We arrived in Seal Cove on Grand Manan at sunset—was that yesterday?—with the sky awash with streaks of rose and lavender. What a paradise!
I think Uncle Dock knows people everywhere. On our way into Seal Cove, Dock called shore by radio, and the person on shore called a friend of Dock’s—Frank is his name—and when we arrived outside the harbor, Frank was there waiting to help guide us in. The harbor is inside a huge breakwall, like a fortress, and The Wanderer was the only sailboat scuttling into the harbor where fishing boats were crammed—triple and quadruple parked—as if it were a big city parking lot. Frank packed us all in his van and took us to his house a few blocks away, and we met his family and swayed around like dizzy clowns on our wobbly sea legs.
I’m really getting into fish and fishing here. You can’t help it; everyone who lives here has something to do with fish. They’re fishing for lobsters or pollock or herring, or they’re working in the factories that can sardines and herring. Fish, fish, everywhere!
Today we all went lobstering with Frank on his fishing boat, Frank’s Fort. He’d bought the shell of the boat and built everything else himself. I love it when people do things like that—take something decrepit and create something grand out of it!
Brian doesn’t like this sort of thing. He said, “Sophie, you don’t have to go overboard. It’s just a boat.”
Just a boat! You could spend months poking around these boats. You’d see buckets of bait, containers full of lobsters, lobster bands to put around the lobsters’ claws, hoses, nets, and other stuff that gets covered in fish slime and seaweed. Maybe someday I’ll be a lobster fisherman; who knows?
Cody said, “How come you like all this stuff, Sophie?”
“Well, don’t you?” I said. “Don’t you like imagining what your life would be like if you were, say, a fisherman? You could smell the sea all day—”
“And smell the fish,” he said. “You might get sick of fish smell.”
“Or you might think it’s the best smell you ever smelled. You might love feeling the air all day and handling the fish and—”
“It’s okay, Sophie,” he said. “You can like this stuff if you want.”
Some of the pots we pulled up were empty, and all that remained of the bait was a perfectly intact snow-white herring skeleton.
“Where’d it go?” I asked.
“Sea fleas,” Frank said. “They’re everywhere, very wee, practically invisible. They love our bait. If you fell overboard and weren’t picked up until the next day, those sea fleas would eat you right up, and your skeleton would sink to the bottom!”
Cody lifted me up and hung me over the side. “Want to try it?” he said.
“Not funny, Cody,” I said. I didn’t much like the idea of sea fleas nibbling me down to my bones.
One female lobster was carrying eggs—millions of orange grains (roe, Frank called them) clustered all over the underside of her tail, right up to the head.
“That sweetheart goes back,” Frank said, tossing her overboard. “To continue the cycle.”
And I had this strange feeling, thinking about how a lobster is saved by being tossed in the ocean, but if I were tossed in the ocean that would be the end of me.
Last night I called home. My mother asked me about two million questions: “How do you feel? Have you been seasick? Are you warm? Are you safe? Are you scared? Are you lonely?” Finally, my dad took the phone and said, “What an adventure! What an incredible adventure!”
I’d been feeling fine until I talked with them. My mother made me uneasy, as if she were expecting something awful to go wrong. I kept telling her everything was fine and she shouldn’t worry, but when it came time to say good-bye, I could hardly say it. It seemed too final. So I had to say, “Good-bye for now,” and I kept saying “for now,” until she repeated it, and then I felt better.
My mother also said she’d called Bompie to tell him we were coming, and “he sounded all fuzzed up.”
“How do you mean?” I asked.
“He didn’t seem to know who I was at first, and he kept calling me Margaret.”
“Margaret? Who is that?”
“Grandma. My mother. His wife. He had me very worried, but then he snapped out of it and he said he was fine, he was just kidding, and he was very excited about your visit.”
“Well, then,” I said. “That’s good, right?”
“That’s good,” she agreed.