By Wayne Johnston

In the summer of 1995, Robert Finch was "heartsick and heartsore, full of guilt and a pain I could find no release from. I had shattered one life and had not yet built another. I was far from home, and yet felt I had no home."

Like many others before him, he wondered if he might find a cure for what ails his heart in one of the far-flung places of the world. Like very few others, he decided that "Newfoundland seemed like a good place to go."

With those Hemingwayesque words, Finch takes the reader with him, away from his past and deep into the heart of someone else's -- that of the residents of Burnside, formerly known as Squid Tickle, an outport on the northeast coast of Newfoundland where the population, at its summer height, soars into the dozens.

Squid Tickle -- a tickle is a narrow channel of water between an island and the mainland or, in this case, a small island and a larger one -- is a 100-mile ferry ride from North Sydney, Nova Scotia. Newfoundland is replete with such outports, located so as to maximize access to the now all but vanished northern cod stocks. As Finch writes, "Burnside, like many of the outports, is already a largely geriatric community," its numbers shrinking yearly, the younger generations having left to find employment "up along," as the locals say.

Finch, who died in 2024 at the age of 81, was a nature writer and radio journalist whose books include "The Outer Beach" and "Common Ground." He writes of spending his first few Squid Tickle summers in a house owned by absent friends, going back to Cape Cod in the Newfoundland autumn. He notes that his need of healing is not such as to lure him into wintering in Newfoundland. His wry, self-deprecating wit serves him well in his new summer home, as does his gregariousness. Judging by the ever-increasing rate at which dinner invitations arrive, he must have seemed as appealing in person as he does on the page -- congenial, affably erudite, piercingly perceptive. He takes to Squid Tickle and Squid Tickle takes to him. "These people's lives -- in fact, the whole history of Newfoundland -- is that of ordinariness lived on the edge of terror and sublimity." Later, he reaffirms, "I am only beginning to touch the wonders of this place."

"These people" come to look forward to the return of Finch and his wife, Kathy, much as they do the return of birds that herald warmer weather. They care for the Finches' house, their garden and their boat while they're away and are always there to welcome them when they re-arrive.

Things go so well that, just before 9/11, Finch buys a house for $12,000. In all, he spends 18 summers in Squid Tickle, slowly learning its history and, to some degree, becoming part of it. He is the writer from away by whom the aged residents hope to be commemorated, heaping him with anecdotes in their efforts to outdo each other. Honestly, tenderly, without a hint of condescension, Finch chronicles the comedy and drama of their lives. He marvels at the cat's cradle of their interrelatedness and interdependence, their community. In descriptive passages, he demonstrates his love and exhaustive knowledge of the natural world. Stunning set pieces over which he must have labored but somehow seem effortless turn up on every page -- storms of wind that crack the knuckles of his house, star-strewn skies, his moored boat rising and falling on the sea "with the grace of a thoroughbred."

Still, Finch is dogged by self-doubt and the fact of his own mortality, the very things that sent him to the island in the first place. One by one, over the course of the generation's worth of summers that he spends in the village, the oldest of his new friends die or have no choice but to move away, bidding goodbye to the couple they have come to fondly know as Bob and Kathy. Late in the book, long after he has become the summer organist at the local church and almost as adept at jigging cod as the locals, he is haunted by the notion that his Newfoundland friends will never see him as one of them.

He frets constantly about it as the end of "Squid Tickle" itself draws near -- the few young villagers who remain have begun to transition from subsisting on the dregs of their parents' world to making their living from tourists to whom they rent the houses and boats their ancestors built from scratch. "I realize, of course, that in participating in traditional activities like fishing and berrying, Kathy and I are simply playing at the old life here," and not simply because they are what the locals call CFAs, or come from aways. "None of the old people here ever had, in their working years, the leisure we have and the freedom of choice we have." He understands that he is "feeding on the ghosts of their labors."

Something ineffable in Finch's spirit comes as close to playing itself out as it ever will. He has not healed as he long ago hoped he would. But this place that, when he first arrived, had him thumbing through the Dictionary of Newfoundland English at night to figure out what someone said to him at dinner, has shown by its example what it is that he must do. "I have come to realize and accept that the story may, in fact, be over." He and Kathy sell their house and say farewell to Newfoundland, not quite at peace with knowing that, in what remains of the premodern world, they can never truly be at home.

It is the very hopelessness of his quest that makes Robert Finch's final book so powerful.

Mr. Johnston is the author of "The Colony of Unrequited Dreams" and, most recently, a memoir, "Jennie's Boy."

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

July 10, 2025 09:00 ET (13:00 GMT)

Copyright (c) 2025 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.