Percy Bysshe Shelley, of course, had much more to say about love and marriage, not all of it encouraging. He described wedlock, or at least monogamy, as “the longest journey,” endured “with one chained friend, perhaps a jealous foe.”

Despite such poetic caution – Guy would have read Shelley’s – and despite the burdens, marriage for Guy was emancipating. A family of his own focused and settled him in a pod of affection, responsibility, and purpose. It provided him with new and different subject matter for his writing. The new material often was on a different plane, more intricate than his Juvenile Outharbour Delights, and relieved of the endless scurrility of Newfoundland and Labrador politics. Marriage and children ended the twin curses of his early adulthood: solitude and frequent loneliness.

The late 1970s was also a time of professional satisfaction. Beginning in 1976 and for the remainder of the 1970s and most of the 1980s, Guy had one of his most durable and stimulating gigs.

For four of those years, he wrote for a Halifax-based regional magazine called Axiom. That publication was succeeded by Atlantic Insight, a glossy, well-produced monthly, also Halifax-based, distributed widely in the Maritimes although sparsely in Newfoundland. Taking over a space previously occupied by the sagacious Dalton Camp, Guy owned the back page of Atlantic Insight every month for almost a decade. It was his most extensive foray into a non-Newfoundland market. A book titled Ray Guy’s Best, a compilation of his Insight columns, sold as well on the Mainland as it did in Newfoundland.

The challenge of writing for non-Newfoundland readers was good for Guy. The arcane intricacies of Newfoundland and Labrador politics, post-Smallwood, were of marginal interest to Mainlanders.

The changes reflected grounding and contentment, and sporadically successful attempts to drink less. In part, it reflected his determination to appeal to a new readership on the other side of the Gulf of St Lawrence, which he believed – Kathie Housser was certain of this – would be key to his financial success as a freelance writer. Mostly it reflected his new status as husband, father, and breadwinner, although the latter role continued to be ancillary to Housser’s more stable and consistent CBC career.

Atlantic Insight forced Guy to find new inspiration, and he did. Guy endeared himself to his new Mainland readership with a formula. The columns offered an inviting mix: children and pets, self-effacing wit; wry, but never demeaning, observations about Newfoundland and Labrador life; and, always, stellar prose that rings as rich today as it did in 1980. An early Insight piece entitled Our Climate Condemned Us to Canada, featured Guy at the top of his whimsical game.

“In other free Christian democracies you can set your calendar by the seasons. White Christmases are guaranteed. Promptly on the first day of spring the trees explode into leaf with a soft vegetable thunk. On midsummer’s day, a heatwave arrives on time and at six minutes past four, September 21, every leaf unhitches itself simultaneously. Even in Newfoundland that’s the sort of climate still taught in the schools …

“Here, however, the trees are just as bare on Coronation Day as they are on the Feast of the Circumcision while, on the other hand, there are shirtsleeve days in February and icebergs in July.”

Guy carries on to explain that Newfoundland has polka-dot, brown and white rabbits due to pathetic but inevitable indecision as to which season they are in, and to explain the habit of Newfoundland weather forecasters of speaking in riddles and circumlocutions.

“On TV, they go at their maps like windmills in a force 10 gale, interspersing all sorts of swoops and arrows with pregnant lice representing the sun and when they’re finished I’ll challenge anyone to repeat what they’ve just said. It saves them from being kicked to death in public. High-speed gibberish is their only method of self-defense in a place where a balmy and tranquil sunset can give way to a night like that on which Lucy Grey was lost.”

Guy explains the influence of weather on Newfoundland’s new status as a province with a much-told anecdote about the signing of the Terms of Union with Canada in 1948: [that] a leading member of the Newfoundland and Labrador delegation to Ottawa allegedly followed his usual practice, a prudent one back home, of wearing his fleece-lined long johns to Ottawa in May. Sweltering in a microwave on the Rideau, he allegedly was prepared to sign anything so long as he could board the next eastbound train.

“It was the custom among the older folk for the women to sew their men into these long-johns about the latter part of September and to cut them free again in early July,” Guy joked. The politician in question was Gordon Bradley, who became Newfoundland’s first Canadian senator.

(The second of two excerpts from Ray Guy: Portrait of a Rebel, by Ron Crocker, published by Boulder Books, $24.94. Photo credit CBC.ca)