Hand Made In Westport

By Ben Robicheau ~ brobicheau@cogeco.ca

Here we are with Christmas bearing down on us once again. As you are reading this, people all over the country are frantically running from store to store searching for just the right present, desperate to finally cross one more person off their list. Then paper, ribbons and bows are selected and our purchases are wrapped, decorated and finally artistically arranged to make an impressive pile under the tree. On Christmas morning all that careful folding and taping is quickly reduced to a red and green blizzard of flying scraps and we end up knee-deep in colourful drifts of crumpled paper. The vast majority of presents exchanged will most likely be manufactured in an anonymous factory in some distant land, but there will be a small percentage of this year’s Christmas gifts that will bear no nylon tag saying “Made in China or Thailand or India”, they won’t be encased in a plastic shell that’s almost impossible to open, and they won’t have a computer bar-code attached. Some of the most appreciated and treasured gifts are ones that were created by someone who took the time to sit down with a pair of knitting needles or a sewing machine or a hammer and some lumber and produce a one-of-a-kind item with you in mind.

When I was eleven or twelve, one of the most sought-after items by young boys on the island was a model boat. Frank Shaw was generally considered to be one of the finest model makers on the Island, from his shop in Irishtown he turned out some very high quality work. There were others, usually fishermen who whiled away the stormy winter days building miniature replicas of the same boats that were bobbing up and down at their moorings in the harbour, everything from Cape Islanders to draggers to herring seiners right down to exact copies of the punts and dories tied to their wharves. All these years later, any of these models that were lucky enough to survive are most likely sitting in a place of honour on a mantelpiece or in a sunroom, maybe protected in a glass box, treated as a piece of art. That wasn’t the original intent, these were built to be toys to be played with, not objects to be put on display.

As kids, we did have some appreciation for the detailed artistry that the more skilled model-makers put into their work; many hours must have been invested in reproducing not only the boat, but miniature trawl tubs, anchors, oars, gaffs and a lot of the other little items you would find on a fishing boat. Some of the models were exact copies of specific boats and it was kind of neat to be sailing your boat among the seaweed covered rocks of the shoreline and look up to see it’s full-size replica floating in the harbour. Someone, it must have been one of the Titus boys, had a model of the “Miss T”, the same boat that his father went fishing on. It took a lot of time and some considerable skill to produce these “toys”, but for the most part, all we kids were really interested in was, did it look like the boats we were used to seeing, would it float properly and how much “fish” (seaweed) would it carry.

As a child in Holland, my Uncle Benny had become interested in model-making. After moving to Canada after WWII, he lived in Westport for a while and learned a lot from Frank Shaw and the other model makers on the Island. He and his friend Donald McDormand honed their skills in Donald’s father’s fish shed. Benny says that Ace was quite tolerant of their interest in miniature ship building; a bit surprising, taking into consideration that the hulls of most of the ships they built were made from Ace’s wooden lobster buoys that they had split in two. My Uncle took what he learned in Ace’s shed and from the Island modelers and turned it into a life-long career. He worked for a couple of years as a cabinet-maker at the Saint John Shipyard where he built models of ship interiors and eventually moved on to a job as model maker for the Ontario Science Centre. His high-quality models of famous and historic ships can be seen in museums all over the world.

After the snow fell, there was another home-made toy that we used to enjoy, it also was a miniature replica of a common Island item, but this one required much less time, skill and material to produce. All you needed was a couple of trap laths, a hammer, a saw and a few nails. First, four short pieces of lathe would be sawed off and carved into the shape of runners, then two more short pieces would be used as front and rear supports for the runners, finally a longer piece of lathe would join the two units together, with the rear runners being solidly fixed and the front runners being attached with a single trap nail so they could swivel. What you now had was a very basic model of a bobsled. After tying a piece of fishing line to the front of the sled and the other end of the line to the other lathe, you could walk along and guide your sled over the snowdrifts. I remember seeing lots of little parallel lines in the snow along the side of the road.

Another winter toy I remember was one that I attempted to build myself, without much success as it turned out. One year someone got a pair of skis for Christmas, they looked like they were having a lot of fun with them on Joe’s Hill so I thought I would also like to take up skiing. Christmas had just passed by and my birthday wasn’t for another ten months so it didn’t look good for getting skis as a gift. Besides, chances were pretty good that my father would look at any request from someone who lived on Brier Island to spend good money on skis as the height of foolishness, after all, the island is noticeably lacking in mountains, a basic requirement for making any real use of skis.

As I mulled over my problem, it occurred to me that barrel staves are sort of shaped like skis, and as it happened I was aware of the location of an old barrel that had fallen apart after the steel retaining rings had rusted away. After yanking out a couple of suitable looking staves, I cut a few pieces of cod line from an old, retired trawl and nailed these to the staves. This would do as bindings to attach my feet to the skis. Next I needed poles to go with my skis and I knew just where to get them. The old smoke house had bundles of “herring stringers”, long thin poles that fish were strung on while they hung in the racks being smoked. I selected a couple of these black, greasy, smoked herring smelling sticks and set off for Joe’s Hill, my skiing ensemble now complete.

By the time I got to the top of the hill I was nearly exhausted, my skis were almost two inches thick and had obviously soaked up a lot of water over the years, they were quite heavy and I didn’t look forward to carrying them up the hill again. But, standing on the top of Joe’s Hill and observing the wide expanse of snow before me, I figured I would have so much fun skiing down that I probably wouldn’t mind walking back up. To make sure that I didn’t go too fast and too far and hit the fence at the bottom of the field, I picked a spot on the hill that wasn’t too steep for my first run.

After tying the cod lines to my boots, I stood up, set my herring stringer poles, and pushed off... except I didn’t move an inch. I tried again, a little harder this time...still nothing, maybe I needed to be on a steeper section of the hill. I laboriously shuffled over to a better spot and tried again... same result, no amount of pushing or trying to slide my skis back and forth would get me going. I ended up on the steepest section I could find, pushing with my poles and leaning as far forward as I dared, I felt like I was on an almost vertical incline but nothing would make those skis slide, I could have been on the steepest slope in the Alps and it wouldn’t have made a difference. Who would have thought that making skis out of rough lumber that has been soaking in fish-pickling brine for forty years or so would turn out to be a bad idea?

I ended up stepping out of my cod line bindings and walking away, for all I know the barrel stave skis are still there, pointing down the side of the hill, waiting for some other poor soul to give them a try. Years later I took up skiing again, but with proper equipment and on a real ski hill this time, I enjoyed it, it was a lot of fun finally getting to zoom down the hill, but I’ll never forget my first ski experience on Joe’s Hill.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to all.

"Hello Elsie, Get Me Twenty-One Ring Two"

by Ben Robicheau ~ brobicheau@cogeco.ca

Today’s technology makes it possible for people to be connected in more ways than ever before. There are just the two of us at home, yet we have a home phone, a cell phone, my work cell phone, Randi’s work Blackberry and her office phone; that’s five phone numbers for just two people. Plus we have a home e-mail address as well as Randi’s work e-mail. People can also contact me though Facebook or through a blog I have. And of course as a last resort there’s what many people consider the old fashioned way; sit down with a pen and paper, put the letter in an envelope and stick it in the mail; snail mail some call it. I haven’t made it onto Twitter yet, although I do have a couple of friends who make a bit of extra money writing updates for other people who feel the need to have a Twitter account but are either too busy or too technologically inept to do it for themselves.

We have become so accustomed to near-constant contact that we now take it for granted without really appreciating it. This was brought home to us several years ago when our daughter Sarah spent a couple of months volunteering for an infrastructure rebuilding project in rural Costa Rica. In order to talk to us, she had to fend off the occasional wild dog pack while hiking for an hour on trails and dirt roads to get to the nearest town and then stand in line to use the only public phone in the only store in the village. Once she got to the phone it was usually hit-and-miss on whether we would be home to accept her call. After several missed calls, we began to make sure at least one of us was home all the time. When she did get us, she was a bit restricted in what she could say because everyone in the store was able to overhear her conversation; also, her time was limited because the next person in line was standing behind her waiting to make their call. A couple of years later, she went to work in the Philippines for the summer. This time she had all the modern conveniences, she was in an office in a city and was supplied with a cell phone and Internet access. The phone didn’t work all that well for international calls so she ended up using it mostly for texting. For calls we installed Skype on our computer and this worked great. It felt very futuristic to be able to call someone part-way around the world and see them as you talked with them.

It was not all that long ago when just being able to hear another person’s voice over a wire seemed like an incredible thing. The first phone that I can remember was a big wooden box that hung on the wall. For some reason this modern convenience had been installed in our unheated porch, so you had to practically go outside to use the phone, not too comfortable in the winter. It was made of some kind of varnished hardwood, possibly oak, and had a little shelf on the front. An adjustable arm stuck out just above this shelf and held the mouthpiece, a black cup that you spoke into, on the side of the box was another cup connected to a wire, you held this up to your ear in order to hear the person on the other end. Also on the side of the box was a crank; to call someone on your line you just turned this crank in a way that produced a series of long and short rings, each phone on the line had a set of distinctive rings, one long and three short or two short and one long or some variation of this pattern.

A couple of people on the Island had private lines, but this was more expensive, so most of us were on a party line; this was a line shared by several people so when someone called it would ring in every house on that line, and everyone would know by the series of rings who was getting a call. If you wanted to make a call, you would have to pick up the earpiece and listen first to make sure no one else was using the line. Sometimes you might have to ask some long-winded neighbour to get off the line so you could use it. Every party line seemed to have at least one person who couldn’t resist the urge to listen in on other people’s calls. Anyone talking on a party line would be wise to assume that there might be a silent third party listening in and occasionally would have their suspicions confirmed when the listener would forget they weren’t supposed to be there and spontaneously joined in the conversation. There were times when the party line came in handy, if you were next door and someone rang your number, you could answer from your neighbour’s house, or if you were expecting a call but were not going to be at home you could ask someone else on the same line to pick up and take a message if they heard your number being called. Once in a while some important event would take place that affected the whole community, and when the phone rang everybody on the line might pick up no matter who it was for.

If you wanted to call someone who wasn’t on your own party line you had to go through the operator. For many years the switchboard for the islands was located in Freeport at the home of Elsie Young. Elsie’s job was not an easy one, she was basically on duty twenty-four hours a day seven days a week, although once in a while a caller would be momentarily startled to be greeted by the gruff voice of her husband Charlie on the line, giving Elsie a break. Several of the Island’s teen-age girls also worked part-time over the years as relief operators so the Youngs could have some time away from the maze of plugs and wires.

The phone number you gave the operator consisted of the line the person was on and then their number on that line, written down it looked like 22-4, which translated to twenty-two ring four when spoken. In addition to connecting the caller with the correct customer, Elsie was often called upon to take or pass along messages, look up phone numbers and act as our own emergency operator. In those pre-911 days, if some disaster happened on the Islands, all you had to do was call Elsie and let her know about it, she would handle it from there by alerting the appropriate people. If anyone wanted reliable information as to what was going on on either island, Elsie could most likely fill them in. Due to her position, she must have inadvertently come across a lot of juicy gossip, but as far as I know, she was very good at keeping it to herself. In some ways Elsie was almost a wizard at her job, often knowing who it was you wanted to call even before you told her. I remember my father, who had a habit of blanking out on people’s names, once telling her he wanted to talk to “that farmer that lives halfway up the Island”, within seconds she had him connected to the exact person he had been thinking of.

The big wooden box in our porch was eventually replaced with a smaller wooden box with a black one-piece handset which was sensibly relocated inside to the kitchen. Sometime around the end of the sixties the Maritime Tel & Tel guys showed up and removed all the wooden phone boxes and replaced them with modern black plastic contraptions. Jerry Hoare of Digby was one of the phone company employees who switched all the phones on Digby Neck, he says they drove truckloads of the old wooden boxes to the dump. With this massive change-over the end of an era was reached, the Islands had become one of the last places in Nova Scotia to be converted to dial-up and the Freeport exchange was no longer needed.

Things have changed a lot since The Westport and Digby Telephone Company started up in 1904, folding a year later after reaching a peak of fifteen customers. Today we can carry around in our pocket a phone that can do more things and handle more traffic than Elsie at her switchboard could ever dream of. Still, there was something comforting about making a phone call in the middle of the night and hearing a human voice on the line. It was reassuring to know that Elsie was there and that she was your connection to the rest of the world.

Hurricane Season

by Ben Robicheau ~ brobicheau@cogeco.ca

The world was dramatically reminded of the devastating power of the hurricane when Katrina nearly wiped out the city of New Orleans a few years ago. Since then, any tropical storm that develops is intently tracked and breathlessly reported on by various news sources who all seem to think that they have discovered some new and unique phenomenon.

Here on the islands we are well acquainted with the storms that arrive every Fall with unfailing regularity. One of the first officially recorded hurricanes in this area was the 1869 Saxby Gale which happened to strike The Bay of Fundy region during a Saros tide; an unusually high tide that occurs once every eighteen years; causing severe flooding in New Brunswick and Nova Scotia. A few years later, in August of 1873 Eastern Canada was hit with what was probably its worst storm in recorded history. What became known as The Nova Scotia Hurricane left over 600 people dead and destroyed more than 1,200 boats and 900 buildings. It was the first storm for which an official hurricane warning was issued.

In more recent times we have experienced Hurricane Juan, which thankfully missed most of this end of the province but hit Halifax hard, causing over $300 million in damage and taking the lives of eight people. Juan is considered to be the worst storm to hit Halifax since 1893. Because of the havoc Juan wreaked, the name was officially retired from use.

Closer to home, our own worst storm of the century would have to be the Groundhog Day Storm of 1976, which, like The Saxby Gale, arrived on a Saros tide. Although classified as a winter storm, it carried sustained winds of 164km/hr, making it equal to a Category 2 hurricane. It struck an unprepared coastline almost without warning and did tens of millions of dollars in damage to roadways, utilities, buildings and fishing equipment in the south-west area of the Province. Thankfully, storms of the destructive calibre of Juan and The Groundhog Storm are not the norm.

Still, even a small hurricane is not something to be taken lightly. Even as a child I became aware of a tension in the air as we got towards the end of August. This was due to the uncertainty that the fishermen and anyone who had property on the waterfront began to feel as we got into that time of year when things started brewing in the southern oceans. It was only a matter of time before one of those storms would come knocking on our door. The big question was; how hard would it knock?

As storms were reported heading our way, fishermen would start making preparations. The expected fierceness of the storm, the direction it was coming from, and where the tide would be when it hit, were all factors to be taken into consideration. If wind speeds were not too high and the tide was expected to be low during the worst of the storm, some might take a chance on grounding their boats out at the high water mark or riding it out on the moorings. If it looked like things might get dirty, then boats might be tied up on the lee side of the breakwater or hauled right out onto dry land. If even more ferocious winds were expected, they could make for the safety of the Freeport cove or across St. Mary’s bay to Meteghan or even up the Sissaboo River at Weymouth. In Tiverton, if the tide was right and you could fit under the bridge, there was room to tie up a few boats in the pond.

Ashore, things were getting busy too. Punts were hauled up off the beach, gear on wharves was either stowed away or lashed down and extra lines and bumpers were secured on boats at the wharf. Precautions were also taken at home. Fresh batteries were laid in, oil lamps were filled and candles were counted ready for the inevitable power outage: and if your house was on the Front Road, you might want to board up your windows.

Then, after all that preparation and worry, we would usually have one of the nicest days of the summer. The air being pushed in front of the hurricane often brought a blazing sun in a cloudless sky and weather that was muggy and hot and deadly still. Although this was a nice break from the usual Island weather of fog or cold ocean wind, it had an ominous feeling about it, and it usually only lasted a few hours.

The first indication that things were about to turn nasty was when you suddenly realized that the dead calm had given way to a light breeze. This gentle wind would steadily increase in intensity until, before you knew it, you found yourself fighting to stay on your feet while being pelted by sheets of horizontal rain. O.K., now we were getting down to it, this thing that the fishermen on the wharves, the old men on the store bench and the kids at school had been talking about for the last few days, was finally here.

Being a kid and not realizing the full destructive potential of a storm like this, I enjoyed the wildness and ferocity of a hurricane and saw it as nothing more than a time of excitement and adventure. Everyone seemed on high alert, the village actually seemed busier than on a normal day, men were out on the streets and wharves in their oilskins and rubber boots, talking among themselves while constantly checking lines and keeping a sharp eye out for signs that some timber or post might be starting to weaken under the relentless pounding of the waves and wind.

Sometimes, there would be a sudden burst of action when someone’s boat would break free from its moorings and drift towards the rocks or a log would get loose in the rolling waves and start smashing the poles out from under someone’s wharf. Then you might see someone risking his life to jump onto the heaving deck of a boat beating itself to pieces against a wharf, or two men working together to lasso and tie off a piece of floating debris before it could do further damage.

At home, mothers were busy trying to keep their children away from the windows and distracted from the howling noise outside. I remember when one particularly vicious storm sent a large beach rock flying through our living-room window; my sisters and I spent the next several hours huddled around a candle in the bathroom sitting on sofa cushions listening to my mother tell stories and sing songs.

But with most of the storms, it was usually just a long night of wind and rain and the occasional dramatic spray of salt water over the road. If the eye of the storm happened to pass directly overhead, the wind would diminish at some point and the sun or stars would appear for a short time in a clear, cloudless sky; then the wind would start again, but from the opposite direction this time as the back half of the storm moved over us.

After it was all over, there would be some cleaning up to do. Even if it was a disappointingly meek hurricane, there would still be the odd section of missing breastwork, maybe a few yards of washed-out roadway, a few missing boards on a few wharves and the neat little shoal of beach gravel and sand in someone’s front yard where the waves came across the Front Road. Up at The Dike you would probably see two things, the road covered with flat stones and the Nova Scotia Power crew trying to get the power back on. The underwater cable that carries the electricity to the Island comes ashore here and it seems that the flying salt spray from every storm big or small, manages to short out the transformers and burn off the connectors.

When the power went out, I used to hope that it would take several days to restore it. As soon as the lights went off, Dad would head to his store and lock up the ice cream freezer, he would cover it with blankets and put pop cases on the lids to keep them closed and keep the cold in. This would keep things frozen for about three or four days, after that it was a lost cause and there would be nothing left to do but eat the ice cream before it all totally melted. I was always willing to do my part to see it didn’t go to waste.

Just recently, hurricane Igor blasted across Newfoundland, tearing up roads, blowing down power lines, and sweeping one unfortunate soul out to sea. The lethal combination of blasting wind, torrential rain and pounding waves that we call a hurricane has once again (as if we needed it) reminded us of the fierce power of Mother Nature.

California Dreamin’

by Ben Robicheau – brobicheau@cogeco.ca

I became a teen-ager at the beginning of the 1960’s. Most of these formative years were spent listening to the evolution of Rock and Roll music as broadcast across the Gulf of Maine by D.J. Arnie (Woo Woo) Ginsberg on Boston radio station WMEX. The airwaves of the time were dominated by West Coast groups like The Beach Boys and Jan and Dean singing songs about sun, surf, girls and cars. Songs like Surf City, Surfin’ Safari, Little Deuce Coupe, Drag City, Little G.T.O. and California Girls painted a picture of a lifestyle that we could only dream of. In our minds, every guy on the West Coast spent his days cruising around in a fast car with a hot chick by his side and a surfboard strapped to the roof. He was always either on the way to Waikiki or Kokomo to catch some wild surf or out looking for someone with an equally hot car and hot chick to drag race with.

Here on the East Coast my friends and I did our best to copy what we thought was the California lifestyle. After all, living here on the coast surrounded by the sea was not all that different from being in California if you overlooked the fact that on most days you couldn’t see the sun through the fog and tried to ignore the total absence of both surfing beaches and endless highways for driving and racing. We tried hard to convince ourselves, but to be truthful, the severe shortage of endless summers, cool cars and sun-tanned, bikini-wearing, blonde-haired beach babes really made it difficult to accurately emulate those laid-back surfer dudes.

Still, we did the best we could with what we had. We tried to copy the surfer look by making surfing shorts out of cut-off pants, these were called “baggies” and we wore them faithfully, even though our knees sometimes turned blue from the cold. We even made a surfboard out of some scrap plywood and almost froze our baggies off trying to surf at Pond Cove. Since the board couldn’t really support a person and the waves were nowhere close to being big enough to ride on anyway, our surfin’ safari wasn’t all that successful. The best we could do was to float the board in the water near the shore, then run down the beach, jump on it and skid out ten or fifteen feet before sinking in the ice-cold water. We eventually came to the realization that our island was not exactly equipped to allow us to follow the surfer’s life. The only time we got any real big surf was during hurricanes and winter storms; not the best time to hit the beach. So we turned our attention to another important aspect of teenage life, cars.

We might not have surf, but we did have cars. Although we didn’t have the bored and stroked, chopped and channelled, metal-flake painted, tire-smoking, screamin’ machines that we pored over in the pages of Hot Rod Magazine, the cars we did have had one advantage, they were cheap. Ricky and Wayne went in together and invested $12.50 each in an old Chev they bought from Dick Thompson. They soon decided their new ride would look better as a convertible and using high-tech tools like an axe, a hacksaw and a sledgehammer, went to work “customizing” it. They got the roof off OK, but didn’t stop there, by the time they were done, all that remained of the body was the front fenders, windshield, front doors and front seat. A rope across the back of the seat tied the doors together to keep them shut.

This Island version of a California Hot Rod lasted less than a week. One afternoon they stopped to ask if I wanted to go for a ride, the only seat was crammed full with four people so I would have to crouch down on the floor behind the seat and hang on to the rope. I decided to pass on their offer, a good decision as it turned out; about twenty minutes later I heard that they had flipped the car on Pea Jack Road. Two riders were thrown clear and the other two were able to duck down in the seat as the car rolled completely upside down on top of them. Except for a bit of road rash and a few bumps and scrapes, all escaped with only minor injuries.

The summer he was seventeen, my friend Leonard got a job in one of the fishplants. He decided that the wisest thing to do with his first paycheck was to buy a car. Luckily for him, The Digby Courier that week had a big ad for Weymouth Motors offering terrific deals on a variety of used cars in near-perfect condition. One of these excellent vehicles, a nearly twenty year old Pontiac, was on sale for the unbelievably low price of only $99.00.

Leonard didn’t have a driver’s licence so he asked if I would come with him to drive his new car home. We arrived at Weymouth Motors and found his car sitting dejectedly at the back of the lot with two flat tires. After pumping up the tires and a bit of tinkering by the mechanic to boost the dead battery and get the engine started, we were ready to hit the road. This turned out to be easier said than done. To get out of town you had to cross a one-lane bridge and then go up a steep hill. Half-way up the hill, the car gradually came to a stop; it didn’t have the power to go any farther. We turned around and went back to the garage where they told us the engine hadn’t been run for quite a while and probably just needed to warm up.

We spent the next hour trying to get out of town, we tried going as far up the hill in the opposite direction as we could get, then turned around and bombed through town as fast as we dared to go, weaving through traffic and dodging pedestrians. If we were lucky, we wouldn’t have to stop for someone on the bridge and we could get a running shot at the hill. We made several attempts, and on one of these it looked like we were finally going to make it to the top when at the last minute, a train crossed the road at the top of the hill. We had to stop with the rest of the traffic and when the other cars finally pulled away, we were left sitting there without the power to get going again. We headed back to the garage once again and this time convinced them that there was definitely something wrong with the car. They said leave it for a few days and they’d take a look at it. We hitch-hiked home and returned a week later to find that the problem had been a cracked distributer cap; this time we roared up the hill with no trouble at all.

My own first car was a 1956 Chev. On rainy days you had to watch out for water and mud flying up through the holes in the floor and everywhere I went I was followed by a thick cloud of oily smoke because it burned almost as much oil as it did gas, but it was still a bargain for $65.00. I eventually was able to eliminate the major problems by installing a plywood floor and rebuilding the engine myself. I didn’t really know what I was doing with the engine, so I’d work along until I got stuck, then go ask Ace McDormand or one of the other local self-taught mechanics what to do next. Surprisingly, when I eventually got it all back together, it actually ran!

In those days annual mechanical inspections were not required and even insurance was not mandatory. Once you paid for the car, your only other expense was gas and registration, and there were ways around both of those. If you stayed on the island, you could get away without license plates or even a driver’s license. I’m sure a lot of people weren’t too happy about us unlicensed drivers cruising around the island in our unregistered cars, but we saw all that paperwork as just a lot of unnecessary hassle and expense. Even the cost of putting gas in your car could by reduced by using boat gas, which was cheaper than regular gas, but also illegal.

I’m sure the Beach Boys didn’t have Pond Cove and chopped up old cars in mind when they sang their songs glorifying the California lifestyle, and I’m sure they would have got a good laugh out of our attempts to copy what we thought was the daily life of the West Coast teen-ager, but looking back on it, we had a lot of fun and freedom back then and in our own way developed our own coastal lifestyle.

Family Day Adventures

In our family, Sunday was usually the only day when we got to do something all together. Dad worked at the fishplant five and a half days a week, (they only worked until noon on Saturday), and also worked Monday to Saturday evenings in the store, so that left only one day for family activities.

Usually our family outings involved driving somewhere. Sometimes it was just around the Island to see the sights, sometimes it was a drive to the lighthouse or Pond Cove or Scattaway Cove for a wiener roast or picnic. We seemed to go on a lot of picnics, I guess it was an economical way to entertain and feed a large group of kids.

My father used to own a piece of land half-way down the Western Light road. The part nearest the road was a sort of gravel pit, but farther back there was a woodlot where Dad used to cut firewood when we still had a woodstove at home. In this area in a small clearing among the trees, Dad had built a little picnic area, complete with a fire pit, a swing suspended between two of the trees and a teeter-totter and picnic table made out of boards and logs. Many of our drives ended up here; on days when the beach was too cold or windy or foggy (sometimes all three at once), it was often quite pleasant in this place in the middle of the island.

I remember one Sunday when we had set out specifically to visit our forest picnic spot. We hiked in loaded down with hot dogs and marshmallows and a whole variety of picnic goodies. After some time spent swinging and teetering and running around gathering up twigs and sticks for the fire, we were ready to start roasting some hot dogs. Then Dad discovered that he had forgotten the matches. To hike back out to get matches would take a lot longer than we hungry hot dog craving kids could bear, so Dad came up with a solution to our problem. He had carried in the supplies in an old orange crate which was made out of strips of some type of light, thin wood, he broke off a couple of pieces of this wood and began rubbing them together.

Now, I had seen Tonto make fire like this for the Lone Ranger dozens of times on TV, but I had never seen it done in real life and wasn’t sure it could really be done; maybe it was one of those things that only happened in the movies, like shooting ten shots from a six-shooter or cowboys playing guitar while riding their horse and singing a song at the end of every adventure. After several minutes of trying to produce fire with friction the only thing heating up was Dad. The beads of sweat were standing out on his forehead and I was thinking that unless Tonto showed up, we weren’t going to be roasting anything today, when suddenly a wisp of smoke curled up from the piece of orange crate under his hand. Dad increased his efforts and now I could see a tiny glowing spot on the wood. With a little gentle blowing and the addition of bits of dried moss and some shredded birch bark, the glowing ember burst into flame and within seconds we had a real fire going. I was very impressed and spent the rest of the day thinking that I now had something in common with the Lone Ranger.

Not all of our Sunday drives were restricted to the Island, we sometimes ventured up the Neck to take a dip in the usually frigid waters of Lake Midway or maybe all the way out to South Range and Porters Lake where a couple of friends had cottages where we could enjoy the exotic experience of playing in water that didn’t turn you blue after five minutes. Occasionally Dad would combine business with pleasure and load up the truck with kids and fish and head up the Valley to do some trading for apples, berries or whatever was in season (he just traded the fish, not the kids).

For many years a truck was the only vehicle we had, so except for the two youngest, who got to ride in the cab, all us kids rode in the back. On long trips it wasn’t all that comfortable, although we did have an old tarp for protection in case of rain or snow. It also tended to get kind of boring back there looking at where you had been instead of where you were going. We passed the time by trying to get the people in the car behind us to wave back or by trying to think up other things to entertain ourselves. On one trip down Digby Neck, Dad became a bit annoyed when he looked in the rear-view mirror and noticed that we were pelting mailboxes with the apples he had just traded his salt fish for.

When I was eleven years old in June of 1960, we left home for a trip up the Valley. We travelled through Digby and Annapolis Royal, crossing over the Annapolis River on the Granville Ferry bridge. That afternoon we were on our way back home and stopped at a roadside park just past Bridgetown for a bite to eat (another picnic). My father got chatting with some other people in the park and when they heard we were heading toward Digby they told us we wouldn’t be able to get there on this road because the Granville bridge was gone. Apparently, just a couple of hours after we crossed it, the bridge had collapsed into the river. I remember feeling cut off from home and stranded at hearing this news, I guess I thought the bridge was like a ferry, if it wasn’t working, you were stuck where you were; of course all we had to do was go back to Bridgetown and cross over to the road on the other side of the river.

Another Sunday pastime we used to enjoy was going for hikes along the shore. On one of our walks, Dad invited Sidney Melanson along. Sydney was from the Meteghan area and worked for Dad in the fishplant, he was a good worker but didn’t seem to be the type who would look at any form of exercise as entertainment. However, he agreed to come along and we set out for Pond Cove. The plan was to walk from the Point d’ Field across the pond wall to the camp road. Ordinarily this would be a fairly easy walk, but we were in late September, there was a strong wind blowing with big rollers breaking onshore and it was almost high tide.

Hiking across in front of Big Pond, we were able to stay back from the water and, except for the occasional scattering of light spray, all went well. The pond wall in front of Little Pond was a lot narrower and closer to the water, here we ran into a bit of a problem. By the time we got to it, the waves were breaking right over the wall into the pond. We considered turning around but by now the tide had come up farther and it was just as bad behind us, plus it was farther to go back than forward. After hunkering down behind a big log for a while, Dad noticed that it was only the third wave that was big enough to come right over the wall, if we timed it right we should be able to run across before the next wave hit. Dad would go first, then Sydney and I would go together.

Sydney was looking kind of scared and didn’t appear to be too sure about this plan, but as soon as the next wave withdrew, Dad took off running and he made it to the other side just before the next big breaker hit. Now it was our turn. I waited for the right time and then made my dash with Sydney right behind, part way across Sydney decided he wasn’t going to make it and turned back. I got to the other side just in time to see him disappear behind a wall of foaming spray. When all had cleared he was nowhere to be seen and we were starting to think he had been carried out to sea when his head popped up from behind the log, he was soaked, but safe. But now he wasn’t going to move from that log, no amount of yelling could convince him. Finally Dad had to run back and get him. It wasn’t all that dangerous, it was just a matter of timing, but Sydney was convinced that he had barely escaped with his life. For some reason he never took us up on another offer to go hiking.

Westport Academy

By Ben Robicheau ~ brobicheau@cogeco.ca

For over a hundred years it stood there on the Back Road, a solid, some might say imposing structure, resplendent in its coat of red painted shingles, the tall rows of small-paned windows looking out over the village. For some, it was a place of opportunity and excitement, a place for learning and exploring and socializing. For others it was nothing more than a dungeon, a boring routine of daily torture where they grudgingly marked time in a hard wooden seat until that happy day when their physical presence there would no longer be legally required.

The big, old, two-story building consisted of four large rooms, two on each side, separated by a bell tower above a central hallway. Back when the school was built, the Island population was larger and all four rooms were used as classrooms, but by the fifties, one of the upper rooms had been converted to a rudimentary gym and the grades were distributed among the remaining three rooms. Louise Garron taught primary to four in the ground floor room on the “up-the-road” side, Greta Swift had a reputation for not taking any foolishness from the young teen-agers in grades five to eight in her room across the hall, and Helen Welch presided over the “big kids” upstairs in grades nine to twelve.

I remember climbing up the grey stone steps on my first day of school, excited and a little scared to be joining the other kids behind the old green door with the well-worn brass handle and thumb-latch. One of the first things that I noticed was the big, black, cast-iron stove in the middle of the room. The back part of the porch that I had just passed through on my way in was actually a coal bin where the fuel to heat the school was stored, piled up in dusty burlap sacks. In the winter time, the school janitor would have a roaring fire going by the time we got to school, and throughout the day one or another of the high-school boys would be assigned to tend to the fire at recess and noon.

On the coldest and windiest winter days, the old stove would sometimes get cherry red in its attempt to heat the farthest reaches of the draughty old classroom. With most of one wall made up of heat-sucking windows, twelve-foot ceilings, no insulation and a floor that had cracks between the boards big enough to lose your ruler or even your pencil through, students seated close to the stove would roast while those near the windows would shiver with the cold. After a recess of frantic tunnel building or a rousing snowball fight, the snow-covered kids would strip off their sodden snow suits and hang them on the hooks at the back of the room and arrange their wet mittens and boots on the sheet of tin that covered the floor around the hot stove. Within short order, the room would fill with the unmistakable smell of wet wool and overheated bodies; you could actually see the steam rising from the damp clothes of those students sitting nearest the stove.

The old pot-bellied stove was a source of fascination to me with its iron door in the front where the coal was fed in, the long black stovepipe that went straight up and then, suspended from the ceiling by wires, ran along high above the teacher’s desk and out through the wall, the coal scuttle and shovel that sat by the stove, the shiny brass decorative ring that circled the top edge of the stove, the little cracks and gaps through which you could see the flames, were all endlessly interesting to a little kid. The bigger kids liked the old stoves too, every once in a while when the teacher wasn’t looking, someone would flip an eraser onto the hot top of the stove and the resulting stench of burning rubber would cause a brief evacuation. If the weather wasn’t too bad everyone would go outside while the teacher opened a window to air out the room; if it was too cold or rainy, they would just huddle in the porch or go into the central hallway for a while. I was shocked when I returned to school after summer vacation one year to find a nondescript brown metal box sitting in the middle of the classroom. The old coal-burners had been replaced with oil stoves, modern times were catching up with Westport Academy.

Well, things didn’t get all that modern, there was still no running water in the building. Every morning one of the older boys would go over to the Parsonage next door and bring back a pail of water for the metal cooler that sat on a shelf in the corner of the room. One ritual that I always looked forward to was the morning line-up to take our daily school-issued dose of cod liver oil. The teacher had a huge jar of capsules and she would pour out some into the lid and place it on the corner of her desk where we would each pick up a capsule and a paper cup as our line snaked its way to the cooler. Most kids hated cod liver oil, but I loved the taste of it and I would usually help some of the others out by swallowing their capsules as well as my own.

The lack of plumbing also made bathroom breaks kind of interesting. Our “boys and girls rooms” were side-by-side outhouses out behind the school. They were attached to the building by an enclosed runway so at least we were afforded the luxury of not having to go outside to get to them. Because they were unheated, in the winter you didn’t use the bathroom unless you really had to and then you usually took care of business as fast as possible in order to avoid the chance of frostbite in some tender areas.

On the side of the property next to the primary grade room, we also had a playground. We thought it was pretty good at the time, but most parents today would probably be horrified to let their kids play there. There wasn’t a lot of equipment, but what there was, was solidly built and had the added attraction of being potentially dangerous. The teeter-totter consisted of two fifteen foot two-by-eight planks. When you were on the “up” side of this, you were about five feet off the ground. One of the great pranks was to get some unsuspecting kid up in the air and then keep him there, or worse, jump off and let him crash to the ground. There are probably several people walking around right now with compressed spines because of this, they most likely would be a couple of inches taller if they had never fallen victim to the Westport Academy teeter-totter scam. There was also a swing set where you could get up some really great speed, the objective was to swing as high as the bar to which the swing chains were attached, there was a theory that it was possible to swing right around the bar, and many tried hard to achieve this goal, but as far as I know it was never accomplished.

The older kids spent their recess and noon times in the upstairs gym playing basketball or volleyball or maybe a bit of badminton. As soon as the weather warmed up, the activities moved outside and consisted mainly of playing ball on the road in front of the school. During his high-school years, Gary Frost managed to knock out more than a few school windows hitting home runs. I remember sitting in class one spring day when a red, white and blue rubber ball crashed through the window, ricocheted off Mrs. Swift’s desk and disappeared into the far corner of the room. We found the ball a few days later, jammed into the corner between the wall and a table leg.

When the new school opened, the old building was sold to Vic Strickland to be used as a workshop and storage for all his odds and ends. Later on, it was sold to an American who seemed to intend turning it into apartments, he made a good start on this, painting and fixing up the exterior, but then seemed to lose interest and the building gradually began to deteriorate again. For many years, there appears to have been some doubt about who owned the building and it fell farther and farther into disrepair. Then, just a few years ago, a group of forward-looking people on the Island started to work towards turning it into a museum; progress was made, items were collected and it looked like the old place might continue to have a valuable position in the community once more.

Sadly, this was not to be. Just when so many people were putting forth an effort to save a piece of island history, someone whose main accomplishment in life seems to be that he unfortunately developed the ability to light a match decided to send all their work, plans and hopes up in smoke. The Island had, in one reprehensible and pointless act of vandalism lost both a symbol of its past and a benefit to its future.

GO PLAY OUTSIDE

by Ben Robicheau ~ brobicheau@cogeco.ca

When I was growing up on Brier Island, we had yet to be invaded by the electronic baby-sitters. This was a time before Xbox or Wii, a time when friends spoke to friends face-to-face instead of on Facebook, it was long before the internet or video games or laptop computers or Ipods; it was even before the advent of VCRs and colour T.V. In those days, if a kid was looking for adventure, instead of sitting in front of a video screen lost in a virtual world, he just walked out the door into the real world. Parents were more relaxed about their children then; they didn’t constantly supervise their kids to make sure they were being entertained or stimulated every second of the day. If you were bored, it was up to you to go find something interesting to do.

On the Islands we probably had a bit more freedom to roam than most kids did. It was not uncommon on a summer’s morning to take off for the back shore or Pond Cove and be gone all day. As long as you were home for supper, your parents usually wouldn’t give a second thought to your whereabouts. If they did want to find out what you were up to, everyone on the island knew everyone else so there was usually someone who could tell them. If a kid was doing something he shouldn’t, any adult could order him to “get the devil out of there” and most kids would obey without question; if you didn’t, you would be sure to hear about it when you got home.

Of course, we did get pretty good at coming up with projects that would take us out from under the watchful eyes of adults. One of the popular summertime activities was the building of “camps”. Some of the older boys built quite elaborate ones, complete with bunks and wood stoves, where they would sometimes stay overnight. But most of the camps, although started with grand ambitions and elaborate plans, usually ended up being rather crude lean-tos thrown together with scrap lumber, tree branches and alders. The construction of the camp was usually the most exciting part, once it was finished we might visit it a few times before interest would wane and we’d go on to our next project.

One summer, a group of us started playing “Cowboys and Indians” on the back shore. We made bows out of alders and arrows out of long straight reeds, and spent several days chasing each other all over Harris’s Bluff, arguing over who was shot and who wasn’t. When a couple of the Indians started making pointed arrows out of solid wood and one of the Cowboys showed up with a loaded .22 rifle and proceeded to ricochet bullets off a rock some of us were hiding behind, we decided things were getting a bit out of hand and that was the end of that game.

Swimming is a common summer activity for most kids, but not so much for Islanders. There are usually only a few days each summer when it is warm enough to tempt the more hardy souls into the water. Pond Cove was always a popular spot on a sunny day, the beach sand would warm up enough to give the false impression that the water might actually be bearable, but the waves rolling into the cove were coming straight out of the Atlantic and most people could only stay in for a few minutes before blue lips, uncontrollable shivering and the real possibility of hypothermia became a concern. Occasionally someone would try swimming on the pond side of Pond Cove where the water was warmer but it was also stagnant and you would sink up to your knees in the black mud.

Instead of going all the way to Pond Cove, a lot of kids would swim off the wharves in town. The usual procedure here was to jump off the wharf into the water, swim quickly to shore before your extremities went numb, warm up a bit and repeat. One summer some kids were jumping off Melbourne McDormand’s wharf next to the ferry slip; it looked like fun and the water temperature near the beach felt bearable, so I decided to give it a try. It was about a twenty foot jump from the wharf, so I went in deep; the water this far down was so cold that the shock gave me an instant headache and took the breath right out of me, I felt like I didn’t have enough air to get back to the surface. When I finally did make it to the surface, I headed straight to shore and that is the last time I went swimming in Westport.

Another popular pastime on the Island was rowing. Some of the fishermen didn’t mind if you borrowed their punt, (as long as you returned it in good condition and tied it up properly) so we often spent hours rowing along the waterfront. Every once in a while someone would over-estimate their rowing abilities and a rescue mission would have to be mounted to retrieve a frantic kid from the tide that was about to carry him and his borrowed craft out through the passage. To avoid this kind of disaster, the smaller kids would leave the punt tied by its bow or stern line and just row back and forth the length of the rope: the fun of rowing without the risk of being swept out to sea.

As small children, Natalie, Wendy and Angela Gower used to enjoy little rowing excursions in Duffy’s punt until one fateful evening when they realized that the light was fading and they weren’t sure that they could get back to the wharf before night fell. The girls were beginning to panic about being lost on the ocean in the dark when Angela saved the day by hiking her dress up around her waist, jumping over the side and pulling the punt and her terrified sisters in to shore. Angela was a hero to her sisters, who believed she had saved their lives; a feeling that didn’t diminish even after they later realized that the bow line had been tied to the wharf the whole time and they had only been a few feet from shore.

Of course, being surrounded by water, fishing was a natural pass-time. We would fish off the wharves for harbour pollock in the summer and “frost fish” in the winter. I’m not sure what the difference was between the two, they looked the same to me. I think the term “frost fish” may apply more to the fisherman than to the fish. Any kid who has sat on the end of a wharf in winter trying to jig a fish knows firsthand about frost. Most of the fish we caught were too small to be of much use, generally they were cut up for bait to catch more fish, fed to the cat, or maybe used for lobster bait if you had a lot of them. Once in a great while you might catch one big enough to actually take home for supper.

One Saturday when I was about twelve years old, David Nickerson and I were fishing off the ramp at my father’s fishplant. David managed to get his hook caught in the side of the wharf so I leaned over the edge and reached way down to unsnag it. The next thing I knew I found myself in thirty feet of water and sinking rapidly. My hip-boots dragged me down feet-first so I ended up standing upright on the bottom. Like most island kids at the time, I didn’t know how to swim, and even if I did, it would be impossible with these boots on. I didn’t for a second consider taking them off, they were brand-new and my father had warned me not to get water in them. I figured I was in enough trouble already for getting them wet, there was no way I was going to tell him that I had also lost them!

Standing on the ocean floor contemplating my predicament, I noticed a pole nearby so I went up it hand-over-hand. When I broke the surface, David tried to pull me to safety, but my wet clothes and water-filled boots were dragging me back to the ocean’s depths. Just before I went under again, I told David “meet me on the beach”. I had come up with a plan; since I couldn’t get on the wharf, I’d just walk to shore. Using the posts as a guide, I plodded along the harbour bottom until I ran out of air, then I’d shinny up a post, take a breath, then drop back down to continue my underwater stroll. When I finally emerged from the sea like some creature from the depths, David was waiting on the beach with tears streaming down his face. I’d never seen him cry before and was touched that he was so emotional about my situation, I told him I was O.K., he didn’t have to worry now; he replied that what had upset him wasn’t so much the possibility that I’d drowned, what had really upset him was the thought that he might get blamed for it!

SMOKE ON THE WATER

by Ben Robicheau ~ brobicheau@cogeco.ca
    One of the sure signs that spring has arrived is when you open a window or step out onto your doorstep and notice an unmistakable, smoky-wet-wood smell drifting over the island: someone, somewhere has a grassfire going.
    This spring-time ritual has been carried on since man first discovered fire, and some of the original reasons for doing it are still in practice today. Those who have grazing animals will burn off last year’s dead grass so the new, green shoots can show through and give their horses, cows or sheep a break from that dusty, dry winter hay. Others do it for appearance; the easiest way to get rid of all of that unsightly, matted, dead grass lining the edge of the yard or wrapped around the lower strands of a wire fence is to just put a match to it. Still others have safety in mind; having fields of tinder-dry grass around your house and buildings is not a good idea, the results of a carelessly tossed cigarette could be catastrophic; a controlled burn gets rid of that problem. Unfortunately, even though grass fires may be started with the best of intentions, that first scent of smoke is often followed in short order by the sound of sirens as the local fire department rushes to a blaze that has spread out of control.
    It was just about his time of year when a gentleman of the town - I won’t mention his name, but I will say that he lived on the Back Road next door to Pinchard and Melida Swift - decided to get rid of some burdock bushes in his back yard. After dousing them with kerosene and setting them alight, he decided to step inside for a few minutes; not surprisingly, this turned out to be a bad idea. Upon his return, he was astounded to see that his little burdock fire had jumped to a near-by field and was now racing before a brisk wind through the long grass behind his house. Luckily, the breeze was pushing the fire away from the houses and along through the fields that lie below the hill that runs behind the village.
    In short order most of the Island was heading for the fields, armed with shovels and wet burlap bags, hoping to stop the fire in its tracks, or at the very least prevent it from doing serious damage. By the time they reached the front of the fire, it was moving along at a rapid clip with a wall of flames reaching fifteen or twenty feet high in some places. One of the first casualties of this inferno was a camp that Braddie and Clayton Titus had built just below the top of Joe’s Hill, it was reduced to smoldering ash in an instant and the flames then sped along towards Edgar McDormand’s big building in the field behind his house. Luckily, the grass around this structure had been kept short so the fire fighters were able to fend off the flames.
    This was before there was a fire department on the island and it was obvious that without proper equipment, the only hope the fire fighters had was that the blaze would burn itself out before it did any real damage. Daniel’s Road lay right across the fire’s path, if they could hold it there, it might starve itself out. The firefighters massed along the road, some still in the barvels and rubber gloves they wore as they ran from the fishplants. Despite a valiant attempt to contain the flames, a few sparks managed to leap this barrier and spread rapidly into the knee-high grass across the road. Just as the fire was getting a good hold, the wind suddenly shifted, blowing directly towards the village. The first building in its path was the old Coggins house which was now home for several of the fishplant workers. The field grass grew right up to the back wall, and to make matters worse, there was a pile of firewood only a few feet from the house. The flames were shooting high into the air and travelling down the field at a rate that the men were unable to match; it looked like the house was gone for sure. Then, at the very last second, just short of the woodpile, the wind shifted once again. Coming now from the exact opposite direction, it blew the fire back on itself and the flames, starved of fuel, dropped to a level where the shovels and burlap bags could be effective.
    Although this part of the fire was successfully defeated, the main body carried on, finally exhausting itself just before reaching the High Knoll; but it went out with one last destructive gasp, sending a camp that Chester and Harry Lent had built at the base of the hill up in flames. The ironic thing about this whole episode is that once it was all over, it was discovered that the burdock bushes that had instigated the entire fiasco had survived with only minor scorching.
    Of course, not every fire resulted in near disaster. Night-time skating parties on Lively’s Pond often involved a roaring bonfire that provided a chance to warm up and enough flickering light to let you see the thin ice and soft spots at the edge of the pond. Bonfires were also popular in the summer months; on many an evening at Pond Cove, hot dogs and marshmallows would be roasted over a roaring driftwood fire while everyone huddled up as close to the warmth of the flames as possible. The wind baffling across the beach usually kept you busy ducking sparks and eye-watering smoke while experiencing the unique sensation that the front of your body was about to burst into flames at the same time that your back was freezing and wet from the fog drifting in off the ocean.
    Beach fires were also used for cooking other things. If you got hungry while hiking the back shore, a little fire inside a circle of stones could be used to boil up some periwinkles in a tin can scavenged off the beach. If you didn’t happen to have a pin to pick the meat out of the shells, a nail pulled from an old, busted up lobster trap would do just fine.
    One of the most innovative ways of cooking on a beach fire that I can remember occurred during a family picnic at Scattaway Cove. A large fire was started and while it was burning we collected some mussels. Since we hadn’t brought any pots, I wasn’t sure what we were going to do with the mussels, but I soon found out. When the fire had burned down to white hot embers, my father came up the beach with an armload of wet seaweed which he threw down on the coals, as it sizzled and popped, he put the mussels on top and covered them with more seaweed. After several minutes in the hot, steaming seaweed, we had some nicely cooked mussels.
    Of course, not every fire has to have a function or a purpose, some are just for fun and for a kid, the Back Shore is ideal for this. There are usually no adults around, the beach is littered with combustible material and it is a relatively safe place to build a fire. What kid who just happens to have a couple of matches in his pocket could resist? Most of the fires we built were just simple bonfires set far enough down the beach that there was no danger of catching the grass and trees ablaze, and after we got tired of the fire we had the fun of watching it die hissing and spitting in the rising tide. Occasionally we would give an old lobster crate a Viking funeral, lashing it to a couple of sticks of pulp wood, then setting it adrift and afire on the ocean.
    One summer I and a couple of friends discovered a large propane tank washed ashore in a cove not far from the Copper Mine. In the past we had enjoyed the pyrotechnics caused by burning up old aerosol cans, so we felt this was an opportunity not to be missed. After building a huge fire on the beach, we picked up the tank, swung it back and forth between us, and pitched it into the middle of the fire. We could hear gas sloshing around in the tank, so we knew the fireworks were going to be good. We ran up into the field and ducked down behind a little hill, peeking over the top and waiting expectantly for the big bang.
    We waited…and waited…but nothing happened. We finally decided that the tank must be a dud, full of water instead of gas, and were just starting down the hill to investigate when there was a terrific explosion. We all hit the ground as bits and pieces of flaming debris rained down around us. We looked up to see dozens of little grassfires radiating out from the smoking crater where our fire had been. After fifteen minutes of frantic running around, we managed to put out all the fires, although in the process one of our group ruined his new jacket by using it to beat out the flames.
    Just before we hit the ground, I had noticed a hiker coming over a rise on the trail along the shore not far from the fire; when I looked up after the explosion, I just caught a glimpse of him heading back the way he had come but at a much brisker pace. His peaceful walk with nature had turned into something more like a hike through a war zone! I might be nearly fifty years too late, but whoever that hiker was, I’m sorry for almost blowing you up!

A Spring Bike Ride

by Ben Robicheau ~ brobicheau@cogeco.ca

It’s early Spring, 1959 and I’m ten years old; the sun’s out and Westport’s gravel roads have dried up enough for me to finally take the bicycle I got for Christmas out for a spin. As I roll down the driveway on my new CCM Supercycle, I notice that the boats usually moored up the road are gone from their spots. Ace and Wick must be out hauling traps, taking advantage of the nice weather in these last few weeks of lobster season. In fact, as I look around I see that most of the boats in the harbour are gone from the three dozen or so mooring sites along the waterfront. As I turn out of the driveway I realize that even though the road is starting to dry up, it’s not very smooth. Brad hasn’t been out with his grader yet and I have to carefully steer between the ridges, ruts and mudpuddles.

Heading down the road, I pass by the buildings that make up my father’s fish plant, the blue-shingled drier is on the right, and over the water on the left is the long shed and ramp where boats unload their catch. As I pass by, I catch a whiff of the woody, fishy scent coming from the smokehouse, which is attached to the front corner of the building. On the same side of the road, at the bottom of Ed Pugh’s lane, is a building that looks like it might have been a store or some sort of business at one time. Lately it has been put to a variety of uses, right now it’s full of large wooden hogshead barrels, someone is using them for salting down fish.

As I roll along past Herald Thompson’s, Ray McDormand’s and Charlie Boy’s shops, all my concentration is dedicated to trying to stay out of the ruts and avoid soft spots in the road. As I pass Edna-Fred’s stone wall I suddenly hear the yapping of a dog and, knowing what this signifies, I throw caution to the wind and splash through mud puddles and over ruts in a desperate attempt to avoid being caught by Mrs. Bowers’ little black Scottie dog. Just when I think I’ve managed to avoid him this time, I feel his teeth clamp onto my pant cuff and all of a sudden I’m fighting to keep my balance as I zig-zag across the road, trying to avoid falling in the half-thawed mud or running into the rocks along the breastwork while fending off my growling attacker with my right leg and trying to pedal faster with my left leg. I’m starting to think Blackie is going to win this one when the sunporch door opens and to my great relief I hear Mrs. Bowers order her dog back into the yard.

Having just survived one of the terrors of travelling the Front Road, I am now confronted with another one. The liver factory is an imposing looking, two-story building where the father-and-son team of Gerald and Albert Baily cook fish livers in a big vat; the resulting liquid is put into forty-five gallon drums and shipped off to be made into fish oil products. This building is a scary place to some kids, not because of the strong cod liver oil smell that comes from it when the vat is in operation, but because of the door on the second floor. Above the big sliding ground-level doors are a set of smaller, upper floor double doors. When these doors are open, passersby can usually see Gerald and/or Albert sitting on an old couch looking out at the road. This is not the scary part, the scary part is that sometimes when you pass by there is another person sitting there, a person you don’t recognise. Some kids say that this is a ghost, some say it’s a dummy that Albert and Gerald made and some say it is just someone with a mask on. Usually he just sits there staring out at you, but several kids swear that they have seen him get up and come to the door, demanding to know where they are going or why they aren’t in school. As a result, many kids take the Back Road to avoid this strange character. I am relieved to see that this time the doors are closed; nevertheless, I speed up and hurry past the building with a prickly feeling on the back of my neck and an eerie sense that someone is watching me from that second floor.

Now I’m coming up to one of the oldest buildings in Westport. On my left is a one-story building with several tall windows in the front; some of which have been replaced with a set of double doors. Before the big red schoolhouse was built on the Back Road, this two-room building was the school for the Island: now Vic Strickland uses it as a garage for his car. Vic is a Studebaker man, every few years he gets a brand new car and as I pass by I can see his latest, a Studebaker Lark, through the small, wavy panes of the old school windows.

Across from Vic’s garage stands what I have always imagined to be the sturdiest house in Westport. Russell Swift has the only brick house on the Island, in fact, I think it’s the only brick house on Digby Neck. Russell also has the most feared cat on the Island, Toby is a grumpy, twenty pound tomcat that doesn’t seem to be afraid of anyone and has a habit of beating up the neighbourhood dogs.

I pass a few more fishsheds and an old green double-ender fishing boat that’s been sitting on the side of the road for the past couple of years; then after passing Edgar MacDormand’s TV repair shop and the little building next to the ferry wharf that houses the post office, I pull up in front of my father’s store. After chatting with Gladys and fortifying myself with some Digby Dairy chocolate milk and a bag of Scottie’s Chips, I’m ready to continue my ride.

As I head down the road I glance out over the harbour; out near the moorings are a couple of boats unloading their catch at the lobster cars, and farther out I can see the lighthouse and the lightkeeper’s house on Peter’s Island. Continuing along, I pass the bank building, open one afternoon a week, then Daniel Kenny’s big fishplant. I make a brief stop to look through the open doorway of Gerald Strickland’s machine shop, he’s always working on something interesting and the noisy, complicated overhead shaft-drive system with its wide, looping belts that power his various saws, lathes and drillpresses is always a source of fascination for me.

As I ride along past the string of wharves between the Co-op Store and Bowers’ Store at the bottom of the New Lane, I notice that some of the big cast iron cauldrons that sit on the side of the road in front of nearly every fish shop are being readied for use again. Soon, fires will be burning under these pots and they will be filled with melted tar, through which new fishing lines will be drawn to coat them with a protective layer.

As I approach the New Lane I notice a thick cloud of smoke pouring out of one of the buildings next to Bowers’ store: someone is making leads. This building contains a forge where scrap lead is melted down and poured into moulds to make fishing weights. Even though all the doors and windows are open, the smoke is so thick you can barely see across the room. Nevertheless, I go in to see if they’ll let me turn the crank that blows air through the coal and heats up the fire in the forge. After half an hour of continuous cranking while breathing coal smoke and lead fumes, my arm is getting sore, my eyes are running and I’m having trouble breathing so I call it quits.

Outside in the fresh air once again, I notice that it’s starting to look like rain so I decide to head home. As I turn onto the Back Road a few scattered raindrops fall. Standing up on my pedals, I race for home, flying past the Oddfellows Hall, Gerald Strickland’s movie hall, the school house and the Baptist Church parsonage, all in a row. Half-way home I slow for a truck coming down from the field behind Whitney Derby’s house where they used to dry fish on wooden flakes in the sun, then I go all out again and just make it home before the rain really starts to come down. What started out as a nice sunny day is now a downpour and in a few hours might well turn into snow. It’s just another typical Spring day on the Island.

In The Comic Book Corner

by Ben Robicheau ~ brobicheau@cogeco.ca

I’ve always been an avid reader; it’s something I inherited from my mother. Even in the midst of the hubbub and uproar of raising nine kids, she could always find time to get totally involved in a good book; it was probably her way of getting a break from all those diapers and runny noses! My mother had taught me to read even before I started school: when they handed out the Little Red, Blue and Green Readers on the first day of Primary, I polished off all three before the morning was over, then I found out that this reading material was supposed to last us for the next three months!

As I got older I would read anything I could lay my hands on. Since Westport had no library in those days, you had to get your reading material wherever you could find it. The comic pages of the daily Chronicle-Herald were a good source of entertainment for a young reader, and the colour comics on the week-end were a gold mine, what with the antics of the characters in Gasoline Alley, Major Hoople’s Boarding House, L’il Abner, The Katzenjammer Kids, Maggie and Jiggs, Mandrake the Magician, Terry and the Pirates and Dick Tracy to keep you either amused or in suspense. Two of my favourite strips were Andy Capp, the Cockney layabout who was always fighting with his wife Flo; and Smokey Stover, a fireman who drove a two-wheeled automobile and whose comic strip panels were filled with impossible machines, outlandish but clever puns and ridiculous sight gags. I don’t think Smokey Stover ever ran in the Chronicle-Herald, I happened to come across it in some old U.S. newspapers that had been used as padding in a shipping crate.

As I moved into the stage of reading more serious literature, I began working on longer books like the Hardy Boys series, then graduated to things with a little more weight, like Moby Dick, Ten Years Before the Mast, Oliver Twist, A Tale of Two Cities, Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. When I ran out of new material, I would go back to one of my old favourites and read it again; I must have read Tom Sawyer half-a-dozen times. For several years my mother belonged to the Reader’s Digest Classic Book Club and through this I was exposed to some of the great novels of the time. Between the gilt-edged pages of those thick books with the fake leather covers, I discovered wonderful stories like To Kill a Mockingbird, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, The Grapes of Wrath and many others. At the beginning I wasn’t really aware that I was reading a condensed version of these stories and years later I read some of those books again in their complete form; but for many of them, the Reader’s Digest shortened version is all I know of what many consider to be some of the great writing of the period.

Anyone who grew up in the ‘50s and ‘60s knows that it was a golden age for the comic book, and a lot of my afternoons were spent lost in the coloured-ink pages of comics like Batman, Superman, Archie, Sgt. Rock, The Lone Ranger, Lash LaRue, Hopalong Cassidy and even Donald Duck and Little Lulu. In addition to the regular comic book, there was also a Classic Comics series that tried to slip a little education and culture by the unsuspecting comic reader. These were thicker, more expensive comics that told the story of such historic events as the Civil War, the French Revolution and the building of the railroads across the Western frontier, all in the familiar comic book format. They also attempted to introduce some of the classics of literature in illustrated form with severely simplified and revised versions of stories like The Man in the Iron Mask, The Count of Monte Cristo, Robinson Crusoe and The Hunchback of Notre Dame.

Early on, I was lucky to have unlimited access to comic books, my father sold them at his little store near the breakwater: every month a new shipment of reading material arrived and I happily spent countless hours sitting on a nail keg or pop bottle crate over in the corner by the rubber boots and oilskins, reading up on the latest adventures of Chip and Dale or Richie Rich. Sadly this idyllic arrangement came to an end when I was about ten years old when my father decided to get out of the comic and magazine business. I was forced to go out and find a new supplier to feed my comic book reading habit. Fortunately, I knew right where to turn: Bowers’ Store carried the largest selection of comics on the Island.

I had visited Bowers’ comic book department many times before, but their comics were displayed in a rotating wire rack that was located right by the store’s front counter, making it very awkward to sit or stand there reading comics for any length of time without getting in someone’s way or running the risk of being stepped on by a customer. Fortunately, at just about the time I needed a new comic book source, they re-arranged the store and the comics were moved to a corner near the end of the candy counter. My first attempt at taking advantage of this new set-up didn’t go well at all. After perusing the comic book selection for a few minutes, I was just about to settle in with the latest edition of The Incredible Hulk when one of the men who usually occupied the bench at the back of the store informed me that if I wasn’t going to buy anything, I didn’t have any business being there. Apparently it was OK for these men to occupy space on the store bench all day, smoking up a storm and arguing a blue streak, but a kid sitting and reading quietly in the corner would be upsetting to the customers! I didn’t give up easily. I came back later when there was no one on the bench and kept on coming back until they finally decided to just ignore me after they realized I wasn’t going to go away. Interestingly, it was only the guys on the bench (some people called them loafers) who ever had a problem with me being there; I spent several years of my life in that corner, but I can’t recall any of the clerks, or even Mr. Bowers himself, ever giving me a hard time about sitting there for hours on end, reading all of his comic books for free.

The last few years that I was in school, the Bookmobile started to make the Islands a regular part of its route. This library on wheels was a great source of reading material, but it only showed up once a month or so and there was a limit to the number of books you could take out, so more often than not, you would finish off your selections in a couple of weeks, then have to wait a couple of more weeks before it returned. You could get around this problem by trading books with a friend, if you could find one who shared your taste in reading material, but the Bookmobile people frowned upon this practice and you ran the risk of getting in trouble with them if your friend wasn’t on time about returning the books you had taken out.

A couple of years after I left Westport, a movement was started to build a library on the island. Through the persistence and perseverance of several dedicated people, it finally became a reality and today the Westport Library is an important addition to the community. Through their own little library, Islanders have access to the thousands of books and other reference materials in Nova Scotia’s provincial library system.

Today I rarely sit in stores for hours at a time and read their books for free, but I still do enjoy a good book, and I am happy to say that both of my kids have inherited a love for literature; a gift from their grandmother that I am more than pleased to pass on.

Turkey, Lobster and Pie - Oh My!

By Ben Robicheau ~ brobicheau@cogeco.ca

Well, here we are in 2010, if you’re reading this, then you’ve survived another year. Even more impressive, you’ve survived the annual Christmas/New Year’s eating marathon. You would think that the act of preparing and consuming food would by now have become extremely boring and mundane to us. After all, it’s a routine chore that most of us perform several times a day each and every day of our lives. Yet we can still get excited over food, and we use special meals as a way to mark those important milestones in our lives; the birthday or anniversary cake, the wedding reception meal, the big turkey feast at Thanksgiving all serve to make a special occasion more memorable. If we want to show someone we really appreciate them or that we just enjoy their company, we do it by inviting them into our kitchen and making them something to eat.

All food-related celebrations seem to be group events where we get to share meals with friends and family, or at the very least, that one very special someone; I can’t think of any holiday that celebrates by people sitting and eating alone. I suppose this all relates back to the dawn of time when we were all hunter-gatherers and the term “bringing home the bacon” was taken much more literally. If you didn’t manage to catch that big fish or spear that mastodon or beat your neighbour to that last bunch of berries before the snow fell, the consequences could be severe. Sharing food with one another at special times must have meant even more to people in those days than it does now.

Today, our most intensive celebrating is done over the Christmas Holidays. Christmas Eve usually involves the consumption of the traditional Egg Nog and other festive drinks as well as a wide variety of special snacks and treats. Christmas Day itself is the highlight of the Holidays, featuring the big meal with all the trimmings; turkey with stuffing, mashed potatoes with gravy and a variety of vegetables. Family favourites like Aunt Rita’s potatoes or Grandma’s special Jell-o salad are brought out for this special meal, and then the whole thing is finished off with a nice big slice of mincemeat pie. Then, just a week later, we do it all over again to celebrate the arrival of the New Year. Many people go with the whole traditional menu again, pretty well duplicating what they had just got through digesting from the previous week, but some people like to mix it up a bit. For people on the Islands, substitutions or additions to the usual turkey main course might include lobster, a nice beef or pork roast, fish is a possibility of course, and maybe some wild duck or venison that was still in the freezer from hunting season. Last year the trendy alternative to the standard Butterball in some areas was “turducken”, a chicken stuffed inside a duck stuffed inside a turkey. I don’t know if this fad made it to the Islands or not; I personally don’t find it all that appealing, it just seems like it might be too much of a good thing.

Of course, on the Islands we have always had a bit of a different relationship with certain foods. As school kids in Westport, we were always able to go home for lunch (except for the lighthouse kids), but when we started going to Freeport, we had to bring packed lunches. Once lobster season rolled around, a lot of kids had lobster sandwiches in their lunchboxes. To someone from off the Island who might pay big bucks for this exotic food, school kids bringing lobster sandwiches for lunch might seem like some kind of unbelievable luxury; but generally after the first week or so, any kid with a peanut butter sandwich could usually trade it for two or three lobster sandwiches if he wanted to, it is possible to get sick of too much of anything, even lobster.

When I was still a little kid and people used to toss their garbage on the beach, you would occasionally find lobster shells wrapped up in newspaper or hidden in boxes among the trash, I asked my father why people tried to hide the fact they were eating lobster and he told me that it was a hang-over from the bad days of The Depression, when, if people didn’t have enough money to buy store- bought food like hamburger or bologna, they would have to eat whatever was available for free. They didn’t want their neighbours to know that they were so poor they had to eat lobster day after day, so they hid the evidence. This may well have been the reason that some people hid the lobster remnants, but I did notice that a lot of the shells looked kind of small and I suspect that it was just as likely that they didn’t want anyone to know they were eating jinks.

A really unique island food item is the egg tart. When you try to describe it to someone from away, they generally think you are talking about something like a quiche. After explaining that, no, this is a dessert tart made mainly of eggs, sugar and vinegar, you usually get some weird looks and comments to the effect that this particular combination of ingredients doesn’t sound like it would be very good. But if you happen to have an egg tart in your possession and can get them to try it, you will most likely make another convert to the delicious local delicacy that is the Island egg tart.

I have never seen the Island-style egg tarts in any other place. While walking through Chinatown in Toronto last summer, I saw egg tarts displayed in a bakery window, they looked sort of like the egg tarts I was familiar with, so I bought one. I was sorely disappointed. It tasted slightly like an Island egg tart, but had more of a spongy, custard type filling, without the sugary crunch and familiar vinegary bite of the Island tart. It turns out that there are Asian, Portuguese and English style egg tarts, but they all are the custard style of tart. The Island egg tart, as far as I can tell, is the only one made with vinegar and appears to be unique to our corner of the world.

Of course I can’t very well talk about Island food without mentioning fish! Sadly, the days when there were nearly a dozen fishplants on the two islands and you could just walk into any one of them and get yourself a mess of fillets, cod tongues or cheeks from fish that were still flipping, is long gone. There was a time when no Islander worth his salt would even consider eating a frozen fish. Between the fishplants and the dozens of fishing boats moored in the harbour, you could have your choice of pollock, halibut, hake, haddock, or cod any day of the week, at certain times of the year there was also mackerel and sometimes even tuna or wild Atlantic salmon to be had. Then there was also the smoked fish, like Digby Chicks and Finnan Haddie. A visit to one of the driers could supply the basic ingredient for a salt fish dinner, add some boiled potatoes, mashed turnip and a little diced, fried salt pork to your boiled salt fish and you’ve got yourself a true Maritime meal. Some old-timers even used to carry a bit of dried salt fish in their pocket so they could bite off a piece any time they felt like a snack.

Sometimes the best meals are the most basic ones. When it is available, nothing beats a simple piece of fresh, pan-fried fish. For years, my Uncle Brian came to Westport on vacation from Ontario, he enjoyed visiting the Island, but would refuse to eat any fish, saying that he had tried it as a child in England and again as an adult in Toronto, and he didn’t like it. My mother always replied that the problem was that he hadn’t tasted HER fish, and one summer she was determined to get him to try it. On the last day of his visit, after a week and a half of pestering from my mother, Brian agreed to taste one piece of her fried fish. After the first piece, he ate another, then another and another until it was all gone. Properly cooked fish, fresh from the ocean, was such a revelation to him that he extended his vacation for several more days and kept my mother busy making more fried fish, baked fish, fish chowder, fish cakes; basically anything involving fish. He couldn’t believe what he had been missing all those years!