ON THE BEACH

by Ben Robicheau

One of the great things about living on the Islands is being so near the ocean. Practically every house has a view of the water, most have waterfront property and many are just across the street from the harbour. Being this close to the shore has a lot of benefits. From your own living room window you can keep track of ferry crossings, tell if the tide is coming in or going out, or see who is going out whale watching today.
Unfortunately, living across the road from the beach can also have its downside. This was made devastatingly clear to me one day when I was about five years old.
It was a rare, fog-free summers day in Westport and my mother was out in the yard hanging some of the endless laundry on the line. My friend Wallace and I were fooling around in my father’s nearly new ’53 Chev pickup. Wallace was riding shotgun while I was behind the wheel, turning knobs and kicking at the pedals. At some point I must have pulled the gearshift, because suddenly the truck started to move. I remember stabbing at what I thought was the brake pedal, but the truck only picked up speed, I yanked on the emergency brake lever with no success. At this point my mother was screaming, the truck was rolling even faster, and I was out of ideas on how to stop it. With a look of fear, Wallace asked, “What are we going to do?” I replied “I don’t know about you, but I’m jumpin” I went out my door and he went out his.
I picked myself up just in time to see the truck disappear over the breastwork. Our driveway ran downhill to the Front Road, on the other side of the road was the breastwork and an eight-foot drop to the beach. The tide happened to be all the way up, so the truck landed in about six feet of water and as Wallace and I watched in disbelief, it began to slowly drift away.
Apparently the tires, the wooden floor of the truck bed, and the air trapped in the cab roof were enough to keep it barely afloat. With just a few inches showing above water, the tide was slowly carrying my father’s new truck out into the harbour.
Luckily, a fisherman unloading his catch just a short distance away happened to notice the truck sailing by, and before it got too far away was able to hook his anchor under the bumper and tow it back to shore.
By this time the whole island had heard about our little accident. I remember standing on the breastwork with everyone else, scared and crying my eyes out, but at the same time noticing that if a leaned out a little I could see all the people lined up on the breastwork, snaking away into the distance. I think this was probably the first time I had seen the majority of the island population in one spot and I must admit that I was just a little bit impressed that it was my action that had brought them all together and arranged them so neatly.
The truck was quickly hauled up on the beach and a group of men went to work on it. The gas tank and seat were removed, the engine was taken apart and various bits and pieces lined up on the now nearly empty breastwork. The truck was towed to a pond and all its parts flushed out with fresh water. By dark, it was back together and running.
The truck was never quite the same after that. The window cranks seized up, sealing the windows forever shut, none of the dashboard gauges worked, and the bodywork suffered badly from premature rusting. One day about a year after the incident, Dad was on his way to Digby when he hit a bump and the cab of the truck dropped down around his ears. The cab supports had rusted away. He drove directly to McDonald Motors and traded it in on a new truck. For his two year old truck, they gave him fifty dollars.
Surprisingly, having your vehicle end up on the beach was not an unusual problem for Island residents. My father’s truck was not the first of his vehicles to end up on the beach. A few years before this incident, he had a car with which he ran an informal taxi service. One day he was hired on short notice to take some passengers to Digby. Before catching the ferry, he hurried home to freshen up a bit. Bending over the kitchen sink, he straightened up just in time to see his car roll past the window and down the driveway. Running outside, the scene was nearly identical to that which I was to witness a few years later. Luckily, this time the tide was down and the car, after rolling over the breastwork and landing right-side up, bounced down the beach and stopped at the waters edge.
Relieved to find his car relatively undamaged, Dads next problem was how to get it off the beach. The tide was rising and the breastwork was far too steep to get the car up over. There was a break in the breastwork where some of the fishermen pulled up their boats for the winter, but it was on the other side of the fishplant. Normally this would have been a problem as the fishplant stretched from the breastwork to beyond the low-water mark, effectively barring the way for any vehicles that happened to be driving along the beach. But, as luck would have it, just the day before, a neighbour had been in the same all-to-familiar situation, car on beach, tide rising, fishplant in the way. He resolved his dilemma by removing a few of the supporting posts from under the plant wharf, allowing him to drive through to the other side and back up onto the road. The posts hadn’t been replaced yet so Dad was able to take advantage of the situation and return his car to the correct side of the breastwork.
Everything seemed to work out, the car was rescued in a matter of minutes, the passengers were picked up on time and they were able to catch the ferry on schedule. It was only later, as they made their way up Digby Neck, that it became apparent that the unexpected trip to the seaside may have caused a problem. The farther they went, the slower the car would go until finally, going up Sandy Cove hill, it came to a complete stop. Looking the car over for damage, Dad noticed that the tailpipe had hit against the bumper and was now pinched shut. This had slowly strangled the engine until it lost all power. He borrowed a hacksaw from a nearby house and cut the end off the pipe. When the engine started it blew out a huge cloud of smoke and by the time they got to Digby, the car was running normally again.
Although we may hold the record, we weren’t the only people to have vehicles end up on the beach. As mentioned above, at least one of our neighbours had a similar experience. And a regular visitor to the Island, Bill Bent the travelling meat man, had a near-beach experience one day when he came out of a customers house to find his truckload of meaty delicacies teetering precariously on the edge of the breastwork. One rear wheel was spinning in mid-air ten feet above the beach and the truck had stopped just inches from going over. A group of workers from a nearby fishplant rushed to the rescue with a load of wooden pallets, which they stacked up on the beach to support the dangling wheel until the truck was pulled back onto the road. I don’t know if Bill Bent rewarded his saviours, but he probably should have. After all, these guys had literally “saved his bacon”!



THE GREAT CHRISTMAS TREE HUNT

by Ben Robicheau

At this time of year I always think back to the old Westport Schoolhouse and the age-old tradition of the Christmas Tree Hunt. Every year, a group of boys would venture out into the wilderness in search of the perfect tree to adorn the classroom. Since the hunt took place during school hours, there was always fierce competition to be included. The leader of the group, usually the oldest boy in the highest grade in the room, would work hard to persuade Mrs.Garron or Mrs. Swift (depending on whether you were in the P to 4 or the 5 to 8 room) that he really did need every boy in his class to come along. His argument must have been convincing because surprisingly, the teachers always agreed.
Proper attire for this venture usually included rubber boots with heavy socks, long johns or insulated pants and this years new winter coat. Mittens and a toque were optional, depending on the weather and how nerdy you dared to look. Invariably, someone would forget that today was Tree Hunt Day and would arrive improperly dressed for tramping around in the woods. This oversight wouldn’t deter them from joining in however, although they usually regretted it after a few hours of wet feet and freezing fingers, and we would set out armed with hatchets, saws and various other implements of destruction, in search of the sacrificial tree.
Our usual route was up the New Lane to Lighthouse Road or straight up through the fields behind the school, over the hill and into the woods. We would make our decision according to how deep the snow was. Usually there was at least a few inches to slog through, sometimes as much as a foot or more, and no matter what the weather, there always seemed to be fields of wet grass and thickets of soggy alders to fight through. More often than not, within a few minutes of entering the woods, we would find a perfectly acceptable tree. Of course, we would not cut this tree. This was partly out of the traditional belief of Christmas Tree hunters everywhere that no matter how nice this tree was, a much better one was out there waiting to be found. But mainly we didn’t cut it right away because we weren’t going to waste a day off from school by arriving back before the last possible minute.
The next few hours would be spent slogging through the brush, getting progressively wetter and colder. We passed the time by entertaining each other with dirty jokes that most of us really didn’t understand, and by convincing ourselves that despite runny noses, numb feet and rumbling stomachs, we were having a much more enjoyable time than those poor saps back at the school.
When we finally got to the point where we were ready to harvest our tree, there was usually a heated debate about the proper way to cut down a Christmas tree. Some thought a saw was the ideal tool, others said an axe was better. Still others thought you should chop down the tree and then saw off the trunk to get the right height and leave a nice straight base for attaching the stand, which was usually the end of a fish packing box, held on with a couple of ten-penny nails. The most radical tree harvesting method I have heard of was from Gary Haines of Freeport, who claims that while out hunting one December, he came across the perfect tree. Not wanting to take a chance on losing it to someone else and lacking either axe or saw, he shot the tree down with his 12 gauge, giving a whole new meaning to the term, “Christmas Tree Hunt”.
Finally, when it had been mutually agreed that an acceptable length of time had passed and that we had milked the maximum amount of “fun” out of our day, we wearily tramped our way back to the schoolhouse. If we timed it right, we would arrive triumphantly back at school just a few minutes before the dismissal bell, wet, tired, just seconds from hypothermia and probably dragging the very same tree that we had first seen upon entering the woods several hours earlier.
We were usually shocked to discover that while we were out in the wilderness getting slapped in the face by wet branches and induring cold, hunger, and if truth be told, several hours of boredom, the “poor saps” we had left behind had not spent the day in monotonous drudgery as we had imagined. Instead of pouring over math problems or spending tedious hours reading about the mundane adventures of Tom and Betty and their boring dog Flip, it appeared that the day had been spent in preparing the class room for Santas’ arrival. The coloured chalk and stencils had been brought out and the chalkboards were now bordered with drawings of red and green holly. The room was festooned with construction paper chains, also in the traditional Christmas colours. Stencils and cans of spray snow had been applied to the windows that stretched across one end of the room and the panes were all decorated with snowy images of candy canes, bells, trees and angels. There was even evidence that cookies and other Christmas treats had been consumed.
This was always a great part of the school year. For all intents and purposes, school work was over for the term, the Christmas concert was only a day or two away, then Christmas break, then the great day itself. The anticipation was almost unbearable!
I don’t know if students still go out to hunt trees for their school, or even if schools allow real trees any more, but I’ll always have the memory of the traditional Great Christmas Tree Hunt of the old Westport School. I hope I’ve stirred a few Christmas memories for you as well.
Merry Christmas and have a great New Year from Ben Robicheau – brobicheau@cogeco.ca