My first parish as an Anglican minister was in the small outport of Trinity East on the north shore of Trinity Bay, in Newfoundland and Labrador.
My wife, Karen, and I had just moved from Toronto, and I soon realized that we could fit all the residents of Trinity East into one Toronto subway car.
I lived there in the early nineties, a time when the folks in Ottawa were making decisions about the future of the fishery. I would sit at kitchen tables in the homes of my parishioners and listen to them talk about their future. I knew that in order to do this job well I had to learn about the fishery. And what better way to find out about the fishery, and those who make their living by dory, than to get out on the ocean and see for myself?
It was cold at dawn on the morning I went out. I stepped into the boat and waited for the three cups of coffee to take effect. One of my parishioners, Ray, started his Mercury outboard and off we went.
I felt excited about this adventure. We rode for an hour in the boat, and I wondered where we were going. Ray knew. He was looking for the seagulls, which, he said, always knew where the squid were swimming.
Ray soon stopped the motor. He looked up at the gulls circling above.
“Put down the jigs,” he said.
There were four large spools on gunwales, rolled with hundreds of metres of heavy fishing line. Every thirty centimetres or so there was a small hook, a jig, which would grab onto any part of the squid’s body. It was crude but effective. I let down the line until I was told to stop.
My captain told me to rock the spools back and forth, back and forth, until I felt the weight of the squid on the end of the line.
“Haul her up!” Ray shouted.
I could not have been prepared for what I was about to see and hear. Squid, all about the size of my hand, came flying off the jigs into the bottom of the boat, their gills gasping for water.
There were more squid than I’d ever seen in my life.
I could tell by the look on Ray’s face that this was a good catch. Ray looked happy. I was proud and honoured to be part of this day.
“Now what?” I asked.
“Well, my son,” he said, “now you got to separate the males from the females.”
“How do we do that?” I asked him.
“Well,” he told me, “if you pick them up and look closely through their tentacles, just below their eyes, you can see the difference.”
It sounded reasonable to me. I’d taken enough marine biology as an undergrad to know that, yes, it was possible to tell the difference between a male and a female squid. As a minister, I knew that God had created them so.
What I’d forgotten, however, was the sophisticated defence mechanism that squid and other cephalopods had developed over millions of years of evolution. It was sophisticated, though not very precise.
But when you’re a squid swimming through the cold waters of Trinity Bay, when you’re a squid trapped in the bottom of a dory, gasping for air, when you’re a squid being picked up by an Anglican minister who until very recently lived at Broadview and Gerrard in downtown Toronto—you don’t have to be very precise. I picked up a squid and tried to determine its gender.
“You might have to hold it closer,” Ray told me.
That was the last thing I remember hearing.
The ejection, if not precise, was certainly thorough.
It was thick, cold, and too salty to describe. It splashed over my face, covered my eyes, went further up my nose than I care to remember. It tasted like nothing I’d ever tasted before. The fact that it got into my ears surprised me.
With my ears clogged I could hear only one sound rising above the squishing sound of the squid on the bottom of the boat. It was my captain, my very much amused captain, laughing harder than he had for a long time. My initiation into the community had begun.
Brighton, Ontario