Stuck in the ice
I have found a new way to exercise my imagination. I have been listening to a series of old documentaries going back to my childhood about the days when people fished for a living. In particular on the Labrador coast. Not a place that people around here paid much attention to because it was too far away but over the years you get a sense of what was going on. A small ship with a crew of maybe two dozen people they would go for the whole season in the hopes of finding enough fish to fill their holds. And they had it rough. Today, hours with people who are stuck in the ice. Not because they wanted to be there but because that was the only way to get close enough to the shore to actually get into the fishing grounds. I do not have an accurate date for the documentary but I can tell from the radio equipment and the mentions of aircraft that this had to be sometime in the early 60s. A time when there were still fish in the waters. The documentaries also give a foundation for later hard time. When the fish came no more. That is something that is well within the lifetime and memory of the older people. Even me. For an area that was known worldwide for its fish stocks to suddenly find that there were no fish in the water must have come as a true revelation. After all if all you know is fish and there are no fish what do you do. No chance of going home and transitioning into a life on the land. I have been up there and they have a lot of rock. I’m going to use what I’m learning from listening to these documentaries to embellish my vacation time. I will be looking for more than signs that a road went this way. If we go down to a harbor I will try to analyze what still remains of an industry that was all important at that time. Like anyone who goes fishing it’s an act of faith. You cannot see below the surface and you can only guess based on past experience where the fish might be. Blind faith. For those of us who grew up on fish once a week we now realize that we too were part of the solution and part of the problem. Fish were cheap to catch and yet there was money to be made in the sales. We pushed the stocks to the brink. And as for going out in the ice? Again something that you had to be both brave and foolish to do. In one shot, they showed someone’s anchor that had been chewed up by an ice pan. Something that had required two or three people to move was now nothing more than scrap at the end of a rope.
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