by Alan Doyle
“B’ys, there’s a busload coming in soon and they all wants tongues. They’re gonna buy every tongue on this wharf if we plays our cards right. They’re old and easily shit-baked, so we can’t be too loud or we’ll scare them away. They loves the cute fellas, so Patty”—he was the youngest and most perfect Irishy-orphan-Oliver-Twisty-looking fella in our group—“will go to the bus once they all gets off. Patty, you know what to say?”
Patty had obviously practised. He doffed his tiny salt-and-pepper hat and with his voice cracking perfectly, said, “How are you gettin’ on? Welcome to O’Brien’s wharf in our town of Petty Harbour, Newfoundland. Would you like to buy some fresh cod tongues from me and the b’ys?”
The con worked like a charm. The ladies would gush, he was so damn cute.
Then another Nitzy Pumpkin (that’s what we’d call a cute little Irish-looking kid with red hair and freckles) would sidle up to the tourists, eyes wide and smelling like a rotten cod, and he’d say, “Me and the boys have been here on the docks since five a.m. We’re trying to raise money for school clothes.”
And that would be all it took. “Oh my honey, I loves tongues. How much are they?”
“A dollar,” Nitzy would say.
“A dollar each?”
“Uh-huh.”
We rarely got a dollar each for them in the end, but when the orphaned Nitzy Pumpkin starts the bidding there, you know you’re gonna do well.
Once all the tongues were sold and all the Nitzys’ cheeks were pinched, we’d walk down to the head of the breakwater, where we’d sit down in a circle and divvy up the money between the big boys and the little ones.
I remember piles of dollar bills and fives and even twenties, and I remember Wade counting out six even piles for six boys.
“There are six pots of money there. I counted them even. You guys pick your pile and I’ll take the last one.”
We all trusted Wade. He was the oldest and the biggest—the enforcer in our lot. He would bully us occasionally if he got out of Jack’s sight, but never too bad. He respected you if you stood up to him and even though he could have beat the crap out of us, he never did. (It was a lesson I never forgot: Don’t be afraid of tough guys. You need them and they need you. Let them have their moments in charge if it buys you order and civility where there might be madness. To this day I always make friends with the security guys and bouncers at gigs and concerts.)
Wade never rigged the piles and always took the last one. Everything he did was transparent and fair. This taught us who was honest and who was not. It was simple: only the kids who might one day try to rip you off counted their money; the others never did. I quickly learned never to count my cash in the circle and never to rip off any of the other kids. To this day, if someone hands me a handful of money, I won’t count it. And if I hand money to someone, I always invite them to double-check the amount just to see if they will.
Later in my life, Ed McCann, Séan’s dad, explained to me his notion of what work is. He said, “Nobody works for you and you don’t work for nobody. You only work with people.” Selling tongues drilled that lesson home for me at a very early age.
When the selling of tongues was done for the day, by late afternoon, I’d amble home with my hopefully empty bucket and my knife. I’d be looking forward to the rest of the day swimming or playing softball or scheming with Perry about how to get girls from the Goulds to like us. I’d be sopping wet, full of guts and gurry and fish blood and dirt. Mom would always make me get undressed on the back step. I’d strip in full view of my grandparents and uncles, usually. They always got a great kick out of this. I’d walk into the house with my stinking clothes in my hands and I’d jam them directly into our ringer washer. (If you did not wash tongue-cutting clothes right away, they’d stink up the house for days.) My sister Kim hated having to wash any of her clothes with my tongue-cutting clothes, as she swore they made everything smell. I’m sure she was right, but Mom would never let us use the washer for just a couple of things.
It’s true that the work was hard, the hours long, leaving me tired, dirty and smelly, but at the end of a good day, I’d head home with as much as twenty to forty bucks in my pocket.
“How much did you haul today?” Mom would ask when I arrived.
“Made just twenty today, Mom,” I’d answer, with thirty dollars in my pocket.
“Well, that’s not bad, Alan. You can save fifteen in your bank account for school clothes or for hockey in the fall. And you can spend five.”
“Good plan, Mom,” I’d say, and then head out that night with fifteen dollars in spending money. Pretty good dosh for a twelve-year-old kid in the early eighties. I could get into plenty of trouble with that much money burning a hole in my pocket. But getting the money in hand was often the trickiest part of the whole day.
Tongue cutting was a young man’s game. By the time you hit fifteen years of age, you were expected to be out of it and to search for other summer work. When I was that age, I heard they were hiring over at the red plant on the Protestant side of town. Picking capelin. There’s another phrase that looks so strange in type and must be so foreign for most people to read. Yet when I was a kid in Petty Harbour, “picking capelin” was as easily understood as “washing the dishes.”
During certain weeks in the Newfoundland summer, millions upon millions of small fish called capelin washed ashore in Petty Harbour and the nearby coastal towns. Capelin look pretty much like sardines, but bigger. You can catch them from a boat in larger nets, as you might codfish or any other schooling groundfish, but the real fun was that magical time of year when you didn’t have to fish for them at all. All you had to do was collect them as they rolled ashore.
The rolling of the capelin was a joyous event that happened only for a few days at most, but not every summer. Like some kind of Old Testament miracle, those fish would roll ashore as part of their spawning process. Dads and moms and kids and grandparents all flocked to the beach to grab the free catch.
Some folks cast nets and would haul them in, load after load. Others would wade up to their waists and scoop the fish in plastic buckets with a few small holes punched in the bottom to let out the sea water. Kids would stand in the rise and fall of the surf and let the fish wash over them. The whole town would gather on the shore when the capelin were rolling.
I recall tales of older times when the rolling of the capelin was known to cause courtships to blossom. I suppose fellas were made randy watching the gals hike up their long dresses and enter the water. A fella could get a very rare glance at a gal’s bare ankles and calves. No wonder so many birthdays are nine months after the capelin season.
There are many traditional Newfoundland tunes about the rolling of the capelin, including “Brent’s Cove Capelin Song,” which commemorates the strange event this way:
Now when it’s caplin time down in Brent’s Cove with the women on the wharf,
And they wipes their runny noses in their scarfs,
All the girls are having fun as they pick them one by one,
’Tis a lovely place to be when the caplin comes!
And it is lovely. It remains an amazing sight to behold to this day. Capelin are pretty good to eat when salted or smoked and roasted. Some folks fry or dry or pickle them. When really plentiful, they are also used as fertilizer in the few gardens in town.
But the capelin also had two commercial uses when I was growing up. The males were used for bait in the hook-and-line fishery, and the females were harvested for their roe, which was quite valuable. For a couple of weeks each summer, fish plants hired extra hands to separate, or “pick,” males and females.
To pick capelin, first you had to know the difference between the males and the females. This isn’t as easy as it sounds. It’s not like the males have a full frontal crank and berries and the females wear bikinis. But once you pick for a few hours, you get the hang of it. The males are usually larger than the females, but it’s the variety in the fins that is the big differe
nce.
In the Protestant fish plant in Petty Harbour, you stood at a conveyor belt in a long line of pickers. The fish would be loaded onto the belt, and as they passed, you’d grab a bucket of capelin from the belt and dump it into the middle pan of your three fifty-pound fish pans. Then you’d sort through the pan, grabbing each fish and tossing it left (male pan) or right (female pan). Once your middle pan was out of fish, you’d refill your bucket from the conveyer belt, and then you’d do it all over again. All day long. Not hard, just boring.
The only enjoyable part of picking capelin in a fish plant was the eavesdropping. I used to listen in on the conversations between women and men older than me. There was lots of innuendo.
“Hey, Connie. This capelin is stiff and wet. Remind you of anything?”
“Nothing comes to mind, Jimmy. I have not had anything in my hand as big as that in quite a while. Now I could tell everyone about something much smaller and wiggly I had in me hand in your truck the other night.”
“No, girl, that’s all right.”
Much laughter followed.
Inevitably, I’d be included in the ribbing somehow. “Hey, Janey,” one guy would joke, “what about our little guitar player here? Why don’t you take him out behind the lunchroom at break time.”
Janey would pretend to put a capelin head in and out of her mouth. “Don’t worry, Little Alan. I won’t hurt you.”
I didn’t get it, but the fellas all laughed and the girls wailed a “Wahoo!” Stuff like that went on all the time. (Note: I never did go out behind the lunchroom with Janey. Probably should have.)
The worst thing about picking capelin was the sound fatigue. The conveyor belt on the line groaned and weaned and squeaked in an endless twelve-second cycle.
Groan. Wean. Squeak.
Groan. Wean. Squeak.
Groan. Wean. Squeak.
… eight to ten hours straight. After my shift, I’d lie awake in bed and hear it well into the night. Bernie worked in the plant with me, and we learned to sleep with the radio on to drown out the noise in our heads.
The mental and eye fatigue was even harder after a week or so of picking capelin. The sight of pan after pan of the skinny silver bodies, each with that single unblinking eye staring back at you—it was a bit more than I could take. At night when I went to bed, I’d close my eyes and instead of seeing darkness, I’d see beady-eyed capelin, hundreds of them lying on their sides staring their one-eyed stare at me. I’d drift off to sleep and dream of a million capelin turning to me and asking, “Am I a boy or a girl, Alan? Are you sure I’m a girl?” And as the fish flopped in the pan, I’d suddenly realize it had lipstick on. I kid you not. I had dreams like this all the time while I picked capelin. Sometimes, the dream fish would cross-dress just to confuse me.
Lucky for me, the capelin picking was seasonal and brief enough that I never completely lost my mind. After about eight or nine nights over a couple of weeks, the run was over and the plant was on to another species.
I was out of work for only a few days or a week before I’d be on to the next summer job, like laying sod with a land-scaper in the Goulds or baling hay with a local farmer. I never liked these jobs very much. It was backbreaking labour, but it kept me busy until school started. By the end of the summer, after all that work, I’d actually be happy to hear the school bell ring, a graceful exit from hard labour. I’ve tipped my hat to manual labourers ever since. I’m nice to the garbage man. I say hi to the room staff at the hotel. I know first-hand what it’s like to work hard, and all those thankless jobs have to be done. So I’m always kind and grateful to folks willing to do work that most of us don’t want to do.
CHAPTER 7
It started innocently enough. I was at the post office with my mother. She was working there temporarily sorting mail into slots. She was chatting to one of her friends who’d come in to gossip and get the mail.
“My dear,” Mom’s friend said to her, “don’t turn that magazine over or you and your b’y will get some eyeful.”
“Why’s that?” Mom asked.
Mom’s friend held a rolled-up magazine close to her chest and said, “This here’s for Simpson. Skin mag. Crowd of skinny women with not a tack on.”
This intrigued me. A lot. Of course, I pretended not to listen and kept leafing through the hockey equipment pages of the Sears catalogue. You have to understand, this was long before the internet or even cable TV. If you were curious about girls, you had to work hard to satisfy your curiosity. I had many unanswered questions.
Later that evening, I consulted a higher authority, a guru of sorts, about what I’d heard in the post office. I was lucky to have such an authority living close by, so close in fact that we shared the same bedroom.
“Bernie,” I said as we were in our bunks about to go to sleep. “Simpson gets skin mags delivered to his house.” Of course, I was not really entirely sure what a skin mag was.
“Yeah, I know,” Bernie said. “Orders them by the dozens. Looks at them and then gets rid of them. He’s afraid of putting them in the regular garbage because Uncle Eddy might find out and make fun of him, so he chucks them over the guardrail down into the Old Woman’s Gulch.”
“But … what’s in the mags?” I really wanted to know.
“Women with no tops on. Women with no bottoms on. Some missus kissing some other missus.”
That’s what I suspected, but if I wasn’t absolutely certain beforehand, this confirmed it. It also confirmed the fact that my brother, Bernie, knew everything about everything.
“Too bad you’ll never set eyes on those mags. You’d have to be cracked to go down Old Woman’s Gulch,” the guru continued. “Jack says two fellas drowned trying to scale down the Gulch and catch capelin a couple years back. And some other idiot tried to get to those skin mags and nearly fell from the rocks. No one goes into Old Woman’s Gulch and comes out to tell the story. No one.”
Perhaps now is a good time to describe for you what the Gulch was like and still is like today. It’s is a jagged, high precipice that leads down, down, down to the sea. It’s flanked by treacherous pointy rocks on each side, and the water that finds its way into that steep cavern blasts against those craggy cliffs. It’s about a hundred feet wide, but the mouth of the Gulch narrows in one section to just a few feet. If you did not know about the Gulch and found yourself upon it, a single misstep and you’d careen down several storeys of rough cliff face, past a maze of sharp-toothed ledges and dangling branches before the Old Woman below swallowed you whole.
Old Woman’s Gulch, just outside of Petty Harbour.
That’s me last winter jumping over the guardrail to get a photo of the gulch. (Kids: Don’t try this at home.)
I was terrified of the Old Woman’s Gulch. Perry and I once dared each other to peer over the guardrail that separated the road from her terrors.
“I’ll hold the rail and you grab my arm and look over the edge,” Perry kindly offered.
“I’ve got a better idea. I hold on to the railing and you look over the edge.”
Gripping firmly to that rail, we’d often examine the Gulch as though she were a puzzle we had to solve. We’d stare down her and wonder if there was a safe way to make it, step by slow step, to the bottom. But it was no use. Every possible path we could map was blocked by an obstacle—a pointy rock, a slippery face, or worse, a giant chasm.
One Sunday morning, the altar boys were all gathered as usual in the church locker room before mass when the topic of Simpson’s captivating reading material in the impossible-to-breach crevasse came up. There was much speculation as to what kinds of pictures were contained in those mags, and the conversation did very little to quell my curiosity.
Later, as the congregation left the church, Bart, one of the boys who had been most interested in the locker room talk, whispered to me as he carried the cross out, “You wanna see the skin mags?”
I nodded.
“I knows how to get down the Old Woman’s Gulch. Meet me after m
ass.”
This news came like a clap of thunder, and my eyes went immediately to the figure on the eight-foot cross that Bart was holding. Was the man nailed there weeping at me?
I immediately recruited Perry and we waited near the entrance to the church basement. A few minutes later, Bart came around the corner, lighting a cigarette as he approached.
“If ye arselickers gets the shit beat out of yerselves trying to get down the Gulch, ye can’t say who told you what I’m about to say. Deal?”
We nodded. Bart continued.
“My uncle Jerry came home from the navy last summer and wanted to catch some capelin. We all knew there was a ton in the Gulch, but no one knew how to get in there. Jerry and me, we went down to have a look and in five minutes he figured it out. He says he saw some cliff just like it in Gibraltar or some place, and he and a bunch of Spanish sailors stashed some rum barrels there once.
“So here’s what you need to know. You have to find some way to bridge the biggest gap between the rocks or you’ll fall to your deaths, but you can’t carry anything with you as the ledges are too narrow. Here’s the trick. Get a twelve-foot plank and about thirty feet of rope and hang the plank down over the side of the gap. When you make your way down the bank to that empty space, the plank will be there waiting for you. Use it like a bridge. Cross it, and off you go. From there, you’ll make it to the bottom. Easy.” Bart took a long drag off his smoke. “But you didn’t hear this from me.”
Then he was gone.
Perry and I were gobsmacked. It seemed so simple. Why hadn’t we thought of this?
Later that afternoon, while the rest of town slumbered after Sunday dinner, we “borrowed” some rope and a plank from a fisherman’s stage on the wharf and made our way down the main road out of town. What a sight we must have been: two ten-year-olds carrying a twelve-foot plank between us and trailing a long tail of rope. Cars passed us and we got a look or two, but no one stopped to ask what we were up to. Petty Harbour was that kind of place, a place where boys roamed and got up to God knows what kinds of adventures. It was perfect.