Three Ways to Capsize a Boat: An Optimist Afloat (19 page)

“What do you suppose we should do, then?” asked Tom.

“There’s Wally Stocks down in Griguet; he’s a customs man. Maybe y’all should see him.”

“And how would we get to Griguet?” (pronounced “grigget”).

“Guess I’ll take y’all there in the pickup.”

And so we found ourselves speeding down the gravel road to Griguet—Tom, Ros, and Hannah in the cab with our new friend, who was called Eli Bridger, the rest of us heaped happily in the open back.

Later that afternoon we had tea with the Bridgers. Eli and his family lived in a little wooden house on the rocks on the edge of the bay of Griguet. From the kitchen where we sat warm as toast by the wood-fired cooking range, we could see the beautiful bay, shining blue, the surface unruffled, sheltered by the horns of low-lying land that almost met at the entrance.

Eli’s wife was called Lee-Anne and she was as talkative as he was taciturn. Her speciality was baking, and there we all sat laying waste a huge plate of sweet fairy cakes, light as a feather, that she had baked that afternoon. Ros and Hannah, who were more fastidious about these things than the rest of us, were taking a long, hot shower. The kitchen, smelling of tea and cakes and a hint of wood smoke, was the sweetest, coziest thing after the trackless wastes of the North Atlantic.

Later, sated with cake and awash with strong tea, I turned again to gaze at the beauty of the bay. To my horror it had completely disappeared. Where before there
had been a glorious sheet of calm water, now I was looking at what looked like a scrapyard full of decomposing pickup trucks, rusty engine blocks, and heaps of assorted junk. It was hideous. What in the name of heaven had happened while I had been drinking my tea?

It transpired that the tide had gone out to reveal the arrangements made by the locals for mooring their boats. The custom was that, when your pickup truck died, you ran it into the bay at low tide and there, with a stout chain passed through the windows, it served as a mooring block for your boat. It was hard not to admire the good sense of it.

There’s not a great deal happens in Griguet, so, in contrast to our first impressions, our arrival and the few days we were there, caused quite a stir. We were adopted by the Bridgers, who were as generous and kind as folks can possibly be, and I suppose got a certain amount of kudos from the fact that we were always around at their place. They took us to Lanso Meadows—or L’Anse aux Méduses—where the Vikings, whose journey we had been following, had made their first settlement. There was a museum and the reconstruction of some of the turf-roofed longhouses. It was a bleak, wind-blasted spot, open to the ocean to the north, but I suppose that, to the Vikings, after many weeks tossed by storms across the sea in an open boat, even a settlement as comfortless as L’Anse aux Méduses would have seemed as cozy as Lee-Anne Bridger’s kitchen.

It was an odd thought, that this was the first settlement on the New World by Europeans, five hundred
years before Cabot or Columbus made their more lasting marks. We all cast about for meaningful observations on this singular truth, which is complicated by the fact that when John Cabot arrived in 1497 to claim the New World for the British Crown, there were no fewer than a thousand Basque fishermen already there, drying the cod they had caught on the Grand Banks. This must have taken the wind from his sails somewhat.

WALKING ALONG THE QUAYSIDE
, distracted a little by the sharp angles of pickup trucks poking out of the water, Eli and his son Jeb told us about the cod fishing. There had been a time when it was said that a man could walk across the Grand Banks on the backs of the cod; for hundreds of years it had been the greatest fishery in the world. But the size of the catches, and the size of the fish, had dwindled to almost nothing, and it was the same story with the smaller inland fisheries like this one. It was no longer possible to make a living from fishing, especially as the sea here was frozen solid in the winter months.

“Yup,” said Jeb. “Whole darn sea’s frozen solid just as far as you can see. You can make a hole and take a fish or two for the family, but there ain’t no money in it.”

“So how do you make a living?” I asked. It was something I’d been wondering about for a while.

“Well, there’s only one way hereabouts. We take some seals. It’s all there is in the winter.”

“Seals?” There was a pause.

“Yup, seals,” repeated Jeb a little less certainly.

“What do you mean?” asked John.

“We cull ’em,” said Jeb. “We jus’ take the young ’uns. The furriers pay well for the pelt.”

“You mean you’re … seal clubbers?”

“Well, that’s sure the way we kill ’em: quick crack on the head with a club. Kills ’em instantly.”

These were our new friends—the very acme of kindness and generosity—and we struggled to take this revelation onboard. A pall of silence descended as Jeb went on to explain his work.

“What you gotta remember,” he told us, “is that there’s millions and millions o’ them seals out there. On the coast of Labrador just across the water, there’s a colony with about four million seals. It ain’t just man who’s over-fishing the cod; it’s them darn seals, too. If we go out of a morning and so much as see a single seal, we turn right about and come home again. You’ll never catch a fish when there’s seals about. So they gotta be culled.”

“But what about the clubbing?” I held out.

“Be a whole lot easier to shoot ’em with a rifle, but it don’t do the job quick enough, so we ain’t allowed to use rifles. The club kills ’em right away. It ain’t a nice thing to have to do, but then nor’s killin’ fish … an’ not cows nor pigs nor lambs, neither.”

We listened quietly, gazing at our respective feet or the distant horizon, as Jeb tried to put the facts straight.

“I tell you the controls is strict, too. You gotta have a license and there’s fishery protection officers there all the
time. There’s any irregularity, you lose your license, and there ain’t nobody here can afford to do that.”

A COUPLE OF DAYS
later I watched as
Hirta
hoisted her sails and tacked out of the harbor to start her run down the eastern seaboard. She was laden to the gunwales with fairy cakes, dried fish, and the warmth and good wishes of the Bridgers of Griguet. For a long time I stood on the dock and waved. It was such a lovely sight, I couldn’t leave until she had disappeared from view behind the hills to the east. Then I gathered up my pack and my guitar and headed off to see the New World … or at least Newfoundland and Nova Scotia. I wanted a spell on land, and a little independence, so I had forged a plan to hitch down through Newfoundland, across to Nova Scotia, and meet up with the boat in a week’s time in Lunenburg.

I trudged off down the cinder track that led south out of Quirpon. You can walk a long way—sometimes half a long day—among the blueberries and the cloudberries in northern Newfoundland before you get a lift. And so I spent a glorious seven days alone and on the solid unmoving road, wandering slow and easy down from the north. I walked for hour after hour, dreaming of home a little and longing for love. Sometimes people took me in, other nights I slept in barns or cheap hotels in the towns. And I ate lobster for the first time, when I got a lift with a lobster fisherman.

“Man, you never ate a lobster?” he questioned me in amazement. “Why, we’ll have one right away. I got a
whole heap of ’em in back of the truck.” And there, on a warm late summer afternoon by the clear water of the Bras d’Or lakes, he persuaded a reluctant lobster to get into the cooking pot, and together we dismembered it with our pocket knives and devoured its sweet pink flesh.

I arrived in Lunenburg before
Hirta
did and checked into a white wooden hotel just behind the waterfront. I was the only guest in the place and it wasn’t very big anyway, so I had the undivided attention of the beautiful Martha, who ran the place and exuded such a welcome aura of warm femininity and subtle scent that it quite befuddled my brain. It was then that I fell prey to homesickness; it came in waves, colored with tender thoughts of Ana. I didn’t know how long I would have to wait for the boat, so I decided to channel my seething emotions into art. I bought a sketchbook and set about immortalizing the pretty little town in ink and wash.

In the morning I would wander out to the rocks on the point and eagerly scan the sea for the sight of a red sail. Later I would walk on the hills around the town, sit in the street and sketch or play some guitar, until I could wander back for dinner. Ah, dinner … I sat alone in the dining room with a candle on my table, freshly picked flowers, and a bottle of wine, and I swear I have never eaten such food. It was mostly the vegetables, the crisp pungent flavor of them, and their moist and glistening hues, but when the dessert arrived, creations of succulent berries gloriously enhanced by the products of the dairy cow and the humble hen, well, I was almost in heaven.

Perhaps
Hirta
would never come, and I would spend the rest of my days, sitting on the point watching for a
sail, munching on exquisite vegetables. Half a week passed and I became fretful, wandering out at first light to scan the horizon or distractedly penning portraits of the boat in small heroic sketches.

Then at last, on the seventh day, in the late afternoon light,
Hirta
appeared, cutting through the bay with all sails billowing, gleaming crimson in the low rays of the sun. I watched, entranced as she tacked in a graceful extended zigzag toward the harbor. They knew I would be watching from somewhere, so they were putting on a show, and I wasn’t disappointed. I was so excited to see them again that I jumped up and down and hooted and hollered from the cliffs, but it was too far off, so I ran down to the dock, arriving just in time to take the lines.

How strange they looked, my shipmates. We had been used to one another huge and amorphous, swaddled in layer upon layer of woolens, topped by shiny oilskins. But now we had been slipping down the lines of latitude toward the warmth of late summer, and bit by bit we had shed our protective clothing, revealing ourselves as less substantial beings. We had become etiolated, too, like plants growing beneath stones, denied the light and warmth of the sun. The skin that was on display shone in mottled shades of white and pink, with here and there a dash of livid red from the saltwater boils. Hannah, who was cavorting around in red cotton shorts, giggled inexplicably when I strode up the gangplank wearing much the same.

“Tell us of the lakes and the Torrible Zone,” demanded Tom, “and the hills of the Chankly Bore.”

I was happy to be back on the boat. It gets to you like
that. I had traveled on foot and in cars and trucks, and even once in a bus, but none of these conveyances made such marvelous use of the wind, that glorious resource that girdles the planet and takes you wherever you want to go, if you happen to have the skills and the time. And I hadn’t been ready yet to leave my shipmates.

I could tell by the warmth of their welcome that everyone felt the same. We needed these few extra days onboard to take proper leave of each other and, most of all, of
Hirta
. So we hoisted the sails and sheeted them in, and again felt that thrill as the old boat shuddered with the wind and plunged her bow to the sea for this, my last trip in her. We could have gone anywhere, but Newport, Rhode Island, was where we headed. The America’s Cup was taking place there and, although the world’s wealthiest millionaires strutting their stuff held little appeal, Tom made a living out of yachting journalism and reckoned there would be a story or two to be had.

And then, Tom said, we would go on to Mystic Seaport: “A true sailor’s port, with sailing museums and shrines and old boats.” It seemed a good and fitting place to leave
Hirta
, the crew, and the sea. I phoned Ana with the news. I was on my way home.