A Hard Lookin' Old Place

 It was a fine morning in June when I stood at the door of a large white house, stern and foursquare, overlooking the Lewis’ cove. I looked out upon a serene blue sea, an ethereal blue with little sparkles as the sun glinted off a pattern of small perky wavelets. The sea stretched out as far as I could see, dotted with small and smaller clusters of small and smaller islands. Turning my head to the right, and then left I could see small clusters of tidy houses, all with docks and fishing boats along the shore.

It was 1966. I had been at the center of a school/political controversy in the small rural town of Putney, Vermont which revealed a variety of conflicts over values, rights, responsibilities and the role of people “from away.” (I have written about this in “Communists, Pacifists and Aliens go Home” on this blog). After months of meetings, letters to the editor, arguments and explanations exposing the underlying tensions between people “from away” and the long-term residents,  Simon and I were both exhausted. As a final salvo in the conflict a school board member called me on a Sunday night in early June to say that school was closing a week early, that is to say, now, and intimated that he would be happy never to see me again.  Within a few days Simon’s mother, Marjorie, arrived from England for a visit and a board flew out of the planer backward breaking most of the bones in the back of Simon’s hand. He came back from the doctor, his arm in a cast and a sling and demanded, gesticulating with the other: Doesn’t your sister have a house in Nova Scotia? 

“Well, yes”, I said, “I think they bought it about two years ago.”

“Let’s go.”, he said, and walked out again.

I called Fran and Dave; they would be delighted to lend us their house for a few weeks in June; they would call their local fishing friends, Collin and Kathleen, to open the house.  Collin could also pick us up at the Government wharf since there was no way to get to Bell’s island in 1964 without a boat. In less than a week Simon had hitched his sailboat, a “Comet” which he shared with a friend, to the back of our Volkswagon pickup truck and we were off, Marjorie and Simon in the front, and in the back, under the canvas hood which made the truck resemble a covered wagon, our me and the two children, Richard and Alison, ages six and three, bedded down on mattresses. I was feeling distinctly ill and began to suspect that there was, as Marjorie suggested, a bun in the oven.

In a pattern which became a part of every succeeding summer we left home after supper and drove the eight or nine hours it took to get to Bar Harbor. This was before the Maine turnpike, before the interstate, before the beckoning motel. We arrived at Bar Harbor in time to drive to the top of Acadia Mountain for the sunset and then to board the old Bluenose at 7:00 am.

Eight hours later the Bluenose docked in Yarmouth and we slowly made our way over the two-lane road which wound through the fishing villages fringing the southern coast of Nova Scotia.  This was also before the provincial highway, Route 103. On this occasion when we got to Bridgewater we left Alison, with her grandmother at a hotel and the three of us set about trying to find the government wharf on Bush island. I remember driving in the dark and the fog over a long narrow road with the sound of the sea on either side, almost as though we would soon drive drive right into it.

When we did see lights in the dark they barely illuminated a large wharf with the dim shapes of boats and masts roiling slightly and rubbing in a now familiar way against the wooden pilings. There was no one in sight except the dim shapes of a man and a woman, coming forward,  smiling broadly,  to introduce themselves: First Kathleen, “Simon? Heidi? Ah, Richard! And yes, Kathleen! – “Call me Aunty Kay”.” And then Collin, a large man in a fisherman’s oilskins with huge hands and a warm smile.

We dropped down a long ladder into the void of what Colin called black t’ck a fog and shivered slightly in the damp open boat. We were to learn that June in Nova Scotia is about the temperature of Putney in April.

Simon described it like this: “We were met at the breakwater by a local fisherman, Collin Hirtle, with his son and helper, Wade, and his lobster boat, the June R. I realized later that bringing a boat that size down a narrow, winding channel at night --and on a falling tide- was quite a trick. There were no navigation lights and some of the few channel markers had a red plastic glove stuck on top with the thumb pointing ahead. So a stranger was left to guess on which side to pass.”

Collin started up the engine, while Kathleen chattered away with questions and assertions of help, and by some miracle, or so it seemed, he steered us through the cloud of damp impenetrable darkness until we came to another dock where we unloaded ourselves and luggage and crept up a long path to a house recognizable that dark night only because there were lights in the windows. Even better, when we got inside a fire in the big wood stove was pushing back the waves of chill and reaching out to us in full promise of hospitality.

 If we had been delivered blindfolded we could not have had had less sense of where we were.  The primary clues that night came from the other senses: the sound of a soft light wind and of the sea, more a murmur than a crash on that quiet night, the tangy smell of the sea, and the hemlocks we later discovered behind the house, and of dusty rooms, and wood smoke.  Soon after a bottle of rum appeared. Collin, grinning broadly, was passing out the glasses and then the bottle.  The ultimate in island hospitality was to invite the guest to pour his own drink, a way of saying take as much as you want. What’s mine is yours.

We awoke to a calm Mediterranean blue sea with the sun glinting off small perky wavelets. I went into Bridgewater to rescue Marjorie and Alison; Simon and Richard went exploring. We spent the next ten days reveling in the absence of human strife and absorbed with watching the colors of the sea change, the variety of shore and land birds, and meeting the neighbors. Simon, with his hand in a cast, put his boat in the water and sailed off. He met all the local fisherman for whom, at this time, a new face and a foreigner was a sight to cherish, and he mapped in his mind the layout of the La Have Islands, their houses and their inhabitants. We often spent the evenings with Colin and Kathleen, listening to fisherman’s stories, and every day I took the children over to visit Aunty Kay. Collin and Kathleen had two adopted children, Wade, who went fishing with his father whenever he wasn’t in school, and Marianne who helped with the domestic chores. Collin was known as a good fisherman and Kathleen as a force to be reckoned with.

 A few days before we left Simon came back from one of his sailing expeditions and announced, “I have found the house for us!” I didn’t know we were looking for a house. “It’s in a perfect location, with a dock and store.” ( In island vernacular a small barn where bait and fishing gear were stored). “It’s empty but I am going to find out who owns it and buy it.”

 In the twenty or so years after the end of World War Two, social reforms in Canada brought unemployment insurance, pensions, fishing subsidies and a health insurance scheme and at the same time war production and manpower was redirected to domestic needs. Most of the traditional double-ended sailing boats with oars and sails now supplemented wind and man power with simple single-cylinder engines, - “putt-putt’s” we called them. and then double cylinder engines. In 1966 almost everyone was motoring to the fish in the traditional sailing boat with an engine of some kind. Purpose-built fishing boats with boat motors came later. Radar, sonic depth finders and two-way radios made fishing safer and more productive. No longer dependent on sails and oars the fishermen did not need to be on the outer islands and began to move closer to roads, hospitals, schools and shops. Often the houses they left were abandoned:  “Who would want to live out there?”

On Middle Island in 1930 there were ten houses. By 1960 there were only seven. By 1966 two more houses on Middle Island disappeared. The house that was to be ours was on its way to disintegration, and Walter Walfield, the old fisherman who owned it had moved into his dead brother’s house closer to the remaining occupied house and a better dock. He was delighted to be able to get money from the house to pay the debts from his wife’s funeral: $200.00.

As Simon described it: “I came around a rocky point on Middle Island and saw a house that I knew immediately would make an ideal summer house for us. It had that neglected look that unoccupied dwellings acquire, shingles missing and a few roof tiles that had been crudely repaired with flattened tin cans. Also a ruinous dock with an impossibly steep slip. So I asked around and found that the owner, Walter Walfield, had moved into his brother’s house on the far side, the more sheltered side, of Middle Island. When I found him and asked if he'd consider selling the house he seemed taken aback that anyone would want ‘ such a hard-looking old place’ but he agreed to sell me the house and land and asked if $200. would be too much.”

Simon and Walter went to Bridgewater to see a lawyer and sign the deed but when Simon discovered there had been no title search he asked the lawyer to see to that, assuming the lawyer would make sure we had a clear title and then send us the completed document. Walter didn’t understand what a “clear title” meant and was disappointed not to receive any money. Simon gave him twenty dollars “for the furniture” and Walter went home content with a case of beer and a bottle of rum, precious commodities on the islands. Walter was not much of a drinker himself, but he had friends.

We left on another fine day in June, talking about when we would come, and what we would do next summer. I still had no idea what the house looked like inside or out.

But that is not the end of the story. We told everyone about our wonderful find, about the beauty and seclusion of the La Have Islands, and the friendliness of the natives. I began to dream of being with three children on an island in the Atlantic during the long summer vacations.

In early September Simon got a telephone call from Kathleen, “Dr. McLetchie is here and he is buying your house from Walter. If you want it you’d better come.”

 Simon put down the telephone  and began throwing things into a suitcase. He was gone within the hour. By some fluke of providence he arrived the next morning at the government wharf at the same time as Walter and the lawyer. Dr. McLetchie had offered Walter and the owner of the only other occupied house on Middle Island $500. and a bottle of rum. Simon insisted his claim on the property preceded Dr. McLetchie’s as he had already engaged the lawyer (the same lawyer!) and paid a deposit: $20.00. Walter, who could not read or write and who would sign the deed with a thumb print did not understand the complications of deeds, titles, or deposits and was content to settle for the price of his wife’s funeral. We did not know at the time how wise this was. Many of the island houses changed hands as the result of a grocery bill, a marriage, or the death of the old folks which went unrecorded and made great complications in a later more beaurocratic time.

Sometime in the winter we got a copy of a deed for a house with a clear title and the next summer I got my first chance to see the cottage, standing on a rise of land near the entrance to a deep rocky cove with a small sandy beach and a rapidly growing forest of hemlocks. For me it is as close to paradise as I am likely to get.

We spent three weeks on Middle Island that summer, with Rebecca, three months old,  sleeping in a cardboard box and the rest of us bunked out with mats and blankets on the floor. Twenty dollars’ worth of furniture consisted of a broken-down organ, a rocking chair tied together with fishing twine, and two scruffy kitchen tables. Simon began re-shingling the roof, rescuing the foundation, and making the house livable. Then, as now, I found these physical challenges easier than the human ones.