Come From Away, Feel at Home: There Are No Strangers in Newfoundland

Twenty-five years after Central Newfoundland became famous for opening its doors to strangers, I came to understand something: 

The doors never closed.

I had travelled to Gander and the surrounding communities to report on the 25th anniversary of September 11.

It is the story that made the hospitality of Gander, and communities including Appleton, Glenwood, Lewisporte, Gambo and Norris Arm, famous around the world.

I knew the story.

Or at least I thought I did.

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But somewhere between the community dinners, commemorative events, conversations with townspeople, coffee stops, interviews and more tight hugs than I could count, I began to understand something.

The extraordinary thing wasn’t necessarily what Newfoundlanders did. It was that, to them, it isn’t extraordinary at all.

“That’s Just Ordinary”

Claude Elliott was mayor of Gander in 2001, and I had spent time talking with him about the thousands of unexpected guests who arrived in his community that September.

“It was nothing for us. That’s just ordinary, but it was extraordinary for them,” he said.

It is difficult to understand that statement until you spend time here.

The Newfoundland hospitality we have spent 25 years talking about wasn’t locked inside a historic event. It was happening around me in tiny, unremarkable ways every day.

There was nothing extraordinary about someone asking whether I’d eaten. Nothing unusual about a stranger making room for me at a table or pulling me into a hug. Conversations happened easily. People lingered.

By the time I left, I knew names, and they knew mine.

Perhaps that’s the real story.

There’s Always Room at the Table

One morning, I found myself sitting at the breakfast table of Derm and Dianne Flynn in Appleton.

Derm was mayor of Appleton in 2001, when the small community became part of the regional effort to care for thousands of stranded passengers.

But 25 years later, there I was, another "come from away" being welcomed into their home.

There were eggs, sausage and bacon, along with toutons, fish cakes, coffee and tea.

A Newfoundland breakfast, served with the kind of conversation you’d expect around a table with extended family.

It struck me that this was precisely what I had spent days interviewing people about.

Doors opening. Food appearing. Strangers sitting down together.

Only this wasn’t 2001.

Why Here?

I kept wondering why.

Why does this particular part of the world respond to strangers the way they do?

Newfoundland author and illustrator Dawn Baker offered an explanation that stretched much further back.

“This is a pocket in the world that is just very kind,” she told me.

Baker believes some of that instinct was forged by necessity.

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"For generations, people living in small, isolated Newfoundland communities survived difficult geography, unforgiving weather and long winters because they depended on one another. If a family didn’t have enough, somebody shared what was in the cellar. If a husband was lost at sea and left behind a wife and children, the community stepped in.

“We fend for each other, and we fend for ourselves,” she said.

Long before thousands of strangers needed beds, food, prescriptions and transportation, Newfoundlanders had generations of practice asking, "What do you need?"

And then figuring out how to provide it.

When a Story Becomes Part of You

I began to understand that separating this story from everyday life was more complicated than I had anticipated.

The 9/11 narratives, I would soon experience, were simply bridges that connected the past and the current day.

Back in 2001, Janice Goudie was 21, a young reporter who had only recently arrived in Gander, when suddenly she found herself covering one of the biggest stories in the world.

When we sat down together, Goudie told me she hopes the moral survives after the anniversaries and interviews eventually stop.

Empathy.

For Goudie, part of the responsibility now belongs to the next generation: teaching them to notice and “stand up when a neighbour needs help.”

That’s how a story like this should be preserved.

Passing It On

Baker is now helping introduce that idea to a generation with no memory of September 11.

Her children’s book, Commander Gander Goes to Come From Away, grew from a trip she and her husband took to New York to see the musical in 2017. She brought along a small stuffed Commander Gander and photographed him around the city and outside the theatre.

People loved the photos.

She began to wonder whether there was a children’s book in them.

Explaining September 11 to children roughly kindergarten to Grade 3 presented an obvious challenge, so Baker didn’t try to explain the horror in detail.

Instead, she tells them simply that “some very bad things happened in New York in America,” and because of that, people needed somewhere else to stay.

Then the story becomes about what happened when they arrived.

For Baker, giving back was also part of the project from the beginning. A portion of the proceeds from each book supports the Janeway Children’s Hospital, and she told me that if her publisher hadn’t agreed to the charitable component, she wouldn’t have done the book.

The People Who Came Looking for the Light

Not everyone I met during my visit had been stranded in Newfoundland in 2001.

Some weren’t here at all.

I met Americans who return year after year not because they were passengers on diverted aircraft, but because they were in New York on that dark day.

In the aftermath, they heard stories about a place far to the north where something very different had been happening.

They wanted to see the light they had heard about.

So they came.

Then they came back.

Now they are seated at head tables at events and at the head of tables in the homes of people who were once strangers.

They became family.

Kevin Tuerff understands that ripple effect better than most.

Tuerff was one of the passengers diverted to Gander in 2001, and during a Pay It Forward event he told a story about deciding to walk to Walmart for clean clothes.

A car stopped.

Then another.

Then another.

By the third offer, Tuerff decided perhaps he should accept the ride.

When he later offered the couple gas money, they refused.

“No, no. You can do the same.”

Tuerff jokes that Newfoundlanders had essentially invented Uber before Uber existed.

But the encounter became part of something much bigger.

Inspired by what he experienced here, Tuerff created Pay It Forward 9/11, encouraging others to perform acts of kindness.

“You can only do it one person at a time,” he told the audience.

Come From Away With New Eyes

I had seen Come From Away before.

But this time, the names weren’t simply characters. Over the previous several days, I had sat across tables from some of the people whose lives unfold onstage. I had heard their stories in their own voices, learned their humour and watched their faces change when they remembered.

Suddenly, I wasn’t watching a musical about people I had read about.

I knew them.

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I also met Michael Rubinoff in person. We had spoken before, when I interviewed him virtually, but watching him interact with people around the production revealed something an interview couldn’t.

For a show that has been touring in various forms for a decade, you would never know it from him.

Rubinoff still carries the air of a new parent — beaming with pride, protective and genuinely interested in what people think of this thing he helped bring into the world. He wanted to hear reactions. He was grateful people had come. And although he isn’t a Newfoundlander, there was something familiar in the way he made time for people.

Perhaps, after spending so much time here, some of it has rubbed off.

Rubinoff has spoken about the responsibility that comes with preserving these stories as the people who lived them grow older.

“As we get older, you’re the caretakers of the story.”

Baker is doing that through children’s books.

Rubinoff does it through theatre.

Tuerff does it through acts of kindness.

And the people of Central Newfoundland seem to do it simply by continuing to live the way they always have.

They Can’t Have You Going Hungry

By then, I had started to recognize that hospitality everywhere I went.

Including at Moosehead Lodge in Glenwood, where I stayed.

My host, Holly, was the epitome of the Newfoundland welcome.

There were tight hugs. Fresh-baked treats waiting in my room. Home-cooked meals appeared at my cabin door.

“We can’t have you going hungry.”

There wasn’t an occasion attached to it. There was simply someone from away staying in her cabin who, in Holly’s estimation, needed feeding.

I was learning there wasn’t much point arguing.

And that’s exactly why those small moments mattered.

Twenty-five years ago, the world was astonished by stories of Newfoundlanders feeding strangers, finding them beds, driving them where they needed to go and making sure they were cared for.

A quarter-century later, Holly wasn’t recreating any of it.

She was just being Holly.

The Doors Are Still Open

At one of the 25th anniversary events, Gander Mayor Percy Farwell stood before a packed arena.

It fell silent with a stillness that seemed to blanket the room as Farwell spoke about his pride in the people of Gander and the surrounding communities.

He made it clear that the open-arm mentality the world associates with one moment in Gander isn’t exclusive to Gander at all.

It exists across Newfoundland and Labrador.

And should people ever need those doors again, they will be open.

By then, I believed him.

I had seen it.

Not on the scale the world witnessed 25 years ago, of course, but in the small gestures that reveal character when nobody is watching.

I came to Central Newfoundland because of something that happened 25 years ago.

I left thinking much more about what is happening there every day.

It was there in the coffee shops and community halls, around dinner tables and in conversations with people who had nowhere else they needed to be. It was in Holly arriving at my cabin with generosity. It was in the Americans who continue to arrive years later, searching for the light.

I heard their stories in their own voices, laughed with them and, more than once, been pulled into one of those tight Newfoundland hugs that seems to skip entirely over the polite stage of getting to know someone.

I had come from away.

And for a few remarkable days, nobody much seemed to care.

There is always another chair at the table.

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