My summer project
Sandford, Nova Scotia is a fishing village a few miles north of Yarmouth, the port from which the Prince of Fundy ferries travellers to and from Maine. A horizontal row of cottages as neat and uniform as baby teeth sit up high on the horizon, broken in each of two places by a clean white steeple; this is the backdrop for a cluster of red fishing shacks nestled by the shore. Tourist literature boasts that Sandford is home to the world’s smallest drawbridge, a red wooden structure that straddles the mouth of an inlet where the boats are docked. It is odd to read that one of the main reasons that people like to visit here is to see what is noted to be the smallest drawbridge…from here you can stand in the evening and watch as the sun sets beyond the Bay of Fundy. It is strange also to think of Sandford’s shanties as a tourist destination and of its fisherman as a tourist attraction. To me it was the village in which my father grew up and the place that told me—even as a child—what he could not say himself. In my mind, Sandford was my father: simple, traditional, and pastoral, qualities that enabled me to connect with and love the man who came home each night now spent and uncommunicative. Somehow he must carry inside him the memory of this place, a landscape almost painfully magnificent in its stark and elemental beauty.
Today you can get to Yarmouth by boat, but when I was a child, you could also travel from Maine to Yarmouth by either ferry or by airplane, and I experienced both. One year I crossed the Gulf of Maine accompanied by an aunt and uncle on the Bluenose; I wore a Nova Scotia tartan kilt fastened with a big brass pin and a wool beret bought by my grandmother. The Bluenose crossed at night and I stood on the moonlit deck, watching dolphins jump and dive in the white froth of the ferry’s wake. Another year—the year my father’s sister married—we flew to Yarmouth Airport on an aircraft no larger than an oversized bus. The trip was marked by turbulence that bounced us like a child’s rubber ball and by the welcome announcement made in unfamiliar, seductive French shortly before we landed: “Mesdames and Messieurs: Bienvenue a Nova Scotia.”
After the crossing came the drive out of Yarmouth over Rural Route 1 up through Hebron and Chegoggin, through gently rolling hills dotted with weathered cottages and herds of cows, onto the ramrod straight portion of the road that ran through Sandford. Nanny’s house always seemed fantastically tiny when we finally arrived, a button-sized green-blue cottage overlooking a mile-wide expanse of brambly, rutted fields that sloped between it and the sea. The first owner dug a crude cellar and over it erected three rooms, and after that my father’s father added on. As a result the house had a cobbled-together feel, older parts preserved within newer parts, like the space where an ironing board had once folded up into the wall now a shelf sprinkled with porcelain knick-knacks, or a shaving mirror and medicine cabinet intact on a kitchen wall. A door in the dining room opened to a narrow staircase that led to three perennially chilly bedrooms, heated only by open floor-grates that let up the warm air from the floor below. In the basement my grandmother kept an old-fashioned agitator that she still used to do laundry, her red, rough hands feeding wet clothes through the wringers and then toting a heavy basketful outside to the line. Down behind the house was the outhouse stacked with pages from old catalogs and a fenced-in frog pond where my father had raised chickens and ducks as a boy.
There were some features of the house—the way of life—that seemed quaint relics of a bygone era. The cool, dank basement—a dirt-floor cave scattered with tools and fishing gear—was a refrigerator of sorts: in a low-ceilinged room off to the side, a long shelf was laden with mincemeat pies, coffee cans of boiled puddings, loaves of brown-bread, and tins of gingersnaps, peanut butter and chocolate chip cookies. A clothesline strung across the other side of the basement bore not laundry but salt-cured pollock hung by the tail with clothespins. Grampy Vic would tromp down the rickety steps and peel off a chunk of flesh for a chew, or bring up two or three fish for dinner. These were boiled and served with potatoes and beet greens. With a long-tined fork he would flatten his food into a uniformly patterned disk of white, green and gray which he then doused with butter and hot cream from a pitcher. Grampy Vic was a huge hulking lobsterman with a bulbous nose and red face, enormous hands, and a maw of a mouth. He shoveled the cream-drenched fish in great mouthfuls and washed it down with tea. I sat miserably looking at my own eye-level plate teaming with fish, potatoes and greens, the overpowering fish smell making me want to cry. “You can’t get up ‘til you clean your plate,” he announced and I would sit long after his plate had been cleared. But I don’t remember one instance in which I actually cleaned my own.
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The other fixture in my father’s boyhood home was Nan Goodwin, my great-grandmother Annabelle Frost Goodwin, whom we called Big Nanny. Big Nanny passed the better part of each day nested like a massive hen in her crushed-velvet recliner in a well-lit corner of the living room where she pieced fabric squares for assembly into quilt tops. I remember her hands and her eyes: gnarled, arthritic fingers that deftly pushed a needle in and out of swatches of calico while she squinted half-blindly through spectacles that sat low on her nose. Piecing fabric is all she ever did, speaking rarely and then only to allow that “children should be seen and not heard.” The silence in the living room was punctuated by two sounds: the tick-tock of a little cuckoo clock and Big Nanny’s occasional inward sigh. “Yuh-yuh-yuh-yuh-yuh-yuh-yuh,” she would say as she drew breath in, speaking to no one in particular and in response to nothing said. Big Nan scared me. Her physiognomy, her hands, her hair and eyes, bespoke a constitution as enduring as steel wool: she was conservative, utilitarian, plain, and sharp-spoken. Once a day I observed her great waddling gait as she made her way, sighing and clucking, to her chair where once plopped down she remained for the duration.
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Nova Scotia has a maritime climate; its summer days are hot and humid but nights are cool enough to sleep under quilts. Nan’s backyard was blindingly bright with white sheets snapping on the line against a sunlit line of ocean that melted into the sky. Nan would hang the laundry and go to town, leaving me in the care of Clara Landers, a girl two years older who lived next door. Clara seemed always to be laughing at me as if I were the most unusual creature she had ever met, a pudgy girl from the States who was afraid of bees and brambles. She would lead me through the pasture to the frog pond, giggling as I winced and recoiled at thorns, insects, and mud. How she managed to lure me, one summer, to strip to my underwear and wade in the pond to catch tadpoles is a trick I cannot remember. What I do recall is sitting half-naked and crying, covered from top to toe in sludge, on my grandmother’s stoop until she returned from town while Clara snickered nearby. “Land sakes,” Nanny exclaimed when she finally pulled in. In Sandford, the ever-present shush of wind and waves fuzzed the edges of words and carried off portions of sentences. Nanny adapted by speaking at the same volume inside the house as she did in the backyard. “Nanny don’t know why a big girl would make such a fuss over a little mud,” she said as she roughly washed off the mud. She always referred to herself in the third person, and this I think is why I was unable to feel close to her: she never seemed owner of the thoughts or feelings she expressed. Inside the house was cool and dim, and smelling of soap and brown bread, and I swallowed my shame with the buttered toast and cookies that she offered.
Some days we went berry picking so Nanny could make jam. The fields were hot and dry and the bushes prickly. Nanny could pick for hours. On other days when I was left in Clara’s care, she and I and her sisters Emma and Ida, and other stray village children would walk a mile down the road “to the Island Pond,” to a secluded spot between two cottages where you could swim. We had to wade out through the shallow part, the bottom of which was slimy with rotting leaves. The other children splashed and swam while I sat on the rocks and watched, self-conscious of my plump pale legs. The return walk back was hot and dusty; sunlight glittered on the road and the village of Sandford was a watery mirage in the distance. On the way back we passed two churches: the Reformed Baptist church on one side of the road where the Landers went, and the Baptist church on the other side that Nanny attended. Ours was a simple, white-washed structure with a steeple visible from the shore that was said to have been built with timbers that washed ashore. “I was glad when they said let us come to the House of the Lord,” the parishioners intoned. I was glad when it was time for the children to leave the service for Sunday school in the basement, where I colored pictures of Jesus and shepherds with broken crayons from a biscuit tin.
On occasion Grampy Vic took us out on the fishing boat to pull in the lobster traps. We drove down the Shore Road to the fishing shanties in his pickup truck then walked out to the pier where he anchored the boat. Getting onto the boat was the stuff of nightmares for a suburban school child. You reached the boat by climbing down a ladder, then jumping over three feet of dank, gray-green brine to the safety of the boat’s deck. In low tide the boat would bob and sway while the seawater clunked and lapped at the pier’s pilings. Grampy would descend first, then stand with open arms shouting for me to “climb down and jump!” while I stood frozen in terror. At last I was scooped under his arm and carried down like a rag doll, certain that when he leaped over that dark water we would drop into its cold depths and drown. Nothing of the kind happened. The boat soon chugged out past the point where the land was visible and we were afloat in an endless expanse of inky gray, no obvious reference points beyond an occasional red and white buoy, and the sun. “How will we find our way back?” I asked him anxiously, and he only laughed and spun the wheel. I clung to side as the vessel churned and coughed to hone in on the trap markers, terrified we would capsize and be swallowed up. On one occasion we entered a pod of right whales, sleek, stone-colored mounds that bobbed to the surface and sprayed. So far out did Grampy go that Nanny kept, on a sill in the kitchen, a pair of worn-out binoculars to scan for the fishing boat at day’s end. “There’s Grampy, coming in now,” she would say, and know how long until dinner.
Summers in Sandford are now snapshots relegated to memory. The older relatives have died and the most of the young ones have moved away. After her death in 2004, Nannie’s cottage was sold. Within weeks it had burned to the ground, the product of a cell-phone charger and antiquated wiring. Hers was not a house built for the millennium. Years later, as a mother, I would tell my young son about the slow summer weeks I spent in Sandford, berry-picking in hot dry fields, sleeping in an unheated room, using the outdoor privy, and watching Grampy Vic haul his lobster traps. They are the kind of memories I wanted but did not hear from my own father until childhood was long gone and I was old enough to understand how much of a true story is never told. Many years would pass before I thought to ask him why he left Sandford in the first place, why he hadn’t become a fisherman like Grampy, and why he rarely spoke of it. It did not occur to me that my father carried the invisible wounds of irrevocable loss.
Beata Infantia 