Iron Will

by Ben Robicheau ~ brobicheau@cogeco.ca

Ka-chunk-thunk. Ka-chunk-thunk. Ka-chunk-thunk. I can hear that familiar sound clear enough, but I can’t quite tell which direction it’s coming from. I’m standing on the end of my father’s wharf peering out into a wall of dense fog. It’s one of those warm August days when you happen to glance up from whatever you’re doing and realise with surprise that you have to squint your eyes against the crystal clear air and the brilliant glare of the sun sparking off the ripples in the harbour. You can see right across to Freeport Cove where the boats at their moorings stand out as clear as a bell. Then, a short while later, you look up again and the end of the wharf and everything beyond it has disappeared into a thick grey nothingness! This happens regularly on sunny summer days, the fog drifting in and out; thick as mud one minute, gone the next, just hanging close enough to the Island that it keeps the foghorns droning on all day, regardless of whether the harbour is filled with nothing denser than sun and fresh air or socked in under a pea soup pall.

Right now I’m straining my eyes to see through the pea soup. The fog reflects and distorts the sound, so my ears aren’t much help in determining from which direction the continuous ka-chunk-thunk is coming. The sound is getting closer and I’m just zeroing in on a likely section of the fog wall when the bow of a small craft faintly materializes through the mist just a few feet to the right of where I’m looking. Slowly, a weather-faded and well-worn red rowboat slips out from behind the curtain of fog. Steadily pulling on the oars, which are ka-chunk-thunking back and forth between the thole pins with each stroke, is a short, burly gnome of a man with a round, ruddy face and a large drooping moustache. As I expected, Will Thurber has arrived to sell today’s catch.

Will Thurber had been a fisherman for pretty much all of his life, eventually, after nearly sixty years on the sea, he decided that he had reached that point in his life where he could sell his boat, retire and do what he enjoyed most, which was...well...fishing! With only his rowboat now and the minimum of gear, his expenses were low, so if the weather was bad, or the tide was wrong, or he just didn’t feel up to it today, he could afford to stay in and miss a day’s fishing. Still, the days he did miss were few and far between, on almost any day of the week from spring to fall you could see Will’s little boat in the harbour. He did all his fishing in the harbour now, mostly around Peter’s Island, venturing just outside the passage only occasionally when the weather and the tide were right. He liked to tie his bow-line to the can buoy and that was most often where you would see him, floating over the ledge that ran between the buoy and Peter’s Island.

Judging by the grooves cut into the gunnels of his rowboat, Will must have spent many an hour sawing away on a handline over the side. I’m sure he didn’t begrudge a single minute of the time he used up trying to entice a decent sized pollock or the occasional codfish out from the safety of the ledge, but the truth is that the harbour is not the most productive fishing ground. I don’t think Will really cared how much he caught, he had had his day of fishing for a living, what he was doing now was something different. Still, an important part of the process was selling the catch at the end of the day. The size of his catch may not have mattered to Will, but it did to the people he tried to sell it to.

At first, Will sold to the closest fishplant, the one on Fish Point; at the time, this plant was catering to seiners and draggers, big boats bringing in thousands of pounds at a time; Will in his little rowboat with his dozen or so fish was just not worth bothering with. Will couldn’t believe it when they eventually told him they weren’t interested in dealing with him anymore, after all, his fish were just as good as anyone else’s; better than some in fact. Sure he might not have a lot, and some were a bit on the small side, but his fish were top quality, fresh and handled with care, caught just minutes away, not like what was being hauled out of the holds of those draggers, crushed and mangled days-old stuff from miles off-shore. Rejected from the only fishplant in Freeport, Will crossed the passage to sell on the Westport side.

Unfortunately, he didn’t fare any better across the harbour; after a few weeks at the first plant, they realised it wasn’t worth the effort to roll the cart down the ramp for his few fish and he was asked to move along. He gradually worked his way along the waterfront, spending time at each fish buyer before being forced along to the next. Finally he came to the last fishplant in Westport; my father’s. To my father’s credit, he recognized that selling his fish was not about the money for Will, being able to sell his catch gave Will a reason and a justification for doing what he loved to do. Dad decided that as long as Will was able to catch fish, he would buy them, no matter how few and far between they may be.

Which is how I came to be standing on the end of the wharf staring into the fog. It was my job to lower the bucket so Will could happily pitch in his day’s catch, maybe pausing to proudly hold up a particularly nice specimen for my admiration, then I would hoist the fish, weigh them, and dump them into a chute where they would be transported to the main building for processing. Our transaction completed, Will would again take to the oars and head home across the Passage; or if a Freeport boat happened to arrive at the wharf, he would patiently wait until they were done, then toss them his bow line and get towed home. He also used this method with the ferry, if the tide was against him and it looked like a tough row home, he would just make a short jog down to the slip and get a tow across behind the ferry. Eventually Will acquired an outboard motor, an antiquated machine that was quite temperamental, so he still had to do some rowing, but he was able to get a break from the oars on the intermittent occasions when his motor actually worked.

My mother used to worry about Will, she thought it was dangerous to be out in a small boat if the weather turned bad, and there was the risk of getting lost or run down when the fog caught him out on the water. She was afraid the work was too strenuous for a man of his age; he must have been eighty or more by now; and in fact on a couple of occasions when the tide had been too strong he had been swept out through the passage into St. Mary’s Bay. But Will was doing what he enjoyed, what he had always done, and he had a life-time of experience with the sea to fall back on. Then, one day it seemed that my mother’s worst fears had come to pass.

I was sitting at the kitchen table eating lunch when Mom yelled from the front room for me to run down to the wharf right away. As I dashed out the door I saw what my mother had seen from the front window, a little red rowboat floating beside our wharf with what appeared to be a motionless body face-down over the back, the head dangling over the sternboard and both of the arms hanging in the water. As I got closer to the scene and still saw no movement, I started to think maybe Will had finally suffered a heart attack and was just wondering what I was going to do about that when suddenly the body in question arose and sat up with a piece of fishing line in his hand. While waiting for someone to come hoist his fish, Will had decided to put the time to use by freeing a line that had got tangled in his propeller.

There finally came a spring when the little red rowboat failed to appear in the harbour. Eighty years of venturing out on the water in every season and in every kind of weather, eighty years of frostbite and windburn and salt water stinging rope-burned hands, eighty years of seeing spectacular sunsets sink below the distant horizon, eighty years of watching whales at play had come to an end. Will Thurber had finally retired from the sea.