By Ben Robicheau
Here we are in the month of December once again! At this time of year I always find myself thinking back to some of the Island Christmas traditions.
The first thing that comes to mind are the annual Christmas concerts. Most of the kids on the Island were generally involved in two concerts each Christmas. First was the school concert which was usually held in the Oddfellows Hall because that was where the stage was; it even had a real curtain. Everyone in the school would take part in this production in some way; weeks of effort would be put into the presentation of skits, songs, recitations and sometimes even a full-fledged play. One year the grades 10, 11 and 12 students - the “upstairs” grades in the old school - put on “A Christmas Carol” complete with sets, costumes and special effects. The clearest memory I have about that production is that the tallest kid in the school was picked to play Ebenezer Scrooge and every time he went through a doorway his top-hat got knocked off.
The other big event of the season was the Sunday School concert. This was similar to the school concert except that there was not as much rehearsal time available plus it included pre-school-age children so the production values were often not up to the high standards we had come to expect from the school group. I remember Etta Webber heroically trying to usher a dozen antsy little kids through a re-enactment of the Nativity story, patiently coaching and prompting from the sidelines, trying to feed the distracted little actors their lines as they stood mutely on the stage or stared off into space or just wandered away into the audience.
Even though it may have suffered a bit quality-wise, the Sunday School concert could be an exciting event; you were never quite sure what was going to happen. At some point in the evening, the twitchy little kid who was standing with her knees squeezed together might announce to the assembled masses; “I’ve got to pee!” This would cause her mother to spring into action, dash to the front of the room, snatch her baby off the stage and rush out the door trying to protect her good Sunday coat by holding the by-now-bawling child out in front of her like a sack of wet potatoes. Sometimes this dramatic rescue mission was executed successfully, but more often than not the other kids were left to carefully tip-toe around a suspicious looking puddle on the stage.
The highlight of the evening of course, was the much-anticipated arrival of Santa Claus. After a lot of thumping, stomping, sleigh bell ringing and ho-ho-hoing, Jolly Old St. Nick would make his grand entrance into the Vestry where he was usually greeted by the sight of several red-faced little kids running screaming to the safety of their mother’s laps. The rest of the children were usually all revved up with the just-released anticipation of what was to come and Etta would have to take a firm hand to get things back under control. Once Santa was safely seated, everyone would line up to take a turn on his knee and receive a present. Even the little ones, once they realized that presents and candy were available, could usually be persuaded to trade mom’s lap for a few moments in Santa’s.
When both concerts were over, you knew that you were well and truly into the Holidays. The only thing left now was the Big Event itself, Christmas Eve, followed of course, by Christmas Day and this brings us to another Island tradition. Actually, I don’t know if this really qualifies as a tradition, because it wasn’t a formal event and it was mostly carried out by teen-age girls. I became aware of it in the early sixties, but I’m not sure how long this practise went on or if it is something that is still done on the Island.
Once all of your own presents were unwrapped and arranged for display under the tree, it was time to go out and “see the neighbour’s trees”. Louise Garron was usually at the top of the visiting list, she always seemed to outdo herself each year with her spectacular and artistically arranged trees; I believe one year her tree was decorated all in pink, another year it was an all-silver theme. Although admiring and appreciating other people’s trees was part of the reason for this venture, really it was just an excuse to see what presents people had received. This definitely wouldn’t qualify as a tradition if it was just kids going to see what other kids had received, but it was a bit more organized than that. Girls would arrange to go out in pairs or in groups, then travel door to door in the days after Christmas, visiting friends, neighbours, young people, old people, anyone who would let them in.
The last tradition I’ll mention is one that I know for sure actually is a tradition. As a little kid, I remember “Sandys” coming to our house in the days between Christmas and New Year. They were heavily disguised, usually dressed in old clothes, with their faces covered, talking in strange voices or not talking at all. Sometimes they just stood there, or sometimes did a little dance or some other attempt at entertaining their hosts. My parents would carefully study the visitors, trying to recognize a piece of clothing or maybe a facial feature that would tell them who this was; if they guessed right, the Sandyer would reveal himself.
For quite a while, I assumed that this was part of the universal Christmas celebrations and something that everyone everywhere did, but later on I discovered that most people off the Island had no idea what I was talking about if I mentioned Sandying, or Santa Clausing, as it was also known. I had to explain that, no, it wasn’t like Halloween, generally, only adults went Sandying and there was no trick or treating involved, although refreshments, usually of the liquid variety, were sometimes offered. The participants didn’t usually dress in costumes, but more often in disguises, the purpose being to hide their identity. I began to think that this activity must be something that was unique to our Islands, then I heard about a similar practice in Newfoundland called mummering or jannying that had been introduced by Irish and English settlers, then I later found out that some people on Prince Edward Island went out belsnickling over the Holidays. By now I had decided that this must be an old ritual that somehow had spread from island to island, then I found out that in a few communities in the Lunenburg area of the South Shore people still carried out the old German custom of belsnickling, also called Kris Kringeling.
Even though these traditions go by a variety of names and have developed some differences in the way they are practiced, it appears that mummering, belsnickeling, and Sandying all stem from an ancient New Year’s custom that was brought to the New World by the first European settlers. As time went on it gradually disappeared in a lot of areas because inviting possible strangers who you couldn’t identify into your home didn’t seem like a good idea to most people; in some towns and cities, it was even outlawed. The tradition survives in isolated places like the Islands probably because, even though you might not be able to identify your visitors, you can feel comfortable that there is no doubt that it is a neighbour, friend, relative or even in some cases, your husband or wife who is standing in your kitchen wrapped up in old clothes and talking in a funny voice.
I never went out Sandying myself, by the time I got old enough to go out, it had pretty well faded away, but a bit later on there was a revival of the practice. One of my sisters tells about going out in a good disguise and not having anyone guess who she was, although one person came close saying; “I don’t know which one you are, but with those eyes, you’ve got to be a Robicheau”.
Sandying appears to be our version of an ancient tradition that has been carried on for hundreds of years. It has survived to the present day because of little communities like ours. When other places got too “sophisticated” or too disconnected from each other to keep up a custom where friends and neighbours were welcomed into each other’s homes regardless of whether or not you knew exactly who it was you were inviting in, on the Islands it was still a part of our Christmas celebrations. Let’s hope that the conditions that have allowed this tradition to live so long in our communities will continue and Sandying will be around for another hundred Christmases.
Tuesday, 1 December 2009
Sunday, 1 November 2009
Westward
By Ben Robicheau ~ brobicheau@cogeco.ca
For the past forty years, my summer vacations have consisted mainly of driving east from Ontario to visit friends and family in Nova Scotia, or driving west from Nova Scotia to visit friends and family in Ontario. This summer we made a big change in our routine and headed west to visit friends and family in British Columbia. We came to this conclusion mainly because our son Michael had moved to Fernie, B.C. a year ago and we decided that was long enough without seeing him. Also, there was the fact that I had never really been west of Ontario and this was a good excuse to see that part of Canada.
We set out on Monday morning. Mike was performing at the Fernie Festival on the week-end so we had to be there by Friday. Since the shortest route was straight west through the States, we headed to Sarnia and crossed the border into Michigan where we planned to go down through Indiana, around Lake Michigan, up through Illinois into Wisconsin, then west on a northern slant across Minnesota, North Dakota and Montana to re-enter Canada south of Lethbridge, Alberta, then west through the Rocky Mountains via the Crowsnest Pass to Fernie. Before leaving, we thoroughly researched this route, printing off information on roadside attractions, points of interest and places to spend the night. As it turned out, we ended up throwing all our research out the window and taking a totally different route.
As soon as we crossed the border, it seemed that everyone we talked to, said “oh, you must be going to Mount Rushmore”. Taking out the map, we discovered that to get to Mount Rushmore we would have to take a longer, more southerly route. We were hemming and hawing about changing our plans when we noticed that this would also take us through the Badlands, The Black Hills of Dakota and the Little Bighorn where Custer’s last stand took place. The intersection for I-90 was coming up, we made a quick decision and headed out to experience a little bit of the old west.
The first place where I felt like I was getting into new territory was when we crossed the Mississippi River in Minnesota. As a young boy, I had read both the Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn books several times and the river seemed like a mysterious and romantic place to me. I hadn’t realized that it came this far north and it was a pleasant surprise to find myself on the banks of the Mississippi.
Minnesota held even more surprises for us, we found yet another famous American symbol a little father down the road. Austin, Minn. is the home of the canned meat product, Spam. The factory is a main feature of the town and right next door is the Spam Museum, detailing the exciting history of Spam. The Midwest featured a variety of attractions, we came across a sixty-foot Jolly Green Giant, a building decorated in corn husks and a sculpture park featuring the world’s largest steer head and a giant hammer, just to name a few. In Wall, South Dakota we stopped at the Wall Drug store which is famous for being advertised all over the world. Randi has a picture of herself from 1975 standing outside the Amsterdam train station beside a signpost indicating 6,329 miles to Wall Drug, she was excited to finally have a chance to visit the store.
After driving for hours upon hours through flat, nearly barren landscape across Minnesota and into South Dakota, we suddenly came upon The Badlands. The dramatic appearance of this miles-wide ravine in the middle of a level plain made me wonder what the early settlers must have felt when they came upon this seemingly impassable barrier of broken and jagged rock, it must have been an extremely discouraging sight.
We made it to Mount Rushmore just before dark. The pavilion and entrance was quite elaborate and did a good job of explaining the work that went into creating the carvings. The monument itself, carved into the side of a mountain, was most impressive. We stayed for the after-dark lighting ceremony and then headed north to spend the night in Sturgis, a quiet little town that for one week a year hosts the world’s largest motorcycle rally and has become a sort of Mecca for bikers from around the world.
The next morning we headed up through the Black Hills to Deadwood, the town where Wild Bill Hickok was shot and killed. We visited the original “Boot Hill” where he and Calamity Jane are buried. From here we headed to Buffalo, Wyoming and a visit to the Occidental Hotel. The Occidental hasn’t changed much since 1880 and is still a functioning hotel. Guests can stay in the same rooms that Butch Cassidy, The Sundance Kid, Buffalo Bill Cody or Ernest Hemingway stayed in.
From here we crossed into the High Plains area of Montana and made our way to the site of Custer’s Last Stand. The area is a National Park and a Ranger did a very good job of explaining the events that led up to the battle and caused it to turn out the way it did. Walking over the fields and ridges with white markers showing where the 263 men fell, I felt a very close connection with the history that I had only read about or seen in movies.
By now time was getting short and we had to make a run for the Alberta border. Crossing back into Canada, we headed west towards the Crowsnest Pass. Making our way through the Rocky Mountains, we suddenly found ourselves surrounded by rubble and broken rock. Frank, Alberta was founded as a mining town at the foot of Turtle Mountain. In 1903 ninety millions tons of rock slid down the face of the mountain and in less than two minutes, buried half the town, the train tracks and the mine entrance killing nearly a hundred people. Moving at up to 120 Kms per hour, the landslide swept two Kms across the valley and up the other side. A hundred years later the evidence is still obvious in the huge scar on the mountain’s face and the cascade of rubble with boulders as big as a house that still fills the valley.
We made it to Fernie in time to see Mike do his solo acoustic guitar set on Saturday afternoon and then again playing bass with the group “Shred Kelly”. Fernie is a ski town on the B.C. side of the Rockies, surrounded by mountains and filled with young people from all over the country and the world. Over the next few days we travelled to Nelson, B.C. and then to Banff and up to Jasper, where we said good-bye to an amazing and beautiful part of the world and headed east.
Coming out of the mountains, we made our way to Edmonton and back onto the wide open spaces of the prairies. Just south of Regina, Sask. we made a stop in the tiny town of Rouleau, better known as Dog River. We visited Corner Gas and all the familiar locations from the TV show. The views across Saskatchewan and Manitoba just went on for ever and ever, it really is the kind of country where you can watch your dog run away for three days!
The trip through Ontario north of The Great Lakes was spectacular with the leaves just beginning to change. After stopping to see the Big Goose in Wawa and the Big Nickel in Sudbury, we were relieved to finally make it back to Hamilton and get out of the car.
The other side of Canada is a long way from Nova Scotia, but even in the Rocky Mountains, the East Coast kept nudging me. In Nelson, B.C. I was coming out of a store when a lady going in called me by name. It was our neighbour from when we lived in Kentville, she happened to be visiting Calgary and was on a day trip to Nelson.
In Banff I had arranged to visit my friend Heather who I had worked with at Fortress Louisburg thirty years ago. Later we were sight-seeing in town when I stopped to read a sign on a historical house. A man came up and told us we could come in and see the garden and he’d tell us about the house. Somehow Randi mentioned that I was from Brier Island and the man replied that he was from Digby County! He turned out to be Lance Woolaver from Digby who I hadn’t seen for over forty years.
Just outside of Thunder Bay we were stopped at a park when a woman walking across the parking lot said, “Are you from Nova Scotia?” This time it was Trudi, who had worked for me ten years earlier at the Paramount Theatre in Kentville.
Anyone heading east or west across Canada has to go through the little town of Nipigon at the top of Lake Superior, this is where Jan and Vern Maynard live. Jan had been following our trip on Facebook and when she realized we were heading in her direction, kindly offered a bed for the night. So it turned out that I ended my cross country trip with a pleasant evening spent reminiscing and catching up on Brier Island news.
You may think you are far from home, but no matter where you are, don’t be surprised if someone comes up and taps you on the shoulder. East Coasters are everywhere.
For the past forty years, my summer vacations have consisted mainly of driving east from Ontario to visit friends and family in Nova Scotia, or driving west from Nova Scotia to visit friends and family in Ontario. This summer we made a big change in our routine and headed west to visit friends and family in British Columbia. We came to this conclusion mainly because our son Michael had moved to Fernie, B.C. a year ago and we decided that was long enough without seeing him. Also, there was the fact that I had never really been west of Ontario and this was a good excuse to see that part of Canada.
We set out on Monday morning. Mike was performing at the Fernie Festival on the week-end so we had to be there by Friday. Since the shortest route was straight west through the States, we headed to Sarnia and crossed the border into Michigan where we planned to go down through Indiana, around Lake Michigan, up through Illinois into Wisconsin, then west on a northern slant across Minnesota, North Dakota and Montana to re-enter Canada south of Lethbridge, Alberta, then west through the Rocky Mountains via the Crowsnest Pass to Fernie. Before leaving, we thoroughly researched this route, printing off information on roadside attractions, points of interest and places to spend the night. As it turned out, we ended up throwing all our research out the window and taking a totally different route.
As soon as we crossed the border, it seemed that everyone we talked to, said “oh, you must be going to Mount Rushmore”. Taking out the map, we discovered that to get to Mount Rushmore we would have to take a longer, more southerly route. We were hemming and hawing about changing our plans when we noticed that this would also take us through the Badlands, The Black Hills of Dakota and the Little Bighorn where Custer’s last stand took place. The intersection for I-90 was coming up, we made a quick decision and headed out to experience a little bit of the old west.
The first place where I felt like I was getting into new territory was when we crossed the Mississippi River in Minnesota. As a young boy, I had read both the Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn books several times and the river seemed like a mysterious and romantic place to me. I hadn’t realized that it came this far north and it was a pleasant surprise to find myself on the banks of the Mississippi.
Minnesota held even more surprises for us, we found yet another famous American symbol a little father down the road. Austin, Minn. is the home of the canned meat product, Spam. The factory is a main feature of the town and right next door is the Spam Museum, detailing the exciting history of Spam. The Midwest featured a variety of attractions, we came across a sixty-foot Jolly Green Giant, a building decorated in corn husks and a sculpture park featuring the world’s largest steer head and a giant hammer, just to name a few. In Wall, South Dakota we stopped at the Wall Drug store which is famous for being advertised all over the world. Randi has a picture of herself from 1975 standing outside the Amsterdam train station beside a signpost indicating 6,329 miles to Wall Drug, she was excited to finally have a chance to visit the store.
After driving for hours upon hours through flat, nearly barren landscape across Minnesota and into South Dakota, we suddenly came upon The Badlands. The dramatic appearance of this miles-wide ravine in the middle of a level plain made me wonder what the early settlers must have felt when they came upon this seemingly impassable barrier of broken and jagged rock, it must have been an extremely discouraging sight.
We made it to Mount Rushmore just before dark. The pavilion and entrance was quite elaborate and did a good job of explaining the work that went into creating the carvings. The monument itself, carved into the side of a mountain, was most impressive. We stayed for the after-dark lighting ceremony and then headed north to spend the night in Sturgis, a quiet little town that for one week a year hosts the world’s largest motorcycle rally and has become a sort of Mecca for bikers from around the world.
The next morning we headed up through the Black Hills to Deadwood, the town where Wild Bill Hickok was shot and killed. We visited the original “Boot Hill” where he and Calamity Jane are buried. From here we headed to Buffalo, Wyoming and a visit to the Occidental Hotel. The Occidental hasn’t changed much since 1880 and is still a functioning hotel. Guests can stay in the same rooms that Butch Cassidy, The Sundance Kid, Buffalo Bill Cody or Ernest Hemingway stayed in.
From here we crossed into the High Plains area of Montana and made our way to the site of Custer’s Last Stand. The area is a National Park and a Ranger did a very good job of explaining the events that led up to the battle and caused it to turn out the way it did. Walking over the fields and ridges with white markers showing where the 263 men fell, I felt a very close connection with the history that I had only read about or seen in movies.
By now time was getting short and we had to make a run for the Alberta border. Crossing back into Canada, we headed west towards the Crowsnest Pass. Making our way through the Rocky Mountains, we suddenly found ourselves surrounded by rubble and broken rock. Frank, Alberta was founded as a mining town at the foot of Turtle Mountain. In 1903 ninety millions tons of rock slid down the face of the mountain and in less than two minutes, buried half the town, the train tracks and the mine entrance killing nearly a hundred people. Moving at up to 120 Kms per hour, the landslide swept two Kms across the valley and up the other side. A hundred years later the evidence is still obvious in the huge scar on the mountain’s face and the cascade of rubble with boulders as big as a house that still fills the valley.
We made it to Fernie in time to see Mike do his solo acoustic guitar set on Saturday afternoon and then again playing bass with the group “Shred Kelly”. Fernie is a ski town on the B.C. side of the Rockies, surrounded by mountains and filled with young people from all over the country and the world. Over the next few days we travelled to Nelson, B.C. and then to Banff and up to Jasper, where we said good-bye to an amazing and beautiful part of the world and headed east.
Coming out of the mountains, we made our way to Edmonton and back onto the wide open spaces of the prairies. Just south of Regina, Sask. we made a stop in the tiny town of Rouleau, better known as Dog River. We visited Corner Gas and all the familiar locations from the TV show. The views across Saskatchewan and Manitoba just went on for ever and ever, it really is the kind of country where you can watch your dog run away for three days!
The trip through Ontario north of The Great Lakes was spectacular with the leaves just beginning to change. After stopping to see the Big Goose in Wawa and the Big Nickel in Sudbury, we were relieved to finally make it back to Hamilton and get out of the car.
The other side of Canada is a long way from Nova Scotia, but even in the Rocky Mountains, the East Coast kept nudging me. In Nelson, B.C. I was coming out of a store when a lady going in called me by name. It was our neighbour from when we lived in Kentville, she happened to be visiting Calgary and was on a day trip to Nelson.
In Banff I had arranged to visit my friend Heather who I had worked with at Fortress Louisburg thirty years ago. Later we were sight-seeing in town when I stopped to read a sign on a historical house. A man came up and told us we could come in and see the garden and he’d tell us about the house. Somehow Randi mentioned that I was from Brier Island and the man replied that he was from Digby County! He turned out to be Lance Woolaver from Digby who I hadn’t seen for over forty years.
Just outside of Thunder Bay we were stopped at a park when a woman walking across the parking lot said, “Are you from Nova Scotia?” This time it was Trudi, who had worked for me ten years earlier at the Paramount Theatre in Kentville.
Anyone heading east or west across Canada has to go through the little town of Nipigon at the top of Lake Superior, this is where Jan and Vern Maynard live. Jan had been following our trip on Facebook and when she realized we were heading in her direction, kindly offered a bed for the night. So it turned out that I ended my cross country trip with a pleasant evening spent reminiscing and catching up on Brier Island news.
You may think you are far from home, but no matter where you are, don’t be surprised if someone comes up and taps you on the shoulder. East Coasters are everywhere.
Thursday, 1 October 2009
Halloween In Westport
By Ben Robicheau ~ brobicheau@cogeco.ca
As a kid, the month of October was always greeted with much anticipation; Halloween was coming! Except for Christmas, this was probably the most exciting time of the year. For the little kids, Halloween was all about the candy. Within seconds of hitting the street, word would instantaneously spread among the trick-or-treaters as to who was giving out the best treats. “Best” usually meant the biggest or the most sugar-filled...hopefully both.
The main objective was to fill that loot bag! If you managed to fill it two or three times before the evening was over, that was even better. At the end of the night, the collected goodies would be dumped out on the living room floor and sorted into piles by order of desirability. Store bought treats were usually at the top of the list, occasionally people would even give out regular items like full-sized chocolate bars or boxes of Cracker Jacks. The miniature sized bars and small packages of liquorice were good too. Home-made treats, like fudge, squares, cookies and popcorn balls, could be high or low on the list, depending on who had made them and what flavour they were. Of this type of treat, the best could be found on the New Lane. If you made it to Mrs. Gaudet’s house before she ran out, you might be treated to a little brown-paper bag containing four of her delicious taffy candies; two molasses flavour, (my favourite) and two of the vanilla.
Then there were some people who actually had the nerve to hand out items that could almost be considered healthy. Into this category fell things like bags of salted peanuts, peanuts in the shell, little boxes of raisins and, at the very bottom of the desirability scale for most kids, fruit, like apples or even the occasional orange or banana. Thankfully, these items usually took up a small section of floor space compared to the huge piles of chocolate, chips and sugar laden treats. At the bottom end of the health scale was one item you could always depend on getting whether you wanted it or not, the orange and black wrapped Halloween chews were a gooey, sticky candy concoction that could suck the fillings right out of your teeth. I also found that, after eating fifteen or twenty in a row, they tended to make you feel a little queasy!
As you got a bit older, it was still about the candy, but also about the costumes. You always tried to come up with a cooler get-up than the next person. On Halloween day you got to wear your costume to school and there was sometimes even a prize for the best outfit. This was in the days before there were a lot of store-bought costumes available so either your mother had to spend a lot of time sewing something fancy or you would put your imagination to work to come up with a disguise using everyday items. This usually resulted in a lot of hobos wearing their parent’s old work clothes, ghosts draped in old bed sheets and pirates with red or blue polka-dot handkerchief headscarves and a sword whittled from a trap lath.
Then, when you got to a certain age, you would be old enough to join in the ancient tradition of roughnecking. For some there would be an overlap period here where people would go out trick-or-treating in the early part of the evening, then safely stash their candy at home before dumping the costume and joining the older kids out roaming the roads. “Roughnecks” were concerned mostly with the “trick” part of trick-and-treating. There were a few traditional pranks that were played on Halloween night. I remember when StClair Cann had a picket fence around his house on the Front Road, every Halloween his gate would disappear, usually to be found the next morning hanging from a tree in the front yard of a near-by neighbour. Outhouse tipping was another popular joke to play on people, especially if they were inside it at the time! Myrna Garron had one of the last outhouses in town and so for several years had to endure the brunt of the Halloween toilet tippers.
But the main endeavour as soon as it got dark was to make the roads impassable for any vehicle. This was accomplished by dragging pretty well anything that was movable out into the road. Teenagers who were hard pressed to find the energy to carry the groceries home for their mother during the day suddenly found themselves endowed with super powers as soon as the sun fell below the horizon.
I remember one of the first Halloweens when I was allowed to go out again after the trick-and-treating was over. A bunch of teen-agers were moving an old double-ender that had been hauled out of the water and left beside the road. It had been there for a couple of years and didn’t look like it was ever going back to sea, so they decided it would make a great barricade. The old boat was lifted from its resting place and swung out across the road. The next morning I happened to be passing by the same spot and watched as it was returned to its former location. Twenty men and a tractor struggled for half an hour to undo what a dozen kids had done in a few minutes the night before.
On an other occasion a great wall was built across the road in front of Bowers’ store. This was done using empty oil barrels. The first couple of rows were no problem, but the rest were more of a challenge. At first a couple of guys climbed up and balanced on the stack of drums while the others passed up the barrels, by the time they were up to the fourth row, the guys on the ground had to swing the barrel back and forth between them and then toss it up to be caught by the guys on top. They were tossing them up five or six barrels high when they ran out of barrels, otherwise who knows how high they would have gone.
One year, Halloween fell right in the middle of a construction job going on at the lower breakwater. The material being used to rebuild the wharf was stored along the side of the road and the job manager (a mainlander) was warned about what might happen to all that lumber overnight. He stacked everything in neat piles, nailed boards across them and left the Island that afternoon feeling confidant that he had made everything secure. The next morning he returned to find his entire inventory of twenty-four foot, eight-by-eight timbers stacked up log cabin style in the middle of the road. He took one look at his building material reaching up past the telephone wires and, in a most un-island like reaction, called the Police. The R.C.M.P. arrived at the school just before noon and pulled the grade eleven and twelve boys out of class, marched them all down the road and made them disassemble the previous night’s project.
Everybody left their cars at home on Halloween, the stores closed early and for the most part, adults stayed home. Even though all the kids worked hard to make it impossible to drive anywhere on the island, if an emergency arose or if an older person found themselves caught on the road after dark, a passageway would be quickly cleared, usually by the same group who had blocked it in the first place. Of course, there were those who deliberately challenged the barricades. One year David Pugh took his father’s Jeep and tried to see how far he could get. He crashed and crawled around, over and through several piles of debris, but the roughnecks rallied to the cause and worked even harder to block him in with bigger and higher walls. David did manage to get the old truck an impressive distance up the road but eventually had to give up when he acquired a couple of flat tires in the process.
Although it sounds as if Halloween night was a wild and crazy time when all the rules were thrown out, it wasn’t quite as lawless as it sounds. Lobster season was just a couple of weeks away, and the wharves and roadsides were lined with traps, they might be perfect barricade building material, but traps were off limits and left untouched. For the most part, anything of real value or necessary to someone’s livelihood was left alone and very little real damage was done. Halloween was a night when the normal order of things was turned on its head for a few hours, but the next day, everything was usually disassembled and put back where it should be in short order...then the planning would begin for next Halloween.
As a kid, the month of October was always greeted with much anticipation; Halloween was coming! Except for Christmas, this was probably the most exciting time of the year. For the little kids, Halloween was all about the candy. Within seconds of hitting the street, word would instantaneously spread among the trick-or-treaters as to who was giving out the best treats. “Best” usually meant the biggest or the most sugar-filled...hopefully both.
The main objective was to fill that loot bag! If you managed to fill it two or three times before the evening was over, that was even better. At the end of the night, the collected goodies would be dumped out on the living room floor and sorted into piles by order of desirability. Store bought treats were usually at the top of the list, occasionally people would even give out regular items like full-sized chocolate bars or boxes of Cracker Jacks. The miniature sized bars and small packages of liquorice were good too. Home-made treats, like fudge, squares, cookies and popcorn balls, could be high or low on the list, depending on who had made them and what flavour they were. Of this type of treat, the best could be found on the New Lane. If you made it to Mrs. Gaudet’s house before she ran out, you might be treated to a little brown-paper bag containing four of her delicious taffy candies; two molasses flavour, (my favourite) and two of the vanilla.
Then there were some people who actually had the nerve to hand out items that could almost be considered healthy. Into this category fell things like bags of salted peanuts, peanuts in the shell, little boxes of raisins and, at the very bottom of the desirability scale for most kids, fruit, like apples or even the occasional orange or banana. Thankfully, these items usually took up a small section of floor space compared to the huge piles of chocolate, chips and sugar laden treats. At the bottom end of the health scale was one item you could always depend on getting whether you wanted it or not, the orange and black wrapped Halloween chews were a gooey, sticky candy concoction that could suck the fillings right out of your teeth. I also found that, after eating fifteen or twenty in a row, they tended to make you feel a little queasy!
As you got a bit older, it was still about the candy, but also about the costumes. You always tried to come up with a cooler get-up than the next person. On Halloween day you got to wear your costume to school and there was sometimes even a prize for the best outfit. This was in the days before there were a lot of store-bought costumes available so either your mother had to spend a lot of time sewing something fancy or you would put your imagination to work to come up with a disguise using everyday items. This usually resulted in a lot of hobos wearing their parent’s old work clothes, ghosts draped in old bed sheets and pirates with red or blue polka-dot handkerchief headscarves and a sword whittled from a trap lath.
Then, when you got to a certain age, you would be old enough to join in the ancient tradition of roughnecking. For some there would be an overlap period here where people would go out trick-or-treating in the early part of the evening, then safely stash their candy at home before dumping the costume and joining the older kids out roaming the roads. “Roughnecks” were concerned mostly with the “trick” part of trick-and-treating. There were a few traditional pranks that were played on Halloween night. I remember when StClair Cann had a picket fence around his house on the Front Road, every Halloween his gate would disappear, usually to be found the next morning hanging from a tree in the front yard of a near-by neighbour. Outhouse tipping was another popular joke to play on people, especially if they were inside it at the time! Myrna Garron had one of the last outhouses in town and so for several years had to endure the brunt of the Halloween toilet tippers.
But the main endeavour as soon as it got dark was to make the roads impassable for any vehicle. This was accomplished by dragging pretty well anything that was movable out into the road. Teenagers who were hard pressed to find the energy to carry the groceries home for their mother during the day suddenly found themselves endowed with super powers as soon as the sun fell below the horizon.
I remember one of the first Halloweens when I was allowed to go out again after the trick-and-treating was over. A bunch of teen-agers were moving an old double-ender that had been hauled out of the water and left beside the road. It had been there for a couple of years and didn’t look like it was ever going back to sea, so they decided it would make a great barricade. The old boat was lifted from its resting place and swung out across the road. The next morning I happened to be passing by the same spot and watched as it was returned to its former location. Twenty men and a tractor struggled for half an hour to undo what a dozen kids had done in a few minutes the night before.
On an other occasion a great wall was built across the road in front of Bowers’ store. This was done using empty oil barrels. The first couple of rows were no problem, but the rest were more of a challenge. At first a couple of guys climbed up and balanced on the stack of drums while the others passed up the barrels, by the time they were up to the fourth row, the guys on the ground had to swing the barrel back and forth between them and then toss it up to be caught by the guys on top. They were tossing them up five or six barrels high when they ran out of barrels, otherwise who knows how high they would have gone.
One year, Halloween fell right in the middle of a construction job going on at the lower breakwater. The material being used to rebuild the wharf was stored along the side of the road and the job manager (a mainlander) was warned about what might happen to all that lumber overnight. He stacked everything in neat piles, nailed boards across them and left the Island that afternoon feeling confidant that he had made everything secure. The next morning he returned to find his entire inventory of twenty-four foot, eight-by-eight timbers stacked up log cabin style in the middle of the road. He took one look at his building material reaching up past the telephone wires and, in a most un-island like reaction, called the Police. The R.C.M.P. arrived at the school just before noon and pulled the grade eleven and twelve boys out of class, marched them all down the road and made them disassemble the previous night’s project.
Everybody left their cars at home on Halloween, the stores closed early and for the most part, adults stayed home. Even though all the kids worked hard to make it impossible to drive anywhere on the island, if an emergency arose or if an older person found themselves caught on the road after dark, a passageway would be quickly cleared, usually by the same group who had blocked it in the first place. Of course, there were those who deliberately challenged the barricades. One year David Pugh took his father’s Jeep and tried to see how far he could get. He crashed and crawled around, over and through several piles of debris, but the roughnecks rallied to the cause and worked even harder to block him in with bigger and higher walls. David did manage to get the old truck an impressive distance up the road but eventually had to give up when he acquired a couple of flat tires in the process.
Although it sounds as if Halloween night was a wild and crazy time when all the rules were thrown out, it wasn’t quite as lawless as it sounds. Lobster season was just a couple of weeks away, and the wharves and roadsides were lined with traps, they might be perfect barricade building material, but traps were off limits and left untouched. For the most part, anything of real value or necessary to someone’s livelihood was left alone and very little real damage was done. Halloween was a night when the normal order of things was turned on its head for a few hours, but the next day, everything was usually disassembled and put back where it should be in short order...then the planning would begin for next Halloween.
Tuesday, 1 September 2009
ON BEING AN ISLANDER
By Ben Robicheau ~ brobicheau@cogeco.ca
Island people are a special breed. Of course it took me a while to become aware of this fact; as a child I didn’t yet know that it takes a certain temperament to be able to live on an island. To me, there wasn’t anything out of the ordinary about the place where I lived. It didn’t seem unusual that our daily travels were restricted by the salt water that surrounded us, that we couldn’t even consider leaving the Island after dark; and if we were off the Island, had to always make sure we were back in time to catch the last ferry home. The fact that we had to cross not one, but two passages on small wooden scows to get to the mainland and that sometimes we couldn’t leave the island at all due to bad weather, mechanical breakdown or just because the ferryman didn’t feel like taking you right now, was no big deal. I assumed that everyone, not just those who lived and worked on the sea, listened faithfully to “the Probs” and planned their days according to its weather predictions.
As I got older I began to notice that not everyone was entirely comfortable with Island life. For instance, there was the travelling salesman who used to visit my father’s store every couple of months; the man always seemed kind of jumpy and nervous and in a big hurry to get going. Every few minutes he would ask if the ferry was still crossing and where exactly it was. He always appeared relieved when business was finally completed and he could escape back across the passage. He acted as if he expected the island to spring a leak and sink under him at any moment.
In the 60’s I attended school in Kentville and boarded with a family in town. Upon hearing where I was from, the man of the house launched into a story about a work trip he had made to Digby County a dozen years earlier. As he remembered it, he took a primitive barge to a tiny, sparsely populated island far off the coast. He was put up for the night in one of the few crude houses in the village, but got very little sleep because the barren, rocky island was only a couple of feet above the high water mark and he laid awake all night worrying that the huge waves continuously pounding on the shore just outside his bedroom window might roll right over the whole settlement and sweep it out to sea. While trying to figure out what rock or ledge he had spent the night on, I asked a few more questions and was astounded to realize that he was talking about Brier Island. I tried to convince him that things couldn’t have really been the way he had described, but he was adamant that this was an accurate memory of one of the most terrifying experiences of his life.
Even in Digby they didn’t seem to know all that much about the goings-on down Digby Neck. If you mentioned you were from the Islands, some people would profess to have never heard of the place, or worse yet, would act as if you had just confessed to being a resident of Dogpatch! Digby Neck and The Islands was considered by some to be a wild and dangerous area, populated by a bunch of in-bred, moon-shine swilling, backwoods hillbillies. People would proudly tell you that they had never been down The Neck, refusing to believe that there could possibly be anything down there that would make it worth the long drive and risky ocean crossings.
My mother once met a couple of tourists in Digby and invited them to visit Westport, but warned them that since it was a windy day, the ferry crossing might be a bit rough. They replied that they loved out-of–the–way places and rough water was not a problem, they were famous among their cottage friends for being the only ones daring enough to take their boat out in choppy weather. Later that day Mom was sitting in the line-up at East Ferry when she saw their car come down the hill. They took one look at the whitecaps in the harbour and the flying spray as the ferry bucked its way across Petite Passage, then made a quick U-turn and headed back up the hill. I guess the Bay of Fundy gets a bit rougher than their cottage lake!
During the 50’s, 60’s and even into the 70’s, I don’t remember many people visiting the Islands. You could sometimes go for weeks on end without seeing a strange face. Oh sure, there were those who regularly came down on business and others who had relatives to visit, but pure tourists were few and far between. Most of the scattered few who did come were of the “adventure tourist” type; if you asked them how they decided to visit the Islands, they would usually tell you that they just looked on the map for the most isolated and out-of-the-way place they could find. Then of course there were accidental tourists; like the couple who, after driving around the Island a couple of times, asked where the Bar Harbour ferry docked. Apparently they hadn’t looked at a map at all; they were on their way to Yarmouth but drove down the wrong side of St. Mary’s Bay!
As a kid, it always caught our attention if a car with out-of-province plates drove off the ferry, and if it had U.S. plates, that seemed even more exotic! I can remember being a teenager with a carload of friends, following strange vehicles around the Island, trying to figure out who they were and why in the world they had come here. Looking back on it now, we must have made the people kind of nervous, maybe that’s one reason we didn’t get more visitors!
By the late 70’s things began to change; our little corner of the world that had been mostly overlooked and left behind while the technical advances and space-age excitement of the 50’s and 60’s passed us by finally started to get noticed. Ironically, the things that many now found appealing about the area were pretty much the same things that people had looked down on us for a few years earlier. Our life-style was no longer “boring” but “peaceful”, instead of being “in the boonies” we were now a place where people could “get-away-from-it-all”, the lack of big-city hustle-and-bustle was now seen as an asset rather than a detriment. As personal contact with the natural world got further and further out of reach for more and more people, they started seeking out places where it was still possible to get in touch with The Great Outdoors.
Today you can usually get a positive response almost anywhere in Nova Scotia if you mention that you’re from the Islands. Many people have been down the Neck whale-watching, camping, bird-watching or just for a scenic drive (if the fog isn’t in). The Island’s renown has even spread across the country and around the world.
My wife Randi works at a hospital in Hamilton, Ontario. While chatting with a new staff member recently, Randi mentioned that she had moved here from Nova Scotia. Her new colleague replied that she loved Nova Scotia; several years ago she had vacationed in N.S. as a newly-wed and had wonderful memories of her visit to a lovely little island in the Bay of Fundy. You guessed it; she spent her honeymoon camping at Pond Cove!
A few years ago, my sister-in-law was living in France. One evening she was out for dinner when out of the hubbub of conversation around her, the words “Nova Scotia” happened to come to her ear. The couple at a nearby table were discussing their favourite travel experiences and she was surprised to hear the woman state to her companion that of all the places she had visited, she thought the most beautiful was a little place in Nova Scotia, a little place called Brier Island!
What are the odds that two people chatting in Ontario or two strangers who happened to sit near each other in a restaurant in Europe would discover they both had connections to Brier Island! Over the course of a few decades, the Islands have gone from a mysterious, isolated area that few people wanted to visit, to a unique tourist destination being discussed in the cafes of Paris!
It’s been quite a while since I’ve lived on Brier Island, but I still consider myself an Islander. There is a part of my brain that is permanently dedicated to keeping track of the ferry schedule and calculating what time I have to leave wherever I am in order to catch the next crossing. Traffic noise keeps me awake at night but I can sleep through a foghorn no problem, even the new electronic ones! I guess once an Islander, always an Islander. Some things stick with you no matter how long you’ve been away.
Island people are a special breed. Of course it took me a while to become aware of this fact; as a child I didn’t yet know that it takes a certain temperament to be able to live on an island. To me, there wasn’t anything out of the ordinary about the place where I lived. It didn’t seem unusual that our daily travels were restricted by the salt water that surrounded us, that we couldn’t even consider leaving the Island after dark; and if we were off the Island, had to always make sure we were back in time to catch the last ferry home. The fact that we had to cross not one, but two passages on small wooden scows to get to the mainland and that sometimes we couldn’t leave the island at all due to bad weather, mechanical breakdown or just because the ferryman didn’t feel like taking you right now, was no big deal. I assumed that everyone, not just those who lived and worked on the sea, listened faithfully to “the Probs” and planned their days according to its weather predictions.
As I got older I began to notice that not everyone was entirely comfortable with Island life. For instance, there was the travelling salesman who used to visit my father’s store every couple of months; the man always seemed kind of jumpy and nervous and in a big hurry to get going. Every few minutes he would ask if the ferry was still crossing and where exactly it was. He always appeared relieved when business was finally completed and he could escape back across the passage. He acted as if he expected the island to spring a leak and sink under him at any moment.
In the 60’s I attended school in Kentville and boarded with a family in town. Upon hearing where I was from, the man of the house launched into a story about a work trip he had made to Digby County a dozen years earlier. As he remembered it, he took a primitive barge to a tiny, sparsely populated island far off the coast. He was put up for the night in one of the few crude houses in the village, but got very little sleep because the barren, rocky island was only a couple of feet above the high water mark and he laid awake all night worrying that the huge waves continuously pounding on the shore just outside his bedroom window might roll right over the whole settlement and sweep it out to sea. While trying to figure out what rock or ledge he had spent the night on, I asked a few more questions and was astounded to realize that he was talking about Brier Island. I tried to convince him that things couldn’t have really been the way he had described, but he was adamant that this was an accurate memory of one of the most terrifying experiences of his life.
Even in Digby they didn’t seem to know all that much about the goings-on down Digby Neck. If you mentioned you were from the Islands, some people would profess to have never heard of the place, or worse yet, would act as if you had just confessed to being a resident of Dogpatch! Digby Neck and The Islands was considered by some to be a wild and dangerous area, populated by a bunch of in-bred, moon-shine swilling, backwoods hillbillies. People would proudly tell you that they had never been down The Neck, refusing to believe that there could possibly be anything down there that would make it worth the long drive and risky ocean crossings.
My mother once met a couple of tourists in Digby and invited them to visit Westport, but warned them that since it was a windy day, the ferry crossing might be a bit rough. They replied that they loved out-of–the–way places and rough water was not a problem, they were famous among their cottage friends for being the only ones daring enough to take their boat out in choppy weather. Later that day Mom was sitting in the line-up at East Ferry when she saw their car come down the hill. They took one look at the whitecaps in the harbour and the flying spray as the ferry bucked its way across Petite Passage, then made a quick U-turn and headed back up the hill. I guess the Bay of Fundy gets a bit rougher than their cottage lake!
During the 50’s, 60’s and even into the 70’s, I don’t remember many people visiting the Islands. You could sometimes go for weeks on end without seeing a strange face. Oh sure, there were those who regularly came down on business and others who had relatives to visit, but pure tourists were few and far between. Most of the scattered few who did come were of the “adventure tourist” type; if you asked them how they decided to visit the Islands, they would usually tell you that they just looked on the map for the most isolated and out-of-the-way place they could find. Then of course there were accidental tourists; like the couple who, after driving around the Island a couple of times, asked where the Bar Harbour ferry docked. Apparently they hadn’t looked at a map at all; they were on their way to Yarmouth but drove down the wrong side of St. Mary’s Bay!
As a kid, it always caught our attention if a car with out-of-province plates drove off the ferry, and if it had U.S. plates, that seemed even more exotic! I can remember being a teenager with a carload of friends, following strange vehicles around the Island, trying to figure out who they were and why in the world they had come here. Looking back on it now, we must have made the people kind of nervous, maybe that’s one reason we didn’t get more visitors!
By the late 70’s things began to change; our little corner of the world that had been mostly overlooked and left behind while the technical advances and space-age excitement of the 50’s and 60’s passed us by finally started to get noticed. Ironically, the things that many now found appealing about the area were pretty much the same things that people had looked down on us for a few years earlier. Our life-style was no longer “boring” but “peaceful”, instead of being “in the boonies” we were now a place where people could “get-away-from-it-all”, the lack of big-city hustle-and-bustle was now seen as an asset rather than a detriment. As personal contact with the natural world got further and further out of reach for more and more people, they started seeking out places where it was still possible to get in touch with The Great Outdoors.
Today you can usually get a positive response almost anywhere in Nova Scotia if you mention that you’re from the Islands. Many people have been down the Neck whale-watching, camping, bird-watching or just for a scenic drive (if the fog isn’t in). The Island’s renown has even spread across the country and around the world.
My wife Randi works at a hospital in Hamilton, Ontario. While chatting with a new staff member recently, Randi mentioned that she had moved here from Nova Scotia. Her new colleague replied that she loved Nova Scotia; several years ago she had vacationed in N.S. as a newly-wed and had wonderful memories of her visit to a lovely little island in the Bay of Fundy. You guessed it; she spent her honeymoon camping at Pond Cove!
A few years ago, my sister-in-law was living in France. One evening she was out for dinner when out of the hubbub of conversation around her, the words “Nova Scotia” happened to come to her ear. The couple at a nearby table were discussing their favourite travel experiences and she was surprised to hear the woman state to her companion that of all the places she had visited, she thought the most beautiful was a little place in Nova Scotia, a little place called Brier Island!
What are the odds that two people chatting in Ontario or two strangers who happened to sit near each other in a restaurant in Europe would discover they both had connections to Brier Island! Over the course of a few decades, the Islands have gone from a mysterious, isolated area that few people wanted to visit, to a unique tourist destination being discussed in the cafes of Paris!
It’s been quite a while since I’ve lived on Brier Island, but I still consider myself an Islander. There is a part of my brain that is permanently dedicated to keeping track of the ferry schedule and calculating what time I have to leave wherever I am in order to catch the next crossing. Traffic noise keeps me awake at night but I can sleep through a foghorn no problem, even the new electronic ones! I guess once an Islander, always an Islander. Some things stick with you no matter how long you’ve been away.
Saturday, 1 August 2009
STRAWBERRY FIELDS FOREVER
By Ben Robicheau ~ brobicheau@cogeco.ca
In the summer of 1969 in the month of August, half a million people made their way to Max Yasgur’s farm in upstate New York to attend the Woodstock Music and Art Fair. The concert became renowned around the world as the largest music festival ever held. Today most people know about Woodstock and its place in popular music history. What many people do not know however, is that another music festival, “a second Woodstock” was held in Canada one year later.
Strawberry Fields – An International Carnival of Sound and Freedom was originally planned to be held on the Woodstock site, but the locals had had enough of noise and traffic jams and now had bylaws in place that made a repeat of the previous year’s event impossible. The backers of the festival, (one of whom was rumoured to be John Lennon himself) had already sold thousands of tickets and had to go ahead with the show, so they moved the venue, appropriately enough, to a strawberry farm in Maine. But here again, the locals were scared off by the potential of being inundated by hundreds of thousands of “Hippies” and quickly passed their own restrictive laws. At this point the organisers decided to look northward and announced that the concert would now be held in New Brunswick. Apparently there was a plan to set the stage up on the Bay of Fundy shore and hold performances when the tide was out with the audience gathered on the beach. Thousands of people where most likely saved from drowning when permits were again denied and the festival moved west in its never-ending search for a home.
In Ontario they settled on Mosport Park, a 500 acre auto racing venue about an hour east of Toronto. By this time the people behind the scenes had figured out that a huge rock festival was not everyone’s idea of a good neighbour, so they tried to keep things under wraps. To rent the facility, they had to guarantee to put on an automotive event, so the week-end was advertised as a motorcycle race with “added entertainment”.
On Friday morning of the festival week-end, I was on Hwy. 401, hitching home to N.S., when three guys in a ’57 Chevy with Maryland plates pulled up and asked if I knew where Mosport was. I had been following the story of the wandering rock concert, and the last I had heard was that the Attorney General for Ontario had brought an injunction application to prohibit the festival from taking place. I told them that I knew where Mosport was but wasn’t sure if the concert was on. They said if I came with them and there was no concert they would drive me to N.S., so I got in the car.
As we approached Mosport it became obvious that the show was indeed going ahead. The roads were lined with cars and clogged with people walking towards the main gate. Since I had neither a ticket nor the money to buy one, (it was $15 for the week-end), I got out of the car with the intention of heading back to the highway. Walking along the edge of the park, I noticed a line of people snaking into the bushes. I quickly took a place in line and within a few minutes was through a hole in the fence and inside the park.
The first thing I saw inside the fence was a girl disappearing into the ground! It turned out that she had stepped into a hole hidden by the tall grass. As I helped her out, she introduced herself as Anne, from Texas. Since the concert had originally been planned for the States, most of the tickets had been sold to Americans, some of whom had spent the last few days travelling from New York to Maine to New Brunswick to Ontario, trying to catch up with the latest incarnation of the festival. When border officials noticed thousands of teen-agers suddenly trying to flood into Canada, some with nothing more than five dollars and a bag of groceries to last them the week-end, they turned them back by the hundreds; still, most managed to find an alternate route over the border.
Anne and I made our way across the race track to the infield area where a stage and massive sound system had been set up. The ground in front of the stage was packed with people who had staked out their area with a sleeping bag or blanket. Most of them would spend the next three days in this same tiny spot. I found an empty patch of ground next to the fence and marked out my own little space.
The performers for the week-end included Procol Harum, Ten Years After, Eric Burdon & War, Grand Funk Railroad, Sly & the Family Stone, Jethro Tull, Mountain, Crowbar, Luke and The Apostles, The Youngbloods, Melanie, Delaney and Bonnie, Jose Feliciano and a little-known-at-the-time performer named Alice Cooper, maybe a female folk singer?
I spent the next three days in the middle of a sea of 250,000 people. The bands took the stage in the late afternoon and went on into the early morning hours, the rest of the time was spent attempting to get some sleep, trying to find a Port-A-Potty fit for human use, or foraging for food. By noon Saturday, the gates to the park had been thrown open and people could come and go as they pleased. The only store nearby had sold out of anything that could be remotely considered food or drink. Water trucks were brought in and local entrepreneurs arrived selling everything from toilet paper to a tractor-trailer full of watermelons. A medical tent had been set up and members of a local commune were handing out free cheese sandwiches and oranges to those who had run out of money.
On Saturday afternoon the motorcycle race was held. It was a total disaster. People were wandering across the track at random, oblivious to the bikes. The race was started and stopped several times, the PA announcer kept telling people to stay off the course. It looked like someone could easily get killed. Some of the concert-goers stepped in as voluntary course marshals, trying to control the people and warn the racers of obstacles ahead. After less than an hour of this erratic, stop-and-go “racing”, it was called off. I found out years later from one of the racers that they were paid $50 each and told “no racing, just complete three laps of the track”. All they wanted was to meet their obligation by appearing to hold a race. He said he had a leisurely ride around the course and was greeted at the hairpin turn by several naked people waving at him. He just waved back and continued on.
Alice Cooper played late Saturday night...definitely not a folk singer. He put on an incredible light and sound show that had the audience amazed and mesmerised. The concert closed early Monday morning just as the sun was coming up to the sounds of Sly & the Family Stone doing “I Want To Take You Higher”. Anne had gone off to find the friends she had come with, and I, along with thousands of others, made my weary way back to the highway where I got a ride with some Americans who were headed to the border crossing at the Thousand Islands Bridge. A couple of miles from the bridge, traffic came to a complete stop; it was backed up from the border out to the highway. I got out and caught a ride with a car that had just come across the bridge; the driver said that cars going into the States were being torn apart by the American border guards, probably looking for drugs. He said people waiting on the bridge were getting out of their cars and tossing stuff into the river.
A couple of days later I was back home, sitting in the poolroom, when in walked Anne from Texas! She had tried to convince her friends to head east, they decided to go west instead, so she set out on her own. All she knew was my first name, that I lived on an island in Nova Scotia and that I had seven sisters; she figured that working with this wealth of information, I wouldn’t be too hard to find.
Having made it to Halifax, she was sitting by the Public Gardens trying to figure out what to do next when she was approached by a police officer. Her explanation of what she was doing and who she was looking for was met with a blank stare, but the officer had a new recruit with him who thought her description sounded a lot like a guy that he had gone to school with in Digby. When she got to Digby, someone sent her to the only Benny they knew, an old fellow who had a garage in Barton. She quickly figured out that this was not the right place but again luck was on her side; someone from the Islands happened to be at the garage, heard her story, and headed her in the right direction.
Someone I met briefly a thousand miles away, using only very basic information, comes to the province and by talking to a few random people, is able to find me! This could only happen in Nova Scotia!
In the summer of 1969 in the month of August, half a million people made their way to Max Yasgur’s farm in upstate New York to attend the Woodstock Music and Art Fair. The concert became renowned around the world as the largest music festival ever held. Today most people know about Woodstock and its place in popular music history. What many people do not know however, is that another music festival, “a second Woodstock” was held in Canada one year later.
Strawberry Fields – An International Carnival of Sound and Freedom was originally planned to be held on the Woodstock site, but the locals had had enough of noise and traffic jams and now had bylaws in place that made a repeat of the previous year’s event impossible. The backers of the festival, (one of whom was rumoured to be John Lennon himself) had already sold thousands of tickets and had to go ahead with the show, so they moved the venue, appropriately enough, to a strawberry farm in Maine. But here again, the locals were scared off by the potential of being inundated by hundreds of thousands of “Hippies” and quickly passed their own restrictive laws. At this point the organisers decided to look northward and announced that the concert would now be held in New Brunswick. Apparently there was a plan to set the stage up on the Bay of Fundy shore and hold performances when the tide was out with the audience gathered on the beach. Thousands of people where most likely saved from drowning when permits were again denied and the festival moved west in its never-ending search for a home.
In Ontario they settled on Mosport Park, a 500 acre auto racing venue about an hour east of Toronto. By this time the people behind the scenes had figured out that a huge rock festival was not everyone’s idea of a good neighbour, so they tried to keep things under wraps. To rent the facility, they had to guarantee to put on an automotive event, so the week-end was advertised as a motorcycle race with “added entertainment”.
On Friday morning of the festival week-end, I was on Hwy. 401, hitching home to N.S., when three guys in a ’57 Chevy with Maryland plates pulled up and asked if I knew where Mosport was. I had been following the story of the wandering rock concert, and the last I had heard was that the Attorney General for Ontario had brought an injunction application to prohibit the festival from taking place. I told them that I knew where Mosport was but wasn’t sure if the concert was on. They said if I came with them and there was no concert they would drive me to N.S., so I got in the car.
As we approached Mosport it became obvious that the show was indeed going ahead. The roads were lined with cars and clogged with people walking towards the main gate. Since I had neither a ticket nor the money to buy one, (it was $15 for the week-end), I got out of the car with the intention of heading back to the highway. Walking along the edge of the park, I noticed a line of people snaking into the bushes. I quickly took a place in line and within a few minutes was through a hole in the fence and inside the park.
The first thing I saw inside the fence was a girl disappearing into the ground! It turned out that she had stepped into a hole hidden by the tall grass. As I helped her out, she introduced herself as Anne, from Texas. Since the concert had originally been planned for the States, most of the tickets had been sold to Americans, some of whom had spent the last few days travelling from New York to Maine to New Brunswick to Ontario, trying to catch up with the latest incarnation of the festival. When border officials noticed thousands of teen-agers suddenly trying to flood into Canada, some with nothing more than five dollars and a bag of groceries to last them the week-end, they turned them back by the hundreds; still, most managed to find an alternate route over the border.
Anne and I made our way across the race track to the infield area where a stage and massive sound system had been set up. The ground in front of the stage was packed with people who had staked out their area with a sleeping bag or blanket. Most of them would spend the next three days in this same tiny spot. I found an empty patch of ground next to the fence and marked out my own little space.
The performers for the week-end included Procol Harum, Ten Years After, Eric Burdon & War, Grand Funk Railroad, Sly & the Family Stone, Jethro Tull, Mountain, Crowbar, Luke and The Apostles, The Youngbloods, Melanie, Delaney and Bonnie, Jose Feliciano and a little-known-at-the-time performer named Alice Cooper, maybe a female folk singer?
I spent the next three days in the middle of a sea of 250,000 people. The bands took the stage in the late afternoon and went on into the early morning hours, the rest of the time was spent attempting to get some sleep, trying to find a Port-A-Potty fit for human use, or foraging for food. By noon Saturday, the gates to the park had been thrown open and people could come and go as they pleased. The only store nearby had sold out of anything that could be remotely considered food or drink. Water trucks were brought in and local entrepreneurs arrived selling everything from toilet paper to a tractor-trailer full of watermelons. A medical tent had been set up and members of a local commune were handing out free cheese sandwiches and oranges to those who had run out of money.
On Saturday afternoon the motorcycle race was held. It was a total disaster. People were wandering across the track at random, oblivious to the bikes. The race was started and stopped several times, the PA announcer kept telling people to stay off the course. It looked like someone could easily get killed. Some of the concert-goers stepped in as voluntary course marshals, trying to control the people and warn the racers of obstacles ahead. After less than an hour of this erratic, stop-and-go “racing”, it was called off. I found out years later from one of the racers that they were paid $50 each and told “no racing, just complete three laps of the track”. All they wanted was to meet their obligation by appearing to hold a race. He said he had a leisurely ride around the course and was greeted at the hairpin turn by several naked people waving at him. He just waved back and continued on.
Alice Cooper played late Saturday night...definitely not a folk singer. He put on an incredible light and sound show that had the audience amazed and mesmerised. The concert closed early Monday morning just as the sun was coming up to the sounds of Sly & the Family Stone doing “I Want To Take You Higher”. Anne had gone off to find the friends she had come with, and I, along with thousands of others, made my weary way back to the highway where I got a ride with some Americans who were headed to the border crossing at the Thousand Islands Bridge. A couple of miles from the bridge, traffic came to a complete stop; it was backed up from the border out to the highway. I got out and caught a ride with a car that had just come across the bridge; the driver said that cars going into the States were being torn apart by the American border guards, probably looking for drugs. He said people waiting on the bridge were getting out of their cars and tossing stuff into the river.
A couple of days later I was back home, sitting in the poolroom, when in walked Anne from Texas! She had tried to convince her friends to head east, they decided to go west instead, so she set out on her own. All she knew was my first name, that I lived on an island in Nova Scotia and that I had seven sisters; she figured that working with this wealth of information, I wouldn’t be too hard to find.
Having made it to Halifax, she was sitting by the Public Gardens trying to figure out what to do next when she was approached by a police officer. Her explanation of what she was doing and who she was looking for was met with a blank stare, but the officer had a new recruit with him who thought her description sounded a lot like a guy that he had gone to school with in Digby. When she got to Digby, someone sent her to the only Benny they knew, an old fellow who had a garage in Barton. She quickly figured out that this was not the right place but again luck was on her side; someone from the Islands happened to be at the garage, heard her story, and headed her in the right direction.
Someone I met briefly a thousand miles away, using only very basic information, comes to the province and by talking to a few random people, is able to find me! This could only happen in Nova Scotia!
Sunday, 5 July 2009
TV TIME
by Ben Robicheau ~ brobicheau@cogeco.ca
Television watching today can be quite a technical affair. What with digital this and hi-def that, VCRs, DVDs, surround sound systems, satellite receivers and video games; coffee tables around the country are collapsing under the weight of all the remote controls needed to assist us in our daily viewing. There was a time when an evening of television watching required a set of skills quite different from knowing which button to push on which remote.
I can (just barely) remember a time when there were no TVs at all on the Islands. I’m not sure who had the first set on Brier Island, but I can recall the excitement caused by the fact that someone actually had one of these amazing gizmos that we had up to now only read about in Life Magazine or The Star Weekly.
The first people to get TV sets suddenly found themselves at the centre of the Island’s social scene. Neighbours would drop by after supper and spend the rest of the evening staring at the snowy images on the small black and white screen. Not that there was a whole lot to look at in the beginning. Programming didn’t start until four o’clock in the afternoon, up until then, all there was to look at was the “test pattern” which, for some reason, was the profile of an Indian Chief centred in a bulls-eye. Some people would sit and stare at the test pattern, thrilled to see any image at all. At midnight the National Anthem would play and your programming day would be concluded.
At first, channel selection was limited to just one station; CHSJ from Saint John, N.B. A couple of years later a second channel could be picked up from the Yarmouth area. To receive these channels, you needed an antenna. These antennas were usually placed on the end of a wooden pole or metal pipe, the higher the better, then it was rotated until an image materialized through the snow on the TV screen. This feat was accomplished with much yelling back and forth between the antenna adjuster on the roof and someone watching the TV, “OK, Ok you’ve got it, oh, you went too far, go back, OK, right there, that’s good”. Once maximum picture quality was attained, the antenna was locked in place. When the Yarmouth station was added, you either had to go out and rotate the antenna every time you wanted to change channels or install a second antenna and a switch so you could flip from one antenna to the other as you changed channels.
Of course every time we got a big wind storm, all the antennas on the Island would have to be adjusted again. Our antenna was on a long steel pipe located right by the living room window, all you had to do was go outside with a pipe wrench, look in the window at the TV and crank the pipe around until you had a good picture. Some people tried to avoid weather problems by putting their antennas in the attic, but usually the signal wasn’t as strong as having it outside. Occasionally, the weather would be the TV watcher’s friend. If a hurricane was due, the unusual weather conditions would make it possible to pick up some of the Maine Coast stations. Although very exciting, this would usually last only a few hours, and was then followed by the storm, which would of course knock your antenna out of kilter so you’d have no TV at all!
Within a few years almost everyone had a TV in their living room, bringing in black and white images from around the world. Then came the next big advance, colour! The first colour TVs were expensive, and of course everyone already had a perfectly good black and white set, so it was hard to justify buying a new one. But there was a way to supposedly get around this expense. My father came home one day with a sheet of plastic that you could stick to the screen and it would magically transform your dreary old black and white TV into a modern colour set. The sheet was made up of tiny prisms and if you looked at it from different angles you could see red, blue and green, but it didn’t conform to the picture behind it. You did have colour, but it was just randomly spread across the screen. There was another “instant colour” system that was also a plastic sheet that was put in front of the TV, the bottom section was tinted green, sort of amber in the middle, and blue on the top. If you were looking at scenery it gave the impression of green grass and blue sky, but it didn’t really work for anything else; people always looked like they were wearing green shirts and had blue hair!
The first colour sets were extremely temperamental. After your new TV was set up in the corner of the living room, you would have to call Edgar McDormand to come and tune it in. He would spend half the day hunched down behind the TV, adjusting and fine-tuning until the colour was acceptable. If you decided to move the set to a different corner, everything would be thrown out of whack and he would have to come back again and re-tune it. Edgar was also called whenever your TV broke down. If the picture wouldn’t stop rolling or people’s faces were a kind of sickly purple-green or the picture was squeezed down to a two-inch strip in the middle of the screen, he would show up with his suitcase full of glass vacuum tubes and spend the next hour or so switching out various tubes until he found the one that was causing the problem.
Once you got your TV working right, it was time to watch some shows! Of course, Hockey Night In Canada was popular right from the start, but Sunday night became the prime TV watching time. Right after supper there was Walt Disney for the kids, then there was something for everyone on The Ed Sullivan Show, remember Topo Gigio with his “Kees mee Eddieee”; after the kids went to bed it was time to join the Cartwright boys for some Western adventures on Bonanza. One show that was popular in our house, and I’m sure in the whole area, was Time For Juniors. This was a kind of early, low-key, East Coast version of Canadian Idol, it was produced in Saint John and featured local children showing off their talents; or in some cases, lack of talent. The host, Jeanie Wood, was something of a celebrity in the Maritimes. I remember a woman from Westport who made a trip across the Bay to visit relatives in Saint John, upon her return all she could talk about was that she had met Jeanie Wood on The Princess Helene.
The arrival of television changed Island life, some would say for the better, and others would argue that it was for the worse. Today some of the shows and events that we watched unfold on those snowy screens are considered important pieces of our social and cultural history. When I was about nine years old, I myself played a small and generally unknown role in the history of television on Brier Island.
Before we even had a TV at home, my father installed one in the store. TVs were still rare on the Island and I guess the idea was that it would attract customers. It was a big floor model that sat on four skinny legs. To raise it up so that people could see it, Dad put it on top of an iron safe that stood next to, and was about level with, the ice cream freezer. The four legs just fit on the very corners of the safe. One evening a few weeks after it was installed, a crowd of men were watching a hockey game when I dropped by for an ice cream sandwich. The ice cream freezer was the old style with hatches in the top; you folded back the hatch cover and reached down in. On this night, the freezer was nearly empty and I had to really stretch to the bottom for that ice cream, I couldn’t quite reach it and, with my head and one arm in the freezer, groped around with my other arm for something to pull myself up a bit more. My hand found a convenient grip and I used the leverage to heave myself up another couple of inches until I could reach the object of my efforts. Just as my hand closed on the elusive Ice cream sandwich, I heard a collective roar from the assembled crowd, followed immediately by a resounding crash.
I pulled my head out of the freezer to see the TV lying on the floor behind me in a heap of broken wood, shattered glass and sparking innards. My grip had been on the leg of the TV and when I pulled myself up, I pulled the set over the edge of the safe and down it went. My desire for a frozen treat had unwittingly catapulted me into the dubious position of being the first person on Brier Island to totally destroy a television set!
Television watching today can be quite a technical affair. What with digital this and hi-def that, VCRs, DVDs, surround sound systems, satellite receivers and video games; coffee tables around the country are collapsing under the weight of all the remote controls needed to assist us in our daily viewing. There was a time when an evening of television watching required a set of skills quite different from knowing which button to push on which remote.
I can (just barely) remember a time when there were no TVs at all on the Islands. I’m not sure who had the first set on Brier Island, but I can recall the excitement caused by the fact that someone actually had one of these amazing gizmos that we had up to now only read about in Life Magazine or The Star Weekly.
The first people to get TV sets suddenly found themselves at the centre of the Island’s social scene. Neighbours would drop by after supper and spend the rest of the evening staring at the snowy images on the small black and white screen. Not that there was a whole lot to look at in the beginning. Programming didn’t start until four o’clock in the afternoon, up until then, all there was to look at was the “test pattern” which, for some reason, was the profile of an Indian Chief centred in a bulls-eye. Some people would sit and stare at the test pattern, thrilled to see any image at all. At midnight the National Anthem would play and your programming day would be concluded.
At first, channel selection was limited to just one station; CHSJ from Saint John, N.B. A couple of years later a second channel could be picked up from the Yarmouth area. To receive these channels, you needed an antenna. These antennas were usually placed on the end of a wooden pole or metal pipe, the higher the better, then it was rotated until an image materialized through the snow on the TV screen. This feat was accomplished with much yelling back and forth between the antenna adjuster on the roof and someone watching the TV, “OK, Ok you’ve got it, oh, you went too far, go back, OK, right there, that’s good”. Once maximum picture quality was attained, the antenna was locked in place. When the Yarmouth station was added, you either had to go out and rotate the antenna every time you wanted to change channels or install a second antenna and a switch so you could flip from one antenna to the other as you changed channels.
Of course every time we got a big wind storm, all the antennas on the Island would have to be adjusted again. Our antenna was on a long steel pipe located right by the living room window, all you had to do was go outside with a pipe wrench, look in the window at the TV and crank the pipe around until you had a good picture. Some people tried to avoid weather problems by putting their antennas in the attic, but usually the signal wasn’t as strong as having it outside. Occasionally, the weather would be the TV watcher’s friend. If a hurricane was due, the unusual weather conditions would make it possible to pick up some of the Maine Coast stations. Although very exciting, this would usually last only a few hours, and was then followed by the storm, which would of course knock your antenna out of kilter so you’d have no TV at all!
Within a few years almost everyone had a TV in their living room, bringing in black and white images from around the world. Then came the next big advance, colour! The first colour TVs were expensive, and of course everyone already had a perfectly good black and white set, so it was hard to justify buying a new one. But there was a way to supposedly get around this expense. My father came home one day with a sheet of plastic that you could stick to the screen and it would magically transform your dreary old black and white TV into a modern colour set. The sheet was made up of tiny prisms and if you looked at it from different angles you could see red, blue and green, but it didn’t conform to the picture behind it. You did have colour, but it was just randomly spread across the screen. There was another “instant colour” system that was also a plastic sheet that was put in front of the TV, the bottom section was tinted green, sort of amber in the middle, and blue on the top. If you were looking at scenery it gave the impression of green grass and blue sky, but it didn’t really work for anything else; people always looked like they were wearing green shirts and had blue hair!
The first colour sets were extremely temperamental. After your new TV was set up in the corner of the living room, you would have to call Edgar McDormand to come and tune it in. He would spend half the day hunched down behind the TV, adjusting and fine-tuning until the colour was acceptable. If you decided to move the set to a different corner, everything would be thrown out of whack and he would have to come back again and re-tune it. Edgar was also called whenever your TV broke down. If the picture wouldn’t stop rolling or people’s faces were a kind of sickly purple-green or the picture was squeezed down to a two-inch strip in the middle of the screen, he would show up with his suitcase full of glass vacuum tubes and spend the next hour or so switching out various tubes until he found the one that was causing the problem.
Once you got your TV working right, it was time to watch some shows! Of course, Hockey Night In Canada was popular right from the start, but Sunday night became the prime TV watching time. Right after supper there was Walt Disney for the kids, then there was something for everyone on The Ed Sullivan Show, remember Topo Gigio with his “Kees mee Eddieee”; after the kids went to bed it was time to join the Cartwright boys for some Western adventures on Bonanza. One show that was popular in our house, and I’m sure in the whole area, was Time For Juniors. This was a kind of early, low-key, East Coast version of Canadian Idol, it was produced in Saint John and featured local children showing off their talents; or in some cases, lack of talent. The host, Jeanie Wood, was something of a celebrity in the Maritimes. I remember a woman from Westport who made a trip across the Bay to visit relatives in Saint John, upon her return all she could talk about was that she had met Jeanie Wood on The Princess Helene.
The arrival of television changed Island life, some would say for the better, and others would argue that it was for the worse. Today some of the shows and events that we watched unfold on those snowy screens are considered important pieces of our social and cultural history. When I was about nine years old, I myself played a small and generally unknown role in the history of television on Brier Island.
Before we even had a TV at home, my father installed one in the store. TVs were still rare on the Island and I guess the idea was that it would attract customers. It was a big floor model that sat on four skinny legs. To raise it up so that people could see it, Dad put it on top of an iron safe that stood next to, and was about level with, the ice cream freezer. The four legs just fit on the very corners of the safe. One evening a few weeks after it was installed, a crowd of men were watching a hockey game when I dropped by for an ice cream sandwich. The ice cream freezer was the old style with hatches in the top; you folded back the hatch cover and reached down in. On this night, the freezer was nearly empty and I had to really stretch to the bottom for that ice cream, I couldn’t quite reach it and, with my head and one arm in the freezer, groped around with my other arm for something to pull myself up a bit more. My hand found a convenient grip and I used the leverage to heave myself up another couple of inches until I could reach the object of my efforts. Just as my hand closed on the elusive Ice cream sandwich, I heard a collective roar from the assembled crowd, followed immediately by a resounding crash.
I pulled my head out of the freezer to see the TV lying on the floor behind me in a heap of broken wood, shattered glass and sparking innards. My grip had been on the leg of the TV and when I pulled myself up, I pulled the set over the edge of the safe and down it went. My desire for a frozen treat had unwittingly catapulted me into the dubious position of being the first person on Brier Island to totally destroy a television set!
Monday, 1 June 2009
Gull Rock Farm
by Ben Robicheau ~ brobicheau@cogeco.ca
Anyone who has ventured down Gull Rock Road knows that when you reach the end of the road at Pond Cove, it opens up into a large field. If you continue straight ahead through the wild grass and clumps of alders, you will come upon a bit of a rise just before the land ends at Point d’Field. Standing on the top of this small hill, you can turn to the right and see Big and Little Pond Coves, turn left and you see Hog Yard Cove nearby and the French Shore in the far distance across St. Mary’s Bay. Face straight out to sea, and right in front of you is Green Island, and beyond that Gull Rock a little further out. These two specks of land, and the ledge of jumbled rock they sit on, are the last visible pieces of the North Mountain Range that runs along the Bay of Fundy from Cape Blomidon, forming the Annapolis Valley, Digby Neck and the Islands before it disappears beneath the Atlantic Ocean.
Right on the top of this hill is where the cow barn once stood. If you look around in the overgrown grass and brush near the base of the hill on the inland side, you might still be able to recognize the old stone remnants of a small farmhouse cellar and maybe even the circular impression of the old well. Once upon a time this was Gull Rock Farm; my father lived here when he was a young boy.
Of all the places on the Island, this is probably the most unlikely spot in which to take up homesteading. Dad and his family lived here during the last years of the 1920’s, by this time, homes on the Island had long since been wired for both electricity and telephones, but neither of those modern conveniences ever reached Gull Rock Farm. This is about as far as you can get from town without actually leaving the Island. You’re right out on the bitter end of a treeless and unprotected point, exposed to that cold, salt-laden Atlantic Ocean wind as it whips in over Pond Cove beach and across the fields. It seems like it would be hard to grow anything at all here, but over the years several different families braved the elements in a valient but usually vain battle with Mother Nature.
Despite the less-than-ideal farming conditions, my grandfather did manage to coax out of the rocky ground a garden that produced potatoes, carrots and turnips among other things. Not only enough to feed his own family, but enough extra that he was able to make a little money supplying the people in town with fresh vegetables.
Besides the vegetable garden, he also kept a herd of milk cows that he put out to pasture in the Big Meadow behind the ponds. The cream from the milk was taken to town and shipped by boat twice a week to a dairy in Yarmouth. To keep it cool until shipping time, the metal milk cans full of cream were immersed in the cold water of the well, which was quite large and had a protective shed built over it.
One day late in the summer, Dad’s best friend Genie Frost was visiting him at Gull Rock and the two of them went berry picking. Returning home with a load of wild strawberries, they decided that a dollop of fresh cream would make them taste even better. While getting the cream out of the well, Genie noticed some tobacco leaves drying in the wellhouse rafters and he reached up and tore off a piece from one of them.
After enjoying a big feed of wild strawberries swimming in a generous helping of cream, Genie rolled up the piece of tobacco leaf and set back to enjoy his homemade cigar. Now, here we have a young boy full of wild berries and heavy cream and we mix in the strong smoke of home-grown raw tobacco! What could possibly go wrong? Genie only got in a few puffs from his make-shift stogie before the strawberries and cream made a sudden and dramatic reappearance! My father still likes strawberries, but maybe being an unwilling witness to this event is one of the reasons he doesn’t smoke.
Dad and his sisters made the long walk back and forth to town every weekday to attend school. As they left the farm and started up Gull Rock Road, they had to pass through Jackass Gate. This was the main gate that blocked off the road from the field and kept all the animals on the farm from wandering away. The primary rule of Gull Rock Farm was “Always Close The Gate”.
One morning on their way to school, they noticed that somehow the gate had been left open and several of the cows had wandered through. The road was narrow and thickly lined on both sides with dense brush. Since this made it impossible to circle around and get in front of the cows to cut them off, the kids first tried walking towards the cows with the idea of passing through the group. The cows of course just kept moving away farther up the road. Next they tried to take the cows by surprise by suddenly running past them. This resulted in the herd bolting even further up the road, heading for town at a brisk clip, leaving the kids with no option but to follow along behind.
By the time they reached the crest of the hill and the village roofs and chimneys started coming in to view, the cows had tired out and slowed down a bit. Just in time, a clearing finally appeared, providing an opportunity to get around in front of the cattle and turn them back. Now the kids had to drive the escapees all the way back down the road, make sure the gate was securely closed behind them this time, then walk all the way back to town again and then explain why they were so late for school.
My father, his parents and his three sisters were the last people to live on Gull Rock Farm. For nearly a hundred years, on and off, a variety of people had tried to make a go of it on this windswept southernmost point of Brier Island. They had tried hard to scratch a living from this rugged and unforgiving part of the Island. Some of the people who lived there had even made a bit of extra cash by salvaging the occasional ship that had the bad luck to run across the Southwest Ledge at low tide or attempt a short-cut over The Bar between Green Island and Gull Rock.
My grandfather tried his best to make the farm successful, growing vegetables, milking cows, cutting hay, raising chickens and pigs, even catching eels in Big Pond. It was a tough life, and probably not too different from that lived by the first settlers on the Island a hundred and fifty years earlier, but my father remembers it with a certain amount of fondness. This was the time of what would come to be known as The Great Depression, compared to many in the world, they were not so bad off. But in the end, just like all the others who had tried to eke a living from these salty windblown fields, it turned out to be too much work for too little reward. So when a better opportunity came along, Gull Rock Farm was abandoned for a final time.
Within a year of their leaving, the house had been burned to the ground, soon after, the barn met a similar fate. Today, after nearly eighty years of wind and rain and sun, nothing is left of a hundred years of hard labour and high hopes. All that remains of the little homestead at the end of the earth is in the memory of my father, the last person to live on Gull Rock farm.
Anyone who has ventured down Gull Rock Road knows that when you reach the end of the road at Pond Cove, it opens up into a large field. If you continue straight ahead through the wild grass and clumps of alders, you will come upon a bit of a rise just before the land ends at Point d’Field. Standing on the top of this small hill, you can turn to the right and see Big and Little Pond Coves, turn left and you see Hog Yard Cove nearby and the French Shore in the far distance across St. Mary’s Bay. Face straight out to sea, and right in front of you is Green Island, and beyond that Gull Rock a little further out. These two specks of land, and the ledge of jumbled rock they sit on, are the last visible pieces of the North Mountain Range that runs along the Bay of Fundy from Cape Blomidon, forming the Annapolis Valley, Digby Neck and the Islands before it disappears beneath the Atlantic Ocean.
Right on the top of this hill is where the cow barn once stood. If you look around in the overgrown grass and brush near the base of the hill on the inland side, you might still be able to recognize the old stone remnants of a small farmhouse cellar and maybe even the circular impression of the old well. Once upon a time this was Gull Rock Farm; my father lived here when he was a young boy.
Of all the places on the Island, this is probably the most unlikely spot in which to take up homesteading. Dad and his family lived here during the last years of the 1920’s, by this time, homes on the Island had long since been wired for both electricity and telephones, but neither of those modern conveniences ever reached Gull Rock Farm. This is about as far as you can get from town without actually leaving the Island. You’re right out on the bitter end of a treeless and unprotected point, exposed to that cold, salt-laden Atlantic Ocean wind as it whips in over Pond Cove beach and across the fields. It seems like it would be hard to grow anything at all here, but over the years several different families braved the elements in a valient but usually vain battle with Mother Nature.
Despite the less-than-ideal farming conditions, my grandfather did manage to coax out of the rocky ground a garden that produced potatoes, carrots and turnips among other things. Not only enough to feed his own family, but enough extra that he was able to make a little money supplying the people in town with fresh vegetables.
Besides the vegetable garden, he also kept a herd of milk cows that he put out to pasture in the Big Meadow behind the ponds. The cream from the milk was taken to town and shipped by boat twice a week to a dairy in Yarmouth. To keep it cool until shipping time, the metal milk cans full of cream were immersed in the cold water of the well, which was quite large and had a protective shed built over it.
One day late in the summer, Dad’s best friend Genie Frost was visiting him at Gull Rock and the two of them went berry picking. Returning home with a load of wild strawberries, they decided that a dollop of fresh cream would make them taste even better. While getting the cream out of the well, Genie noticed some tobacco leaves drying in the wellhouse rafters and he reached up and tore off a piece from one of them.
After enjoying a big feed of wild strawberries swimming in a generous helping of cream, Genie rolled up the piece of tobacco leaf and set back to enjoy his homemade cigar. Now, here we have a young boy full of wild berries and heavy cream and we mix in the strong smoke of home-grown raw tobacco! What could possibly go wrong? Genie only got in a few puffs from his make-shift stogie before the strawberries and cream made a sudden and dramatic reappearance! My father still likes strawberries, but maybe being an unwilling witness to this event is one of the reasons he doesn’t smoke.
Dad and his sisters made the long walk back and forth to town every weekday to attend school. As they left the farm and started up Gull Rock Road, they had to pass through Jackass Gate. This was the main gate that blocked off the road from the field and kept all the animals on the farm from wandering away. The primary rule of Gull Rock Farm was “Always Close The Gate”.
One morning on their way to school, they noticed that somehow the gate had been left open and several of the cows had wandered through. The road was narrow and thickly lined on both sides with dense brush. Since this made it impossible to circle around and get in front of the cows to cut them off, the kids first tried walking towards the cows with the idea of passing through the group. The cows of course just kept moving away farther up the road. Next they tried to take the cows by surprise by suddenly running past them. This resulted in the herd bolting even further up the road, heading for town at a brisk clip, leaving the kids with no option but to follow along behind.
By the time they reached the crest of the hill and the village roofs and chimneys started coming in to view, the cows had tired out and slowed down a bit. Just in time, a clearing finally appeared, providing an opportunity to get around in front of the cattle and turn them back. Now the kids had to drive the escapees all the way back down the road, make sure the gate was securely closed behind them this time, then walk all the way back to town again and then explain why they were so late for school.
My father, his parents and his three sisters were the last people to live on Gull Rock Farm. For nearly a hundred years, on and off, a variety of people had tried to make a go of it on this windswept southernmost point of Brier Island. They had tried hard to scratch a living from this rugged and unforgiving part of the Island. Some of the people who lived there had even made a bit of extra cash by salvaging the occasional ship that had the bad luck to run across the Southwest Ledge at low tide or attempt a short-cut over The Bar between Green Island and Gull Rock.
My grandfather tried his best to make the farm successful, growing vegetables, milking cows, cutting hay, raising chickens and pigs, even catching eels in Big Pond. It was a tough life, and probably not too different from that lived by the first settlers on the Island a hundred and fifty years earlier, but my father remembers it with a certain amount of fondness. This was the time of what would come to be known as The Great Depression, compared to many in the world, they were not so bad off. But in the end, just like all the others who had tried to eke a living from these salty windblown fields, it turned out to be too much work for too little reward. So when a better opportunity came along, Gull Rock Farm was abandoned for a final time.
Within a year of their leaving, the house had been burned to the ground, soon after, the barn met a similar fate. Today, after nearly eighty years of wind and rain and sun, nothing is left of a hundred years of hard labour and high hopes. All that remains of the little homestead at the end of the earth is in the memory of my father, the last person to live on Gull Rock farm.
Friday, 1 May 2009
MOM
by Ben Robicheau ~ brobicheau@cogeco.ca
Towards the end of World War II, during the winter of 1944-45, the Allied Forces worked their way through The Netherlands, pushing the German Army back across the border and liberating Dutch cities, towns and villages. One of the hardest fought battles was carried on in and around the city of Nijmegen, in eastern Holland near the Dutch-German border, where a strategically placed bridge across the Waal River was of vital importance to both the retreating German Army and the advancing Allies. When the bombing ended and the people of Nijmegen were finally freed from the Nazi occupation they had been living under since the beginning of the war, they did what they could to thank the soldiers that had risked so much.
One night a dance was arranged for the Troops, and a local girl, Marie Verburgh, wanted to go. Unfortunately, her mother knew that Canadian soldiers would be at this dance, and some British soldiers who had been recently billeted in her home had warned her that the Canadians were all crude, rowdy backwoodsmen who didn’t know how to behave properly and she shouldn’t let her daughters anywhere near them. Marie insisted on attending the dance and it was finally agreed that she could go only if she took one of her sisters along, the assumption being that there was safety in numbers. After some intense persuading, her sister Riekie reluctantly agreed to accompany her as long as she didn’t have to actually dance with anyone.
While Marie danced the evening away, Riekie tried to fade into the background, turning down several offers to dance. The evening was almost over when she was approached once again, this time by a tall, dark and handsome Canadian with a dashing little moustache. This time she said yes and the couple just had time for a waltz or two around the floor before the evening ended. That was how my mother met my father.
Over the following weeks and months there were many visits to the Verburgh home at 43 Dobbelmannweg. My Grandmother quickly discovered that Canadians were much more civilised than the Brits had made out and the soldier from the dance, soon known to all as “Robbie” was welcomed into their home. Things progressed quite nicely and, in March of 1946, a wedding was held at the little church around the corner. Even though the war in Europe was now over, times were still very tough in Holland; basic necessities were scarce, and luxuries were non-existent, still, a lovely service was arranged with the groom looking sharp in his uniform and the bride beautiful in a dress put together by her sisters and wedding slippers salvaged from a bombed-out shoe factory. After the ceremony the happy couple drove off in their bridal carriage, an Army Jeep.
When the war ended, Dad had volunteered for the Occupation Army so he could remain in Europe, but a couple of months after the wedding he received word that he was going to have to leave his new bride behind because his duties had ended and he was being sent home. By June he was back in Nova Scotia. In August The Queen Mary arrived at Pier 21 carrying hundreds of War Brides from Holland, England, France, Belgium and several other countries. Mom had left all her family behind in a war-torn land and come by herself to a new country to start a new life with someone she had known for a relatively short time under less than ideal circumstances.
As someone who had grown up in a large city, she found Halifax a bit small, but thought if this was what Canada was like, she could live here. The next morning they started out for Westport. She was surprised as they travelled along that there were no more cities, only small towns and villages and lots of trees. The farms and fields of the Valley reminded her a bit of the agricultural area around Nijmegen, but by the time they were starting down Digby Neck she was beginning to wonder if maybe she had made a mistake. Then the fog set in. When they drove onto the ferry to cross Grand Passage, she thought she had reached the end of the world, not sure if she believed her new husband that there really was an island over there.
If she thought Halifax was small, Westport in 1946 must have been a real shocker. Many of the women who had come over on the ship with her had similar experiences, some coming from cities like London or Paris to join their new husband on his “farm” or “ranch” only to find themselves living among the blackflies in a primitive log cabin in Northern Ontario or in a sod hut miles from their nearest neighbour on the Prairies. Some of these women took one look, turned around and headed back to where they had come from. Most, like my mother, put their trust in the man they had married and decided to make a go of it.
Things must have been difficult at first; for one thing, although they had been married almost half a year, this was their first chance to really get to know each other. Mom was an ocean away from her family, in an environment quite different from what she was used to, she didn’t speak the language and could understand very little of what was said. She had to get used to being a wife and at the same time learn to deal with unfamiliar customs and products. On one occasion Dad came home for supper to find Mom sitting in the kitchen crying. She said she had tried to make a nice meal for him, but as hard as she had tried, she just couldn’t beat the lumps out of the tapioca pudding.
Except for the problems with pudding, things must have worked out all right because within a couple of years a tradition was started at the Robicheau household, one that would become a more-or-less regular event. A baby was born, the first of many as it was to turn out, all born at home except for one. When my mother was expecting Ruth Ellen, the Doctor in Freeport knew he was going to be away so he advised her to go stay with her parents, who by now were living in Saint John, N.B. He thought having easy access to a hospital might be a good idea since it was the middle of winter and the trip to Digby over frozen dirt roads might be too hard on a pregnant woman. My Grandparents lived at the bottom of a steep hill on a dead-end road along the Saint John River. Ruth Ellen announced she was arriving just after midnight in the middle of a freezing rain storm. When the taxi arrived to take my parents to the hospital, it came down the hill with no problem, but was unable to get back up. Meanwhile, Ruth Ellen was getting more insistent and finally the taxi driver, after several failed attempts to get back up the slippery hill, called another cab and told him to stay on the other side of the hill, he then drove up as far as he could. My parents got out of the cab and, to avoid falling on the ice, made their way over the hill to the other taxi on their hands and knees. My mother says that as she crawled up the icy hill, stopping every few feet to have a contraction and sliding her suitcase full of maternity supplies along in front of her, it occurred to her that, all things considered, she might have been better off staying home.
Eventually Mom’s experience with babies grew to the extent that she was considered by people on the Island to be a bit of an expert on the subject. She advised mothers-to-be on how to prepare for their new arrival and even assisted with some of the deliveries. The doctor would call and let her know when he was leaving for someone’s house and she would meet him there. There were a few times when Mom and the baby both arrived before the doctor did. Several people walking around the Island today were helped into the world by my Mother.
A long time ago a young Dutch girl accepted an offer to dance from a soldier. Now they’ve been married for over sixty-three years, she’s Mother to nine kids, Oma to a dozen more and Great-Oma to several more.
The things that can happen when you agree to a waltz!
Happy Mother’s Day Mom.
Towards the end of World War II, during the winter of 1944-45, the Allied Forces worked their way through The Netherlands, pushing the German Army back across the border and liberating Dutch cities, towns and villages. One of the hardest fought battles was carried on in and around the city of Nijmegen, in eastern Holland near the Dutch-German border, where a strategically placed bridge across the Waal River was of vital importance to both the retreating German Army and the advancing Allies. When the bombing ended and the people of Nijmegen were finally freed from the Nazi occupation they had been living under since the beginning of the war, they did what they could to thank the soldiers that had risked so much.
One night a dance was arranged for the Troops, and a local girl, Marie Verburgh, wanted to go. Unfortunately, her mother knew that Canadian soldiers would be at this dance, and some British soldiers who had been recently billeted in her home had warned her that the Canadians were all crude, rowdy backwoodsmen who didn’t know how to behave properly and she shouldn’t let her daughters anywhere near them. Marie insisted on attending the dance and it was finally agreed that she could go only if she took one of her sisters along, the assumption being that there was safety in numbers. After some intense persuading, her sister Riekie reluctantly agreed to accompany her as long as she didn’t have to actually dance with anyone.
While Marie danced the evening away, Riekie tried to fade into the background, turning down several offers to dance. The evening was almost over when she was approached once again, this time by a tall, dark and handsome Canadian with a dashing little moustache. This time she said yes and the couple just had time for a waltz or two around the floor before the evening ended. That was how my mother met my father.
Over the following weeks and months there were many visits to the Verburgh home at 43 Dobbelmannweg. My Grandmother quickly discovered that Canadians were much more civilised than the Brits had made out and the soldier from the dance, soon known to all as “Robbie” was welcomed into their home. Things progressed quite nicely and, in March of 1946, a wedding was held at the little church around the corner. Even though the war in Europe was now over, times were still very tough in Holland; basic necessities were scarce, and luxuries were non-existent, still, a lovely service was arranged with the groom looking sharp in his uniform and the bride beautiful in a dress put together by her sisters and wedding slippers salvaged from a bombed-out shoe factory. After the ceremony the happy couple drove off in their bridal carriage, an Army Jeep.
When the war ended, Dad had volunteered for the Occupation Army so he could remain in Europe, but a couple of months after the wedding he received word that he was going to have to leave his new bride behind because his duties had ended and he was being sent home. By June he was back in Nova Scotia. In August The Queen Mary arrived at Pier 21 carrying hundreds of War Brides from Holland, England, France, Belgium and several other countries. Mom had left all her family behind in a war-torn land and come by herself to a new country to start a new life with someone she had known for a relatively short time under less than ideal circumstances.
As someone who had grown up in a large city, she found Halifax a bit small, but thought if this was what Canada was like, she could live here. The next morning they started out for Westport. She was surprised as they travelled along that there were no more cities, only small towns and villages and lots of trees. The farms and fields of the Valley reminded her a bit of the agricultural area around Nijmegen, but by the time they were starting down Digby Neck she was beginning to wonder if maybe she had made a mistake. Then the fog set in. When they drove onto the ferry to cross Grand Passage, she thought she had reached the end of the world, not sure if she believed her new husband that there really was an island over there.
If she thought Halifax was small, Westport in 1946 must have been a real shocker. Many of the women who had come over on the ship with her had similar experiences, some coming from cities like London or Paris to join their new husband on his “farm” or “ranch” only to find themselves living among the blackflies in a primitive log cabin in Northern Ontario or in a sod hut miles from their nearest neighbour on the Prairies. Some of these women took one look, turned around and headed back to where they had come from. Most, like my mother, put their trust in the man they had married and decided to make a go of it.
Things must have been difficult at first; for one thing, although they had been married almost half a year, this was their first chance to really get to know each other. Mom was an ocean away from her family, in an environment quite different from what she was used to, she didn’t speak the language and could understand very little of what was said. She had to get used to being a wife and at the same time learn to deal with unfamiliar customs and products. On one occasion Dad came home for supper to find Mom sitting in the kitchen crying. She said she had tried to make a nice meal for him, but as hard as she had tried, she just couldn’t beat the lumps out of the tapioca pudding.
Except for the problems with pudding, things must have worked out all right because within a couple of years a tradition was started at the Robicheau household, one that would become a more-or-less regular event. A baby was born, the first of many as it was to turn out, all born at home except for one. When my mother was expecting Ruth Ellen, the Doctor in Freeport knew he was going to be away so he advised her to go stay with her parents, who by now were living in Saint John, N.B. He thought having easy access to a hospital might be a good idea since it was the middle of winter and the trip to Digby over frozen dirt roads might be too hard on a pregnant woman. My Grandparents lived at the bottom of a steep hill on a dead-end road along the Saint John River. Ruth Ellen announced she was arriving just after midnight in the middle of a freezing rain storm. When the taxi arrived to take my parents to the hospital, it came down the hill with no problem, but was unable to get back up. Meanwhile, Ruth Ellen was getting more insistent and finally the taxi driver, after several failed attempts to get back up the slippery hill, called another cab and told him to stay on the other side of the hill, he then drove up as far as he could. My parents got out of the cab and, to avoid falling on the ice, made their way over the hill to the other taxi on their hands and knees. My mother says that as she crawled up the icy hill, stopping every few feet to have a contraction and sliding her suitcase full of maternity supplies along in front of her, it occurred to her that, all things considered, she might have been better off staying home.
Eventually Mom’s experience with babies grew to the extent that she was considered by people on the Island to be a bit of an expert on the subject. She advised mothers-to-be on how to prepare for their new arrival and even assisted with some of the deliveries. The doctor would call and let her know when he was leaving for someone’s house and she would meet him there. There were a few times when Mom and the baby both arrived before the doctor did. Several people walking around the Island today were helped into the world by my Mother.
A long time ago a young Dutch girl accepted an offer to dance from a soldier. Now they’ve been married for over sixty-three years, she’s Mother to nine kids, Oma to a dozen more and Great-Oma to several more.
The things that can happen when you agree to a waltz!
Happy Mother’s Day Mom.
Thursday, 12 March 2009
The Little Store
By Ben Robicheau ~ brobicheau@cogeco.ca
As a child I found myself in a situation that many kids could only dream of. On the day I was born, my father took ownership of a small general store, so I grew up having access to everything a kid could possibly want. Candy, pop, ice cream, chips and comic books were all there, free for the taking. All I had to do was walk in and help myself to whatever I wanted any time I felt like it. At least, that was what most people thought, the reality was a bit different.
First of all, there was the health aspect to consider. I would have been quite happy subsisting on a diet of licorice, chocolate milk and potato chips. Understandably, my father thought it might be a good idea to leave a little bit of room for real food in my system so he tried, with varying levels of success, to limit the amount of “junk” I consumed. Also, as time went on and the family grew, it just became too expensive to allow everyone free access to the candy counter. All those ten-cent chocolate bars, nickel bags of Scottie’s Chips and seven-cent bottles of pop soon added up. I don’t know how many times people have told me that I was eating up my father’s profits.
Since Dad worked in the fishplant during the day and he was only in the store in the evenings, the bulk of the responsibility as guardian of the goodies unfortunately fell to his day-time clerk, Gladys Bailey. I think that some days Gladys spent more time arguing with us over how many Fudge-stiks was too many for one person than she did waiting on customers. Gladys could put up a good argument, but as the family increased, she became badly outnumbered and quite often just gave up in frustration, saying, “Go ahead, take it, I don’t care if your father does fire me”.
Even when we did lose the odd battle, there were other ways to get what we wanted. In those days every time you bought a bottle of pop, you paid a deposit on the bottle. When it was returned to the store, you got the deposit back. A small bottle was worth two cents and a large bottle got you a nickel. Any kid in need of some quick money could usually come up with a couple of bottles after a quick scour around the wharves and fishplants. Then you could just walk into the store like any other customer and buy whatever you wanted. (As long as it didn’t cost more than a few cents.)
This bottle return system was a kind of fore-runner to the recycling system we have in place now, except it was run entirely by the bottling companies. The bottles were glass and were re-used over and over. Each store had a rack near the pop cooler where you placed your empties, they would then be sorted into wooden crates according to whether they were Coke or Pepsi products, taken back to the plant, washed out and refilled.
For the most part, this system worked quite well. Unfortunately, between the time they were bought and the time they were returned, a few bottles were used for purposes for which they were never intended, often coming back with the residue of gasoline, oil or who-knows-what in them. One of the most popular uses of an empty pop bottle was as a make-shift ashtray; as a result, occasionally a customer would have the unpleasant experience of discovering a decomposing cigarette butt or some other unidentifiable object floating around in their half-consumed bottle of Evangeline Ginger Ale or Frostie Root Beer.
Digby Dairy used a similar system, empty milk bottles were returned, cleaned and refilled. I can remember more than one occasion when I grabbed a bottle of nice, cold chocolate milk, popped the cardboard stopper and took a big gulp, only to run gagging and spitting from the store. Apparently the sanitizing equipment had failed to remove some of the old sour milk at the bottom of the bottle. Maybe the disposable, one-time-use container is not such a bad idea after all.
Digby Dairy also delivered the ice cream. This was before they had refrigerated trucks so frozen products were packed in green canvas containers that looked like well-insulated duffle bags. To keep things cold, dry ice was packed in around the frozen items. Dry ice is frozen carbon dioxide; it is extremely cold and can cause instant frostbite in anyone that touches it. When it melts it turns directly from a solid back into a gas. The fact that it could be dangerous in the wrong hands made it very interesting to us kids and we usually made a point of hanging around when the ice cream man dumped out the leftover ice at the end of his delivery. Laying there on the ground in front of the store just giving off little waves of vapor it didn’t look all that exciting; but kick it into a puddle of water and all kinds of steaming and hissing took place.
Of course it didn’t take long for someone to figure out how to get even more excitement from this chemical reaction. Kids started bringing jars on ice cream day, for some reason pickle jars seemed to be the jar of choice. Using a stick, you would maneuver some of the dry ice into your jar, screw the lid on tight, then retreat to a safe distance and wait. As the ice turned into gas, pressure would build up until the jar exploded in a satisfying spray of glass and old pickle juice. Surprisingly, given the high possibility of putting an eye out, except for a few minor cases of frostbite, no one was ever seriously injured in these experiments with exploding ice.
Like the milk and ice cream, almost everything was delivered to the store by truck. Jones Bottling Co. delivered Pepsi products from their plant in Weymouth, the Coke truck came from the Valley as did the Scottie’s Potato Chip truck, Willett Fruit delivered fruit and vegetables, Atlantic Wholesalers brought a wide variety of items and Oscar Andrews made a weekly run in his little van to deliver fresh meat from his butcher shop near The Crossroads on Digby Neck. Some of the larger items, like barrels of stove oil and bags of coal, were delivered to the warehouse on the end of the breakwater by the coastal freighter “Mohawk” on its regular run between Yarmouth and Saint John.
Unlike today, not everything was available all the time, things had a season. In winter there was not a lot of fresh fruit available except at Christmas time when Dad would get in a few boxes of oranges and apples for the Christmas stockings. You knew that summer had officially arrived when Popsicles re-appeared in the ice cream freezer. Later in the summer watermelons would become available. I always thought of watermelon as a really exotic item. There was nothing as luxurious as biting into a cool, crisp slice of watermelon on a hot day. Unfortunately, watermelon was only available for about three weeks and I ate so much of it in the first week that I was usually sick of the sight of it by the third week. I think I probably did eat up the profits as far as watermelons were concerned. Late in the summer strawberry season arrived, Dad loves strawberries and he would usually order more than he could sell, as a result we ate a lot of leftover strawberries at our house.
The little store across from the ferry slip was an important place not just to me but to the whole Island. From it’s doorway you could see the ferry arriving and leaving or watch the wharf pile up with traps as the fishermen prepared for lobster season. The store was a meeting place for the tired and the retired as they sat on the bench in a cloud of smoke from hand rolled “makins”, and spent hour after hour discussing the weighty affairs of the world as well as the latest gossip on the Island. It was a warm refuge from the bitter wind for the high-school students waiting for the ferry on a winter morning. It was a place where, even if you didn’t have a penny in your pocket, you could still get the necessities of life just by saying, “Put it on the bill”.
The building still stands, but it no longer invites the customer or the lounger, the bench is long gone, the windows are boarded and the doors locked. It’s a storage building now, but in my memory, and hopefully in the memory of many others, it will always be “The Little Store”.
As a child I found myself in a situation that many kids could only dream of. On the day I was born, my father took ownership of a small general store, so I grew up having access to everything a kid could possibly want. Candy, pop, ice cream, chips and comic books were all there, free for the taking. All I had to do was walk in and help myself to whatever I wanted any time I felt like it. At least, that was what most people thought, the reality was a bit different.
First of all, there was the health aspect to consider. I would have been quite happy subsisting on a diet of licorice, chocolate milk and potato chips. Understandably, my father thought it might be a good idea to leave a little bit of room for real food in my system so he tried, with varying levels of success, to limit the amount of “junk” I consumed. Also, as time went on and the family grew, it just became too expensive to allow everyone free access to the candy counter. All those ten-cent chocolate bars, nickel bags of Scottie’s Chips and seven-cent bottles of pop soon added up. I don’t know how many times people have told me that I was eating up my father’s profits.
Since Dad worked in the fishplant during the day and he was only in the store in the evenings, the bulk of the responsibility as guardian of the goodies unfortunately fell to his day-time clerk, Gladys Bailey. I think that some days Gladys spent more time arguing with us over how many Fudge-stiks was too many for one person than she did waiting on customers. Gladys could put up a good argument, but as the family increased, she became badly outnumbered and quite often just gave up in frustration, saying, “Go ahead, take it, I don’t care if your father does fire me”.
Even when we did lose the odd battle, there were other ways to get what we wanted. In those days every time you bought a bottle of pop, you paid a deposit on the bottle. When it was returned to the store, you got the deposit back. A small bottle was worth two cents and a large bottle got you a nickel. Any kid in need of some quick money could usually come up with a couple of bottles after a quick scour around the wharves and fishplants. Then you could just walk into the store like any other customer and buy whatever you wanted. (As long as it didn’t cost more than a few cents.)
This bottle return system was a kind of fore-runner to the recycling system we have in place now, except it was run entirely by the bottling companies. The bottles were glass and were re-used over and over. Each store had a rack near the pop cooler where you placed your empties, they would then be sorted into wooden crates according to whether they were Coke or Pepsi products, taken back to the plant, washed out and refilled.
For the most part, this system worked quite well. Unfortunately, between the time they were bought and the time they were returned, a few bottles were used for purposes for which they were never intended, often coming back with the residue of gasoline, oil or who-knows-what in them. One of the most popular uses of an empty pop bottle was as a make-shift ashtray; as a result, occasionally a customer would have the unpleasant experience of discovering a decomposing cigarette butt or some other unidentifiable object floating around in their half-consumed bottle of Evangeline Ginger Ale or Frostie Root Beer.
Digby Dairy used a similar system, empty milk bottles were returned, cleaned and refilled. I can remember more than one occasion when I grabbed a bottle of nice, cold chocolate milk, popped the cardboard stopper and took a big gulp, only to run gagging and spitting from the store. Apparently the sanitizing equipment had failed to remove some of the old sour milk at the bottom of the bottle. Maybe the disposable, one-time-use container is not such a bad idea after all.
Digby Dairy also delivered the ice cream. This was before they had refrigerated trucks so frozen products were packed in green canvas containers that looked like well-insulated duffle bags. To keep things cold, dry ice was packed in around the frozen items. Dry ice is frozen carbon dioxide; it is extremely cold and can cause instant frostbite in anyone that touches it. When it melts it turns directly from a solid back into a gas. The fact that it could be dangerous in the wrong hands made it very interesting to us kids and we usually made a point of hanging around when the ice cream man dumped out the leftover ice at the end of his delivery. Laying there on the ground in front of the store just giving off little waves of vapor it didn’t look all that exciting; but kick it into a puddle of water and all kinds of steaming and hissing took place.
Of course it didn’t take long for someone to figure out how to get even more excitement from this chemical reaction. Kids started bringing jars on ice cream day, for some reason pickle jars seemed to be the jar of choice. Using a stick, you would maneuver some of the dry ice into your jar, screw the lid on tight, then retreat to a safe distance and wait. As the ice turned into gas, pressure would build up until the jar exploded in a satisfying spray of glass and old pickle juice. Surprisingly, given the high possibility of putting an eye out, except for a few minor cases of frostbite, no one was ever seriously injured in these experiments with exploding ice.
Like the milk and ice cream, almost everything was delivered to the store by truck. Jones Bottling Co. delivered Pepsi products from their plant in Weymouth, the Coke truck came from the Valley as did the Scottie’s Potato Chip truck, Willett Fruit delivered fruit and vegetables, Atlantic Wholesalers brought a wide variety of items and Oscar Andrews made a weekly run in his little van to deliver fresh meat from his butcher shop near The Crossroads on Digby Neck. Some of the larger items, like barrels of stove oil and bags of coal, were delivered to the warehouse on the end of the breakwater by the coastal freighter “Mohawk” on its regular run between Yarmouth and Saint John.
Unlike today, not everything was available all the time, things had a season. In winter there was not a lot of fresh fruit available except at Christmas time when Dad would get in a few boxes of oranges and apples for the Christmas stockings. You knew that summer had officially arrived when Popsicles re-appeared in the ice cream freezer. Later in the summer watermelons would become available. I always thought of watermelon as a really exotic item. There was nothing as luxurious as biting into a cool, crisp slice of watermelon on a hot day. Unfortunately, watermelon was only available for about three weeks and I ate so much of it in the first week that I was usually sick of the sight of it by the third week. I think I probably did eat up the profits as far as watermelons were concerned. Late in the summer strawberry season arrived, Dad loves strawberries and he would usually order more than he could sell, as a result we ate a lot of leftover strawberries at our house.
The little store across from the ferry slip was an important place not just to me but to the whole Island. From it’s doorway you could see the ferry arriving and leaving or watch the wharf pile up with traps as the fishermen prepared for lobster season. The store was a meeting place for the tired and the retired as they sat on the bench in a cloud of smoke from hand rolled “makins”, and spent hour after hour discussing the weighty affairs of the world as well as the latest gossip on the Island. It was a warm refuge from the bitter wind for the high-school students waiting for the ferry on a winter morning. It was a place where, even if you didn’t have a penny in your pocket, you could still get the necessities of life just by saying, “Put it on the bill”.
The building still stands, but it no longer invites the customer or the lounger, the bench is long gone, the windows are boarded and the doors locked. It’s a storage building now, but in my memory, and hopefully in the memory of many others, it will always be “The Little Store”.
Sunday, 1 February 2009
How I Spent My Summer Vacation
by Ben Robicheau ~ brobicheau@cogeco.ca
This past summer we decided to take a trip to Labrador. I have always wanted to visit some of Canada’s more remote parts and this seemed like a good place to start. Labrador has always had a certain appeal to me, possibly because my father spent several months there at the beginning of the Second World War building the airport at Happy Valley-Goose Bay. His stories about life in Labrador at that time made it seem like a wild and remote corner of the world.
I had read stories posted on the Internet by people who had travelled through Quebec and Labrador. Most of them made it seem like things hadn’t changed much since WWII. They warned of rough roads, punctured tires, a scarcity of gas stations and accommodations, miles and miles of nothing but dust and gravel, and most of all, vast clouds of blackflies. For some reason, my wife wasn’t exactly thrilled at the prospect of driving a thousand kilometres on dirt roads through mostly deserted wilderness while facing the possibility of being eaten alive by insects.
While considering whether to do this trip, it was brought to my attention that the 2008 Westports Of the World convention was to be held in Westport, Newfoundland. This clinched it; Randi and I registered for the convention and I began to organise the trip. The plan was to head east from Ontario, follow the north shore of the St. Lawrence River to Baie-Comeau, drive north 600 Km. to Labrador City, then another 520 Km. to Goose Bay. The road isn’t continuous through Labrador so at Goose Bay you have to take a twelve-hour ferry ride to Cartwright to re-connect to the section that lies along the Labrador Straits across from Newfoundland. It’s then 410 Km to Blanc-Sablon where you catch the ferry across the Straits to the island of Newfoundland.
After studying various maps and ferry schedules, we decided that a week should be enough time to make our way through Quebec and Labrador. This would allow us to explore L’Anse Au Meadows and Gros Morne on the west coast of Newfoundland, and make it to Westport in time to register for the conference. After W.O.W. was over, we would take the ferry from Port aux Basques to N.S. and then head back to Ontario.
We had been on the road only a couple of hours when Randi found a major flaw in the plan. I had neglected to make a reservation on the Goose Bay to Cartwright ferry. I told her I doubted we needed one, it was early in the tourist season and with gas prices at an all-time high, the news was full of stories about how no one was travelling this year so getting on the ferry shouldn’t be a problem. Despite my reassurances, and since the whole trip revolved around us being able to get on this ferry, Randi called just to be sure and was informed that the ferry was booked up into the next week. After a brief but spirited discussion about my abilities as a trip planner, we decided to do our trip in reverse; to N.S. first, then to Nfld., then out through Labrador and Quebec.
After confirming reservations on every ferry we would need to take, we had a leisurely drive to Cape Breton, arriving in Sidney the recommended one hour before loading only to be informed that the ferry was delayed. We spent the next few hours sitting in line in the blazing sun listening to the kids in the next vehicle blast Rap music while shouting at their little dog to stop yapping at everyone in sight. We finally departed four hours late, which got us to Nfld. around three-thirty in the morning. We had reserved a motel room in Port aux Basques and would be charged for it anyway, so we, along with a long line of other passengers, checked in. After a short sleep, we checked out again and started for Deer Lake where we met up with Mom, Dad, Joyce, Wally and Ben.
The next morning we parted company. Randi and I were on our way to L’Anse au Meadows and everyone else was off to Gros Morne Park. L’Anse au Meadows, at the end of the Northern Penninsula, is a very small and isolated fishing village that probably wouldn’t be known outside of the province except for the fact that it is the location of a World Heritage Site, the only Viking settlement in North America. The first thing we saw upon our arrival in town was an iceberg in the harbour, it had arrived in January and was still there in July.
The reconstruction of the Viking Village gives you a very good impression of what it must have been like for those early settlers who spent the winter surviving off the land in their sod huts. After an interesting and educational morning, we set off back down the coast to meet up with the family again in Gros Morne Park at an old hospital that had been turned into a hostel. The next morning we drove out to Long Pond, this is the "fjord" that is featured in many advertisements for Gros Morne. It is actually a lake, no longer connected to the sea, although it was at one point back in time. It is a forty-five minute walk in to the lake, then an impressive three hour boat ride between the mountains to the head of the lake and back. I would recommend that anyone who has the opportunity to visit this part of Canada visit both L’Anse au Meadows and Gros Morne, they are well worth the time.
After walking back out from Long Pond, we got in the car again for a three-hour trip to the W.O.W. convention. Westport, Nfld. is a lot like Westport, N.S., it’s a small fishing village that has been badly hurt by the downturn in the fishery. It’s not easy to get to, being near the end of a long dead end road. Many of the men in this and other near-by villages regularly travel back and forth to Alberta, earning money there while keeping hope alive that they will be able eventually to return to live on the Island. Several empty houses were pointed out to us where people had given up hope of returning and had moved west permanently.
The convention visitors were all billeted with local people and I was thinking we might get some traditional Newfoundland meals like fish and brewis, or maybe even seal flipper pie. Our host turned out to be a lovely gentleman named John Harrill, a summer resident from North Carolina. Our welcoming meal was a traditional meal all right, just not of this place. John had brought his special herbs and spices with him and we were presented with a big platter of very delicious southern fried chicken. Although not what I was expecting, it was probably the best chicken I’ve ever eaten.
The rest of the week-end in Westport was a lot of fun, there were events every night at the firehall which involved wonderful food, dancing and great local music. During the day we went on walking tours of the town and a bus tour to a neighbouring cove where ladies in period costume made bread and baked beans for us in an outdoor oven. There was a concert at the ball field which involved a mass "screech-in" making all of us honorary Newfoundlanders. Randi and I, Wally, Joyce and Ben even got a personal tour of the surrounding area by the mayor of Westport.
On Sunday morning we had to leave early to catch the ferry to Labrador. According to the rest of the family we missed a very pleasant boat tour of the harbour which included the sighting of several whales; yet another similarity between the two Westports.
Finally, after a two-hour trip across the Strait, we were in Labrador, well, not quite, the ferry docks on the Quebec side of the border, so we had to drive for a few minutes before we saw the big blue "Welcome to Labrador" sign. Our first night in Labrador was spent at a B&B in the tiny community of L’Anse Amour which has only three families and eight residents, all Davises. The next morning we headed out to catch the ferry from Cartwright, an overnight trip up Lake Melville, which isn’t a lake at all but a 120 Km long inlet from the Labrador Sea. Early the next morning we had breakfast in Goose Bay, at a little restaurant that had Mooseburgers and Caribou steak on the menu.
Now we were into the serious driving. Six hours on the dusty gravel road got us to Churchill Falls where we toured the massive hydro power project that is carved into a solid granite mountain. Then another couple of hours to Labrador City where we intended to spend the night, but once again, we neglected to book ahead assuming that it would not be a problem. Little did we know that there was a new mine about to open and there was a housing shortage in the Labrador City area, resulting in most of the hotel and motel rooms being taken by the new miners. The first vacancy we could find was just across the border in Quebec at a town called Fermont. Owned entirely by a mining company, it had a huge development in the centre of town consisting of a mall, a large apartment complex, a hotel and an arena, all attached to each other. A resident could live most of their daily life without ever going outside, beneficial in the winter to avoid the cold and in the summer to avoid the blackflies.
The next morning we embarked on our longest day, the next community of any size was Baie-Comeau, nearly twelve hours away on roads that were gradually getting worse. After a couple of hours on the road, we were admiring the unending view of rolling hills and beautiful lakes when the dirt road suddenly turned to a paved, two lane boulevard with a grassed centre divider. On one side of the street was a sidewalk and on the other were gaps in the concrete curb for driveways, but there was not a house in sight. Gagnon is a ghost town, it was once a thriving mining community, but when the mine closed the company picked up all the buildings and moved them somewhere else. Later that day we reached Manic-5, one of a series of power dams built on the edge of a huge natural reservoir created when a meteorite crashed into the Canadian Shield. We gassed up here and paid $1.66/Liter, the highest price of the whole trip. Finally, just as I had all I could take of dirt roads, we hit pavement again about 100 Km before Baie-Comeau and felt like we were back in civilisation again. After a quick tour of Brian Mulroney’s hometown, we headed for our own home, appreciating paved roads and availability of services like never before.
This past summer we decided to take a trip to Labrador. I have always wanted to visit some of Canada’s more remote parts and this seemed like a good place to start. Labrador has always had a certain appeal to me, possibly because my father spent several months there at the beginning of the Second World War building the airport at Happy Valley-Goose Bay. His stories about life in Labrador at that time made it seem like a wild and remote corner of the world.
I had read stories posted on the Internet by people who had travelled through Quebec and Labrador. Most of them made it seem like things hadn’t changed much since WWII. They warned of rough roads, punctured tires, a scarcity of gas stations and accommodations, miles and miles of nothing but dust and gravel, and most of all, vast clouds of blackflies. For some reason, my wife wasn’t exactly thrilled at the prospect of driving a thousand kilometres on dirt roads through mostly deserted wilderness while facing the possibility of being eaten alive by insects.
While considering whether to do this trip, it was brought to my attention that the 2008 Westports Of the World convention was to be held in Westport, Newfoundland. This clinched it; Randi and I registered for the convention and I began to organise the trip. The plan was to head east from Ontario, follow the north shore of the St. Lawrence River to Baie-Comeau, drive north 600 Km. to Labrador City, then another 520 Km. to Goose Bay. The road isn’t continuous through Labrador so at Goose Bay you have to take a twelve-hour ferry ride to Cartwright to re-connect to the section that lies along the Labrador Straits across from Newfoundland. It’s then 410 Km to Blanc-Sablon where you catch the ferry across the Straits to the island of Newfoundland.
After studying various maps and ferry schedules, we decided that a week should be enough time to make our way through Quebec and Labrador. This would allow us to explore L’Anse Au Meadows and Gros Morne on the west coast of Newfoundland, and make it to Westport in time to register for the conference. After W.O.W. was over, we would take the ferry from Port aux Basques to N.S. and then head back to Ontario.
We had been on the road only a couple of hours when Randi found a major flaw in the plan. I had neglected to make a reservation on the Goose Bay to Cartwright ferry. I told her I doubted we needed one, it was early in the tourist season and with gas prices at an all-time high, the news was full of stories about how no one was travelling this year so getting on the ferry shouldn’t be a problem. Despite my reassurances, and since the whole trip revolved around us being able to get on this ferry, Randi called just to be sure and was informed that the ferry was booked up into the next week. After a brief but spirited discussion about my abilities as a trip planner, we decided to do our trip in reverse; to N.S. first, then to Nfld., then out through Labrador and Quebec.
After confirming reservations on every ferry we would need to take, we had a leisurely drive to Cape Breton, arriving in Sidney the recommended one hour before loading only to be informed that the ferry was delayed. We spent the next few hours sitting in line in the blazing sun listening to the kids in the next vehicle blast Rap music while shouting at their little dog to stop yapping at everyone in sight. We finally departed four hours late, which got us to Nfld. around three-thirty in the morning. We had reserved a motel room in Port aux Basques and would be charged for it anyway, so we, along with a long line of other passengers, checked in. After a short sleep, we checked out again and started for Deer Lake where we met up with Mom, Dad, Joyce, Wally and Ben.
The next morning we parted company. Randi and I were on our way to L’Anse au Meadows and everyone else was off to Gros Morne Park. L’Anse au Meadows, at the end of the Northern Penninsula, is a very small and isolated fishing village that probably wouldn’t be known outside of the province except for the fact that it is the location of a World Heritage Site, the only Viking settlement in North America. The first thing we saw upon our arrival in town was an iceberg in the harbour, it had arrived in January and was still there in July.
The reconstruction of the Viking Village gives you a very good impression of what it must have been like for those early settlers who spent the winter surviving off the land in their sod huts. After an interesting and educational morning, we set off back down the coast to meet up with the family again in Gros Morne Park at an old hospital that had been turned into a hostel. The next morning we drove out to Long Pond, this is the "fjord" that is featured in many advertisements for Gros Morne. It is actually a lake, no longer connected to the sea, although it was at one point back in time. It is a forty-five minute walk in to the lake, then an impressive three hour boat ride between the mountains to the head of the lake and back. I would recommend that anyone who has the opportunity to visit this part of Canada visit both L’Anse au Meadows and Gros Morne, they are well worth the time.
After walking back out from Long Pond, we got in the car again for a three-hour trip to the W.O.W. convention. Westport, Nfld. is a lot like Westport, N.S., it’s a small fishing village that has been badly hurt by the downturn in the fishery. It’s not easy to get to, being near the end of a long dead end road. Many of the men in this and other near-by villages regularly travel back and forth to Alberta, earning money there while keeping hope alive that they will be able eventually to return to live on the Island. Several empty houses were pointed out to us where people had given up hope of returning and had moved west permanently.
The convention visitors were all billeted with local people and I was thinking we might get some traditional Newfoundland meals like fish and brewis, or maybe even seal flipper pie. Our host turned out to be a lovely gentleman named John Harrill, a summer resident from North Carolina. Our welcoming meal was a traditional meal all right, just not of this place. John had brought his special herbs and spices with him and we were presented with a big platter of very delicious southern fried chicken. Although not what I was expecting, it was probably the best chicken I’ve ever eaten.
The rest of the week-end in Westport was a lot of fun, there were events every night at the firehall which involved wonderful food, dancing and great local music. During the day we went on walking tours of the town and a bus tour to a neighbouring cove where ladies in period costume made bread and baked beans for us in an outdoor oven. There was a concert at the ball field which involved a mass "screech-in" making all of us honorary Newfoundlanders. Randi and I, Wally, Joyce and Ben even got a personal tour of the surrounding area by the mayor of Westport.
On Sunday morning we had to leave early to catch the ferry to Labrador. According to the rest of the family we missed a very pleasant boat tour of the harbour which included the sighting of several whales; yet another similarity between the two Westports.
Finally, after a two-hour trip across the Strait, we were in Labrador, well, not quite, the ferry docks on the Quebec side of the border, so we had to drive for a few minutes before we saw the big blue "Welcome to Labrador" sign. Our first night in Labrador was spent at a B&B in the tiny community of L’Anse Amour which has only three families and eight residents, all Davises. The next morning we headed out to catch the ferry from Cartwright, an overnight trip up Lake Melville, which isn’t a lake at all but a 120 Km long inlet from the Labrador Sea. Early the next morning we had breakfast in Goose Bay, at a little restaurant that had Mooseburgers and Caribou steak on the menu.
Now we were into the serious driving. Six hours on the dusty gravel road got us to Churchill Falls where we toured the massive hydro power project that is carved into a solid granite mountain. Then another couple of hours to Labrador City where we intended to spend the night, but once again, we neglected to book ahead assuming that it would not be a problem. Little did we know that there was a new mine about to open and there was a housing shortage in the Labrador City area, resulting in most of the hotel and motel rooms being taken by the new miners. The first vacancy we could find was just across the border in Quebec at a town called Fermont. Owned entirely by a mining company, it had a huge development in the centre of town consisting of a mall, a large apartment complex, a hotel and an arena, all attached to each other. A resident could live most of their daily life without ever going outside, beneficial in the winter to avoid the cold and in the summer to avoid the blackflies.
The next morning we embarked on our longest day, the next community of any size was Baie-Comeau, nearly twelve hours away on roads that were gradually getting worse. After a couple of hours on the road, we were admiring the unending view of rolling hills and beautiful lakes when the dirt road suddenly turned to a paved, two lane boulevard with a grassed centre divider. On one side of the street was a sidewalk and on the other were gaps in the concrete curb for driveways, but there was not a house in sight. Gagnon is a ghost town, it was once a thriving mining community, but when the mine closed the company picked up all the buildings and moved them somewhere else. Later that day we reached Manic-5, one of a series of power dams built on the edge of a huge natural reservoir created when a meteorite crashed into the Canadian Shield. We gassed up here and paid $1.66/Liter, the highest price of the whole trip. Finally, just as I had all I could take of dirt roads, we hit pavement again about 100 Km before Baie-Comeau and felt like we were back in civilisation again. After a quick tour of Brian Mulroney’s hometown, we headed for our own home, appreciating paved roads and availability of services like never before.
Thursday, 1 January 2009
ON THE ROAD WITH MURF THE SURF
by Ben Robicheau ~ brobicheau@cogeco.ca
In the Spring of 1968 I got a letter from my friend Jonathon Ross. Jonathon’s mother was originally from Nova Scotia and every couple of years Mary, her husband Ernie and their family would travel from Hawaii to spend the summer at the family home near Digby. Jonathon spent quite a bit of time on Brier Island and, because of where he was from, the local kids of course had to label him, "Murf the Surf".
The Rosses had arrived the previous summer, but because Ernie was on sabbatical from his job as a university professor, they didn’t go back to Hawaii when the summer was over. Instead, they headed south to Gainsville, Florida where Ernie was doing research at the University of Florida. Jonathon soon found himself an after-school job and used his earnings to buy a motorcycle. When spring arrived and Mary and Ernie began planning their return to N.S. Jonathon thought it would be great to make the trip north on his bike. Although far from thrilled, his parents agreed on the condition that he find someone to go with him. A few days later I got the letter.
Jonathon’s plan was that I would arrive in Florida just as he was finishing his school year and we would return to N.S. together. The previous summer I had bought a second-hand motorcycle; actually it was more like third-or-fourth hand; a 1960 Honda that had seen better days. On my way to the Yarmouth ferry it started leaking oil and a mechanic in town discovered that a gasket needed replacing. When I told them I was on my way to Florida, the whole shop had a good laugh and told me this old junker would never make it. With a new gasket installed and those less-than-encouraging words ringing in my ears, I made my way to the ferry.
On the long trip across the Bay I passed the time by talking with the man in the next seat who was on his way home to Bangor after attending a church event in N.S. As we neared the Maine coast the sky darkened and it began to rain. Before we parted, my new-found friend handed me his address and told me that if I didn’t want to ride in this weather, he and his family could put me up. I hoped that once I got inland things would improve, but a half hour later it was pouring even harder, I was soaked and cold and the offer of shelter for the night started looking pretty good.
Arriving in Bangor, I was greeted with a hot meal and the opportunity to dry my clothes. Warm and fed, I was just getting ready to settle in for the evening when my host informed me that we were off to a Christian revival meeting. This meeting was held in a huge high-school auditorium with a couple of thousand people in attendance. The program involved performances by the school ROTC drill team, which consisted of marching back and forth while spinning and twirling rifles, which seemed a bit odd to me, it being a religious meeting and all, but everyone else seemed to enjoy it. The main speaker of the evening was Doug Anderson, an Olympic weight lifter who at one point was the strongest man in the world. He spoke about how religion helped him to overcome the effects of the flu to win a gold medal at the Olympics in Russia. He finished off his speech by lifting up a wooden platform with several football players and the cheerleading squad on it.
At six a.m. the next morning I was asked to help set up tables and chairs at the church for a breakfast meeting. It looked like it was going to be a nice day and I was eager to get on my way but I was reluctant to pass up free food so I packed up my bike and drove to the church. It turned out that the weightlifter from the night before was a special guest at this gathering. I had a very good breakfast and a nice chat with Mr. Anderson, who was interested in my trip and also in motorcycles, he said he used to have a Harley he rode around his farm, but it fell apart under his weight. He weighed about 350 lbs, all of it muscle, and had at one time set a world record by lifting more than 6000 pounds.
I finally got on the road and headed south. I had a tent and my plan was to camp out on the way. By the time I got to the State of Georgia, I had my system down pat. Just before dark I pulled off the main road onto a side road, found a field full of cornstalks, drove my bike around the perimeter of the field until I was out of sight and set up my tent at the edge of the woods. I felt pretty secure with this system, no one could see me, and nobody knew I was there. At some time during the night I was awoken by the sound of a loud roaring and thrashing going on somewhere in the woods. It didn’t seem to be getting any closer and eventually died out so I went back to sleep. The next morning I had just got back out on the main road when I noticed a large sign reading, "Warning! You are entering The Okefenokee Swamp. Please stay in your car and beware of alligators." I had camped on the edge of an alligator sanctuary! My sleep had been disturbed by alligators fighting! I wouldn’t have dozed off again so easily if I had known what was making all that noise.
I was now only a day or so from Gainsville and was just thinking how well my bike was running and how wrong the motorcycle shop guys were when the engine suddenly quit. I coasted to the side of the road and kicked the starter a few times, but no luck. After checking the gas, spark plug wires and everything I could think of, I took off a side cover to see a wire hanging down, vibration or wind had broken it off. The problem now was that there was no way to re-connect it to the small spot of solder that held it except by re-soldering. Stuck on the side of the road in Middle-of-Nowhere, Georgia, I couldn’t see how I was going to be able to fix this problem. Suddenly an idea occurred to me. I took a walk along the shoulder of the road and within a few yards came across just what I needed, a piece of scrap wire lying in the dirt. I twisted the bare end of the broken wire to the middle of the scrap wire and then tied it to the bike so that the wire made contact with the solder spot. I kicked the engine over and away she went. My side-of-the-road repair worked so well I left it like that until I got to Florida.
After a week in Gainsville, Jonathon and I were ready to hit the road north. We took a westerly route and rode up through Georgia on the Blue Ridge Mountain Skyway, a beautiful ride through a gorgeous part of the country. On our second day out we were cruising through a rural part of Georgia close to the Alabama border when we drove past a car with a flat tire. Four women dressed for church were standing by the open trunk obviously trying to figure out how to change the tire. We turned around and went back to see if we could help. When we got off our bikes one of the women announced that their husbands were fishing in a stream nearby and would be right back. It seemed a little odd to me that their husbands would leave them in their good clothes to change the tire, but I said "That’s OK, we don’t mind doing it", and I took the tire iron she was holding out of her hand. We changed the tire, the husbands still hadn’t returned, the women thanked us and we left.
It wasn’t until years later when I was thinking about this incident that I finally realised what was going on. The four women were black, we were in an area of the south where just a few years before and a few miles away in Birmingham and Montgomery, Alabama, race riots and anti-segregation demonstrations had taken place. When two white guys on motorcycles pulled up to their disabled car, I’m sure we must have looked like their worst nightmare. There were no husbands nearby, that was just a story to scare us off. I probably came within a hairsbreadth of getting that tire iron upside the head. But being a naïve guy from Brier Island, I was oblivious to all that at the time, I just saw some people who needed help and lent a hand.
The rest of the trip involved a two thousand mile detour to Cincinnati, Ohio to see a girl I had met for three days the previous summer, getting frisked at the border, rear-ending a taxi in Toronto and getting peppered by beetles while driving all night through Vermont to catch the Bar Harbour ferry back home. Except for the broken wire my bike ran perfectly the whole trip. I sold it a month later to someone in Digby, he came to Westport to pick it up and it died at Lake Midway on the way back. I guess the guys from Yarmouth were right after all, they just had their timing off a bit.
In the Spring of 1968 I got a letter from my friend Jonathon Ross. Jonathon’s mother was originally from Nova Scotia and every couple of years Mary, her husband Ernie and their family would travel from Hawaii to spend the summer at the family home near Digby. Jonathon spent quite a bit of time on Brier Island and, because of where he was from, the local kids of course had to label him, "Murf the Surf".
The Rosses had arrived the previous summer, but because Ernie was on sabbatical from his job as a university professor, they didn’t go back to Hawaii when the summer was over. Instead, they headed south to Gainsville, Florida where Ernie was doing research at the University of Florida. Jonathon soon found himself an after-school job and used his earnings to buy a motorcycle. When spring arrived and Mary and Ernie began planning their return to N.S. Jonathon thought it would be great to make the trip north on his bike. Although far from thrilled, his parents agreed on the condition that he find someone to go with him. A few days later I got the letter.
Jonathon’s plan was that I would arrive in Florida just as he was finishing his school year and we would return to N.S. together. The previous summer I had bought a second-hand motorcycle; actually it was more like third-or-fourth hand; a 1960 Honda that had seen better days. On my way to the Yarmouth ferry it started leaking oil and a mechanic in town discovered that a gasket needed replacing. When I told them I was on my way to Florida, the whole shop had a good laugh and told me this old junker would never make it. With a new gasket installed and those less-than-encouraging words ringing in my ears, I made my way to the ferry.
On the long trip across the Bay I passed the time by talking with the man in the next seat who was on his way home to Bangor after attending a church event in N.S. As we neared the Maine coast the sky darkened and it began to rain. Before we parted, my new-found friend handed me his address and told me that if I didn’t want to ride in this weather, he and his family could put me up. I hoped that once I got inland things would improve, but a half hour later it was pouring even harder, I was soaked and cold and the offer of shelter for the night started looking pretty good.
Arriving in Bangor, I was greeted with a hot meal and the opportunity to dry my clothes. Warm and fed, I was just getting ready to settle in for the evening when my host informed me that we were off to a Christian revival meeting. This meeting was held in a huge high-school auditorium with a couple of thousand people in attendance. The program involved performances by the school ROTC drill team, which consisted of marching back and forth while spinning and twirling rifles, which seemed a bit odd to me, it being a religious meeting and all, but everyone else seemed to enjoy it. The main speaker of the evening was Doug Anderson, an Olympic weight lifter who at one point was the strongest man in the world. He spoke about how religion helped him to overcome the effects of the flu to win a gold medal at the Olympics in Russia. He finished off his speech by lifting up a wooden platform with several football players and the cheerleading squad on it.
At six a.m. the next morning I was asked to help set up tables and chairs at the church for a breakfast meeting. It looked like it was going to be a nice day and I was eager to get on my way but I was reluctant to pass up free food so I packed up my bike and drove to the church. It turned out that the weightlifter from the night before was a special guest at this gathering. I had a very good breakfast and a nice chat with Mr. Anderson, who was interested in my trip and also in motorcycles, he said he used to have a Harley he rode around his farm, but it fell apart under his weight. He weighed about 350 lbs, all of it muscle, and had at one time set a world record by lifting more than 6000 pounds.
I finally got on the road and headed south. I had a tent and my plan was to camp out on the way. By the time I got to the State of Georgia, I had my system down pat. Just before dark I pulled off the main road onto a side road, found a field full of cornstalks, drove my bike around the perimeter of the field until I was out of sight and set up my tent at the edge of the woods. I felt pretty secure with this system, no one could see me, and nobody knew I was there. At some time during the night I was awoken by the sound of a loud roaring and thrashing going on somewhere in the woods. It didn’t seem to be getting any closer and eventually died out so I went back to sleep. The next morning I had just got back out on the main road when I noticed a large sign reading, "Warning! You are entering The Okefenokee Swamp. Please stay in your car and beware of alligators." I had camped on the edge of an alligator sanctuary! My sleep had been disturbed by alligators fighting! I wouldn’t have dozed off again so easily if I had known what was making all that noise.
I was now only a day or so from Gainsville and was just thinking how well my bike was running and how wrong the motorcycle shop guys were when the engine suddenly quit. I coasted to the side of the road and kicked the starter a few times, but no luck. After checking the gas, spark plug wires and everything I could think of, I took off a side cover to see a wire hanging down, vibration or wind had broken it off. The problem now was that there was no way to re-connect it to the small spot of solder that held it except by re-soldering. Stuck on the side of the road in Middle-of-Nowhere, Georgia, I couldn’t see how I was going to be able to fix this problem. Suddenly an idea occurred to me. I took a walk along the shoulder of the road and within a few yards came across just what I needed, a piece of scrap wire lying in the dirt. I twisted the bare end of the broken wire to the middle of the scrap wire and then tied it to the bike so that the wire made contact with the solder spot. I kicked the engine over and away she went. My side-of-the-road repair worked so well I left it like that until I got to Florida.
After a week in Gainsville, Jonathon and I were ready to hit the road north. We took a westerly route and rode up through Georgia on the Blue Ridge Mountain Skyway, a beautiful ride through a gorgeous part of the country. On our second day out we were cruising through a rural part of Georgia close to the Alabama border when we drove past a car with a flat tire. Four women dressed for church were standing by the open trunk obviously trying to figure out how to change the tire. We turned around and went back to see if we could help. When we got off our bikes one of the women announced that their husbands were fishing in a stream nearby and would be right back. It seemed a little odd to me that their husbands would leave them in their good clothes to change the tire, but I said "That’s OK, we don’t mind doing it", and I took the tire iron she was holding out of her hand. We changed the tire, the husbands still hadn’t returned, the women thanked us and we left.
It wasn’t until years later when I was thinking about this incident that I finally realised what was going on. The four women were black, we were in an area of the south where just a few years before and a few miles away in Birmingham and Montgomery, Alabama, race riots and anti-segregation demonstrations had taken place. When two white guys on motorcycles pulled up to their disabled car, I’m sure we must have looked like their worst nightmare. There were no husbands nearby, that was just a story to scare us off. I probably came within a hairsbreadth of getting that tire iron upside the head. But being a naïve guy from Brier Island, I was oblivious to all that at the time, I just saw some people who needed help and lent a hand.
The rest of the trip involved a two thousand mile detour to Cincinnati, Ohio to see a girl I had met for three days the previous summer, getting frisked at the border, rear-ending a taxi in Toronto and getting peppered by beetles while driving all night through Vermont to catch the Bar Harbour ferry back home. Except for the broken wire my bike ran perfectly the whole trip. I sold it a month later to someone in Digby, he came to Westport to pick it up and it died at Lake Midway on the way back. I guess the guys from Yarmouth were right after all, they just had their timing off a bit.
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