Out from the Harbour: Outport Life Before Resettlement

Index

Harbouring Tack’s Beach

I harbour a lot of Tack’s Beach.

Tack’s Beach, Placentia Bay, which is no more. The island community suffered resettlement (that is de-settlement/abandonment) in 1966-67. Before I turned twenty, we were no more.

For several decades following the demise of Tack’s Beach, the few lobster fishermen who returned each spring stood outnumbered, minimally fifty to one, by inhabitants lying in the three graveyards. In the spring of 2012 no lobster fisherman returned. Dawn broke over the island to signify nothing. Year-round, the dead had the place all to themselves, except for summer’s tourists. At burial each soul had left behind, to mourn, a community of nigh on 500 fisherfolk.

The Tack’s Beach of my boyhood thrived. Cod (salt fish) was the mainstay. Summer’s cod fishery was supplemented by the lobster fishery in the spring and the herring fishery in the late fall and early winter. The seasonal round of activities on the water and on shore cycled much the same as it had in my father’s and grandfather’s youth. That lifestyle is long gone. For all but a few Newfoundlanders and coastal Labradorians, let alone Canadians, the island community where I turned twelve in 1959 is an alien world. Science fiction in reverse.

The author with his first two-wheeler on the back path. The account in this book is all about this era of his life, growing up in Tack’s Beach, Placentia Bay.

My long-time friend George King said to me once, I never understood you, Rex, until I met your mother. I am my mother’s son. But, aside from nature, I suspect the nurture of Tack’s Beach harbour also runs deep. And I also suspect from whence we sprung shapes traits that all Newfoundlanders exhibit, and makes us unique, even today in the nearly new millennium.

Maybe my recounting the lifestyle of tiny Tack’s Beach harbour during my boyhood may reveal something about the place, something about our crowd here in this province.

Why a book on resettlement now, rather than forty years ago? In August 2012 my wife and I attended the South Coast Folk Festival in St. Jacques. There, songwriter Bud Davidge sang his recently written Black and White. The song was his reaction to being resettled from Bay du Nord, Fortune Bay. His 1985 song, Outport People, had been from his father’s perspective, but now, over twenty-five years later, the new song was from his own, that of a young boy in an old photo. His parents and mine were of the generation who, in Bud’s memorable phrase, move(d) without leaving and never arrive(d). They lost a lot. Maybe, out of respect, it is only now that it is my generation’s turn to assess. For us this is not only a recollection of what we lost but also a recounting of what we gained, what makes us us. The nurture of an outport childhood. Being raised by a whole community.

So I will tour the harbour for you, family by family, all around the harbour from Inside Point to Barrett’s Point, the community as I remember it. Every detail is true and, it is my hope, accurate.

A note on the dual meaning of Tack’s Beach: when island residents were away from home, all would say they hailed from Tack’s Beach. Everyone on the island had the mailing address Tack’s Beach, Placentia Bay. But on the island you hailed from Baker’s Cove or Best’s Harbour or Broad Cove or Bunker’s Hill or Cooper’s Cove or Tack’s Beach or Yawl’s Cove. My tour of the harbour focuses upon Tack’s Beach, the cove I lived in. What I mean by harbour, though especially the cove, is really the whole community, our island. And the island was actually King’s Island. Six miles long north-south, King’s Island was one of dozens of islands that together made up the Ragged Islands that were referred to by Captain James Cook on his mapping expedition. The inhabited coves lay in the middle of King’s Island. When residents used the term island, as in back home, up on the island, they meant the community of Tack’s Beach, the settled coves on King’s Island. King’s Island was a term reserved for topographical maps and charts only, and was seldom if ever spoken.

Tack’s Beach (bottom) and Best’s Harbour (top) in the mid-1950s.

Round-the-Shore

Mr. John Henry Bolt and Mrs. Ettie reared their crowd on the Inside Point. Their son Frank, his wife, Bessie, three daughters, and, in time, three sons, lived in a one-storey bungalow landward of their two-storey dwelling. Although the houses were the first ones a boat would pass entering the U-shaped cove, they were among the last that passengers aboard would see. Charlie and Jessie Barrett’s bungalow, on Barrett’s Point opposite, they wouldn’t see at all because of the sheltering trees. What caught one’s eye entering Tack’s Beach was the Brown business premises at the bottom of the cove and the stately white clapboard steepled church silhouetted against the evergreens along Hussey’s Hill.

I hadn’t been going over Round-the-Shore (what we called the west side of Tack’s Beach Cove) for more than a couple of years when Mr. John Henry and Mrs. Ettie abandoned the old house. It became Frank’s store, a woodshed for the most part. The old stage had crumbled into the landwash before long without a trace. Along with youngest son, Clar, and youngest child, Mollie, they moved a hundred yards farther into the cove. Sam Brown (engineer Sam, not Broad Cove Sam Brown) had moved to Chamberlains, outside St. John’s, to better access his job on the Canadian National Railroad (CNR) boats, following the path trodden by his older brother, Captain Charlie Brown, who had moved to Mount Pearl for the same reason a few years previously. Round-the-Shore, ever the bastion of the Tack’s Beach Bolts, became exclusively theirs when Mr. John Henry’s crowd moved into Sam Brown’s vacated two-storey cream clapboard house. The house stood in the bottom corner of a sloping grassy meadow, fenced all around.

The meadow boasted the finest plum tree on the whole of King’s Island. September’s plums, plump and sweet, were a nuisance. Not only would local boys from around the cove raid the tree, but so, on occasion, would the savages from out in Best’s Harbour or the heathens from down in Cooper’s Cove or up in Broad Cove. Raiding plum trees or gooseberry bushes provided wonderful adventuresome sport and a rite of passage for the young fellas. While they might mean no harm, it just wasn’t right to have the tree torn up with the fruit only half ripe. (Some people, older ones who ought to know better, sometimes jumped the gun to invade the berry barrens while the blueberries were still green—that is, red—or the partridgeberries unripened. While only a few intoned that the world had gone mad, most felt it was wrong.)

Too good a tree ever to be cut down, in the early fall the plum tree was oftentimes a bother to have up. Mostly a yell would suffice to beat off raiders. For some reason, Clar Bolt, a man not to be toyed with when playing hockey for the Tack’s Beach Beavers, was not noted for vigorously defending the family orchard. Maybe he himself had been a raider too short a spell ago to rouse himself for the home side. Still, his merely being about the place necessitated uncommon bravery. A pocketful of plums devoured in the shelter of the dwarf evergreens outside the fence constituted the true diet of champions. Plums thus attained tasted sweet, green or not. When our family moved across the cove, when I was twelve, we inherited Bill Barrett’s plum tree. Somehow the plums never achieved the texture and taste I remembered of the ill-gotten gains from John Henry’s tree in my younger years. I never went out of my way to fend off raiders. Later on in life, as a schoolteacher, I oftentimes struggled with which side I was cheering for.

Mrs. Ettie was a midwife, one of two on the island. Mrs. Dora Hapgood, up in Broad Cove, was the other. Along with Mrs. Cecil (Maude), my mother, and Mrs. Otto (Lydia) out in Best’s Harbour, they were the only medical servants in practice. Both Mom and Mrs. Otto had served as district nurse but by now were both stay-at-home mothers. Other than these four, and stoicism, there was Come By Chance Cottage Hospital fifteen miles down the bay if the weather was fit enough to get there. Ultimately there was St. John’s but that was dire, scary stuff to young boys. Not only young boys, I dare say. I allow the painful resettlement of the mid-1960s garnered what little support it did through the anxieties of caregivers shouldering too much care in heath crises. There must have been some good reason behind it somewhere.

Mrs. Ettie seemed to be younger than Mr. John Henry. She was his second wife. By the time I started hanging out over Round-the-Shore with the Bolts, Mr. John Henry had long since retired. He still rowed his dory, however, and tended a few lobster pots in the bight each spring. One memorable day he landed a yellow lobster, the only one of that colour that anyone, even the older men, had ever seen or heard tell of. The novelty and excitement surrounding his catch always springs to mind whenever I think of back then, back there, on the island. It is far from fair to Mr. John Henry, who, like all the Bolts, lived a lengthy life, to be forever in my mind’s eye the man who caught the yellow lobster. But, to be fair to Neil Armstrong, too, I allow there was much more to him than that step he took on the moon. My apologies are reserved for Mr. John Henry from up home.

While the Bolts’ meadow suffered unwelcome visitors, their house welcomed friendly guests. Theirs was one of several halfway houses on the island. Since there were no restaurants, theatres, or other public buildings, unless there was a time in the school or lodge, or church to attend, such households were the prime places to slip out of the public wayfares. Courting couples regularly visited, seeking a break from walking the roads. In inclement weather, that’s all there was. Sometimes halfway houses filled up with all sorts of people who were out and about, necessitating couples to hang on for the long haul if they desired quality time. My grade six teacher and his girlfriend were regulars—annoyingly so because his arrival in the neighbourhood caused concern that you might be observed out when you ought to be in doing homework (of which one never did enough, with books to study even when all written assignments were completed).

The only equivalent of a car up home was a motorboat or skiff. Such vehicles were never used for social purposes except of a Sunday. In warmer weather there were a number of prime gathering places, especially in the vicinity of rocks suitable for sitting. The most popular, by far, was the Big Rock, halfway between the Neck and Cooper’s Cove. Lesser rocks often became associated with specific courting couples. So, too, were certain spots along the handrails that ran along the side of the road for the sake of safety above steep banks and breakwaters. Up home when you went out, as often as not you did just that, went out(doors). People married younger back then. Welcome though you were, there was a shelf life to hanging out in Mr. John Henry and Mrs. Ettie’s kitchen.

Mr. Frank Bolt worked down on the line maintaining the poles supporting the telegraph wires that stretched along by the sides of the railway tracks and the dirt roads. When he was home and he and Mrs. Bessie walked the roads of a Sunday they flowed smooth as silk. Maybe unfairly to Mrs. Bessie, I credited their ballroom-like perambulations to Mr. Frank’s lead because he played the accordion for the dances during times in the school and the lodge. He ranked up there with Hank Snow and Elvis Presley in my world. A good fiddler could bring the best out of the dancers. When they got her going at the dances the building swayed in tune with the rhythm of the music and the energetic stomping footwork. Mr. Frank’s black hair would soak, sweat would bead on his brow, his leg would tap, his fingers would fly, and his powerful wrists would pump. Set done, all participants would retire to the bridge outside for a blow. Boys my age stood in awe. We could only dream that someday we would be able to plank her down like Mr. Frank Best, Harold Bolt, and even Dad.

It seemed that all Mrs. Ettie’s crowd could play, as could she. Frank, Clar, and Freeman (by now living in Meadows over Corner Brook way) were solid gold. I’m sure the crowd down in Arnold’s Cove would have been able to dance far better than they showed had they had such fine fiddlers. Tack’s Beach was blessed. Sure, we even had Clev Best from Best’s Harbour who was as good a hand on the guitar as he was on the accordion. He played on Corner Brook radio and on television when it came in, in 1959. When Clev was back home one time he and his buddy, a fellow named White, put off a concert in the new Orange Lodge. He was better than Jimmy Linegar and that’s saying something. Nowadays, my musical appreciation expanded, I laud the talents of other musicians from what Ray Guy called our far greater bay. How places like Buffet, Merasheen, and Paradise have risen in stature. Even