I don’t think you will like this column very much. That’s a funny way to start a piece. It is almost an apology for sharing with you what is really an “alternate view” to something that is part of our heritage here in Newfoundland. There is danger in that but if you just write the things that are popular and that people want to hear from you then I don’t think you are doing a very good job as a writer. If you just like telling happy stories you might be better off writing for a greeting card company or something nice and safe.
To put it simply, I don’t like the whole Atlantic Ocean story much and I never have. I have never bought into those modern romanticized views that have come into vogue since the closure of the cod fishery where we look back through a very dirty pane of glass at how wonderful everything was. I think it is a bogus memory rooted in chic bars and coffee houses more than in the brutal realities of life in Newfoundland over the centuries. To me there has always been to the Atlantic a sense of danger and foreboding and a terrible air of tragedy. You can write songs about sun on the water and boats gently at anchor until your ears bleed and they’ll love you on George St. but that is not the ocean I was raised up to understand. The Atlantic I know is grey, rough, cruel, and unforgiving. It has thus always been so. Since I was 12 years old, I have used the first notes from The Petty Harbour Bait Skiff to tune my guitar. It is the first “Newfoundland” song I knew, and it is a tale of the loss of young lives. Actually, if you look back at the music of Newfoundland that reflects our past you will perhaps be surprised to find that they are mostly songs of terrible hard work and loss. They are so because that is the way it was and that is the reality the music reflected. The Atlantic is not about tour boats or watching whales, puffins, or icebergs. It is certainly not about being ‘Screeched In’.
The people of Newfoundland understand that with loss of lives. I think really the older ones already understood the terrible truth. The Atlantic can turn mean and ugly in an instant and change families and communities forever. The Atlantic also forgives no mistakes. Brutally and deadly cold in winter it is but a few degrees warmer in July. When I was growing up, we spent summers in the community of Bay Bulls. We were a St. John’s family but had the opportunity to move out of town during July and August. Yes, I have been to “the traps” many times and I know about spreading fish on a flake and cutting out tongues and all of that but Bay Bulls to me is forever in my mind because a young boy on a warm summer day drowned off the main wharf. I don’t know his name, and I never did but his was a life taken so unfairly. To never grow up. To never have children. To never experience the larger world. To die 10 feet from the main wharf. That is the same Atlantic Ocean that took the Southern Cross, the Florizel, the Ocean Ranger and a thousand more. That is the Atlantic of the Titanic, the Pollux and the Truxton and the Atlantic of Cougar Helicopter flight 491.
One of the first news stories I remember was of a vessel overdue on the Atlantic. It was 1959 and I was 12 years old. I listened to the stories on the radio. It was February. The vessel was the Blue Wave, and she was never seen again. She was lost about a hundred miles off Grand Bank with all hands. The ceremony of remembrance from Grand Bank was carried live on radio. In our archives are television images of the service. Seven years later in an eerily familiar situation in that same month of February the Blue Mist suffered a similar fate. All of this part of the collective memory of the south coast of Newfoundland. If I write the phrase “lost with all hands” everyone in every outport and every town in Newfoundland will know what I’m talking about.
In hundreds of Newfoundland communities and perhaps in all of them, there are stories of smaller but nevertheless tragic losses. There are stories of trap skiffs that never made it back to port and stories of banking schooners that sailed but never returned. There are stories of small vessels cut down on the high seas by ocean going giants. That is the Atlantic that I will never forget. It is on some level the Atlantic we all know in our hearts.
Never far from the surface of the travelogues with whales breeching and puffins and gulls wheeling overhead is a mean and violent ocean. It is an ocean made saltier by a million tears. People of the sea will understand that. As a matter of fact, most Newfoundlanders in their souls understand it. They just bury deeply that thought. It is easier that way. We deal with it but remains part of who we are.
An oft cruel sea.
You can contact Jim Furlong at jfurlong@ntv.ca