ISSUE: Spring 2009
An iceberg had drifted deep into White Bay, near the hamlet of Sop’s Arm, and was stuck there, depreciating quickly in the mild summer waters. Ed Kean and I were riding up to claim it, traveling by bus through a rolling landscape of stone and bright lichen, bald patches and spindly white stubble of third- and fourth-growth forest, through fog and sun and fog again.
This was Newfoundland in June, the middle of the working season, one of long daylight and heavy drinking and erratic weather. A season mild enough for trawlers to make three-day runs off the coast and for cruise ships to pause during North Atlantic jaunts to let tourists swarm the pubs of St. John’s harbor. A time when mainlanders come in droves to hike the cliffs and ogle icebergs drifting south.
Kean was seventy, but still tough, a longtime merchant seaman with some of the archetypal stuff in him: rude blue eyes, boyish and crowfooted; arms tanned and wrists striped from long days in the sun. He gestured with a kind of shyness, but he didn’t suffer contradiction, which was perfectly clear without him having to say so. It was clear in the list of provisions I had scribbled down just a couple of nights ago, as dictated by him: five days at sea; very little sleep, lots of work; earn your keep; oilskins & boots; sleeping bag; wear some wool, lots of wool; five boxes of 12-gauge slugs; 40 oz. of scotch.
The scotch was my idea, because it would be impossible to go five days at sea among strangers without it. Scotch soothes the nerves. You can barter with it. It is an immediately practical item. Kean suggested the slugs, a remarkable improvement over bullets. “Put a slug in one last week,” he said, gazing at the landscape scrolling past us. “Two thousand tons with one shot, boy … shattered like a window.” He was talking about shooting an iceberg, which was part of how the Keans, both father and son, harvested its water. And it was my reason for joining them—to take part in the hunt.
It began with the idea of bringing fresh water to US troops in Kuwait but evolved from that failure into Canadian Iceberg Vodka, a Toronto company that mixed Ontario-grown sweet corn with water that the Keans extracted from icebergs lumbering past Newfoundland’s coast, to distill what was marketed as “the purest vodka on the planet.”
With the debate over global warming picking up speed, the preciousness of the Arctic had become a novel commodity. There was already plenty of evidence—which the Bush administration would deny for years to come—that the Arctic was suffering permanent damage caused by man-made industries, that the warming trends weren’t simply part of a larger geological cycle, that we were, in fact, screwing up the planet.
And here, every summer, the proof came down in scraps and pieces: icebergs, prehistoric and luminescent, breaking off Greenland’s glacial shelf to float south along the Labrador Current, finally dissolving in the warmer Gulf Stream. During the pleasant months between March and October, several hundred icebergs moved past Newfoundland this way, at an imperceptible pace, in what locals called the migrating season. It had long been a staple of Newfoundland’s tourism shtick. But for a handful of fisherman for whom the fish had run out—the cod that was once their livelihood now endangered—icebergs had become the next best natural resource, and a way to put their idle nets and gaffs and boats to good use. For Kean, as long as the ice was moving, there was work to be done.
We spent eight hours drifting in and out of sleep, until the bus finally pulled over at a defunct gas station in the middle of the woods, the only sign of man for miles. Kean and I unloaded and were greeted by Eric, a local member of the crew. By now Kean’s son, also named Ed, had joined us. Put together, Ed and Eric carried four times the brawn of the old man and me; but where Ed, Jr. was tall and heavy—a slightly graying, massive facsimile of his father—Eric was short and fire-plug thick, with a red mustache springing off his lip. His hands looked like industrial objects—knotted, destructive, slightly destroyed, and stained. But dangerous as he looked, his mood was light, almost giddy. Violently goofy when drunk, I figured. As for Ed, he greeted me with the same disappointed scowl he would wear the whole trip. His mood would always seem twice as heavy as his size.
Sop’s Arm was just a short stretch from the gas station, at the bottom of a dirt path that wound past an abandoned tin-sided warehouse glistening stubbornly in the fog and drizzle. We pulled onto a concrete wharf where our trawler, the Mottak, was docked next to a barge. It was fitted with a stainless-steel tank from a eighteen-wheel rig, along with eighty blue, fifty-gallon barrels that would be used to haul the ice water south to the plant. Looking back toward the warehouse, at the grass bank that sloped up to the path, I could see a few cars sitting idle, with couples inside watching the fog take the water, doing what’s done in a car by a wharf in a light rain-talking, drinking, kissing, smoking. Silhouettes of heads tipping back to take a sip.
The Mottak was the Kean family ship, a sixty-foot vessel painted three coats of green. A winch stood in the middle of the deck; where its arm extended, the deck paint had been worn down to the wood. Sharing the middle of the deck was the hold, the vessel’s hollow storage where I could see a couple dozen of the blue barrels under a clear, thick tarp. They were full of ice water from a previous trip, who knew how clean or valuable. Various canisters of gas (propane, nitrogen, etc.) leaned against the wheelhouse. A little farther up at the bow sat a pair of anchors the size of steamer trunks, painted red. At the stern, a couple of giant plastic tubs held the nets old man Kean wove together in the winter months, which we’d use to corral the iceberg’s smaller chunks.
The Keans slipped down into the forecastle to dump their gear and claim their bunks. I chose the bunk beneath the old man, figuring he was the least risky to sleep under. It hardly mattered, given the cramped air down here. They had set a picnic table at one end, painted the same green as the deck, and built a cupboard-stove unit smack in the middle of the space, with a television strapped to the top. In the racks running along the sides were guns, repair equipment, life jackets, cold-water safety suits. In the farthest corner, a tiny closet with a mirror and pump-action toilet. Old man Kean set tea on the stove, dug crackers and Cheez Whiz out from the cupboard. The Cheez Whiz would remain on the table for the rest of the trip. Tea would always be on, too, for the next few days, the kettle nearly always boiling. Tea was the old man’s addiction.
Toward evening, Ed decided to head out and have a look at the iceberg we’d come to hunt-or har-vest, since the ice isn’t exactly elusive. It floats, and seems to wait. It is threatening only in its size: as the iceberg melts, it begins to crumble, and its weight shifts. It becomes unstable, like a rockslide on a floating mountaintop. As the weight is redistributed, the mountain turns bottom-end-up-not completely, but to the degree that a portion of the seven-eighths that had been under water will rise and send a con centric, crushing wake outward. This movement is called rolling, and it can lead to tremendous damage depending on the size of the iceberg and the depth of the water in which it floats. Icebergs as big as cruise ships have lodged themselves in coves, where they’ve melted and rolled and throttled the shore as thoroughly as a hurricane, flipping trawlers like plastic toys against the rocks. Even in open water, an iceberg is dangerous if you’re as close as we’d need to be to harvest it; you could easily be flipped into freezing waters or sucked deep down as the ice rolls over.
The rain was light but bitterly cold, ugly enough that I pulled out the oilskins I’d bought-fluorescent-yellow rubber pants and jacket-from their plastic packaging. I slipped on the rubber boots, too, the whole humiliating outfit reeking of bleach and rubber. Ed was waiting for me in the skiff, a seventeen-footer outfit-ted with a small outboard motor. I brought the shotgun and shells, as ordered, and tucked them underneath a pair of life jackets, as ordered, and set a pair of paddles on the pile. Ed was giving me a look, something like irritable patience. He had on a I light waterproof windbreaker, kept his cap low, and that was pretty much it. His tolerance was, in part, shaped by a lifetime in this weather, and it now had a strange effect on him. He seemed more like the weather than in it.
The old man had seen me put on the oilskins, had chuckled and called the suit a “cheapie”; now, riding out across the bay, I knew what he meant. At a healthy ten knots, a cold drizzle will find its way inside a cheapie. It was a weak defense. My bands and ears stung. I pulled my fists into the sleeves, tucked my bead down miserably, and stared at the ribs of the skiff, now and then looking briefly up at the fog tucked between dense ranks of black spruce on the cliff. The dark, oily back of a whale parted the water several yards in front of us, spit a loud breath high into the air, then sank again. I looked out toward the mouth of the bay, but where the wide Atlantic should have been, a close horizon disappeared into the fog—and slowly from the mist an iceberg came into view.
We cut the motor. At close range, the ice was bright enough that it pulsed, just a little. No verse came to mind, no Virgin appeared in the folds. Instead, I was dumbfounded by the physicality of the thing, by how something so massive had relocated here, alien against the muted colors of the woods. A fraction of the four hundred mil-lion tons of ice that calved daily from Greenland’s glacial shelf, the iceberg had traveled around that country’s southern tip, then moved with the cur-rent north along the western coast, and turned again to ride southward along the Labrador Cur-rent. The trip took several years, during which time it melted, so that the fifty thousand tons floating in front of us now was just a fraction of an original piece, itself dwarfed by the immensity of the North Atlantic, but larger still than anything I could imagine as mobile. To understand that it had traveled here, and that it might suddenly rear back on us, or on top of us, created a thickening tension. It seemed alive and merely sleeping.
One face of the iceberg was a sheer drop—a kind of fluted mesa with blue, translucent crevices—but with roughly half of it ripped away, so that instead of a flat, horizontal top it formed a rough arc that rose gently on the left, planed out, and dropped steep again. The crevices were about the width of a fist, and at least a foot deep, running symmetrically between the white ribs that had formed around them. This was where the ice had melted, spilled, and frozen again. Those same blue veins ran along the broad face where the wind had scraped the melting water into it, in long diagonal cuts and cracks where the ice looked as if it might ooze or split.
Ed paddled us around to the other side. Here the ice formed a glassy dome, lined top-to-bottom with the same blue scars as on the other side. Where the dome met the water, trapezoidal shingles fell or were licked off by the wake. At the highest point, about three stories up, a gnarled protrusion jutted out like a mangled limb. We could see that the iceberg had formed a kind of strait where the ice dipped underwater and up again, running twenty feet long, about ten feet wide, just deep enough for us to paddle through, lit from below by its amplification of the sky’s dull light—a natural, luminescent dry dock through which we moved very quietly, so as not to wake the thing.
“Can hear it frying,” Ed said.
I looked down at the water. A hissing sur-rounded us, amplified by the damp, clutching weather. As the ice melted, the trillions of air bubbles trapped inside rose and burst at the water’s surface, so that an effervescence enveloped the skiff. The fog and rain were warming up the ice, so that the prehistoric gas inside created a faint mist all over—two airs blending, similar in property but radically different in character. If the weather held, the whole thing would disappear in a matter of days.
Once we’d cleared the strait, Ed started the motor and began steering us in slow circles, looking for something. “Trying to see where we can get a piece off,” he said. He noticed the mangled protrusion above and thought it might yield enough. “Give us the gun there, bud;’ he said. I handed him the shotgun, a twelve-gauge Winchester Cooey single-barrel, and he gently slipped a shell into it and snapped it shut. A whale blew off to starboard. Ed aimed and fired, a fluid move, and the mangled tip of ice plumed into shards that slapped the water.
Where the whale had been, seals broke.
“Seal!” Ed shouted, and dug a shell from his jacket, thumbed it into the Cooey, and popped a shot off-quick, second nature. The slug sparked across the water just over the heads of the seals that ducked in unison.
“It skipped,” he said, bewildered by their luck. “Fuckers.”
I pointed to the spent casing floating just a few feet away. “Over there, Ed. There’s your shell.”
He observed it a moment. “It’ll just go back to nature there, bud.”
I stared at the shell. “You mean these are bio-degradable?”
“Plastic and brass,” he said, glancing at me, and shrugged.
That night, at Eric’s house, we indulged in a long, heavy dinner. Ed used small chunks of the ice he’d shot to cool his glass of vodka, and held it up to admire the tiny bubbles. They argued over who among the men they’d worked with was the laziest, and who among them was worth his salt. Reputations were defended with tales of brawls and small heroics. They argued over salmon routes, and hallelujahed at the injustice of a law that prohibited them from fishing in their own backwaters. They griped about seals, which were voracious and countless and gorged on whatever cod hadn’t already been depleted by the Europeans and their massive floating factory ships. And we got steadily just a little drunk. In that kitchen—the smoke and food and talk—I felt the Zen of new camaraderie among strangers.
Suddenly, Eric popped out his teeth and stared at me. He was trying to remember some-thing; popping his teeth wasn’t necessarily sup-posed to be provoking. It was an unconscious habit, like rubbing your thumb or twisting a lock of hair. Teeth askew in Eric’s mouth was nor-mal. Fine. But it was sudden, and he obviously didn’t realize that staring with his teeth out of kilter like that might upset a man. Finally he popped them back into place. “How you like that chicken there, Tex,” he asked, smiling.
“Did you just call me Tex?”
“Texas!” he said.
“Why are you calling me Tex?”
“He’s a New York man there, bud,” Ed reminded him.
“He looks like a Tex to me,” Eric said, and winked. “Hey, Texas?”
The name had stuck.
Kean leaned back in his chair, “Te-xas,” he sang, relishing the sound of it, then sipped his tea.
The next morning, the rest of the crew arrived: Paul Anthony was a longtime friend of Ed’s who was out of work after his shrimper had been moored with engine trouble. A seaman for twenty years, Paul was thin and slope-shouldered, mustachioed, and never without his thick, wire-framed glasses, even during the hardest labor; he looked more like a starving mathematician than a fisherman. Matt Budden, Eric’s nephew, a lanky boy of seventeen with a wholesome high-cheeked smile, was here to earn summer money before going back to school in Quebec. This was his first time working on a boat.
The iceberg had dwindled overnight. Pushed by the currents, it was now only a twenty-minute ride from the wharf, just past Wise-man’s Cove. As we approached it, I could see the LORAN navigation system’s impression of its size in how the blue digital line shot down toward the radar’s left corner, then cut right and kept declining until it ran off the grid. We circled wide around the ice a few times, hoping the Mottak’s wake would shake off a fragile section. Failing that, Ed ordered Eric to fetch the gun, then followed him to the bow, where the two of them settled in for a shot. I joined the old man in the wheelhouse and watched. Ed pointed to a spot in the ice, then Eric pointed to another spot, and then Ed pointed again. The idea was to shoot at a blue crevice, a weakness, so that the slug’s concussion would cause the ice to rupture, sending a good-sized chunk into the water. But they couldn’t agree on which blue crevice to shoot. I couldn’t see a difference; it looked like you could hit it just about anywhere and something big would happen.
Eric finally aimed, and held still.
The old man lost his patience. “Go on, now, Eric! Take your shot!”
He fired. A clap echoed off the ice, a thunderous snap followed, and a section—tens of tons, thirty yards long—plowed into the water. It was an enormous kill, and we yawped and cheered and quickly went to work.
Kean drew the throttle down and scuttled from the wheelhouse to the portside rail, where the skiff was, and where, once on board, he piled the twenty-pound nets we fed to him. Eric followed him into the skiff, and with nets and a hatchet they sped off toward the felled pieces.
Pulling up to one piece, they began wrapping the net around it, pushing one side of the net underneath the frozen piece with an oar, guiding it across as best they could. It took some guesswork, since even this piece was too large to see its exact shape. Once the net was around, its ends were drawn together and tied, and the whole catch was then towed to where the Mottak waited. The ice was steadied between the two hulls. Ed ran the winch, cranking the arm outward, lowering the cable until Kean and Eric could grab it, slip the net around the cable’s massive hook, and step aside.
The winch groaned. The arm bent a little. Ed read the scale: seven tons, far too heavy. The winch was already torqued from a previous job, and any piece over five tons would ruin it. So Ed lowered the ice, Eric and Kean loosened the net, and we watched as Eric set upon the chunk with a hatchet. He started hacking at it with an awkward fury. Shards spit out, pieces flew onto the deck. After several minutes of chopping, there was only a small cleft to show for it, with Eric leaning over the thing, panting. Then Ed brought out the ice lance, a seven-foot, stain-less-steel pole that weighed about thirty pounds, with one end sharply beveled. From his spot on the deck, he lifted and drove the lance down into the cleft with all his weight. Nothing. Then he and Eric took turns, back and forth, stabbing and hacking at the thing, but it barely made a difference.
The job called for the chainsaw. Paul went and fetched it, a Husqvarna, hopped into the skiff, got the Husqvarna going, and promptly shoved its blade down into that miserably shallow cleft. The cleft spat at him, but he maintained his mathematician’s poker face and kept jamming that wailing tool as deep as it would go, without a wince or even a squint. I winced, and was well away from the action. When Paul pulled back, Ed put two shoulders into yet an-other strike, and Eric, restless, interrupted them both to scalp it again. A whale breached, but was unimpressive.
Finally Eric chopped through—nearly falling into the water as the ice split open like a nutshell. They let one half roll over into the water, then readjusted the net to fit the remaining piece. Ed dropped the lever, the winch turned, and the ice rose with slow, ceremonious difficulty.
Some hint of an iceberg’s deceptive beauty was suggested by how this five-ton piece, swinging gently in the net, made the Mottak shudder when it bumped against the hull. Eventually it was lowered into the hold and released, and then five tons tipped, found balance, and were still. By this process we filled the hold all morning, piling the ice well above the deck.
We’d finished, the boat’s belly full, but there was room for more, near the lazarette, where a few large pieces would fit. We’d salvaged most of Eric’s kill, and the rest was too small to bother with, or too far away. For more ice, we’d need another shot. I was elected.
Eric and Paul motored the skiff out thirty yards or so and waited. Ed ordered me to the bow, where Matt shoved a shell into the shot-gun and handed it over. Eric sang from the boat. “Now you’re going to get your shot, boy!” I could hear him giggle as he lit a cigarette.
“We come all the way out here, now,” Matt said, with a bully’s grin, “so you better make it a good one.”
Ed watched from the wheelhouse, and said to wait until he got close enough—not to worry, he’d tell me when. I held the gun up in the direction of the ice, but didn’t aim it yet. As we got closer, I set it in the crook of my shoulder, held this pose for a while, and remembered daydreaming about this moment back in the city, sweating and jobless in a Spanish Harlem apartment on a day so hot it had become an actual emergency. I was watching a documentary about water, or the planet, or something environmental, and there were the Keans among the icebergs, and there was Eric with the Cooey, raising it and aiming, popping off a shot that sounded puny on the television’s tiny speakers. The ice fluttered like a showgirl’s fan into a sublimely blue sea, and instantly I wanted that ridiculous moment. The ice fell, the North called. And so I set the chase, and by luck and slight cunning found a way onto this same bow to hold this same gun.
The Virgin still refused to show. The wind muttered no encouragement. Even the whales were missing. Instead I had a quick and miserable vision of a misfire and the bloody consequences. I tried to focus on a target—a blue crevice, a hole, anything—and followed the eerily natural motion of aiming a gun, which, even if you haven’t practiced you could still do by virtue of having seen it thousands of times in the stock footage of memory. So I aimed for what looked like a weakness, though I was only guessing.
“Go ahead and shoot, there, bud,” Ed said. Suddenly the ice rumbled—a deep low-frequency rip—and then a wall of it collapsed into the water. I never even pulled the trigger, no shot fired, nothing. That was it. I turned to Ed and shrugged, apologetic. The ice just…surrendered.
Docked at the wharf, the winch loaded each block onto a blue tarp, where we attacked again with axes and hatchets, breaking the ice into pieces small enough to shovel into the blue barrels, which we filled to the lip and then sealed and rolled to the wharf’s far end. Rolling eighty fifty-pound barrels twenty yards or so quickly becomes monotonous, painful work. The pieces that were too awkward for the shovel we picked up by hand and stuffed into the barrels as the ice melted and made a little extra room. I’d brought the wrong type of gloves for this—wool, not waterproof—and soon the cold began shooting a slow painful pulse through my arms. Now and then I grabbed a piece and sucked on it, and drank from the barrel we’d set aside for our-selves. The shock of that cold water on the teeth was furious, but its purity was real, and palpable. It was no sham. The toil of shoveling would’ve made any drink delicious, and maybe anything that cold would’ve tasted clean. But this water felt bright on the tongue. It was delicious water. I couldn’t taste the spirit of the North, per se. But it was the cleanest water I’d ever tasted.
Toward evening, we ran out of ice, and lay our shovels down, and sat and drank a few precious beers, and talked: of fights, of drinking accidents, of infamous American presidents and movie stars. Eric’s kids came down to visit, and began throwing small chunks of ice at each other and at the defunct warehouse at the wharf’s other end. Eric watched them. I asked what the building had been. “A fishing plant,” he said, and offered a tour.
Tossing aside discarded two-by-fours and plastic tubs, spotlighting the dark with his flashlight, Eric led me through the hollowed-out rooms. This was his plant, he said. Back in the mid-198os he worked as its manager. About five hundred people—practically the entire community—worked under him in day and night shifts, pumping out five thousand tons of codfish and turbot a year. “I run everything here;’ he said, wiping the bright spot of light across the walls, “from the boats, straight on up. The place was boomin’ then.” Our voices widened in the vacant metal rooms. He shined the light on empty freezer units, assembly-line belts, broken stairs that once led to his office on the now ripped-out second level. As he talked, his voice softened with a hollow distance. “This is the state it’s in now. People got no appreciation for anything.” For some reason, the place still had power, and Eric threw the fuse box switches to prove it, lighting up every empty room with anemic florescent lights. The place looked like a clinic of trash.
Eric got close enough that I could smell the beer on him. “I had ‘em who would come in high as three o’clock in the morning and start work, work ten, twelve hours, go home, get three or four hours of sleep, and come in again.” He shut off the lights and clicked the flashlight on. He muttered about tonnage and dollar value and cursed what people had stolen after the place shut down following Canada’s moratorium on cod: pipes, electric heaters, stairs, siding, wood. The theft infuriated him, but that was all the building was good for now, just a grab bag of raw materials, and worse: a giant, dolorous shack where kids rendezvoused to smoke and drink and fuck by small indoor fires.
In 1969, twenty years after Newfoundland’s confederation with Canada, the pianist Glenn Gould set out from St. John’s to interview various Newfoundlanders about the province’s transition from a self-sufficient culture to one that had spent a generation under the influence of Canada’s mainland trends. The interviews for “The Latecomers” —the second part of his Solitude Trilogy, a radio documentary in which voices and atmospheric sounds overlap as the parts of a fugue—fade in and out and repeat above the basso-continuo of the rock-scrubbing Atlantic, sputtering outboard engines, bells and birds. His subjects speak of the effects of assimilation, of the corrupting charity of the Canadian dole, and of the disappearance of what, as one subject put it, was once “almost a perfect anarchy.” They were unconsciously forecasting the worst of it.
In joining Canada, in 1949, the island province had agreed to surrender control of its fishing zones, which in turn were bartered out to European interests in order to promote trade with the mainland. Massive gillnetting fleets—both Canadian and European—began raiding the cod’s spawning grounds off the Grand Banks, and the take of small-time inshore fishermen steadily diminished. By the time Gould arrived, factory trawlers from at least a dozen nations were lighting up the Grand Banks to capitalize on the fishing rights sold to them by Canada, razing the ocean bottom and extracting fish with extraordinary recklessness—some eighty thousand tons of fish a year. It was a rout. In another twenty years’ time, the cod that had sustained the east-ern provinces had been all but wiped out, forcing the Canadian government to declare a moratorium. Fifty thousand people were instantly out of work. By the time I arrived, the unemployment rate in Newfoundland was still close to 20 percent, and talk of “earning stamps” —the currency of the dole—could be overheard in the bars of every town and quiet outport.
Most Newfoundlanders I met considered confederation a curse, and in no small part be-cause of what had happened with the cod. Talk of it evoked strong opinions of its architect, a politician named Joey Smallwood, who through confederation became Newfoundland’s first premier. His ambition was to modernize the island. He built trade schools in the island’s impoverished interior, and saw the rosters fill. He built a university in the capital. He introduced a federal health-care system and improved the roads. He erected monuments, such as a Stalinist central headquarters overlooking St. John’s from its tallest hill and a plaque bolted to a shelf in the Grand Banks’ Virgin Rocks that reminded future entrepreneurs—seeking oil, minerals, gas—to whom those banks belonged. He built and built. But talking about Smallwood provoked bitter opinions, spinning mostly out of the humiliation confederation had brought to a once proudly independent island culture, with nothing to show for the usurpation of its resources.*
So the province crawled toward rehabilitation through other means, the signs of which remained mostly in the capital of St. John’s, the last city of any considerable size one passes be-fore disappearing into the Arctic Archipelago.
A week before the Sop’s Arm hunt, while strolling its harbor in warm, brilliant weather, I came across a crowd a few hundred strong pro-testing Canada’s allotment of Newfoundland’s shrimp rights to Prince Edward Island. The allotment was a harmless fraction of the industry’s gross, but the gesture threatened an already brittle faith in the government. The union men were out in full, their families in tow. Curious tourists had gathered round. Pickets shook and waved. And on a makeshift stage, microphone in hand, union president John Efford spurred the crowd with a conductor’s flourish and the rhetoric of oppression: “We have got to send a message that we will not tolerate any kind of action like this anymore! We as a province are all a part of this great country of Canada, and we deserve as much respect, and as much loyalty, and as much trust as anybody else!”
There was a huzzah; the pickets bobbed. This respect, it seemed, was bitterly over-due. But when the speech was over, the stage quickly cleared, with handshakes and smiles all around. The union men filed out, and the crowd followed—dissipating into a beautiful, vapid afternoon. For all the ruckus of the speech, you couldn’t sense an ounce of anger once it was over. Even the pickets were piled neatly, politely, there at the foot of the stage.
Shooting the iceberg wasn’t quite the moment I’d anticipated. For one thing, I lacked enthusiasm; the previous day’s work had been brutal, and I awoke the next morning feeling as if I’d spent the night pressed under a concrete slab. My neck flared with a sunburn. The idea of returning to that wharf to repeat the Sisyphusian exercise of topping off eighty barrels with more ice as the ice inside kept melting—I loathed the thought of it. I preferred the stale air of the bunkhouse.
Standing on the lazarette, brushing my teeth while gazing across the bay, this should have been a romantic moment, a, quiet communion with Nature. But even my teeth hurt. I was filled with dread.
The iceberg hadn’t moved at all the night before. But it was hardly the phenomenon it had been that first evening, when Ed clipped a thorn from it. The mood was all centered on me—Texas, the city boy, getting his shot. The iceberg’s peak was dull and low. It bled gallons of meltwater in thick rivulets that ran along those blue scars, now serving as small channels. At the water line, the light chop had carved a deep shelf into the ice, like a mushroom cap. Seagulls watched us from a perch on the iceberg’s flat end, twitching.
On my way out of the wheelhouse, old man Kean and Eric wished me luck. “Don’t shoot the birds!” Eric said, giggling.
The old man muttered: “Careful with that gun.”
The Mottak circled at about one-quarter trawl, just thirty yards from the ice, while Ed and Eric bickered again over exactly where to aim and what portion would fall as a result. I’d forgotten the shells, so I slid back down into the forecastle to fetch a box. I didn’t dawdle, but by the time I climbed back onto the bow, old man Kean had lost his patience again. He was squawking at me, though I could hardly hear him over the clacking of the diesel.
“Shoot that corner now!”
“You want it now?”
“Yes—now!”
The wake rolled back off the ice and rocked the boat. I pulled a shell from the box and had it between my fingers but struggled to bend the rifle open. I’d wanted to do this at the last moment, so that I didn’t stumble around with a loaded gun. As often as I’d imagined shooting the ice, I’d imagined shooting the wrong thing—the boat, a crewman, my foot.
“Come on!” Kean was shrieking now.
I jerked the barrel open and the shell dropped, clicked on the deck and rolled under a pile of rope. I set the gun down, then crawled after it, running my hand under the pile. I could hear the old man’s hatred. I finally felt the shell, snatched it, jammed it into the Cooey, and stood up—humiliated, but with a loaded gun. The crew, all of them, were yelling at me to shoot. Neither Ed nor Eric pointed, they just hollered, and I couldn’t see where I was supposed to aim, so I just aimed for the white part, and fired.
The kick of a rusted old Cooey is about the same as driving into a pole at twenty miles an hour. It feels that way, at least. Those of us who fired it would end up with sore and purple shoulders. But the trick, aside from keeping the gun still, is to not let go. In my case, I held too tightly, and now held the Cooey in two parts—barrel in one hand and stock in the other. Fifty tons fell, yes—it was beautiful! —but I’d broken the gun.
“I broke the gun,” I said, faintly so as not to draw notice, and set it down on the pile of rope with the parts set close, a tidy apology.
“Hurt your arm?” Ed said.
“I broke the gun,” I told him. I felt awful.
“Naw,’ he said, and bent down and grabbed it and slapped the stock and barrel back together. “Has a kick on her, doesn’t she?”
He handed it to Matt, who loaded it and took his own shot, which dropped another ten tons. I had thought this would be enough for the day, but apparently we needed more. Ed took a turn, and with the Mottak idling, he fired, and fired. But nothing happened. He fired again. Nothing. He had me fetch yet another box of shells so he could continue firing. The day had started out with a jubilant little fever: the city boy had a kill, Matt had a kill, and Ed was simply fetching some insurance. But the ice wouldn’t yield the last bit, and after about the sixth shot, we began exchanging looks—a visible guilt, especially from the old man, who seemed tortured by any undue violence toward the ice. Finally we heard a crack, a small thunder and the slough of something heavy pushing away the water. A portion had fallen from the iceberg’s other side.
At the wharf that night, after a marathon of axes and hatchets, shovels and spray, the first beer of the evening felt close to holy. Bullshitting improved the mood. It was well past evening, but the sky was still backlit by the sun.
That night, Eric’s wife prepared a caribou roast. The table was crowded with cabbage, beets, yams, potatoes, carrots, “Newfie” pudding (dough balls with molasses), and more beer. The arguments were the same as before, but this time we had to figure out the matter of fuel, how far we could get on what was left. And we somehow lit upon tales of wildlife’s revenge on man: falcons preying on chickens, owls and eagles snatching up cats and dogs from yards and from the streets. The cases grew horrific in proportion. Eric told us of bald eagles that had pounced upon his hounds, and of an owl that had lifted off with a German shepherd. There was something majestic in the act. It reminded him of one time, he said, when he plucked a cod out of the water, slapped its head against a rock, and tossed it back in just so he could watch an eagle glide down, snap it up, and soar away. “That;’ he said calmly, “was beautiful.”
Steering south out of white bay (49 degrees, 53 minutes), we carried thirteen thousand gallons of the cleanest water on the planet, sloshing around in eighty plastic barrels and a stainless steel tank. This water had taken shape long ago, as Arctic snowfall compacted over the span of tens of millennia-in the time it took homo sapiens to arrive, tame dogs, cast copper, invent writing—then crumbled as ice into the sea to follow a slow, lonesome course down to where the Icemen wait. Now it was ours to sell, for civilizations to savor.
Ed had the wheel, the chop at a light three feet. A iceberg the size of Dover lay another twenty miles east of us. He held up a glass of water with a piece of the iceberg in it, hairy as cotton candy. “You see money in that ice?”
“A dollar in every bubble,” I said.
He scowled at it. “Aw, there’s no money in this shit.”
He had at least a half dozen other irons in the fire, but money still wasn’t coming in as fast as he needed it. He intended to improve that year’s take of a quarter million gallons by another quarter million, all to be harvested from May through September. Setbacks notwithstanding, my impression was that, even if all his money came in, even if everything was in its right place, Ed would still find a way to overextend himself. You could tell he had trouble staying with a single thought because of the way his eyes disengaged, how he squinted as if offended—which he wasn’t, he was just planning something else a week or so in the future, or going over what could have been finished by now. He spent little time in the present. I understood. It’s what drew us both to the sea, the dark and infinite back-drop of big dreaming.
“Some people think working is a forty-hour week, and then come Friday they get drunk, chase girls, get laid, and screw off …” he rubbed his head and mumbled, never finished his sentence. “Everything is hard,” he said finally, staring away. “We always come up for hard jobs.”
We spotted something in the distance, bright roiling trash that turned out to be a pack of balloons tied together, most likely lost from a cruise ship, some party. “I think I’m going to go shoot at it just for fun,” Ed said.
”You put a lot of lead into that ocean, Ed.”
He looked at me and shrugged—so the fuck what?
I watched the balloons spin. There was nothing else in sight but the sea. ‘’Actually, yeah, let’s shoot it.”
By the time we reached Carmanville, the next day, the Mottak’s engine was struggling. In the weak light of early morning, Ed was already nose-deep in the Cummins manual, engine grease on him, the apparent culprit part lying next to him on the deck—a bad fuel pump, and he didn’t know enough to repair it. His only option was to borrow a car and drive the part to the neighboring town of Twillingate to see if any of the old men he knew there could help him fix it.
But the old men of Twillingate were a bust. No one knew how to fix the pump, and Ed was forced to choose the last option, the most ex-pensive, which was to rent a car and drive to St. John’s, a two-hour drive, to buy a new pump. l volunteered to rent the car, which I could tell he was hoping l would do.
So I bid goodbye and good job to Paul and Matt, and Ed and I hitched a ride to the closest town where I could rent a car and drive him home. We took the Trans-Canada Highway back the way we’d come by bus just a few days ago, back through that cold, green country, the Martian-like, moss-covered rocks, past slow drivers with Canadian plates, past “Joey’s Lookout,” a twenty-foot-tall billboard profile of Smallwood that marks the edge of his hometown. We sang two songs along the way. Ed bitched about the seals, the Russians, the moratorium. He talked about losing his best friend to booze, about how he lost his brother and first ship in a storm. He worried he might not see a dime next year.
But, in fact, the business would grow. He wouldn’t make a lot of money at it, but he’d make a living. Canadian Iceberg Vodka would keep producing the purest vodka, but it would also begin making gin and rum. The Keans would acquire an old molasses barge fitted with an earthmover, a vessel rigged together by their competition—Iceberg Industries—which was up and running when I arrived, but would soon go bankrupt and sell at auction. The ice would keep flowing, the waters would keep warming, and in the years to follow, the question would no longer be whether the Arctic was actually threatened by man, but how thorough the damage was, and of course, how money could be made through its demise. This was all to come. For now, the old man was home, resting up before the final run of the summer. He would pass on in a year. Ed, meanwhile, just wanted a brief respite from the bullshit of this job.
Once in St. John’s, Ed guided me to the suburb where he lived. I made a couple of turns, found his house, and stopped but kept the engine running. He thanked me; I wished him luck, and asked him to pass along my best to his old man. Then I watched him saunter across the lawn, a flaring green, the fuel pump dangling from his fingers with the weight of all his curses upon it.
Walking through town again, past the sidewalk Titanic museum, past maritime trinket shops and those selling handmade cable-knit sweaters, past Irish pubs and bed-and-breakfasts, I saw a vandal’s tag on a wall above a set of cobblestone steps. FREE NFLD it read, in black letters stenciled over a bright red silhouette of the province, the southern coast dripping as if slaughtered. Point taken.
And then the ships! Suddenly, a massive sound rose from the harbor. Tugs and trawlers and freighters had all gathered to perform a symphony of horns, their maudlin honks arranged in harmony for a show. It was a summer thing, and apparently the tourists loved it. Folks had gathered along the docks and along the top of the hillside cove that formed a natural amphitheater to marvel at the brawny music. It shook the streets.
There was as much science as art to it, you could tell, and the point was to put Newfoundland’s best foot forward. And it worked: a bright day, the fog gone, the sky clear, the cool air hugged by a powerful sunlight, those maritime groans made a giant, sweet, and wistful soundtrack of a people. Any other day, with all those horns going off, the noise would have been unbearably dissonant.
* Smallwood’s most egregious oversight is perhaps his negotiation of the contract for the Churchill Falls hydroelectric dam, which not only razed a considerable portion of lnnu territory in Labrador, but ended up selling its power to Quebec at rates fixed in 1954, with no provisions for inflation. So while Quebec sells the same power to America’s Eastern Seaboard for billions of dollars, Newfoundland’s profit is based on its value over fifty years ago, bringing in only 1/20th of its worth. The contract cannot be revised until the year 2036.
