2 comments on “Fogo Island through a dirty windshield”

1. Comment made by Pat Parker on January 11, 2011 at 11:04

   My mother is a Newfoundlander out of St. Brides. She was the first woman down the shore to go into the WWll and I suspect that a easy place to go after the hard life of Newfoundland.
   I was so touched by your writing, your clarity and your ability to not romanticize the hardship of that wonderful place.
   You made my morning.
   patricia parker
2. Comment made by mgb on December 7, 2010 at 23:52

   I wrote something very similar to this after one of my far too infrequent sessions with my grandfather as he explained life down home when he was a lad. It’s very important to understand a few things about that life beyond what you’ve said:

   The kids were an investment, a workforce critical to survival of the family, and too many daughters could be a problem, even in those cases where they could work on the ocean. I don’t know that this ever lead to infanticide, but I know a bit about the deaths of children in the bay, and it wouldn’t surprise me. Harder people with harder decisions to make, no doubt about it.

   The houses these folks built were not (are not) carpenter-grade, even for the boat builders amongst them. My own great grandfather and his father were boat builders of some repute, and their sons all had a hand in the business, and most of them built their first homes with their own hands. Those homes are tiny, cramped, and while they’re still standing it’s hard to believe the number of bodies that once lived within those walls.

   The gardens in Newfoundland grow the sweetest, most delicious turnip you can find anywhere on this earth, but the carrots are hard and sometimes bitter, and there’s a reason why dinner vegetables are limited to cabbage, carrot, turnip and potatoes – those are the few and far between that will grow reliably in the hard, salty soil of the bay.

   Speaking of salt, while every sea worker that ever lived seems to live well into old age despite the worst of habits – baccy, sauce, butter and salt – you wouldn’t want to chance your heart on the food if you didn’t have to.

   It’s also important to know that while Newfoundlanders tend to be wonderful to their adopted children, it’s few and far between amongst the native sons that don’t eventually feel the weight of the rural society. Expectations are a kind of burden that we’ve all but forgotten, but listening to scraps of conversation from my parents and sisters I’ve learned a great deal about the kinds of lengths people can be driven to under the scrutiny of a small town.

   Finally, and this is the one that still leaves me reeling in trying to find a future for my home, change is the thing that keeps Newfoundlanders alive. In a hundred years the island has seen itself no longer a country or colony but a big part of a huge entity; roads and railroads have come and gone and come again; the fish have gone away and reappeared; hundreds of thousands of Newfoundlanders have left for parts unknown, and only a few curious grandchildren have ever returned. In La Scie there was the community beach, and then the community wharf, the Tan and Table and then the Liver Plant and then the Tilt Cove Mine and then the Baie Verte Mine and the Baie Verte forest camps, three days walk over snow at Christmastime, which was a blessing because before that the walk was to Millertown, a week over the snow and then a ferry ride across the bay.

   I’ve watched my father struggle to run a business in that town, and I’ve watched everything slowly shrivel and rejuvenate and shrivel like some sort of anemone breathing the ocean in and purging it again and I’m left with the knowledge that if they hadn’t changed, if La Scie had been Trinity or tried to be Bonavista with her larger and fiercer fishing fleet, she might have simply shrivelled and died altogether.

   As it is, my home is on life support, and every year somebody’s grandparent passes away or some plant worker cousin of mine can’t make 26 weeks anymore and has to transplant to the land of black oil and honey or some fisherman my father grew up with moves, boat, crab licence, and all over to a better harbor with better prospects and easier access to the things a professional fisher needs.

   There isn’t a basic industry anymore, and unless you’ve got an army of hippies with the guts to do what those old men and women did, and the guts to weather the terrible times that those souls weathered, and the will to simply exist without ever really moving the larger society forward, then you’ve got a problem. Newfoundland is a stark place, and she’s not far removed from hand to mouth living. The people who lived through that seem to have loved their lives a lot more than most of us, but the price of that love is incredibly high, and it hardly makes sense to look at going back to that when you really take it in perspective. It was a hard life, often a life lived in service to someone else, and it was good because it was simple, and it was simple because it was hard, but a hard life is not intrinsically better than an easy one.

   Returning Newfoundland to her roots isn’t, unfortunately, an answer, attractive as it might seem. Maybe if her stocks had been preserved instead of ravaged for hundreds of years, and if Joey hadn’t come along and wiped out what was left of her independent spirit, maybe there’d be something to rescue.

   As it is, the fishermen of today are not the hand-to-mouth sort. Owners in particular are often living a life of ease and those of us who watch some of their shenanigans with EI, earning literally hundreds of thousands of dollars and filing EI claims for themselves, their spouses, anyone they can trust. The foresters, I’m guessing, are much the same, though they’ve got to be a dying breed at this point. The miners certainly are – a few sad little gold mines scattered throughout the woods keeping a few more bodies afloat.

   I’m not saying it’s a bad thought. Hardly. I wanted very much to find that key myself. But in the end there has to be an industry to make it work, because most people want more, no matter how much they have. But Newfoundland’s natural industries are worn out. When the oil runs out, there is a chasm coming, and although it’s a ways off, for those of us thinking about it it is about as black and deep as impossibility itself.