The price some pay for our feed of lobster
The other day, because I had no choice, I was up before the sun, walking down a country road that offered a view out to sea. There were lights on the horizon, fishing boats chugging east now that the South Shore lobster season was open.
The lights blinking in the darkness looked downright festive to a man inside a parka, whose feet were firmly planted on dry land, a couple of hundred yards from a wood fire, and a hot cup of coffee.
It would be easy, in such circumstances, to take pleasure in the Christmas card quality of the scene, to luxuriate in the certainty that a helluva scoff of lobster will be possible in the days ahead. Not this year, though. The terrible events on the Bay of Fundy remind us all of the ephemeral quality of life and the arbitrary nature of death.
For those who are mere bystanders in the tragedy, whose lives were not directly entwined with those of the six crew of the Chief William Saulis, they also underscore something it can be easy to forget: that for each plated lobster, each bowl of scallopladen chowder, someone had to get out of bed and board a boat.
Then, as you and I lay there at home, they had to head out, in the dark, and freezing air, into the North Atlantic where they dropped their traps and nets into water cold enough, within minutes, to kill a human being.
If it all works out, if all of the hardship pays off, they will get a decent price for their fish.
They will, God willing, earn a living good enough to make us city folks spit out our candy cane-flavoured lattes at the perceived unfairness of someone who wears Dickies overalls to the office making serious do-rae-me.
The sailor’s memorials around this province show what happens when something goes awry out there.
Waves can overwhelm a boat, as was thought to be the case with the 56-tonne Chief William Saulis as it headed home to Digby last week — and as almost surely happened in 2013 when the Miss Ally, while fishing for halibut, capsized, leaving the bodies of five young southwestern Nova Scotia fishermen never to be recovered.
Sometimes what happens on the sea is just a mystery and all that is known is that a boat left port and never returned, as happened in 2010 when the 13-metre scallop dragger RLJ headed out into the Bay of Fundy, and disappeared with all four of its crew aboard.
They are all worth thinking about as we dig into our lobster mac and cheese and our Coquilles St. Jacques. They are worth remembering, over the Christmas break, when we stew perhaps over that sideways promotion at the office, or the wage package that hasn’t kept up with inflation.
We can agree, can we not, that any line of employment is less stressful than working in an industry, which, by general consensus, is the most dangerous line of work in the land?
Yet this detachment, or perhaps indifference, from the things that make our lives so comfortable is the way it mostly is in our 21st century world.
Granted we have had other things on our minds lately.
Yet even before the woes of 2020 befell this province, I seldom looked up from my daily preoccupations — how did the Raptors do? When will the next episodes of Peaky Blinders drop? — to wonder where the things I used and consumed came from, thanks to whose labour, and at what cost.
I will try to do better in the year ahead, when I will do my best to remember to give thanks to the Brazilian coffee farmers, the grape growers of California, and the woodlot owners of Sweden for all they do for me.
It is always, of course, good to start small and close to home with such grand promises. I vow, then, to be appreciative when I wheel my cart up to the fish counter at the grocery store.
I hope my gratitude swells even more when I pull up to the door of a fisher willing to bypass the middleman.
At that moment, forking over my money with hands soft from a life of typing, I hope that I recall the one time I went far out into the North Atlantic on a vessel many times larger than a lobster boat, and perhaps remember how I spend the next 36 hours unable to leave my bunk because of the seasickness.