The Little House Out Back

by Ben Robicheau 

 

    I was born just at the end of the outhouse era. No, I’m not talking about the Long Island Outhouses, I mean the little-house-out-back outhouse, also known as the biffy, the one-holer, the privy. I missed out on all of the novelty and romance of going out in the dark and slogging through wind, rain, and snow to go pee because the house I grew up in had been converted to indoor plumbing just a couple of years before I was born. Actually, to be truthful about it, only half of the house had been converted, it was a two-family home and the other side still had a little room in the back porch that contained a bench with a hole in it. I imagine that not having to go outside and make a forty-yard dash to get to the john when you were hit by a sudden onset of the green-apple-quickstep was probably considered quite a luxury back in the day. My Grandparents lived in that part of the house for several years, and for the most part they didn’t take advantage of this convenience, they just came over to our side and used the more modern facilities, but the little room in the back porch was still available for the occasional emergency.

    By the time I started school, most of the houses in the village had been converted over to indoor plumbing for some time so I and most of my classmates were not exactly familiar with the use of the outhouse, however we were about to become intimately acquainted with this passé practise.  To me, the big old red schoolhouse was one of the most impressive buildings in town. Surely this majestic monument to higher learning would have all the conveniences our modern age could offer.

    Not quite; there was no running water in the building and therefore, no indoor plumbing. The bathrooms, two holers, were located in a small building behind the school, ominously topped off with several louvered “stink vents”. The outhouse building was joined to the school by an enclosed walkway, so at least you didn’t have to go outside, although in the winter this made very little difference, there was no heat to this little building, and the several slotted vents in the walls and roof designed to carry away any noxious odors guaranteed that the temperature inside was pretty much the same as it was outside. I’m not sure if the designers of this building just didn’t give any consideration to the comfort, health and safety of the students who were going to be using this miracle of last-century engineering, or if it was deliberately made uncomfortable to prevent any “lollygagging”.

    A dozen years or so after modern plumbing and a growing recognition of the importance of personal hygiene had made the last of the outdoor bathrooms pretty well obsolete among the general population, we moved into the new school where we finally got to partake of the modern luxury of flush toilets and the novel experience of using the facilities without snowflakes settling in your head or bees buzzing around your knees and distracting you from the business at hand.

    By this time there were only two outhouses left in town that I was aware of, one of these belonged to Myrna Garron. Located just a few convenient steps from her back door, it had by this time been long relegated to the role of conversation piece, a quaint reminder of the past. The only regular use it got was when it was faithfully tipped over by teen-agers on Halloween night.

    What may well have been the last functioning outhouse within the village of Westport was a narrow little building located to the south of what used to be known as the Coggins house. My father owned the Coggins house and used it as a sort of bunk-house for some of the men who came over from the French Shore to work at the fishplant. Eventually he installed an inside bathroom and the outhouse, like its brethren before it, fell into disuse.

    One fine spring day, Dad decided that the yard around the house was in need of a clean-up and the by-now-decrepit old outhouse needed to go. He thought this would be a good project for me to take on, and I decided that the most economical and convenient way to get rid of an old and smelly outhouse would be to burn it. It was a hot day and the gasoline that I splashed around the inside of the little house and up the back of the door vaporized almost immediately. I closed the door and splashed the rest of the gas on the outside, stood back a few feet and tossed a match on the gas-soaked door. A barely-visible flame shot up to the top of the door and disappeared. I expected the building to burst into flames, but for several seconds there was nothing. I was just thinking I’d have to go get some more gasoline when suddenly there was a terrific explosion! I could feel the concussion as the walls flew away in different directions, the roof came off and landed upside-down in the middle of Daniel’s Lane and part of the door whizzed past my head.

    I had instinctively ducked down and when I looked up again, I saw through the slowly clearing smoke and dust, the vision of an irate Gladys Bailey standing in her yard fifty or sixty feet away. Now, you might think that Gladys would be out there to thank me for the good job I did in removing an eyesore from her neighbourhood, but no, all she seemed concerned about... and she was making sure I knew in no uncertain terms about this concern... was the heart attack I had apparently nearly caused and the rain of flaming debris that was falling down around her!

    I imagine some of the camps on the island still have outhouses, but I don’t think there are any left in town, this may well have been the last one. It was just a little nondescript building with a not-very-glamorous function, but it did its duty well over the years, and when its work was done it got to go out with a bang!

Iron Will

by Ben Robicheau ~ brobicheau@cogeco.ca

Ka-chunk-thunk. Ka-chunk-thunk. Ka-chunk-thunk. I can hear that familiar sound clear enough, but I can’t quite tell which direction it’s coming from. I’m standing on the end of my father’s wharf peering out into a wall of dense fog. It’s one of those warm August days when you happen to glance up from whatever you’re doing and realise with surprise that you have to squint your eyes against the crystal clear air and the brilliant glare of the sun sparking off the ripples in the harbour. You can see right across to Freeport Cove where the boats at their moorings stand out as clear as a bell. Then, a short while later, you look up again and the end of the wharf and everything beyond it has disappeared into a thick grey nothingness! This happens regularly on sunny summer days, the fog drifting in and out; thick as mud one minute, gone the next, just hanging close enough to the Island that it keeps the foghorns droning on all day, regardless of whether the harbour is filled with nothing denser than sun and fresh air or socked in under a pea soup pall.

Right now I’m straining my eyes to see through the pea soup. The fog reflects and distorts the sound, so my ears aren’t much help in determining from which direction the continuous ka-chunk-thunk is coming. The sound is getting closer and I’m just zeroing in on a likely section of the fog wall when the bow of a small craft faintly materializes through the mist just a few feet to the right of where I’m looking. Slowly, a weather-faded and well-worn red rowboat slips out from behind the curtain of fog. Steadily pulling on the oars, which are ka-chunk-thunking back and forth between the thole pins with each stroke, is a short, burly gnome of a man with a round, ruddy face and a large drooping moustache. As I expected, Will Thurber has arrived to sell today’s catch.

Will Thurber had been a fisherman for pretty much all of his life, eventually, after nearly sixty years on the sea, he decided that he had reached that point in his life where he could sell his boat, retire and do what he enjoyed most, which was...well...fishing! With only his rowboat now and the minimum of gear, his expenses were low, so if the weather was bad, or the tide was wrong, or he just didn’t feel up to it today, he could afford to stay in and miss a day’s fishing. Still, the days he did miss were few and far between, on almost any day of the week from spring to fall you could see Will’s little boat in the harbour. He did all his fishing in the harbour now, mostly around Peter’s Island, venturing just outside the passage only occasionally when the weather and the tide were right. He liked to tie his bow-line to the can buoy and that was most often where you would see him, floating over the ledge that ran between the buoy and Peter’s Island.

Judging by the grooves cut into the gunnels of his rowboat, Will must have spent many an hour sawing away on a handline over the side. I’m sure he didn’t begrudge a single minute of the time he used up trying to entice a decent sized pollock or the occasional codfish out from the safety of the ledge, but the truth is that the harbour is not the most productive fishing ground. I don’t think Will really cared how much he caught, he had had his day of fishing for a living, what he was doing now was something different. Still, an important part of the process was selling the catch at the end of the day. The size of his catch may not have mattered to Will, but it did to the people he tried to sell it to.

At first, Will sold to the closest fishplant, the one on Fish Point; at the time, this plant was catering to seiners and draggers, big boats bringing in thousands of pounds at a time; Will in his little rowboat with his dozen or so fish was just not worth bothering with. Will couldn’t believe it when they eventually told him they weren’t interested in dealing with him anymore, after all, his fish were just as good as anyone else’s; better than some in fact. Sure he might not have a lot, and some were a bit on the small side, but his fish were top quality, fresh and handled with care, caught just minutes away, not like what was being hauled out of the holds of those draggers, crushed and mangled days-old stuff from miles off-shore. Rejected from the only fishplant in Freeport, Will crossed the passage to sell on the Westport side.

Unfortunately, he didn’t fare any better across the harbour; after a few weeks at the first plant, they realised it wasn’t worth the effort to roll the cart down the ramp for his few fish and he was asked to move along. He gradually worked his way along the waterfront, spending time at each fish buyer before being forced along to the next. Finally he came to the last fishplant in Westport; my father’s. To my father’s credit, he recognized that selling his fish was not about the money for Will, being able to sell his catch gave Will a reason and a justification for doing what he loved to do. Dad decided that as long as Will was able to catch fish, he would buy them, no matter how few and far between they may be.

Which is how I came to be standing on the end of the wharf staring into the fog. It was my job to lower the bucket so Will could happily pitch in his day’s catch, maybe pausing to proudly hold up a particularly nice specimen for my admiration, then I would hoist the fish, weigh them, and dump them into a chute where they would be transported to the main building for processing. Our transaction completed, Will would again take to the oars and head home across the Passage; or if a Freeport boat happened to arrive at the wharf, he would patiently wait until they were done, then toss them his bow line and get towed home. He also used this method with the ferry, if the tide was against him and it looked like a tough row home, he would just make a short jog down to the slip and get a tow across behind the ferry. Eventually Will acquired an outboard motor, an antiquated machine that was quite temperamental, so he still had to do some rowing, but he was able to get a break from the oars on the intermittent occasions when his motor actually worked.

My mother used to worry about Will, she thought it was dangerous to be out in a small boat if the weather turned bad, and there was the risk of getting lost or run down when the fog caught him out on the water. She was afraid the work was too strenuous for a man of his age; he must have been eighty or more by now; and in fact on a couple of occasions when the tide had been too strong he had been swept out through the passage into St. Mary’s Bay. But Will was doing what he enjoyed, what he had always done, and he had a life-time of experience with the sea to fall back on. Then, one day it seemed that my mother’s worst fears had come to pass.

I was sitting at the kitchen table eating lunch when Mom yelled from the front room for me to run down to the wharf right away. As I dashed out the door I saw what my mother had seen from the front window, a little red rowboat floating beside our wharf with what appeared to be a motionless body face-down over the back, the head dangling over the sternboard and both of the arms hanging in the water. As I got closer to the scene and still saw no movement, I started to think maybe Will had finally suffered a heart attack and was just wondering what I was going to do about that when suddenly the body in question arose and sat up with a piece of fishing line in his hand. While waiting for someone to come hoist his fish, Will had decided to put the time to use by freeing a line that had got tangled in his propeller.

There finally came a spring when the little red rowboat failed to appear in the harbour. Eighty years of venturing out on the water in every season and in every kind of weather, eighty years of frostbite and windburn and salt water stinging rope-burned hands, eighty years of seeing spectacular sunsets sink below the distant horizon, eighty years of watching whales at play had come to an end. Will Thurber had finally retired from the sea.

THIS OLD HOUSE

by Ben Robicheau ~ brobicheau@cogeco.ca

While my father was serving overseas during WWII his grandfather passed away and left him a house on Brier Island. By the time Dad returned from the War he was a newly married man and in need of a place to live, unfortunately, by this time the house had been sitting empty for a while and had deteriorated somewhat. Like almost every other house on the Island, it had been built on sloping land, facing towards the harbour with the front supported by a four-foot stone foundation and the back of the house sitting on the ground. This resulted in the back sills rotting out and the kitchen floor dropping about six inches. Since his new bride would be arriving in a few weeks, Dad got to work fixing the old place up, replacing the sills and levelling the floor. It occurred to him that indoor plumbing might be a nice touch too, so a pantry off the kitchen was converted into a bathroom and Dad put the metal-working skills he had picked up in the Army to use building his own zinc-lined shower stall. This was the house in which I was born and where I lived for the first fifteen years of my life.

This old house, which was already old when I was born there over sixty years ago, was in many ways a good example of a typical Island home. It wasn’t a fancy house; in fact, the only thing about it that could be considered even remotely fancy was the decorative pressed-tin ceiling in the front room; the rest of the house was what you might call plain but practical. It was a square house with eight rooms, four downstairs and four upstairs, equally divided on either side of a central hall and stairway. Someone looking at our house from out front would see four front room windows, two on either side of a front door that I can’t remember ever being used; everyone went in and out through the porch door at the back of the house. Because of the way the roof sloped down to just above the living room windows, this observer might think that he was looking at a single-story home, but in fact there were two second-story windows at each end of the house, one for each bedroom.

Because they were tucked up close to the roof, all of the bedrooms had sloping walls, this made it difficult to stand up in places but still they were roomy enough. My own room was on the north end of the house and from my window I could see across the harbour to Fish Point. There was a streetlight on my side of the house and at night the light shining through the tree at the bottom of Stanley’s lane threw constantly moving shadowy designs on my bedroom wall. In the summertime it sometimes got warm up in those rooms, although that wasn’t usually a big problem in Westport; it was in the winter that you really noticed the lack of insulation and central heating in the old place.

On many a winter’s night I could feel the draft all the way across the room as the wind rattled and whistled in around my window. If it was an exceptionally cold night, Dad would spread an Army greatcoat over my bed for extra warmth. After reading in bed for a while I would dread having to get out of the warm nest I had made to turn off the bare bulb that hung from a cord in the middle of my room. Eventually I tied a string from the bulb to my bedpost so all I had to do was stick one arm out into the cold to turn off the light. In the morning, if the wind had been from the North, my window would be all frosted up and there might be a snowdrift on the inside sill or even on the floor below the window. Getting out of a nice warm bed in the morning could be a challenge; hitting that ice-cold linoleum with my bare feet was not something I looked forward to. Often I would just leap out of bed, grab my clothes and rush downstairs to change beside the living room oil stove that struggled to provide heat for the whole house.

Even though our family was steadily growing and we could use the space, for some reason we only used half of our main-floor rooms. The house had either been built to be a two-family home, or it had been converted at some point, either way, it had two kitchens and two living rooms. For a few years my grandparents lived in the other side of the house. My grandfather had been a baker in Holland and I still remember the wonderful smell of his just-out-of-the-oven raisin bread coming from the kitchen across the hall. After they moved away, the front room was turned into a playroom for us kids and the kitchen became a storage area for various odds and ends.

We probably used that room for storage because we didn’t have a basement to put things in. The house was built on a stone foundation that provided just a crawl-space under it. If you really needed to get under there, there was a small door in the foundation wall that you could crawl through. The only other way to get under the house was by going into the root cellar. In the front hall beside the stairs was a square patch cut into the linoleum, beneath this was a hatch in the floor and a short set of steep stairs leading to a small, stone-walled, dirt-floored room. I didn’t mind going down into the root cellar in the early fall after Dad had wrestled several bags of potatoes and a barrel of apples down there, then it was kind of nice, the scent of the apples and potatoes, the bags of onions and boxes of turnips and squash all combined to overpower the naturally musty, damp-earth smell and gave me a secure feeling that we were well prepared for the coming winter.

A few months later it was a different story. By spring the odour down those stairs was a strong blend of rotting fruit and vegetables combined with the winter-long dampness of earth that had never seen the sun. Reaching into the dark bottom of the apple barrel with great reluctance, I could anticipate the feeling of my fingers breaking through the skin of a decaying Macintosh; the half-deflated bag of potatoes in the corner would have ghostly-looking pale white tendrils growing through the burlap and would be stained with rancid smelling, black, rotten potato juice. The spongy, slimy onions would be competing with the potatoes to see who could grow the longest sprouts and any squash left would be sitting in a row with their heads slowly caving in; of course the turnips, the vegetable that I liked the least, survived the winter in pretty good condition if you overlooked the places where the mice had nibbled on them.

One spring day, Roger Denton and I were sitting out front of this house with my new Daisy Lever Action BB gun shooting at cans and bottles lined up on the breastwork across the road. To cock the gun after every shot, you had to swing down the lever under the trigger and then pull it back up again. Because it was new, the spring that was being reset with this action was very stiff and Roger had difficulty performing this action. He tried several different ways of cocking the gun and found that putting the barrel over his shoulder pointing backward allowed him to pull down the lever. The second or third time he did this, he must have accidently held the trigger down because as soon as he cocked the gun it fired. The BB went through one of the living room windows, across the room and bounced off the far wall above the couch just a few inches from the nose of my father who was having a little lie-down before going back to work. By the time he got to the window to see the source of this missile, Roger was well on his way home and all my Father saw in the front yard was me holding my Daisy Lever Action and trying my best to look as innocent as I actually was.

We moved out of this house when I was fifteen and a few years later my father sold it to Mrs. Ripton from New York to use as a summer home. Since then, the old place has been renovated inside and out, it even has a full basement under it now, but I know that deep down in its wooden bones all my memories are still there and that it is still the same old house that I grew up in.

Big Dogs and Dental Work

by Ben Robicheau ~ brobicheau@cogeco.ca

Over the past couple of months I have been recounting my memories of some of the doctors that have served the Islands. So many doctors have come and gone over the years that I can’t remember them all; for instance, I have absolutely no recollection at all of Dr. Thomas; it was only while talking with my friend Jim Prime that his name came up. Jim remembers Dr. Thomas very well: when he was a boy, Jim had the unfortunate and painful experience of driving a large splinter under the nail of his big toe. Jim says he can clearly recall Dr. Thomas’s young son sitting with his nose only inches away from his toe and watching in fascination while his father removed the offending sliver.

One doctor I do recall very well is Dr. Mink. I remember him mainly for two reasons; the first is for his love of dogs; big dogs. He had two slobbering black Newfoundlanders that accompanied him everywhere he went, even on house calls; they would sit behind him in the back seat of his car with their head over his shoulder while he drove. This usually resulted in Dr. Mink arriving on his patient’s doorstep with the lapel of his jacket dripping with dog drool. These dogs weighed in the vicinity of a hundred and fifty pounds each and were generally friendly, but their large size did make them kind of intimidating and any close encounter usually left you covered with flecks of flying slobber. Because of this, my sister Judy was a bit uncomfortable around these animals.

One summer’s day, my mother took all of us kids over to the doctor’s office in Freeport for our annual checkup. After sitting in the waiting room for a while, Judy; who was about six years old at the time, got bored and asked if she could go outside. After a few minutes it occurred to me that the dogs might be out there too, so I looked out the window to see if she was O.K. To my surprise, Judy was standing in the yard right beside one of the dogs, calmly patting its head and talking to it, I was so amazed by this sight that I called my mother over to have a look. The patting went on for several minutes until finally the dog walked away and Judy came back inside. My mother mentioned to her that she was surprised to see her out there standing so close to the dog since we all were under the impression that she was afraid of them. Judy replied that she WAS afraid of them, the reason she had stood there for so long was because the dog was standing on her foot and she didn’t dare to move it.

The second thing that I remember Dr. Mink for was his part in starting up the Freeport Sea Scouts troop; apparently he had been involved in Scouting back in England and thought it was an organization that the kids of the Islands could benefit from. Sea Scouts is a marine version of Boy Scouts and is supposed to provide ocean-oriented experiences for those who live near the water; although the only real sea-going experience I ever got in the year-and-a-half that I belonged to the group was on the ferry ride going to the meetings. I believe I was the only Westporter to join the troop, not surprising when you consider that the group met once a week through the winter months in Freeport on a school night. In order to attend, I had to eat supper early, rush down the road to catch the ferry across the passage, and then walk from Fish Point to the church hall on Crocker’s Hill carrying my school books and a change of clothes for the next day. Since it would be dark by the time the meeting was over and the ferry stopped running at dark, my father had arranged for me to stay overnight at the home of Curtis and Elsie Prime, whose son Jim was also in Sea Scouts. The next morning I got up before daylight, had breakfast, walked back to the point, and caught the ferry home in time for school in Westport.

This might sound like quite a bit of inconvenience and effort, but the fun we had at Sea Scouts made it worth the trouble. We earned badges for things like learning how to find our way through unfamiliar terrain using only a compass, how to build a shelter from tree branches, how to make a fire in the winter snow using a single match, and how to administer emergency first-aid. On cold or wet days, we continued to work on our badges back at the hall by mastering useful skills like how to tie a wide variety of knots and how to send semaphore messages with flags. Dr. Mink usually brought his beloved dogs to these meetings and each week a different person would be assigned to clean up after them. Since both dogs were massive droolers and didn’t seem to be all that well housebroken, this was not a chore that anyone looked forward to. You didn’t even get credit towards a badge for this job, which was a real shame because the poor sap who was on clean-up duty the night the dogs ate something out of the garbage and then threw up all over the floor really did deserve some kind of award.

After Dr. Mink and his giant dogs left, Dr. Meehan was the next to arrive. Before coming to Canada, he had worked for a big oil company in the Middle East where he and Mrs. Meehan had been living while the kids were back in England at boarding school. When they arrived in Freeport it was the first time in quite a while that they had all spent any time together as a family. I think coming to the Islands in the middle of the turbulent sixties with a family that included three teen-agers presented quite a challenge for them all.

Dr. Stokes was the last doctor that I remember; he seemed to really enjoy the lifestyle here and appeared to have every intention of making it a permanent situation. Sadly, that was not to be. A few years after his arrival, Dr.Stokes’ son was involved in a horrific highway accident that took the life of a young island woman. Possibly due to the stress that this incident caused him, a couple of years later, while responding to a medical emergency, Dr. Stokes suffered a fatal stroke behind the wheel of his Mini. This sad event marked what was to be the final few years of doctor service on the Islands. Apparently there were at least two more doctors, Dr. Westlake and then Dr. Boucher practiced on the Islands for a couple of years each, but when the last of these left, an end was brought to over a century of Islands-based medical service.

In addition to enjoying the services of an Island doctor, we also used to have access to a dentist, at least occasionally. For a few days every year, Dr. Julius Comeau would leave his office in Meteghan and set up shop in one of the front rooms at Lloyd’s Hall in Freeport, bringing with him a portable dentist’s chair and an antique drill rig that looked like it was barely one step above being powered by steam. This Rube Goldberg contraption was a complicated combination of pulleys and belts and it ran at such a low speed that you could almost count the revolutions of the drill bit as it slowly ground its way through your tooth enamel.

Because my father owned a store and I had easy access to a wide variety of sugary drinks and snacks, I was probably more in need of Dr. Comeau’s services than most kids. By the time I reached the age of sixteen, I had already lost a couple of teeth due to cavities. When I went back to him once again with a tooth-ache, Dr. Comeau confirmed that I had yet another cavity and commented that he could probably fix the tooth with a filling, but he might as well pull this one out too. When I protested that I would rather keep the tooth if at all possible, he looked surprised. It was the practise at the time among many of the boys and even a few of the girls on the Islands to scrupulously avoid visiting the dentist until they reached their mid-to-late teens, then they would pay the dentist a visit, and in one fell swoop have what was left of their teeth removed and get themselves fitted with a set of shiny new dentures. Dr. Comeau was amazed to learn that I was interested in keeping as many of my own teeth as possible; and I was both astounded and appalled to realize that for the past few years he had been working on my teeth under the assumption that my ultimate goal was to make room for a set of store-bought choppers!

Borrowed Boats and Broken Bones

by Ben Robicheau ~ brobicheau@cogeco.ca

Last month I wrote about my fortuitous acquaintance early in life with Dr. O’Riley. He was only one of the many doctors that served the Islands over the years. Early on there were the two Dr. Weirs, the son, who took over the practice from the father, used to transport his bicycle across the passage in a dory and would then ride around town doing house calls. A punt with an outboard motor was used by a couple of the later doctors to visit patients on the other side of the harbour. I think the same boat might have been passed along from doctor to doctor; it was probably considered a necessary piece of equipment for anyone practicing medicine on the Islands. When you think about it, it makes a lot of sense for someone responding to an emergency; no need to wait for the ferry, just zip across the harbour and land on the beach right in front of your patient’s house.

One fine summer’s day this very punt was hauled up on the beach in front of my parents’ house. The doctor had been called because my mother had gone into labour. Being only ten years old, I wasn’t all that interested in what was going on in the upstairs bedroom so instead headed down to the beach to have a look at the doctor’s boat. When he had arrived, the tide was receding and the boat was left high and dry, but things had progressed slowly at home and by now the tide was on its way up again. As the boat started to float, I thought it would be a good opportunity for me to take a spin around the harbour; I was sure the doctor wouldn’t mind, he was going to be occupied for the next little while anyway.

After pushing off from shore, I ran into a slight problem; the motor had been tilted up and it took me a while to figure out how to release it, then it occurred to me that I didn’t actually know how to operate an outboard motor. After yanking on the starter cord several times with no positive results, I started thinking that maybe this wasn’t such a good idea after all; by now the tide was starting to carry me along the waterfront and farther out into the harbour. While I was trying to figure out what to do next, my grandmother happened to look out the front window and saw my predicament. My mother was having enough trouble with this baby that didn’t seem to want to come out, I’m sure it didn’t help matters any when my grandmother ran into the room screaming that I was being swept out to sea in the doctor’s boat.

For a few minutes there, I would have had to agree with my grandmother’s assessment of the situation. The tide was about to carry me out past the end of my father’s wharf and all I could see beyond that were the big green rollers going through the passage by Peter’s island: it looked to me like that was where I was headed. At the last minute I realized that there were a pair of oars in the boat and I started frantically rowing towards shore. With a lot of struggling and splashing, I managed to get back in far enough to just catch hold of the last post on my father’s wharf. When I finally managed to work my way back in to safety, there was my father standing waiting for me. My memory about what happened next is a bit fuzzy, but I do remember that I had difficulty sitting down for a while.

My next experience with an Island doctor took place about a year later. It was a Sunday morning and I and my sisters were on our way to Sunday School. For some reason, Rikki didn’t want to go so I saw it as my Christian duty to make sure she did. I did this by chasing her along the Front Road towards the Church. As we passed by Malcolm McDormand’s fish plant she tried to get away from me by running off onto the wharf, so I ran after her. This wharf had a very narrow walk-way along the side of the shed with only a single high rail on the open side. Just as I entered this walk-way, the smooth leather soles of my Sunday shoes slipped on the weathered planks and I went under the rail and over the edge of the wharf.

Fortunately, there was a boat tied up at the wharf and I hit the bow line on the way down, breaking my fall somewhat. Unfortunately I wasn’t able to hang on to the rope. Since I couldn’t swim, it was fortunate that the tide was out. Unfortunately, that meant I hit the rocky beach pretty hard. By the time I managed to struggle back up the beach to the road, Edgar McDormand was waiting for me in his big shiny DeSoto. He had been on his way to church when he caught a glimpse of someone falling off the wharf. I was expecting a lecture about playing on his father’s wharf, but he just told me to get in the back seat. When we started up the road, I told him I needed to go the other way; I was on my way to Sunday School. He said he was taking me home. I insisted that I was supposed to go on to Sunday School. Edgar said, “You’re not going to Sunday School, look at your arm.”

I had laid my arm on the door armrest and when I looked at it I noticed that the section between my wrist and elbow didn’t lay flat, it kind of humped up in the middle. Up until that point, I had felt shaken up, but in no pain. The moment I realized my arm was broken, the pain came flooding in. After Edgar delivered me to my parents, they gave me a couple of Aspirin, put my arm in a sling and headed for the doctor’s office in Freeport. An X-ray confirmed that I had broken both bones in my left arm. Dr. McDonald told me that to re-set them he would have to pull on my broken arm. I wasn’t too thrilled at this prospect, but he told me not to worry, he had something that would fix me right up; I wouldn’t feel a thing.

What he had was ether. Ether is a liquid that will knock you out if you breathe the fumes. It is administered by placing a rubber mask over your mouth and nose, the liquid is then dripped on a piece of gauze placed in a hole in the mask, and you inhale the fumes. Administering ether can be a fine art; too little ether and you’re not completely asleep, too much and you might never wake up again. With the mask over my face, I felt like I was suffocating, and the strong ether smell made me choke. I fought the mask and pulled it away while Dr. McDonald and my father struggled to hold me down. Finally everything faded to black and the next thing I knew I was waking up with a headache, my arm in a cast and my father asking how I felt. I told him I was OK but I had had a very vivid dream about yelling at the doctor. Dad said, “That was no dream”. Apparently I didn’t get quite enough ether, because when Dr. McDonald pulled on my arm, I sat straight up and screamed.

About a month later I was sitting in our kitchen on a chair across from Dr. McDonald, who had come to take off my cast. As he prepared his implements, he explained that some people get nauseous when having casts removed and asked my mother to hold a basin ready just in case. I felt this was a bit unnecessary, I had been living with this thing on my arm for a month, it was heavy, itchy, smelly and awkward; I was thrilled to be finally getting rid of it, I couldn’t see me having any problem with its removal. All was fine when he cut away the part that looped around my thumb and over my hand, but as he started working his way up the cast, the sensation of the cold metal shears sliding against the skin of my damaged arm and the sound of the crunching as it cut through the plaster made my stomach turn somersaults. As it turned out, Dr. McDonald was right, the basin did come in handy, and I learned something that I would like to pass along to anyone who might have a broken bone or two: It’s not a good idea to eat red liquorice just before having your cast removed.

How The Department of Immigration Saved My Life

By Ben Robicheau ~ brobicheau@cogeco.ca

As any Islander well knows, one of the disadvantages of living in this unique but relatively remote part of the Province has always been the lack of certain services that people on the mainland take for granted: the one service that’s probably the most important to most people is health care. Several years ago the Islands were chosen as a test site to experiment with the position of nurse-practitioner and although the experiment itself has more-or-less worked out and people are more than happy to have a clinic and a health-care provider available, finding a qualified nurse-practitioner who can adapt to the Islands lifestyle and at the same time keep the powers-that-be happy seems to be an elusive and on-going challenge.

Up until sometime in the 1980’s, the Island communities had their own resident doctor, the result of a Dept. of Immigration program that seemed to be designed to attract doctors to Canada from The British Isles. The reward for agreeing to serve for a certain length of time in some far-flung corner of the province was a faster and easier trip through the immigration process. The aspiring new Canadians that came to Freeport would move into the big old house near the bottom of Crocker’s Hill that was a combination family residence, medical clinic and pharmacy, and usually stay for the required four years before moving on and being replaced by another British newcomer. This revolving-door system of attracting doctors was not exactly an ideal situation, but for the most part it worked. In fact, in some ways it worked very well. The people who came here were generally well-educated, often came from cities where they had access and exposure to the latest developments, and had usually spent time working with considerably larger populations so had acquired a much wider experience base than the typical country doctor. This put us in the unique situation of often having a medical service that was in some ways equal to or even superior to that which was available in other parts of the province. In fact, I believe that if this system had not been in place, I would not be alive today.

When I was only a few days old, my parents noticed that I was not able to keep my food down. Various well-intentioned people advised the new parents not to worry, I probably just needed to get used to eating, or maybe they were feeding me too much, or maybe it was too little, or possibly I was swallowing too much air as I ate. But when things didn’t improve with time and I started getting lethargic and losing weight, they took me to Digby Hospital where it was determined that I was most likely suffering from an allergy to mother’s milk and putting me on formula would solve the problem. After several days on formula, I still was not doing any better so it was back to Digby, where the advice now was to try a different formula. This did not help either and by now I was nearly a month old and getting dangerously malnourished and dehydrated. While all this was going on the latest doctor, a Dr. O’Reilly, had arrived in Freeport from Dublin, Ireland and my father, now feeling increasingly desperate and not so confident in the advice he had been getting from Digby, gave him a call.

To my father's surprise, upon hearing a description of my symptoms, the doctor immediately hung the phone up on him. Twenty minutes later he was standing in our kitchen giving me an examination. After seeing my violent reaction to being fed, he told my parents he thought he knew what was wrong; I appeared to be suffering from a condition called pyloric stenosis; but to be sure, he wanted a second opinion. Fortunately Dr. O’Reilly’s wife was also a doctor, so I was bundled up and taken to Freeport where, without being told what her husband suspected, Mrs. O’Reilly examined me and almost immediately also diagnosed the problem as being pyloric stenosis.

Pyloric stenosis is a condition that appears in about 3 out of every 1000 infants, it appears mostly in first-born boys, is four times more common in boys than girls and is usually fatal if left untreated. The over development of a certain muscle constricts the bottom of the stomach, shutting off the entrance to the intestines. Since the stomach contents can’t exit in the normal manner, it all goes back the way it came, resulting in what is accurately described as “projectile vomiting”. Although the effects of pyloric stenosis were first observed in 1717, it wasn’t until 1887 that it was diagnosed as a medical condition through autopsies of infants who had died of it. Although there were earlier attempts to rectify the problem with surgery, it wasn’t until 1917 that a Dr. Ramstedt came up with an operation that reliably corrected the condition without killing more patients than it saved. Even today, it is not known exactly what instigates the muscle thickening that causes pyloric stenosis to occur.

With both the Dr. O’Reillys agreeing on the diagnosis, and considering my rapidly deteriorating condition, it was decided that I had to get to the hospital immediately. Dr. O’Reilly told my father to call and hold the ferry in Tiverton. When he called the telephone exchange and said he needed to get a message to the ferry, the operator, Charlie Young, informed him that that party line was busy and hung up. When Dr. O’Reilly heard this he instructed Dad to call back and say it’s an emergency; this time Charlie said, “Why the Hell didn’t you tell me that the first time? I’ll get those old biddies off the line!” The next thing Dad heard was some women talking and then Charlie telling them in no uncertain terms that he needed the line.

At first, Digby Hospital was not sure what to make of this new-comer with the Irish accent when he showed up with two distraught parents and a deathly ill baby. The doctors were reluctant to accept his diagnosis of a condition that they appeared to be unfamiliar with, and even more reluctant when he insisted that the only solution was an immediate operation on a weak and sickly month-old infant. No one at Digby Hospital had ever performed this procedure, and although Dr. O’Reilly had seen it performed just before leaving Britain, he was not yet accredited at the Digby Hospital and therefore could not perform it himself, so he had to convince someone else to do the surgery. The Digby doctors suggested keeping me for observation for a few days to see if they could improve my condition, but Dr. O’Reilly insisted that I was rapidly approaching the point of no return, without the operation my condition was not going to improve, and within  hours I would be too weak to survive the procedure, it had to be done immediately. Finally Dr. McCleave stepped forward and said he would attempt it with guidance from this insistent Irishman .

Obviously the operation was a success or I wouldn’t be here to tell you about it. Dr. McCleave and Dr. O’Reilly were happy to tell my parents that I had survived but they did warn them that due to the severe lack of nourishment I experienced in my first few weeks of life there would be ongoing health problems; my growth would probably be stunted, I would most likely be sickly all my life, and I would probably be mentally deficient. I eventually grew to be 6’2” and never had any unusual trouble with my health along the way, so I’m happy to be able say that at least two of their three predictions did not come to pass!

As far as I can tell, I was the first baby to be operated on for this condition at Digby General Hospital, most likely the first in all of Digby County and possibly one of the first in the Province. Four or five years later, Dad ran into Dr. McCleave on the street and, after asking how I was doing, Dr. McCleave informed him that since operating on me, he had performed the same procedure on a dozen or so other children.

By the time I was born in 1948 pyloric stenosis had been well documented in medical literature for over sixty years and the solution to the condition had been known for nearly thirty years; yet it took a combination of luck, fate, and the Canadian Department of Immigration to bring Dr. O’Reilly from Dublin to Freeport just in the nick of time and with the experience to identify my problem and the knowledge to fix it. That, and the willingness of Dr. McCleave to take a chance on the word of someone he barely knew, saved not only my life, but also the lives of many other Digby County kids.

Movie Night

By Ben Robicheau ~ brobicheau@cogeco.ca

Nowadays, if anyone mentions movie night, they are most likely talking about an evening slouched on the living-room couch in front of the TV with a bag of microwave popcorn and a rented DVD. Not long ago, a night at the movies meant something a little grander. It was more of a community social event, a chance to dress up a bit and go out to the local cinema where you would meet up with family, friends and neighbours to spend a couple of hours together lost in a big-screen adventure.

Almost every town had a movie theatre, and for many people, taking in the latest film was a regular event. Even small communities like the ones on the Islands had theatres; the one in Westport was built sometime in the forties by Bernard Gower and Holland Titus, but by the time I became aware of it in the fifties, it had been sold to Gerald Strickland. The official name of the theatre was The Star although I don’t think many people were aware of this fact since I have only ever heard it referred to as “Gerald’s Hall”.

Since it was right next to the school; more or less where the fire hall is now; the theatre was a familiar building to us kids. Because the 155 seat wooden structure was built on posts with a slant from front to back to accommodate the sloping floor, the front part of the building was about four feet off the ground. This provided a handy shelter for the younger students to go under to get out of the weather while waiting for the school doors to open; and for the older students it was a place safely off school property to discreetly take their recess smoke break.

Although I was well acquainted with the outside of the building, I didn’t see the inside until I was nearly ten years old. Since Saturday night was the only night the theatre was open, and my father had to work in the store every Saturday night, we had never been able to go to a movie. I don’t recall if it was my idea or my father’s, but I do remember the excitement I felt when he presented me with thirty-five cents one Saturday night and told me I was old enough to go to the movie by myself. In addition to the money, he also gave me a flashlight to help avoid the mud puddles on my way home after the movie.

I felt quite grown up as I joined the dozen or so other movie patrons on the high steps in front of the theatre doors. We must have been a bit early because while we were standing there expecting the doors to open any moment, Mr. Strickland came walking down the Back Road with the evening’s film under his arm. After making his way through the scant crowd to unlock the door, he kept us waiting for another fifteen minutes or so while he set up the film and made the necessary technical preparations. Finally the doors were flung open and our small group of theatre-goers filed in to see Gerald sitting in a little booth with a roll of tickets in his hand and a display of potato chips and chocolate bars laid out beside him. Admission turned out to be twenty-five cents, which left me with a dilemma; did I spend my extra dime on two bags of Scottie’s chips at a nickel each or one chocolate bar at eight cents? I decided on the chips.

I cautiously made my way into the auditorium juggling two bags of chips, my theatre ticket; which I thought I had to keep ready in case someone - I don’t know who - asked to see it; the flashlight and my coat. I had just got settled in my seat when it happened, that thrilling moment when the houselights dim and the projector light hits the silver screen. Unfortunately, I don’t remember a whole lot about the movie other than it was a western of some sort. Just as the image of galloping horses hit the screen, I dropped the flashlight on the floor and it came on! I quickly grabbed it from where it had rolled under the seat in front of me and tried to turn it off, but it wouldn’t turn off! After a couple of minutes of fiddling with the switch while trying to ignore mounting complaints about the distracting light from those around me, I gave up on turning it off and attempted to hide it by shoving it in my pants pocket. This turned out to be very uncomfortable, plus I felt a little conspicuous sitting there with the front of my pants glowing, so I just wrapped it up in my coat and placed it on the seat beside me.

Just as I was starting to get interested in the movie, the flashlight fell off the seat and rolled down the floor for a second time, splashing light all over the auditorium and onto the screen! I quickly retrieved it and wrapped it up again. Over the next half-hour or so I spent more time fussing with the flashlight and worrying about disrupting the movie than actually watching what was on the screen, in the end I resolved the problem by taking the flashlight apart and putting the pieces in my pockets. Again, this was kind of uncomfortable, but at least this time my pants weren’t lit up! When the movie finally ended night had fallen, and since I couldn’t figure out how to put the flashlight back together, I ended up walking home in the pitch dark, clinking and rattling along with my pockets full of batteries and flashlight bits and pieces and trying to avoid stepping in unseen mud puddles.

This turned out to be my one and only visit to the Westport movie theatre, TV had recently arrived on the Island and within the next few months, attendance at the theatre dropped off to the point where it was no longer feasible to stay open.

Over in Freeport, with a bigger population to draw from, Lloyd Blackford managed to keep The Nu-Era Theatre going for a few more years. When I was thirteen or so I went to a Jerry Lewis movie there with my friend Jimmy. The Nu-Era was bigger and fancier than the Westport theatre; it could seat 200 and even had a balcony. In fact, since several people had warned me not to sit right below the balcony because of the tendency of people to “accidentally” spill drinks and drop various items over the edge onto the customers below, we decided it was probably safer to watch the show from the second level seats.

Again, this was the only opportunity I would have to attend a movie in this theatre, sometime in the early sixties it closed, although the attached dance hall would continue on for several more years. Unlike the now long-gone Westport theatre building, Lloyd’s Hall still survives; in the seventies it was bought by The Royal Canadian Legion and lives on today as the Carpiquet Branch.

A few years after the Freeport theatre closed, someone at Islands Consolidated School came up with the idea of starting a Cinema Club; they would put on one movie a month for the public and hopefully make some money for the Student Council. The first presentation was to be the Steve McQueen movie, Bullitt. On the big night there was a pretty good turn-out, most of the plastic chairs in the school auditorium were filled and the canteen was doing a brisk business, everything was looking good, maybe people were interested in going out to the movies again...then the film started and it all went downhill from there.

I don’t know if the problem was with the poor condition of the film, the inexperience of the projectionist or the school’s rickety old Bell & Howell projector; probably a combination of all three; but just a few minutes into the movie, the film jammed up and the lights had to be brought back up while it was fixed. This continued to happen on a regular basis throughout the rest of the film, the projector jamming every few minutes and the lights going on and off like a slow-motion strobe light. Among film buffs, Bullitt is considered to contain one of the most exciting and suspenseful car chase scenes in movie history. Unfortunately for the audience that night, having it interrupted every few minutes made it very hard to appreciate the drama.

There were a couple more movies in the following months, and although they both went off quite smoothly, the audience, maybe turned off by their first experience, quickly dwindled and the Cinema Club was forced to quietly follow in the footsteps of the Star and the Nu-Era, bringing a final close to the era of film on the Islands.