And there goes my family…
It has become a tradition for Tri-County Vanguard lead editor Tina Comeau to share personal reflections on the start of the lobster season. Here’s a story she wrote on dumping day morning – not long after the boats had left their wharfs, including her family’s boat with her husband and two sons on board. She knows her thoughts and feelings are ones that hundreds of other households and families can relate to.
Fishing is hard work. It is noble work. It is gruelling work. It is needed work. It is physically demanding work.
Over the winter a day at the “office” is in bitter cold temperature with windy conditions – and as a bonus you can throw rain and snow into the mix. There’s no real schedule fishermen can rely on. Their lives and livelihoods are governed by the weather throughout the sixmonth season that will end on May 31. And by default, the lives of their families are governed by the weather too.
WATCHING THEM LEAVE
At the Pinkney’s Point wharf there’s always that one boat every dumping day that scares those of us on shore as leans to one side while steaming out of harbour. It almost makes me feel physically ill. I have to look away.
And then our family’s boat, Jacob’s Journey, pulls away from the wharf. I know what thoughts are going through my mind. I wonder what Emmy is thinking of at this moment too. I see tears in her eyes. Jacob is waving goodbye. I see Justin in the wheelhouse and yell out my lifejacket reminder, just in case he missed it the other 135 times, according to his calculations.
As boat after boat steams away – forming a what looks like a lighted city on the water’s horizon – there’s a bit of comic relief on the wharf as one boat is throwing out a lot of smoke from its exhaust. “I finally got a boat named after me,” laughs a woman. “And look at me, I’m smokin’ hot!”
The last boat leaves. The harbour is quiet and empty. It’s a far cry from an hour ago when it was bustling with activity. Now it’s just peaceful – that peace I was longing for an hour ago although really the worrying has only just begun.
Emmy and I walk back to my car and I pick out another song for drive home. It’s the song ‘From Now On,’ from the movie The Greatest Showman.
I like when the song kicks up into a specific set of lyrics that repeat themselves again and again:
“And we will come back home. And we will come back home. Home, again!”
I think about my family that just sailed away.
On this morning, those are exactly the words I want (and need) to hear.