By Ben Robicheau ~ brobicheau@cogeco.ca
Christmas is almost upon us once again. Here in Ontario, with the multitude of stores, over-decorated malls and vast arrays of gift items on display, I can’t help but contrast the way things are today to the way it used to be back on the Islands when I was a kid. The Holiday shopping opportunities were a bit more limited back then when the Island roads were unpaved, the ferries stopped running at dark and not everyone had a car. Even if you did have a vehicle, it took most of the day to get to Digby and back, and a shopping trip to Halifax was a major expedition involving at least one overnight stay. Of course, those without their own transportation could still get to Digby by "going on the mail" which meant catching an early morning ride with Lloyd Blackford, or one of the people who followed in his footsteps over the years, as he carried the mail up Digby Neck. Unfortunately, most of the day would be taken up with stops at every rural post office along the way and you would end up with only an hour or so of shopping time before the return trip back down the Neck in the afternoon.
For most of us, Christmas shopping back then was pretty well limited to two options. First of these was the local stores of which you had a much wider selection than you do now. There was Elliott’s Store in Tiverton, there was one in Central Grove where Pyne’s Garage is now, and Freeport had McIntyre’s store, Norman Perry’s store and Curtis Prime’s small but mighty corner store. Westport was a veritable shopping Mecca with six stores in all. My father’s store was located across from the ferry wharf, Dick Welch had a store just a couple of doors down the street, Wilfred Swift ran the Co-op store a bit further down the road, and in Irishtown, Mary Chayko had the retail area below the bridge all to herself. Bowers’ Store was built out over the water at the bottom of The New Lane, and directly across from it, in the building that now houses Joyce and Walley’s business, was Louey’s Store.
Even though the stores made a big deal at Christmas time by decorating their windows and stocking up on special food and gift items for the Holiday season, the truth was that they all dealt mostly with the same suppliers therefore they all carried pretty much the same things. When you went out on Christmas and Boxing Day for the traditional checking out of your friend’s presents, you were pretty well guaranteed to see many of the exact same items under their tree that you had at home under your own.
Of all the stores, Louey’s was your best bet for Christmas shopping; it was a bit different from the other stores on the Island. Louey’s was a dry-goods store, no groceries, no boat anchors, no roofing nails, just a quiet little store crowded with lots of things you couldn’t find anywhere else. From the high counters and deep cubby-hole shelves along the walls you could buy cloth by the yard, a wide variety of thread and yarn, winter coats, puzzles, toys, magazines, china teacups, pots and pans; you name it, Louey’s had it. There was a big side window looking out onto the New Lane that was decorated for special occasions and at Christmas time it was always dressed up with Holiday decorations and you might even see your own special Christmas present-to-be on display there. Louey’s always brought in a few exotic items at Christmas time, but because they were usually a bit more expensive, they only got one or two of each. These items would be put on display, and in the weeks leading up to Christmas, one by one they would disappear from the window. This would cause a weird mixture of anxiety and anticipation; it might mean that someone else had bought that one thing that you really, really wanted before you could successfully convince your parents that you absolutely deserved to have it. Of course on the other hand, there was always the possibility that it was your parents that had bought it! Only on Christmas morning would you know for sure.
Although it was owned by the E.C.Bowers Company, and was really just an extension of the main grocery and hardware store across the road, everyone called it Louey’s Store. Lulu (Louey) Repool was the clerk who had looked after business in the store for as long as most people could remember. I recall her as always being a little old lady, right from my very first memory of her. She was a very reserved, quiet person whose main social activity seemed to consist of faithfully attending church once or even twice a week. She lived in Irishtown, up the lane past Cora Thompson’s, with her brother Ray who was her polar opposite in personality. Sometimes loud and boisterous, Ray liked to regale anyone who would listen with stories about his wild and rambunctious younger days.
The second shopping option for Islanders was the "wish book"; the Eaton’s or Simpson’s catalogue that arrived every Spring and Fall. On the face of it, it would appear that this was the perfect way for someone in an isolated area to do their shopping. You browse through the thousands of items in the book, choose something you like, and a short time later pick it up at the Post Office, nothing could be simpler. Well, in reality it didn’t work quite that smoothly.
First of all, it was a commonly held belief that all of the popular items were reserved for the big cities like Toronto and Montreal and all of the out of date fashions and items that didn’t sell elsewhere were sent off to the Maritimes. It always seemed that if you ordered anything that was currently at the top of the fashion charts, it would inevitably be out of stock. In fact, it seemed that you almost never got exactly what you ordered no matter what it was! They would often substitute your order if they didn’t have the exact item in stock. Usually it would be last year’s version of the same thing but probably in a different colour or style than what you had ordered. Occasionally you would get something completely unrelated to what you wanted. It almost seemed that the warehouse guys just chose something at random on the off-chance that you could use it and shipped it out on the premise that after waiting six weeks for your order, getting anything at all was better than getting nothing.
The other problem was that although the items always looked great on the glossy catalogue pages, you couldn’t pick them up or feel the quality of the material or try them on, so you never really knew exactly what you were going to get, even if by some miracle you did get what you ordered. Even though the catalogue contained several sizing charts and a whole page of detailed instructions on how to properly measure yourself, getting clothes or shoes that actually fit was a hit-or-miss proposition. Often an article of clothing would make several trips back and forth before the correct size was arrived at. Mothers habitually over-estimated their children’s sizes on the basis that it was better to get clothes too big because the kid would eventually grow into them. My sister Rikki once convinced my mother, after a long and intensive campaign, to order her a shirt that was all the rage among the fashion conscious at the time. After waiting in high anticipation for several weeks, the package from Eaton’s finally arrived, Rikki tore it open and tried on her stylish top, only to find that it was two sizes too small. Despite a lot of pleading and begging, my Mother couldn’t face all the hassle of returning it for the correct size, so the shirt went down the line of sisters until it came to one that it would fit. Judy, who couldn’t care less about fashion at the time, got a fabulous new shirt and a disappointed Rikki got a replacement shirt from Dad’s store, one just like every other kid on the Island was wearing.
Today, people on the Islands have an easier time of it, the roads and the ferry service has improved. Just about everyone has a car or access to transportation of some sort, and nearly anything you can think of can be ordered just by pushing a few buttons on your phone or with a few clicks of your computer mouse. Modern technology has its benefits and Ebay has long ago overtaken the Eaton’s catalogue, but it will never replace the excitement and anticipation hundreds of Island kids felt as they poured over the "wish book" in those days and weeks leading up to an Island Christmas.
Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to all.
Monday, 1 December 2008
Sunday, 2 November 2008
ANNIE MOORE – A Woman Ahead Of The Times.
By Ben Robicheau~brobicheau@cogeco.ca
It seems to me that whenever anyone mentioned Annie Moore they always used her full name. I never heard anyone call her Mrs. Moore or just Annie unless they were talking to her. If they were talking about her it was always Annie Moore. I’m not sure why this was so because as far as I can remember, she was the only Annie on the Island, so there was no danger of being unclear as to who it was you were talking about. Besides, the community had a well-established system for avoiding identity problems, if two women had the same first name at least one of them would have her name spliced to her husband’s first name. This was the case with Alma-Wally, who lived on the back road beside the new school, and of course there was also Edna-Fred who lived across the lane from Edna Bowers, so it was pretty obvious where confusion could arise there.
Possibly people thought Annie required a bigger name because she had a bigger personality than most. I remember her as being a tallish, raw-boned kind of woman, with her face and hands always looking red and weathered. She usually wore a long tweed coat and sturdy walking shoes or boots depending on how muddy the road over the High Knoll was that day. For some reason she liked to come visit my mother on Mondays, which was laundry day. I can still see her in our kitchen, sitting on a wooden chair amid the steam and soapsuds from the wringer washer and the washtubs of wet clothes. Even in the heat of the kitchen, she’d usually be all bundled up in her hat and coat and chatting away at my mother on the busiest day of the week. And when Annie chatted you paid attention! She tended to talk in a very loud voice, possibly the result of living next door to a foghorn for a good part of her life.
For many years Annie and her husband Fred were the keepers of the Northern Light. Fred had a car from the early 40s; a Hudson Super Six that was his pride and joy. He kept it in great shape and after he passed away several people offered to buy it. Annie wouldn’t sell and kept it stored away in the garage; she had never learned to drive despite living at an isolated end of the Island a couple of miles from her nearest neighbour. A year or so after Fred died she had Stanley Moore take the car up to a field across from Daniel Kenny’s barn, lock the doors and leave it there. The car slowly deteriorated over time and eventually was bulldozed into the ground, I guess she couldn’t stand to see anyone else driving her husband’s baby.
After Fred got too sick to drive, at least once a week Annie would walk several miles from Northern Point to my father’s store across from the ferry wharf to do her grocery shopping. Occasionally, if the weather was bad or she had an extra large order, she would accept a ride home or have her groceries delivered, but for the most part she would have her supplies packed into a cardboard box tied up with twine and then carry them home herself. She was always very particular about the box, it had to be sturdy with the top flaps still attached; the boxes that cans of Carnation Milk came in were perfect for the job, being strong and the right size. My father usually cut the tops off of the boxes when unpacking the freight, but would keep a few good boxes intact just for Annie. The twine had to be strong also because that’s what she used to carry the box; it must have been hard on the fingers toting a box full of groceries all the way back home.
Eventually, after Fred died, Annie moved from Northern Point, I don’t know if it was her own decision, or if the Government forced her out. It’s possible that they thought a woman couldn’t operate a lighthouse on her own even though Annie had been doing just that for a couple of years while Fred was bedridden and for another year or more since his death. In any case, she moved into town, but just barely. She bought the last house on the very edge of the village, the one closest to Northern Point.
My father had offered to move her and when he arrived at the lighthouse he was surprised to see all of those Carnation boxes again. She had hundreds of them, all neatly tied up with the carrying string and filled with empty tin cans and glass bottles and jars. My father said that for every truckload of furniture he hauled, he hauled three more of boxes. I don’t think anyone knows for sure why she had been saving all this stuff for so long. Dad thinks that maybe she got into the habit during the Second World War when everybody saved everything so it could be recycled for the War Effort and she just never gave it up. Whatever the reason, by the time she was moved into her new home, a good part of it was taken up with boxes.
Annie rarely let anyone into her house, I occasionally delivered her groceries and was always instructed to leave them outside the door. I did get inside on one occasion, probably ten years or so after the move, when she was having trouble with her kitchen stove and asked me in to look at it. It appeared to me that she was living in just two rooms, the crowded kitchen was her living area and I could see that what had probably been the dining room now had a bed in it. The former living room looked to be mostly full of boxes and stacks of old newspapers and I assume the other five or six rooms in the big old house must have been full too.
It wasn’t just tin and glass that Annie stockpiled. She also scoured the beach for driftwood to be hauled home and cut up for firewood. It wasn’t an unusual sight to see her, probably into her 70’s by now, wrestling a four-foot stick of pulpwood up over the breastwork. Many people won’t burn driftwood; it’s usually wet and the salt in the wood will eventually rust out the bottom of your stove. But Annie had a system to minimise this problem. She piled the newly salvaged wood in her back yard for a year or so to let the rain and snow wash away most of the salt, then it was cut and split and stacked outside for another year, then she finally moved it into an old barn she had on the property. By the time she was ready to burn it, the wood was well dried and mostly salt free. Over the years her woodpile grew and grew, the barn was eventually filled to the rafters. In fact, it was so full that I think it was only the wood stacked inside that kept the decrepit old building from falling down. When the barn wouldn’t hold any more, she stacked it in the yard in neat circular piles. The last few years she lived in the house, I’m not sure she even burned wood anymore, I know that at some point she had an oil stove installed in the kitchen. But she kept on hauling home wood off the beach and piling it up in her yard. I think that, like the cans and bottles, collecting driftwood was a habit she found impossible to break; she just couldn’t bear to see all that firewood go to waste.
Annie Moore may have been considered an eccentric person by some, but as is the case in many small communities, the people of Brier Island knew that there was more to her than her sometimes-unusual behaviour and accepted her for what she was. In fact, she could be considered a woman ahead of the times. She lived a good part of her life as an independent woman, relying on her own resources and efforts to support herself, living life on her own terms. And long before anyone else started talking about saving the environment by reducing, recycling and reusing, Annie Moore was already doing it.
It seems to me that whenever anyone mentioned Annie Moore they always used her full name. I never heard anyone call her Mrs. Moore or just Annie unless they were talking to her. If they were talking about her it was always Annie Moore. I’m not sure why this was so because as far as I can remember, she was the only Annie on the Island, so there was no danger of being unclear as to who it was you were talking about. Besides, the community had a well-established system for avoiding identity problems, if two women had the same first name at least one of them would have her name spliced to her husband’s first name. This was the case with Alma-Wally, who lived on the back road beside the new school, and of course there was also Edna-Fred who lived across the lane from Edna Bowers, so it was pretty obvious where confusion could arise there.
Possibly people thought Annie required a bigger name because she had a bigger personality than most. I remember her as being a tallish, raw-boned kind of woman, with her face and hands always looking red and weathered. She usually wore a long tweed coat and sturdy walking shoes or boots depending on how muddy the road over the High Knoll was that day. For some reason she liked to come visit my mother on Mondays, which was laundry day. I can still see her in our kitchen, sitting on a wooden chair amid the steam and soapsuds from the wringer washer and the washtubs of wet clothes. Even in the heat of the kitchen, she’d usually be all bundled up in her hat and coat and chatting away at my mother on the busiest day of the week. And when Annie chatted you paid attention! She tended to talk in a very loud voice, possibly the result of living next door to a foghorn for a good part of her life.
For many years Annie and her husband Fred were the keepers of the Northern Light. Fred had a car from the early 40s; a Hudson Super Six that was his pride and joy. He kept it in great shape and after he passed away several people offered to buy it. Annie wouldn’t sell and kept it stored away in the garage; she had never learned to drive despite living at an isolated end of the Island a couple of miles from her nearest neighbour. A year or so after Fred died she had Stanley Moore take the car up to a field across from Daniel Kenny’s barn, lock the doors and leave it there. The car slowly deteriorated over time and eventually was bulldozed into the ground, I guess she couldn’t stand to see anyone else driving her husband’s baby.
After Fred got too sick to drive, at least once a week Annie would walk several miles from Northern Point to my father’s store across from the ferry wharf to do her grocery shopping. Occasionally, if the weather was bad or she had an extra large order, she would accept a ride home or have her groceries delivered, but for the most part she would have her supplies packed into a cardboard box tied up with twine and then carry them home herself. She was always very particular about the box, it had to be sturdy with the top flaps still attached; the boxes that cans of Carnation Milk came in were perfect for the job, being strong and the right size. My father usually cut the tops off of the boxes when unpacking the freight, but would keep a few good boxes intact just for Annie. The twine had to be strong also because that’s what she used to carry the box; it must have been hard on the fingers toting a box full of groceries all the way back home.
Eventually, after Fred died, Annie moved from Northern Point, I don’t know if it was her own decision, or if the Government forced her out. It’s possible that they thought a woman couldn’t operate a lighthouse on her own even though Annie had been doing just that for a couple of years while Fred was bedridden and for another year or more since his death. In any case, she moved into town, but just barely. She bought the last house on the very edge of the village, the one closest to Northern Point.
My father had offered to move her and when he arrived at the lighthouse he was surprised to see all of those Carnation boxes again. She had hundreds of them, all neatly tied up with the carrying string and filled with empty tin cans and glass bottles and jars. My father said that for every truckload of furniture he hauled, he hauled three more of boxes. I don’t think anyone knows for sure why she had been saving all this stuff for so long. Dad thinks that maybe she got into the habit during the Second World War when everybody saved everything so it could be recycled for the War Effort and she just never gave it up. Whatever the reason, by the time she was moved into her new home, a good part of it was taken up with boxes.
Annie rarely let anyone into her house, I occasionally delivered her groceries and was always instructed to leave them outside the door. I did get inside on one occasion, probably ten years or so after the move, when she was having trouble with her kitchen stove and asked me in to look at it. It appeared to me that she was living in just two rooms, the crowded kitchen was her living area and I could see that what had probably been the dining room now had a bed in it. The former living room looked to be mostly full of boxes and stacks of old newspapers and I assume the other five or six rooms in the big old house must have been full too.
It wasn’t just tin and glass that Annie stockpiled. She also scoured the beach for driftwood to be hauled home and cut up for firewood. It wasn’t an unusual sight to see her, probably into her 70’s by now, wrestling a four-foot stick of pulpwood up over the breastwork. Many people won’t burn driftwood; it’s usually wet and the salt in the wood will eventually rust out the bottom of your stove. But Annie had a system to minimise this problem. She piled the newly salvaged wood in her back yard for a year or so to let the rain and snow wash away most of the salt, then it was cut and split and stacked outside for another year, then she finally moved it into an old barn she had on the property. By the time she was ready to burn it, the wood was well dried and mostly salt free. Over the years her woodpile grew and grew, the barn was eventually filled to the rafters. In fact, it was so full that I think it was only the wood stacked inside that kept the decrepit old building from falling down. When the barn wouldn’t hold any more, she stacked it in the yard in neat circular piles. The last few years she lived in the house, I’m not sure she even burned wood anymore, I know that at some point she had an oil stove installed in the kitchen. But she kept on hauling home wood off the beach and piling it up in her yard. I think that, like the cans and bottles, collecting driftwood was a habit she found impossible to break; she just couldn’t bear to see all that firewood go to waste.
Annie Moore may have been considered an eccentric person by some, but as is the case in many small communities, the people of Brier Island knew that there was more to her than her sometimes-unusual behaviour and accepted her for what she was. In fact, she could be considered a woman ahead of the times. She lived a good part of her life as an independent woman, relying on her own resources and efforts to support herself, living life on her own terms. And long before anyone else started talking about saving the environment by reducing, recycling and reusing, Annie Moore was already doing it.
Wednesday, 1 October 2008
ACE – Trial by Fire
by Ben Robicheau ~ brobicheau@cogeco.ca
One of the aspects of living in a small town is that you get to know all of your neighbours extremely well. As a child it did not seem unusual to me that I would know everyone on Brier Island and that everyone knew me. Every person in town is a part of my growing up, but there are a few who tend to stick out a bit more in my memory all these years later. This story is about one of them. Remember, it is mostly from the long ago perspective of a young person, as far as I know, or can recall, this is what happened. It may or may not be entirely accurate.
"Ace" McDormand got his nickname because as a young man, he and his brothers had an obsession with playing card games. He was so well known by this name that few people knew his real one. One day a man from the Fisheries Dept. arrived looking for Bernard McDormand only to be told quite definitely by several people that there was no one of that name on the Island. Finally he tried the store by the ferry wharf where the men on the bench all said he must be mistaken, there was no Bernard McDormand that they knew of. Probably thinking that he either had the wrong island or there was some conspiracy to keep him in the dark, the man was about to leave when Gladys Baily spoke up. Gladys always seemed to know everything about everybody and she was more than happy to inform the visitor, as well as the crew on the bench, that Bernard was in fact Ace’s real name.
Ace had a talent for fixing the old car engines that powered most of the local fishing boats. His methods being somewhat free and easy, he often ended up with a few bits and pieces left over after completing the job. His philosophy was that: "if it would run without those parts then it didn’t really need them anyway". One year, a few days before lobster season, he spent hours tied up at the wharf, trying to get his engine running properly. Finally, in a fit of exasperation at his lack of success, he hoisted the engine out of the boat, swung it over the side and dropped it into twenty feet of water. The next morning it dawned on him that the season opened in a couple of days and he didn’t have power for his boat. At low tide he went down on the beach, hoisted the engine back in the boat, and a couple of days later had it running well enough to go fishing with it.
It could be said of Ace that in some respects, "if he didn’t have bad luck, he’d have no luck at all". Most of Ace’s bad luck involved fire and water, usually at the same time. I remember sitting in the Vestry one Sunday morning when people were suddenly distracted from the minister’s sermon by a long plume of black smoke which had appeared over the harbour. Sunday School was abruptly cancelled and we all rushed outside to see that the the oily cloud appeared to be coming from "up the road".
The source of the smoke turned out to be Ace’s boat. By the time I arrived on the scene it was lying half sunk on its side in the shallow water beside his fish shed. His son Donald sat on the wharf, obviously upset and in pain from a burned face and hand. The story emerged that Donald had gone out to the moorings to bring in a load of fish caught the day before. It was a hot, sunny day and a can of gas stored in the cabin had filled the boat with fumes. This being Ace’s boat, he had "temporarily" put his battery in the cabin and rigged it up with jumper cables leading to the engine. When Donald hit the starter button it created a spark which ignited the gas fumes, shooting a ball of fire out into the wheelhouse and setting the boat ablaze. Donald, frightened and in pain, jumped in the punt and headed for shore. Ace and some of his neighbours went back out to the moorings and towed the burning boat into shallow water where they sank her by chopping a hole below the waterline, putting the fire out and saving what was left of the boat.
The next episode in Aces’ fire related trilogy happened on a Sunday as well. I remember laying in bed wondering why I wasn’t being called to get ready for Sunday School. When I eventually went downstairs I found two piles of smelly, wet clothes in the middle of the kitchen floor. By now the rest of the kids were up and we went to our parents’ room to find out what was going on. There we found them still in bed and obviously exhausted, Dad looked at us and said, "Ace’s house burned down last night".
Ace had awoken sometime after midnight to find his house full of smoke. He and Donald started carrying furniture out while his wife Ileene alerted a neighbour. A phone call was made to Elsie the switchboard operator, who rang people all over the Island. When Dad got the call he headed for his store, where he gathered up all the buckets he could find, meanwhile a group of men headed for the barn where the "fire pump" was kept.
The fire pump was a trailer with a large pump mounted on it; power for the pump was supplied by an old car engine: it hadn’t been used for quite some time. By the time it arrived at the scene, a bucket brigade had already been set up, bringing water up from the beach in a futile attempt to keep the fire under control. Hoses were rolled out and the key was turned to start the engine. Nothing; the battery was dead. Quickly a battery was pulled from someone’s truck and now the engine turned over but still wouldn’t start. While the men worked feverishly to get the pump going, the fire continued to grow and the by now exhausted bucket brigade continued to toss water at it. Finally to everyone’s relief the engine roared to life, the pump started to pump and some men grabbed the hoses, ready to douse the now raging inferno. Noticing a lack of water pressure, they looked behind to see that the old hoses had split under the strain. Hoses were changed and changed again until some were found that could stand the pressure. Meanwhile the engine kept stalling and the fire kept growing until, in the end, Aces’ house burned to the ground. But the fire pump was instrumental in saving the Garron’s house next door from suffering more than minor damage.
Aces’ second boat-related incident took place a few years later. I was rummaging around in the back porch of our house when I heard what I thought was a rumble of thunder. After a minute or two it dawned on me that there was not a cloud in the sky, so it couldn’t be thunder. I ran outside to see, once again, a thick cloud of black smoke rising above the harbour. I took off on my bike, heading "down the road" to the ferry wharf. There stood Ace on the wharf at Dan Kenny’s fish plant and there, between Kenny’s and the breakwater, amid a litter of wreckage, lay what was left of his boat, adrift and on fire; it’s cabin and deck gone and it’s sternboard blown out. As I watched, a fishing boat hooked on a line and towed the burning shell away from the wharves and other boats and out into the harbour where it could harmlessly burn itself out.
Again the disaster had involved gasoline. Ace had been fuelling up at Kenny’s wharf and had wedged the nozzle open and left it running in the old oil drum that served as a gas tank and then gone below. He apparently lost track of time and only remembered the nozzle when he became aware of the overpowering smell of gasoline. He emerged from the cabin to see a fine spray of gas spurting into the air from the over-filled tank, pouring onto the deck and down into the bilge. Ace had left his engine running and quickly realised that he had only seconds before the fumes from the gas met with a spark from the engine. He made a flying leap for the ladder and was about halfway up when a terrific explosion blew him the final few feet onto the wharf.
Not one to be easily defeated, Ace had the burned and blasted hull of the boat towed ashore and hauled up into his front yard. There he went to work replacing the deck and cabin, putting in a new sternboard and re-caulking the boat all over. The interior of the hull was black and charred, and the whole boat needed a coat of paint. Luckily, Ace had recently been to a Government surplus auction where he had been the successful bidder on several five-gallon cans of paint. This now came in handy and the boat soon had a new paint job, in fact, at one point, his boat, house and car were all painted the same shade of Government Orange. Within a few weeks, Ace was back on the water, going fishing miles offshore in that same boat. Unfortunately, despite his continuous caulking and patching, the boat always ever after leaked like a sieve and Ace had to be constantly pumping her out. If he was going to be away for a few days, he would bring the boat in to his wharf and tie it as far up the beach as possible, where it could sink only a few inches until it was safely sitting high and (mostly) dry on the beach.
One of the aspects of living in a small town is that you get to know all of your neighbours extremely well. As a child it did not seem unusual to me that I would know everyone on Brier Island and that everyone knew me. Every person in town is a part of my growing up, but there are a few who tend to stick out a bit more in my memory all these years later. This story is about one of them. Remember, it is mostly from the long ago perspective of a young person, as far as I know, or can recall, this is what happened. It may or may not be entirely accurate.
"Ace" McDormand got his nickname because as a young man, he and his brothers had an obsession with playing card games. He was so well known by this name that few people knew his real one. One day a man from the Fisheries Dept. arrived looking for Bernard McDormand only to be told quite definitely by several people that there was no one of that name on the Island. Finally he tried the store by the ferry wharf where the men on the bench all said he must be mistaken, there was no Bernard McDormand that they knew of. Probably thinking that he either had the wrong island or there was some conspiracy to keep him in the dark, the man was about to leave when Gladys Baily spoke up. Gladys always seemed to know everything about everybody and she was more than happy to inform the visitor, as well as the crew on the bench, that Bernard was in fact Ace’s real name.
Ace had a talent for fixing the old car engines that powered most of the local fishing boats. His methods being somewhat free and easy, he often ended up with a few bits and pieces left over after completing the job. His philosophy was that: "if it would run without those parts then it didn’t really need them anyway". One year, a few days before lobster season, he spent hours tied up at the wharf, trying to get his engine running properly. Finally, in a fit of exasperation at his lack of success, he hoisted the engine out of the boat, swung it over the side and dropped it into twenty feet of water. The next morning it dawned on him that the season opened in a couple of days and he didn’t have power for his boat. At low tide he went down on the beach, hoisted the engine back in the boat, and a couple of days later had it running well enough to go fishing with it.
It could be said of Ace that in some respects, "if he didn’t have bad luck, he’d have no luck at all". Most of Ace’s bad luck involved fire and water, usually at the same time. I remember sitting in the Vestry one Sunday morning when people were suddenly distracted from the minister’s sermon by a long plume of black smoke which had appeared over the harbour. Sunday School was abruptly cancelled and we all rushed outside to see that the the oily cloud appeared to be coming from "up the road".
The source of the smoke turned out to be Ace’s boat. By the time I arrived on the scene it was lying half sunk on its side in the shallow water beside his fish shed. His son Donald sat on the wharf, obviously upset and in pain from a burned face and hand. The story emerged that Donald had gone out to the moorings to bring in a load of fish caught the day before. It was a hot, sunny day and a can of gas stored in the cabin had filled the boat with fumes. This being Ace’s boat, he had "temporarily" put his battery in the cabin and rigged it up with jumper cables leading to the engine. When Donald hit the starter button it created a spark which ignited the gas fumes, shooting a ball of fire out into the wheelhouse and setting the boat ablaze. Donald, frightened and in pain, jumped in the punt and headed for shore. Ace and some of his neighbours went back out to the moorings and towed the burning boat into shallow water where they sank her by chopping a hole below the waterline, putting the fire out and saving what was left of the boat.
The next episode in Aces’ fire related trilogy happened on a Sunday as well. I remember laying in bed wondering why I wasn’t being called to get ready for Sunday School. When I eventually went downstairs I found two piles of smelly, wet clothes in the middle of the kitchen floor. By now the rest of the kids were up and we went to our parents’ room to find out what was going on. There we found them still in bed and obviously exhausted, Dad looked at us and said, "Ace’s house burned down last night".
Ace had awoken sometime after midnight to find his house full of smoke. He and Donald started carrying furniture out while his wife Ileene alerted a neighbour. A phone call was made to Elsie the switchboard operator, who rang people all over the Island. When Dad got the call he headed for his store, where he gathered up all the buckets he could find, meanwhile a group of men headed for the barn where the "fire pump" was kept.
The fire pump was a trailer with a large pump mounted on it; power for the pump was supplied by an old car engine: it hadn’t been used for quite some time. By the time it arrived at the scene, a bucket brigade had already been set up, bringing water up from the beach in a futile attempt to keep the fire under control. Hoses were rolled out and the key was turned to start the engine. Nothing; the battery was dead. Quickly a battery was pulled from someone’s truck and now the engine turned over but still wouldn’t start. While the men worked feverishly to get the pump going, the fire continued to grow and the by now exhausted bucket brigade continued to toss water at it. Finally to everyone’s relief the engine roared to life, the pump started to pump and some men grabbed the hoses, ready to douse the now raging inferno. Noticing a lack of water pressure, they looked behind to see that the old hoses had split under the strain. Hoses were changed and changed again until some were found that could stand the pressure. Meanwhile the engine kept stalling and the fire kept growing until, in the end, Aces’ house burned to the ground. But the fire pump was instrumental in saving the Garron’s house next door from suffering more than minor damage.
Aces’ second boat-related incident took place a few years later. I was rummaging around in the back porch of our house when I heard what I thought was a rumble of thunder. After a minute or two it dawned on me that there was not a cloud in the sky, so it couldn’t be thunder. I ran outside to see, once again, a thick cloud of black smoke rising above the harbour. I took off on my bike, heading "down the road" to the ferry wharf. There stood Ace on the wharf at Dan Kenny’s fish plant and there, between Kenny’s and the breakwater, amid a litter of wreckage, lay what was left of his boat, adrift and on fire; it’s cabin and deck gone and it’s sternboard blown out. As I watched, a fishing boat hooked on a line and towed the burning shell away from the wharves and other boats and out into the harbour where it could harmlessly burn itself out.
Again the disaster had involved gasoline. Ace had been fuelling up at Kenny’s wharf and had wedged the nozzle open and left it running in the old oil drum that served as a gas tank and then gone below. He apparently lost track of time and only remembered the nozzle when he became aware of the overpowering smell of gasoline. He emerged from the cabin to see a fine spray of gas spurting into the air from the over-filled tank, pouring onto the deck and down into the bilge. Ace had left his engine running and quickly realised that he had only seconds before the fumes from the gas met with a spark from the engine. He made a flying leap for the ladder and was about halfway up when a terrific explosion blew him the final few feet onto the wharf.
Not one to be easily defeated, Ace had the burned and blasted hull of the boat towed ashore and hauled up into his front yard. There he went to work replacing the deck and cabin, putting in a new sternboard and re-caulking the boat all over. The interior of the hull was black and charred, and the whole boat needed a coat of paint. Luckily, Ace had recently been to a Government surplus auction where he had been the successful bidder on several five-gallon cans of paint. This now came in handy and the boat soon had a new paint job, in fact, at one point, his boat, house and car were all painted the same shade of Government Orange. Within a few weeks, Ace was back on the water, going fishing miles offshore in that same boat. Unfortunately, despite his continuous caulking and patching, the boat always ever after leaked like a sieve and Ace had to be constantly pumping her out. If he was going to be away for a few days, he would bring the boat in to his wharf and tie it as far up the beach as possible, where it could sink only a few inches until it was safely sitting high and (mostly) dry on the beach.
Monday, 1 September 2008
FOGGED IN
By Ben robicheau ~ brobicheau@cogeco.ca
I always enjoyed September on the Island. You start to feel a bit of a nip in the air, and though sad to see another summer go; it’s often a relief to finally leave the fog season behind and be able to enjoy the sometimes brilliantly clear days of early Fall. As a kid I thought that the quality and quantity of fog we experienced, sometimes on a daily basis, was unique to the Islands. But after spending a summer in Louisburg, Cape Breton, I know that there is at least one other place that can equal us for the density of its summer air. One of the things that always amazed me about fog was how many different types there are. I’ve often thought that we should be like the Inuit, who have many different names for snow, depending on the quality of it.
As a kid I would sometimes forget that the whole world wasn’t living in a thick, cold, wet cloud. In those days we didn’t leave the Island as frequently as people do today. I remember going up through Long Island after several weeks of being socked in on Westport, and by the time we reached Lily Small’s place in Central Grove, I was amazed to see the sun. I had forgotten that not everyone was living their summer under a wet, grey blanket. Of course, by the time we approached Tiverton, the fog had crept back and we were driving with the headlights on again! The Neck was usually clear most of the way, except for brief dips back into the soup again at Little River, Sandy Cove and Seawall Hill.
In those days clothesdryers were still not a common item in most households, so most back yards had a clothesline. Because of the fog, it was not unusual to see the same clothes on the line for several days in a row, still trying to get dry. My mother did the laundry for our large family, usually with one or two kids in cloth diapers, and trying to get things dry on a line was often frustrating. If the fog was in solid, nothing dried at all, in fact they usually got wetter than when they came from the wringer. If the fog did clear out, you had to time it just right to bring the laundry in again before the fog rolled back in or any drying achieved during the brief period of sun would be lost. Sometimes the fog could drift in and out several times in a day, alternately wetting and drying your washing. Many times Mom would give up on the outdoors and string up the laundry in the porch or across the kitchen.
Of course the fog always lingered the longest over the water and this made for some interesting situations for a fog-watcher. I remember seeing the fog densely covering the harbour to a depth of three or four feet with nothing but clear, brilliant sun above. A boat would go by and all you could see would be the cabin and spars moving along above a grey mist. At other times the fog would reverse itself and hover a few feet above the water. In this case you could clearly see the hull of a boat going by with the upper part hidden from view. Some days the fog would move aside like a curtain, granting us a few hours of sunshine over the Islands and Passages, but hovering just offshore ready to sweep back in at a moment’s notice, a constant reminder not to get too used to that rare commodity, sunshine!
I remember in the mid-sixties when the Digby scallop fleet was fishing out of Westport. At that time they had a reputation for being, shall we say, economical, and only one boat in the whole fleet had radar. On foggy days the whole fleet stayed at the wharf until that one boat left, then they all followed him out. When he decided to come back in they all followed him in. If he decided to return to Digby a day early, the whole fleet left a day early. Without radar or the intimate knowledge of the area that local fisherman had, the fog made the whole Digby scallop fleet helpless.
As teen-agers living on the Island, the fog had a major effect on our lives too. We used to listen mostly to radio station WMEX from Boston because they had disc jockey Arnie (Woo Woo) Ginsburg with all the late breaking news on those new bands from England, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and all the other important things we wanted to know about. They also had weather reports and it always seemed to me that if they had very hot weather in Boston, we could be assured of thick fog the next day. We still continued to do the things we always did, but Saturday night weiner roasts in Pond Cove were not quite as much fun with banks of cold wet fog rolling in off the sea and the Western Light moaning in the background. Riding our bicycles, or later on, motorcycles, was also not so much fun either, especially in the evening when the fog seemed to take on an even denser, heavier quality. Besides the difficulty of seeing where you were going in the fog after dark, within a few minutes you were usually freezing cold and dripping wet. Also, the fog collected in puddles and made the grass wet and slippery, making it dangerous to zip through people’s back yards and between houses playing "bike tag".
Another social event affected by the fog was the weekly Saturday night dance at Lloyd’s Hall in Freeport. In those days the ferry stopped running at dusk but would make special trips after dark if the weather was good. Sometimes you didn’t even get to the dance, either because it was too thick to make the trip in the first place, or because you knew it was going to be that thick soon and you wouldn’t be able to get back. The dance ended at midnight and the ferry would usually arrive to pick up the dance-goers at quarter after twelve. Many times, long before Fats Domino sang "I Want to Walk You Home", signalling the last dance of the night, a rumour would sweep the Hall that the fog was coming in and the ferry was making it’s last trip. Most of the Westporters would have to cut their evening short and head for Fish Point. Sometimes the fog came in so suddenly that everyone would be stranded, in this case some people found accommodations with friends if they were lucky, walked the foggy roads until morning if not so lucky or maybe spent the night cramped and shivering in their car.
Even though it can sometimes be depressing and after eight straight days or so, you might think that you’ve seen enough fog to last a lifetime, I have to admit that it can also sometimes be spectacularly beautiful. Lifting over the Passage with the brilliant sun glaring off it, or hanging in the harbour entrance like a great grey giant, it is an impressive and in some ways unique force of nature that we might not always appreciate.
When my sister Virginia first went into the hotel business she had a guest from the States who booked one night in order to go whale watching. The next day was thick fog and the boat didn’t go out so he stayed another night and spent his time walking the Island in the fog. The next day was fog again, no trip out so he stayed one more night, more walking. When the third day was still foggy, Virginia, thinking he must be getting bored of the fog and endless walking, told him the forecast called for several more days of fog so maybe he might want to go somewhere else. He told her he was from Arizona and after a lifetime of hot, dry weather, he thought the fog was wonderful, fascinating and refreshing! He stayed several more days, just to enjoy the fog.
I always enjoyed September on the Island. You start to feel a bit of a nip in the air, and though sad to see another summer go; it’s often a relief to finally leave the fog season behind and be able to enjoy the sometimes brilliantly clear days of early Fall. As a kid I thought that the quality and quantity of fog we experienced, sometimes on a daily basis, was unique to the Islands. But after spending a summer in Louisburg, Cape Breton, I know that there is at least one other place that can equal us for the density of its summer air. One of the things that always amazed me about fog was how many different types there are. I’ve often thought that we should be like the Inuit, who have many different names for snow, depending on the quality of it.
As a kid I would sometimes forget that the whole world wasn’t living in a thick, cold, wet cloud. In those days we didn’t leave the Island as frequently as people do today. I remember going up through Long Island after several weeks of being socked in on Westport, and by the time we reached Lily Small’s place in Central Grove, I was amazed to see the sun. I had forgotten that not everyone was living their summer under a wet, grey blanket. Of course, by the time we approached Tiverton, the fog had crept back and we were driving with the headlights on again! The Neck was usually clear most of the way, except for brief dips back into the soup again at Little River, Sandy Cove and Seawall Hill.
In those days clothesdryers were still not a common item in most households, so most back yards had a clothesline. Because of the fog, it was not unusual to see the same clothes on the line for several days in a row, still trying to get dry. My mother did the laundry for our large family, usually with one or two kids in cloth diapers, and trying to get things dry on a line was often frustrating. If the fog was in solid, nothing dried at all, in fact they usually got wetter than when they came from the wringer. If the fog did clear out, you had to time it just right to bring the laundry in again before the fog rolled back in or any drying achieved during the brief period of sun would be lost. Sometimes the fog could drift in and out several times in a day, alternately wetting and drying your washing. Many times Mom would give up on the outdoors and string up the laundry in the porch or across the kitchen.
Of course the fog always lingered the longest over the water and this made for some interesting situations for a fog-watcher. I remember seeing the fog densely covering the harbour to a depth of three or four feet with nothing but clear, brilliant sun above. A boat would go by and all you could see would be the cabin and spars moving along above a grey mist. At other times the fog would reverse itself and hover a few feet above the water. In this case you could clearly see the hull of a boat going by with the upper part hidden from view. Some days the fog would move aside like a curtain, granting us a few hours of sunshine over the Islands and Passages, but hovering just offshore ready to sweep back in at a moment’s notice, a constant reminder not to get too used to that rare commodity, sunshine!
I remember in the mid-sixties when the Digby scallop fleet was fishing out of Westport. At that time they had a reputation for being, shall we say, economical, and only one boat in the whole fleet had radar. On foggy days the whole fleet stayed at the wharf until that one boat left, then they all followed him out. When he decided to come back in they all followed him in. If he decided to return to Digby a day early, the whole fleet left a day early. Without radar or the intimate knowledge of the area that local fisherman had, the fog made the whole Digby scallop fleet helpless.
As teen-agers living on the Island, the fog had a major effect on our lives too. We used to listen mostly to radio station WMEX from Boston because they had disc jockey Arnie (Woo Woo) Ginsburg with all the late breaking news on those new bands from England, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and all the other important things we wanted to know about. They also had weather reports and it always seemed to me that if they had very hot weather in Boston, we could be assured of thick fog the next day. We still continued to do the things we always did, but Saturday night weiner roasts in Pond Cove were not quite as much fun with banks of cold wet fog rolling in off the sea and the Western Light moaning in the background. Riding our bicycles, or later on, motorcycles, was also not so much fun either, especially in the evening when the fog seemed to take on an even denser, heavier quality. Besides the difficulty of seeing where you were going in the fog after dark, within a few minutes you were usually freezing cold and dripping wet. Also, the fog collected in puddles and made the grass wet and slippery, making it dangerous to zip through people’s back yards and between houses playing "bike tag".
Another social event affected by the fog was the weekly Saturday night dance at Lloyd’s Hall in Freeport. In those days the ferry stopped running at dusk but would make special trips after dark if the weather was good. Sometimes you didn’t even get to the dance, either because it was too thick to make the trip in the first place, or because you knew it was going to be that thick soon and you wouldn’t be able to get back. The dance ended at midnight and the ferry would usually arrive to pick up the dance-goers at quarter after twelve. Many times, long before Fats Domino sang "I Want to Walk You Home", signalling the last dance of the night, a rumour would sweep the Hall that the fog was coming in and the ferry was making it’s last trip. Most of the Westporters would have to cut their evening short and head for Fish Point. Sometimes the fog came in so suddenly that everyone would be stranded, in this case some people found accommodations with friends if they were lucky, walked the foggy roads until morning if not so lucky or maybe spent the night cramped and shivering in their car.
Even though it can sometimes be depressing and after eight straight days or so, you might think that you’ve seen enough fog to last a lifetime, I have to admit that it can also sometimes be spectacularly beautiful. Lifting over the Passage with the brilliant sun glaring off it, or hanging in the harbour entrance like a great grey giant, it is an impressive and in some ways unique force of nature that we might not always appreciate.
When my sister Virginia first went into the hotel business she had a guest from the States who booked one night in order to go whale watching. The next day was thick fog and the boat didn’t go out so he stayed another night and spent his time walking the Island in the fog. The next day was fog again, no trip out so he stayed one more night, more walking. When the third day was still foggy, Virginia, thinking he must be getting bored of the fog and endless walking, told him the forecast called for several more days of fog so maybe he might want to go somewhere else. He told her he was from Arizona and after a lifetime of hot, dry weather, he thought the fog was wonderful, fascinating and refreshing! He stayed several more days, just to enjoy the fog.
Friday, 8 August 2008
Breastwork Blues
By Ben Robicheau ~ brobicheau@cogeco.ca
Every time I visit Westport I think of it the way it used to be before the Groundhog Day storm forever rearranged the waterfront. One of the major changes resulting from that event was the loss of nearly all of the old wooden breastwork. Running pretty well the whole length of the village, it gave a solid and unified look to the community. Varying from a couple of feet in height in some places to close to ten feet or so in others, it was constructed of a crib-work of big square timbers, presenting a solid face to the sometimes-violent sea. I always felt protected by the breastwork, it was a sort of barricade to the elements, a defence against the eroding force of the ocean. I remember walking along the waterfront during big storms or hurricanes and seeing waves shooting straight up into the air after crashing into the immovable breastwork wall.
For a small child, the breastwork could be a little bit scary, it looked like a long way to the beach when you peered over the edge, there was always the possibility of falling off it, and it was usually too high and too difficult to climb up and down. The timbers were stepped back slightly as they were stacked on top of each other, so every eight inches or so there was a little ledge to give you a bit of a toe-hold. As soon as we were able to master scaling the wall, going over the breastwork became second nature and we were always going up and down to the beach. In those days before garbage collection and before we all became more environmentally conscious, “throw it off the breastwork” was a commonly heard phrase, so for us kids, the beach was a wealth of interesting cast-offs. Some kids had a habit of going about their daily travels using the beach instead of the road, just in case something good had been thrown away that day.
Now that I think about it, the breastwork back then more or less took the place of a Jungle Gym today. You could walk along it, like on a balance beam, climb up and down it, jump off it if it wasn’t too high; onto the beach if the tide was down or into the water if the tide was up. My sisters used to play house on the beach, setting the table on top of the breastwork with shells and tin cans and decorating the “walls” with beach glass and pretty rocks. The wooden timbers also provided hours of entertainment for older kids who chiselled their initials into them. And I know of at least one teen-ager who carved an anchor into the top of the wall, then built a fire on the beach, melted some scrap lead, and used the breastwork to mould little lead anchors. The breastwork had other attractions too. It conveniently blocked the view of anyone on the road side of it, so you could sit on the beach right in front of your own house and nobody could see what you were doing. And when it went under a building, it provided an even more secure hiding place, I remember finding a pack of cigarettes and a book of matches hidden on a beam under a wharf one day, obviously someone had been doing some secret smoking hidden behind the breastwork.
The breastwork was more or less level with the road and, as I have mentioned in previous stories, this sometimes was a problem, what with cars, trucks and sleds occasionally ending up on the wrong side of it. It also could be an obstacle for anyone trying to get off the beach. There were a few places where there was no breastwork, providing a place for fishermen to haul up their boats or pull something down onto the beach. Just about every wharf had a ramp beside it, going from the beach to the top of the breastwork, so a punt could be hauled up to safety in case of bad weather.
The breastwork wasn’t an obstacle only for people. We had a pet seagull at one time, named Charles DeGull. Since he was raised by humans, Charlie didn’t know how to fly and he was also afraid of water! My sister Virginia taught him to fly by coasting him off a small hill in our front yard and to swim by floating him out in the water on a board and then yanking it out from under him. After swimming back to shore a few times, he realised he liked the water and he would walk down to the breastwork, jump off and glide to the beach. After enjoying his swim he would walk back up the beach to the breastwork and yell until someone came and lifted him up to the road. Eventually he figured out that he could fly up as well as down!
One of the things I always enjoyed was the times when we got extra high tides. The water would be nearly level with the road and you could walk along on the breastwork, the ocean only inches away on one side and the road on the other, the breastwork dividing the two, a clear line separating the land from the sea. The breastwork was fun in other ways too, I remember one time when we nearly gave Madeline Lent a heart attack! Ed Pugh had been cutting the long grass along the side of the road and all this cut grass had been gathered up and dumped in one spot over the breastwork. Roger Denton and I had been jumping off into this mound when we noticed Madeline coming up the road. We knew that she couldn’t see the hay pile from the road, so when she got close we stood on the breastwork, pretended to lose our balance, screamed and fell over. She came rushing over to the breastwork only to see us lying on a pile of hay a couple of feet below. We thought it was hilarious at the time!
I believe that there are still a few remnants of the old breastwork left, I don’t know if it is being maintained or just replaced with rock as it deteriorates. And I realise that at the time, dumping rock was a fast and efficient way to protect the road and shoreline from the ravages of the storm, but it sure doesn’t have the look or the history of the old breastwork.
Every time I visit Westport I think of it the way it used to be before the Groundhog Day storm forever rearranged the waterfront. One of the major changes resulting from that event was the loss of nearly all of the old wooden breastwork. Running pretty well the whole length of the village, it gave a solid and unified look to the community. Varying from a couple of feet in height in some places to close to ten feet or so in others, it was constructed of a crib-work of big square timbers, presenting a solid face to the sometimes-violent sea. I always felt protected by the breastwork, it was a sort of barricade to the elements, a defence against the eroding force of the ocean. I remember walking along the waterfront during big storms or hurricanes and seeing waves shooting straight up into the air after crashing into the immovable breastwork wall.
For a small child, the breastwork could be a little bit scary, it looked like a long way to the beach when you peered over the edge, there was always the possibility of falling off it, and it was usually too high and too difficult to climb up and down. The timbers were stepped back slightly as they were stacked on top of each other, so every eight inches or so there was a little ledge to give you a bit of a toe-hold. As soon as we were able to master scaling the wall, going over the breastwork became second nature and we were always going up and down to the beach. In those days before garbage collection and before we all became more environmentally conscious, “throw it off the breastwork” was a commonly heard phrase, so for us kids, the beach was a wealth of interesting cast-offs. Some kids had a habit of going about their daily travels using the beach instead of the road, just in case something good had been thrown away that day.
Now that I think about it, the breastwork back then more or less took the place of a Jungle Gym today. You could walk along it, like on a balance beam, climb up and down it, jump off it if it wasn’t too high; onto the beach if the tide was down or into the water if the tide was up. My sisters used to play house on the beach, setting the table on top of the breastwork with shells and tin cans and decorating the “walls” with beach glass and pretty rocks. The wooden timbers also provided hours of entertainment for older kids who chiselled their initials into them. And I know of at least one teen-ager who carved an anchor into the top of the wall, then built a fire on the beach, melted some scrap lead, and used the breastwork to mould little lead anchors. The breastwork had other attractions too. It conveniently blocked the view of anyone on the road side of it, so you could sit on the beach right in front of your own house and nobody could see what you were doing. And when it went under a building, it provided an even more secure hiding place, I remember finding a pack of cigarettes and a book of matches hidden on a beam under a wharf one day, obviously someone had been doing some secret smoking hidden behind the breastwork.
The breastwork was more or less level with the road and, as I have mentioned in previous stories, this sometimes was a problem, what with cars, trucks and sleds occasionally ending up on the wrong side of it. It also could be an obstacle for anyone trying to get off the beach. There were a few places where there was no breastwork, providing a place for fishermen to haul up their boats or pull something down onto the beach. Just about every wharf had a ramp beside it, going from the beach to the top of the breastwork, so a punt could be hauled up to safety in case of bad weather.
The breastwork wasn’t an obstacle only for people. We had a pet seagull at one time, named Charles DeGull. Since he was raised by humans, Charlie didn’t know how to fly and he was also afraid of water! My sister Virginia taught him to fly by coasting him off a small hill in our front yard and to swim by floating him out in the water on a board and then yanking it out from under him. After swimming back to shore a few times, he realised he liked the water and he would walk down to the breastwork, jump off and glide to the beach. After enjoying his swim he would walk back up the beach to the breastwork and yell until someone came and lifted him up to the road. Eventually he figured out that he could fly up as well as down!
One of the things I always enjoyed was the times when we got extra high tides. The water would be nearly level with the road and you could walk along on the breastwork, the ocean only inches away on one side and the road on the other, the breastwork dividing the two, a clear line separating the land from the sea. The breastwork was fun in other ways too, I remember one time when we nearly gave Madeline Lent a heart attack! Ed Pugh had been cutting the long grass along the side of the road and all this cut grass had been gathered up and dumped in one spot over the breastwork. Roger Denton and I had been jumping off into this mound when we noticed Madeline coming up the road. We knew that she couldn’t see the hay pile from the road, so when she got close we stood on the breastwork, pretended to lose our balance, screamed and fell over. She came rushing over to the breastwork only to see us lying on a pile of hay a couple of feet below. We thought it was hilarious at the time!
I believe that there are still a few remnants of the old breastwork left, I don’t know if it is being maintained or just replaced with rock as it deteriorates. And I realise that at the time, dumping rock was a fast and efficient way to protect the road and shoreline from the ravages of the storm, but it sure doesn’t have the look or the history of the old breastwork.
Tuesday, 1 July 2008
The Working Life
by Ben Robicheau ~ brobicheau@cogeco.ca
As a young person growing up on Brier Island, the first day of July marked one of the milestones of the year. The trials and tribulations of exams and report cards were finally over and two solid months of freedom stretched out in front of you. For the first few school years, summer vacation consisted of endless days of taking it easy: sleeping in, hiking to the back shore, riding your bike to Pond Cove, messing around on the beach, berry picking; doing pretty well whatever you wanted, whenever you wanted. But, like all good things, this idyllic existence eventually came to an end. By your early teens, you were expected to find a summer job.
On the Islands there were a variety of summer employment possibilities; starting with the traditional kid jobs like babysitting and lawn mowing. Herb Barnaby recalls a couple of summers when he had built up a mowing empire of over forty lawns, fetching the princely sum of two dollars per lawn. Peggy Thompson, Janice Albright, Heather Williamson and Brenda Guptill managed to land much sought-after jobs at Foof’s Place the first summer it opened, serving up hamburgers and milkshakes to the rest of us who were eagerly spending our babysitting and lawn cutting money.
An occasional source of summer employment was the Highways Department. My sister Janet remembers having "so much fun", the summer she and Ruth Ellen, Betty Ann McDormand and Reta Barnaby were hired to cut the brush along the side of the road.
In those low-tech days before they had Bushhogs to mangle and shred the roadside shrubbery, the bushes, tall grass and weeds were cut by hand, a much more environmentally friendly method which usually produced a nice, neat job and several weeks of reasonably well paid work for a few students.
If you were in a fishing family, you were pretty well guaranteed a job for July and August. In fact, from about Grade nine on, for some, a summer job working on their father’s boat turned into a permanent situation. Every fall at least one person wouldn’t return to school, deciding his future lay more with hooks than with books.
Periwinkleing was another way to pick up a bit of money. You could only pick when the tide was down and the work was hard on the back, but the pay for a bucket of winkles made it worthwhile; and it was a job you could do after school and on weekends year round. For several years my father provided a demand that was filled by both kids and adults in need of a little pocket money. The winkles were bagged and shipped live to the States where, apparently, they were popular snacks in bars around the Boston area. The winkle exporting business was even featured on CBC’s "Land and Sea" in an episode called "The Periwinkle King".
For smaller kids, there were the occasional Kool-Aid stands or the ever-popular roadside sales of coloured glass, rocks and shells collected from the beach. I remember one summer when a couple of my sisters sold painted scallop shells door-to-door for ten cents apiece, or two for a quarter. They were puzzled that people seemed reluctant to take advantage of the two-shell deal.
The summer I was fourteen, I went to work in my father’s fish factory. Of course I had been around the place my whole life and thought I was quite familiar with what went on there. My first day on the job I found out that I still had a lot to learn. At eight o’clock on a cold, foggy morning, I found myself decked out in my new barvel, a rubber apron which offered a modicum of protection from flying fish guts, and standing at a keeler, a wooden bin which was the fish’s first stop in its journey through the plant. I was going to spend my summer gutting fish.
A sluiceway system transported the fish from the hoisting shed to the keeler, water was pumped from the harbour to push the fish along. As the fish arrived at my station, I would grab one by sticking my thumb under the jaw and one finger in an eye, flip it backwards over the edge of the keeler and cut the throat. Next I would run the knife down the belly and pull out the intestines, finally the head would be removed. A fish in this condition was called a "round" fish and it usually went right from the keeler to the splitting table. The splitter could be considered the maestro of the fish plant; it took a certain amount of skill, stamina and maybe even artistry to properly split a fish. The splitting knife was a unique tool, it had a wide, square ended blade which had a bit of a twist to it. The splitter’s job was to remove the backbone by slicing down both sides of it, then chopping through the spine, pulling up one end and cutting underneath. This was usually accomplished in a few seconds and was harder than it looked. If you went too deep you could cut through and ruin the fish, not deep enough and it was a struggle to get the backbone out and the de-boned fish might not lay flat. A well-split fish would lay perfectly flat on the table.
By the time our mid-morning break rolled around I had to run home and soak my hands in warm water to get the feeling back. I had made the mistake of working with bare hands because I didn’t feel confident about handling the knife with gloves on. In addition to the effect of the ice-cold sluice water, I also discovered that when handling fish the scales would sometimes slide under your fingernails, which really hurt. I soon got used to working with gloves on.
I spent the next few summers at the fish plant, during that time I hoisted fish from the boats, drove the forklift, took loads of pickled fish to Joe Casey’s plant in Digby, and loaded and emptied the dryers. The dried fish were shipped in wooden boxes, one hundred pounds per box. A press was used to squeeze the lid shut, then it was nailed down and secured with wire straps. Lastly, they were addressed and stacked ready for shipping. I remember using a stencil and ink brush to print "To Santo Domingo" and "Product of Canada" on hundreds of boxes.
Two events remain most clearly in my mind from those years. The first one took place the second summer I worked in the plant. As was common in those days, waste from the plant went through a hole in the floor directly into the water or on the beach. The only thing really thrown away was the actual guts of the fish. The liver was saved in forty-five gallon drums to be picked up by Gerald and Albert Baily who processed it into fish oil, the backbone and head went out through a hole in the wall into what was known as the gurry bin. Every couple of days a little scow we called The Gurry Boat would arrive from Freeport to take away the contents to be turned into fishmeal.
One hot day in August we realised that the scow hadn’t been around for a while and the bin was getting full. It turned out that the boat had broken down and would be out of commission for a while longer. A few days later the bin was full to the point were the holes were blocked and a couple of us were elected to go into the bin and move things around to make more room. The smell as we approached the bin was bad enough, then, after a few seconds of slipping and sliding around, we noticed that our boots, shovels and the bottom of our barvels were covered with little wriggling creatures. The whole floor of the bin was a moving carpet of maggots! We quickly abandoned our assigned job and hosed down. Thankfully, the next morning the bin was empty; the Gurry Boat was back in action! I can’t imagine what conditions on that boat were like after emptying half a dozen bins like ours.
The last year I worked at the plant I witnessed an event that most likely will never be seen again. Early one evening Albert Graham got his seine around a huge school of pollack just outside the harbour on the Bay of Fundy side. They needed help and several boats went out to assist, arriving back loaded down with fish, every one of them fat and firm and at least three feet long. Ray McDormand brought in a load and when he started back out, I went with him. We loaded up again and headed back in with the boat so full the only place I could find to stand was on the washboard. We were so low in the water I was afraid we would swamp before reaching the wharf, it looked like the wake behind the boat would wash right over the stern if we slowed down too fast.
After the catch was totalled up Dad’s fishplant had its biggest day ever, over 106,000 pounds of fish brought in. Every part of the building was filled several feet deep, you had to walk on top of the fish to get around, hanging on to the rafters as you went. Fish were spilling out the front doors onto the street. Dad had to make an emergency run to Meteghan in his speedboat to get more workers, he set them up with a keeler and splitting table right on the side of the road. I remember some tourists walking by and asking what we were going to do with all those sharks!
As a young person growing up on Brier Island, the first day of July marked one of the milestones of the year. The trials and tribulations of exams and report cards were finally over and two solid months of freedom stretched out in front of you. For the first few school years, summer vacation consisted of endless days of taking it easy: sleeping in, hiking to the back shore, riding your bike to Pond Cove, messing around on the beach, berry picking; doing pretty well whatever you wanted, whenever you wanted. But, like all good things, this idyllic existence eventually came to an end. By your early teens, you were expected to find a summer job.
On the Islands there were a variety of summer employment possibilities; starting with the traditional kid jobs like babysitting and lawn mowing. Herb Barnaby recalls a couple of summers when he had built up a mowing empire of over forty lawns, fetching the princely sum of two dollars per lawn. Peggy Thompson, Janice Albright, Heather Williamson and Brenda Guptill managed to land much sought-after jobs at Foof’s Place the first summer it opened, serving up hamburgers and milkshakes to the rest of us who were eagerly spending our babysitting and lawn cutting money.
An occasional source of summer employment was the Highways Department. My sister Janet remembers having "so much fun", the summer she and Ruth Ellen, Betty Ann McDormand and Reta Barnaby were hired to cut the brush along the side of the road.
In those low-tech days before they had Bushhogs to mangle and shred the roadside shrubbery, the bushes, tall grass and weeds were cut by hand, a much more environmentally friendly method which usually produced a nice, neat job and several weeks of reasonably well paid work for a few students.
If you were in a fishing family, you were pretty well guaranteed a job for July and August. In fact, from about Grade nine on, for some, a summer job working on their father’s boat turned into a permanent situation. Every fall at least one person wouldn’t return to school, deciding his future lay more with hooks than with books.
Periwinkleing was another way to pick up a bit of money. You could only pick when the tide was down and the work was hard on the back, but the pay for a bucket of winkles made it worthwhile; and it was a job you could do after school and on weekends year round. For several years my father provided a demand that was filled by both kids and adults in need of a little pocket money. The winkles were bagged and shipped live to the States where, apparently, they were popular snacks in bars around the Boston area. The winkle exporting business was even featured on CBC’s "Land and Sea" in an episode called "The Periwinkle King".
For smaller kids, there were the occasional Kool-Aid stands or the ever-popular roadside sales of coloured glass, rocks and shells collected from the beach. I remember one summer when a couple of my sisters sold painted scallop shells door-to-door for ten cents apiece, or two for a quarter. They were puzzled that people seemed reluctant to take advantage of the two-shell deal.
The summer I was fourteen, I went to work in my father’s fish factory. Of course I had been around the place my whole life and thought I was quite familiar with what went on there. My first day on the job I found out that I still had a lot to learn. At eight o’clock on a cold, foggy morning, I found myself decked out in my new barvel, a rubber apron which offered a modicum of protection from flying fish guts, and standing at a keeler, a wooden bin which was the fish’s first stop in its journey through the plant. I was going to spend my summer gutting fish.
A sluiceway system transported the fish from the hoisting shed to the keeler, water was pumped from the harbour to push the fish along. As the fish arrived at my station, I would grab one by sticking my thumb under the jaw and one finger in an eye, flip it backwards over the edge of the keeler and cut the throat. Next I would run the knife down the belly and pull out the intestines, finally the head would be removed. A fish in this condition was called a "round" fish and it usually went right from the keeler to the splitting table. The splitter could be considered the maestro of the fish plant; it took a certain amount of skill, stamina and maybe even artistry to properly split a fish. The splitting knife was a unique tool, it had a wide, square ended blade which had a bit of a twist to it. The splitter’s job was to remove the backbone by slicing down both sides of it, then chopping through the spine, pulling up one end and cutting underneath. This was usually accomplished in a few seconds and was harder than it looked. If you went too deep you could cut through and ruin the fish, not deep enough and it was a struggle to get the backbone out and the de-boned fish might not lay flat. A well-split fish would lay perfectly flat on the table.
By the time our mid-morning break rolled around I had to run home and soak my hands in warm water to get the feeling back. I had made the mistake of working with bare hands because I didn’t feel confident about handling the knife with gloves on. In addition to the effect of the ice-cold sluice water, I also discovered that when handling fish the scales would sometimes slide under your fingernails, which really hurt. I soon got used to working with gloves on.
I spent the next few summers at the fish plant, during that time I hoisted fish from the boats, drove the forklift, took loads of pickled fish to Joe Casey’s plant in Digby, and loaded and emptied the dryers. The dried fish were shipped in wooden boxes, one hundred pounds per box. A press was used to squeeze the lid shut, then it was nailed down and secured with wire straps. Lastly, they were addressed and stacked ready for shipping. I remember using a stencil and ink brush to print "To Santo Domingo" and "Product of Canada" on hundreds of boxes.
Two events remain most clearly in my mind from those years. The first one took place the second summer I worked in the plant. As was common in those days, waste from the plant went through a hole in the floor directly into the water or on the beach. The only thing really thrown away was the actual guts of the fish. The liver was saved in forty-five gallon drums to be picked up by Gerald and Albert Baily who processed it into fish oil, the backbone and head went out through a hole in the wall into what was known as the gurry bin. Every couple of days a little scow we called The Gurry Boat would arrive from Freeport to take away the contents to be turned into fishmeal.
One hot day in August we realised that the scow hadn’t been around for a while and the bin was getting full. It turned out that the boat had broken down and would be out of commission for a while longer. A few days later the bin was full to the point were the holes were blocked and a couple of us were elected to go into the bin and move things around to make more room. The smell as we approached the bin was bad enough, then, after a few seconds of slipping and sliding around, we noticed that our boots, shovels and the bottom of our barvels were covered with little wriggling creatures. The whole floor of the bin was a moving carpet of maggots! We quickly abandoned our assigned job and hosed down. Thankfully, the next morning the bin was empty; the Gurry Boat was back in action! I can’t imagine what conditions on that boat were like after emptying half a dozen bins like ours.
The last year I worked at the plant I witnessed an event that most likely will never be seen again. Early one evening Albert Graham got his seine around a huge school of pollack just outside the harbour on the Bay of Fundy side. They needed help and several boats went out to assist, arriving back loaded down with fish, every one of them fat and firm and at least three feet long. Ray McDormand brought in a load and when he started back out, I went with him. We loaded up again and headed back in with the boat so full the only place I could find to stand was on the washboard. We were so low in the water I was afraid we would swamp before reaching the wharf, it looked like the wake behind the boat would wash right over the stern if we slowed down too fast.
After the catch was totalled up Dad’s fishplant had its biggest day ever, over 106,000 pounds of fish brought in. Every part of the building was filled several feet deep, you had to walk on top of the fish to get around, hanging on to the rafters as you went. Fish were spilling out the front doors onto the street. Dad had to make an emergency run to Meteghan in his speedboat to get more workers, he set them up with a keeler and splitting table right on the side of the road. I remember some tourists walking by and asking what we were going to do with all those sharks!
Sunday, 1 June 2008
A TRIP TO THE NEW ENGLAND STATES
by Ben Robicheau ~ brobicheau@cogeco.ca
In the spring of 1968 my brother-in-law Don Bolstad was hired to tow five boats to Portsmith, New Hampshire. These were Cape Island style fishing boats built on the French Shore, ordered by Americans who liked this type of boat and also liked the fact that it was more economical to have their boats built in Canada. Since it was cheaper for the engines to be installed in the States, four of the boats had no power. The fifth boat, which was a little fancier than the others and looked like it was intended more for pleasure than for work, was outfitted with a V-8 engine that the owner had delivered while his boat was under construction.
After picking up the boats in Meteghan we towed them across St. Mary’s Bay to Westport where we prepared for the long tow to Portsmith. Deciding it would be a good idea to have a "back-up boat" in case of emergency, we took the one operating boat out for a test run. Within minutes we noticed that the temperature gauge was steadily rising and getting close to the danger zone. An investigation revealed that the engine’s cooling system had been hooked up backwards. After a bit of re-plumbing, a fast run around the harbour confirmed that the problem had been corrected. That evening we headed out across the Bay of Fundy with our tow bobbing along behind us like a flock of oversized ducklings.
By the next morning we were following a route south among the picturesque islands of the Maine coast. We made one overnight stop and by noon on Friday had arrived at the mouth of the Piscataqua River, the border between Maine and New Hampshire. We headed upriver to Portsmith Harbor and searched the waterfront for room to dock six boats. The public wharf was crowded with a variety of fishing and pleasure craft, but just next to it was a slightly run-down but empty and apparently suitable wharf. After getting all six boats safely tied up, we reported our arrival to the relevant authorities and called the boat owners.
Late that afternoon the first owner arrived to pay his share of the towing fee and pick up his new boat. On Saturday two more were towed away and the owner of another paid his fee and told us his boat would be OK where it was until he picked it up on Monday. The owner of the last boat, the one with the engine, had said he would be there early Sunday morning. This worked for us as long as we left by noon in order to be well on our way by nightfall. He finally showed up late in the afternoon with a dozen friends and several cases of beer. He was in a big rush to get under way because he lived a couple of hours down the coast and wanted to make it home before dark. After getting his entourage and his beer aboard, he started the engine and headed straight out of the harbour without bothering to check the boat out at all. It was a good thing for him the cooling system problem was discovered back in Westport Harbour and not off the coast of New Hampshire.
Now that all the boats were taken care of, we called Customs to tell them we were ready to leave. By the time an agent came down to check us out and all the paperwork was done, it was too dark to navigate the unfamiliar waterway so we settled in to get some sleep and wait for daylight.
Around 1:30 in the morning the running of the bilge pump woke me up. This was unusual because the pump started and stopped automatically at random times and it had never woken me before. Don was still sound asleep in a lower bunk, he was famous for being able to sleep through anything, a skill he picked up during his years in the Navy. After a few minutes I realised that the pump was running on a lot longer than usual so I got up to check it out. The water level in the bilge looked a bit higher than would be expected and the pump didn’t seem to be making much headway. I started the engine to run the bigger auxiliary pump and the water level started to drop. While the engine pumped out the boat, I went back to lay in my bunk for a couple of minutes.
I awoke about twenty minutes later to the sound of the engine still running and Don shouting, "Get up, get up, we’re sinking!" Jumping from my bunk I saw that the cabin floor was covered with water up to the level of Don’s bunk, which is what had finally woken him. Rushing out on deck, we were both at a loss to understand what was happening. Where was the water coming from, why were we sinking? Don pulled out a hand-operated pump and yelled to me to go get the fire department to bring one of their pumpers.
As I ran full-tilt through the nearly deserted streets of late-night Portsmith, two things occurred to me: number one, I was in my bare feet and had on no shirt, only a pair of jeans, and number two: I had absolutely no idea where the fire hall was. Luckily, a couple of blocks from the waterfront I came across the police station. A startled-looking Desk Sergeant seemed slightly confused as to why a half-naked person whose boat was sinking needed the Fire Department but he informed me that it was another couple of blocks up the street and two minutes later I was urgently punching their front door buzzer.
After what seemed like an eternity, a sleepy-eyed fireman appeared at the door and listened to my hastily explained request, just as I completed my explanation for a second time, slower this time so he could understand what it was I required, the fire alarm went off. The fireman said, "Sorry, gotta go, call the Coast Guard", and slammed the door. As I hot-footed it back to the Police Station I cursed myself all the way for not thinking of the obvious. The Coast Guard Station was less than a mile away, right across the river from where we were docked. Back at the police station, the Desk Sergeant called the Coast Guard for me, and after they said they’d be right over, I high-tailed it back to the boat.
The situation had not improved in the fifteen or twenty minutes I’d been gone. Don was still working the hand pump, but was now nearly knee-deep in water. He had shut off the engine as the water rose around it, but the electric bilge pump was still going. I told Don that the Coast Guard was on its way, grabbed a bucket and started bailing. As Don and I bent to our tasks, we both strained to hear the Coast Guard cutter coming to our rescue. If we could stay afloat long enough for them to get a pump aboard, we might be able to ground our boat out in shallow water somewhere. As the minutes ticked by, and our arms got more and more tired, the water continued to rise. Finally it became clear that our efforts would be in vain, the Coast Guard wasn’t going to make it in time; we weren’t going to be saved. With only a couple of inches of freeboard showing, we abandoned ship. As we sat on the wharf in the quiet darkness, listening to the soft bubbling and gurgling of the water, we finally heard the starting engines of the Coast Guard cutter echo from the other side of the river. Our hopes soared at the sound, only to be dashed seconds later as water swept over the side of the boat and it settled to the bottom of the harbour.
The Coast Guard arrived a couple of minutes later to find just a few feet of mast and the top of the cabin protruding from the water. They surveyed the scene and told us there was nothing they could do now, they’d be back in a few hours when the tide was down. As they disappeared into the night, we made our way over to the last remaining boat and climbed aboard. Just as we were settling in, trying to get comfortable on the bare wood of the mattressless bunks, a shout came from the wharf. It was a town cop, checking to see if anyone had drowned. We stepped out of the cabin to show him we were all right. Seeing us wearing nothing but wet jeans, he suggested it might be a good idea if we came up to the Station to warm up and dry out. So, for the third time tonight, I made my way to the Portsmith Police Station.
At the station, the Desk Sergeant rummaged among some used clothing kept on hand for their less fortunate visitors, which I guess now applied to us, and came up with a couple of shirts and a selection of shoes for us to try on. I found a nice pair of penny loafers that fit OK; Don, with his size thirteen feet, had a little more trouble and had to settle for a pair of black wingtips. Once we were more or less suitably outfitted, we were led down a corridor and shown our room for the night, the drunk tank! Luckily it had been a quiet Sunday night and we were the only guests. We stretched out on the plastic-covered bunks, trying hard to ignore the glare of the always-on hundred-watt light bulb in the middle of the ceiling, and made an attempt to get some shut-eye. Just before I fell asleep I heard Don say, "What the Hell happened? Please tell me this is all just a bad dream".
I woke up the next morning in a condition probably familiar to most people who have had the misfortune to spend the night in a drunk tank: feeling lousy and hoping that the events that had brought us here had been nothing more than a bad dream. But the truth all too quickly came rushing back; Don and I had indeed spent the night as guests of the Portsmith Police Department. I worried for a few seconds that whoever was now on duty would think that we were a couple of winos instead of just unfortunate victims of circumstance who needed a warm place to spend the night. I was relieved to see that the cell door was still open, and we walked out without setting off any alarms. After thanking our hosts for the accommodations we headed for the waterfront just as the sun was rising.
Back at the wharf our predicament was starting to attract some attention. The tide was falling and more of the boat was showing; as daylight increased and waterfront workers arrived, a crowd started to gather. People from neighbouring boats showed up with various items they had found floating around the dock and we were offered help from all quarters. Don wanted to check out the bottom of the boat but found his diving gear covered in a foul mixture of diesel fuel and engine oil. A member of the crowd said he had gear he could lend us and was back in minutes with a complete SCUBA outfit.
After making a survey of the hull, Don reported that it appeared to have several broken planks and that the harbour floor appeared to be covered with pointed posts. This caused one of the observers to recall that about a year previously the City had started to tear down the wharf, then abruptly abandoned the job. A building had been removed, and the posts it stood on were pulled out by a crane. Some of them had broken off and the stumps had been left sticking up out of the mud. Last night’s tide was the lowest of the month, dropping just far enough to set us down on the remainder of these posts. Don’s boat was used mainly for diving and salvage work; the deck was covered with protective steel plates, it was equipped with a heavy-duty winch with several hundred feet of steel cable, it had a steel mast and boom and a big diesel engine. All this extra weight sitting on these posts had cracked some of the planks and, as the tide rose again, the boat filled with water.
Now we knew what had caused our problem, but what could we do about it? Don went back in the water to saw off the post tops and patch the most obvious holes. By now the tide was nearly all the way down and the Coast Guard had returned. They put a gas-powered pump aboard and within minutes we were floating freely again. Their plan was to tow us across to the Maine side of the river where there were two shipyards. One was the Portsmith Naval Yard where the first U.S. Navy submarine was built in 1917 and the first American nuclear sub was launched in 1957; our destination was a commercial shipyard right next door to the Navy yard. As we headed across the harbour it quickly became apparent that Don’s patch job had been incomplete; water was coming in at a rate that the pump could just barely keep up with. Halfway across, the pump began to sputter; we were able to keep it going but at a slower speed and now the water began to gain on us. By the time we neared the Maine shore, we were once again settling low and the floorboards were awash. Then the pump quit altogether.
The shipyard had a large cradle that they rolled into the water, you floated your boat in over it and they hauled you up into the yard. Our problem now was that we might be too low in the water to clear the cradle. We were sinking lower by the second and in serious danger of floundering in deep water only a few yards from safety. After some frantic manoeuvring, we scraped our keel over the bar, got into position and for the second time that day, sank to the bottom: only this time we had settled safely onto the cradle.
With the boat hauled out of the water we were now able to assess the damage. The interior of the boat and all its contents were covered in an oily slime. The engine needed to be taken apart and all its parts flushed and checked for damage and the batteries and electrical system tested and replaced if necessary. Taking a good look at the bottom, we saw that there were more broken and cracked planks than we had realised. Dwayne, the yard’s head carpenter, recommended replacing all the damaged planks but Don said he couldn’t afford that, he’d just cover the holes with plywood patches and have the repairs done back in Nova Scotia. Upon hearing we were from N.S. Dwayne asked if we happened to know a place called Brier Island and a fellow by the name of Raymond Robicheau. It turned out that Dwayne and his friend James spent their summer vacations sailing up and down the coast and a few years previous had run into engine trouble crossing the Bay of Fundy. They made it to Westport where Dad had helped them out by letting them make phone calls, finding the required engine parts and lending his truck to pick up those parts.
Now it was Dwayne’s opportunity to repay the favour; he said there was no way he would let us leave with patches on the hull, he’d do a proper job and replace the planks himself at no charge. He also arranged free accommodations for us. The yard owner had built a cosy little apartment on a barge when his wife had kicked him out of the house the previous summer. Luckily for us, she had recently taken him back and the barge was now vacant. With our basic shelter taken care of, we got to work on the boat.
First we stripped out everything that was removable, all clothes and bedding went to the laundromat where hot water and copious amounts of detergent took out most of the oil. Then we steam-cleaned the interior and left all the doors, windows and hatches open to dry things out. When the engine was disassembled it was discovered that the head had warped, the result of hot metal submerging in cold water. The yard owner drove it seventy miles to a shop that could grind it flat again, waited several hours for the work to be done, and delivered it back to us; no charge. Dwayne’s friend James worked at the Navy Yard and he took our two heavy-duty batteries in to drain, flush and recharge them. He also managed to find some "surplus" electrical cable to replace our battery straps that had been corroded away by the reaction of electricity to salt water.
While this was going on Dwayne was repairing the damage to the bottom. Because he could only work on it in his spare time, it was going rather slowly. This was partly due to the fact that it was a time-consuming job; the planks had to be chiselled out and removed, new ones cut to fit, seams caulked and the new wood painted. But it was also going slow because Dwayne suffered from Sleep Apnea; if he relaxed for more than a few seconds, he would fall asleep. After twice discovering him sitting under the boat fast asleep with his hammer and chisel in his hands, I started to keep an eye on him and if he dozed off, I would bang on the hull to wake him up.
After five days of cleaning up, drying out, taking things apart and putting them back together again, we were finally ready to head home. At the last minute it was discovered that the alternator wasn’t working, this meant our batteries weren’t charging, so if we shut the engine off, we might not be able to start it again. Don came up with a simple solution; we just wouldn’t stop until we were home!
We tentatively made our way north, hanging close to the coast in case any undiscovered problems arose. By the time we started across the Bay of Fundy from Grand Manan Island we were feeling pretty confident in our repair work and arrived safely back in Westport with no further mishaps.
Even though we weren’t thrilled about the reason for our extended stay, the people we met in Maine and New Hampshire were terrific! They brought us meals, invited us to their homes, worked for free, gave us supplies and equipment, drove us places; in short, did everything that they could to help us out. The U.S. Government wasn’t quite so hospitable however. About a month after arriving home, Don got a letter informing him that he was being charged with leaving the country without clearing customs and had been fined twelve hundred dollars. He replied that we HAD cleared customs and our departure was only delayed due to an improperly demolished wharf. This, plus the fact that there were no warning signs on the wharf and no warnings from the Government officials who had twice visited us at the wharf, seemed to provide a good basis for a suit for damages. A few weeks later a letter arrived advising him that the charges had been dropped and the fine cancelled.
In the spring of 1968 my brother-in-law Don Bolstad was hired to tow five boats to Portsmith, New Hampshire. These were Cape Island style fishing boats built on the French Shore, ordered by Americans who liked this type of boat and also liked the fact that it was more economical to have their boats built in Canada. Since it was cheaper for the engines to be installed in the States, four of the boats had no power. The fifth boat, which was a little fancier than the others and looked like it was intended more for pleasure than for work, was outfitted with a V-8 engine that the owner had delivered while his boat was under construction.
After picking up the boats in Meteghan we towed them across St. Mary’s Bay to Westport where we prepared for the long tow to Portsmith. Deciding it would be a good idea to have a "back-up boat" in case of emergency, we took the one operating boat out for a test run. Within minutes we noticed that the temperature gauge was steadily rising and getting close to the danger zone. An investigation revealed that the engine’s cooling system had been hooked up backwards. After a bit of re-plumbing, a fast run around the harbour confirmed that the problem had been corrected. That evening we headed out across the Bay of Fundy with our tow bobbing along behind us like a flock of oversized ducklings.
By the next morning we were following a route south among the picturesque islands of the Maine coast. We made one overnight stop and by noon on Friday had arrived at the mouth of the Piscataqua River, the border between Maine and New Hampshire. We headed upriver to Portsmith Harbor and searched the waterfront for room to dock six boats. The public wharf was crowded with a variety of fishing and pleasure craft, but just next to it was a slightly run-down but empty and apparently suitable wharf. After getting all six boats safely tied up, we reported our arrival to the relevant authorities and called the boat owners.
Late that afternoon the first owner arrived to pay his share of the towing fee and pick up his new boat. On Saturday two more were towed away and the owner of another paid his fee and told us his boat would be OK where it was until he picked it up on Monday. The owner of the last boat, the one with the engine, had said he would be there early Sunday morning. This worked for us as long as we left by noon in order to be well on our way by nightfall. He finally showed up late in the afternoon with a dozen friends and several cases of beer. He was in a big rush to get under way because he lived a couple of hours down the coast and wanted to make it home before dark. After getting his entourage and his beer aboard, he started the engine and headed straight out of the harbour without bothering to check the boat out at all. It was a good thing for him the cooling system problem was discovered back in Westport Harbour and not off the coast of New Hampshire.
Now that all the boats were taken care of, we called Customs to tell them we were ready to leave. By the time an agent came down to check us out and all the paperwork was done, it was too dark to navigate the unfamiliar waterway so we settled in to get some sleep and wait for daylight.
Around 1:30 in the morning the running of the bilge pump woke me up. This was unusual because the pump started and stopped automatically at random times and it had never woken me before. Don was still sound asleep in a lower bunk, he was famous for being able to sleep through anything, a skill he picked up during his years in the Navy. After a few minutes I realised that the pump was running on a lot longer than usual so I got up to check it out. The water level in the bilge looked a bit higher than would be expected and the pump didn’t seem to be making much headway. I started the engine to run the bigger auxiliary pump and the water level started to drop. While the engine pumped out the boat, I went back to lay in my bunk for a couple of minutes.
I awoke about twenty minutes later to the sound of the engine still running and Don shouting, "Get up, get up, we’re sinking!" Jumping from my bunk I saw that the cabin floor was covered with water up to the level of Don’s bunk, which is what had finally woken him. Rushing out on deck, we were both at a loss to understand what was happening. Where was the water coming from, why were we sinking? Don pulled out a hand-operated pump and yelled to me to go get the fire department to bring one of their pumpers.
As I ran full-tilt through the nearly deserted streets of late-night Portsmith, two things occurred to me: number one, I was in my bare feet and had on no shirt, only a pair of jeans, and number two: I had absolutely no idea where the fire hall was. Luckily, a couple of blocks from the waterfront I came across the police station. A startled-looking Desk Sergeant seemed slightly confused as to why a half-naked person whose boat was sinking needed the Fire Department but he informed me that it was another couple of blocks up the street and two minutes later I was urgently punching their front door buzzer.
After what seemed like an eternity, a sleepy-eyed fireman appeared at the door and listened to my hastily explained request, just as I completed my explanation for a second time, slower this time so he could understand what it was I required, the fire alarm went off. The fireman said, "Sorry, gotta go, call the Coast Guard", and slammed the door. As I hot-footed it back to the Police Station I cursed myself all the way for not thinking of the obvious. The Coast Guard Station was less than a mile away, right across the river from where we were docked. Back at the police station, the Desk Sergeant called the Coast Guard for me, and after they said they’d be right over, I high-tailed it back to the boat.
The situation had not improved in the fifteen or twenty minutes I’d been gone. Don was still working the hand pump, but was now nearly knee-deep in water. He had shut off the engine as the water rose around it, but the electric bilge pump was still going. I told Don that the Coast Guard was on its way, grabbed a bucket and started bailing. As Don and I bent to our tasks, we both strained to hear the Coast Guard cutter coming to our rescue. If we could stay afloat long enough for them to get a pump aboard, we might be able to ground our boat out in shallow water somewhere. As the minutes ticked by, and our arms got more and more tired, the water continued to rise. Finally it became clear that our efforts would be in vain, the Coast Guard wasn’t going to make it in time; we weren’t going to be saved. With only a couple of inches of freeboard showing, we abandoned ship. As we sat on the wharf in the quiet darkness, listening to the soft bubbling and gurgling of the water, we finally heard the starting engines of the Coast Guard cutter echo from the other side of the river. Our hopes soared at the sound, only to be dashed seconds later as water swept over the side of the boat and it settled to the bottom of the harbour.
The Coast Guard arrived a couple of minutes later to find just a few feet of mast and the top of the cabin protruding from the water. They surveyed the scene and told us there was nothing they could do now, they’d be back in a few hours when the tide was down. As they disappeared into the night, we made our way over to the last remaining boat and climbed aboard. Just as we were settling in, trying to get comfortable on the bare wood of the mattressless bunks, a shout came from the wharf. It was a town cop, checking to see if anyone had drowned. We stepped out of the cabin to show him we were all right. Seeing us wearing nothing but wet jeans, he suggested it might be a good idea if we came up to the Station to warm up and dry out. So, for the third time tonight, I made my way to the Portsmith Police Station.
At the station, the Desk Sergeant rummaged among some used clothing kept on hand for their less fortunate visitors, which I guess now applied to us, and came up with a couple of shirts and a selection of shoes for us to try on. I found a nice pair of penny loafers that fit OK; Don, with his size thirteen feet, had a little more trouble and had to settle for a pair of black wingtips. Once we were more or less suitably outfitted, we were led down a corridor and shown our room for the night, the drunk tank! Luckily it had been a quiet Sunday night and we were the only guests. We stretched out on the plastic-covered bunks, trying hard to ignore the glare of the always-on hundred-watt light bulb in the middle of the ceiling, and made an attempt to get some shut-eye. Just before I fell asleep I heard Don say, "What the Hell happened? Please tell me this is all just a bad dream".
I woke up the next morning in a condition probably familiar to most people who have had the misfortune to spend the night in a drunk tank: feeling lousy and hoping that the events that had brought us here had been nothing more than a bad dream. But the truth all too quickly came rushing back; Don and I had indeed spent the night as guests of the Portsmith Police Department. I worried for a few seconds that whoever was now on duty would think that we were a couple of winos instead of just unfortunate victims of circumstance who needed a warm place to spend the night. I was relieved to see that the cell door was still open, and we walked out without setting off any alarms. After thanking our hosts for the accommodations we headed for the waterfront just as the sun was rising.
Back at the wharf our predicament was starting to attract some attention. The tide was falling and more of the boat was showing; as daylight increased and waterfront workers arrived, a crowd started to gather. People from neighbouring boats showed up with various items they had found floating around the dock and we were offered help from all quarters. Don wanted to check out the bottom of the boat but found his diving gear covered in a foul mixture of diesel fuel and engine oil. A member of the crowd said he had gear he could lend us and was back in minutes with a complete SCUBA outfit.
After making a survey of the hull, Don reported that it appeared to have several broken planks and that the harbour floor appeared to be covered with pointed posts. This caused one of the observers to recall that about a year previously the City had started to tear down the wharf, then abruptly abandoned the job. A building had been removed, and the posts it stood on were pulled out by a crane. Some of them had broken off and the stumps had been left sticking up out of the mud. Last night’s tide was the lowest of the month, dropping just far enough to set us down on the remainder of these posts. Don’s boat was used mainly for diving and salvage work; the deck was covered with protective steel plates, it was equipped with a heavy-duty winch with several hundred feet of steel cable, it had a steel mast and boom and a big diesel engine. All this extra weight sitting on these posts had cracked some of the planks and, as the tide rose again, the boat filled with water.
Now we knew what had caused our problem, but what could we do about it? Don went back in the water to saw off the post tops and patch the most obvious holes. By now the tide was nearly all the way down and the Coast Guard had returned. They put a gas-powered pump aboard and within minutes we were floating freely again. Their plan was to tow us across to the Maine side of the river where there were two shipyards. One was the Portsmith Naval Yard where the first U.S. Navy submarine was built in 1917 and the first American nuclear sub was launched in 1957; our destination was a commercial shipyard right next door to the Navy yard. As we headed across the harbour it quickly became apparent that Don’s patch job had been incomplete; water was coming in at a rate that the pump could just barely keep up with. Halfway across, the pump began to sputter; we were able to keep it going but at a slower speed and now the water began to gain on us. By the time we neared the Maine shore, we were once again settling low and the floorboards were awash. Then the pump quit altogether.
The shipyard had a large cradle that they rolled into the water, you floated your boat in over it and they hauled you up into the yard. Our problem now was that we might be too low in the water to clear the cradle. We were sinking lower by the second and in serious danger of floundering in deep water only a few yards from safety. After some frantic manoeuvring, we scraped our keel over the bar, got into position and for the second time that day, sank to the bottom: only this time we had settled safely onto the cradle.
With the boat hauled out of the water we were now able to assess the damage. The interior of the boat and all its contents were covered in an oily slime. The engine needed to be taken apart and all its parts flushed and checked for damage and the batteries and electrical system tested and replaced if necessary. Taking a good look at the bottom, we saw that there were more broken and cracked planks than we had realised. Dwayne, the yard’s head carpenter, recommended replacing all the damaged planks but Don said he couldn’t afford that, he’d just cover the holes with plywood patches and have the repairs done back in Nova Scotia. Upon hearing we were from N.S. Dwayne asked if we happened to know a place called Brier Island and a fellow by the name of Raymond Robicheau. It turned out that Dwayne and his friend James spent their summer vacations sailing up and down the coast and a few years previous had run into engine trouble crossing the Bay of Fundy. They made it to Westport where Dad had helped them out by letting them make phone calls, finding the required engine parts and lending his truck to pick up those parts.
Now it was Dwayne’s opportunity to repay the favour; he said there was no way he would let us leave with patches on the hull, he’d do a proper job and replace the planks himself at no charge. He also arranged free accommodations for us. The yard owner had built a cosy little apartment on a barge when his wife had kicked him out of the house the previous summer. Luckily for us, she had recently taken him back and the barge was now vacant. With our basic shelter taken care of, we got to work on the boat.
First we stripped out everything that was removable, all clothes and bedding went to the laundromat where hot water and copious amounts of detergent took out most of the oil. Then we steam-cleaned the interior and left all the doors, windows and hatches open to dry things out. When the engine was disassembled it was discovered that the head had warped, the result of hot metal submerging in cold water. The yard owner drove it seventy miles to a shop that could grind it flat again, waited several hours for the work to be done, and delivered it back to us; no charge. Dwayne’s friend James worked at the Navy Yard and he took our two heavy-duty batteries in to drain, flush and recharge them. He also managed to find some "surplus" electrical cable to replace our battery straps that had been corroded away by the reaction of electricity to salt water.
While this was going on Dwayne was repairing the damage to the bottom. Because he could only work on it in his spare time, it was going rather slowly. This was partly due to the fact that it was a time-consuming job; the planks had to be chiselled out and removed, new ones cut to fit, seams caulked and the new wood painted. But it was also going slow because Dwayne suffered from Sleep Apnea; if he relaxed for more than a few seconds, he would fall asleep. After twice discovering him sitting under the boat fast asleep with his hammer and chisel in his hands, I started to keep an eye on him and if he dozed off, I would bang on the hull to wake him up.
After five days of cleaning up, drying out, taking things apart and putting them back together again, we were finally ready to head home. At the last minute it was discovered that the alternator wasn’t working, this meant our batteries weren’t charging, so if we shut the engine off, we might not be able to start it again. Don came up with a simple solution; we just wouldn’t stop until we were home!
We tentatively made our way north, hanging close to the coast in case any undiscovered problems arose. By the time we started across the Bay of Fundy from Grand Manan Island we were feeling pretty confident in our repair work and arrived safely back in Westport with no further mishaps.
Even though we weren’t thrilled about the reason for our extended stay, the people we met in Maine and New Hampshire were terrific! They brought us meals, invited us to their homes, worked for free, gave us supplies and equipment, drove us places; in short, did everything that they could to help us out. The U.S. Government wasn’t quite so hospitable however. About a month after arriving home, Don got a letter informing him that he was being charged with leaving the country without clearing customs and had been fined twelve hundred dollars. He replied that we HAD cleared customs and our departure was only delayed due to an improperly demolished wharf. This, plus the fact that there were no warning signs on the wharf and no warnings from the Government officials who had twice visited us at the wharf, seemed to provide a good basis for a suit for damages. A few weeks later a letter arrived advising him that the charges had been dropped and the fine cancelled.
Monday, 31 March 2008
A WHALE OF A TALE
by Ben Robicheau ~ brobicheau@cogeco.ca
If you ever happen to find yourself in the Living Earth section of the Ontario Science Centre in Toronto, be sure to look up, look way, way up. Suspended from the ceiling you will see the skeleton of a sixty-foot Fin Whale. You might wonder how this former Bay of Fundy denizen came to reside in a city so far from the sea.
During the 1970’s I worked at the Science Centre and in the summer of 1977, made the annual trek back east for my summer vacation. While I was home a whale washed up on Long Island, the first one to come ashore in several years. When I got back to Toronto I casually mentioned this to one of the Science Centre staff who excitedly informed me that they were looking for a whale skeleton to exhibit. I immediately phoned my father only to learn that the whale in question had drifted out to sea again. I asked him to let me know if another whale happened to come ashore, assuming it might be years before another one turned up.
Two weeks later my father called to say that he had a whale for me if I was still interested. Dr. Peter Beamish, a biologist with the Bedford Institute of Oceanography, had a sideline of running nature treks for kids and while camping near Pond Cove had come across a dead Fin whale on the east side of Point D’ Field. While Peter and his group secured the whale so that this one wouldn’t escape, I went to see how serious the Science Centre really was about this whole whale thing.
It turned out they were very serious. Twenty-four hours later I was on a plane to Nova Scotia accompanied by Lorraine Dumoulin. Lorraine had dissected frogs while earning her biology degree, so was the closest thing the Science Centre had to an expert on whale skinning. Although I had estimated it would take at least a couple of weeks to do the job, we were given one week to complete our project. Arriving in Halifax, we went to see Dr. Beamish for advice on the easiest and fastest way to extract the skeleton from a whale. Peter had an extensive interest in whales and had spent years studying the whaling industry, acquiring information and equipment from the many whale-processing stations that used to exist along the Atlantic coast. One of the artefacts he had was a flensing knife, which looked a bit like a hockey stick, with a long wooden handle and a dangerous looking curved eighteen-inch metal blade. This was the main tool used by whalers to cut through the thick layers of blubber and in his opinion our job would be nearly impossible without it. Since his knife was both an antique and a collector’s item, he recommended a “metal artist” in Bear River who could build us a couple of new ones.
Arriving in Westport armed with two surprisingly accurate replicas of the whale skinners basic tool, we added to our arsenal with two splitting knives, a bucksaw and a couple of the biggest carving knives we could find. We also added to our group Greg Hannah, a New York artist who spends summers on the island, my sister Janet, and a fellow whose name I can’t recall, I believe he was a friend of Greg’s. We gathered our gear and crew and headed down Pond Cove Road to see what exactly we had gotten ourselves into.
The whale, a sixty-foot mass of black and white blubber with a gaping hole in the middle where sharks had been ripping at it, nearly filled the small cove. Cutting away all those tons of flesh and pulling out the ribs, vertebrae, jaw bones, skull and numerous other smaller bones seemed like an impossible task, especially since none of us really had any idea what we were doing. By the second day, guided by a book on whale biology that Lorraine had luckily thought to bring along, we were beginning to make some headway when Greg’s friend cut through his rubber boot with one of the razor-sharp flensing knives and sliced his little toe nearly off. Janet took him over to Dr. Stokes in Freeport, who unfortunately was out of anaesthetic to freeze the wound, so instead gave him a rolled up towel to bite on while he stitched it up.
According to fishermen on the island, the carcass had been drifting around for nearly a month, possibly the victim of a collision with a large ship. By the time it reached shore it was starting to decompose, and lying on the beach in the August sun sped up the process considerably. By the time we got to it the smell was noticeable but bearable. As the week went on and disassembly of the creature advanced, the odour grew gradually worse, but because we were around it all day we adjusted to the smell and didn’t realise how bad it was getting. We did notice that the group that came down to observe and take pictures stood farther and farther back as each day passed. How ripe we were getting was really brought home to us at noon on the third day when we went to the store to get some lunch. Dad met us at the door with a can of air freshener in his hand and told us to stay outside, he’d bring our lunch out to us. Janet says she remembers Dubie Frost stopping to discuss the whale but backing up further and further as he talked to us.
Aside from the toe episode things were going surprisingly well, every time the tide came up it
covered the whale and carried away most of the slabs of blubber we had cut off. We were able to pull some ribs out of the damaged midsection and were gradually building up a stockpile of bits and pieces above the high-water mark. We built skids out of driftwood and used my brother-in-law Don’s four-wheel-drive truck to haul some of the larger sections up the beach as we separated them from the carcass. By the end of the week, just as the smell was finally getting too much for even us to bear, we were relieved and as amazed as everyone else to see that we had actually succeeded in collecting a pile of bones that comprised a complete whale skeleton. We had everything from the fifteen foot jaw bones to the nickel-sized ear bones that we had managed to dig out of the massive skull, missing only a couple of ribs that had been lost due to shark damage. Now all we had to do was get this decaying, smelly mess to Toronto.
The man for the job was Danny Kenny. He had to build an extension onto one of his trucks to fit everything on, but he managed to get it all loaded, packed in hay and covered with a tarp, and on its way to Toronto. He decided to take the U.S. route to Ontario and here his extensive experience in travelling back and forth across the border came in handy. Somehow, he was able to cross into the States with a minimum of trouble and then back out again carrying a stinking, dripping load of whalebones and decaying blubber. Arriving in Toronto the evening before he was to deliver his load, he decided to spend the night at his sister’s house. She lived in a nice neighbourhood on the outskirts of the city and while happy to see her brother, for some reason she wasn’t thrilled about having his truck and its fragrant load parked in her driveway. Danny had to go find a gas station that was willing to let him park his truck overnight, I think he even had to pay them to take it.
Now that we had the whale what did we do with it? There was still meat attached to many of the bones, so we unloaded them straight from the truck and buried them in the ground. The theory was that bugs in the soil would clean the flesh from the bones. Two years later we dug them up and dropped them into Lake Ontario. Whale bones are full of oil which will continue to ooze out for years, to get rid of the oil you submerge the bones and the water pressure forces the oil out. After a couple of years in the lake, and many jokes about whales in Lake Ontario, the bones were finally brought to the Science Centre where they spent another year on the roof, drying and bleaching in the sun. Finally they were steam-cleaned and prepared for assembly.
By the spring of 1984 the public finally got to see the bones on display. They were spread out in the Great Hall, part of the main entrance to the Science Centre, where they were carefully sorted and assembled by an expert who usually reconstructs dinosaur skeletons. Over the next few months thousands of visitors got to see the Bay of Fundy behemoth take shape. Upon it’s completion, it was carefully moved to the Living Earth section and hung from the ceiling, finally ending its long journey from the sea. Now, many years and many miles from the Fundy shores, it is one of the Science Centre’s most popular exhibits, impressing and educating thousands of school children every year. - brobicheau@cogeco.ca
If you ever happen to find yourself in the Living Earth section of the Ontario Science Centre in Toronto, be sure to look up, look way, way up. Suspended from the ceiling you will see the skeleton of a sixty-foot Fin Whale. You might wonder how this former Bay of Fundy denizen came to reside in a city so far from the sea.
During the 1970’s I worked at the Science Centre and in the summer of 1977, made the annual trek back east for my summer vacation. While I was home a whale washed up on Long Island, the first one to come ashore in several years. When I got back to Toronto I casually mentioned this to one of the Science Centre staff who excitedly informed me that they were looking for a whale skeleton to exhibit. I immediately phoned my father only to learn that the whale in question had drifted out to sea again. I asked him to let me know if another whale happened to come ashore, assuming it might be years before another one turned up.
Two weeks later my father called to say that he had a whale for me if I was still interested. Dr. Peter Beamish, a biologist with the Bedford Institute of Oceanography, had a sideline of running nature treks for kids and while camping near Pond Cove had come across a dead Fin whale on the east side of Point D’ Field. While Peter and his group secured the whale so that this one wouldn’t escape, I went to see how serious the Science Centre really was about this whole whale thing.
It turned out they were very serious. Twenty-four hours later I was on a plane to Nova Scotia accompanied by Lorraine Dumoulin. Lorraine had dissected frogs while earning her biology degree, so was the closest thing the Science Centre had to an expert on whale skinning. Although I had estimated it would take at least a couple of weeks to do the job, we were given one week to complete our project. Arriving in Halifax, we went to see Dr. Beamish for advice on the easiest and fastest way to extract the skeleton from a whale. Peter had an extensive interest in whales and had spent years studying the whaling industry, acquiring information and equipment from the many whale-processing stations that used to exist along the Atlantic coast. One of the artefacts he had was a flensing knife, which looked a bit like a hockey stick, with a long wooden handle and a dangerous looking curved eighteen-inch metal blade. This was the main tool used by whalers to cut through the thick layers of blubber and in his opinion our job would be nearly impossible without it. Since his knife was both an antique and a collector’s item, he recommended a “metal artist” in Bear River who could build us a couple of new ones.
Arriving in Westport armed with two surprisingly accurate replicas of the whale skinners basic tool, we added to our arsenal with two splitting knives, a bucksaw and a couple of the biggest carving knives we could find. We also added to our group Greg Hannah, a New York artist who spends summers on the island, my sister Janet, and a fellow whose name I can’t recall, I believe he was a friend of Greg’s. We gathered our gear and crew and headed down Pond Cove Road to see what exactly we had gotten ourselves into.
The whale, a sixty-foot mass of black and white blubber with a gaping hole in the middle where sharks had been ripping at it, nearly filled the small cove. Cutting away all those tons of flesh and pulling out the ribs, vertebrae, jaw bones, skull and numerous other smaller bones seemed like an impossible task, especially since none of us really had any idea what we were doing. By the second day, guided by a book on whale biology that Lorraine had luckily thought to bring along, we were beginning to make some headway when Greg’s friend cut through his rubber boot with one of the razor-sharp flensing knives and sliced his little toe nearly off. Janet took him over to Dr. Stokes in Freeport, who unfortunately was out of anaesthetic to freeze the wound, so instead gave him a rolled up towel to bite on while he stitched it up.
According to fishermen on the island, the carcass had been drifting around for nearly a month, possibly the victim of a collision with a large ship. By the time it reached shore it was starting to decompose, and lying on the beach in the August sun sped up the process considerably. By the time we got to it the smell was noticeable but bearable. As the week went on and disassembly of the creature advanced, the odour grew gradually worse, but because we were around it all day we adjusted to the smell and didn’t realise how bad it was getting. We did notice that the group that came down to observe and take pictures stood farther and farther back as each day passed. How ripe we were getting was really brought home to us at noon on the third day when we went to the store to get some lunch. Dad met us at the door with a can of air freshener in his hand and told us to stay outside, he’d bring our lunch out to us. Janet says she remembers Dubie Frost stopping to discuss the whale but backing up further and further as he talked to us.
Aside from the toe episode things were going surprisingly well, every time the tide came up it
covered the whale and carried away most of the slabs of blubber we had cut off. We were able to pull some ribs out of the damaged midsection and were gradually building up a stockpile of bits and pieces above the high-water mark. We built skids out of driftwood and used my brother-in-law Don’s four-wheel-drive truck to haul some of the larger sections up the beach as we separated them from the carcass. By the end of the week, just as the smell was finally getting too much for even us to bear, we were relieved and as amazed as everyone else to see that we had actually succeeded in collecting a pile of bones that comprised a complete whale skeleton. We had everything from the fifteen foot jaw bones to the nickel-sized ear bones that we had managed to dig out of the massive skull, missing only a couple of ribs that had been lost due to shark damage. Now all we had to do was get this decaying, smelly mess to Toronto.The man for the job was Danny Kenny. He had to build an extension onto one of his trucks to fit everything on, but he managed to get it all loaded, packed in hay and covered with a tarp, and on its way to Toronto. He decided to take the U.S. route to Ontario and here his extensive experience in travelling back and forth across the border came in handy. Somehow, he was able to cross into the States with a minimum of trouble and then back out again carrying a stinking, dripping load of whalebones and decaying blubber. Arriving in Toronto the evening before he was to deliver his load, he decided to spend the night at his sister’s house. She lived in a nice neighbourhood on the outskirts of the city and while happy to see her brother, for some reason she wasn’t thrilled about having his truck and its fragrant load parked in her driveway. Danny had to go find a gas station that was willing to let him park his truck overnight, I think he even had to pay them to take it.
Now that we had the whale what did we do with it? There was still meat attached to many of the bones, so we unloaded them straight from the truck and buried them in the ground. The theory was that bugs in the soil would clean the flesh from the bones. Two years later we dug them up and dropped them into Lake Ontario. Whale bones are full of oil which will continue to ooze out for years, to get rid of the oil you submerge the bones and the water pressure forces the oil out. After a couple of years in the lake, and many jokes about whales in Lake Ontario, the bones were finally brought to the Science Centre where they spent another year on the roof, drying and bleaching in the sun. Finally they were steam-cleaned and prepared for assembly.
By the spring of 1984 the public finally got to see the bones on display. They were spread out in the Great Hall, part of the main entrance to the Science Centre, where they were carefully sorted and assembled by an expert who usually reconstructs dinosaur skeletons. Over the next few months thousands of visitors got to see the Bay of Fundy behemoth take shape. Upon it’s completion, it was carefully moved to the Living Earth section and hung from the ceiling, finally ending its long journey from the sea. Now, many years and many miles from the Fundy shores, it is one of the Science Centre’s most popular exhibits, impressing and educating thousands of school children every year. - brobicheau@cogeco.ca
Monday, 3 March 2008
ROAD WORK
Ben Robicheau
Spring is on the way and with it comes the annual road closures, frost heaves, broken pavement and potholes. As annoying as it might be to have your front wheel dropping unexpectedly into a crater that just appeared overnight, the roads are still better than they were before pavement brought the Islands into the age of modern transportation. Fifty years ago a simple trip up the Island could be an ordeal for both man and machine.
Driving challenges changed with the seasons. In winter there were the frozen ruts to contend with. It was not unusual for the roads to thaw for several days in mid-winter, allowing axle-deep ruts to form, these would then freeze solid, forming a spider web of intersecting tire tracks. A driver trying to negotiate his way through this icy maze would pick the most likely looking ruts to follow. It was important to choose the correct set of grooves because once committed to a certain set of ruts it was often difficult, if not impossible, to get out of them again. Occasionally you would be steered in a direction you didn’t necessarily want to go, like into the ditch. Sometimes the ruts would diverge causing your front wheels to try to go in opposite directions and your car to shimmy frantically from side to side as if trying to decide which wheel to follow, this was not exactly great for your wheel alignment.
In the springtime all cars became the same shade of mud brown as warmer weather brought large murky puddles that looked like they could be home to the Creature from the Black Lagoon. There were also several “soft spots” that year after year ate up truckloads of gravel but never seemed to get any firmer. Drivers would zig-zag back and forth across the road trying to pick a fairly solid route that could get them through to the other side without sinking up to the rocker panels.
Summertime brought drier roads but drier roads also brought dust and flying stones. Nearly every vehicle had a broken headlight, cracked windshield or occasionally even a punctured radiator from rocks thrown by passing traffic. If the weather was dry cars were followed by swirling clouds of dust which covered every surface and every passenger in a gritty film. If it was wet the roads were greasy and your windshield was periodically covered in a muddy spray thrown up by other cars.
The Dept. of Highways did most of its improvements in summer, but by fall the roadwork would begin to deteriorate again and multiple potholes would develop, making it feel like you were driving over a washboard.
Dirt roads require a lot of maintenance and each island had its own roadmaster. For many years the roads of Westport were attended to by Brad Delaney. His main piece of equipment was a Caterpillar tractor. This was basically a bulldozer which had a powerful diesel engine and ran on steel treads, in the winter a snow plow could be attached to the front, the rest of the year it towed various pieces of road maintenance equipment. To a young boy the most interesting piece of machinery, next to the tractor itself, was the grader. This was a complicated looking long, gangly rig, with a scraping blade in the middle, two wheels in the front, two tall wheels in the back and a platform at the very back where an operator would stand. The operator was kept busy turning several adjusting wheels, manipulating a row of levers and fine tuning the blade as the grader was towed along by the tractor. For some reason the rear wheels could be leaned over to the right or left which made it look like it was crabbing sideways as it rolled down the road.
The grader was only brought out after the roads had reached a certain level of decrepitude, so it was kind of exciting to see bumpy, potholed dirt roads transformed into nice smooth, gravelled streets. One day after lunch Chester Lent and I were on our way back to school when we stopped to watch the grader at work. We found the fresh new gravel and the way the blade made a neat little row of dirt in the middle of the road so fascinating that we decided to follow it for a while, we were in no hurry, afternoon classes wouldn’t start for a while yet. We trailed it down the back road and up the front, mesmerised by our own footprints in the soft, freshly turned gravel. When we rolled past the schoolhouse, the operator turned around and told us it was time to stop following him and go to school. We decided he was probably right, afternoon classes were likely ready to start by now. When we presented ourselves at the door we were surprised to see that school had already begun. We explained to Mrs. Garron that we were late because we had been following the grader. She just sighed and said that we might as well come in and take our seats. Assuming we were only a few minutes late we sat down and were just getting out our books when the bell rang. School was over for the day! We had spent the whole afternoon transfixed by the operations of the road grader.
A couple of times a summer, usually right after the roads had been graded, a tanker tuck would arrive on the island and spray the roads in an attempt to keep the dust down. We didn’t think much of it at the time, but they were spraying hundreds of gallons of used oil on the road. Years later it turned out that there was a good possibility that the chemical cocktail they used included transformer oil, or PCBs, now considered a hazardous material. A small spill of this product today is treated as an environmental and human health disaster and is handled by specially equipped biohazard teams.
For many years Brad’s Caterpillar tractor was the most powerful machine on the Island. If you needed a piece of equipment moved, a snowdrift pushed aside or a car pulled out of the ditch, Brad’s tractor could do it. It was a very rare situation that couldn’t be resolved with the brute strength of that diesel engine. I happened to witness one of those rare occasions when Brad and his machine were forced to give way to an older technology.
In those days a few of the local fishermen would haul their boats up onto the safety of dry land for the winter. One fall day I was watching a group of men struggle to get one of these boats up the beach. They were positioned on either side of the hull, balancing it on its keel while Brad and his tractor pulled from the bow. Unfortunately, things were not going well, the beach was fairly steep at this spot and it was covered with flat stones. The steel tractor treads were slipping and spinning and the boat was not budging. This futile struggle had been going on for some time and the tired and frustrated men were shouting helpful, and some not so helpful, suggestions at Brad who was constantly jogging back and forth and left and right, trying to get some traction.
While all this was going on, Gerald Morrell happened along with his team of oxen. He stopped to see what all the commotion was about and some of the men suggested that he be given a chance to see if his animals could do any better. Brad was sceptical, if his machine couldn’t move this boat, then no animal was going to be able to. After a few more unproductive attempts, he reluctantly unhitched his tractor and the oxen were hooked up in its place.
Watching these huge animals, it was apparent that they knew exactly what their job was. Once they were attached to the boat, you could see them lean into the yoke, getting a sense of the load they were being asked to pull. They shuffled around, looking for solid footing among the beach rocks. Gerald patiently stood and waited for his team to get ready, then he just spoke a command and flicked their rumps with his whip. As a couple of thousand pounds of oxen put their weight into the job, you could hear the creaking and straining of the leather yoke straps and the grinding of the beach stones under their hooves, but the boat didn’t move. Brad was just starting to say, “I told you so”, when the pair repositioned themselves, lowered their heads, and then lunged ahead, pulling the boat with them. One step, then another, and then straight up the beach, across the road and into the field. Amid the cheering of the relieved group, Gerald just smiled, unhitched his team and continued on his way. – brobicheau@cogeco.ca
Spring is on the way and with it comes the annual road closures, frost heaves, broken pavement and potholes. As annoying as it might be to have your front wheel dropping unexpectedly into a crater that just appeared overnight, the roads are still better than they were before pavement brought the Islands into the age of modern transportation. Fifty years ago a simple trip up the Island could be an ordeal for both man and machine.
Driving challenges changed with the seasons. In winter there were the frozen ruts to contend with. It was not unusual for the roads to thaw for several days in mid-winter, allowing axle-deep ruts to form, these would then freeze solid, forming a spider web of intersecting tire tracks. A driver trying to negotiate his way through this icy maze would pick the most likely looking ruts to follow. It was important to choose the correct set of grooves because once committed to a certain set of ruts it was often difficult, if not impossible, to get out of them again. Occasionally you would be steered in a direction you didn’t necessarily want to go, like into the ditch. Sometimes the ruts would diverge causing your front wheels to try to go in opposite directions and your car to shimmy frantically from side to side as if trying to decide which wheel to follow, this was not exactly great for your wheel alignment.
In the springtime all cars became the same shade of mud brown as warmer weather brought large murky puddles that looked like they could be home to the Creature from the Black Lagoon. There were also several “soft spots” that year after year ate up truckloads of gravel but never seemed to get any firmer. Drivers would zig-zag back and forth across the road trying to pick a fairly solid route that could get them through to the other side without sinking up to the rocker panels.
Summertime brought drier roads but drier roads also brought dust and flying stones. Nearly every vehicle had a broken headlight, cracked windshield or occasionally even a punctured radiator from rocks thrown by passing traffic. If the weather was dry cars were followed by swirling clouds of dust which covered every surface and every passenger in a gritty film. If it was wet the roads were greasy and your windshield was periodically covered in a muddy spray thrown up by other cars.
The Dept. of Highways did most of its improvements in summer, but by fall the roadwork would begin to deteriorate again and multiple potholes would develop, making it feel like you were driving over a washboard.
Dirt roads require a lot of maintenance and each island had its own roadmaster. For many years the roads of Westport were attended to by Brad Delaney. His main piece of equipment was a Caterpillar tractor. This was basically a bulldozer which had a powerful diesel engine and ran on steel treads, in the winter a snow plow could be attached to the front, the rest of the year it towed various pieces of road maintenance equipment. To a young boy the most interesting piece of machinery, next to the tractor itself, was the grader. This was a complicated looking long, gangly rig, with a scraping blade in the middle, two wheels in the front, two tall wheels in the back and a platform at the very back where an operator would stand. The operator was kept busy turning several adjusting wheels, manipulating a row of levers and fine tuning the blade as the grader was towed along by the tractor. For some reason the rear wheels could be leaned over to the right or left which made it look like it was crabbing sideways as it rolled down the road.
The grader was only brought out after the roads had reached a certain level of decrepitude, so it was kind of exciting to see bumpy, potholed dirt roads transformed into nice smooth, gravelled streets. One day after lunch Chester Lent and I were on our way back to school when we stopped to watch the grader at work. We found the fresh new gravel and the way the blade made a neat little row of dirt in the middle of the road so fascinating that we decided to follow it for a while, we were in no hurry, afternoon classes wouldn’t start for a while yet. We trailed it down the back road and up the front, mesmerised by our own footprints in the soft, freshly turned gravel. When we rolled past the schoolhouse, the operator turned around and told us it was time to stop following him and go to school. We decided he was probably right, afternoon classes were likely ready to start by now. When we presented ourselves at the door we were surprised to see that school had already begun. We explained to Mrs. Garron that we were late because we had been following the grader. She just sighed and said that we might as well come in and take our seats. Assuming we were only a few minutes late we sat down and were just getting out our books when the bell rang. School was over for the day! We had spent the whole afternoon transfixed by the operations of the road grader.
A couple of times a summer, usually right after the roads had been graded, a tanker tuck would arrive on the island and spray the roads in an attempt to keep the dust down. We didn’t think much of it at the time, but they were spraying hundreds of gallons of used oil on the road. Years later it turned out that there was a good possibility that the chemical cocktail they used included transformer oil, or PCBs, now considered a hazardous material. A small spill of this product today is treated as an environmental and human health disaster and is handled by specially equipped biohazard teams.
For many years Brad’s Caterpillar tractor was the most powerful machine on the Island. If you needed a piece of equipment moved, a snowdrift pushed aside or a car pulled out of the ditch, Brad’s tractor could do it. It was a very rare situation that couldn’t be resolved with the brute strength of that diesel engine. I happened to witness one of those rare occasions when Brad and his machine were forced to give way to an older technology.
In those days a few of the local fishermen would haul their boats up onto the safety of dry land for the winter. One fall day I was watching a group of men struggle to get one of these boats up the beach. They were positioned on either side of the hull, balancing it on its keel while Brad and his tractor pulled from the bow. Unfortunately, things were not going well, the beach was fairly steep at this spot and it was covered with flat stones. The steel tractor treads were slipping and spinning and the boat was not budging. This futile struggle had been going on for some time and the tired and frustrated men were shouting helpful, and some not so helpful, suggestions at Brad who was constantly jogging back and forth and left and right, trying to get some traction.
While all this was going on, Gerald Morrell happened along with his team of oxen. He stopped to see what all the commotion was about and some of the men suggested that he be given a chance to see if his animals could do any better. Brad was sceptical, if his machine couldn’t move this boat, then no animal was going to be able to. After a few more unproductive attempts, he reluctantly unhitched his tractor and the oxen were hooked up in its place.
Watching these huge animals, it was apparent that they knew exactly what their job was. Once they were attached to the boat, you could see them lean into the yoke, getting a sense of the load they were being asked to pull. They shuffled around, looking for solid footing among the beach rocks. Gerald patiently stood and waited for his team to get ready, then he just spoke a command and flicked their rumps with his whip. As a couple of thousand pounds of oxen put their weight into the job, you could hear the creaking and straining of the leather yoke straps and the grinding of the beach stones under their hooves, but the boat didn’t move. Brad was just starting to say, “I told you so”, when the pair repositioned themselves, lowered their heads, and then lunged ahead, pulling the boat with them. One step, then another, and then straight up the beach, across the road and into the field. Amid the cheering of the relieved group, Gerald just smiled, unhitched his team and continued on his way. – brobicheau@cogeco.ca
Thursday, 31 January 2008
EASTWARD BOUND
by Ben Robicheau
This year I came home for Christmas. An overnight, twenty-two hour drive from Hamilton, Ont. to Halifax, stopping only for gas and Tim’s. The trip home for Christmas, family gatherings or summer vacation is a ritual that many Islanders perform on a regular basis. Whether you are coming from somewhere else in Nova Scotia, across Canada or the other side of the world, you’re on a journey that ends with a ferry ride.
Over the years I’ve travelled between Ontario and Nova Scotia by plane, train, bus, truck, car, motorcycle and thumb. I’ve done the trip driving all night by myself, accompanied by other Islanders, and with newcomers to the Islands who didn’t really believe my stories about where I grew up until I showed them.
The drive is better than it used to be. From Hamilton to Halifax it’s all divided highway except for a short section of good quality two-lane road near the Quebec-New Brunswick border. My first trips to Ontario were before the Trans-Canada was finished and the road through Quebec was a time consuming stop-and-go route along the St. Lawrence River through numerous little towns with big churches all named Saint something-or-other.
Janet Morton knows this drive well, her family was in the military and lived for many years in Ontario, the yearly trip home is burned into her memory.
“Long before the main highways, (no 401 in Ontario) the 20 and 40 through PQ and the newer one down through northern NB, we travelled that path every summer from Ontario to NS. We didn't measure it in hours but in days, Dad was the only driver and I still don't know how he ever survived those drives with us monsters in the car. Sometimes there was an extra child to be dropped off in Bear River or another quiet place. Many people where we lived on the base were from the Maritimes and would send their children with whoever would take them to visit families in the east.
I remember the heat, the windows open trying to get relief, the noise! Most of it from us kids. Stopping beside the highway, not a fancy rest stop.. for warm drinks and mushy sandwiches and if we were lucky a stream to cool off in. The wet bathing suits hanging on the aerial to dry while driving, broken up radio stations, the games we came up with to play. Counting licence plates?? I can't even see them now, they all look the same.
Richard preferred the back window for travel but I’m not sure how he could stand the heat, Barry liked to watch the road and I just wanted to get there!
We won't even get into car breakdowns, repairs and time involved in that.. Did I mention we tented both ways, those old canvas tents can get pretty crowded and hot at night! I am surprised my mother survived all those trips.”
My first Christmas in Ontario I was looking for an economical way to get home when my Aunt Minnie came up with a solution. Having worked for a car rental company in Saint John, N.B., she knew that they bought cars direct from the factory in Ontario, then paid someone to drive them east. She made a call and sure enough, there was a car in Toronto waiting to be delivered. I picked it up after school and headed east in a 1970 Duster with summer tires and power steering. I was stopped by the O.P.P. before I had barely left the city. His attention had been drawn by my unsteady driving and the fact that the car had no plates. After my explanation that I was just getting used to the power steering and a thorough examination of the temporary permit in the side window, he let me go with the observation that it was December and I really should have winter tires on. I wasn’t worried about the tires because the roads were clear and there was no sign of snow.
Four hours later I was stuck in the middle of a howling blizzard, at a dead stop in a miles-long line of traffic. After three hours of sitting, idling and watching the gas gage sink towards “empty”, I took a chance and plowed my way into tracks made by several four-wheel-drives that had passed us by. Despite the lack of snow tires, I was able to keep moving and eventually reached the head of the line where a transport truck was uselessly spinning its wheels. Continuing eastward the storm lessened and by the time I hit New Brunswick the road was mostly bare with just a thin layer of wet snow at the edges. The sun was coming up and I was the only car on the road, I had to make up for lost time if I was going to catch the morning ferry to Digby.
I was doing close to 100 MPH when I wandered into the slush at the edge of the pavement. The car fishtailed to the right, then left, then right again, making a bigger swing each time. I knew I was going to lose control and figured it would be better if I slid towards the road than the ditch. When the car slid left again I slammed on the brakes, did a couple of 360s and ended up on the other side of the road facing in the opposite direction. I made the ferry O.K., but I never told my Aunt how close I came to wiping out that brand-new Duster.
Just before Christmas a year later I got a phone call from Peggy Thompson. She was on her way home from B.C. and wanted to know if I could give her a ride from Toronto. As it happened, I had just become the proud owner of a ten year old VW Beetle with 200,000 miles on it and I was glad to have the company. Setting out, the weather was good, but by the time we hit Montreal it was snowing and extremely cold. The VW heating system was not great at the best of times, and combining an old Beetle with a Quebec winter was just asking for trouble. Our breath froze on the windshield to the extent that we had to use an ice scraper on the inside of the glass to see where we were going, at the same time Peggy had to periodically reach out the window to clear snow that the wipers didn’t get. After a long cold night, we finally made it to the Digby ferry, crossed the Bay and happily started down the Neck, we were almost home! Then we ran into a problem that is familiar to every Islander, or, as Peggy tells it:
“After a very long trip, we ventured down Digby Neck behind the snowplough...only to get to East Ferry and find that the ferry wasn't crossing! I had come from Prince George...hit an avalanche in Rogers Pass in the Rockies, driven frozen all the way to New Brunswick, gotten seasick across the Bay of Fundy, risked our necks on the Neck to find the FRIGGIN’ FERRY WASN'T CROSSING!!!!!“
Many of my early trips were in the company of Herb Barnaby, who was going to university in Ontario. One trip he remembers is when I misjudged how far I could go on a tank of gas and ran out just as we were going up a hill. Herb was just envisioning us freezing to death in the dark beside the highway when with our last bit of momentum, we slowly crested the hill to see a gas station on the other side. We were able to coast most of the way, although Herb and my sister Janet did have to get out and push the last fifty feet to the pumps.
On another occasion, I had Herb and his brother Rodney as well as Rodney’s German Shepherd, Shamus, all crammed into the cab of my Toyota truck. With the four of us in such close quarters, the windshield fogged up and froze to the extent that we only had a small hole to see out of. Herb says he remembers going through Montreal changing lanes with no idea if anyone was beside us because he could hardly see out the front and the side windows were totally iced up. When we finally got to New Brunswick the road from Fredericton to Saint John was a glare of ice and we were reduced to a crawl. As usual, we were pressed for time to make the boat and at this rate we were going to miss it. Luckily, in New Brunswick you couldn’t go far without seeing a pile of pulpwood on the side of the road. One of these appeared now so I stopped, tossed a few logs into the back of the truck, and with the added weight providing traction, was able to make the ferry on time.
I hadn’t been thrilled about taking a dog with us, but Shamus turned out to be an excellent traveller. Though I don’t know where he found the room, he laid curled up on the cab floor for the whole trip. The only sign of complaint I saw from him was when we had to leave him in the truck on the Digby boat. I don’t know if it was out of boredom or in protest at being left alone, but he chewed up my wooden gearshift knob that I had made in Herbie Thurber’s woodworking class. I was able to sand out most of the tooth marks, but I did leave a few as a memento of the trip.
Someone once said, “You can’t go home again”, but I think with a bit of perseverance, you can… a good set of snow tires might help too. - brobicheau@cogeco.ca
This year I came home for Christmas. An overnight, twenty-two hour drive from Hamilton, Ont. to Halifax, stopping only for gas and Tim’s. The trip home for Christmas, family gatherings or summer vacation is a ritual that many Islanders perform on a regular basis. Whether you are coming from somewhere else in Nova Scotia, across Canada or the other side of the world, you’re on a journey that ends with a ferry ride.
Over the years I’ve travelled between Ontario and Nova Scotia by plane, train, bus, truck, car, motorcycle and thumb. I’ve done the trip driving all night by myself, accompanied by other Islanders, and with newcomers to the Islands who didn’t really believe my stories about where I grew up until I showed them.
The drive is better than it used to be. From Hamilton to Halifax it’s all divided highway except for a short section of good quality two-lane road near the Quebec-New Brunswick border. My first trips to Ontario were before the Trans-Canada was finished and the road through Quebec was a time consuming stop-and-go route along the St. Lawrence River through numerous little towns with big churches all named Saint something-or-other.
Janet Morton knows this drive well, her family was in the military and lived for many years in Ontario, the yearly trip home is burned into her memory.
“Long before the main highways, (no 401 in Ontario) the 20 and 40 through PQ and the newer one down through northern NB, we travelled that path every summer from Ontario to NS. We didn't measure it in hours but in days, Dad was the only driver and I still don't know how he ever survived those drives with us monsters in the car. Sometimes there was an extra child to be dropped off in Bear River or another quiet place. Many people where we lived on the base were from the Maritimes and would send their children with whoever would take them to visit families in the east.
I remember the heat, the windows open trying to get relief, the noise! Most of it from us kids. Stopping beside the highway, not a fancy rest stop.. for warm drinks and mushy sandwiches and if we were lucky a stream to cool off in. The wet bathing suits hanging on the aerial to dry while driving, broken up radio stations, the games we came up with to play. Counting licence plates?? I can't even see them now, they all look the same.
Richard preferred the back window for travel but I’m not sure how he could stand the heat, Barry liked to watch the road and I just wanted to get there!
We won't even get into car breakdowns, repairs and time involved in that.. Did I mention we tented both ways, those old canvas tents can get pretty crowded and hot at night! I am surprised my mother survived all those trips.”
My first Christmas in Ontario I was looking for an economical way to get home when my Aunt Minnie came up with a solution. Having worked for a car rental company in Saint John, N.B., she knew that they bought cars direct from the factory in Ontario, then paid someone to drive them east. She made a call and sure enough, there was a car in Toronto waiting to be delivered. I picked it up after school and headed east in a 1970 Duster with summer tires and power steering. I was stopped by the O.P.P. before I had barely left the city. His attention had been drawn by my unsteady driving and the fact that the car had no plates. After my explanation that I was just getting used to the power steering and a thorough examination of the temporary permit in the side window, he let me go with the observation that it was December and I really should have winter tires on. I wasn’t worried about the tires because the roads were clear and there was no sign of snow.
Four hours later I was stuck in the middle of a howling blizzard, at a dead stop in a miles-long line of traffic. After three hours of sitting, idling and watching the gas gage sink towards “empty”, I took a chance and plowed my way into tracks made by several four-wheel-drives that had passed us by. Despite the lack of snow tires, I was able to keep moving and eventually reached the head of the line where a transport truck was uselessly spinning its wheels. Continuing eastward the storm lessened and by the time I hit New Brunswick the road was mostly bare with just a thin layer of wet snow at the edges. The sun was coming up and I was the only car on the road, I had to make up for lost time if I was going to catch the morning ferry to Digby.
I was doing close to 100 MPH when I wandered into the slush at the edge of the pavement. The car fishtailed to the right, then left, then right again, making a bigger swing each time. I knew I was going to lose control and figured it would be better if I slid towards the road than the ditch. When the car slid left again I slammed on the brakes, did a couple of 360s and ended up on the other side of the road facing in the opposite direction. I made the ferry O.K., but I never told my Aunt how close I came to wiping out that brand-new Duster.
Just before Christmas a year later I got a phone call from Peggy Thompson. She was on her way home from B.C. and wanted to know if I could give her a ride from Toronto. As it happened, I had just become the proud owner of a ten year old VW Beetle with 200,000 miles on it and I was glad to have the company. Setting out, the weather was good, but by the time we hit Montreal it was snowing and extremely cold. The VW heating system was not great at the best of times, and combining an old Beetle with a Quebec winter was just asking for trouble. Our breath froze on the windshield to the extent that we had to use an ice scraper on the inside of the glass to see where we were going, at the same time Peggy had to periodically reach out the window to clear snow that the wipers didn’t get. After a long cold night, we finally made it to the Digby ferry, crossed the Bay and happily started down the Neck, we were almost home! Then we ran into a problem that is familiar to every Islander, or, as Peggy tells it:
“After a very long trip, we ventured down Digby Neck behind the snowplough...only to get to East Ferry and find that the ferry wasn't crossing! I had come from Prince George...hit an avalanche in Rogers Pass in the Rockies, driven frozen all the way to New Brunswick, gotten seasick across the Bay of Fundy, risked our necks on the Neck to find the FRIGGIN’ FERRY WASN'T CROSSING!!!!!“
Many of my early trips were in the company of Herb Barnaby, who was going to university in Ontario. One trip he remembers is when I misjudged how far I could go on a tank of gas and ran out just as we were going up a hill. Herb was just envisioning us freezing to death in the dark beside the highway when with our last bit of momentum, we slowly crested the hill to see a gas station on the other side. We were able to coast most of the way, although Herb and my sister Janet did have to get out and push the last fifty feet to the pumps.
On another occasion, I had Herb and his brother Rodney as well as Rodney’s German Shepherd, Shamus, all crammed into the cab of my Toyota truck. With the four of us in such close quarters, the windshield fogged up and froze to the extent that we only had a small hole to see out of. Herb says he remembers going through Montreal changing lanes with no idea if anyone was beside us because he could hardly see out the front and the side windows were totally iced up. When we finally got to New Brunswick the road from Fredericton to Saint John was a glare of ice and we were reduced to a crawl. As usual, we were pressed for time to make the boat and at this rate we were going to miss it. Luckily, in New Brunswick you couldn’t go far without seeing a pile of pulpwood on the side of the road. One of these appeared now so I stopped, tossed a few logs into the back of the truck, and with the added weight providing traction, was able to make the ferry on time.
I hadn’t been thrilled about taking a dog with us, but Shamus turned out to be an excellent traveller. Though I don’t know where he found the room, he laid curled up on the cab floor for the whole trip. The only sign of complaint I saw from him was when we had to leave him in the truck on the Digby boat. I don’t know if it was out of boredom or in protest at being left alone, but he chewed up my wooden gearshift knob that I had made in Herbie Thurber’s woodworking class. I was able to sand out most of the tooth marks, but I did leave a few as a memento of the trip.
Someone once said, “You can’t go home again”, but I think with a bit of perseverance, you can… a good set of snow tires might help too. - brobicheau@cogeco.ca
Saturday, 5 January 2008
GOING DOWNHILL
by Ben Robicheau
In the days before Ski-Doos and Arctic Cats the biggest, fastest winter vehicle in Westport was the bobsled. This was a home-built contraption with four steel runners, the two in the back were fixed and the two in the front could swivel from side to side, providing a modest amount of steering capability. The main body of the sled consisted of a board which connected the front and back sets of runners and was long enough to hold four or five kids sitting in a row. The person at the front was the “steerer” and the person at the back was the “pusher”. As indicated by the name, the pusher would start the sled off by running behind and pushing for three or four steps before making a wild leap and hopefully landing on the last few inches of board not already occupied. A bobsled was built to run on ice and on a steep hill could attain exciting speeds.
In Westport there was really only one bobsled run, and that was on the New Lane. This was due in large part to the efforts of one young man. For some reason he had been saddled with the unfortunate nick-name of “Clarabell” and he lived with his parents in the last house on the New Lane, just across from the church. I’m not sure how his fascination with bobsleds started, but I imagine he must have looked out one winter’s day and realised that with a little help, the hill he was living on could provide hours of entertainment. As soon as it got cold enough, he would be out there, occasionally with others helping, scooping water from the ditch onto the road. Sometimes it would take several days of diligent watering to produce a suitable layer of ice. Only one side of the road was iced, leaving the other side for cars to go up and down. Drivers would carefully share the road with the sliders and each other. Even the roadmaster, Brad Delaney, would usually try to avoid spreading sand on the icy side of the lane. With the moderate and fluctuating weather in Westport, the icemaker’s work was sometimes in vain, just as he was building up a good bed of ice, the temperature would rise by ten degrees overnight, resulting in nothing but bare ground for his effort the next morning.
But on those rare occasions when the thermometer stayed below freezing for several days in a row, every kid on the island would flock to take advantage of Clarabell’s toil. The ice run stretched from the church down past the Back Road to where the hill started to level out. At this point you would usually come to a grinding halt before reaching the Front Road. Occasionally, after a freezing rain or maybe extra watering by the icemakers, you could continue straight on or veer to the right past the Vestry steps and down a short trail that came out near the Irishtown bridge. If you decided to go straight you had to make a sharp left or right turn at the Front Road, or make a slight jog to the right and run off onto Bowers’ wharf. These manoeuvres required an experienced and skilful pilot, there were at least a couple of instances where the unfortunate sliders were unable to master the turn and ended up continuing straight ahead over the breastwork and onto the beach.
Most of the sliding took place after dark when it was colder and the ice was a bit harder. There were three or four bobsleds on the island and kids also showed up with toboggans, one-man sleds, flying saucers, Crazy Carpets, just about anything that would slide. This made for quite a mix of ages and equipment, all going up and down at random with the big bobsleds periodically thundering down the hill scattering everyone in their way and all the while cars would be passing by just inches from the barely under control sliders. Surprisingly, I don’t recall any injuries although there must have been a few, and close shaves were just laughed off as a natural part of the fun.
Although the bobsled was the undisputed king of the New Lane, there was one other sliding device that I believe was its equal for excitement and danger, and it wasn’t even a real sled.
One day the Coca-Cola people showed up at my fathers store and attached two round, red and white signs to opposite ends of the building. A couple of summers later Dad took them down to repaint the store. He was a little slow about putting them back up and that winter it occurred to us kids that they might make good sleds. It took only one run for us to know that those signs would never be going back up on the wall.
Because they were shaped like the commercial “Flying Saucers” that were available at the time, we gave the signs the same name but in many ways they were much superior to the store bought version. They were made of heavy gauge steel and were about four feet across, so they could hold several kids at a time. Because of their size and shape, they would slide well on anything from heavy frost to deep snow, and the lighter they were the faster they would go. There was no way to steer, so you usually went down the hill while rotating wildly, adding to the excitement. The inside was smooth, painted metal so there was no traction and nothing to hang on to for the riders who would slide around and fly up in the air with every bump. The lip of the saucer was a sharp unprotected edge and every once in a while you would come down on this edge. There are probably still people on the Island with crescent shaped marks on various parts of their bodies.
One day we were sliding in Shelly Bailey’s front yard, ending our run at an old picket fence just before the Front Road, when a young lady happened along. Although she was at an age where makeup and hairdos held more interest than sliding, she decided to give the saucer a try. Not wanting to ride with “little kids”, and although we warned her about the tendency of the saucer to go faster with less weight, she insisted on going alone. We set her off with a good push and she flew down the hill, picking up speed as predicted, and when she reached the bottom of the run instead of being stopped by the fence, she blew right through it, sailing straight across the road and over the breastwork. Luckily, the tide was up so the saucer hit the water, skipped a couple of times, then slowly sank under her. Drenched to the neck, the distraught young lady waded back to shore, dragging the saucer behind her and swearing a blue streak. She had a memorable ride, but I’m pretty sure her hairdo and makeup were ruined.
One evening a couple of years later, I was hanging onto a rope tied to the back bumper of Barry Mortons’ car and was being pulled along in the saucer which was zigzagging back and forth across the road. There was quite a fierce snowstorm going on and we expected the roads to be pretty well deserted, when we suddenly met oncoming traffic. I pulled on the rope to swing in behind Barry’s car but my timing was off and I swung back out again right in front of Dick Thompson’s station wagon. Seeing that a collision was unavoidable, I hung on to the rope and stood up. I struck the front of the car and was pulled across the hood by the rope, landing on the road beside the car. I don’t know who was more scared, me or Dick. I spent a couple of days in bed with a badly bruised hip, but the real victim of this fiasco was the saucer, it ended up under Dick’s front wheel, bent and twisted, its sliding days forever over. It was dragged out from under the car and unceremoniously dumped over the breastwork, a sad and inglorious end to a great instrument of winter fun. – brobicheau@cogeco.ca
In the days before Ski-Doos and Arctic Cats the biggest, fastest winter vehicle in Westport was the bobsled. This was a home-built contraption with four steel runners, the two in the back were fixed and the two in the front could swivel from side to side, providing a modest amount of steering capability. The main body of the sled consisted of a board which connected the front and back sets of runners and was long enough to hold four or five kids sitting in a row. The person at the front was the “steerer” and the person at the back was the “pusher”. As indicated by the name, the pusher would start the sled off by running behind and pushing for three or four steps before making a wild leap and hopefully landing on the last few inches of board not already occupied. A bobsled was built to run on ice and on a steep hill could attain exciting speeds.
In Westport there was really only one bobsled run, and that was on the New Lane. This was due in large part to the efforts of one young man. For some reason he had been saddled with the unfortunate nick-name of “Clarabell” and he lived with his parents in the last house on the New Lane, just across from the church. I’m not sure how his fascination with bobsleds started, but I imagine he must have looked out one winter’s day and realised that with a little help, the hill he was living on could provide hours of entertainment. As soon as it got cold enough, he would be out there, occasionally with others helping, scooping water from the ditch onto the road. Sometimes it would take several days of diligent watering to produce a suitable layer of ice. Only one side of the road was iced, leaving the other side for cars to go up and down. Drivers would carefully share the road with the sliders and each other. Even the roadmaster, Brad Delaney, would usually try to avoid spreading sand on the icy side of the lane. With the moderate and fluctuating weather in Westport, the icemaker’s work was sometimes in vain, just as he was building up a good bed of ice, the temperature would rise by ten degrees overnight, resulting in nothing but bare ground for his effort the next morning.
But on those rare occasions when the thermometer stayed below freezing for several days in a row, every kid on the island would flock to take advantage of Clarabell’s toil. The ice run stretched from the church down past the Back Road to where the hill started to level out. At this point you would usually come to a grinding halt before reaching the Front Road. Occasionally, after a freezing rain or maybe extra watering by the icemakers, you could continue straight on or veer to the right past the Vestry steps and down a short trail that came out near the Irishtown bridge. If you decided to go straight you had to make a sharp left or right turn at the Front Road, or make a slight jog to the right and run off onto Bowers’ wharf. These manoeuvres required an experienced and skilful pilot, there were at least a couple of instances where the unfortunate sliders were unable to master the turn and ended up continuing straight ahead over the breastwork and onto the beach.
Most of the sliding took place after dark when it was colder and the ice was a bit harder. There were three or four bobsleds on the island and kids also showed up with toboggans, one-man sleds, flying saucers, Crazy Carpets, just about anything that would slide. This made for quite a mix of ages and equipment, all going up and down at random with the big bobsleds periodically thundering down the hill scattering everyone in their way and all the while cars would be passing by just inches from the barely under control sliders. Surprisingly, I don’t recall any injuries although there must have been a few, and close shaves were just laughed off as a natural part of the fun.
Although the bobsled was the undisputed king of the New Lane, there was one other sliding device that I believe was its equal for excitement and danger, and it wasn’t even a real sled.
One day the Coca-Cola people showed up at my fathers store and attached two round, red and white signs to opposite ends of the building. A couple of summers later Dad took them down to repaint the store. He was a little slow about putting them back up and that winter it occurred to us kids that they might make good sleds. It took only one run for us to know that those signs would never be going back up on the wall.
Because they were shaped like the commercial “Flying Saucers” that were available at the time, we gave the signs the same name but in many ways they were much superior to the store bought version. They were made of heavy gauge steel and were about four feet across, so they could hold several kids at a time. Because of their size and shape, they would slide well on anything from heavy frost to deep snow, and the lighter they were the faster they would go. There was no way to steer, so you usually went down the hill while rotating wildly, adding to the excitement. The inside was smooth, painted metal so there was no traction and nothing to hang on to for the riders who would slide around and fly up in the air with every bump. The lip of the saucer was a sharp unprotected edge and every once in a while you would come down on this edge. There are probably still people on the Island with crescent shaped marks on various parts of their bodies.
One day we were sliding in Shelly Bailey’s front yard, ending our run at an old picket fence just before the Front Road, when a young lady happened along. Although she was at an age where makeup and hairdos held more interest than sliding, she decided to give the saucer a try. Not wanting to ride with “little kids”, and although we warned her about the tendency of the saucer to go faster with less weight, she insisted on going alone. We set her off with a good push and she flew down the hill, picking up speed as predicted, and when she reached the bottom of the run instead of being stopped by the fence, she blew right through it, sailing straight across the road and over the breastwork. Luckily, the tide was up so the saucer hit the water, skipped a couple of times, then slowly sank under her. Drenched to the neck, the distraught young lady waded back to shore, dragging the saucer behind her and swearing a blue streak. She had a memorable ride, but I’m pretty sure her hairdo and makeup were ruined.
One evening a couple of years later, I was hanging onto a rope tied to the back bumper of Barry Mortons’ car and was being pulled along in the saucer which was zigzagging back and forth across the road. There was quite a fierce snowstorm going on and we expected the roads to be pretty well deserted, when we suddenly met oncoming traffic. I pulled on the rope to swing in behind Barry’s car but my timing was off and I swung back out again right in front of Dick Thompson’s station wagon. Seeing that a collision was unavoidable, I hung on to the rope and stood up. I struck the front of the car and was pulled across the hood by the rope, landing on the road beside the car. I don’t know who was more scared, me or Dick. I spent a couple of days in bed with a badly bruised hip, but the real victim of this fiasco was the saucer, it ended up under Dick’s front wheel, bent and twisted, its sliding days forever over. It was dragged out from under the car and unceremoniously dumped over the breastwork, a sad and inglorious end to a great instrument of winter fun. – brobicheau@cogeco.ca
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