I was born in Newfoundland in 1951, when the nights were black as pitch and quiet enough to hear snow falling. We had no electricity, no indoor plumbing, and no telephone. Our well was up on the hill, and my sisters would haul buckets of water down to the house, every day, through sun and snow. Later, a pipe was laid and gravity took over their job—an invisible hand delivering cold, clear water straight to the sink. It felt like we’d arrived in the future.
Back then, the world moved slow. News came by radio or word of mouth. People fixed what they had. A broken boot could be mended. A torn coat was patched. There were no plastic gadgets or throwaway culture. Work was done by hand, and the hand knew its worth.
I left school in grade nine and went into the woods to earn a living. The old bucksaws were gone by then—we had chainsaws, and they didn’t ask twice. I worked pulpwood and logging, cutting in the winter cold, boots soaked through by noon, the air thick with two-stroke and the sweet scent of spruce. It was hard, dangerous work, but I learned discipline, grit, and the quiet pride that comes from putting in a full day’s labour.
Five years later, I returned to school—older than my classmates, but more sure of why I was there. I went on to study nuclear medicine, a long way from the forest floor. I later taught in that field, and then transitioned to applied arts, passing on what I knew to students full of curiosity and ambition.
But while my own life changed, the world around me changed even more.
I saw men land on the moon. I watched black-and-white television turn to colour, and colour screens shrink to the palm of a hand. I saw the rise of computers, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the birth of the internet, and the sudden reach of information across borders and oceans. I lived through oil shocks, economic booms, recessions, and the march of globalization. I saw people go from writing letters to texting in emojis, from party lines to pocket-sized satellites.
I saw Newfoundland join the modern world—and sometimes struggle with it. The old ways disappeared fast: cod fishery closures, outmigration, rural decline. But I also saw resilience, reinvention, and the quiet pride of a people who never stopped adapting.
When I retired, I turned to writing. Not for fame, but for the sake of remembering. I wrote about life in the woods, about cold mornings and water buckets, about education and transformation. I wrote to honour the past and to hold it up beside the present—not to judge either, but to understand both.
From chainsaws to smartphones. From hauling water to turning on a tap. From a world where you waited weeks for a letter to one where news comes by the second.
And through it all, I’ve lived. I’ve worked. I’ve changed. But I’ve never forgotten where I started—or the long, winding road that brought me here.