"The Outport People - A Book Review

The Outport People

A Book Review
The Outport People
By Claire Mowat
Non Fiction
McClelland and Stewart edition
published April 1983

Claire Mowat wife of Canada's Farley Mowat, who needs no introduction, both I'm proud to say Canada's own. Claire's book about Canada's most easterly Province, the Rock we all know and love as Newfoundland, is sweet in it's honest to goodness purity of portrayal of a people and a place inextricably drawn together. I must first admit Newfoundland is the only Province or for that matter territory in Canada where I have yet to visit. We have all known and have as dear friends those we call Newfies. We also know and understand them as a strange and wonderful breed, unto their own. They are not like us in so many ways, but they have a quality which soon emerges and we love it and them.

What Claire Mowat has achieved and I'm certain she set out to do in this heartwarming journey, is to give the reader the experience of being with her and her soul mate Farley. I could taste the salt swept air and feel that biting wind she braced herself against, we will giggle like children at their odd and deliriously happy altruisms. We all, as Canadians, can be proud of these people who have endured and prospered clinging to this rock they all so dearly love, and is so much a part of them.

Before sailing to Newfoundland with Farley, Caire had being working in Toronto at Simpson Sears' Planning Department and she was seduced by a map depicting NFLD and the stories the draftsman brought back with him from there, while trying to get a store built in Saint John's. Head office wasn't the least bit amused says Claire, the store being two weeks late in opening due to lack of, finish nails! But Claire was.

Claire says I married an author, a man who could live anywhere, and by one of those flukes of fate that make you wonder, (is someone up there looking after us?) Farley shared her infatuation for that rugged place and so they decided by passion more than logic to go and live there. They would have gone there no matter the cost or difficulties. They yearned for the simple life, far away from the "vexations" of the urban, managed world.

This book is Claire Mowat's first published and for it I will forever be grateful to share a part of her five years of life in Baleena Newfoundland.
Her descriptions are real, the Formica skating pond , the sky was pewter and more.

On one Gorgeous day in August, when a west wind had blown away the fog, they took their little schooner out to sea. Good weather never lasted long and the skipper was anxious to get going. They left the way they arrived on their own ship. They chartered a course back westward, they were seen off by three old salts in a dory. "You'll have a safe voyage sure," said Dan senior. "Bad beginning - good ending!" "We'll miss yas" "tis always the bad dog ye misses the most!" and they all laughed as they moved out through the narrows. The salt spray mixed with Claire's tears as she waived while looking back. Claire says you should never look back.

Peter Fuller