Montana Prize in Nonfiction Runner Up, selected by Matthew Gavin Frank
NOTE: This essay is accompanied by video clips produced by the author, and we recommend viewing these clips as you read. Find them here: https://www.maryjanedoherty.com/fishing-widows
In the late fall of 2011, while wandering about a remote corner of Nova Scotia, I chanced upon a half dozen late-middle-aged women, hoisting beers, hollering sea shanties in a weathered, strictly-for-the-locals, log cabin bar. They were lobster and crab fishers, they told me, and all widows, and would I like to sing along? Gladly. I recognized one song and yelped along at the choruses for the others. While reveling, it occurred to me that the odds of once again meeting a group of singing fishing widows were slim to none. So before leaving, I grabbed their contact information, in case one day there was a film to be made. That day arrived five years later when, inexplicably, a sea shanty rollicked into my brain. "And when I'm far away on the briny ocean tossed..." I took it as a sign, scrounged up my list of phone numbers, carefully archived on a wadded up bar napkin, called Theresa, the second name on the list—an arbitrary but ultimately propitious choice as it turned out—then jumped in the car. Destination: Bay St Lawrence, Nova Scotia.
The province of Nova Scotia, shaped roughly like a three pea’d peapod, dangles out in the North Atlantic, barely attached to the Canadian eastern seaboard. Its northern lobe, Cape Breton Island, is roped off from the sea by a shore-hugging highway. (This means, if you miss your stop, just keep driving; you'll get a second chance a day or two later.) At one point though, at a village called Cape North, about twelve miles from the northern tip of the island, the highway cheats inland for a spell, sloughing off a good-sized wedge of province, free of tourists. This was my left turn. I moseyed down a gently winding two-lane road, passing first through dark forests strobing flashes of sea, then open pastures bordered by low, blue mountains. After about ten miles I screeched to a halt on a jetty, a couple feet short of the wide open ocean: I seemed to have misplaced the town.
Bay St Lawrence, I learned eventually, is not a Here, a pulsing hive of habitats and commerce; the town name refers instead to a thin dusting of modest homes strung along the last one-mile stretch of road before the sea begins. And Theresa's directions, "Oh you can't miss it," did not include an address, thus sending me up and down the road, dipping furtively into, then quickly out of, several incorrect driveways before finding her home, a one-story shiplap vinyl ranch. Bright annuals guarded the front door, the one you’re not supposed to use as I discovered when hailed from the side door.
Theresa MacLellan, mid-sixties, sturdily built, neatly capped with straight brown hair, led me in through her mudroom. "Hello, how are you, come on in." She was matter of fact, as if she routinely entertains strangers she's met in bars five years ago, but I was unnerved suddenly, felt my insides shift: I'm walking into the private, the intimate, space of someone I know not at all. I asked Theresa if this was a good time, or maybe I was interrupting her Sunday nap? "No, I have time. Come on in." We shuffled into her light-flooded kitchen—spacious and clean with a tiled floor, flowered wainscoting, French doors framing the meadows and mountains beyond. She continued, "Can’t sleep anyway ever since I lost my son." This, before I’d taken off my jacket. Then she said, "I lost my stepson, too. We didn’t know how to deal with the first one, but we learned. Even though you never really do. But never mind. So, what do you want to know?" We sat down at her kitchen table. I had no idea now, what I wanted to know. I had come here to find out about fishing widows, not fishing mothers. This is loss of another dimension. Theresa sensed my hesitation. "OK, you want to know all about how we fish, well I can tell you that."
Margaret Fraser, Theresa’s younger sister by a couple years, joined us at this point. She was warm, softly contoured: the quintessential grandmother, and a little shy. The three of us bantered for an hour or so and within short order I learned that they’re of the Buchanan, MacLellan and MacKinnon clans; they have thirteen siblings with Theresa and Margaret positioned, respectively, at numbers five and six, and they have some two hundred and fifty cousins (no one knows the exact number). They grew up impoverished but now operate multi-million dollar fishing businesses. Throughout our conversation Theresa and Margaret scribbled helpful charts of their family tree on pieces of scrap paper.
Theresa: "So. Peter MacKinnon, our grandfather you know, well his sister was my husband, Robert’s, great grandmother. Do you see?" I said, "No." Margaret continued, "And, Peter, who by the way, lived to be one hundred and one, had three daughters from his second marriage, one of them being our mother, Marcella. And each of those daughters had fifteen to eighteen children, which accounts for fifty-one grandchildren right there. Add those to Peter’s eleven children from his first marriage, and each of them had double-digit families, and that's how you arrive at two hundred and fifty or so grandchildren. Do you follow?" I said, "No." We moved on to the fishing industry. Theresa and Margaret carefully explained, again with doodles and figures, recent annual lobster and crab yields, net versus gross figures, quotas, license transactions. A hundred thousand here, a couple million there; the numbers swam together, not unlike the fine print of a mortgage application. I took photos of the doodles to study later. I felt the conversation waning so I stood up, gathered my stuff together.
Then Theresa said, "The other thing is that a lot of men around here seem to die." I sat back down. A quiet moment. I saw raging seas, icy gunnels, yellow-slickered men sliding into the deep, their upstretched hands swallowed by the blackness—and made a weak stab at commiseration, "Well I can only imagine, I mean the fishing business is one of the most dangerous jobs in the world...” Theresa looked up sharply, barked, "Nobody in our family has died from fishing, are you crazy? We don’t fish in storms, it’s way too fucking dangerous. The men here die of cancer mostly, or heart disease. They're not healthy here."
Clearly I had more to learn—about Bay St Lawrence’s disproportionate male mortality rate, about how the fisherwomen took over the fishing industry, about the dynamics of a town populated almost exclusively by hundreds of cousins—so I arranged for an extended visit and filming session during next summer's fishing season. Theresa asked me, as I was leaving, what I planned to do with the film. "Oh," I said, "Maybe make an exposé, uncover the salacious details of your hidden lives, that sort of thing." She said, with no shift in expression, "Good." I knew then that we'd get along.
I headed home, pondering much during the fourteen-hour drive. Given that I have no history, no experience with lobster fishing or remote Nova Scotian villages or multi-sibling families I wondered about my deep, almost visceral, feelings for the sisters and their world. There is a built-in tension here, familial sadness set against the beauty of the land, and tension implies movement: anything that moves or flows, as the 18th century physicist Bernoulli tells us, creates a vacuum, pulling us in. There is that. But I sensed something more, something to figure out during the filming process next year.
* * *
July, 2017. I propped my camera-mounted tripod and then myself at the tip of the jetty, ready for Theresa's return from lobstering. Twenty minutes passed but it felt like hours. I stared at the vast sea and the sky until their shared horizon slowly vaporized, bent down to tie my shoe, then looked up. A couple hundred yards away, Theresa’s boat silently churned through the waves at a steep angle, shooting spasms of white spray. How could I not have seen her coming? (My brain must have disconnected itself from my eyes. It happens.) The engine roar eventually caught up to the image; her boat, the Greyhound, charged through the narrow channel, spun one hundred and eighty degrees, throttled down, nestled up gently against the wharf, all in one fluid motion. Somebody here knows how to drive.
Theresa, her hair now several inches longer, a jaunty streak of red along the part, noticed me up on the wharf. "Hi, how’re you doing?" She was friendly but preoccupied with a bright red plastic container, the size of a steamer trunk, brimful of clicking olive green lobsters. She picked one giant lobster off the top of the pile. "We think this one’s about seven pounds." Theresa told me they’re averaging some two hundred more lobsters each day compared with last year, but that’s all she had to say, she had work to do. She briskly sorted lobsters into gray milk-crates pausing only once to invite me to a lobster dinner at Margaret’s that night. This was Theresa’s kind but efficient way to suggest I go away, let her get back to work.
Margaret's house, a tidy, two-story, beige ranch, anchors a sweep of eleven nearly treeless acres, mown bare, I later learned, to allow the snow to blow away in the winter. There are four other cottages dolloped about, three housing a Buchanan sibling while the fourth is reserved for visiting strangers like me. Margaret owns a peerless view of the inner harbor, Deadmans Pond, now—as I arrived for dinner—black, plate-glass smooth, mirroring lobster boats to the east, the evening sun wedged behind mountains to the west. I was late by a few minutes, but already the dining room table was covered with lobster carcasses as eight women, some of substantive girth, dispatched a sizeable portion of today’s catch. I handed Margaret an expensive Cabernet, she thanked me, somewhat perfunctorily, then shoved it into the back of her kitchen cabinet. That's when I noticed beverages of every variety on the table except for alcohol. The women deftly plowed through piles of beige and yellow-colored food: biscuits, strawberry shortcake, crab custard tarts, macaroni salad, tureens of lobsters, tubs of butter—all organized around a half dozen rolls of industrial strength paper towels. I picked away at a lobster, listened to the women’s animated chatter, their rapid, staccato, almost incomprehensible brogue—Scottish modified by decades of isolation in this cut-off section of Nova Scotia—during which time I was, for the most part, ignored. I felt right at home.
Margaret's dinner ended early, leaving me with plenty of light to wander. I scuffed up a sandy lane, through goldenrod meadows then tunnels of dark spruce and birch. Bavaria by the sea. At points the road bent sharply around sandstone cliffs, obscuring the view and thus heightening the drama of the seascape once revealed. Far out in the vast silvery sea a lone cherry-red lobster boat wobbled into a cone of light, shot through a heavy cloudbank—if I took a photograph I'd be accused of having photoshopped it. So I skipped it. On my way home I plotted out the next three weeks: chase after Theresa and Margaret fishing, meet the townsfolk, set up some interviews, do some research, maybe kick a pebble or two down the road...
Two-thirty a.m. Theresa, her son Cole, known as “Coley,“ myself and our crew, Phillip and Barret, bundled into the Greyhound and rumbled off to St Paul Island, Theresa’s treasured fishing grounds some twenty miles due east. Coley, our skipper, is thirty-five years old. With his clear green eyes and strong, lightly bearded jaw he is—in the menswear-ad sense—classically handsome. During our departure bustle he said as little as possible; other than one moment, when I caught a slight smile, it was hard to tell if he’d noticed a stranger onboard. Phillip and Barret stowed their gear, then threw themselves face down into the forward bunks. Coley stuck a smoke into his mouth, flipped the switch to auto pilot, turned on 103.5 AM Country, then rocked back in his high-tech captain’s chair.
I slid into the cabin's café booth, across from Theresa; she handed me sweatshirts and pillows to make my seat more comfortable. We shouted in conversation at first but the engine throb, the fuzzy AM babble, plus an unrelenting high whining sound together created a stupefying din. We sank into gazing mode. A full moon astern, Venus hovered directly ahead, a prick of light. Shimmering black three-foot waves heaved our bow up and to port, Venus swung out of view, but the Greyhound corrected itself and Venus slipped back to its proper place. The pattern was mesmerizing. The universe slowly disappeared leaving only this tiny, fastidious pendulum of light ahead. I fell sound asleep.
Four-thirty a.m. A harsh floodlight snapped on, lighting up a sheer wall of glistening, spray-washed rock no more than a broomstick away. The men yanked on pale, olive-green, rubber overalls—"Oilers,” as they’re known—and Theresa wiggled into her bright orange pair. I struggled to prep my camera, mount the microphone, unfold the tripod while the Greyhound rocked erratically due to the cliff-side backwash. I watched but filmed not a single frame. This was because for the first time in my life—and I’ve been on the water in some form or other since birth—I was seasick. (I must call back decades of scorn I’ve held for others similarly afflicted.) Instead I wedged myself deep into the café booth and studied the paint-chipped table.
One hour later, the sun now firmly established, I lifted my head to watch a trap line zinging through a winch, shedding a glorious backlit spray. I turned my camera on. The trap appeared, careening toward the boat like the Jaws shark, erupted from the surface, then dangled, dripping, from the pulley. Philip grabbed the bottom end of the trap by a rope handle and, with a spasmodic hoist and a grunt, dropped the trap onto the gunnel. (The trap, made of sodden wooden laths, a heavy stone strapped to its bottom, weighed close to one hundred pounds.) Philip, in his early thirties, is trim, red-blond, scruffily bearded; his expression perennially on the verge of a smile. I watched his fluid, economical moves, how his muscles knew what to do; they've been “learning” for years. Barret, a little younger than Philip—blond, on the pudgy side—slid the trap down the gunnel, then separated the lobsters, two or three usually, from the Undesirables: sculpins, sea urchins, starfish, seaweed and the “seeded” lobsters—females with roe clusters on their undersides. Each trap arrived with the enchantment of possibility; like waiting for your luggage at the airport but, of course, many times more interesting.
Theresa measured the lobsters of questionable size with calipers, then rubber-banded both claws and tossed the keepers into the holding chest. When not banding, she grabbed a handful of mackerels, gashed their sides once with a sharp knife, folded them double, stuffed them into yellow net bags. Barret re-baited the trap, shoved it overboard; the uncoiling line whipped off the deck, the crew blithely unaware, it seemed, of the line hissing lethally past. If you stepped into its path you’d be snagged, pitched into the drink. I asked Phillip how many times he had to trip on that line before learning how to avoid it. He smiled, said, "Oh, yes, several." Coley timed the Greyhound's acceleration just so—fast enough to rip the boat away from the rapidly sinking trap, but not too fast, thus allowing him to cut speed suddenly, twist in an abrupt curve and place the next buoy conveniently at the end of Phillip's gaff. I wondered how Coley kept track of individual buoys—those he’s pulled, those needing to be pulled—from among the flotilla of identical bright orange buoys. He tapped his brow. "It’s all in here. I know the pattern, I remember where each trap is. Sometimes I mess up and we pull one I just hauled minutes ago. But not often."
We zigzagged in and out of the coves along the windward side of St Paul Island for three straight hours, then worked our way through “The Tickle,” a watery slash through a tumble of jagged rocks at the northeastern tip of the island. There I saw a set of buoys painted an elegant glossy black. No, wait, those are seals. On the leeward side of the island—blessedly calm, the waves merely pet the cliffs—I used my long lens and filmed crayon-green gloves, cobalt-blue gauntlets, sparkling water rolling over the toes of their lustrous, thick-soled fishing boots. I filmed Coley’s quick hands, working his gears, his fingers hovering ever so delicately above the shifters before he rammed them home. I filmed the writhing mountain of dark-green lobsters, waving their claws, in what looked like slow motion, heavenward.
At eleven-thirty a.m. the crew abruptly peeled off their fishing togs, in Barret’s case, revealing his plaid cotton jammies. We headed home, having relieved the St Paul Island shoreline of some five hundred and sixty pounds of keepers. Back at the wharf we learned that this catch, combined with yesterday’s, put Theresa fifty thousand dollars ahead of where she was the same time last year.
* * *
Theresa and Margaret’s fishing licenses account for the bulk of their multi-million dollar businesses; their crab licenses alone are each worth eighty thousand dollars and Theresa owns sixteen. Fishing itself—halibut, lobster and snow crab combined—generates about four hundred and eighty thousand dollars a year. They could quit today, buy second homes in Florida and spend their winters staring at the back nine. They could. But they don’t. In fact, and in refutation of the idea that a deprived upbringing leads to poor fiscal management later, Margaret and Theresa have little interest in wealth for wealth’s sake. They are comfortable, satisfied with their lot. On the rare occasions they spend freely it is most likely to help out a cousin or two with extra traps or bait. They do take one major trip each year—having been, so far, to Cuba, Mexico, China, Italy, Scotland, Ireland, France—but their day-to-day activities cost almost nothing: quilting, berry-picking, hiking during the shoulder seasons, cross country skiing in the winters. In the evenings they play card games up at the community center, a different game for each night of the week, and periodically (fortunately for me) they’ll venture out of town, find a log cabin bar for feisty songfests.
Other than berry picking, there is little about their present-day lives the sisters could have foreseen when growing up. Back in the fifties and sixties, Theresa and Margaret’s family of seventeen had almost nothing: no electricity, no indoor plumbing, no toilet paper (just the Eaton's Catalogue). Theresa said, "Milk the cows in the morning, go to school, dig potatoes when we got home." The girls, often with a child or two on the hip, did most of the work, including the harvesting. Mother staggered meal times, with the boys going first. They ate mostly boiled food for dinner, since it was impossible to fry food in batches for a family that size. "We were poor all right," Margaret said, "We just didn’t know it." She told me, with mild irony, the one thing they truly longed for, and that never requited, was store-bought white bread.
The children attended a local school nestled deep within their valley, their isolation thus cultivating a nascent tribalism that persists, although sotto voce, even today. Dingwall, for example, a tiny town one flap of an eagle’s wing over the nearest mountain, might as well be in France in terms of ethos, according to various Bay St Lawrentians. "Next question," Theresa said, when I asked her about the Dingwallians. "Wait," she continued. "I will say this—the women there don’t fish. But that’s all I’m going to say." Margaret, a little more politic, said, "It’s what they think of us, we’re not perceived as good as them. But here in Bay St Lawrence we’re a lot friendlier, more welcoming."
In the early morning hours of June 4, 1966, Theresa, then fourteen, woke upon hearing one of her sisters yelping about a hot stair bannister. She saw smoke filling the floor below, the flames growing. Ten children were home at the time, Father was out at sea fishing, Mother was three hours away in Sydney, giving birth to her fifteenth child. Theresa roused Margaret who quickly jumped out the second story window. (Margaret said, "I’m not sure why I jumped, why I didn’t just hang first, but I wasn’t too hurt, a broken arm or a leg or two.") Theresa tossed her remaining siblings out the window, into Margaret’s waiting arms. All ten children then stood in the yard and watched their house burn to the ground. Eventually they traced the cause of the fire to a leaky valve on the kitchen oil stove, which their father had left on to provide a bit of extra warmth. The community gathered up enough funds for the family to build a new house in the same spot. And, for her bravery, Theresa received a medal plus an elaborately inscribed “Honorary Testimonial” from the Royal Canadian Humane Association, now featured prominently on the family photo wall.
Decades later, Theresa has emerged as the de facto boss of the family; some would say of Bay St Lawrence itself. It could be that her heroic efforts saving her siblings nudged her toward self-awareness, an inner confidence leading to her eventual role as family caretaker. Or not. It’s possible the question itself —of self-identity—might not even arise if you grow up amidst an endless conga line of siblings: are you a YOU or just the one following number four? Theresa told me she recognized her own strength when she turned fifty-eight, after her husband Robert died. It was the first time she placed personhood on the top rung of her identity ladder. "Now," she said, "I’m an individual. After that, I’m a mother, then a fisher, then a sister. But first, I am me."
* * *
One early morning, the dawn at this point a mere suggestion, I filmed opening day of crab season. Eighteen or so fishing boats charged through the channel in a single line throwing up steep, smashing, six-foot waves. A glorious seven minutes and then it was over. Filming material “on the fly,” as we say, is like watching baseball: nothing happens for long stretches of time, but when something does it is sudden and ferocious and generally you miss it. I broke down my rig in the prickly silence that followed the boat barrage, then walked home along the empty road, past stacks of crab and lobster traps, open grassy patches and several fishing boats propped up on stands. Your boat, most likely a “Cape Islander,” signals your status here, more so than your actual home. About four hundred people live in Bay St Lawrence but nobody knows for sure. There is no official number because the town is not recognized as a municipality. The locals here identify instead by their county, Victoria; their home dock, Deadmans Pond; and, above all, by their fishing zones, Nineteen and Twenty. These watery neighborhoods are, for Bay St Lawrentians, as rigorously bound as fenced-in pastureland. And beware the unbridled wrath of a Bay St Lawrentian should, say, a Dingwall lobster boat saunter one zone over. And vice versa. "A long time ago, our licenses used to let us fish in their zones," Theresa explained, "So we did have a few cases of Dingwall fishers cutting our trap lines." (During my visit a year ago, Theresa had pulled out her navigational charts to show me the precise location of her fishing zones. I said, "Oh good, I love maps." Theresa, with an extra edge to her voice said, "These are not maps, these are charts. Never call them maps." Apparently only some terms are sacred. Others—nautical language understood around the world—mattered not a whit to Bay St Lawrence fishers: here, it's okay to say “right and left” for starboard and port; or, “rope” for “line;” or “front and back” works just fine for “fore and aft.” A head-scratcher, this.)
I asked Coley for an interview during the second week of my visit. He demurred, he's not a “word-person” he said, and I didn’t push, the narrative documentarian’s cardinal rule being never to film a person against his or her will. I assured Coley he had far more to say than most blustery pedagogues. Our goal, I explained, and not as a way to convince him but to distinguish narrative documentaries from the educational sort, is to deliver fully realized human beings to our viewers. The people in our films are not there as “expert testifiers,” supporting some agenda we might have; they're there as themselves, their lovely messy gloriously complex, selves. So interviews, words—slippery things, dependent as they are on context—are only one element of a person’s essential being. Actions, on the other hand, lay bare irrefutable signifiers of oneness: you can't, for example, argue about how someone pours a cup of tea. What a person does matters as much as, if not more than, what a person says.
Coley listened patiently, then said, "Okay, sure"—in a way that suggested my lecture was probably unnecessary. We met up the next day on the Greyhound. Coley was there before I arrived, neat and trim: shorn of his lovely two-day beard he was almost cherubic. I yelled at him, "Coley, you’re messing with continuity here. How will people know you’re the same cowboy?" He apologized shyly, to which I then tripped over myself, trying to undo my pretend wrath.
Coley grew up in the early 1980s, in the shadows of his older brother and stepbrother (another stepbrother, fifteen years his senior, was not a presence in his life) with no aspirations other than to work “out back,” the term for “crew,” on his uncle’s boat. But the tiny local schools merged then, into one regional elementary school, thus introducing children to the world beyond their local pond—a good thing—but also to ever more ways to wreck themselves. Not a good thing. For Coley this meant pills, dope, and, eventually, weeklong visits to a clinic in Sydney for drug and alcohol addiction. Coley said, "We all did it, all my pals. We were thirteen, fourteen at the time. My parents tried their best, helped me get counseling. And they stuck by me, no matter what. My father was the nice one, the go-to person if you needed something."
I asked Coley what changed. He said, "One day you just grow up." That day arrived at some point in 1999 when, as he said, "Everything suddenly slowed down." He quit high school, became an apprentice fisherman, met his present day partner, Corrine, and had the first of his four children. He was all of seventeen years old. "Being a dad is a lot harder than fishing," Coley said. "Especially seeing them sick or angry or mad at you. The best is when they’re in a loving mood. The worst is when they’re not listening, when they’re saucy." Coley is pleased that, so far, his three sons want to fish. (His youngest child, Claire, is only nine months, old.) His eldest, Cameron, now seventeen himself, will soon join his father full-time once he finishes school; his second son, Carter, fourteen, already fishes with Coley but he plans a side gig as a mechanic. And Chace, age ten, shows fishing interest but, compared with his two older brothers, might have a more complicated future. "Chace is easy going," Coley explained, "but he can be bad and good; he can trick you. He’s the only one of my kids who’d just as soon be in school—the only one with common sense and school smarts."
Coley apprenticed for ten years for his uncles, before “taking the wheel” at age twenty-six. "I get nervous before the season opens, practically sick to my stomach. Happens every year," Coley said. "I want to do good. On off days I go nuts, in fact after a lot of sleep I feel even more tired. But I love it." Besides skippering, Coley has taken the prudent step of acquiring two back-up licenses—one for one-hundred-ton fishing vessels and one for heavy equipment operation. Theresa told me later, "Coley had to man up, pay attention. He knows he’s got to take care of a multi-million dollar business some day."
* * *
By the 1970s, most of the Buchanan siblings had dispersed broadly throughout eastern Canada due to poor fishing conditions in their home territory. But curiously, within the single year of 1979—and whether by coincidence or plan nobody could tell me—each one returned. Theresa left her well-paying factory job in Hamilton, Ontario, returning to Bay St Lawrence with her new partner Robert, a steel worker, when she was nineteen. She applied for one restaurant job, was rejected, so she said, "I got in a boat and never looked back." She and Robert had three children soon thereafter, to add to Robert’s two from his first marriage.
Children yes, fishing yes, but marriage? Not on the to-do list. But in 2003, their children by then grown and fledged, Theresa and Robert finally did marry, as a way, according to Theresa, to placate Robert after their son Robbie had died. No wedding dress, no dancing, no guests beyond immediate family. I asked her if she wore her fishing boots. She said, "Pretty well." (This means “yes” and it's one of my favorites of her expressions.) In the course of my visit I met several other long-term unmarried couples from the Buchanan, MacLellan clans. Coley and Corrine, in fact, are just now considering marriage, this after four children and eighteen years together. I asked Corrine, "Why not get married?" She said, "The better question is 'Why?’”
Margaret, having spent much of her childhood jumping out the window, both literally and figuratively, bucked the trend. One night, age sixteen, she slipped out, met a boy named Percy, married him shortly thereafter: by age twenty-two, she was the mother of three. I asked her if she was the bad girl in the family. "Oh yes," she said, with a small amount of pride. Margaret is today the sort of grandmother you'd go “over the river and through the woods” to see—which makes the idea of her rebel past all the more delicious.
There were zero women fishing professionally during Margaret’s window-jumping days. "Women were not supposed to be on a boat back in 1979," she said. "But I had to work, someone had to help Percy and it might as well be me." And fish she did, the first woman in Bay St Lawrence to do so. But, unlike the men, Margaret could not draw seasonal unemployment checks since women fishers did not, as a profession, exist. Back then only a couple of crab boats bobbed about in the bay: there were no quotas; crabs sold for ten cents a pound. Some days they fished for mackerel, five thousand pounds, all day and all by hand.
Eventually, in the 80s, Theresa too started fishing. She and Robert trawled for halibut and cod, she doing mostly the shore work, baiting upwards of seven hundred hooks, then sorting and freezing the haul. She fished early in the morning, made it back home by eight a.m., readied the kids for school, then headed back out to sea. Theresa said, "We used to jig for cod by hand. Without gloves. I wouldn’t be able to open my hands the next day. But me and my husband had just returned from Ontario, we hadn’t fished for years. We just didn’t know how to do it."
During the mid-90s, Bay St Lawrence attracted an increasing number of fishers, prompting the government to issue licenses by lottery. This arrangement infuriated the locals: they protested, blockaded the harbor, eventually forcing the government to redistribute licenses, three per family. In Theresa’s case she had to push Robert to buy the four thousand-dollar licenses—a tremendous investment in those days and especially vexing for Robert since he simply did not love to fish. At the same time, startling information came from “up the way” in Yarmouth, Nova Scotia's southernmost town. (The locals flip the cardinal points here: “up the way” means “south” and “away down” means “north”: these locutions kept me up at night until I learned they originated from the relative ease of sailing downwind with the north-flowing prevailing winds.) The lobster yields from the waters around Yarmouth, supplied by the same Gulf Stream current lapping Bay St Lawrence, far surpassed the latter. The Yarmouth fishers, it turns out, had increased the minimum lobster carapace length defining a “legal keeper” by eight or so millimeters, thus allowing the lobsters more years to grow and multiply. Today, this seems like an obvious strategy but the old guard, Theresa’s parent’s generation, were fearful of plummeting yields, with no guaranteed recovery timeline—they levied stiff resistance, called the Yarmouth fishers “crazies.”
But Theresa and Margaret, the “new generation” of fishers, had by then taken over the fishing business; they organized companies, formulated business plans and hired scientists to conduct fish surveys and larvae tests. For the first time in more than a century, the fishers gazed at the far horizon for more than just to gauge the weather. And it paid off. For the next ten years, an eternity in the fishing world, yields were crushingly low, averaging between four and six thousand pounds a year per fisher. But change finally came, and when it did it was exponential. 2004 marked the first slight uptick, in 2005 the yield doubled; by 2017 Theresa and Coley were bringing in eighteen thousand lobsters. "That’s never been heard of before in Bay St Lawrence," Margaret said. The most recent increase in carapace length defining a keeper—one millimeter, the width of an eyelash or two—last year put several hundred thousand more dollars into each fisher's pocket. And the surge continues to this day but, by this point, probably due less to carapace measurements and more to the steadily warming seas.
* * *
One evening, after a day filming a snow crab haul, I was pleased to discover SIA’s Food Shack was open. SIA’s, run by a pretty, dark-haired woman named Willa, is a tollbooth-sized hut, painted rich turquoise. Along with the wharf and the community center, SIA’s is a town gathering spot, especially for the younger set. It sits catty-cornered across the road from my cottage and directly across from The Hollow, a sandy lane swallowed up by dense scrub entangling beat-up trailer homes, old cars and three-wheelers. Willa slid her window open, "Same thing as yesterday Dear?" "Yes, Ma’am. Burger, rare, two pickles, coleslaw." "I saw you running the other day Dear,” she said. (It's difficult moving around unnoticed in a town with only one road and that bordered by mostly wide-open spaces. I did not want anyone to see me stumbling along. But Willa didn't judge, just served me up.) With my order placed I had a few minutes to sit on her deck, swing my legs, watch the townsfolk come and go. First, the youngsters Edwin and Carlos, charming freckle-faced MacKinnons, emerged from The Hollow. Then three faded, hubcap-less, low slung Toyota Corollas pulled up followed by a Ford pickup and a couple of muffler-less scooters. A lithe teenager with wet, black hair stepped out of the pickup; she wore plastic slide-ons and a hot-pink trench coat, so short it barely covered her black shorts: a Gaelic Lolita, I decided. Her name was Ting and, "Yes," she told me, "I’ve been swimming, but the river was cold, even colder than the ocean." Ting soon attracted an audience of teenagers for her stories about this fucking thing and that fucking thing—the kids were rapt and so was I even though I could not quite understand her thick and sandy brogue.
The following night, while contemplating another SIA's burger, I heard a soft tapping on my cottage door. I found a man standing on my deck holding forth a majestic three-pound cooked lobster, so big it looked like a prop for a medieval play. Byrdman (birth-named Hugh), Theresa and Margaret’s brother, is in his fifties—gaunt, bandanaed, with a heavy beard and scraggly long gray hair. He said, "I thought you might need some dinner in case your food supply runs low." I thanked him, we chatted. I asked him where he fell in the Buchanan line-up. He had to think for a second, then recite the names out loud in order to establish that he is number thirteen. Margaret later told me that Byrdman routinely delivers lobsters to many of the locals, including to the Small Options Home up the way, a place for mentally challenged people. He was Margaret's special charge growing up. Early on he ran into severe difficulties with drug and alcohol addiction, but he's been clean for the last twenty years. Of late, having organized a decent archive of black and white photos, he's become the town and family historian. Byrdman is a “giver,” Margaret told me, and she would know.
If SIA’s is closed, or Byrdman otherwise occupied, the last food option within walking distance is The Hut, run by a cheery middle-aged woman named Mary Jane. Mary Jane’s first husband, she told me the first time we met, fell off the wharf on Derby Day eighteen years ago and drowned. Her introduction, in keeping with almost all the people I’ve met in Bay St Lawrence, followed a pattern: first, they identify their clan; then their fishing boat; and, finally, which male members of their family have died and how.
On a Friday night in July, 2004, Margaret returned from bingo, found her husband Percy sitting in his regular chair, pipe in hand, blue as a berry. She called the ambulance even though she knew he was gone. A massive heart attack killed him, she explained, but cancer created the conditions for the heart attack in the first place. Percy was fifty-seven and his death came as no surprise given his family’s miserable track record with illness: his mother had died of cancer at age fifty; his brother also of cancer, age thirty four; and his sister was crippled for life with polio. After Percy died Margaret's children returned to stay with her for three months until she finally told them to go home. "I miss him now," she said. "It’s the loneliness. But you pull yourself up by your bootstraps." Margaret and Percy enjoyed the better part of thirty four years together, making her window-leap into his arms at age sixteen seem, in retrospect, like a wise idea.
* * *
From my early encounters with Bay St Lawrentians, I remember wondering if any man could survive the institution of marriage in these parts. It is true, men do die here at a disproportionate rate, but the numbers are not quite as dire as I had first surmised, yet neither are they dismissible. There was talk awhile back of a “cancer cluster” but the population is sparse—there is no “cluster” here period, healthy or otherwise. "New York and Boston smokestacks. They’re the problem,” Theresa said flatly. "Everyone is dying here and they’re dying young." Theresa is correct in one sense: the cancer mortality rate increases steadily as you march eastward, province by province, across Canada. Nova Scotia’s cancer mortality rate is, accordingly, only slightly lower than that of its two more eastern neighbors, Labrador and Newfoundland. Given that the trade winds also travel predictably west to east, Nova Scotia might indeed prove to be the dumping ground for airborne industrial waste.
But the source of health-related problems in Victoria County is multifarious, bound up with long term poverty cycles, social and cultural isolation, and genetics. You could argue the real problems began once wealth, and that unevenly dispersed, started to accrue and when the Internet arrived: Theresa, in particular, frets about computers, as obviating both the skills and the need for true socialization. On the one hand, the dividing line between the haves and the have-nots today is stark, the trap of disenfranchisement especially insidious if social media routinely reminds you of your under-status. On the other hand, domestic abuse, child neglect, alcoholism—these travails were just as prevalent, if not more so, several generations ago, yet they had few tools then, or social structures, or even the language to bring these problems to the foreground so corrective measures could begin.
Theresa and her husband, Robert’s, ancestors intersect five generations ago, at the tail end of the Scottish immigration wave. Scots first arrived in significant numbers in the 1820s, in response to the controversial “clearances,” when tenant farmers of the Scottish Highlands were shoved off their home farms. The wave continued, though to lesser degree, throughout the rest of the nineteenth century, driven by the prospect of land ownership, religious freedom and the growth of Nova Scotia's mining and fishing industries. The Scots chose Cape Breton Island because, according to historical consensus, it was the first piece of land they slammed into after weeks of a harrowing Atlantic crossing; they said, in effect, “Close enough.” From the start, the Gaelic speaking Highland Scots—Theresa and Margaret's forebearers—were marginalized by the more Anglocentric Lowlanders, having developed, according to Professor Glenn Graham of St Francis Xavier University, a reputation for “laziness and alcoholism.” Recently though, Cape Breton Island, has achieved a certain cachet as the home of the sole remaining Gaelic community in North America, thus attracting increasing numbers of tourists, particularly folk musicians and cultural anthropologists, willing to dump a few critical dollars into the island's thirsty economy. A case of poetic justice perhaps.
Early to mid-twentieth century families of Scottish heritage produced oodles of children, including untold numbers of double cousins—children from multiple marriages between the same two families. (There were also double second cousins, but you have to be wired in a special way, a way that I am not, to untangle that definition.) Margaret said, "My mother never wanted all those kids but men were the boss. If he wants sex, you have sex. No birth control of course. You didn’t have much say in it." Theresa broke in here, "Trust me, I’d have found a way." Massive families in isolated, impoverished rural areas—this is not a new story. More unusual and, frankly, unnerving, is the story of Margaret and Theresa’s grandmother, Flora Wilkie; she never married, but nevertheless bore thirteen children, from twelve different fathers. One of those children was Margaret and Theresa’s father, named William.
Flora died of suspected drug overdose or suicide (the cause of her death has never been conclusively determined) when William was five. In those days there was no formal adoption pathway, orphans were simply salted out among the relatives—what’s one more child along with the seventeen or so you already had? The bigger, the more wrenching issue, was the family into which William happened to land, that of his uncle, Archie Mackinnon. Theresa and Margaret discovered that he abused William; they now believe their father’s subsequent alcoholism traces directly back to his dreadful upbringing. The male members of their family in general, Margaret explained, suffer to this day from addictive tendencies. "And now our children show the signs. Coley, the way he smokes, scares me. You see, the men don’t take care of themselves. We Buchanan women,” she went on, "we’re in good shape. None of us drink, we just work."
Theresa and Margaret, each having had only three children, belong to the first generation to put the kibosh on procreation. Only a few decades earlier one person—such as their grandfather Peter—could count his or her grandchildren by the hundreds, yet all fifteen Buchanan siblings combined have managed to eke out only thirty-four. Small families should, in theory, ease child rearing pressures, but the chronic problems besetting Victoria County trump even that advantage: an aging and diminishing population; a child poverty rate at thirty 3% (one of Canada’s highest;) a 27% unemployment rate; rampant substance abuse—the list forms a self-reinforcing cycle of woe. "Bay St Lawrence had a bad reputation for awhile," Margaret said. "The kids were stealing, the family feuds, the derelicts living even now in The Hollow, most everyone on welfare. The kids were sniffing gasoline. One day up on the mining road they found Joe Mackinnon, fourteen years old, next to his four-wheeler, with his face in a can of gas. He was my nephew, and he was an only son."
In Theresa and Margaret's case, any time gained from parenting so few children was swept up by their growing fishing businesses. "We couldn’t enjoy our children then, the same way we enjoy our grandchildren now," Margaret said. Their own children, the sisters agreed, grew up entitled. "If you’re trawl fishing for halibut you can’t sleep for two days," Theresa said. "You have to put your heart and soul into it. But the kids won’t do that now." Margaret added, "We gave them everything. They’re not unwilling, just not used to hard labor." Even to this day Margaret contends with her middle child, Billy, a scaffolder now out west in Edmonton, Alberta. Several years ago she summarily refused to pass her lucrative fishing licenses on to him, unconvinced as she was of his fishing and business acumen. "My son never took up with fishing, and now he wants me to simply hand over the business that took me decades to build? I can’t and won’t do this." Their impasse has caused a painful rift in Margaret’s family, perhaps the only dark spot in her otherwise well-ordered life.
* * *
Derby Day, the annual Bay St Lawrence fishing contest and crab festival, coincided with the last Sunday of my visit. By eight in the morning the Deadmans Pond dock was abustle. Most of Theresa's family were there—her daughter Teke and Teke’s husband, Daniel; also Coley, Corrine and three of their four children, including nine-month-old Claire. They were out for fun. And to win. They set about prepping the Greyhound with the sort of relaxed confidence only seasoned victors can affect—the Yankees of the Bay St Lawrence fishing scene essentially, and equally as intimidating.
We chug-chugged out into the bay for forty-five minutes or so. White cotton gloves on, handlines flipped over the side. Theresa revved up what Coley called The Terminator, and what looked to me like a giant tooth flosser, a pair of stainless steel poles ruthlessly stripping mackerels off a hook-studded handline. The boys fished mainly for sculpin, a hoary reptilian fish with dragon-like protrusions—exciting to stare at, useless as a comestible.
The hustle-bustle made for a cinematic feast: blood-soaked gloves, ogling sculpin eyes, a line rippling through a curled gloved hand, but my camera locked on to Chace, Coley's youngest son, and I'm not sure why. (I can film or I can think; I cannot do both at once.) All morning long dense cumulous clouds passed by, but intermittently, thus posing a classic filming dilemma: the light when we were under the clouds produced gentle shadow gradients—like a Vermeer—but the light from the unfiltered sun produced harsh, knife-edged shadows—like a Hockney. It will be tricky, if not impossible, to weave such disparate material into a single flowing scene. While thus preoccupied I heard a shriek from aft and saw Teke and Daniel leaping about as a four foot long, pancake-flat fish flapped spasmodically on deck. All hands mobilized: what to do with this monster fish? Could this halibut, a commercial fish, count for the Derby since it was caught using recreational means—a handline? Corrine pounced on her cell to find out. No such luck. On our way home Chace declaimed their “two hundred and fifty pound halibut” as one for the ages. The fish was, in fact, about forty pounds, but the sentiment rang true. Coley later said, and he not one for hyperbole, "Never in my lifetime have I seen a fish that size caught by a handline."
Theresa and Coley are considered by most in town—I did indeed ask pretty much everyone—two of the top fishers in Bay St Lawrence: they know how to play the long game. Theresa smiled quietly when I told her what she already knew. "You have to invest," she said. "You have to use high quality gear, take care of it." Coley told me, "It’s about your crew. They have to want to work for you and they will if you pay them well." Theresa does just this, sending her crew home with 30% of the day’s gross, which translates to around thirty thousand dollars for each crewmember for eight weeks of work. Ultimately, according to both Theresa and Coley, the best fishers know how to find the lobsters in the first place and then—the hard part —move their traps in pursuit. Coley and Theresa have forged a remarkable working relationship. "She knows what she’s doing." Coley says. "She can be better than half the guys." For his part, Coley handles the Greyhound with an uncanny skill, on a level that can’t be taught. Most crucially, he shares the same work ethic as Theresa.
For a couple weeks every July, the crabbing and lobstering seasons overlap and Theresa must work twenty-one hour shifts over three straight days. Once, during one of those marathons, she somehow found time to rustle up a dinner for me—this was her idea—sending me home with a plate of fresh lobster, the claws conveniently cracked. "Return my plate," she growled. I asked Margaret later if Theresa is unusual in terms of her work ethic. Margaret said, "Yes, she is unusual. In fact I’m worried about her, she can’t stop working ever since her son died."
* * *
To date, Theresa has lost both parents, her husband, two brothers, her step son and her eldest biological son, but it is this last death, Robbie’s, that haunts her: when and if she ever relaxes, Robbie is there. As I set up my camera for her interview she said, "I don’t want to talk about my son Robbie." I said, of course. I straightened the camera frame, adjusted Theresa’s lapel mic, asked her for a “sound check”—could she recite a prayer or the alphabet or a poem?—whereupon she launched into “The Wreck of the Hesperus,” her deep voice marching out the iambs with rhythmic precision. "Memorized that in second grade," she said proudly. I was enchanted, and temporarily forgot my interview questions. To tease her, I asked her for average daily lobster yields from three years ago. She’s told me this umpteen times already but it won’t stick, so I keep asking, to nourish our running joke. She laughed, we carried on with questions about her family history when, suddenly, she took a right turn: "You know, after Robbie died I lost thirty pounds." Caught a little off guard, I mumbled something condolatory. She said, "But I don’t want to talk about it." I said, okay. Back to fishing arcana, more business strategies and we were done. I flipped the viewfinder closed, started disassembling the tripod. Then Theresa said, "Robbie was the one fellow I never really worried about. He and his girlfriend had just broken up." I stretched the tripod legs out again, flipped the viewfinder open and turned my camera back on. She continued, "One night in August, this was fifteen years ago, he was dancing and drinking at the club in Ingonish (a town about a forty minute drive away). Robert and I had come home late, we’d already been in bed for an hour. We get a phone call, Robbie wants us to come pick him up. For years and years, Robert and I had been driving all over the county, picking up our kids whenever they were in trouble. But that night, for some reason just that one night, I said, 'No. It’s your fucking turn. You drive yourself back this time.'" That night, August 25, 2002, just north of Ingonish, Robbie crashed head-on into a bridge abutment. He was twenty-six-years old. "It took me five years," Theresa said, "before I learned to be happy again. But I can never be happy. How can I be happy if my son is gone?" She continued, in tears, "My husband, Robert, pretty well stopped living."
Robert got counseling but it was of little use; he died eight years later within four months of his lung, then brain cancer, diagnosis. "I think my Dad went into shock," Coley said. "He was either in his room or at the graveyard. He gave up. During the season he’d fish, then lie in bed, not eating, just smoking. My mom was a little stronger, except for those first years she was a little hysterical." Coley added, quietly, "I never want to go through that again." Margaret said, "It was the guilt. We didn’t think she’d survive. Oh my gosh, for two years we couldn’t help her. Robbie was a part of her, that was the difference."
* * *
My films are generally about people who are good at what they do: the Bay St Lawrence fishers satisfy this simple, but to me, endlessly beguiling criterion. But Theresa and Margaret and Coley tug on me for more than just their skills. They have endured much, and from their world travels they're well aware of the alternatives—they can afford to opt out. But they choose to live in Bay St Lawrence, to build a community, a carefully nurtured sense of family among the villagers, based less on the nuclear family structure and more on their common heritage. They have the wherewithal to step back, see their own world and then love it. This precious sensibility—intangible perhaps, more felt than seen—forms the bedrock of my film portrait of the family. Time to head north once again, give the family a look.
It's 2019, a couple years since my summer of fishing and filming. I crunch up Theresa's gravel drive, take a moment to relish the frisson of familiarity and, at same time, register a certain regret that I will never again perceive this place afresh. On my first trip, eight years ago, I had seen a gentle valley, soaring bluffs and fishing boats, reflected in a black pond. But each trip since has brought the subtle demarcations of place into stronger relief: the Buchanans, out on their windswept acres, next door to The Hollow, the dark gouge of shrubs filled with packs of freckle-faced youngsters. I know the wharf hierarchies, the prize dock moorings; I can read the subtle signifiers of status. Even the ocean, before an undifferentiated smear of gray, has formed distinct “neighborhoods” by now.
But something is different this time. Dirt bikes, many dirt bikes. Back and forth they go, one mile each way—wharf to St Mary's Church and back again. I struggle to appreciate the entertainment value of this repetitive game. But I see no alternatives. Other than a forlorn playground with a rusty swing-set outside the community center there are no playing fields, no courts, no skateboards, no bikes—that is, of the kind you peddle—no convenience stores even, in front of which to loiter. The unrelenting Dopplering roar of the bikes should, but strangely doesn't, wreck the singular beauty of this land. I know these kids: familiarity breeds more than tolerance but also a kind of proprietary joy. This is what the kids here do, period. Their goal, according to Coley's son Cameron, is to pop the longest wheelie. Another goal, and the most important, is to make a lot of sound.
My second night back, we screen the film in Theresa's living room, scrounging up enough chairs for about a dozen family members, leaving me wedged into a baby-sized rocker, so tight it will surely come along with me when I stand. I'm a wreck. But the family is relaxed, only a little more animated than if they were about to watch mid-season baseball. As the film plays though, they laugh and murmur at all the right places. I am seated up front, and so can only hear, sense really, their generally pleased reactions. Afterward Coley says, "Everyone sounds good except for me." Theresa is a little worried—but I also think secretly pleased—about her spicy language. Baby Claire, now almost three, says, "Now there are two Claires and two Nanas!"—an astute comment that, in my mind, points to the veracity of the footage. I'll take a three-year-old's unabashed critique over a didactic film theorist's any day.
I grab a private moment with Theresa while she preps our celebratory dinner. "It's okay, yes?" Her eyes twinkle, "Yes, it's fine." With this thundering approbation I can now relax enough to eat our meal, a classic Jig’s Dinner of boiled potatoes, cabbage and corn beef, supplemented with water. Apparently you can drink alcohol or you can eat; you just can't do both at the same time. We eat at the preposterously early time of five-thirty, leaving plenty of time and low-angled golden light for me to wander about one more time.
Mary-Jane Doherty is a filmmaker and Boston University Associate Professor Emerita, currently in the process of shifting to prose, focusing on her solo film journeys around the world.