by Farley Mowat
It was warm and sunny on the morning that Claire and I made our way to Oregon, where the rest of the party had already assembled, laden with camping gear and hampers of good things to eat and drink. Smoking a large cigar and wearing a khaki-coloured boiler suit and a tropical pith helmet, Théo greeted us grandly. He was a man with many heroes and on this day was honouring a rather unusual couple: Britain’s Winston Churchill and Nazi Germany’s Field Marshal Erwin Rommel.
Under Théo’s direction we slacked off the capstan and Oregon bumped noisily down her rollers into the sea. We boarded and the ladies made themselves comfortable under rugs up in the bow while the men slouched in the stern sheets, close to the make-and-break. A smaller version of Itchy’s bullgine, this one was not so temperamental. Théo had kept it running for more than thirty years, during which it had become a weird melange of brazing, welding, soldering, and grafted-on parts. It drove Oregon hissing and plunging through the ocean swell at the speed of a trotting horse.
Passing out of the North Channel, we soon came under the loom of Grand Colombier, which, though a mere dot of an island, rises almost sheer out of the sea to a height of six hundred feet. Flocks of puffins wheeled away from its cliffs as we approached. It seemed such a forbidding fastness that Bernard decided he and I should climb it. Théo laid Oregon alongside with consummate skill and quickly backed the dory off to safety as soon as the two of us had leapt from the bow to the rocks.
We had a hard scramble up the cliff, made even more difficult because it was riddled with holes originally dug by puffins but now mostly in the possession of brown rats. Survivors of some long-forgotten shipwreck, the rats fed on puffin eggs and young. According to Théo the puffins retaliated by digging out and gobbling up baby rats.
Gaining the crest, Bernard and I found ourselves on a plateau perhaps three acres in extent surrounded by what looked like a ruined wall five or six feet high. A lush growth of grasses and flowering plants coated the enclosed space. I thought the wall must have been man-made. Théo agreed.
“Has nobody ever dug up there to see what they could find?” I asked.
“Oui. In my grandpère’s time five men climb up with shovels and go to work, but soon the ground begin to shake. Those men, they try to come down the cliff but the island shake them off into the sea and three of them are drown. Nobody try since then.”
Now Oregon pounded on through a violent tide rip across the channel called la baie into the lee of the massive cliffs of the island of Langlade. With the rising sun warming our faces, we coasted along to Percé Rock, an out-thrust bastion of high cliffs pierced by a tunnel through which Oregon barked an echoing passage that sent flights of storm petrels flitting around us like monster butterflies. At Anse aux Soldats we went ashore on a pebble beach under the sea cliffs where during the summers two families made their livings fishing lobster and capelin.
Each July millions of sardine-like capelin came to this hidden place. Gleaming masses of green-flanked males and less flamboyant females allowed themselves to be washed ashore by each incoming wave to form a living carpet on the gravel. As the wave withdrew, it left the capelin shimmering in ecstasy as females discharged their eggs and males drenched them in milt. The next wave would wash most of them back into the sea, leaving behind so many fertilized eggs that the beach became as resilient under foot as if made of rubber. During the two or three weeks of the run, enormous numbers of the little fishes were shovelled up by men, women, and children and spread to dry in sun and wind on wire racks high up on the beach. Autumn found tons of silvery dried capelin ready to be shipped to France, where, lightly toasted and served with fresh-baked bread and new wine, they were a gourmet delight.
The fishers, jovial men and stout women, did not see many visitors. They welcomed us with laughter and good-natured badinage. One small boy put to sea in a miniature dory no longer than a bathtub to welcome us. Daily he dared the surging breakers in this pumpkin seed to fish for lobsters among the very claws of the sea cliffs.
To my delight Claire was as enthralled by this tiny community isolated at the end of the world as I was, and appeared happy to remain indefinitely. But our safari leader insisted we push on. Laden with gifts of capelin and two fine lobsters, we continued on our way, motoring past the ominous bulk of Cap aux Morts (a place of many wrecks) until a vast bight came into view at whose far horizon lay La Dune, the seven-mile-long isthmus of saffron-coloured sand connecting Langlade with Miquelon. Our destination, the Great Barachoix, was a vast salt-water lagoon at the northern end of the isthmus. We beached Oregon on the gleaming sands to the south of its entrance to await the rising tide so we would could enter.
Meanwhile I took Claire off exploring. Skeins of shorebirds, including rare piping plovers, scampered along the beach, where stranded purple-and-gold jellyfish melted in the hot sunlight. In from the water’s edge lay a waste of rolling sand dunes seemingly devoid of life except for sparse clumps of sand grass, forage for a few herds of wild horses who threw up their shaggy heads and snorted at us before streaming off into the distance.
We came across the remains of a dozen wrecks, including the jutting ribs of wooden ships, some of which must have been of great age. A hundred yards back from the beach, storm seas had built windrows of wreckage around the skulls and baleen plates of blue and fin whales. One skull half-buried in the sand was so huge Claire and I could lie side by side on the sun-warmed bone of its broad brow. When we slid down, Claire turned and lightly caressed it in a gesture of respect for one of the great ones.
We had brought along wine, a yard of fresh bread, cheese, and tinned anchovies, on which we picnicked while two harbour seals watched from the water’s edge. Afterwards we stripped and swam, then lay naked in the hot sands making angels with our arms and legs. We made love while flights of terns swooped close above as if delivering a benediction.
Walking for miles through sand and flotsam, we found such strange objects as a little wooden pig with a sand-polished brass ring in its nose; the jawbone of a human being; and part of a cork life preserver bearing an inscription in the Cyrillic alphabet.
Returning almost reluctantly to Oregon, we found an impatient Théo, for the tide had risen and begun to fall again. Herding us aboard, he started the engine and we plunged through the shallows guarding the entrance to the lagoon. On this fine summer’s day the barachoix was a mystical place. A faint indigo haze made objects waver and fade and mirages shimmer in the distance. As Oregon made her way up the channel, the water surrounding her boiled and eddied–not just with the current’s turmoil but with the comings and goings of hundreds of seals whose sleek black heads bobbed high as they watched us.
On the beach at Langlade.
The Great Barachoix belonged to the seals, especially grey seals whose crowded rookeries once gave life to a thousand reefs and islets from Labrador south to Cape Hatteras, but who had been almost exterminated by sealers before the middle of the twentieth century. By 1940 the few North American survivors were mainly concentrated around St. Pierre and Miquelon, principally in this lagoon. In the 1950s they began recolonizing some of their old haunts in the Atlantic region. By the 1960s fishermen were complaining that the greys, along with harp and hood seals, were eating too much fish, so the Canadian government placed a bounty on them and once again their numbers began to decline. A public outcry in Canada and abroad, in which I was involved, resulted in a temporary halt to the slaughter, but in 2003 Canada again bowed to the demands of the fishing industry and authorized a “cull”–the weasel word for butchery–of twenty to thirty thousand grey seals together with close to a million harp and hood seals. By then human fishers had effectively exterminated most commercially valuable fish stocks so this was a double victory by humankind over life in the sea.
When we visited the barachoix in 1960, a good many grey seals were summering there. This salt-water lake, which even at high tide was nowhere more than six feet deep, was also home to numberless clams, crabs, and other shoal-water fauna that provi
ded an inexhaustible source of food for the grey seals and for smaller harbour seals. Both species shared the riches of the lagoon with island fishermen who for several centuries had dug clams here with which to bait their trawls. Piles of clam shells left by them formed squat white cones as much as twenty feet tall.
A myriad of seals surrounded us on all sides. We stared at them–and they stared back with equal intensity. They were of all sizes and ages, from pups thrusting their wrinkled faces high to peer at us myopically to ancient bulls weighing several hundred pounds and equipped with teeth that could have given a tiger pause. Some of these dove under the dory, surfacing so close we could have touched them. I was enormously pleased when Claire did not flinch even when one broke the surface only inches from where she sat.
It took Théo an hour to work his way across the lagoon to where a hunting cabin stood on the north shore. Here the others disembarked, but Claire, Théo, and I had no time to go ashore for the tide was now falling fast and if we did not quickly get clear of the lagoon we stood a good chance of being marooned in it until the next high tide. Heading for the exit, we were frequently forced out of shrinking channels and had to retract shaft and propeller so we could pole the dory over intervening sandbars. We were still far from the exit when Théo failed to haul up the shaft in time. There was a shuddering impact and the engine stalled. I stripped and went overboard, to find that the propeller had been jammed against the hull and the shaft badly bent.
There was nothing we could do here to repair it so Théo and I got out the two pairs of massive sweeps and began rowing. I assumed we would row back to the north shore of the lagoon, where we had left our passengers, then walk the ten miles cross-country to Anse aux Miquelon for assistance, but I reckoned without Théophile’s adamantine nature. We rowed to the mouth of the lagoon, frequently going aground, and eventually reached the exit, where the current swept us out through a wild tide rip into the open ocean.
If Claire was worried by our predicament she gave no sign of it, except to wonder aloud how we were going to get back to St. Pierre.
“Bien,” said Théo with Gallic confidence. “We will sail.” He dug out a triangle of dirty canvas worn so thin it resembled a piece of lace. This we rigged using one of the sweeps for a mast and set our slow course for home. The breeze was no more than a zephyr. This was fortunate because the rotten halyard supporting the sail tended to break when a strain came on it. Idling along in a generally southerly direction, we stretched at full length on hatch boards warmed by the late afternoon sun, drank wine, ate canned pâté de foie gras, sometimes snoozed, sometimes chatted, all with an insouciance I can only account for as a consequence of Théo’s absolute confidence in his own infallibility.
We were content–until the breeze began to strengthen out of the sou’east and the sky began to darken ominously. Théo and I exchanged glances. A storm was brewing. We did not speak of it to Claire.
At first I wasn’t much worried because the massive hump of Langlade was only about five miles off. I assumed we could reach a landing place below its cliffs but Oregon had no keel and would not go to weather under sail. In fact, while we were trying to beat in toward the lee of Langlade, the dory was actually being pulled in the opposite direction. Worst of all–a black fog was now bearing down upon us. Without a word Théo and I downed the sail, picked up the sweeps, and began to row toward the disappearing island as if our lives depended on it.
When we caught sight of a powered dory hugging the Langlade shore, we pulled toward her with the concentration of brute beasts while Claire did her bit by clambering up on the tiny bow deck to wave Théo’s yellow oilskins tied to the end of a boathook. The men in the distant dory either failed to see us or were themselves in too much of a hurry to come to our assistance.
Fog was now pouring over Langlade’s cliffs and before long the island vanished. We were alone in the gathering dark. Then a hard puff out of the southwest hit us and the sail, which we had again hoisted, blew away in rags and tatters.
This left just Théo and me and the sweeps to keep us from being driven to the shores of Newfoundland. Claire had remained crouched in the bow as lookout. Suddenly she swayed precariously to her feet and began waving her makeshift flag for she had spotted a vessel at the edge of the fog bank. We dropped our oars. Théo roared like a wounded bull. I blew my lungs out into the big conch shell that served as Oregon’s foghorn, and Claire flailed the yellow oilskin above her head. Long minutes passed. The distant vessel vanished into a swirl of fog. Then she miraculously reappeared, heading toward us.
She was the St. Eugène, a passenger launch belonging to the commune of St. Pierre. As she surged up alongside and took our tow rope, her skipper told us how lucky we were. He had just received a radio message that the first hurricane of the season was on its way and an all-ships warning had been issued. He himself had turned back from his trip to Miquelon in obedience to the warning.
Although she did not show it, Claire must have been mightily relieved to be headed for St. Pierre at the end of a stout rope. I certainly was. Not so Théophile Detcheverry. As the tow got underway he stood dourly at Oregon’s tiller, head hunched between his massive shoulders and his great nose arrogantly cocked as if in defiance of the fates that had inflicted this ignominy upon him. I have a sneaking suspicion that, had it not been for Claire’s presence, he might have slipped out his sheath knife and cut us adrift to sink or swim by our own efforts.
That evening as the wind roared among the chimney pots of St. Pierre, hundreds of fishermen-sailors swarmed ashore from Spanish trawlers taking shelter in the harbour. There were lively times in every café and bistro and Claire and I joined in for a while. Théo did not. He spent most of the night down on the hard, in driving rain and screeching wind, repairing the damage done to his beloved Oregon and ensuring that no further harm came to her.
Hard Times
The end of August and of our too brief time together was upon us. Claire had to return to Toronto and her job. I was a married man so she did not anticipate a long-term future with me, nor I with her: yet both of us nurtured the hope that next summer we would somehow be able to bring our own happy adventure back to life. Meantime, I did not have the heart to continue the voyage without her so I decided to leave Itchy in St. Pierre for the winter.
When I broached the idea to Paulo and Théo they both assured me they would take good care of her. Probably they would have done so had I not made a stupid blunder. Instead of appointing one or the other to take charge of my vessel I asked both of them to do it, thereby putting two captains in command. My stupidity would prove disastrous.
Claire flew sadly off to Ontario while I crossed to Newfoundland on the Spencer, a retired fishing schooner now serving as the ferry between St. Pierre and Fortune. Making my way to Ferryland, I reclaimed my Jeep and headed west in a morose state of mind, torn between my reluctance to leave Newfoundland and my little ship, and a burning desire to see Claire again as soon as possible.
While crossing the barrens of Newfoundland, I picked up a hitchhiker, an unremarkable-looking fellow who told me his name was Simeon. He said he was from St. John’s and on his way to the “mainland” to look for work. He also claimed to be an expert driver, ready and willing to spell me off at the wheel.
At dawn of our second day Sim was driving. Dozing in the seat beside him, I was awakened by a horrendous crash as the Jeep broadsided a sedan that had pulled out of a side road. Nobody was seriously injured and the Jeep was essentially undamaged but the sedan looked like a melon that had been kicked by an angry giant.
The car’s owner did not wish the accident reported, which was a piece of good luck because, as we drove away from the scene, Sim confessed he did not have, and never had had, a driver’s licence. Furthermore, he confided that he was a resident, albeit absent without leave, of “the Mental,” the hospital for the insane in St. John’s. This was his first venture into the world beyond the Rock and he hoped I wouldn’t send him back.
; He did no more driving but his companionship for the rest of the journey kept me from brooding over my own problems. When I bade him goodbye in downtown Toronto, he told me earnestly: “If ever ye finds yerself in the Mental, say as you’re Sim’s buddy an’ they’ll be bound to treat you right.”
I paused long enough in Toronto to unburden myself to Jack McClelland, confessing that I did not know how I was going to resolve the conflict of loyalties and passions.
“You’re such a stupid bastard,” Jack snorted. “Bloody romantic nincompoop!”
Nevertheless, he dealt with my problem in typical style. Giving me the key to his parents’ modest mansion in Forest Hill (they were away on vacation), he instructed me to take Claire there, wine her, and tell her how much I loved her.
Somewhat hesitantly I phoned Claire at the office where she worked as a commercial artist. She was astonished and bewildered by my call. Later she would tell me: “I never expected to hear your voice once we were back in Ontario. I did very much hope we’d see each other again sometime, but was sure it could never be more than a summer romance. How could it be, when you were a married man with two small children?”
Despite her uncertainty, we did meet that evening and, in consequence, I spent the next three days and nights in Toronto. Then I went home to Palgrave, where I failed to screw up my courage sufficiently to tell my wife I wanted to leave her. My two small boys, Sandy and David, proved to be the mooring lines that held me and I could not muster the strength to break away.
Claire made no attempt to persuade me to leave my family for her, but resigned herself to the situation as it was. So the two of us spent the winter in a kind of limbo, lightened by an occasional loving rendezvous.