Even though I always seemed to miss school when it closed for the summer, I could never wait for the end of the school year. Summer was a favourite time of the year and there were so many things to do. We had no time to get bored and even on rainy days, we would not be caught inside the house. We always had ways of keeping ourselves busy, contented, and happy.
For the longest time we all had the smell of June capelin on our hands and capelin spawn on our clothes. Our rubber boots were never dry. We would be up at the break of dawn with father seining capelin. Some were for bait. Some were sold to the local bait depot, and some were salted to be later dried on grandfather’s stage head. We spent many hours turning capelin over to dry, trying desperately to keep away the fish flies.
Once the capelin had spawned and left the beaches, we often took our old bamboo poles and headed for Partridge harbour. We left early in the morning. Many times it was foggy, but we always had one person who seemed to know the way. It was a fairly long walk from Hermitage to Partridge harbour. I remember getting my bamboo and my single hook and bobber snarled in the boughs many times along the way. It sometimes caused me to curse, but it was all worth it when we got to the fishing hole. Sometimes the fishing was good, other times someone else had beaten us to it. But we always made the best of a bad situation. If the fish were gone, we all jumped into the fishing hole for a swim and after, lay on the beach to wait for our clothes to dry. Lunch was often a can of sausages or beans and a bottle of tang or kool aid that we mixed up. I remember one day someone had cigarettes and home brew, but that is another story that mother didn’t know about.
There were summer days when we often put on a good can of snails to boil over an open fire in the land wash. We picked the largest snails that we could get from the shores of the stage head and threw them into a large can to boil. They were a delicacy that we hooked out of the shell with bobby pins. No, “snail, snail, come out of your shell.” did not work.
On fine days, we often got lend of grandfather’s punt or father’s dory and went for a row to western cove or little Fox Island. We had two sets of paddles and a couple of scoops and a jigger. On those days we would jig for cod and use the liver to bait our glay to try and catch a saddle back gull. The gulls were smart, but the temptation of a chunk of liver floating on the water was too much. For most of the day, we carried our pet gull around in the bottom of our dory until we released him with a full belly of tomcods and fish liver that we had fed him.
Catching eels was a great summer sport as well. There were many summer days that we spent underneath the wharf catching eels that fed on fish offal. We tied three fishhooks together to make a jigger and attached it to a long line. Eels were large and plentiful and as they swam just beneath the surface of the water, we would jig them. There were times when we had a dozen of eels aboard of our dory. They stayed very much alive in our leaky dory that we hauled back and forth underneath the wharf on a rising tide.
On some days, especially on Sunday afternoons, we often took a stroll out the road to have a game of soccer, a game of stretch, a game of jack knife or simply to make whistle pipes from green alders. Not everyone could make a whistle pipe. It took a bit a work. First it was the task of finding a smooth alder and trimming it up. Then it was the tricky part of cutting the alder around and sticking it into your mouth to make it wet enough so that the outside layer of bark would slip off. It did not always work the first time and it had to be coaxed with a little tap. Finally it was making the notch in the stick and slipping the bark back onto the stick without breaking it. By the end of day, the sound of home made whistle pipes broke the silence of a Sunday afternoon.
Among the things that we did, I cannot forget our days of swimming. There were days that we swam in the barasway from the wharf and stage heads, then it was up to the pond with cake of soap and one of mother’s old towels. I remember going up back into the woods behind the pond to change into a pair of swimming trunks from Sears. It had to be quick because everyone seemed to use the same change area. It took us some time to get into what felt like very cold water, but before long we were all swimming out over “the cliff” as we used to call it, and unto a home made raft. Sometimes we would get a block of ice from Garland’s old icehouse and after we had washed off the sawdust, we would suck on slivers of ice that we beat off with a rock. Then at the end of the day, we all gathered around an open fire to dry off. We often swam on foggy days, so a hot fire from blasty boughs was welcomed. Our feet were black from standing into the ashes and we tried to keep ourselves warm by wrapping a small wet towel around our shoulders. Hot flankers burned holes into our clothes and left red spots onto our flesh when someone stirred the fire. Smoke brought tears to our eyes and we had to turn back on to the fire while the cloud of smoke consumed us.
Ah yes, summer days seemed longer then, and to tell all that we did would seem to take forever. There are more stories to tell about catching connors, working on the coal boat, playing the games of bar off, 123 red light and hoist the green sails, playing hop scotch with the girls and playing cowboys and Indians, and berry picking. Then there are stories of rainy days when we would do nothing except to relax and fall asleep on a pile fishing seines in the loft of my grandfather’s store, while fire crackled in a warm morning stove.
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