One Man and His Boat
Chapter 3: I Find Das Boot
One of my favored destinations whenever I’m in Nova Scotia is the seaside town of Lockeport, a memorably depressed place that reminds me of what the 1940s and '50s must have been like along this coast, when spots like this might as well be in Greenland. The town is magnificently situated at the end of a long peninsula, with a stunning crescent strand facing the ocean, flanked on either side by rental cottages that must clean up during the short summer season (yes, the vistas are that good). Lockeport proper is located behind the eastern edge of this beach, its harbor protected by a substantial sea wall. Old railroad tracks on the waterfront indicate the activity that several canning plants used to generate for local fishermen, but these enterprises failed years ago, and this summer rumors were flying that the single factory still remaining was about to shutter its doors. A few old warehouses by the water are for sale, but they look as though their foundations will buckle and their roofs collapse before a buyer is ever found. The two thriving enterprises still functioning down here are the provincial liquor store and a seafood restaurant. Both have splendid views of, what else, a lighthouse that guards the harbor’s approach. Other than that, I wonder why there are so many Stop signs at every intersection in town, the traffic being about a sparse as anyone seeking peace and quiet could possibly wish for.
The incentive for this trip is that a friend of mine recently purchased 14 acres on East Ragged Island, across the expansive harbor from Lockeport. I’ve come to take a look at the small vacation house he’s built here, and to stay for a few nights. I follow his directions, pretty basic, to the island, and drive down what turns out to be a long dead-end dirt road that’s laid out due south straight for the sea. There are no other vehicles to be seen as I pass an old country cemetery and a few houses here and there. The entire peninsular seems depopulated. In fact, it seems as though no ever lived here at all, which I know cannot be true.
I drive down to the end and park. An incredible panorama unfolds: an old weather-beaten barn, a couple of slipways with a dory or two tied up, another lighthouse—Gull Rock—standing two to three miles out in the ocean, its minute shores surrounded by the white froth of disordered waves, and a little cove, slightly protected by a ring of ledges and rock, at my immediate feet. There appear to be about four or five houses out here, but more (as I would later discover) lie on either side of the road, hidden to some degree by low-lying gorse and thick stands of pine and spruce. I follow one dirt track up to introduce myself to the man who has the key to my friend’s cottage. His driveway, dirt of course, passes an old shed that’s full to bursting with byproducts of his various professions (fishing and splitting wood), and the house I approach is more than modest. Amos Hagar, who appears to be in his late seventies, is up on his roof shingling. He hands over the keys and I’m off.
Over the next several days I bump into Mr. Hagar here and there. He’s the more or less unofficial caretaker of East Ragged Island, and he makes his rounds with some regularity, always with an eye out for both weather and anything out of the ordinary. His services are more valuable in the off season when the summer people, who seem to make up a majority of the populace here, have left for home, but he’s busy this July and August as well, doing minor repairs and providing everyone with the institutional memory of this place that keeps people in line. Hagar’s memory is prodigious, as I would discover, and his delivery of the local history is measured, precise, and produced at his leisure in predetermined dollops. He gives you what he wants in installments, not too much, not too little, which leaves the listener dissatisfied and usually wanting more. If you’re worthy of it, he may, or may not, deliver the goods. In American terms, he’s the quintessential down-easterner: laconic, careful with his words, highly intelligent despite little formal education, an old-fashioned gentleman. His standards are high. In all our time together, he disdained to ever address me by my first name, it was always Mr. Roy. That makes him sound like an English butler, but of course his persona is far more that of a Moses than Mr. Jeeves. Having been down here three or so times on other visits, we have developed an easy relationship. It’s pretty hard not to like Amos Hagar. The question is, does he like me?
At the end of my first stay on East Ragged Island, I walked up to his house to return the keys. Amos was in conversation with one of the summer people, an elderly gent from Ontario, retired from college teaching, who had bought, years ago, the farmhouse and seaside property of Hagar’s uncle as a vacation home. I stood aside, waiting for the opportunity to interrupt, say goodbye, tell him the house was locked, and the driveway gate as well. Being a modern sort of guy, and a Virgo to boot, I was impatient, in a hurry, and mentally annoyed at being made to wait. Amos Hagar, of course, marches to a different drummer. He’s never in a rush. So I stand there, an eavesdropper, and get a drift as to what they’re talking about. The man from Ontario needs the old bait shack cleared out; he’s planning to convert the building into apartments for two of his children who like to visit, and all the old junk has to go. Can Amos help getting rid of the stuff inside, particularly the boats? My ears pick-up at that. What boats?
There really isn’t an answer to this question. The summer man knows nothing about boats, can’t really identify what the inventory is down there, and is indifferent to anything of a maritime nature except, perhaps, the ocean sunsets he watches every evening from his porch. So I turn to Amos. What boats? “Uncle Clayton’s,” is the reply. Being an authority (a lie), I offer to give an opinion to the professor as to what, exactly, is in the shed. I’m handed the keys, told where to go, and in ten minutes I’m down by the shore, about to enter a time warp one hundred or so years old.
The bait or trap shack is a story and a half tall; not a barn per se, but similar in appearance, though considerably smaller than what most of us are familiar with as the domicile of various farm animals. It stands at the head of large slipway, essentially a series of pretty hefty logs laid down horizontally and moored at their outer edges to stationary posts, and which fishermen used both to launch and haul up their craft. Two swinging doors from the bait shack lead directly to the slipway. The immediate vicinity is littered with maritime debris, including the carcass of a fair-sized boat that lies, collapsed and rotting, in the woods. A smaller building, in some disrepair, stands nearby, with an ancient motor and flywheel inside. This looks to me to have been a saw mill of some sort. Everything clicks into place when I unlock the bigger building and enter.
I’m not sure if Canada has a Smithsonian Institution, but if it does a suggestion came to mind within a minute or two of wandering about inside. The government, I thought, would be well advised to come down here and buy this place; don’t touch a thing, don’t even inventory the contents, just buy it sight unseen. Then they could send a crew down here to jack the building up, wrap it up in cellophane, put it on a truck, take it to the museum, put it down, unwrap it, and just put a sign that says: “Here’s the way people lived and worked in the Maritimes, eking a living from the sea. Take a look at this, because it’s all gone now.”
This little building is stuffed with gear. I catch sight of a prow, and the outlines of a boat come into view. It seems about twenty feet in length, maybe six or seven wide, and is full of debris: old oil cans, some oars, a sail, several buoys (one carved in the shape of a cod fish), a pile of old nets with cork floats, lots of bait boxes, rubber boots, and one big, hulking inboard motor. I can’t tell if it’s a diesel, but it looks like a car engine, which in fact it turned out to be. It lies in a haphazard spot in the belly of the boat, as though someone had ripped it out but then, in a moment of discouragement, just left the thing to rust. The hull, or what I can see of it, seems covered with a layer of fiberglass which is frayed and cracked, strips peeling off here and there. I really can’t identify what this boat is. It doesn’t seem to have the lines of a Novie, but it does appear to be the real thing, a “classic” of some sort but just what, I don’t know.
There’s a small sailboat of similarly ancient provenance also on the ground floor, and a dory as well. Upstairs has more of the same lying about in profusion, mostly nets, cork floats and barrels, or what are locally called trawl kegs. All the hand-carved wooden buoys and the kegs are painted alike, white with a black stripe across their girth. These were evidently the colors of whoever ran this operation, presumably the uncle of Amos Hagar, and frankly I feel like an archaeologist rummaging through this stuff. One conclusion comes to mind pretty quickly: if the bigger boat is salvageable, I have to have it. This is something that just can’t be tossed out, cut up and burned as though it were some piece of trash. It also occurs to me that I could get it pretty cheaply. I locked up the shack and walked away. I was going to stay in Nova Scotia a few days more.
I asked the owner of the shack if I could have a boat guy take a survey of what had been, just thirty minutes before, only a nuisance, something to throw away. It’s funny how someone else’s interest in something automatically increases its perceived value which was, again, thirty minutes previously, exactly zero. A furrow of suspicion creases his brow, with wariness in his eyes but yes, by all means, feel free to bring someone out. Amos has the keys. He walks off to ponder this strange turn of events. He wanted his bait shack cleared of the mess inside, mess that had not been disturbed for some thirty years. He may suddenly have had in mind a situation somewhat akin to what happened in my home town just a few months previously, the sort of happenstance which periodically comes up in the press. The pastor of a local Episcopalian church came across an original oil painting by the sixteenth-century Florentine artist, Andrea del Sarto, hidden away in the attic; it had sold at auction for the phenomenal price of over a million dollars, money used by the church to build, among other things, a handicapped access ramp to the main door. Somehow this combination—art and utility—seemed incongruous to say the least, but never look a gift horse in the mouth, because you can never be sure how much money is involved.
Amos appeared bemused, but at the same time mildly intrigued by my interest in something so prosaic and mundane that it beggared his imagination. That is not to say that its being ordinary in any way diminished his capacity to recall every single detail regarding this boat, far from it. But like any feast, there was a certain order in how the story would be told: hors d’oeuvres first then, depending on how things went, meat later on and maybe dessert. Uncle Clayton, for starters. “He was born here on East Ragged Island in 1902.”
“In the house where the retired professor lives?”
“Well, that’s a complicated story. He was born in my house here, but not a part of it that you can see now. When Uncle Clayton married in 1926, he was living here, but he wanted to be closer to the water.”
“From your house it isn’t a two-minute walk to the water.”
“He wanted to be closer, that’s all I know. The closer he could get to his work, the better. So he lived up here on the hill for a while. There used to be a house where the professor lives now. Uncle Clayton inherited that, but the house was rotted out, so they moved a part of this place down there, with two yolk of oxen. The old house was dismantled—in fact, part of what they took away was used for the bait shack—and then he and two or three men dug a full-sized basement on the site, by hand, and put the newer building on that. Aside from growing up, he spent most of his life there until he went to the soldier’s home.”
“He didn’t grow up here?”
“Well at first he did, but then it was out there on Gull Rock, where his father ran the light.” Amos is pointing out to sea at the small, exposed trap rock, covered mostly by a lighthouse and an attached building, to which every eye is drawn when it scans the open water. “Uncle Clayton went to school on East Ragged Island until they moved out to sea. Then Grandmother Decker took over the work of teaching her three children. I think he graduated with a perhaps grade 8 or 9 education. After World War II, when he returned from the Air Force, he studied and got his general equivalency to grade 11. His theory always was he learned more going to school than actually being in school. There were no buses then, they walked. He learned all the flowers, the birds, the snakes, and a great deal about weather. You look to the sky, you watch the clouds, you see fog forming, you watch how the birds are acting, things like that. City people don’t stop to think about such things, they don’t have to. But if you live on the sea, you do.
“So Grandfather Beaumont went light keeping. The salary wasn’t large enough to be a living for them back then because it was before the days of fog signals. All he had to do was maintain the light itself and keep a single watch. That being so, the government allowed for a certain amount of commercial fishing in order to augment their income. There’s a slipway on Gull Rock where grandfather could haul up his dory. He kept traps out there for lobsters, and did some long lining for cod.”
“That must have been a lonely life. A strain on a marriage too, I would think.”
“I don’t really know other than what I can guess. Basically here in this part of the country, man and wife lived very close to each other. They had few neighbors, who visited sometimes, but you were often on your own, especially if your husband was a fisherman. He could be gone for long, long periods of time. I suppose out there on Gull Rock they would have had their difficulties, but they had a great respect for each other, and I think this helped them cope with the isolation. In the summertime, you know, it was different, when the weather was fit. They’d have a great many visitors. Friends would come out, particularly on weekends or a Sunday, lots of goings on between Lockeport Harbor and the Rock. Where grandfather had been a fisherman before he went light keeping, he was friends with all the men out here, and if there was important news as the fishing boats went by, they’d steer for Gull Rock and even if they couldn’t land they would yell a message back and forth. It wasn’t the same as being completely shut off from civilization.
“Then Harry, one of the boys, came down with what they called in those days consumption. I don’t know if he really had tuberculosis or not, but the doctor said he needed to have fresh milk, so a cow had to be on hand, and Gull Rock couldn’t support a cow. So grandfather transferred to the lighthouse at Cape Roseway, which is on McNutts Island at the head of Shelburne Harbor. That’s a pretty big island, has pasturage on it, about a mile or so from the nearest shore. I remember Uncle Clayton saying he often stood the night watch, twelve hours
long. When the boys grew old enough, it was pretty natural that they’d turn to the sea for a living.”
“Did Clayton ever do anything else?”
“Aside from serving in the war, not really. But everyone back then, they did whatever they had to do to keep busy and make a living. Uncle Clayton could fish, he could build or repair boats, he could work in the woods. I guess the only thing he really didn’t do was farm, though he kept chickens, had an ox and a milk cow, those sorts of things. In terms of jobs and paychecks, there just wasn’t much of that down here.”
“What about the boat?”
“That was, I’d say, the fourth boat he had in his career as a commercial fisherman. He built it … let’s see …probably around 1959, and probably used it for about thirty years, into the ‘90s.”
“He built it himself?”
“Aunt Althea helped when he needed a hand, but I’d say mostly he did it himself. He had a little saw mill, he had the wood from his lot, he’d had a great deal of experience by then from years out on the open water, so he knew what he wanted.”
“Which was what?”
“He was getting on a bit in years. He still had his big boat, but he wondered if it wouldn’t be easier fishing up Lockeport Harbor instead of further out to sea, the usual quarter mile to two or so offshore. He got tired of fishing out there where comes a big storm, the traps either smashed up or came in on the beach. You wouldn’t lose as many traps up to Lockeport because the water is quieter. What you did have were ledges and rocks, and he didn’t like that with his big boat, so he decided to build a smaller one. That’s pretty much it. I knew he was building one, but I really didn’t pay it much attention. He was a very friendly man, had a great sense of humor, but he preferred doing things alone. He generally fished alone, didn’t have a helper or anything, just went about his business, until he got to be near sixty. Then he needed some help, and welcomed it.”
“How did it all end?”
“When Aunt Anthelia died. Uncle Clayton had a few health problems, had a stroke. When his son decided to move to Middletown, he just packed his suitcase and said I’m going too, and they found a spot for him in the soldier’s home.”
“He didn’t miss the sea?”
“Uncle Clayton wasn’t sentimental. Lots of people, outsiders, they have a romantic notion about fishermen, boats, lighthouses, all those things. Fishing was a tough life, it could be dangerous too. Uncle Clayton never named any of his boats, they just had numbers. The boat in the bait shack, it was just a boat, just a tool, something necessary to make a living. I remember him saying, when he was building it, I’m not going to plane it anymore, that’s good enough. He wasn’t out to make it tidy, streamlined, or good looking. He wanted it as a work boat, nothing more.”
“That’s quite a story, Amos, something right out of the nineteenth century.”
“I suppose you could say that. Those days are long gone, I’m sure.”
“Imagine someone in this day and age, though, growing up on a Gull Rock, the child of a lighthouse keeper. Not too much room to play on that place.”
“You’d be surprised, Mr. Roy, you’d be surprised. You make do with what you have, I suppose, and a child’s imagination, that can take you places far and wide.”
“I’d have loved to have had a chat with that guy.”
“Well, why not?” I let that simmer for a minute.
“You’re not really telling me that your uncle is still alive? God Almighty, he’d have to be a hundred years old.”
“A hundred and two, actually, and his memory is pretty near perfect. I just visited him a week ago.” At that moment I determined to buy the boat no matter what.
In the afternoon, I called Clayton Beaumont Decker’s son to see if I could talk with his father. No problem. Dad was in the Old Soldier’s Home in Middleton, a small town about a three-hour drive away. We made an appointment. Then I sped off to find Charlie, my boat builder. He’d love a job like this.
My mind was certainly busy, going through a gyration a minute. The last thing I needed was another boat—what would my wife say?—but then again, this entire situation was so intriguing. I gave myself the challenge: if I was an Egyptologist, would I turn down the opportunity to dig at a previously undiscovered site? What would I do, as a Joyce scholar, if twenty missing pages of Molly Bloom’s final soliloquy from Ulysses was just handed me in a plain, unaddressed manila envelope? Surely the man in me would want to read more. If Baron Rothschild discovered a bottle from 1923 (a very good year) would he turn away? The very insignificance of what I was preparing to do fueled my inclination to do it. Who cared about a boat like this? Who cared about the life of a man who did the same thing with probably monotonous regularity day in and day out: fished for cod, caught lobsters, cut wood, and raised a family in hard times? Who, in fact, even cared about Nova Scotia, a remote, irrelevant, and largely ignored piece of terra firma? Well, there was me, and that seemed a pretty good place to start. If you please the most important audience you have, namely yourself, maybe others might come along for the ride. I was also cheered by a happenstance further on down the road. Reaching Rte 3 at a crossroads called Jordon Falls, I stopped to eat a sandwich at a small community park down by a frigid looking stream. An outsized iron anchor marked a plaque of some sort, which I read with tremendous satisfaction. Jordon, it appears, was the birthplace of Donald McKay.
Anyone interested in the history of shipbuilding knows who McKay was, the father of magnificent clipper ships that, for a brief moment in the 1850s, stunned the maritime world with their grace, beauty and, most important of all, speed. McKay began his career as an independent shipbuilder in Newburyport, of all places, but he had his eye on larger horizons and established his most important yard in East Boston where he constructed some thirty-seven clippers along with a variety of other boats. An understated monument to this man’s ingenuity stands in South Boston looking out to the “roads” of Boston Harbor where, back in the heyday of sail, his magnificent vessels would have set off to round the Horn on their way to the California gold fields and, beyond that, to China and Japan. Nowadays, as fate would have it, this memorial obelisk stands directly beneath the flight pattern of jets approaching the twin north-south runways of Logan Airport which handles a lion’s share of over 30,000 flights a month. No matter, Sovereign of the Seas, Flying Cloud, Stag Hound, and Westward Ho! all came first.
As I drive into Pubnico, of course, I’m not looking for Daniel MacKay but for Charlie Thibaudeau. Trouble is, I can’t find him, no Charlie anywhere. There’s no one at the house, where the lawn hasn’t been cut in weeks, and no pick-up truck in the driveway. The shop is deserted and has a “For Sale – Price Reduced ” sign on the road. I ask around. "Charlie?" says a guy on the road. "He went off on a drunk a year ago and hasn’t come back. Should have showed up in November for the season, but he never did." I spend the night camping out at his shop after snooping through the neighborhood. Next morning I track him down at his wife’s new apartment, where he’s essentially trapped, having lost his truck to the debt collector and his driver’s license to the province (DUI). He is in a deep, deep depression. It’s 8:30 in the morning and he’s in a dirt-floored basement, sitting next to the furnace, drinking beer and smoking a joint. He’s not interested in checking out any boat, he’s not interested in fixing it up, he’s not interested in a job. What are you living on, Charlie, I ask? “Love.”
The only thing I get out of his mouth is advice. Next time I’m home, he says, I should fill the tub full of bubble bath, surround it with candles, get my wife to climb in, and keep saying “I love you.” Frankly, I’d rather drive off a cliff, but in his fragile state I don’t share this thought with Charlie. I try to insert some basic psychology into the situation, some blather intended to buck him up, get him focused, but I’m not getting anywhere. Motivational lingo is just not my style. This is altogether too distressing a sight, his poor wife has no idea what to do next. Neither do I, except to leave.
I’m in a pickle, but not for long. I try to refresh my memory, always a tenuous proposition, and think back to three years before when I had undertaken my first run-through of the province looking for a boat builder. I remember that one of the outfits I had investigated, and been reasonably impressed with, had some sort of fruit associated with its name, and yellow pages I rummaged through did the trick: Apple Island Marine. I gave the guy a ring, he recalled my visit (anything to do with strangers in Nova Scotia is a moment to treasure, it seems), and we agreed to meet the next day on Rte 3. There was no work in the shop, Apple Island could use a job, any job.
I remet the proprietor, Wade Goulden, at 10 a.m. on a Wednesday. He arrived in the biggest pick-up truck I’d ever seen, equipped with enough electronic gear to go to the moon. Wade himself was also big, probably tipping the scales at 300 pounds. My first impression was that this guy was no one to lose your temper with. I remember his type from school football games, guards and tackles you could hit all day and they’d never go down. As per usual in Nova Scotia, though, he was about as friendly a person as you could hope for. Rather than crushing your fingers in a handshake, he instead grasped it as though reaching for a cloud.
We drove down to East Ragged Island, retrieved the shack keys, and went down to take a look. We opened the big swinging doors to get more light, and started to clear as much debris out of the boat as possible. He pulled out an old, handmade pump—“This here has saved many a fisherman’s life,” he said, as he worked the contraption up and down. Then he took out his pocket knife and poked around, looking for rot. At first he had little to say, which impressed me. When he did open his mouth, it confirmed to me that I have a pretty good aesthetic eye. “I’ll tell you something, Jim, you won’t find a boat like this anywhere in the province. You won’t find too many sheds like this around here either, they’ve mostly been cleared out by antique dealers and people like that, who talk some of the older people into selling all their stuff off for pennies. I can’t tell you what this boat is except that it’s handmade. There’s a reason there’s a saw mill over there. It might be a Fox Islander, but I’m not sure. More likely, whoever built this just made it all up and put it together to satisfy his own requirements, whatever they might have been.”
“Well, he was a fisherman.”
“Right, I can tell that from looking around at the gear in here, but it looks to me like this was maybe his last boat, something he built to keep his finger in the business. That boat in the woods, for instance, that’s a Cape Islander, probably 30 feet. I’ll bet he was an older guy who couldn’t walk away from the sea.”
“Is it a good boat?”
“Oh yeah, absolutely. This is one-of-a-kind, and I don’t see nothing too wrong with it.”
We talked over what it might take to put her back together, a subject Wade refused to discuss in any detail until we had it in his shop. The large inboard motor, for example, we couldn’t budge, so there was no telling what condition the planking might be in once that was removed. We locked the place up and, leaving Wade behind, I went to search out the owner.
“What do you think?” he asked. I said I was willing to take it off his hands, implying he might like to pay me for such a handsome offer. That illusion passed pretty quickly. He’d had time to mull over my interest. I had apparently appeared too eager. He’d gone down and taken a look himself. “How much do you want to pay for it?”
“As little as possible, to be honest.”
“How about $1,000?” My heart sank. Here I was, doing this guy a favor, and he wants $1,000. He could tell from the look of utter amazement on my face that this figure wouldn’t fly. I related the millions it would cost me to restore this old wreck, and we went back and forth a bit until a pretty decent price presented itself. I made out a bill of sale in my notebook, we shook hands on the deal, and this strange little craft, history unknown (at least to me) was now mine. I said I’d be back next spring to pick her up. I made him promise that he’d remember to lock the shed. “Don’t worry, Amos’ll keep an eye on it. And by the way, it’s your responsibility to get rid of the motor. You can’t just dump it on the ground and leave it here.” That didn’t cheer me up any.
The incentive for this trip is that a friend of mine recently purchased 14 acres on East Ragged Island, across the expansive harbor from Lockeport. I’ve come to take a look at the small vacation house he’s built here, and to stay for a few nights. I follow his directions, pretty basic, to the island, and drive down what turns out to be a long dead-end dirt road that’s laid out due south straight for the sea. There are no other vehicles to be seen as I pass an old country cemetery and a few houses here and there. The entire peninsular seems depopulated. In fact, it seems as though no ever lived here at all, which I know cannot be true.
I drive down to the end and park. An incredible panorama unfolds: an old weather-beaten barn, a couple of slipways with a dory or two tied up, another lighthouse—Gull Rock—standing two to three miles out in the ocean, its minute shores surrounded by the white froth of disordered waves, and a little cove, slightly protected by a ring of ledges and rock, at my immediate feet. There appear to be about four or five houses out here, but more (as I would later discover) lie on either side of the road, hidden to some degree by low-lying gorse and thick stands of pine and spruce. I follow one dirt track up to introduce myself to the man who has the key to my friend’s cottage. His driveway, dirt of course, passes an old shed that’s full to bursting with byproducts of his various professions (fishing and splitting wood), and the house I approach is more than modest. Amos Hagar, who appears to be in his late seventies, is up on his roof shingling. He hands over the keys and I’m off.
Over the next several days I bump into Mr. Hagar here and there. He’s the more or less unofficial caretaker of East Ragged Island, and he makes his rounds with some regularity, always with an eye out for both weather and anything out of the ordinary. His services are more valuable in the off season when the summer people, who seem to make up a majority of the populace here, have left for home, but he’s busy this July and August as well, doing minor repairs and providing everyone with the institutional memory of this place that keeps people in line. Hagar’s memory is prodigious, as I would discover, and his delivery of the local history is measured, precise, and produced at his leisure in predetermined dollops. He gives you what he wants in installments, not too much, not too little, which leaves the listener dissatisfied and usually wanting more. If you’re worthy of it, he may, or may not, deliver the goods. In American terms, he’s the quintessential down-easterner: laconic, careful with his words, highly intelligent despite little formal education, an old-fashioned gentleman. His standards are high. In all our time together, he disdained to ever address me by my first name, it was always Mr. Roy. That makes him sound like an English butler, but of course his persona is far more that of a Moses than Mr. Jeeves. Having been down here three or so times on other visits, we have developed an easy relationship. It’s pretty hard not to like Amos Hagar. The question is, does he like me?
At the end of my first stay on East Ragged Island, I walked up to his house to return the keys. Amos was in conversation with one of the summer people, an elderly gent from Ontario, retired from college teaching, who had bought, years ago, the farmhouse and seaside property of Hagar’s uncle as a vacation home. I stood aside, waiting for the opportunity to interrupt, say goodbye, tell him the house was locked, and the driveway gate as well. Being a modern sort of guy, and a Virgo to boot, I was impatient, in a hurry, and mentally annoyed at being made to wait. Amos Hagar, of course, marches to a different drummer. He’s never in a rush. So I stand there, an eavesdropper, and get a drift as to what they’re talking about. The man from Ontario needs the old bait shack cleared out; he’s planning to convert the building into apartments for two of his children who like to visit, and all the old junk has to go. Can Amos help getting rid of the stuff inside, particularly the boats? My ears pick-up at that. What boats?
There really isn’t an answer to this question. The summer man knows nothing about boats, can’t really identify what the inventory is down there, and is indifferent to anything of a maritime nature except, perhaps, the ocean sunsets he watches every evening from his porch. So I turn to Amos. What boats? “Uncle Clayton’s,” is the reply. Being an authority (a lie), I offer to give an opinion to the professor as to what, exactly, is in the shed. I’m handed the keys, told where to go, and in ten minutes I’m down by the shore, about to enter a time warp one hundred or so years old.
The bait or trap shack is a story and a half tall; not a barn per se, but similar in appearance, though considerably smaller than what most of us are familiar with as the domicile of various farm animals. It stands at the head of large slipway, essentially a series of pretty hefty logs laid down horizontally and moored at their outer edges to stationary posts, and which fishermen used both to launch and haul up their craft. Two swinging doors from the bait shack lead directly to the slipway. The immediate vicinity is littered with maritime debris, including the carcass of a fair-sized boat that lies, collapsed and rotting, in the woods. A smaller building, in some disrepair, stands nearby, with an ancient motor and flywheel inside. This looks to me to have been a saw mill of some sort. Everything clicks into place when I unlock the bigger building and enter.
I’m not sure if Canada has a Smithsonian Institution, but if it does a suggestion came to mind within a minute or two of wandering about inside. The government, I thought, would be well advised to come down here and buy this place; don’t touch a thing, don’t even inventory the contents, just buy it sight unseen. Then they could send a crew down here to jack the building up, wrap it up in cellophane, put it on a truck, take it to the museum, put it down, unwrap it, and just put a sign that says: “Here’s the way people lived and worked in the Maritimes, eking a living from the sea. Take a look at this, because it’s all gone now.”
This little building is stuffed with gear. I catch sight of a prow, and the outlines of a boat come into view. It seems about twenty feet in length, maybe six or seven wide, and is full of debris: old oil cans, some oars, a sail, several buoys (one carved in the shape of a cod fish), a pile of old nets with cork floats, lots of bait boxes, rubber boots, and one big, hulking inboard motor. I can’t tell if it’s a diesel, but it looks like a car engine, which in fact it turned out to be. It lies in a haphazard spot in the belly of the boat, as though someone had ripped it out but then, in a moment of discouragement, just left the thing to rust. The hull, or what I can see of it, seems covered with a layer of fiberglass which is frayed and cracked, strips peeling off here and there. I really can’t identify what this boat is. It doesn’t seem to have the lines of a Novie, but it does appear to be the real thing, a “classic” of some sort but just what, I don’t know.
There’s a small sailboat of similarly ancient provenance also on the ground floor, and a dory as well. Upstairs has more of the same lying about in profusion, mostly nets, cork floats and barrels, or what are locally called trawl kegs. All the hand-carved wooden buoys and the kegs are painted alike, white with a black stripe across their girth. These were evidently the colors of whoever ran this operation, presumably the uncle of Amos Hagar, and frankly I feel like an archaeologist rummaging through this stuff. One conclusion comes to mind pretty quickly: if the bigger boat is salvageable, I have to have it. This is something that just can’t be tossed out, cut up and burned as though it were some piece of trash. It also occurs to me that I could get it pretty cheaply. I locked up the shack and walked away. I was going to stay in Nova Scotia a few days more.
I asked the owner of the shack if I could have a boat guy take a survey of what had been, just thirty minutes before, only a nuisance, something to throw away. It’s funny how someone else’s interest in something automatically increases its perceived value which was, again, thirty minutes previously, exactly zero. A furrow of suspicion creases his brow, with wariness in his eyes but yes, by all means, feel free to bring someone out. Amos has the keys. He walks off to ponder this strange turn of events. He wanted his bait shack cleared of the mess inside, mess that had not been disturbed for some thirty years. He may suddenly have had in mind a situation somewhat akin to what happened in my home town just a few months previously, the sort of happenstance which periodically comes up in the press. The pastor of a local Episcopalian church came across an original oil painting by the sixteenth-century Florentine artist, Andrea del Sarto, hidden away in the attic; it had sold at auction for the phenomenal price of over a million dollars, money used by the church to build, among other things, a handicapped access ramp to the main door. Somehow this combination—art and utility—seemed incongruous to say the least, but never look a gift horse in the mouth, because you can never be sure how much money is involved.
Amos appeared bemused, but at the same time mildly intrigued by my interest in something so prosaic and mundane that it beggared his imagination. That is not to say that its being ordinary in any way diminished his capacity to recall every single detail regarding this boat, far from it. But like any feast, there was a certain order in how the story would be told: hors d’oeuvres first then, depending on how things went, meat later on and maybe dessert. Uncle Clayton, for starters. “He was born here on East Ragged Island in 1902.”
“In the house where the retired professor lives?”
“Well, that’s a complicated story. He was born in my house here, but not a part of it that you can see now. When Uncle Clayton married in 1926, he was living here, but he wanted to be closer to the water.”
“From your house it isn’t a two-minute walk to the water.”
“He wanted to be closer, that’s all I know. The closer he could get to his work, the better. So he lived up here on the hill for a while. There used to be a house where the professor lives now. Uncle Clayton inherited that, but the house was rotted out, so they moved a part of this place down there, with two yolk of oxen. The old house was dismantled—in fact, part of what they took away was used for the bait shack—and then he and two or three men dug a full-sized basement on the site, by hand, and put the newer building on that. Aside from growing up, he spent most of his life there until he went to the soldier’s home.”
“He didn’t grow up here?”
“Well at first he did, but then it was out there on Gull Rock, where his father ran the light.” Amos is pointing out to sea at the small, exposed trap rock, covered mostly by a lighthouse and an attached building, to which every eye is drawn when it scans the open water. “Uncle Clayton went to school on East Ragged Island until they moved out to sea. Then Grandmother Decker took over the work of teaching her three children. I think he graduated with a perhaps grade 8 or 9 education. After World War II, when he returned from the Air Force, he studied and got his general equivalency to grade 11. His theory always was he learned more going to school than actually being in school. There were no buses then, they walked. He learned all the flowers, the birds, the snakes, and a great deal about weather. You look to the sky, you watch the clouds, you see fog forming, you watch how the birds are acting, things like that. City people don’t stop to think about such things, they don’t have to. But if you live on the sea, you do.
“So Grandfather Beaumont went light keeping. The salary wasn’t large enough to be a living for them back then because it was before the days of fog signals. All he had to do was maintain the light itself and keep a single watch. That being so, the government allowed for a certain amount of commercial fishing in order to augment their income. There’s a slipway on Gull Rock where grandfather could haul up his dory. He kept traps out there for lobsters, and did some long lining for cod.”
“That must have been a lonely life. A strain on a marriage too, I would think.”
“I don’t really know other than what I can guess. Basically here in this part of the country, man and wife lived very close to each other. They had few neighbors, who visited sometimes, but you were often on your own, especially if your husband was a fisherman. He could be gone for long, long periods of time. I suppose out there on Gull Rock they would have had their difficulties, but they had a great respect for each other, and I think this helped them cope with the isolation. In the summertime, you know, it was different, when the weather was fit. They’d have a great many visitors. Friends would come out, particularly on weekends or a Sunday, lots of goings on between Lockeport Harbor and the Rock. Where grandfather had been a fisherman before he went light keeping, he was friends with all the men out here, and if there was important news as the fishing boats went by, they’d steer for Gull Rock and even if they couldn’t land they would yell a message back and forth. It wasn’t the same as being completely shut off from civilization.
“Then Harry, one of the boys, came down with what they called in those days consumption. I don’t know if he really had tuberculosis or not, but the doctor said he needed to have fresh milk, so a cow had to be on hand, and Gull Rock couldn’t support a cow. So grandfather transferred to the lighthouse at Cape Roseway, which is on McNutts Island at the head of Shelburne Harbor. That’s a pretty big island, has pasturage on it, about a mile or so from the nearest shore. I remember Uncle Clayton saying he often stood the night watch, twelve hours
long. When the boys grew old enough, it was pretty natural that they’d turn to the sea for a living.”
“Did Clayton ever do anything else?”
“Aside from serving in the war, not really. But everyone back then, they did whatever they had to do to keep busy and make a living. Uncle Clayton could fish, he could build or repair boats, he could work in the woods. I guess the only thing he really didn’t do was farm, though he kept chickens, had an ox and a milk cow, those sorts of things. In terms of jobs and paychecks, there just wasn’t much of that down here.”
“What about the boat?”
“That was, I’d say, the fourth boat he had in his career as a commercial fisherman. He built it … let’s see …probably around 1959, and probably used it for about thirty years, into the ‘90s.”
“He built it himself?”
“Aunt Althea helped when he needed a hand, but I’d say mostly he did it himself. He had a little saw mill, he had the wood from his lot, he’d had a great deal of experience by then from years out on the open water, so he knew what he wanted.”
“Which was what?”
“He was getting on a bit in years. He still had his big boat, but he wondered if it wouldn’t be easier fishing up Lockeport Harbor instead of further out to sea, the usual quarter mile to two or so offshore. He got tired of fishing out there where comes a big storm, the traps either smashed up or came in on the beach. You wouldn’t lose as many traps up to Lockeport because the water is quieter. What you did have were ledges and rocks, and he didn’t like that with his big boat, so he decided to build a smaller one. That’s pretty much it. I knew he was building one, but I really didn’t pay it much attention. He was a very friendly man, had a great sense of humor, but he preferred doing things alone. He generally fished alone, didn’t have a helper or anything, just went about his business, until he got to be near sixty. Then he needed some help, and welcomed it.”
“How did it all end?”
“When Aunt Anthelia died. Uncle Clayton had a few health problems, had a stroke. When his son decided to move to Middletown, he just packed his suitcase and said I’m going too, and they found a spot for him in the soldier’s home.”
“He didn’t miss the sea?”
“Uncle Clayton wasn’t sentimental. Lots of people, outsiders, they have a romantic notion about fishermen, boats, lighthouses, all those things. Fishing was a tough life, it could be dangerous too. Uncle Clayton never named any of his boats, they just had numbers. The boat in the bait shack, it was just a boat, just a tool, something necessary to make a living. I remember him saying, when he was building it, I’m not going to plane it anymore, that’s good enough. He wasn’t out to make it tidy, streamlined, or good looking. He wanted it as a work boat, nothing more.”
“That’s quite a story, Amos, something right out of the nineteenth century.”
“I suppose you could say that. Those days are long gone, I’m sure.”
“Imagine someone in this day and age, though, growing up on a Gull Rock, the child of a lighthouse keeper. Not too much room to play on that place.”
“You’d be surprised, Mr. Roy, you’d be surprised. You make do with what you have, I suppose, and a child’s imagination, that can take you places far and wide.”
“I’d have loved to have had a chat with that guy.”
“Well, why not?” I let that simmer for a minute.
“You’re not really telling me that your uncle is still alive? God Almighty, he’d have to be a hundred years old.”
“A hundred and two, actually, and his memory is pretty near perfect. I just visited him a week ago.” At that moment I determined to buy the boat no matter what.
In the afternoon, I called Clayton Beaumont Decker’s son to see if I could talk with his father. No problem. Dad was in the Old Soldier’s Home in Middleton, a small town about a three-hour drive away. We made an appointment. Then I sped off to find Charlie, my boat builder. He’d love a job like this.
My mind was certainly busy, going through a gyration a minute. The last thing I needed was another boat—what would my wife say?—but then again, this entire situation was so intriguing. I gave myself the challenge: if I was an Egyptologist, would I turn down the opportunity to dig at a previously undiscovered site? What would I do, as a Joyce scholar, if twenty missing pages of Molly Bloom’s final soliloquy from Ulysses was just handed me in a plain, unaddressed manila envelope? Surely the man in me would want to read more. If Baron Rothschild discovered a bottle from 1923 (a very good year) would he turn away? The very insignificance of what I was preparing to do fueled my inclination to do it. Who cared about a boat like this? Who cared about the life of a man who did the same thing with probably monotonous regularity day in and day out: fished for cod, caught lobsters, cut wood, and raised a family in hard times? Who, in fact, even cared about Nova Scotia, a remote, irrelevant, and largely ignored piece of terra firma? Well, there was me, and that seemed a pretty good place to start. If you please the most important audience you have, namely yourself, maybe others might come along for the ride. I was also cheered by a happenstance further on down the road. Reaching Rte 3 at a crossroads called Jordon Falls, I stopped to eat a sandwich at a small community park down by a frigid looking stream. An outsized iron anchor marked a plaque of some sort, which I read with tremendous satisfaction. Jordon, it appears, was the birthplace of Donald McKay.
Anyone interested in the history of shipbuilding knows who McKay was, the father of magnificent clipper ships that, for a brief moment in the 1850s, stunned the maritime world with their grace, beauty and, most important of all, speed. McKay began his career as an independent shipbuilder in Newburyport, of all places, but he had his eye on larger horizons and established his most important yard in East Boston where he constructed some thirty-seven clippers along with a variety of other boats. An understated monument to this man’s ingenuity stands in South Boston looking out to the “roads” of Boston Harbor where, back in the heyday of sail, his magnificent vessels would have set off to round the Horn on their way to the California gold fields and, beyond that, to China and Japan. Nowadays, as fate would have it, this memorial obelisk stands directly beneath the flight pattern of jets approaching the twin north-south runways of Logan Airport which handles a lion’s share of over 30,000 flights a month. No matter, Sovereign of the Seas, Flying Cloud, Stag Hound, and Westward Ho! all came first.
As I drive into Pubnico, of course, I’m not looking for Daniel MacKay but for Charlie Thibaudeau. Trouble is, I can’t find him, no Charlie anywhere. There’s no one at the house, where the lawn hasn’t been cut in weeks, and no pick-up truck in the driveway. The shop is deserted and has a “For Sale – Price Reduced ” sign on the road. I ask around. "Charlie?" says a guy on the road. "He went off on a drunk a year ago and hasn’t come back. Should have showed up in November for the season, but he never did." I spend the night camping out at his shop after snooping through the neighborhood. Next morning I track him down at his wife’s new apartment, where he’s essentially trapped, having lost his truck to the debt collector and his driver’s license to the province (DUI). He is in a deep, deep depression. It’s 8:30 in the morning and he’s in a dirt-floored basement, sitting next to the furnace, drinking beer and smoking a joint. He’s not interested in checking out any boat, he’s not interested in fixing it up, he’s not interested in a job. What are you living on, Charlie, I ask? “Love.”
The only thing I get out of his mouth is advice. Next time I’m home, he says, I should fill the tub full of bubble bath, surround it with candles, get my wife to climb in, and keep saying “I love you.” Frankly, I’d rather drive off a cliff, but in his fragile state I don’t share this thought with Charlie. I try to insert some basic psychology into the situation, some blather intended to buck him up, get him focused, but I’m not getting anywhere. Motivational lingo is just not my style. This is altogether too distressing a sight, his poor wife has no idea what to do next. Neither do I, except to leave.
I’m in a pickle, but not for long. I try to refresh my memory, always a tenuous proposition, and think back to three years before when I had undertaken my first run-through of the province looking for a boat builder. I remember that one of the outfits I had investigated, and been reasonably impressed with, had some sort of fruit associated with its name, and yellow pages I rummaged through did the trick: Apple Island Marine. I gave the guy a ring, he recalled my visit (anything to do with strangers in Nova Scotia is a moment to treasure, it seems), and we agreed to meet the next day on Rte 3. There was no work in the shop, Apple Island could use a job, any job.
I remet the proprietor, Wade Goulden, at 10 a.m. on a Wednesday. He arrived in the biggest pick-up truck I’d ever seen, equipped with enough electronic gear to go to the moon. Wade himself was also big, probably tipping the scales at 300 pounds. My first impression was that this guy was no one to lose your temper with. I remember his type from school football games, guards and tackles you could hit all day and they’d never go down. As per usual in Nova Scotia, though, he was about as friendly a person as you could hope for. Rather than crushing your fingers in a handshake, he instead grasped it as though reaching for a cloud.
We drove down to East Ragged Island, retrieved the shack keys, and went down to take a look. We opened the big swinging doors to get more light, and started to clear as much debris out of the boat as possible. He pulled out an old, handmade pump—“This here has saved many a fisherman’s life,” he said, as he worked the contraption up and down. Then he took out his pocket knife and poked around, looking for rot. At first he had little to say, which impressed me. When he did open his mouth, it confirmed to me that I have a pretty good aesthetic eye. “I’ll tell you something, Jim, you won’t find a boat like this anywhere in the province. You won’t find too many sheds like this around here either, they’ve mostly been cleared out by antique dealers and people like that, who talk some of the older people into selling all their stuff off for pennies. I can’t tell you what this boat is except that it’s handmade. There’s a reason there’s a saw mill over there. It might be a Fox Islander, but I’m not sure. More likely, whoever built this just made it all up and put it together to satisfy his own requirements, whatever they might have been.”
“Well, he was a fisherman.”
“Right, I can tell that from looking around at the gear in here, but it looks to me like this was maybe his last boat, something he built to keep his finger in the business. That boat in the woods, for instance, that’s a Cape Islander, probably 30 feet. I’ll bet he was an older guy who couldn’t walk away from the sea.”
“Is it a good boat?”
“Oh yeah, absolutely. This is one-of-a-kind, and I don’t see nothing too wrong with it.”
We talked over what it might take to put her back together, a subject Wade refused to discuss in any detail until we had it in his shop. The large inboard motor, for example, we couldn’t budge, so there was no telling what condition the planking might be in once that was removed. We locked the place up and, leaving Wade behind, I went to search out the owner.
“What do you think?” he asked. I said I was willing to take it off his hands, implying he might like to pay me for such a handsome offer. That illusion passed pretty quickly. He’d had time to mull over my interest. I had apparently appeared too eager. He’d gone down and taken a look himself. “How much do you want to pay for it?”
“As little as possible, to be honest.”
“How about $1,000?” My heart sank. Here I was, doing this guy a favor, and he wants $1,000. He could tell from the look of utter amazement on my face that this figure wouldn’t fly. I related the millions it would cost me to restore this old wreck, and we went back and forth a bit until a pretty decent price presented itself. I made out a bill of sale in my notebook, we shook hands on the deal, and this strange little craft, history unknown (at least to me) was now mine. I said I’d be back next spring to pick her up. I made him promise that he’d remember to lock the shed. “Don’t worry, Amos’ll keep an eye on it. And by the way, it’s your responsibility to get rid of the motor. You can’t just dump it on the ground and leave it here.” That didn’t cheer me up any.