by David Ward
I don’t need a bucket list either. I’ve done what I had to. If I should die today, feel whatever you need to for yourself, but don’t shed a tear for me. I plan to live a whole lot longer, but if I don’t, know that I was okay with that. I don’t want to fear aging, illness, and death. Resistance is pointless.
After a lifetime of trying to be a big-shot, I’m going to get smaller. I’m going to return to Ontario, that ugly old ogre I’ve been running from. I need to face the demons I left behind, reacquaint myself with family and friends, and find new ways to make my manifesto work. Plus, I need more children around. One of the greatest challenges of living in McCallum is that there are too few children. I’ve never liked the feel of an adults-only community, and with a grownup-to-child ratio of thirteen to one, McCallum’s kids don’t need me. I’d like to find a child or two that wishes for adult attention. Maybe I can coach some Little League baseball.
With any luck at all I’ll fall in love again, and hopefully that relationship will go the distance this time. It has often crossed my mind that I might be able to assist someone in an unfortunate situation — someone who wants and needs what I have to give. I may finally be at a point in my own maturity where I can support another in her efforts to heal, without me taking all her pain personally. My McCallum neighbours have taught me this. It’s amazing how well they find ways to work with each other — to the point of making peace with some highly damaged individuals.
The close confines of an isolated outport never permit you to completely get away from those you don’t want to be around. Including your enemies. Whether you’re playing for the same darts team or part of a group effort to re-shingle someone’s roof, McCallum requires constant courteousness and compassion. It’s so unlike the city that way. If the sun is setting over the Gulf of St. Lawrence, and you notice the neighbour who stole a can of gas from your shed last summer hasn’t come home from his cabin, you don’t allow your anger to stop you from preparing a search party at the possibility that this shady character might be clinging to a cold, slippery rock in the North Atlantic. Because without each other, we’re all dead in the water.
Yet, as much as I love to assist my elders, the load that comes with doing so in McCallum has become increasingly large. One early morning, I helped stretcher a badly suffering senior to the ferry. Four of us had to cart that man and gurney down a steep, slippery, snakelike stairway. Two of my earnest coworkers were in their seventies, and the other was fighting cancer. I was glad to help — even honoured to be asked — but I remember thinking that I, at fifty-something, with a bad back, should not be the youngest, healthiest man here.
Many men figured this out before I did — that the number of McCallum males up for assisting the elderly with their chores has been exceeded by the number in need — and that this imbalance is unbearable some days, like when a storm is approaching and everyone’s boat needs to be pulled from the water. The able men have made themselves scarce. “I want to help, but my own work isn’t getting done,” I’ve heard several guys say. This burden alone has caused some amazing men to move away. Aging is hard on everyone.
Never are the pressures on outport people greater than they are at Christmas. Whether you’re one of those who stays or goes — almost nobody comes — it’s a tough time of year. For those who stay, they run the risk of being housebound and all alone. I don’t imagine a solitary life is a good substitute for the Christmases these people remember from their past, when crazy youngsters, kitchen parties, mummers, and ice skating on Brandy Pond were a twelve-day way of life. And for those who leave town in search of loved ones, travel can be difficult when bad weather puts their trip, and lives, at risk. Newfoundland roads are not safe, and death doesn’t care whether it’s Christmas.
Those who work on trawlers, or in the oil fields, also feel considerable sadness over the holidays when their bosses don’t recognize the ways in which low morale actually hinders a worker’s capacity to make money for those who employ them. Then there’s the group who unselfishly take time away from their families in order to maintain essential services for the rest of us. Our nurses, for example, and those who keep our ferries afloat. These aren’t easy absences either.
As for the gang that spends the holidays hanging around the outport, they do what they can to make the most of the season — decorating their homes, sharing delicious meals — but time can be long when you’re miles from your children and your grandchildren except for the occasional heart-wrenching phone call on Christmas day. Even webcam technology — the chance to witness a grandchild opening a gift in Grande Prairie, perhaps — is less and less an option, what with governments increasingly dumping an inadequate internet infrastructure on rural Newfoundlanders in hope that every inconvenience they can impose on people will eventually force them to move to the city.
I’ve spent a few Christmases away — first in Melbourne, then Banff, and now in McCallum — and, despite the surfing, skiing, and tasty dinners I indulged in, each absence brought me sizeable suffering. I understand what outport people feel when they are far away from those who they care most deeply for. In fact, Christmas can be hard even when you’re surrounded by loved ones. Just ask fifty-seven-year-old Ralph Coles of Bonavista Bay.
“No, my buddy, this is going to be a Christmas like none before,” the St. John’s taxi driver strongly states. He is taking me to the airport so I can spend my first Christmas with family in a long time. Unclear of what Ralph is trying to tell me, I ask for clarification. “Well, my son,” he says, “last week the doctor told my wife she has breast cancer. And, while I know a lot of people is scared off by the ‘C’ word — there seems to be a lot more cancer around than there were when we was kids — me and my girls are not afraid. I mean all eight of ’em. We’ve got seven daughters, the wife and I do, and they are all grown up and educated except the youngest, and she will be going to university in Halifax next year. The others are in Yellowknife, Gander, Brampton, Dubai, and we got two in Calgary.
“I always said I would do what I could to make money — I built boats before the fishery crashed — but that every penny we saved had to be put to helping our girls get schooled. I am not one of those men who thinks women should not go to school.”
A likeable little guy, Ralph is a distracted driver. Following the car in front of us far too close for my comfort, he has to apply his brakes more often than I think necessary. I do understand, however, why he might have other matters on his mind. “Her cancer is treatable,” he tells me. “That’s what the doctor says. The doctor is a woman too. She is going to take the lump out, in January, and she wants to get a look at the other lymph nodes while she is in there. If those nodes are cancer free, and me and my girls are saying they will be, then my wife can get radiation, and we know that can beat a person down, don’t we?” But before I can reply, Ralph has another question: “Did I say that right — lymph nodes?” I assure him that the words he uses, and the way he says them, are correct, but even if they weren’t, Ralph Coles has made himself clearly understood — he is expecting this coming Christmas to be like none he and his courageous crew have ever experienced.
Twenty-one
Linda Hennessey, the chair of McCallum’s relocation committee, refers to McCallum as “a dying community. The population of the community drops to between 40–50 people during the winter months, with the others coming back to spend their summers. The school has only six students this year and, with one graduating high school in June, there will only be five students going back in September.” She worries that these children and youth are missing out on important socialization skills.
— Danette Dooley, Grand Falls-Windsor Advertiser, June 2, 2015
I don’t mean Linda Hennessey any harm — she’s worked hard at a tough job that no one else wanted, including me — but I don’t believe she should comment publicly on whether McCallum’s “children and youth are missing out on important socialization skills.” I don’t thin
k anyone should. To discuss among your family and friends about how staying in a dying outport might affect the development of a child’s socialization skills is fair territory. But to tell newspaper reporters, and go on social media, open-line radio, and television news, to speak about your concerns regarding other parents’ choices to keep their children in an arguable situation? That’s not right. That might be the meanest way in which resettlement is presently playing out — people all over this province are publicly suggesting that raising your children in an isolated outport stunts their growth.
I can see how the aggressors got to this insensitive place — if you’re desperate to move someone along, and they resist your efforts, you might be frustrated enough to indirectly toss the occasional hurtful comment in your opposition’s direction. And there’s no more surefire way to do that than to tell them that they’re hurting their children. But such a choice is uncharitable, and self-degrading if you stand to make money from it.
I often get asked if I believe McCallum’s children suffer socially, given they are such a small group. I don’t think so, I say. I’m seeing so many of them do so incredibly well for themselves after they leave the outport that for me to suggest otherwise would be misguided on my part. I also point out that afflictions like social anxiety are not exclusive to outport people — lots of big-city residents are shy around strangers and overwhelmed upon entering a big arena. Then I tell those doing the asking that it’s outport people who have previously moved away that I’m most uneasy about, because there are some really inconsiderate thinkers in that group who have way too much to say about this sensitive subject. I wonder how these commentators can, in good conscience, constantly suggest that because they attended a school that had a whopping fifty-four learners, they’re somehow socially superior. This self-centred way of seeing the world frustrates me so much I’ve occasionally found it necessary to confront these critics.
I wish more people could acknowledge the amazing upside that results when you have one teacher for every three or four students, as you do in McCallum. I’ve seen firsthand how fruitful this situation can be for those kinds of learners who would surely receive less attention in a more populated environment. There were seventeen hundred students at my high school, a number that did not work in my favour. Yet I can guarantee you that no child slips through the cracks in McCallum these days, because McCallum loves its children.
Not that everyone everywhere doesn’t care about their kids, just that events like Halloween remind me how much the people of McCallum look out for the children in their community. McCallum’s pumpkin-heads collect much larger piles of loot than you’d expect from a town with only twenty-five homes to hand out candy. If the children in McCallum imagine that kids in the city get more, they’re wrong.
McCallum knows exactly how many children will be trick-or-treating. So families don’t have to budget what they buy at the store or give out at the door, unlike city people who never know from year to year how many kids could be arriving and are cautious with their handouts as a result. So while it may look like children in the city have an unlimited number of houses to collect candy from, a night’s take for a townie is no greater than it is for a bay-kid in McCallum, and the tricksters don’t have to cover as many miles to amass it.
With so few goblins participating in this ritual pillage of the village, and with everyone knowing these children so well, McCallum folks are extremely generous, some even picking up fancy chocolate in the city so as to provide diversity among the mix. Plus, McCallum candy costs considerably less than Halloween sweets in the city, because, while Fudge’s Store intends to turn a profit, city stores look to make a killing. In the city, large faceless chain stores don’t hesitate to swindle customers on special occasions, unlike a little family-owned outfit in an outport, which simply prices everything with its usual markup. So a big box of little potato-chip bags in McCallum costs half as much as it does in the city, and the children benefit from that difference when the locals spend their savings on additional treats.
My favourite part of an outport Halloween is knowing that the night this event occurs can be decided at suppertime on the thirty-first of October. If heavy rain or a community-wide flu bug comes to town, a couple of phone calls after supper can truly postpone the entire community’s Halloween operations. Halloween doesn’t happen until conditions are safe and ideal. McCallum’s moms make sure of that. And the public criticism of McCallum’s youngest and most vulnerable doesn’t occur as often as it might either — not as long as I’ve got those kids covered.
So make no mistake about it, McCallum’s relocation committee is pro resettlement — it’s not a neutral board — and this is disappointing. This absence of balance makes the group that wants to stick around feel outnumbered more than ever, and it didn’t have to happen that way. An equitable discussion among everyone could have been facilitated from the beginning. Government could easily have led such a conversation, and it would have cost them almost nothing. Instead they dumped this hot potato in the hands of some frustrated people who feel they have to oversimplify the situation in their efforts to move things along.
When you consider all the amazing skills that outport people possess, working through a polarizing situation in a harmonious way is not one of them. I remember chairing a public meeting in McCallum regarding ferry issues. Doing so was as challenging a professional assignment as I’ve ever accepted. The community group that wanted change had some worthy concerns, but their conveyance of them was fuelled by relentless anger. I never saw the facilitation of a peaceful resolution as an option that I was allowed to choose as chair. I was expected to carry the torch for the angry group, and nothing else was seen as acceptable. Even a visiting teacher from another part of the province told me that my idea of presenting the committee’s concerns in a balanced way was “one of the silliest things” she’d ever heard. “This is war,” she firmly informed me, and no one disagreed. In the end, ferry personnel felt dumped on after receiving the news, via their employer, that McCallum was unhappy with their efforts, and I don’t believe our run-in had to happen that way. I think we could have initiated change without anyone further feeling hurt.
So now, because the group that wishes to take the province’s resettlement offer has done such a thorough job of alienating those who don’t want to go, the crew that wants to stay has stubbornly dug in deeper than ever. So deep that even if this team that doesn’t want to go was presented with an argument that might give them reason to reconsider, they wouldn’t listen. As a consequence, there are no winners around here right now. And I find that unfortunate.
As for the outlying islanders who are watching the final days of this outport unfold from afar, and chiming in negative comments whenever it makes them feel good about themselves to do so, the idea that they’re next — that once they’ve chased these outport people from their ancestral homes, the forces at work to destroy those who are different will turn their attention on them — is lost on these dissidents. This club of critics doesn’t realize that the argument that these smaller communities are economically inefficient will eventually come around to bite them in the butt because, shortly after the final outport gasps its last breath, someone somewhere will point out that at first the smaller cities, and eventually the entire island, should be resettled on the grounds that they are an economic anchor tied to the rest of the province/country. And once again, the aggressors will forget that there are real people affected by their rhetoric.
Yet, new ferries and the cost of running and maintaining them are indeed expensive. So much so that politicians have decided some special-interest groups — Fogo Island, for example, Newfoundland’s equivalent to Disneyland — should get themselves a big, beautiful boat, while the rest of the communities are culled. So when the alternative is to be turned into a counterfeit tourist attraction like Quidi Vidi Village is, I think that outport people elsewhere should consider themselves lucky that their plug is being
pulled. I’d rather see McCallum die a dignified death than become an amusement park for mainlanders. But that was never going to happen anyway — government has already secretly decided that the Southwest Coast is to be Newfoundland’s newest industrial basin.
Few rural Newfoundlanders know what an industrial basin is. It’s a townie term, I tell them. It’s the place where city planners traditionally put their most unsightly, smelly, and environmentally unsound things. Factories, sewage treatment plants, auto wreckers, warehouses — it’s where a community’s appearance, health, and recreation opportunities are set aside in the name of making money.
Provincial governments create industrial basins as well, but on a much larger scale. The Newfoundland town of Buchans is a good example. If Canadian vacationers ever saw the former mining town in commercials and other ads, they’d spend their travel dollars in Detroit. Buchans looks like something out of a science-fiction movie where the earth’s environment has been destroyed, and the poor souls who survived that disaster are desperately fighting over what few natural resources remain.
Now compare that apocalyptic vision to the outports of Burgeo, Ramea, Francois, Grey River, and Grand Bruit. The people in those drop-dead-gorgeous towns had a dream — a dream they were working on for ten years. The residents of those five communities wanted to create a National Marine Conservation Area around the cliffs and fiords of the Southwest Coast. So for a decade they worked together in an effort to utilize money that Prime Minister Jean Chrétien had set aside for just such ideas. For ten years, these towns worked not only with each other but with fishing and mining organizations to take control of their own destiny, rather than wait for their fishery to continue to collapse and for politicians to indirectly force them into accepting resettlement. But that was before the province of Newfoundland shut down their whole idea, saying government wasn’t interested in any community conservation projects that might interfere with big business’s efforts to further set up salmon cages and access minerals along the Southwest Coast. And, as if it wasn’t painful enough that politicians denied these outport people of their dream, government kept that February 2012 decision a secret for an entire year, while those outport people laboured away. It was only when Parks Canada said they would like to go ahead with a study to see if such a park proposal was possible that the people working away learned that their politicians had already subversively sabotaged their efforts.