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!