other guys, most of whom are Newfoundlanders. We’re about six or seven flights of stairs below deck, so we can hear management approaching a long time before they arrive. That is conducive to a very relaxed work environment. I remember writing a letter to my parents from that engine room, and the first line was “from where I’m writing this I can see at least six people sleeping.” But when we weren’t napping, we did somehow get the ships done, and they’re out on the seven seas to this day enforcing freedom of navigation in the strait of Taiwan or somesuch horseshit which has no conceivable link to Canada’s national security. Anyway, the Newfs are a garrulous lot. When they weren’t napping in that engine room they NEVER stopped talking! The stories I heard! There was a kid from Grand Falls who was my apprentice for a spell who shared the story of the mysterious German who’d settled there after the war. When the old square-head kicked the bucket, Buddy and his pals looted the joint before the morgue crew arrived, and discovered a treasure-trove of Nazi memorabilia! Of course they did! It wouldn’t amount to much of a yarn if it was just ya we thought about it but decided against it. And you know for sure that Newfoundlanders will always come down on the side of basic human decency. Then there was other Buddy with the tale of his pal, let’s call him Other other Buddy, phoning up to share the good news that he’d liberated several cases of tinned corned beef from a rail siding nearby. I didn’t know they ever had trains in Newfoundland, but apparently that part of the story could be true. So Buddy heads over to other Buddy’s place, or we might be at Other Other Buddy’s place at this point in the story. But back to the original Buddy who’s sharing this story in the engine room of the HMCS Vancouver. Other Buddy goes over to (let’s keep the Buddy thing simple) his buddy’s place, and the first line off is lips is “that’s not fucking corned beef, that’s dogfood!” But that’s not the punchline. Other Buddy comes back with “keep your voice down man, if the kids hear that they won’t eat it!” And that just exploded the entire engine room crew into a massive laughing fit. Truth be told, Newfoundlanders have always had their own culture, since long before they joined Canada, and in spite of everything that has transpired since. The reason there’s Newfs everywhere from Ontario’s industrial heartland to Alberta’s oil patch is because these folks routinely uproot their lives to make sure their children eat well. And in a worst-case scenario, there’s still the cod and the moose.