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.