by Alan Doyle
The Wonderful Grand Band was a musical variety group and a TV show in Newfoundland in the late 1970s and early ’80s. WGB played contemporary versions of traditional songs and the amazing original compositions of Ron Hynes, the greatest songwriter in the world. The band’s TV show, which aired once a week on CBC, was by far the most popular show on the air in Newfoundland—and it was homegrown through and through. Kids as young as toddlers and their grandparents alike watched every episode. The whole island came to a halt for thirty minutes when The Wonderful Grand Band was on. WGB was one of the only things that united Baymen and Townies alike in Newfoundland. I watched it in Petty Harbour and Séan and Bob watched it in St. John’s, all of us laughing and singing along, none of us with the slightest clue how the musical foundations of our lives were being laid.
While WGB is the mother of GBS, she had quite a few suitors before her baby was born. When my teenage years hit, I, like so many young fellas my age, fell under the spell of hair metal bands like Van Halen and Whitesnake as well as sexy rockers like Pat Benatar and songwriters with gun bands like Billy Joel and John Cougar. Meanwhile, when Bob Hallett became a teen, he loved early British punk and its near antithesis, new wave. And not too far down the road in the East End of St. John’s, a young Séan McCann idolized Christy Moore, Bob Marley and the Police.
Photo by Jennifer M. Livick
We had no idea at the time, but when the three of us finally met in 1992, we would bring all these improbable musical roots together—traditional shanties and Catholic hymns, hair metal and punk, Celtic folk and reggae—to produce the wave of sound we came to call Great Big Sea.
Photo by Jennifer M. Livick
CHAPTER 5
Petty Harbour fell quiet, like many other fishing villages that were victims of the cod moratorium in the early nineties. On that day in 1992, one of the darkest in Newfoundland history, in an effort to conserve fish stocks, the Canadian government effectively forced the extinction of a Newfoundland way of life that had persevered through centuries. The government of Canada declared inshore cod fishing illegal. And with that declaration, Petty Harbour, along with much of rural Newfoundland, was forever changed. The deep rumbling sound heard in my town that day was my Granda spinning in his grave. I was glad he wasn’t alive to experience that tragic moment the way the rest of us did, but we could still hear his cold corpse booming up to us from six feet underground—“I told you so!” he said.
I wish everyone I know today could have seen the Petty Harbour of my childhood. Let me try to paint for you a picture of what the inshore cod fishery of the mid-1970s till the late ’80s looked like. When I was a kid, the fishery was going full bore. Petty Harbour was a twenty-four-hour town for more than half the year. At one point, three fish processing plants operated around the clock, employing hundreds of folks from town and down the shore. Workers began early and finished late; fishermen got up at the crack of dawn and headed to the wharf; trucks came and went at all hours of the day and night.
I remember lying in my bed hearing the sound of the offal chutes from across the harbour, as guts and gurry (the leftovers of fish processing) slid down aluminum chutes to an awaiting hopper that fed it all up to a huge container perched on two-storey-high metal posts. I remember the psshht of a truck’s air brakes carrying a load of fish out of town, and the unmistakable putt-putt of the one make-and-break engine, the shouts and laughter of plant workers ending their night shift and drinking beers pulled from a fish pan filled with ice in the back of a pickup truck. I remember the slam of the screen door of our neighbour—a fisherman—who at four every morning left his missus in bed, closed the door behind him and started his old truck. This was the soundscape of our town from May through October. To this day, I can hear it in my mind.
One of the unfortunate aspects of being a mischievous teenager at this time was that it was nearly impossible to sneak around in the middle of the night during the summer months. There was always someone awake to see you.
Winter nights were quieter, but the days were almost as busy. Fishermen and plant workers who worked during the busy summer season collected decent unemployment insurance cheques throughout the winter—not that this stopped them from being busy in the cold months. Their skidoos towed sleighloads of firewood, which were loaded onto pickup trucks and hauled to homes all over town, where logs would be cut and split and split again. Then there was the hauling and stacking. And eventually, those split logs would be lugged piece by piece into wood stoves in homes and sheds and garages and makeshift boat shelters all over town, where fishermen sat close to the hearth as they mended nets, rebuilt gear and patched holes in their boats. Petty Harbour, summer or winter, was a busy place, with no end of good and bad a young lad could get up to.
All through my childhood, there was a larger section of covered wharf that jutted into the harbour perpendicular to the breakwaters. It was called the White Wharf. It resembled what most North Americans would call a covered bridge. It was my favourite section of wharfage in Petty Harbour. The White Wharf was a magical place, and I was saddened beyond belief years later when the local council decided it was too much of a liability to restore. It was demolished sometime in the late 1980s.
The White Wharf was an excellent place to sit and fish for tomcods or sculpins or to ride a bike, if you were lucky enough to own one, or to try to kiss a girl.
You could easily grab a few large nails and build a perfect ladder up one of the posts to the attic-like space in the roof. The kids in the harbour would often “borrow” a few planks from boats and line them along the lower trusses to make a walkway from one end of the White Wharf to the other. Some of us even made vertical walls to create our own hideouts high above the harbour. It was like having the best tree house in the world. Kids would bring ghetto blasters and old couch cushions up there and we’d listen to the radio or to the rain hitting the roof. If you were quiet enough after dark, you could go up there and spy on unsuspecting couples who’d stolen away behind one of the posts for a smooch … or whatever else.
All young male fantasies aside, the best thing that happened on the White Wharf was the Blessing of the Boats. Late in the spring, early in the summer, the boats from both sides of the harbour, yes, Protestant and Catholic, would gather at the head of the White Wharf. There, the priest and the reverend would lead a unified Petty Harbour congregation, joined for the one and only all-denominational event held in the town all year. It was beautiful. A choir comprising both churches sang songs of the sea and offered prayers to the North Atlantic for her to send our boys and men home safely. It was by far my favourite religious service, and it seemed so sensible to have the whole town gather to wish and hope for the same thing: Give us lots of fish and don’t let anyone drown this summer. That was a prayer I could believe in.
The inshore fishery consumed the town from top to bottom for six days a week, nearly six months a year. The men fished for as long as they could stand it, then slept for a few hours on a daybed in the kitchen, and then jumped up the next day to do it all again. The women and girls had their work cut out for them keeping families fed and in clean clothes and houses. And most boys between the ages of ten and fourteen started cutting out tongues.
Cutting out tongues. I realize that phrase requires a bit of explanation. I have never met a Mainlander from anywhere on earth who had the slightest clue what I was talking about when I’ve made reference to cutting out tongues. Even people from New England fishing towns, Scandinavian fishermen and folks from other great fishing cultures like Portugal all draw a complete blank whenever I use the term. Knowledge of cutting out tongues seems restricted to the small fishing towns along certain coasts of Newfoundland.
And now for a working definition. Cutting out tongues refers to cutting out the tongues of codfish, along with the triangular bit of flesh that lies beneath the actual tongue. Cod tongues are a bit of a delicacy in Newfoundland and a really big delicacy in parts of Europe and Asia. They are very labour intensive to harvest, as i
t requires someone to handle every single fish and cut out the tongue by hand. In the modern world of super trawlers and mechanical processing, fish come out of the water and into a processing boat where the meaty fillets are machined off the bone and into a store-ready package without ever touching a human hand. But when I was a kid, most of the fish that landed in Petty Harbour were caught on hand-held, single-hook lines, and those fish were carried to shore daily on small twenty-foot boats. Each fish was individually lifted from the boat to the wharf and from the wharf to a table, where every last one was hand-gutted and bled. Of course, the fillets were the choicest parts, but there were all sorts of other bits of the cod that were valued, including heads, livers, britches (roe), sounds (the fleshy liner of the spine) and tongues. The rest of the offal was shipped to a plant to make fertilizer. There was very little, if any, waste.
A typical summer day for me and most other teen and preteen boys meant rising around seven thirty, eating a toast-and-butter breakfast and dressing in the oldest, most wrecked clothes we owned. Around eight, I’d get on my rubber boots and avail myself of two very important tools in the tongue-cutting trade—the bucket and the knife. The bucket was generally an old white plastic salt-beef pail with a wire handle. The bucket was important because it held your cod tongues, but it also served as your seat for the early, sit-around-and-wait part of the day. The knife was usually a hand-me-down fish-filleting knife that had a full-size handle, but the blade had been worn too small for any kind of full-size fish work. When brand new, a Russell knife had a six-inch blade, but the constant razor sharpening wore them down to half that size. They would then be useless for filleting and perfect for cod-tongue cutting.
If you were lucky enough, one of the professional fish filleters from the fish plant would be throwing away his well-used Russell knife and you’d catch him and ask him for it before he ditched it. I got one from a fella that lasted me almost my entire four-year tenure on the wharf. Most young fellas around the harbour became adept at sharpening knives with a file or a steel or a stone. It was one of the services you could offer the fishermen in exchange for access to their catch.
Once my old clothes were donned, my toast eaten, my knife and bucket readied and my rubber boots pulled on, I’d head for the wharf. On the Catholic side. (Yes, Petty Harbour had Catholic and Protestant cod-tongue cutters.) Most of the gang would assemble around eight to wait for the boats to arrive after their morning “spurt,” as the fishermen called their first outing of the day. These fishermen would have been up since four. Depending on the catch and the weather, they would head back to shore as early as eight thirty or as late as two or three in the afternoon.
Between six and a dozen of us boys would gather and wait on the harbour side of the grey plywood weigh house. Jack Walsh, the weighmaster, let us nail an eight-foot-long two-by-eight piece of lumber to the side of the weigh house to serve as a makeshift bench. He was even nice enough not to ask us where we had “borrowed” it from.
I’m not in this awesome photo taken by Robert O’Brien, but it totally captures the joy and fun of cutting out tongues.
Jack was the unpaid, unofficial supervisor of us boys. The principal of summer school. The Fagan to our Oliver Twist gang of hooligans. The boss. A poor report from Jack, and you were off the wharf—out of work and out of spending money for the rest of the summer. Jack insisted we keep the place clean and the language, too. “No shagging around, lads,” he’d say. “No bullying, no fighting, no cheating—and no stealing cod tongues from your buddies.” He was constantly keeping us from falling overboard from boats or from electrocuting ourselves with some car battery that we found in an old boat. He was also quick to show us how to sharpen our knives or how to properly fillet a codfish or tie a half hitch knot or whatever else we needed to learn.
Jack had mystical superpowers. Apart from the fact that he never seemed to age and had that same youthful twinkle in his eye summer after summer, he could also forecast the weather forty-eight hours in advance—and he did it better than the meteorologists from the CBC.
“You won’t be out tomorrow. It’s gonna be blowin’ a gale.” The fishermen knew not to challenge Jack’s forecast.
Jack Walsh was so familiar with the fleet of small boats around Petty Harbour that he could tell which boat was approaching just by the sound. A distant hum of an engine would drift along the water and up to the wharf.
Weighmaster Jack Walsh, who always kept the harbour in order when I was a boy.
Notice how Jack looks almost the same today, whereas I have aged considerably.
“That’ll be Jacob Chafe,” Jack would announce. And he was always right.
As if that wasn’t enough, Jack could also look at a boat coming into sight through the breakwaters and estimate the weight of its catch to within a hundred pounds.
“I’d say Jacob’s carrying twenty-six hundred pounds today, give or take a couple.” And right he was.
Jack would greet us every morning as we took our seats on the bench. “There’s the b’ys, ready to work for a few dollars like the big fellas. ’Attaway. Keep your knife sharpened and your bucket clean.”
Sometimes we’d wait on the bench for just a few minutes before we’d see the boats coming to shore; other times, we’d wait for hours. Sitting there on the long-wait days were some of my favourite times during my childhood. Perched on the narrow bench, rubber boots on the wooden edge of the wharf with a bunch of friends around my age. We passed the time talking about sports and how Gretzky would never be as good as Lafleur and how Tiger Williams would never take Stan Jonathan in a fight. We’d argue over who was the best local softball pitcher or darts player and how Gordie Doyle was probably a good enough goalie to make the NHL but would never be given a chance by the scouts. Everything was up for discussion and debate.
We’d declare Mike Hearn the strongest man in Petty Harbour, replacing old Frank, who wasn’t as strong as he used to be years ago when he apparently turned a Volkswagen Beetle over all by himself. We’d spend hours debating which boat could hold the most fish and which cost the most and which could go the fastest. We figured Benny was the fastest runner but Bobby could probably still hit him with a rock, as he had by far the best arm. We knew for certain Harry Chase was one of the richest men in the world as he had two cars and a job in town somewhere. We heard that Ray was on drugs and that’s why he came home from Toronto. Another girl, Mary, was definitely pregnant, and the father of her baby was a fella from up the shore who owned a van and played the Doors as loud as his stereo could suffer as he drove up and down the shore.
The older boys would talk about girls and how someone’s brother had seen more than half of Jenny’s chest from the second-floor choir loft at church. Another fella would swear that Rhonda let him stuff grass down her top just so he could cop a feel. And yet another would share the hot tip that if you brought a certain widow a meal of cod tongues, she’d reward you by leaving the bathroom curtain open so you could watch her while she took a bath.
When we got bored of talking, we’d wander around the wharf looking for trouble. We’d make a kink in one of the long rubber hoses and stop the water flow till one of the boys would stick his face to it and check if the nozzle was clogged. Then we would release the kink in the hose and blast his face with water. We’d bring little bits of flour with us to scatter around the wood cribs below the wharf and wait for the hungry rats to come out for a feed. The moment a rat stuck its head out, we’d pelt it with rocks or even shoot at it with a pellet gun, if one of us had been sly enough to sneak a gun on the wharf without Jack seeing it.
We’d get a line and old hook or even a fishing pole, and we’d play catch-and-release with sculpins. The ugliest fish in the world, sculpins lined the harbour floor and ate anything. You could catch them with a piece of red rag on a line. You would not even need a hook. You could pull them up to the wharf, where they’d regurgitate the hookless lure. Awesome.
We did a similar thing with the seagulls. We’d take a
cod liver and put it in ice for a few minutes so it was not quite so mushy. We’d wrap fishing line in and around it and let it float out to the middle of the harbour or even past the breakwater into the open sea, if our line was long enough. Some poor unsuspecting gull would spot his lunch and nosedive to it, swallowing the liver and line in one gulp. Then the bird would fly off and just before our length of line ran out, we’d yank with all our might.
Most times, the gull would turn mid-air with a very confused look, barf up the line and liver, and head for the hills. But if you were really lucky, the gull would bite down hard on the line and refuse to give up the liver dinner. Then you had a fight on your hands—pulling and yanking a flying bird out of the air or being pulled into the harbour yourself if the gull was stubborn and strong enough.
One morning, Mikey went head to head in an epic battle with a big gull. Mikey was a smaller fella, barely ten years old, and he landed one of the biggest seagulls I’d ever seen up close. He was trying his best to reel the bird in, but this particular gull was just too strong. We all got behind Mikey and started chanting his name and he swelled up with pride and held his own for a good minute or two. When it looked like he was gonna get yanked in the harbour, a couple of us took a coil of rope and lashed him to a bollard. He was going nowhere now, but the gull would still not give up. The avian terror got closer and closer to the wharf till it was about four or five feet above Mikey’s scared little head. It looked like the bird was going to attack him, and Mikey, still tied down, was crying like a baby. But to his credit, he would not let go of the line.
“Mikey, Mikey!” we chanted, at a safe distance.
Mikey gave one final heave and the gull released the line about three feet above Mikey’s face. Unfortunately for Mikey, the gull’s surrender caused the creature to barf up the liver—along with the rest of the contents of its stomach—all over Mikey’s face and shoulders. As the gull flew off, we caught a whiff of the half-digested fish innards and rotting capelin and who knows what else that made up the seagull’s last meal.