There are places we visit, and then there are places we belong.

For me, the journey back to Newfoundland is not a vacation; it is a homecoming. I have just returned from my seventh trip to the island, and with each visit, the tether that binds my soul to that rock grows stronger, shorter, more insistent.

I’ve often felt, living here in the States, that my soul is of a slightly different shape than the space it’s meant to occupy. It’s a feeling that’s hard to name—not one of overt rejection, but of a quiet, persistent dissonance. A sense of being a guest, even in my own life. I’ve learned to live with it, to navigate the world with this feeling of slight misalignment.

And then we dock in Channel Port Aux Basques.

The moment the salt-stung air hits my lungs, something inside me settles. The friction is gone. The feeling of being the wrong shape vanishes, because here, my soul fits. It slips into place with a sigh of relief so profound it’s almost audible. If my life were unencumbered by the beautiful responsibilities of marriage and children, I wouldn’t be just visiting; I would simply be there, a permanent fixture, as much a part of the landscape as the fishing stages clinging to the cliffs.

I would be home.

What is it about this place?

I ask myself this every time.

Is it the raw, humbling power of the ocean, a constant reminder of our smallness and the world’s vastness? Is it the people, who possess an inherent kindness and a radical acceptance that feels like a warm blanket on a foggy day? They look you in the eye, they listen, and they welcome you not as a tourist, but as a fellow traveler who has, for a moment, found their harbor.

Perhaps it’s the culture, where art and music are not commodities but the very language of the people. It flows through their veins, expressed in a spontaneous fiddle tune in a pub or a poem recited over a cup of tea.

There is an unapologetic embrace of awe here. No one is too cynical to gasp at the glacial blue of a 10,000-year-old iceberg floating majestically into a bay. No one is too busy to pause and watch a pod of whales breach, their songs echoing in the deep, cold harbors. They lean into wonder, and in doing so, they give the rest of us permission to do the same.

But most of all, I think it’s the stories.

In Newfoundland, storytelling isn’t a pastime; it’s a way of being. It’s the connective tissue of the community. People don’t just recount events; they weave tales. They spin yarns rich with wisdom, warmth, and a sharp, self-deprecating wit. A simple trip to the store can become an epic, a weather report a saga. You can’t help but be drawn in, to listen with your whole being.

And the landscape itself is the greatest storyteller of all.

The wind that howls across the barrens moans with a history of struggle, survival, and shipwreck. The salt-battered sheds and tilted houses along the bays whisper tales of generations who have wrested a living from the sea. Old dories, pulled up on shore and left to silver and decay, are monuments to a thousand forgotten voyages. Those ancient icebergs, drifting down from the Greenlandic Ice Sheet, carry within them the story of millennia, a silent, frozen history.

Each of these stories—the human ones and the elemental ones—have embedded themselves in my soul. They are the invisible threads that tether me to that rock, pulling me back again and again. There is a wild magic there, an energy that feels deeper than the tides and older than the cliffs. It recognizes something in me, and I in it.

I may not have been born there, but that doesn’t matter. When my feet are on that island, when the fog rolls in and the only sound is a distant foghorn and the cry of a gull, I am not a visitor.

I am home.