The Chronicle Herald (Provincial)
Demont: The agony of waiting
What must the waiting be like?
Is it possible from a distance to feel the agony of knowing that somewhere in the unforgiving waters off of Nova Scotia, a fishing boat, crewed by people you care deeply about, is lost?
Can we in our faraway cities, suburbs and towns understand the deep ache of everyone, family, friends and neighbours, whose lives are intertwined with the six crew members of the Chief William Saulis, based in Yarmouth but since Monday missing on the Bay of Fundy?
I would say no, not a chance in the world, and yet, on some level, this waiting, this agony, this ache, is the birthright of everyone in this province.
In the fishing communities where death at sea is enough of a fact of life that a defining architectural feature of local homes is a widow’s walk from which mariner’s spouses would look, often vainly, out to sea awaiting their husband’s return.
But also, for those who live in urban, inland places to whom the notion of climbing out of a warm bed into a fishing boat and then steaming out to sea in the darkness of morning would be as alien as donning combat gear and going off to battle.
There seems to be no end to the woe of a year that began with a global pandemic, followed by the horror of Portapique, as well as tragic deaths in the air and sea that ends with a missing scallop boat and its crew.
Yet, the truth is that even in the year 2020, life remains closer to the elements for many in Atlantic Canada than it does in other places.
Here, as they have for hundreds of years, men and women still make their daily bread in the woods, and on the ocean. The price for these elemental lives has always been immense.
The database of the Maritime Museum of the Atlantic has not been updated since 1999. Even then it lists almost 5,000 ships — from the Delight in 1583 to the Merrimac in 1999 — that have gone down in the waters off Nova Scotia.
Unofficial estimates actually run many times higher, which means tens of thousands of mariners aboard schooners, square-riggers, passenger and cargo steamships and warships went to their graves out there.
So many of them crewed fishing vessels, which, according to the museum website, were often “small and overloaded” ships that were wrecked in storms — four Lunenburg schooners with 80 crew members were lost in the terrible August gales of 1927 — or “by fire and engine trouble.”
Improved boats and safety equipment reduced the death toll, but Monster, the job search website, still says fishing and trapping is the most dangerous work in the country.
We need no reminders of this. Seven years ago, the crew of the Miss Ally ran into trouble during a storm while fishing for halibut.
The boat capsized, and the bodies of five young South Shore Nova Scotia fishermen were never recovered.
No wonder the monuments to those lost at sea can be found in marine towns all along the Atlantic seaboard.
In Yarmouth, where a monument for the more than 2,400 people from Yarmouth County who have perished out on the ocean, stands on Water Street, but also in
Lunenburg, where eight, three-sided columns are filled with the names of the dead.
In Peggys Cove, where William E. degarthe has carved 32 fishermen and their families into a rock face, and even in Gloucester, Mass., where plaques to the 5,000 men who lost their lives sailing out of the New England fishing port, 1,200 of whom came from Nova Scotia, are found.
To my knowledge, I have no direct connection to the names on those stone monuments. Yet, I feel, as we all must, for Yarmouth’s Ezra Church II, Jacob Flint and Rufus Utley, who went to sea when that port was one of the most important marine centres in the world and never returned.
I will say that it is equally
hard to look at the names etched on the Shelburne monument, and know that James F. Demings and William H. Demings, did not live pleasantly into old age, but died at sea on Jan. 5, 1856.
On Tuesday, though the name of the person whose body had been recovered remained unknown, the identities of Chief William Saulis’ other crew began to emerge: the ship’s captain, a young man with high-functioning autism, along with a father of two, were still missing.
With each passing hour, logic would indicate that their chances grew slimmer. Logic, though, has nothing to do with moments like this. Their families still waited and hoped. So did I, so did everyone of us.