When you live on Canada's easternmost point, the whole country feels 'far and wide'

Childhood trips from Newfoundland to Nova Scotia felt like an Odyssey: a thousand kilometres of road that became a boat on the Atlantic ocean, breaking into a bleary dawn winding the Cape Breton highlands, to the endless highways 104, 102, and 101, and eventually the Annapolis Valley. To think this was a single province journey seemed impossible. Those summer fields were the ends of the earth for me: a place to linger before making the long journey back from the edge.

As an adult Newfoundlander, I realized it was I who was truly on the edge. I live twenty minutes from Cape Spear — the most easterly point in the country — and so every Canadian journey goes west. As a touring musician, the concept of distance is right there on the screen every time I open the concert calendar and see just how far apart some of the shows are.

I've flown and felt the contrast in a fun way: I remember getting driven through bustling downtown Montreal by a friend and noticing the red sands of PEI stuck to the bottom of a bag from earlier that day. But it's driving those routes that truly shows you what a map never will — watching coast turn to shield and trading an ocean for lakes; driving forever and ever towards mountains that still somehow surprise you when you get there. And then, a different ocean.

And then, you realize you're a beginner on this road: you've mostly taken the trans Canada training wheels journey, you've left out the territories of the north, and missed a million turnoffs. None were on the way, but you know that there was gold in some of them hills.

Through the car window, things don't change so much as evolve over the hours on the road. I don't feel that distance as acutely now as I did as a child, but there are days. It was only recently that I stood at the end of Pelee Island, the southern most tip of Canada, watching the currents of Lake Eerie work against one another. It seems only yesterday that I was in Black Tickle, Labrador (population 120 or so, only accessible by boat and plane) and playing for the school as part of a festival. Black Tickle is a town now fighting for its very existence in the decades following the collapse of the cod fishery in the 1990s.

While it might be difficult to imagine living there when one reads about its lack of resources and the struggles that must be endured as a result, it's less so when you look into the eyes of people who have lived there for generations. One of the gifts of the touring life is seeing these edges in a vast country and meeting those who have made the edges home. And I've personally only scratched that surface.   

Coming from an island, I would be lying if I said this kind of geography doesn't have an effect on who we are: we're physically apart, and often feel personally apart. At the very least, like a good song, the geography can help us understand something about ourselves. After all, the miles themselves are not lonely, we just sometimes think of them that way.

Learning to feel at home by the sea, inland, or in the mountains has become a part of what it is to be a Canadian for me. Born on a frontier, I find myself drawn to others, physical or symbolic. The colour fields near Greenwood, N.S., or the Pacific Ocean off the beaches of Vancouver.

Impossible, yet here we are, scattered far and wide.

Next in So, Canada...: Cory Doctorow's take on "O Canada, we stand on guard for thee:"