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!