Was digging through our archives (a grand word for the loosely-organized piles of boxes in our basement!) and found this article about my great-uncle Everett Hardy. He was a lovely fellow who was able to rhyme off stories, facts and figures nearly to the end of his 94 years. He was from another age, steeped in stories of the sea, both tales of his own escapades and from the books and National Geographic magazines that he read.
My mother says the local doctor of her youth, John Stewart, said that if Everett had been able to have a good education, he could have been a lawyer (high praise in a time when lawyers were still mostly universally respected). As his parents aged, Everett gradually took over much of the business side of their cannery. He had a head for numbers, and remembered lobster prices and catch sizes decades after the fact.
The reporter who captured Uncle Everett’s tales was Debbie Horne of the West Prince Graphic weekly newspaper. She left the paper quite a few years ago, but was a fixture in West Prince for a long time. If something was happening in our area in the 1980s and 90s, you could be sure Debbie would be there, along with the West Prince reporter for the (then) daily Journal Pioneer, Eric McCarthy. How lucky we were to have that amount of coverage of our small communities. They had to cover everything, from fishing and farming to crime and human interest, and they both did it well.
I have a poor recording of Uncle Everett from about a decade after this interview, which I transcribed a few years ago. He used phrases and pronunciations that have died out of common usage today, as does my mother. He mentions a type of ship called a schooner in this article, but he never pronounced to rhyme with “tuner”, more like “gunner”…it’s difficult to describe. Ask me sometime and I’ll say it fer ye!
His deep interest in the natural world filled him up to the brim, so much so that in his later years, his love of the world and all that was in it would choke him up as he spoke. No gentler, kinder man has ever lived, and I’m glad someone took the time in 1983 to record his tales.
The photo of Uncle Everett from the newspaper article, colourised with PhotosRevived, also part of Setapp. Uncle Everett usually wore dark work clothes, so the colour of the shirt and homemade walking stick is remarkably accurate. As this photo was taken in March, I see his long-sleeved undershirt peeking through his sleeve, though the house was always boiling hot from a wood furnace!He was sitting in his bedroom, where he spent many hours in a rocking chair looking out at Freeland Creek below his house. On top of the dresser to his left was a globe, and he kept Wrigley’s chewing gum in a drawer to give to us children.
A technical note for anyone who transcribes newspaper clippings: I’ve been using TextSniper for the past few weeks to capture text from PDFs and photos, and it is a helpful little app that sits patiently in my menu bar waiting to be triggered. I recently found the toggle to prevent it from adding line breaks, which has saved me a lot of editing when copying text from newspaper columns, and now I love it even more! It’s part of Setapp, a subscription plan I ignored for years but decided to try when RapidWeaver came up for renewal and I realised it was part of Setapp. There are 240+ fun and useful tools that all seem to work really well. I’m just sharing my Setapp experience – I don’t monetize anything on my website, so you won’t make or break me if you do-or-don’t click!
My mother and I took a short detour on our way home after a recent appointment. I wanted to pick eelgrass from the shore to place around my tiny asparagus bed, a trick I learned from local master organic gardener Paul Offer, who generously taught an organic gardening course at our community school for many years. He said asparagus likes a little salt – it’s probably one of the few cultivated plants that does, I imagine – so some eelgrass scattered around suppresses weeds both by blocking light and from the trace of salt from the seawater in which it grows.
We drove down one of the many dirt roads that lead to the Conway Narrows, the body of water separating the mainland of PEI from the Conway Sandhills. I have written many times about the Sandhills, and my mother’s connection to them as possibly one of the last people to have lived there when, as a child in the 1920s and 30s, she spent every summer with her grandparents at their lobster cannery at Hardy’s Channel.
There are not many remote, wild places on PEI, but this is one of them. It is rare to see another human, except maybe an oyster fisher in a boat. During spring and fall migration it is common to see large flocks of geese and ducks as they move north or south.
I had forgotten to bring buckets with me, so I grabbed two grocery bins from my trunk and quickly filled them with the dried grass that a high tide had helpfully deposited on some wild rose bushes, so it had been well rinsed in the rain and then dried well in the sun and wind.
The quiet and calm of this place, the undulating dunes on the horizon, the absence of motorized anything, is a portal to another time. I was there at high tide, which prevents a walk as the beach is completely submerged, but at low tide you can walk a long way and see cranberry bogs and peatmoss hanging off the low bank, seabirds and shells and all sorts of treasures.
It is possible, in a couple of places, to walk through the water over to the Sandhills at low tide, but you really need to be aware of the weather and tides to do so, and it isn’t recommended unless you know what your doing. I’ve actually only done it once – we always boated over when I was a child – and it was a bit too wild, even for me!
There was no time for wading or strolling anyway as my mother wanted to go see “Jimmy Mick’s place” while we were out that way. Jimmy MacDonald was a customer of my parent’s, a veteran of the First World War, long gone now. The electricity lines end at the intersection of the Luke and Murray Roads, and you keep following the later road, which is only really one lane at that point, to a turn the bend and there is Jimmy’s old house. It is in remarkably good shape for something that hasn’t been lived full-time in for decades, the roof line still straight, windows and doors intact. Someone has kept the grass cut around it. With the over-inflated PEI real estate market, even this ancient abode could now likely fetch more money than Jimmy ever made in his entire life.
We used to go out to Jimmy’s place to pick blueberries in the shrubby fields. The fields are all woodland now, and I doubt you could pick a cup of blueberries where once people could fill buckets. One of my mother’s great loves was picking wild berries, spending hours each summer gathering strawberries, raspberries and blueberries. I did not inherit the love of berry picking, and would dutifully accompany her and various great aunts when I was a child, but would only pick for a few minutes before wandering off to explore or head back to the car to read.
Our visit to the land of Jimmy Mick complete, we headed back home. The roads out there in the Black Banks (the blackness because of deposits of dark peat moss) are narrow and muddy in a few spots, and in a couple of swales I closed my eyes and gunned the car to get through, my mother and I laughing each time, well aware we could get stuck and relieved when we didn’t. We turned onto the Luke Road, a much better-kept route, but still narrow and muddy in places. We soon reached the pavement and drove in modern comfort the kilometer or so to our house.
You can still see a few older houses in our area ”banked” with dried eelgrass each fall. People collect truckloads of it and put it around the outside of the bottom of their house to keep out cold drafts in the winter, using stakes to keep it in place. Eelgrass was also used as insulation inside house walls a long time ago, which wasn’t really that effective, but better than nothing. My mother used to sleep on a straw tick mattress at the lobster cannery, and I bet you could throw some dry eelgrass in there, too, if it your mattress flattened and needed some bulk.
I remember learning to operate a dory with an outboard motor when I was about 8 and the feeling of the motor bogging down when I would steer into a shallow area and eelgrass wrapped around the propeller. I’d have to stop the boat, tip the motor up slightly, and then run it in reverse to clear the blades to continue on my way.
Reenactment of propeller-stopping eel grass.
And yes, eelgrass is long and slithery like an eel, but there are also eels in eelgrass. When you learn to swim in a muddy-bottomed river, as I did, you get used to the silky feel of eelgrass brushing your legs as you move through it, and you sometimes feel an eel rush by, too, if you set your feet down in the wrong place. People who learned to swim in concrete pools or oceans usually find the river swimming experience unpleasant because of these encounters, and it probably is.
Lobsters live in eelgrass, too, and I would sometimes come face to face with them when I played Jacques Cousteau in the river as a child, each of us surprised to see the other, and both retreating in opposite directions. I never caught a lobster, as that’s both illegal without a license and pretty tricky with bare hands, but it was always fun to see them.
Eelgrass is under threat in some areas of the world, which is astonishing to me as it is such a ubiquitous part of my seascape, lots of it in the water just steps from our house. I will gather it as long as I can.
My mother’s parents were married 100 years ago today. I know almost nothing about that event as my grandmother, Thelma, died so long ago in 1927, and my grandfather, Wilbur, later remarried and died the year after I was born. My mother says that her father rarely talked about her mother, so she doesn’t know where they met or what their short life together was like. There is no one left from that time, of course, so it is a mystery that will never be solved. All we have is their marriage certificate, and a photo taken after their wedding.
Some of my family’s history is so clear to me, even events that occurred long before I was born, because I heard the stories over and over. I can hear the sleigh bells as Wilbur and his brothers head up through the Foxley River woods to cross over the ice to Cascumpec and on to Alberton, where they sold firewood in the 1930s. I can smell the tar and oil and half rotten fish of the wharves where most of my mother’s uncles spent much of their lives. I can see my great-grandmother, Eva, who fell and broke her hip while feeding her hens on the Sandhills in the 1940s, being carried by her sons on an old door to a dory, then rowed to the mainland where a truck was waiting at Brooks Wharf to take her to the doctor. All the tales carefully polished, shining, sharp, and each story helping me to find my place in my family, starting first as just a listener, and now as a keeper and recorder of the lore.
But Thelma and Wilbur are always in soft focus in my mind, just as they are in their wedding photo, and I have had to make up my own version of their story over the years from the bits and pieces I have gathered. The story ends sadly, with Thelma dying from tuberculosis, leaving Wilbur and her two small children, but this photo from the beginning – Wilbur confident and casual, hand stuffed in his jacket pocket, and Thelma next to him, finally with someone to care for her after losing both her parents by the time she was seven – this photo reminds me that the story really didn’t end sadly, for my mother is still here, I am here, my cousins are here. We are here, we were there.
I took my mother to visit a friend of ours on an extremely windy day last week, and our journey allowed us a brief glimpse of the ocean surf pounding against the Sandhills, the barrier sand dunes the protect our coastline at this end of PEI. It was a dramatic sight, and my mother said, “That’s what they used to call a trap smasher.”
I didn’t remember hearing that phrase before, but it makes sense, as those kinds of roiling seas will tangle lobster gear and can certainly end up smashing lobster traps. T.K. Pratt’s Dictionary of Prince Edward Island English includes “trap smasher”, saying it’s a noun frequent in Egmont (the federal electoral riding where we live) and is:
In lobster fishing, a severe wind storm during the fishing season.
So, technically, trap smashers can only occur along our section of the north side of PEI between May 1 and June 30, the spring lobster fishing season here. We, of course, ignore and never discuss the weather the other 10 months of the year (lol!).
My father and I bringing in unsmashed lobster traps circa 1980.
A beautiful new video from L’neuy about plans to create a National Park Reserve on Pituamkek/Hog Island and the Sandhills that are just a couple of miles from my house. This initiative is important for the Miꞌkmaq and all Epekwitkewaq, because the Miꞌkmaq have lived and gathered food there for millennia and deserve the right to determine their future use. The Sandhills protect the shoreline and are important resting spots for migrating birds and nesting areas for the endangered piping plover.
Those sand dunes are the wildest place I’ve ever been on PEI, raw, stunningly gorgeous and powerful. I was lucky to visit with my parents many times as a child, and rarely would you see another person, miles and miles of beach and dunes and pounding surf. Such vivid memories of long summer days over there having picnics, playing in the cold water, beachcombing to find shells and starfish. I would always fall asleep on the boat ride home, through Cascumpec Bay and Foxley Bay, right up to the shore in front of our house, cradled on the waves, epekwitk.
My father and I in the water on the Sandhills, 1968
My father and I beachcombing on the Sandhills, 1968
Heading home with Toronto visitors after a long day on the Sandhills, 1970
I woke before sunrise this morning. As I write this, it is calm and cool as the sky begins to glow in the east. Sometimes on such a morning, when I step out on the back step to smell the fresh air, I can hear the roar of the ocean a couple of miles away, but today it was silent.
My mother, Vivian, told me yesterday that April 15 was the day her grandparents, Eva and Ernest Hardy, would move from their home in Freeland to their lobster cannery on the sand dunes that run along part of PEI’s north shore. My mother and her younger brother, Edgar, lived with their grandparents from 1927 until 1938, after their mother, Thelma, died of tuberculosis in March 1927. Their father, Wilbur, was unable to care for two small children and operate his farm and sawmill, so his parents took them in.
My mother’s description of the “moving to the Sandhills” day is like something out of a history book. It began with a horse and wagon drive a couple of miles out the Murray Road from their Freeland home, probably through lots of mud, down the Mickie Allen Shore Road to the water. They would row across the Conway Narrows in a dory, then walk down the beach of the Sandhills to the cannery, or perhaps take another horse and wagon that would already be over there.
You can walk across the Narrows at low tide at a couple of places, so the dairy cow would be walked and, where it was deeper and her legs couldn’t touch bottom, floated across. A pig would somehow be maneuvered into a dory, and Eva’s hens would be crated up and rowed over to spend the summer pecking at the sand. Their few articles of clothes would be in steamer trunks along with bedding, everything stinking of mothballs.
I’m thinking of my mother as a tiny four year old on that first cold April morning 93 years ago, waking up next to her 20-month-old baby brother. They would hear Eva making breakfast: oatmeal porridge, beans, bread and butter, tea. Hear their grandfather and uncles in other shanties or perhaps heading out in their boats to fish for bait that would be salted and used for fishing lobster over the following months.
Less than a month after her mother had disappeared slowly and painfully and she had to leave her father and home, my little mother was waking up on a straw-filled mattress basically right on the ocean, at sea in more ways than one.
Only one of two photos of my grandmother, Thelma Rose (Hutchinson) Hardy, taken on the Conway Sandhills, 1922.
