We are standing in a verdant potato patch planted near a windbreak of scraggly black spruce trees. The sea of St.Mary's Bay, one of these broad-shouldered Newfoundland coves which for centuries protected small fishing boats from North Atlantic gales, is bright in the late summer light, and the man we followed to the patch is turning his nearly blind eyes to its glare. He is standing still, breathing the evening air pungent with sea smells.
"I took them stones out and threw over there," he says, and points at round rocks heaped behind the garden. There are many rocks in this thin soil which did not yield good crops unless you yanked the stones out the best you could and nourished the patch with armfuls of rubbery kelp. And even then, the weather -- the fog blotting out the sun, the wind tugging at young plants, and the cold keeping them from growing -- could eat away at your harvest and leave you with nothing but more rocks to pick.
Lawrence Gibbons is 89 now, and lives in a nursing home a dozen miles from his old house in St.Vincent and a vegetable garden he cultivated for much of his life. He used to be a commercial fisherman, one of many men whose small brightly painted houses huddled on the shores of the Rock -- as the natives called the island of Newfoundland -- and who expected nothing but the staggering hardship of their daily toil. When he was young, men often died at sea, women in childbirth, and kids in infancy. The boats were small, and doctors too far to reach them in howling sea storms and winter blizzards. There was no money, few roads, and Newfoundland was the poorest province of Canada.
We are back on the Rock because our 1988 book, "This Marvellous Terrible Place; Images of Newfoundland and Labrador," was recently adapted by Petrina Bromley for the Rising Tide Theatre in Trinity, and we loved seeing it on stage. But when we first came to St. Vincent quarter of a century ago, we walked the beach looking for humpback whales. The sand underfoot was soft with a thick layer of capelin, small forage fish grazing on plankton near ice shelves and later devoured by whales, codfish, seals and seabirds. In early summer, they spawned on sandy beaches and then died in teeming millions. Lawrence was there, gathering their silver bodies in a bucket to fertilize his potato patch. We were working on a National Geographic magazine article at that time, and over the years we kept returning to hear his sea stories where each sentence formed a separate and distinct tale.
We would fish in shoal water.
A steel hook, stuck into a big fish.
Twenty pounds of wild fish, just five fathoms down.
You haul in 150 of them, your hands wet and line slipping on your fingers.
By and by, the skin comes off, and then the salt water eats away your flesh right into the bone.
You talk about sore.
Oh, blessed Virgin who is dead.
Oh, misery.
But that all happened many years ago, when his eyesight was clear and his muscles supple. Today he is very old and he cannot see much except for some slivers of dim shapes way to the side of what used to be his field of vision. He is dressed with great care in scrupulously ironed blue shirt and trousers, a neat small hat, and well polished shoes: a man treated with due consideration by the nursing home's staff. We learn that from time to time his son Jerry roars in on his shiny red motorcycle and carries his father -- always dressed as if heading for church -- to St. Vincent and his old home.
But this sense of decorum does not last. "Dad comes with me, says something about just wanting to sit inside a bit, and then he disappears," Jerry says. "He goes down the ditch and scratches some dirt to let the water flow. He pulls the weeds. He sits on the ground and digs. By the time I am ready to drive him back, he is dirty from head to toe. He just cannot help it but work."
We are still standing in the potato patch with Lawrence and swatting mosquitoes which arrive on the wing of the cool evening air when John asks him about the biggest cod -- called "fish" in Newfoundland -- he has ever caught. And we sense the encounter comes back to him in a bright flash because he is suddenly quiet, with no more small talk left in him.
He spreads his arms. "It was a calm, calm water," he says, and his palms, now flat, smooth the sea he remembers. "Not a good thing for catching fish: you need a ripple, a wave. So we tried and tried and no fish, and the guy I was with got sleepy because we were catching nothing. So I said: 'fine, you sleep, I will try some more.' And a little while later, bam! I caught something with my jigger but it was so heavy I was sure I hooked the bottom."
He spins his hands close to his chest, pulling the fish in: wild, strong, fighting for its only life. He switches to present tense because it is happening now, right in front of him.
"I move my jigger this way and that way, and then I feel the thing I hooked is running this way and that way like crazy, heavy as anything. A shark? Must be a shark! So I yell at my buddy to wake up and we are both pulling and tugging and getting the fish tangled in heavy bull kelp, and then it comes out, a monster cod! Where is the gaff? the gaff! but we don't need it; the fish swallowed the whole jigger, all the way down his throat. He is not going nowhere. He is so big the boat is tipping, but we try and try and pull him in."
"How big was it?" asks John. Lawrence spreads his arms as wide as they would go, and we see the span is still too short because his fingers move about as if feeling the tip of the slippery fish nose and the end of the flapping tail. "He was clear across the boat," he says, "and hanging over both gunwales. Ninety six pounds. A monster."
The fight to land the big fish is done, the dusk thickens, and we slowly walk back to Lawrence's nursing home. Just before we reach the first step I try to take his hand but he waves me off: he will find the steps himself. It is not difficult, really, just another hardship which needs to be tackled. And as he reaches the landing he turns and waves -- at us? or at that faraway day when the bottom of the sea moved and came into his dory, muscular, glistening and full of life?
©Yva Momatiuk
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