It's the last night of the Writers At Woody Point festival. I am in the van with mom, dad, Guy and Doreen. We detour first to Trout River for a feed at the Seaside and a long gawk on the beach. Stopping by the Tablelands on the way back to Woody Point, we pick our way over broken brown rocks and ridges, talking and taking pictures of tuckamore. One side of the road is lush bog, the other this strange landscape as if suddenly we have stumbled upon another world. The road must be built right on a faultline, says dad. How is it that we live so close and yet rarely visit here? The innards of the earth offered up on a vast platter. A geologist's immoveable feast.

Despite our dawdling we arrive at the Sea Breeze Lounge early enough for second-row seats and a good look around. It is a small, well-worn building, one room really, with a deck at the back overlooking Bonne Bay. Dartboards and video lottery terminals dot the walls. In one corner I find a poem by Al Pittman, typewritten and framed, and remember this was one of his haunts.

It's a warm overcast Bonne Bay afternoon.
There's a slight north-east breeze on the water.
Inside, Black Hat George is tending bar.
He, myself, and one other patron are the only
people here. The younger man has made his way
to the gambling machine with the aid of some
awkward machinery designed to keep him
upright. A truck ran over him in Toronto
and he's come home to learn to walk again.
· Al Pittman, The Sea Breeze Lounge

People trickle in, securing seats with a strategically-placed hat or spouse. In the dimly-lit bar, the rectangle of blue light on one end magnetizes our eyes, and everyone inevitably wanders out onto the deck. It is late evening; sunlight skips across low waves like a thrown stone, sailing towards Gros Morne. There are a dozen or so people on the deck, constellating into three or four conversations. Someone yells they see a whale but by the time our eyes follow their finger it is already gone. We watch the water's surface for a few minutes afterwards, hoping the animal will resurface. Someone comments on how nice the light is. It takes the promise of spectacle to cause us to pause and focus on the bay itself, its surface pocked and polished by wind and light. The depth, the weight of it. The bay is the shape of a bell, upside-down. Another word for bay is sound.

From the moment the music begins, we are transfixed. Pat and Joe Byrne wear twin beards as trim and round as their acoustic guitars. And Allan Byrne, the young one, Joe's son. And Linda Slade, Joe's wife. All four from Placentia Bay, all with bold loud voices and hands that grip guitars with firm familarity. Clyde Rose reads from Al's poems as they play The Merasheen Motif, then The Labrador Motif. Allan nails Free In The Harbour, "by a man who shoulda been a Newfoundlander." This's Placentia Bay music, said dad. Plenty of music coming out of there.

When Linda Slade sings The Pollution In Placentia Bay, dad recognizes all the names in the song, all fishermen from Little Harbour East where he grew up. He has never heard it before.

Songs strong and celebratory, yet cautionary, about people who were wronged or abandoned, but survived - or are at least resolutely remembered. Songs written on a boat, songs written on a bet. Songs that tell stories, or have accumulated introductory anecdotes over the years - hand-me-downs, passed on from parents to children like a quilt or a house or a parcel of land. Songs from an older world, taken on as our own.

We wrote these songs, said Pat, when everyone was moving from St. Leonard's to Arnold's Cove ("centralization" he calls it, not resettlement) - and now it seems everyone's moving from Arnold's Cove to Alberta or to God Knows Where, so we're still current.

This is a performance, and also a ceremony of sorts - the handing down of the old songs to Allan and others, the next generation. A chance to hear the names of the old communities recited again: long-abandoned outports like St. Leonard's, like Toslow. There are many others I don't know; I remember those two because of a song. It's easy to see the role songs play in remembering.

Joe Byrne, Pat Byrne, Clyde Rose.

There is a For Sale sign on the Sea Breeze Lounge. The problem with tourism here, says Guy, is you can only do it really five, maybe six months of the year. Sure this is beautiful beachfront property here now, but who'd want to come here in winter? That road up to Trout River is a hard old road in December. Downright treacherous. Most of these are summer homes. When the park closes and the restaurants and the gift shops close and the students go off to school, there really isn't much of a population left here, mostly seniors.

We drive slowly home in the dark, five pairs of eyes fixed on the side of the road ahead, watching for moose. It takes the possibility of a collision to cause us to pause and examine the roadside itself, its tufts and rushes and reeds. Look says Doreen, hoofprints. On the ride up I had been reading John Steffler's That Night We Were Ravenous:

She reminded us. She was the ocean wearing a fur suit.

She had never eaten from a dish.
She knew nothing of corners or doorways.

She was our deaths come briefly forward to say hello.

Despite all our amenities, this is yet a place where, travelling home on the freshly-paved highway (no lines painted on it yet), a ragged, rugged shadow with four knotted legs can crash up from the underbrush to meet us, almost instantaneously, and windshields and airbags and seatbelts and safety glass are statistically just no match

for the sideswiped weight
of all that wilderness.