In Placentia we stop for breakfast at Harold’s Hotel, a place that looks as if it has remained stuck in the 1950s. At the counter is a sports trophy naming Harold “Freshman of the Year l973–74,” and also a light-box projecting a color photo of the town, which we turn on to get the attention of someone in the kitchen. A jukebox in the dining room has the usual mixture of current hits and old country and western standards.

After breakfast we begin the long and spectacular drive down the coast road from Placentia to St. Bride’s, a distance of some forty-six kilometers, through a series of steep picturesque stream valleys, or barachois (pronounced, and sometimes spelled, “barasways”), all ending in impounded coves. There are small villages or sometimes only a single house at each of these stream outlets. Penny and I went to high school together in West Virginia, and we remark how much these villages resemble a seacoast version of the hollows and mountain towns of Appalachia.

Most of the houses are one-story contemporary ranches painted in the usual Newfoundland fashion with two or three tones of bright boat paint, primary and secondary colors, often in distinct bands around the house. Penny explains to me the mortgage approval system in Newfoundland, which accounts for so much of the homogeneity of contemporary outport architecture. The Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC, a Crown corporation) must approve each house plan before the lender banks give a mortgage. They provide a limited range of approved house plans—fifty or so—or you can submit your own. But since the CMHC plans are free, buddy says, why should I pay to get my own? Most of these government-provided plans are ranch-style houses from the 1950s, a happenstance that has, over the past several decades, transformed the traditional architecture of most Newfoundland outports into early versions of Levittown as painted by Mondrian.