Gaspe Peninsula, Quebec, Canada, and Southwest Harbor, Maine, USA, November 2002

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Seavey and I went to Seawall the other day, sat in the truck and talked it over. We hadn’t had a good chat in a while. Since the last time we had talked he’d gotten a divorce, a new girlfriend, a new routine of picking up his daughter on certain days of the week and giving her to his ex-wife on others. He also had a new truck. Black and shiny, the truck reflected the rocks, the surf, and the seabirds that flew just offshore.

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“I’ve never seen them in this close to shore, let alone in November,” he said.

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It’s been a weird year.

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Gannets, there must have been a hundred of them, circled wide and dove into the water. It was incredible, the way they dove, in three or four rows they came down like a wave, one after the other, wings folding back at the last minute and then explosions of water until the whole flock was floating. They regrouped, swallowed whatever fish, I’d guess herring, that they’d captured in their insane thrashing under the ocean, and then as of one mind they began to take flight again, circling immediately. The one with the most moxie would then hit the water first, and then they came on again, all of them, three or four hitting every second until the whole hundred disappeared into a sea made silver by the late afternoon sun.

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*

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I fished with Seavey the previous November into part of December, before I went to Spain and Italy. I especially remember lobstering one frigid, nasty day a couple of miles off Duck Island. The sea rolled in on slow waves, each deep trough frizzing with tiny bubbles. There is a color in those troughs like a cross between ginger ale, lime and slate, with a darkness underneath that seems as old as forever. Two gannets flew overhead. They look like seagulls from afar, but with longer necks and black tipped wings. Seagulls come close to being graceful in flight but gannets fly like they’ve lost something important and can’t find it. They’re here and then there in their athletic search, bobbing and turning. The two I remember seeing didn’t dive, but instead flew over a big scallop boat we saw further offshore.

 

Seavey took a handful of rocks, beach pebbles, and held them up with his left hand while he steered the boat with his right, drawing attention to them and then set them on the counter next to the instrument panel, under the bottom machine and the radar so I could have a look at them.

“My daughter gave those to me when we went for a walk on the beach,” he told me, gesturing toward them.

 

“You can be goddamned sure that if I ever go overboard, I’ll be reaching for them and I’ll have them in my hand if I drown, I’ll tell you that much.”

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He picked one up and squeezed it, tossing it back on the counter, next to an old paper coffee cup and a rusty can opener that had bait slime on it.

I had my own lucky item. I didn’t tell him though, and I don’t know why. Maybe I was freezing my ass off and didn’t want to haul it out, but most likely because Seavey would have given me a good ration of shit. It was an old bait-bag string that I cleaned by washing it several times in the laundry and then soaking it in dish soap. I used it as a necklace for a tiny metal dragonfly that my girlfriend Jeanine gave me as a lucky charm for the sea. I had told her how when I was a little kid a mosquito had landed on my nose, and a dragonfly had swooped in and taken it away, and how I had liked them ever since. She wanted me to wear the necklace whenever I went out on the boat. She thought it kept me safe.

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*

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She and I went up to the Gaspé Peninsula in Quebec last week. I found out that gannets use the area around Perce rock as a breeding ground. From a parking spot atop a windy pass north of town we saw the tall cliffs where they summer. A seagull flapped its wings far below over the dark slate and ginger ale water, while waves fizzed out on the rocks. The gannets had headed south. Some of them were probably close to our house in Southwest Harbor, perhaps the flock Seavey and I saw. It was odd to go northeast to the end of land and find a summer home for the birds I see every fall.

 

Past Perce we drove on to Gaspé, rounded the peninsula’s corner and headed down the north shore going back west toward Quebec City, spending the night in a place called St-Anne-des-Monts. The next morning, we drove up to a small town called Tourelle, I’d seen some fishing boats on the way in the night before and wanted to photograph them. They were hauled out for the season. Bigger than most of the boats at home, they looked to be over 60 footers, with deep steel hulls to challenge the weather. Most of them were freshly painted, their huge wheelhouses were decked out with antennae for radar, GPS and radios. They had French names like Dauphin II, Marcel D., and Le Grand Maraudeur. I pulled up the car, dwarfed by these giants, and started snapping photos. A few guys were hanging around, talking to one another around a fairly new pick-up truck, it seemed the fishing was good. Most of them had baseball caps on, plaid flannels, work jeans and a rough around the edges look. They were, as we say back home, talking it over. I walked up to them and proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that I have forgotten nearly all of the French I ever learned.

 

When I asked them about the boats, and told them I was a lobsterman from the U.S., I started to smile. one of them was staring at me. He was trying to be a hard ass in the exact same way I have seen locals in Maine try to intimidate tourists. His two missing teeth made him more funny than scary. Two of the others were almost too friendly, but answered my questions with so many words I didn’t understand that I had to just thank them, tell them the boats were interesting for me and move on while the last one of the bunch hung back as if looking for a cue on how to behave. I immediately thought of which of the four fishermen they might have been at home. Jimmy Dow, Chris Goodwin, Sean “Taboo” Stanley, and Mike Merchant maybe? Or Crossman, “Chief”, Pat and “Squeak”?

 

I learned that those Frenchies fished for crabs, in traps six feet high. They used feet as a measurement instead of metric, or so I’d heard them say, pieds, feet. That seemed very odd in Canada. I wondered if they used fathoms for depth or knots for speed. I didn’t have the words to ask the questions.

 

They were different, that’s for sure, the very way they held their faces was alien, but the undercurrent was the same. They worked hard, their hands were cracked and swollen like mine during the season, they had work clothes that probably always smelled like bait no matter how much they washed them. One of them had a snowmobile jacket on, but other than that they wore the same sweatshirts, flannel plaids, and baseball caps we did. They talked things over next to pick-up trucks, joked with each other, and like us probably had secrets about how much fish they caught and where. Gannets and seagulls watched them put in long days on the water. Some of those boats must have the French-Canadian sentimental equivalent of Seavey’s rocks on the counter, and maybe one of those guys had a necklace on that his girlfriend gave him, one that he was embarrassed to let his friends know about.

 

*

 

 

I was thinking about that at Seawall, and I told Seavey about the Quebec fishermen who were so much like us.

 

“It’s good to know some things are the same, wherever you go,” he said.

 

Even though he was enjoying his new life, it certainly was a different year. And what were those birds doing in so close? It was the damnedest thing.

Out beyond the truck’s shiny hood the normally offshore gannets dove again, first one, then a few, then a wave of them until the whole hundred were in the sea.