Where I Belong

by Alan Doyle

  That’s me, Séan, Darrell and Bob in 1993.

  Photo by Justin Hayward

  0ur first album cover, featuring (you guessed it) a great big sea.

  On that first record is a traditional Newfoundland song about a tidal wave. The song is often called “A Great Big Sea Hove in Long Beach,” but we shortened that mouthful and amongst ourselves called it, simply, “Great Big Sea.” We really liked the intro to that song, so we figured it should be the first on the album. Then we liked the name so much, we thought we’d call our whole album Great Big Sea.

  But we were still very stuck on a band name. With the artwork deadline only hours away, we had to think of something. Lots of bands named their first albums after their band, but few ever did it the other way around.

  “Guys, why not call ourselves Great Big Sea? We liked it for everything else.”

  “Better than Best Kind, that’s for sure,” said Bob. “And we’d have a cool three-letter abbreviation like the Wonderful Grand Band. WGB and GBS. Cool.”

  And so it was. Four guys agreed and our new band was about to be launched in downtown St. John’s. It was only when we got some airtime on the radio that we realized naming a band, an album and the first song on that album all the same thing might be problematic. DJs certainly had an awkward time of it: “And now, I’d like to introduce to you a new band from Newfoundland, from their debut record Great Big Sea, here’s Great Big Sea, with ‘Great Big Sea.’ ”

  CHAPTER 2

  When I was a young fella, my world was not a big one. I would often go many days or even weeks without seeing, much less meeting, a single person that I had not known for my whole life. Many people around me were happy with those boundaries, but even at a tender age, I would challenge “the way things were.” I lusted for new faces and new stories. This attitude probably came from my mother, who always taught me to question everything and to be aware that there was a great big world beyond the confines of our tiny little town.

  Now don’t get me wrong. Petty Harbour was a wonderful place to grow up … until one got curious enough to want to see other stuff. And if I look back into my mind, I can see myself standing on that bridge and wondering what the world beyond was actually like, because at that young age, I still had no idea. And I also had to reckon with the fact that almost the entire town believed that Petty Harbour was truly the only place in the world to live. And by extension, whatever was the best in Petty Harbour had to be the best in the world.

  One of my uncles was a bit of a cynic. He had travelled, so he was a bit more worldly than other types in town. He, too, liked to challenge “the way things were.” If Granda said that Roger who worked at the fish plant was the best hockey player ever, my uncle would say, “If that were true, he’d be in the NHL, and he’s not.”

  Getting angrier, Granda would say, “Yeah, but that’s ’cause that crowd up on the Mainland never gave him a chance.”

  My uncle wouldn’t leave it there. “Well, maybe he didn’t try hard enough or he just wasn’t good enough to make it in the big leagues, or maybe he just decided that the pro hockey life was not for him.”

  “No. Roger is the best damned hockey player in the world, no question. If he didn’t make it to the big leagues, that’s the fault of the f—king Mainlanders who never gave him a chance. Like I’m always tellin’ ye, Mainlanders will take everything we got, but they won’t put a Newfoundlander in the NHL.”

  “But Alex Faulkner made it to the NHL.” My uncle was making a point about the first Newfoundland NHLer. “What, did he hide his birth certificate?”

  “Go f—k yourself.” Granda would always get the last word.

  And so it went.

  I remember thinking about this attitude as a kid, trying to work out the logic. I’d think to myself, that can’t be right. Just because Roger is the best hockey player in Petty Harbour doesn’t mean he’s the best hockey player in the world. Not necessarily. Even then, without ever having left Petty Harbour, I knew the world beyond my town was bigger than I could imagine, the same way I knew it was possible that there was life on another planet. So maybe, just maybe, there were better hockey players elsewhere, too, like, say, in the NHL.

  But whenever I tried to challenge the adults around me, I wouldn’t get very far. “Jerry is bar none the best fish filleter in the world,” someone would say.

  “But are you sure that’s right?” I’d ask. “I’m sure Jerry is the best fish filleter around here, but isn’t it possible there’s someone better in another place, like maybe someone over in Sweden or Russia? There must be lots of guys filleting fish over there. Is it possible that one of them might be better than Jerry?”

  “You can wonder all you likes, but I’m telling you, Jerry is the best. That’s it. No one’s better at fish filleting than him.”

  I was often encouraged to look no further afield. But I could not help it. Whenever there was a foreigner passing through the town, unlike some of the other local lads who would point and jeer or run away, I was always curious. What on earth, I wondered, would bring people from away to Petty Harbour? It was as if by watching the outsiders in our midst I was seeing my community for the very first time.

  When I was about eight years old, a painter came to town—an artist, rather. He was not what we called a painter back then—that was someone who whitewashes your house. This man was French. Not like Quebec French but from France. He would have been in his twenties, I guess. He’d been standing at the head of the wharf all morning in front of an easel like the one Mr. Dressup used on TV. Some of the other boys from Petty Harbour and I had been spying on him for a few hours.

  “I wonder if he works for the government,” I said to my cousin Benny.

  “No, b’y. I’d say he’s high or something. Just there drawing, whacked out of his head on dope or whatever,” Benny surmised.

  High or not, we wondered what this man could possibly be doing there in one spot for so long, not lifting or hauling or building anything. He held a long paintbrush in one hand and a flat piece of board in the other, which was dotted with reds and blues and greens. His longer than local hair lifted and fell gently in the spring breeze. As we often did when a new person showed up in town, we came to the unspoken yet unanimous decision that we should throw rocks at him and run up behind the church when he chased us.

  But something about his peaceful progress at his labour got the better of me and I shocked the other lads by saying, “Hold on, b’ys. I’m going to ask him what he’s at.”

  “What?!” Benny had already gathered a couple of real good throwing rocks—about half the size of your fist and round so they would not curve in the wind. He dropped them. “F—k sakes,” he said.

  I walked up the length of the wharf and the painter must have seen me over his easel but he did not speak. I stood in front of him, looking at the back of the canvas stretched over the wooden frame.

  “Hey,” I said.

  In a thick French accent he replied, “Allo. ’Ow are you?”

  I didn’t waste any time with small talk. “Me an’ the b’ys are wondering what you are doin’.”

  “I am painting.”

  “Painting what?”

  “Painting what I see—the sun, the hills, the church.”

  “Why?”

  “Because they are beautiful and will make a nice picture.”

  “What for?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe someone will want to hang this picture in their house.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it will make their home a happier place.”

  I had no clue what to say to that. How could a painting make a room happier? I must have carried the question on my face, as the painter smiled and asked, “Would you like to see? I am almost done.”

  I walked around the easel and stood beside him in front of the canvas. I thought my eyes would burst when I saw what he had created. I’d never seen anything like it in my young life. He’d painted the water bluer and whiter than it really was, and
the colours of the spring trees on the hill jumped off the canvas in thick ridges of paint. The white wooden church was slanted and tilted, and the cross on the spire looked like it was about to reach down and shake your hand.

  “What do you think?”

  All I could think to say was, “It looks like a dream.”

  He took his brush and made a diamond shape in the sky above the church in hazy, broken lines.

  “What’s that?” I had to ask.

  “The sun.”

  “But the sun is round.”

  “Not my sun,” he said and smiled a long-lingering smile. I knew I was supposed to learn something from what he’d said, but was not sure what it was.

  I stood there for a half-hour or so and watched him put the finishing touches on his picture. When he said he was done, I said, “See ya.”

  And he replied, “Au revoir,” which I’d heard on Sesame Street.

  I looked around for Benny and the boys, but they must have gotten bored and left.

  I walked up around the bend on Skinner’s Hill and went in the back door of the house. Mom was at her usual pre-supper station, bent over a pot of gravy.

  “Mom, I talked to a painter fella.”

  “That queer-looking fella on the wharf?”

  “Yeah. He was painting a picture of the church.”

  My mom looked up from the pot she was stirring. “The Protestant church?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Why?”

  “He thought it would be a nice picture that would make someone’s home happier.”

  My brother walked in then, having heard our conversation. “What a pansy,” he said as he dipped a slice of homemade bread in the gravy pot. I was not sure if he was talking about me or the painter.

  Mom gave him a smack for the bread-dipping and for his crass tongue.

  She said to me, “Honey, I’m sure he made a nice picture. Did you see it when it was finished?”

  “Yeah. It was cool, I s’pose. But none of the stuff looked like it do in real life.”

  “Maybe he’s just learning,” Mom said and turned back to stirring the gravy.

  In my adult life, I came to know this painter I met on the wharf. His name is Jean Claude Roy. He made frequent visits to Petty Harbour in the 1970s. In my mid-thirties, I bought one his paintings of Petty Harbour and the Protestant church. And guess what? It does make my home happier.

  There were other CFAs—Come From Aways—who I talked to as a child. I recall speaking with a tourist couple down behind the Bidgood’s lobster pound. (Note for Mainlanders: a lobster pound is an onshore holding tank for lobsters, where sea water is pumped in to keep the creatures alive and kicking until they’re sold and moved. I was shocked when my editor told me I had to explain this.) Bidgood’s pound was perched on a three-storey-high granite ledge that stuck out into the open bay on the northernmost side of the harbour. Easily the windiest spot on earth. There was not a blade of grass or so much as patch of moss on that spot. Bone rock. This tourist couple had been sitting on that rocky ledge for hours as the wind nearly beat the faces off them. Yet they looked so content with their picnic lunch and camera ready at the hip. I had to find out what they were up to, so I asked.

  Jean Claude Roy’s stunning painting of Petty Harbour, making my kitchen a happier place.

  “We want to see a whale,” the woman answered.

  I was stunned. I was confused. I thought she was an absolute nutcase. I had to clarify my question.

  “You want to see a whale do what?”

  They just giggled. I never got an answer to my question.

  It was the same with the tourists who were bused in to look at the icebergs. Who in their right mind would spend all day or even longer on a bus, come all the way to a tiny town in the middle of nowhere and go out to sea on a boat to watch a chunk of ice?

  These encounters always gave me pause, because the people from away, the people from these interesting faraway places my mother assured me existed, saw the world in a totally different light. These moments made me even more eager to understand the perspective of people from away, one that was obviously not widely shared around Petty Harbour. In my little fishing town, folks were quite content with looking inward at the inexhaustible supply of characters and world views we had locally. And who could blame them when we had such a colourful cast. Consider Frank Brake.

  Fisherman Frank Brake was as old as the hills when I was a kid on the wharf.

  “The face on Frank is like a catcher’s mitt,” my brother, Bernie, used to say. I always thought it was more like well-worn saddle leather. The skin on his hands was even rougher. His sausage-sized fingers were twisted and ripped from years of cuts and injuries that were left to heal—or not—in whatever shape or misshape nature desired.

  Unlike most of the other fishermen in town, Frank spent much of his life away from Petty Harbour and Newfoundland—and away from Canada, for that matter. He was a sailor and had sailed around the globe a few times and worked in various capacities as a deckhand or in whatever job aboard whatever vessel he found himself.

  He would regale me and the other young fellas on the wharf with tales of storms at sea and the countless times his ship and crew were nearly lost. He’d tell us of fights he had in foreign lands where a man’s throat was cut or neck was snapped at the hands of another sailor. He told us of brothels in French and Spanish ports, where dark-skinned beauties would come down by the dozen to “welcome” the crew. He told us of a shipmate who regretted his time in the brothel as he itched and scraped his infected crotch till it bled.

  Listening to him talk over a fishing table, with an everburning cigarette hanging from his lips, was for a ten-year-old boy nothing short of mesmerizing. Jack Walsh, the respected weighmaster at the wharf who was responsible for recording each fisherman’s official catch, best described Frank as an old workhorse: “Frank was rode hard and put away wet.”

  As if Frank’s experiences were not enough to make him a source of fascination, he lived in the most remote and strange dwelling I’ve ever seen—an old wooden Canadian National Railway car. How that railway car got to the wharf on Petty Harbour is beyond anyone’s imaginings. The closest railway line to the harbour was at least twenty-five kilometres away, but still, there it sat on the edge of the wharf tucked underneath the steep bank. It had always been there, for as long as anyone, including the all-knowing Jack, could remember. To this day, no one has been able to propose a scenario about how the railcar could have possibly wound up on the wharf.

  Frank’s boxcar had a single sliding window. What was in that boxcar was the source of much speculation, so much so that me and my ever-present accomplice and friend Perry Chafe decided we’d investigate. When Frank was out on the water, we’d hoist a littler fella to look in and report back to us. There were always a dozen or so younger boys hanging around, being baptized into life on the wharf. Mostly, these kids were scared stiff by the things us older boys said and did. But the eager ones wanted in. Mikey was my favourite of all the little fellas.

  “Mikey, what can you see?” I asked as we hoisted him up for a peek.

  “Can’t see all that much. Pretty dark in there. He’s got a kitchen table set up under the window.”

  “What else?”

  “There might be a moose head, and that could be an accordion or a suitcase. Not sure.”

  “You’re useless, Mikey,” Perry declared. “Look harder. Is there anyone dead in there?”

  “I can’t see, b’y. There’s not a light on in the place. Wait! Is that a rifle on the wall?”

  And that’s about as clear a view as we ever got, leaving lots of room for all of us to use our imaginations.

  “He sleeps on old sails,” Perry decided. “From an old shipwreck he was in just off of Spain or Africa.”

  “I heard he’s got a trap door in there that leads to a hole in the wharf where he can get out to his boat without anyone seeing. He smuggles rum from St-Pierre and he sneaks it out to hide it.”


  But my favourite rumour was one the Hearn boys started about Frank being a pirate.

  “He’s got treasure in there. That’s why he never lets anyone in and why he don’t have a real address or a phone. There’s Portuguese sailors after him. He’s got gold church mugs and that stashed away, but what everyone’s really after is the map to where the motherlode of treasure is.”

  “What?! Have you seen any of this gold stuff?” I asked.

  “No, but I heard Father say that Frank was looking for some metal polish that was good for brass and gold. Ya knows that’s what he’s at in there—polishing gold church mugs and hiding from Portuguese pirates who wants to cut his throat.”

  I suppose Frank could have just been a lonely bachelor who wanted to polish brass fittings for his boat, but what was the fun in thinking that?

  The truth of Frank’s place, much like the man himself, is lost in darkness. I tried many times to be around when Frank hauled open the massive sliding door that occupied about half of one side of the boxcar, but I never got to see in. Most times, Frank came and went through a normal house door that he had built into the narrow side of the car. But he was so large and imposing that even when he entered and exited, we never got to see a single thing inside. Where did he sleep? Did he have a bathroom in there? A fridge? We could see smoke coming from a makeshift chimney pipe, so we assumed he had some kind of wood stove, but there was never any firewood lying around outside. What was he burning? Was there electricity or an oil lamp or what? The mystery of Frank’s abode made for hours of curious speculation.

  The other thing that made Frank so amazing was his ability to ignore his advancing age and the myriad of health issues that came with it. Frank was so hardened by years at sea that he had no time for illness.

  “You can stitch that up yourself as good as any doctor,” I heard him tell one of the boys on the wharf who was going home after slicing himself with his knife.

  Frank fished alone and really had no one to take care of him. As he aged, Weighmaster Jack asked us kids to watch after Frank.