That first summer, June 1968

I was unprepared for the beauty of a June day on the La Have islands: old homesteads surrounded with perennials: daffodils waving bravely in a fierce wind; narcissus decorating  stone outcroppings and perfuming the air; blooming lilacs drawing in as much of the surrounding land as they could manage in a year and so slowly eating up the paths and fields around them; wood trails carpeted with  four petaled bunch berry, the white petals morphing into red berries by winter.

 

I was unprepared for just about everything that first summer in Nova Scotia. The previous summer we had traveled by VW bus like a mess of itinerant gypsies to stay  in my sister’s house on Bell Island. I had two small children, my English mother-in-law and an increasingly difficult case of morning sickness; Simon had a broken wrist and his arm in a cast but managed, nonetheless, to put the small sailboat  we were trailing behind the bus into the water and sail off (literally) single-handed to explore the islands. In a brief ten days he found what he called “our house” and put a down payment on it before we had to come home. (You can find this story on the blog as :”A hard Lookin’ Old Place “) I never saw the house but loved the idea of a permanent home on these beautiful islands with the sea lapping softly in the background.

In June of the following summer, we loaded up the VW  bus again, with one more child but not the mother-in-law, and set off for a house on an island without any public means of transport from the main land. We did have an astonishing number of tools, and the ubiquitous provisions. Our pediatrician friend, John Trumper, and his son, Peter were to follow in a few days.

What were we thinking?  I had never seen the house ; Simon had seen it only from the outside. It was on a remote island without electricity and with only one other house, derelict , in sight. No one had lived in the house for several years: the roof leaked, the rock foundation, built in 1864, was sliding to its knees. Without electricity there was no running water, no toilet. There was an outhouse, looking sturdier than the main house, built of boards three feet wide from the original timber on the islands. We found the well at the end of a long path in the woods by feeling for an indentation in the earth wholly hidden in ferns and bushes, a path created by thousands of footfalls by the “old people”. In addition to the well there was one other essential amenity, an old wood cook stove in the summer kitchen.

 Although Simon had given Walter Walfield, the owner of the house, $20.00 for :”the furniture”, which neither he nor I had ever seen the furniture turned out to be a small rocker, the rails  tied to each other by rope, two beaten up wooden tables, an old sewing machine, an even older and less serviceable organ, and one spool bed. We gave the bed to our doctor friend when he arrived, and Simon hastily improvised three beds for Richard, Alison and 10-year-old Peter. Rebecca, three months old, slept in a bureau drawer beside me on a mattress Simon found in the small, dark, grubby attic. We had brought with us a handsome mahogany bureau with brass handles, quite out of place but very serviceable, and three yellow kitchen chairs.

We only stayed three weeks, that first summer, but in that time Simon managed to shore up the foundation and get new shingles on the roof. We cleared and cleaned and made lists of things to leave, things to bring and things to do. We threw into the sea four barrels of stinking pickled salt herring hidden away  in the “store”; followed by the rusting remains of at least two previous wood cook stoves – pieces of old iron are still settling into the sand near the dock. We explored the island to find a magical sandy beach on the northeastern side;  a rapidly rotting old dock and breakwater on the south-western side of the island; and a freshwater pond very nearby. It took about 45 minutes to walk around or through the island, whether climbing over rocks along the coast or bushwhacking trough the middle.  I was in love with the islands, but exhausted  all the time. There were the three older children to be watched over, Rebecca to nurse, meals to be conjured up from a cranky wood stove, and water to be carried, diapers to be washed…. I remember sometimes hiding in the attic for a few quiet moments to cry and catch my breath before descending again to the turmoil and demands.

I was unprepared for the warmth of the welcome we would receive from the islanders.    I should not have been surprised. In our brief ten day visit the year before we were befriended and welcomed in “like family “ by Colin and Kathleen Hirtle. There were few official roads on the outer islands but there was a tacit understanding that paths could be made along the water leading from house to house. In the first week Simon came home from doing a carpentry errand and was stopped by one of the old fishermen, wisened but lively, Percy Baker. “I seen you was a stranger and I come out to have a yarn w’t you.” Television had just come to the islands and would eventually replace the stock of stories fishermen – and women too – could spin out and linger over until they became reified as gospel.

 We had landed in the middle of a small but vibrant fishing community, contained within a cluster of islands, at the mouth of the La Have river.  Except for Malcolm,  the proprietor of the only store on the island,( known to all as The Shop) , every able-bodied man on the islands was involved in fishing, but fishing was changing at an accelerating speed, like everything else in the second half of the 20^th century.  Boats were getting engines and radar; unemployment benefits helped through the non-fishing winter months; medical expenses were  absorbed by a national health scheme and  the government sponsored support services conspicuously raised the  standard of living for all Canadians. In 1968 it was all happening as post war social programs edged into action, and more advanced technologies wiggled their way across the Canadian borders. 

We were privileged to arrive in the middle of change. There were too many changes happening at once to chronicle but I can offer an example, Colin Hirtle’s  daughter, MaryAnne had all her teeth removed when she was 14 to avoid later trouble.  They were doing her a favor, saving her from the pain of  toothaches and the financial burden of dentistry, before a national health service, before easy access to dentists. Their grandchildren would grow to maturity with a mouthful of teeth and no fear of the dentist.

Post war social support services were making life easier for fishermen but ironically there were fewer fish for these better supported fishing families. That first summer we could drop a hook in the water and catch a cod.  Now it takes a week’s patience to catch a fish; the fish were plentiful in 1968; by 1980 it was clear the fish stocks were dwindling and improvements in technology could not make up the difference, in fact technology and trawlers on a global scale were contributing to the decline.  Now there are a few boats in lobstering season but hardly a fish to be caught or a market for selling the fish should there be any. With the fish there has been a striking decline in tide pool life, in varieties of fish, birds and small creatures. But, even more striking is that when there are no fish there are no fishing families.  In a mere 100 years the La Have islands were settled: houses built, land cleared, a community created and in half that time the community had disappeared, the land reverting to scrubby evergreens and the houses composting themselves back into the soil.

As summer visitors “from away” in 1968 we were  able to live much as did the earliest settlers in our house: immigrants from Germany during the famines of the mid-19^th century. We had a hand dug well for water, an outhouse for waste, a wood stove for heat and cooking, and neighbors for help and comradeship. Some of our neighbors had  animals, cows and/or chickens or an occasional pig and almost all had gardens with good keeping vegetables like potatoes, cabbage, and  cranberries for essential Vitamin C. The staple was dried salt fish. We didn’t have a refrigerator, but we kept food likely to spoil in a watertight pail in the well, the coldest place available.

We were in a sense tourists, people from away living on the land or “back to nature”, a deliberate choice on our part. We left when it got cold; we had access to sophisticated medicine and dentistry and when we did abandon the 19^th century life we often skipped the century between, going from no phones to a computer, from kerosene lamps to solar panels, sailing or rowing boats to motor boats and we were free to leave whenever we chose.

Boats? Of course, we had boats, as essential to life on the islands as wood or water. That first summer we had a new 18-foot lapstrake wooden boat with an engine in the back which Simon bought in a local boat yard; and his pride and joy, an international ’14, an elegant lapstrake wooden sailing boat, 14 feet long with a 25-foot mast and  two sails,  a jib and a main.  It went like the wind until, many years later I made repairs with fiberglass and it no longer could be hauled over an isthmus by two people.

 We came in June when the sun stretches out his arms as far as  they will go, certainly to the ends of the known world and beyond. I would awake to the sound of the local fishing boats putt, putt, putting  out Bell Channel in the silvery dawn: putt, putt, puttputt, putt, putt, mostly single- or double-cylinder engines installed in old open, double-ended fishing boats originally designed to sail or row. A few of the more prosperous fisherman had lobster boats, with a blunt stern and a small engine room up front,  but these had old car engines. The specially designed marine engine appeared in boats and gradually replaced the putt-putts during our early years in Nova Scotia but that first summer we greeted the dawn with a symphony of putt-putts.

The first morning and every morning thereafter, rain or shine, I awoke to the sounds of the fishing boats and the sliver of light coming through the one attic window. Only half awake I  would roll over in bed and gather in Rebecca who was beginning to make mumbling, fussy sounds, for a long sleepy nurse, the two us slowly waking up as she sucked and dosed. Simon slipped off his side of the mattress and reappeared perhaps twenty minutes later with a cup of coffee for me, freshly brewed on his old primus stove.

Simon was the first person I met who made a ritual of coffee making, fussing over the quality of the coffee, the grind, and the making of it. He would buy the best coffee he could find in a fine grind and pour boiling water through the grounds “in an old sock” or the equivalent. His old sock was a small funnel-like cloth bag he had brought back from Mexico. It was very good coffee. My relatives put a spoonful of instant coffee into a cup, poured in hot water, not always “on the boil’ and added canned milk. One of the many things I learned from Simon was how to be a coffee snob.  

After coffee the wild rumpus began. I struggled with the grumpy old stove to get the chill off the morning, the children fell into various patterns,  some running down to the shore to check on the crabs caught the day before, or to add to the assortment of shells, sea urchins, star fish or buoys they were collecting, others stumbled into the kitchen half awake, looking for sustenance. Baby Rebecca sat nicely propped up in a cardboard box on the table next to the salt and pepper, waving her arms in delight, and giggling when tickled.

 There was breakfast and bed making and chores such as bringing up water from the well. In later years  the red plastic buckets gained names: Bobby Bucket and Betty Bucket. Some children carried water, some wood, and Rebecca had a second milky breakfast before going back down for a nap. Then I did dishes with water heated on the wood stove and, since I hoped not to have to start it again, I usually made a soup for lunch . Simon went immediately to work on the foundations, the roof and all the unanticipated little repairs needed to keep the house standing. Sometimes I took the children to the beach, sometimes I washed diapers and scrubbed floors, sometimes I helped Simon on the project of the moment. I rocked Rebecca and nursed her, stopped fights , produced painting material or playing cards on rainy days, and suggested games like hide and seek, or fort building.

Fishermen came to visit.  The fishing boats which went out in near dark at 4:00 am came back in the full glow of morning between 10:00 and 11:00. The single cylinders, the double cylinders and the sound of a few old car engines heralded their reappearance. Between the blue of the ocean and the blue of the sky,  crowds of gray, blue and black seagulls  circled around the fishing boats crying, clamoring, announcing the arrival of fish.  On the way in, the fishing crews gutted and dressed their fish for selling at the “Fish Plant’ on Bush Island. and when the tide was high enough to get into our dock either Collin or Nelson, both Hirtles but not from the same family, would swing up alongside the dock with “a nice mess of mackerel.” I’d run up to the house for beer, Simon would settle down on the dock “for a yarn” and the children would watch wide-eyed until it got boring and then they’d go back to skimming stones, or collecting shells and sand dollars, or fort building.  In later years Nelson, one of the younger fisherman, became a great favorite. He would tease them and they him, and they made a great game of stealing his cap.

There were four standing houses on Middle Island in 1968, and only one was now occupied year-round. Shortly after the La Have Islands were first settled in the mid-10^th century there were 10 houses on Middle Island but only these four remained, and all were empty save one, holding a family of seven; the father, Percy Hirtle; his two daughters, Shirley and Hazel; and five surviving sons. Freddy, the youngest, was 15 that first summer and when he wasn’t fishing with one of his brothers he would walk across the island to visit us. He didn’t talk much but he was clearly fascinated with the shingling project and would sit and watch Simon  all afternoon. Freddy lived with his brothers and sisters in a two-bedroom house with an unfinished attic  - probably built about a hundred years ago - and I was told they had only one lamp between them.  Percy’s wife had had several babies who died before they were a year old, and she herself died of cancer shortly after the last surviving baby was born The babies’ little wood marked graves behind the house were slowly disappearing in a marsh which was itself disappearing into a pond. 

The fishermen came to us and we went to them. We were as warmly welcomed by Kathleen and Collin as we had been the previous summer when we first arrived. Since there were no roads and no phones every visit was a drop-in, but there was a wide welcome; always cup of tea and a rocking chair. Kathleen held out her arms and I had no choice but to deposit Rebecca there. We rocked and talked. They were endlessly curious about us and we about them.  We talked about our children,  the winter, the weather, the price of lobster,  how the mackerel harvest was doing, and local island gossip: church,  politics, births and deaths,-  yarns. Wonderful, well-rehearsed tales of rum running, fishing adventures, drownings and marvels.

We packed up all that we had brought and intended to leave. The motorboat, the skiff, Sea Urchin and the ’14 were tucked away in the store. We  packed the rest of our stuff into the car, and went around the island to say good-bye to our new friends “When you are comin’ home again?” was always the parting  question. We promised them and ourselves that we would come and when we came it would be for the whole summer.  One or another of us didn’t always make it for the whole summer, but as a teacher with summers off,  the children and I were on the islands most of the next 50 summers, though in the last decades the number of children dwindled as the children were grown up enough to have jobs, schooling and even families of their own.  I replaced their energy and companionship with a coterie of friends who came every summer.

More than fifty years later, on the last day of August 2019, Rose, my granddaughter, and I emptied the water barrels, took down the solar panels, made sure all the perishable food was packed up to go, locked the house, the store and the boathouse – another Simon project  added in the intervening years, - loaded our kayaks with the last essentials and pulled off from shore. The narcissus and lilacs had gone by  but small green forests of cranberry bushes clung to the rocks, suggesting fall was on the way.  I looked back from the water and my eyes swept the shoreline: saying goodbye to the old, weathered house, the shingles covered with fading red paint as it had been when we arrived. I thought briefly of the paint we put on a few years after our first arrival: a paint made of fish oil, kerosene and red ochre, a formula popular on the islands for more than a century. The old-fashioned formula was a good preservative but what a smell!  The faded red house standing alone on a small bluff was looking a little sturdier than it had 51 years earlier, but not much.  As my eyes slid further down the shore I saw the old store, several times reshingled and blocked up, and a large new boathouse where this year’s fleet of Simon-made wooden boats were shoehorned in, snug for the winter. I thought as I always did of a line from Robert McClowskys’ “Time of Wonder”. The family in the book, like ours, were packing up their summer home in Maine to go back to their winter home, work and school,  feeling: “A little bit sad about the place we are leaving; a little bit glad about the place we are going.”  I scanned the shore line we were leaving, reviewing the joys, set-backs  and surprises of the summer and  I said, under my breath, “Keep safe.” Then we turned our backs on paradise and paddled toward the mainland.

 

 

May 2020.  ……………………….   Heidi Watts