In many ways, the people of St. Lawrence, while their roots were mostly Irish, related more to the United States, where so many of their friends and kinfolk lived. For many years, the two radio receivers in the town of about nine hundred brought news and entertainment mostly from America. During the thirties, Gabriel Heatter would become a media personality in St. Lawrence. At nine most evenings, people would gather round the privately owned radios in town—one in the rectory and one at Louis Etchegary’s house—to listen to the news from WOR in New York. The only Canadian presence on the airwaves was CJCB, from Sydney in Cape Breton, two hundred miles to the west.
Monday, November 18, had been a perfect washday. Clotheslines were flapping and crackling in a light breeze. This break in the late-autumn weather was a bonus for the housewives, who were busy all that day. The sunshine couldn’t last. The weather-wise were already warning that there was another storm blowing up the eastern seaboard.
Bertha Slaney was temporarily living with her parents, Gregory and Mary Turpin, while her husband, Rennie, was off on the west coast of Newfoundland scrabbling for wages in the new pulp-and-paper industry, based in Corner Brook. He and his older brother, Arcule—a name that echoed their French connections—fished together, and the fall season that year had been productive, though the prices seemed to be unsteady worldwide.1
They were an odd pair of brothers, Rennie and Arcule. Rennie was younger but intensely curious and gifted at communication. Rennie, they would say, had a way with words. Even when he was relatively young, people took Rennie Slaney seriously. Arcule was quieter. People would defer to him for a different reason—unlike his younger brother, who was about five foot ten, normal stature for a Newfoundlander then, Arcule was huge, at least six four and near three hundred pounds. Gentle, though, as so many large men are, and powerful in a boat or on a codfish trap.
Most fishermen turned to other work in the gap between the end of fishing in the fall and the onset of winter—weatherproofing homes, cutting firewood. For the lucky and the venturesome, there were wages somewhere, in the offshore fishing fleet, the annual seal hunt. Rennie needed cash immediately. He and Bertha were building their own home, across the harbour from the in-laws. So after fall fishing, Rennie went away.
Bertha missed her husband, but she understood the need for wages. And she would have acknowledged that just three years earlier, he had given up a paying job—he’d been a cook on the coastal vessel SS Glencoe—to marry her and try to live a normal life on land. Bertha would have been reminded of all this by a garment hanging in a closet at her mother’s house—a suit, now rarely worn, that Rennie had purchased for their marriage from a haberdashery in Brooklyn. The wedding ring she now wore had come from Boston.
They were mostly self-sufficient. There were always fish. Rennie and Arcule were successful fishermen, and the catches for the last three years had been abundant. They would never starve as long as they could fish. And there were game birds in the barrens. Almost everybody had a cow or two for milk and butter. Most people in St. Lawrence had horses and oxen for heavy work and transportation. They kept pigs and sheep and hens. Rising above the town and the houses and the boats and the small businesses—the stores and fishing sheds, wharves and rickety racks for drying fish—were meadows where the animals grazed in the good weather. Yards around the squared-off tidy houses were secure behind tight picket fences that kept the kids and chickens from straying far from home.
Bertha Slaney already had two toddlers and another baby on the way. It would have neither daunted nor surprised her to know that she would in time bring fourteen children into a world that was, in her lifetime, hurtling through unimaginable changes. Large families were normal in mostly Catholic St. Lawrence. At five o’clock on the evening of November 18, 1929, however, she could not have imagined that for her and her husband and her children—for her whole community—the beginning of a transforming change was only minutes in the future.
GUS Etchegary was five and a half years old, but he’d started to grow up swiftly when his mother died just six months earlier. His mom had been Rennie Slaney’s sister. In a photo taken before she fell ill, she is serene and solemn. She was quite beautiful and only forty-five when she was taken by tuberculosis, which had become a plague across the entire Dominion of Newfoundland.2
Gus’s two older sisters had adapted quickly to running their father’s household. Louis was away frequently, at sea or doing business in St. Pierre or the United States. Gus was too young to understand or care about his father’s business ventures, beyond the fact that they produced an enviable stability at home, even when it seemed that everybody else—other than the Farrells and the Giovanninis, who were successful merchants—was struggling.
Not that there wasn’t occasional anxiety among the Etchegarys when Louis was away for longer than seemed normal. And there would even be an anxious couple of weeks when, according to the local gossip, Louis, along with about a dozen others on a local boat, the slyly named Which One, was arrested somewhere in the territorial waters of the United States. Smuggling, the rumour had it. Gus and his sisters would soon find out that their dad and all his shipmates were indeed in jail, somewhere in New York City.
Gus and his sisters went to church every evening then and prayed for their dad’s deliverance. And the prayers were swiftly answered, thanks to faith in the divine and a resourceful Yankee lawyer who was on the payroll of the famous New York gangster Charles “Vannie” Higgins. Soon Louis and his shipmates were back in St. Lawrence, celebrating freedom and the triumph of American private enterprise, not to mention justice.
Just before five on the evening of November 18, 1929, Gus was lurking in the family kitchen, waiting for his supper. His sisters had been frying sliced potatoes on the stove. Then they busied themselves with other preparations. Gus was hungry and now the fried potatoes were just sitting there. It was approximately two minutes after five.
He was staring longingly at the potatoes when, to his amazement, the frying pan began to tap-dance across the stovetop. Pots and pans were rattling, and there was a clatter in the cupboards. And Gus realized the whole house was trembling, creaking. Doors slamming. Loud and unfamiliar sounds from outside; wooden structures suddenly stressed to the limits of design, twisting, shuddering, threatening to fall. There seemed to be a sudden wind.
Across the harbour, on the east side, his aunt Bertha and her mother were running towards a china cabinet to brace the doors, which were threatening to swing open and send the precious dishes crashing to the floor. In the Giovanninis’ west side fish shop, fifteen workers paused their cutting, gutting, beheading to steady themselves. The building was on wooden posts hanging out over the harbour. It was sturdy, but obviously imperilled by this extraordinary motion. The owner of the business, Adolph Giovannini, later told the St. John’s Evening Telegram that he and his wife, Dinah, were at home, settling in for a quiet evening, when they felt the shudder passing through their house.
The peculiar movement and the unfamiliar sounds subsided, and all was quiet once again—even quieter than before, as people stared silently into each other’s faces, seeking reassurance, some explanation for what had just happened.
Or did it really happen? Might it have been a freak of the imagination in the gloom of an early evening not long after Halloween, just before the prayerful weeks of Advent?
But the blank expressions and the silent questions in the eyes of parents, children, siblings, husbands, wives would have confirmed for everyone that, yes, it really happened. An earthquake had just happened in their town.
LATER that evening, after supper, Adolph and Dinah Giovannini decided to check their property for damage. It was close to half past seven. They put on their coats and stepped outside. They lived close to the shoreline and the shop, and they immediately noticed an unusual tidal action in the harbour. The water there was churning, swirling, menacing.
From the now-darkened lanes and pathways throughout the town, the sound of voices. People on
the move, word spreading. Something ominous was going on.
There were people gathering near the Etchegarys’ house. Gus and his sisters, too young to be afraid, stepped outside. They started walking towards the voices. There was a familiar murmur on a nearby veranda. The sound of women praying. The rosary.
They had already survived something potentially disastrous. But this new phenomenon, the disturbance in the water of the harbour, seemed more dangerous. It wasn’t like the momentary shuddering of hours earlier. This peculiarity seemed to be continuing and growing.
Because it was a Monday, the people praying on the veranda would have been reciting the joyful mysteries. Even at the age of five, Gus would know that. And that the rosary was structured into themes called mysteries—joyful, glorious and sorrowful. How Catholics experienced life itself. The sorrowful mysteries were later in the week, on Tuesday and again on Friday.
2.
FAR west of there, in a different time zone but the same marine environment—the vast Gulf of St. Lawrence—a girl named Alice Donohue, not yet in her teens, was milking cows. Milking was women’s work in many northwest Atlantic places with deep Celtic roots, like Bay St. Lawrence, on the northern tip of Cape Breton Island, where young Alice lived. Like the gulf, it was named for St. Lawrence—martyr and patron saint of comedians, cooks and miners. In such isolated communities, the Irish connection was still unmistakeable. Though growing dim in the memory, it survived in the speech, the politics and the traditions.
These northern Cape Bretoners felt at home in both Newfoundland and St. Pierre. They were foreign countries, but that didn’t matter much to fellow islanders, people who had small regard for borders, liberated as they were by a wary knowledge of the sea. They travelled where they had to go. Borders were invisible and easy to ignore. In St. Pierre, they freely traded livestock for merchandise they couldn’t buy at home, including rum.
Alice Donohue was fascinated by the small gold stud in her grandfather’s earlobe, a permanent reminder of an early trading trip to St. Pierre. Equally fascinating to her was that Granddad never seemed entirely sure how this little bit of gold became implanted there and grew impatient whenever he was asked about it.3
For Cape Breton fishermen and sailors, like the people on the south coast of Newfoundland, the eastern and southern sea lanes were more relevant and better known than the vast continental territories to the west and south, with all their westbound highways and railroads, and all the broad lakes and rivers, with their thriving trade and traffic.
Quietly milking in a cavernous barn on that November afternoon in 1929, twelve-year-old Alice Donohue had many questions in her busy mind—and there was soon to be another. She was looking forward to her thirteenth birthday, less than a month away, in the middle of December. Suddenly, at 4:30, Atlantic Standard Time (half an hour behind Newfoundland time), the cows all started to stagger. It was frightening. And then Alice realized that everything around her, beneath her, was moving, wobbling. Farm equipment in the barn was shifting, rattling. Dust fell from rafters and from the hay stored in the loft above her. There were ripples in her milk pail. The cow that she was milking had turned to stare at her with its huge liquid eyes.
And then everything was still.
Alice was well read and curious, and she knew that this was a moment she would never forget. This was something she’d read about. An earthquake. Perhaps, hopefully, a once-in-a-lifetime moment—a moment of potential disaster that had passed as a brief dramatic episode in an otherwise quiet pastoral existence. And indeed it was, for a short while, the talk of the community. Nature flaunting incalculable power. Maybe God reminding them to be aware of their innate vulnerability. Not to forget the fragility and transience of mortal lives. All worth serious reflection, a quiet prayer or two. A few decades on their rosaries before retiring for the night. But then, devoid of tragic consequences, the incident passed quickly into the private memories of those who had experienced it.
There was almost greater excitement at the shore later in the evening—an extraordinary tidal surge that Alice Donohue’s father, Jack, a fisherman, attributed to the unusual fullness of the autumn moon. The phases of the moon were important in the lives of the farmers and fishermen who eked out a marginal existence from the land and sea in Atlantic Canada. Many aspects of their lives were determined by the moon.
Each autumn in November, the fishermen in northern Cape Breton would drive a stake in the shoreline, well above the high-water mark for normal tides. When the sea rose to the stake, it was a signal that the autumn moon was at its zenith, and that it was time to slaughter the pigs and superannuated cattle. It was also an ideal time to get a haircut—hair grew back more slowly on the waning of the moon.
These customs were rooted in beliefs drawn from centuries of experience, and while there might not have been scientific validation for the practices, logic was irrelevant. It was what they did because they had always done so.
When Jack Donohue returned from the shore that evening, he remarked that the tide had been extraordinary, even for a full moon. The incoming sea had surpassed the stake by a considerable distance and had even flooded over the deck of the wharf, raising the possibility that boats would end up stranded there and damaged as the tide receded.
But they were lucky: the tide dropped almost as quickly as it had surged. There was no damage to either the wharf or their boats. In the days and weeks and years to come, the people of Bay St. Lawrence would learn precisely how lucky they had been, sheltered as they were by the brooding mass of Cape North, which stood between them and a natural catastrophe unfolding beneath the sea more than two hundred miles to the southeast.
AT 198 Young Street in the North End of Halifax, Frank Lowe was sitting in front of his kitchen range with his feet warming in the oven, possibly looking forward to November 30—the day Prohibition would end in Nova Scotia and alcohol consumption would no longer be a crime. Suddenly, at 4:34, Atlantic Standard Time, the house began to shake so violently it moved the stove.
A few blocks away, on Kane Street, a frightened family began moving furniture outdoors, while throughout the North End there was panic building as people recalled the December 6, 1917, explosion that had wiped out the entire neighbourhood. That disaster, after a munitions vessel collided with a freighter in the harbour, killed almost two thousand Halifax residents, many of them in the North End, and injured an estimated nine thousand others.
On this day, the weather was nasty. Just as a ferocious blizzard had added to the suffering on the day of the explosion a dozen years before, a severe snowstorm—the first of the winter of 1929–30—would soon be pounding the people of Halifax and the rest of the Nova Scotia mainland. As the storm moved on towards Newfoundland, the snow was followed by heavy rain driven by a thirty-six-mile-per-hour gale. Frank Lowe had good reason to have his feet in the oven on such a day.
The Halifax Chronicle reported the next day, November 19, that there had been widespread confusion in the downtown business district “as streams of men and girls rushed to the street. Reminiscences of the tragic explosion of 1917 were in the air. Several girls fainted including one on the way out of the Roy building and three at Simpsons.”
At the post office, pictures and calendars hanging on the walls moved, and many clattered to the floor as the stone building shook. Clerks were afraid the walls and ceilings were about to collapse on top of them. The clock on the customs building wobbled but did not stop.
Telephone operators worked heroically at their switchboards, though several of the “girls” became hysterical and, according to the local evening paper, were removed, their places being filled immediately with extras. The phone lines were so busy just after the disturbance that the system crashed temporarily.
In Sydney, Cape Breton, a witness testifying at a trial in the Supreme Court passed out when the tremors hit. Throughout the city, chimneys cracked and toppled. In nearby rural areas, barns collapsed. Coal miners emerging from the pits in Glace Bay and in Pic
tou County, on the mainland, reported feeling the earth moving, while those still working underground remained unaware of the drama on the surface.
Lighthouse keepers reported that mercury slopped out of containers as the silent coastal sentinels rocked briefly. Ships at sea, south of the Grand Banks, suddenly were wallowing and vibrating, as though their propellers had been damaged. The SS Nerissa reported feeling the quake on one of her regular runs between New York and St. John’s.4
Captain Frank Thornhill, sailing from Fortune to St. Lawrence with a cargo of lumber, later recalled the moment when “the boat and all started to tremble.” He said, “We were off Lamaline then. It was right calm, calm as a clock. And I didn’t know what the trouble was.”5 Moments later, when normal progress had resumed, the puzzled captains speculated that they’d struck uncharted underwater hazards.
At a sawmill in Lower River Inhabitants, Cape Breton, John MacLeod decided to leave work early and visit friends. It was a decision that may have saved his life.6
A SEISMOGRAPH at Dalhousie University responded so violently that it failed to give an accurate measurement of what Professor J.H.L. Johnstone described to the Halifax Chronicle on November 19, 1929, as “the greatest shock since installation.” It would later be established that the earthquake registered 7.2 on the scale of magnitude, and that the first shock recorded in Halifax caused a measurable “disturbance” that lasted for two and a half hours, with a dramatic aftershock registered at 7:03 that evening. Instruments recorded the event in Montreal and Toronto, New York and Bermuda. People felt the tremors along the Atlantic seaboard as far as South Carolina.
The Wake Page 2