drong

The northern edge of Newfoundland, a frayed lace of rocks and water and durable vegetation, is not a place to seek a throng or a crowded street, yet you may find yourself with little lateral room to move. In an island community such as Herring Neck or Twillingate, the houses appear to have been cast like so many dice across the bumptious land, stopping near the water; wherever a cube has halted its tumble, at whatever distance and angle from others, a roof is dropped on and windows and doors added, and there you are. So there is ample space between them. And yet.

And yet a scrabbling landscape that fights every alteration except the slow erosions of plants and water is no graceful receiver of roadways. Even the roads you can actually drive on are no wider than a cod-based economy would allow for; they wind up and over and around the rocky landscape in routes that would be thrilling to drive in a Lamborghini for exactly twenty-three seconds, at which point the heaving pavement would abruptly rip its low-slung undercarriage right off. 

To reach my friend Sarah’s house at the end of a succession of ever-smaller islands connected by short causeways and bridges, we take a road that starts as two lanes, then loses its paint, then loses its width, then loses its pavement, then nearly loses its very self, so that the last few hundred metres is a one-person-wide path over rocks and grass between peat and boulders. Beyond the house it continues on, by a bog, between bushes, up over stones, less than a foot’s width at times between vegetation that will undo your laces, finally fading out where the head of the peninsula meets the sky and you can look out on the endless ways of waves and whales.

This is a place of folk ways and folkways, little paths of culture proudly maintained, traditions that have held on like lichen over the generations since they crossed the ocean, from – in the case of this particular area – Cornwall and Devon. Newfoundland does not have a distinct dialect or accent; it has many, as many varying dialects and accents as it has villages, or rather more than that, even. And along with that comes an assortment of words that dictionaries tend to think are obsolete or at least covered in library dust.

Which is how, as we drove through Twillingate on the way to its lighthouse, we passed a street with the sign PRIDE’S DRONG.

“Drong?!” I said.

Sarah explained that a drong is a narrow laneway. She referred me to the Dictionary of Newfoundland English. “I have a copy at home,” she told me.

“So do I,” I said.

“Of course,” she said.

I’m back in my home in the sky in Toronto now, and I have my copy of that essential book on the table next to me, and I can tell you that at “drong” it says “See DRUNG.”

And at “drung” it gives the definition “A narrow lane or passage between houses, fenced gardens, etc.” It notes its etymology as coming from the same Old English root as throng.

Now that I have internet access (on the sketchy margins of Newfoundland the sketchiest thing of all is cellular service, and don’t get your hopes up about wifi either), I can confirm that drong (or drung) is an ablaut form of dring, which is a Southwest England way to say thring, which means ‘squeeze’ or ‘press’ or ‘crowd’. It is from that ‘crowd’ (verb) sense that the noun throng developed.

But you won’t see a crowd on Pride’s Drong, and you won’t feel crowded there either. If you’ve been to England, you no doubt have seen many narrow passages between buildings and fences and so on, the slender walled ways that would make it a challenge to pass another person. You are crowded by humanity and its clamoring for simultaneous space and closeness in its building and dividing. But in Newfoundland, it’s not quite the same. When a way can barely let two people pass, it’s not walls but peat and granite and the threat of falling into one or off the other that keeps you in line, or it’s the thriving scrub brush that gives your bootlaces a gantlope. And when a lane is only wide enough for one car going one way, as on Pride’s Drong, well, it’s not that there’s not enough room for the road, it’s just that there’s not enough road on the room. 

I didn’t take a picture, but have a look at the Google Streetview. I won’t say that the road is narrow on a matter of principle, but it may be narrow due to lack of principle (financial) or lack of interest (not financial). Sometimes ways are tight when means are tight, and sometimes there’s just no need to insult the landscape, or to do wrong to a strong pride of place.