Field Notes: The World at the End of the Road

I wasn’t expecting to travel this afternoon.

I was simply sitting in a nail salon in St. John’s while two women worked side by side.

The woman doing my nails was from Ukraine. She had been in Newfoundland for two and a half years with her husband and their six-year-old daughter. I asked her how she liked living here.

“It’s very different,” she smiled. “The winters are so long.”

Where she lived in Ukraine, she explained, the seasons were more distinct. Winter lasted only a few months before giving way to spring. Here, she laughed, it seemed to linger.

We talked a little about the war. She speaks Ukrainian, Russian, and English. I asked what language they speak at home.

“Russian,” she said matter-of-factly.

She told me that before the war, Russian and Ukrainian neighbours simply lived beside one another. They were friends. Families. Ordinary people sharing ordinary lives. When I asked if she planned to go back one day, she didn’t hesitate.

“As soon as the war is over,” she said. “Within two weeks.”

In Ukraine, she had stayed home to raise her daughter. Here, she works while building a new life for her family.

At the next station sat another young woman, this one from China. She had come to Newfoundland six and a half years earlier to study biology at Memorial University, only to discover that art was a better fit. Somewhere along the way she had also found love. Her boyfriend is from China as well, but grew up near the Russian border, where Russian is commonly spoken.

The conversation drifted toward food, the city, and how surprisingly international St. John’s has become. For a place perched on the eastern edge of North America, it offers an astonishing mix of cultures, languages, and cuisines.

As I listened, I realized that the room itself had become a tiny map of the world.

A woman from Ukraine whose family speaks Russian. A woman from China who came to study science and found a life in art. A man from northern China who grew up close enough to Russia to speak the language. And me, visiting from Québec, asking questions because I’m endlessly curious about the people I meet.

It’s easy to think of Newfoundland as remote—a place at the end of the road, where the continent gives way to the Atlantic.

But perhaps that’s the wrong way to think about it.

Maybe the edge of the continent isn’t the edge of the world.

Maybe it’s one of the places where the world quietly gathers.

Before I left, one last part of the conversation stayed with me. Both women work six days a week. The Ukrainian woman said there simply aren’t enough hours in the day to do everything she needs to do. The woman from China laughed and said she wouldn’t even know what to do with another day off. It wasn’t a conversation about immigration or politics. It was simply two women talking about the rhythm of their lives—and those are often the details I remember most.