I'm renting a place in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, and a very tall, solid man in sweats and white socks and gray shirt opens the door. His name is George, and his eyes are incredibly kind. He shows me a picture of his boat - beautiful, pristine, white. The Caroline J.
“My wife's from here. Caroline. Five years ago this April 23rd I lost her. She was everything.
"I loved traveling with her. Up in the barn one day making lobster traps I saw a bit of newspaper on the ground, talking about Spain. I walk down to the house, say “Let’s go to Spain!” Next thing I know we’re on our way. At the the airport I think to myself, “What are you doing!” But I'm so glad we went. So glad.
“She had such a way with people. Such a way. She knew how, you see, from having the store and post office for so long. I just got to stand back. We went through Spain, and Portugal, and Morocco, and had a wonderful time.
"We’d get into fights -- ah, what fights! I’d get into the car and head down to Neil’s Harbor, and halfway there I’d shake my head and think -- what were we fighting about? What was it?" He laughs. "I couldn’t stay mad at that woman."
"I held her hand as she died. I'm still getting over it. Can’t stay here this winter -- last winter, it was only me and my son Dean up here, everyone else left. Can’t tell you how glad I was when it hit spring and I could get back on the boat! I don’t know what to do. I don’t know where to go, or what comes next. Human beings have something inside them, that lets them survive, and I hope I’ve got it in me, too.
"See, the way my life has been, I haven’t interacted with a bunch of people. I go out and fish -- that’s me on my own. And I come back and I hit the door, and it's “Caroline!” The first thing. And if she wasn’t there, I had to find her.
"I was younger when I met her. Working one night in the barn and my uncle comes in, says ‘I’m going to a dance. Why don’t you come for a little dance and get away from this fishing stuff for a while?' And so I do. I walk in the door to the dance, and across the room there’s a woman with the best pair of legs you’ve ever seen." He smiles. "I’d had a few to drink. I couldn’t have done it otherwise, but I walk over and ask her to dance. And she said yes, and we went out and then got married. 41 years. After we married, I never touched the stuff again. Neither did she. But drinkin' did get me a wife!
"I have two such different sons. Dan got on the boat and didn’t have to be told what to do -- he just knew. Never been on a boat with anyone like Dan. I loved it. Dean, I had to hassle a bit but he’s very good now, can go out for anything. Dean's very different. There's no one like him, he's incredibly kind. When his mother was sick, Dean went to Halifax to take a class in dialysis so he could do it for her up here, and she wouldn’t have to leave. It’d be a sin to hurt Dean."
I ask if his family were fishermen. "Well no, not so much. Only my grandfather and father, and he hated it." He gives a big wonderful smile. "I love it. Grandfather was a rum-runner in Newfoundland. I lived with him and grandmother until I was 14, then came down to fish with my father. And then the night I quit school I came out to the mountains overlooking the water to stay the night, and the schooner Joan Garland came ashore. Oh, she was creakin' and moanin'! I decided then to go, went down and came up the long gangplank, only thing I had was a case of margereen!
"When I was young, I had no fear. I'd leave at seven at night to set snares and head down the mountain. Go out for two days to pick cranberries, pack up and set out and stay overnight, fill my sack in between. I'd go out in the boat, set lobster traps, stop at the rocks over the water on my way from the bank and just sit when I had a lot on my mind."
I tell him about my own life changing so much, so quickly. "You and I," he says, "we’re on the same boat." Sort of, I say. We’re on different boats, but we’re close enough to wave. He laughs and looks at me out of the corner of his eye. "You got it, girlie. You’ve got it exactly."
I get to talk with his son Dean, too -- he takes me to his favorite chowder house twenty miles away, and then gives me a tour of the Caroline J. He's another giant of a man, incredibly gentle like his dad. In his late 30s, I think. Very shy, for years only used to being alone on his boat. I love it though -- he does open up a little, and turns out he has a wicked sense of humor.
"In high school I got a math award, one of the top five kids in Canada. Just followed the instructions, and got 'em all right. Other kids from the towns and cities were angry, saying, 'He doesn't deserve it, I need it for a scholarship because I want to go to school and he just wants to go fishing!' They always looked down on us up here, thought we were stupid. French girls are nicer. In high school, I'd go to Cheticamp because the girls were nice. Never really went to anyplace else, except to beat people up.
"Have you seen Braveheart? The bad guy? We're related to him. It's hard to watch it with friends, they're all Scots. But," he grins, "I told 'em we were all related, because when my ancestor beat theirs he had sex with all their relatives. Got whacked up a bit for that.
"It was a big deal, Mom and Dad getting together. She was Catholic, he's Protestant, it just wasn't done. I grew up Catholic. I was an altar boy and everything. When I was 14, they let me choose to go or not, and I quit.
"I just looked at my little league photo -- I’m the only one who’s not gone. The only one still here. Used to be, that school down the road had a hundred kids. Then the next one, 100 kids. The next, 100. Now, it’s just the one school and it’s 100 total. It's hard to raise a family here, there's nothing for ‘em. Just crap jobs for the women, unless you’re a nurse or school teacher." I ask if he'd raise kids here. "I dunno. It’d depend. I’d like to."
After the tour of the Caroline J, we stand and look out at the Cape. He sighs. "My brother Dan and me were supposed to fish together all our lives. He was the one supposed to take this over." He shakes his head. "But I like it. It has benefits. Weed -- nothing like going out on the boat with a bit of weed first thing in the morning."