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                Dale continued : “The groundfishing was mainly done in by the Russian factory trawlers that were operating at the height of the Cold War forty miles off Grand Manan Island.  The Russians use to come ashore to take ferns and flowers to the ship. There were two or three defectors. One drowned. One of our women was working on one of the trawlers and had a baby on it and they all cried. That struck me as the end of the cold War. It was a turning point in my life to see that the Russians were just like us. They all came from fishing families and were working on these ships because they had to feed their families.” 

      Dale has three weirs, and until his father died last year, three generations of Mitchells worked them together. “Traditional fishing provides the second-biggest income in Atlantic Canada,” he said. “The government claims salmon farming is a $300 million industry. 2.2 million fish are put in the water, but .2 million die, and with the average salmon weighing ten pounds and  fetching three dollars a pound at the Boston wharf, that’s only $60 million, and traditional fishing is a $157 million business.” But the problem was that the herring weirs and the salmon cages were competing for space in the sheltered coves, and the aquaculturists were squeezing the traditional fishermen like Dale out. The  herring weren’t coming in the numbers they once did, and the non-productive weirs were being converted into salmon cages.  Dale blamed the aquaculture itself for this. “The salmon are fed meal of ground-up herring, which along with their fesces makes the harbors and coves greasy, and herring require clean, pristine water,” he explained. “Plus the noise of the stressed salmon flopping in the cages scares them off. And maybe  the light pollution from shore is affecting the nocturnal movement of the fish. There used to be one light on the wharf. Now there are 5-7. Why ? All these street lights take power.” [In Hawaii sea turtles head for the glow of cities and highways thinking they are the full moon and get slammed by cars.]  Salmon farming pays ten to fourteen bucks an hour for a fifty hour week. For someone just out of high school this is enticing money, and the income is guaranteed. Fishing is never a sure thing, and not everybody can fish. It takes initiative. Last year I made $153,000 from lobster, and that was only half my income. 30% was from herring, and 20% from scallops. When all three hit at once, it can be a spectacular living.  But the opportunities for a young man to go into fishing are getting fewer. My nephew is the youngest sardine fisherman on the island. He’s 25. All the others his age are farming salmon. But we were brought up to think that somebody who worked for wages was a second-class citizen, to believe that we should never rely on credit. No one in my family has ever had a mortgage or has ever bought anything— a single length of rope—on credit from the lobster buyers, because then they would be in debt to them. My nephew just built a house for $125,000 that he owns free and clear. And it’s more house than he needs. [This is the environmentally commendable Canadian attitude, something Americans would do well to emulate. But on the other hand, it produces a small-mindedness and a conformity in the Canadian zeitgeist that many Americans would find claustrophobic. A Mohawk friend of mine who lives across the St. Lawrence River from Montreal has one of the biggest homes on Kanawake Reservation. “Boy I sure would hate to have to heat that thing,” his jealous neighbors say. And in the small dying Ukrainian towns of rural Manitoba, where all the houses are tiny, when I asked why don’t these people splurge a little and give themselves some space. They’re going to be living in these houses for the rest of their lives. It was explained to me that the attitude is the last thing you want is a house that’s bigger than everybody else’s because everyone will be trying to undermine you and cut you down to size. “The tall poppy syndrome,” as Conrad Black, the media moghul who gave up his Canadian citizenship and is now a British lord, has called it.  Even the mansions of Westmount, the fanciest part of Montreal, are small and modest by American standards. Conspicuous consumption and flaunting don’t go over well up here except among some of the nouveaux-riches who want to be like Americans. A Scots parsimoniousness and frugality, living within the carefully circumscribed limits of what you need and not more,  are one of the Canadian values, and Dale with his modest little house and eight-year-old pickup was a good embodiment of it.]

         “My grandfather Mitchell, who was born in l884, worked for the Stewart family, who had a weir. They paid him a buck a day and he was so poor he couldn’t ever buy a weir of his own. Today all you need is a hundred bucks for a license, and you can build a weir anywhere so long as it isn’t within a hundred feet of another one and doesn’t interfere with navigation. Today there are 150 permits, but only 30 weirs that are built. In l986 there were 67 active weirds. Aquaculture started on this island in l978. It was the first salmon farming anywhere. By l983 it had become a problem. We started to realize that we were coming up against something. Now there are 19-20 huge sites.”

      What about this dragging that the enviros are so bent out of shape about ? I asked. “We only drag for scallops in the dead of winter, when the lobsters move off shore, so it will do the least damage. We fought to stop summer dragging and put in a two-mile conservation limit. But there are very few places you can drag here, anyway, because it’s so rocky. One time I brought up a 16,000 year old walrus fossil  that’s now in the museum at St. John. Another time I caught an undetonated bomb from the Second World War. The dragging fleets were a problem, but nobody was aware of the ecological damage they were doing at the time.  This year so far I’ve caught five bluefin tunas and put ‘em back alive. No one is fishing tuna here, but my brother-in-law, who lives on another island,  landed a 1070-pound bluefin with a rod and he has a license and got 17 cents a pound for it. I see more tunafish coming through the water, maybe because this year there’s more shrimp and krill.  They move around all over the Atlantic, from New England to the Azores to Florida, so I don’t think they’re endangered. I caught 400 Atlantic salmon this year, but most of them were escapes. They were full of sea lice and fatter and looked different from the wild, sea-running ones because they don’t get any exercise, and the fins were wore on ‘em. Fishermen are saying the cod are coming back and maybe they’re right because I’m getting more cod in my lobster traps. We did fish too hard,” Dale admitted. “I’m trying to anticipate the global changes over the next fifty years, so I can keep my family here, but it’s hard because I’m so tied to the present. I wish I would understand what to do. Is it going to get warmer, or is the melting polar ice going to shut down the Gulf Stream ? There have been no whales this year. Not yet, anyway. All these whales the last few years are a new phenomenon. Right whales in the Bay of Fundy, and one little humpback and a small minke around here—what does it mean ? I kind of scratch my head about these marine protected areas. I can see protecting certain things for certain amounts of time, especially estuaries and other spawning grounds. But a lot of places are naturally protected by their rockiness, and the places where the fish are are constantly shifting, especially with global warming. And I don’t believe that if you protect one place, it will make a lot of fish elsewhere. Fish are like us. They like choice areas, and most of the middle of the Bay of Fundy is like a desert.  David Coon and Janice Harvey and Maria Burzeta [who is working for the DFO in nearby Letete to demarcate  marine protected areas] are not radical Greenpeace types. They take humans into consideration. I have a lot of respect for these people. The only thing I disagree with Janice and David about is they want no rockweed harvest.” 

This locally abundant seasweed is harvested for its  carragenan, a thickening agent used in toothpaste and ice cream. A lot of the local people supplement their incomes by harvesting it with long rakes, which Dale said was not a problem as long as they leave a foot or so off in the water so it will grow back. “I have no problem with cutting rockweed, as long as it’s sustainable. There’s so much of it, and there will always be places to harvest it. But the big diesel-powered rigs I have a problem with. Everything hurts something, don’t it ? When I drive down the road, it hurts the environment.”

     I found this argument somewhat specious. If that’s the case, if we really want to do a favor to the environment, why don’t we all just kill ourselves ? There’s actually an organization,  called the Church of  Euthanasia that advocates doing this and has info on the most painless way to do yourself in on its website. Founded by Chris Korda, the cross-dressing, seriously Dada son of  New York editor  Michael Korda,  it advocates, besides killing yourself, abortion,  castration, sodomy, and cannibalism. But this is an ideological stance. None of the church’s members have actually gone so far as to remove themselves from the planet. 
 

       “Most fishermen are conservation-minded these days,” continued Dale. “We have all witnessed the virtual collapse of the ground fishery because we didn’t  manage it properly. I’m a workaholic, but I want to do the least damage and fish the best way possible. I’m 45 and ready to slow down. I got maybe 20 or 30 more years to fish. I hope my son’s a fisherman and my daughter marries a fisherman and we all work together and get along. My dad remembers Indians coming in canoes from the mainland to hunt porpoise. I’m a better fisherman than he was because  I’ve got the basic electronics- GPS, sonar, and a depth record. But we fishermen are naturally pessimistic. We have to look ahead to the worst of times. I’m not living day to day. I have reserves. But the deck is stacked against fishing families like us in so many ways that I can’t say I’m not worried about the future. And now if you’ll excuse me”—it was five to midnight—“I love talking fishing, it’s my passion, but I got to scoot.” And Dale jumped in his pickup and headed off for his boat. 

      “It might be a hard life, but it’s your own life,” my wife said as we watched this man who was so obviously and inspiringly in love with his way of life   grow increasingly antsy and eager to get to work as the herring witching hour drew nigh. The mystique of this disappearing way of life is captured in Linda Greenlaw’s books, The Lobster Chronicles and The Hungry Ocean, which are about traditional subsistence fishing on an island over the Maine border  much like Deer Isle, which has “no modern baloney,” as Dale put it. “Twenty years ago the government wanted to put transmitters on the whales and make Deer Isle a big tourist destination like Bar Harbor. But the whole island was against it.  All these whale-watching boats cruising up until dark would have spooked the herring from coming into the weirs, and it would have led to a reduction of the fishing effort.” Dale had another problem : with the natives inland who had aboriginal licenses to fish lobsters and hired white men to fish for them. “If they’re gonna have a license, they need to fish themselves,” he argued. His relationship with the enviros and scientists who wanted to tell him how to fish, and to put in more marine protected areas, seemed to a wary symbiosis, like the one between the enviros and the rubber tappers in the Amazon. 

         Dale told me that several of the Al Q’eda terrorists who participated in 9/11 took the catamaran ferry from Yarmouth, Nova Scotia, to Bar Harbor.
 
 
 

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