10-07-2025
- General
- Wall Street Journal
‘Summers in Squid Tickle' Review: At Canada's Eastern Edge
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.
