Peggy’s Cove is a picturesque little town forty minutes out of Halifax, one of a series of tiny fishing communities hugging the coast. What Santorini is to Greece, Peggy’s Cove is to Nova Scotia- one of those places that are memorialized on postcards and tourist brochures and supposedly capture the essence of a region... in this case, the old-time, small-town, maritime culture of Atlantic Canada.
The town itself has a population of about 40, half of whom are apparently related to Paul, Garreth’s Nova Scotian buddy, who brought us there. Most of the townsmen are lobster and mackerel fishermen. The lobster season begins in November and stretches into late May- this is when the lobsters stop molting, and their exoskeletons become hard and their insides packed with meat. The locals work in pairs on small trawlers; one man drives, and the other retrieves, unloads, and resets the traps. It’s hard and potentially dangerous work, but rewarding- one of the locals would later tell me that it is possible to make $20,000 in six weeks at the height of the season.
But before I get into that, I want to tell you about the lobster meal. We had lunch at a place called the Sou’wester, and Garreth and I each chowed down on a 1.5 lb lobster. Lobster is hard to get cheaply in the West; they aren’t native to our coast, and with rising gas prices, it takes bucketloads of cash to ship them out to Vancouver. I can’t afford Alberta beef nowadays, let alone Nova Scotia lobster.
The restaurant was kind enough to furnish us with bibs and a printed guide to eating lobster. (Paul jokingly told the waitress that we were from Vancouver and needed all the help we could get.) Regardless, I got a local perspective on all the little tricks of cracking open the lobster and finding the hidden nuggets of meat. I now know how to get all the meat out of the tail without breaking the shell, and can suck every last millimeter of flesh out of the legs as though they were straws. If anyone wants to head down to the Atlantic Trap some night, I will happily demonstrate.
But the true glory of the lobster is what the locals call “tomalley”. When you crack open the thorax, you find a bunch of feathery gills, milky fat, roe (if your meal is female), and a mass of grimy, sickly-looking puke green mush- the “tomalley”. Neither Garreth nor I knew what this was, and Garreth pushed it off to the side with distaste. I, on the other hand, come from a culture that eats pig intestines for breakfast and considers tiger penises and dried worms forms of medication. So I slathered the green stuff all over my fries, poured melted butter over it, and ate it with gusto. It was rich and tasty, much like what liver would taste like if it were ground to mush.
I later learned that tomalley is the lobster’s feces. No, I did not throw up on the spot. In fact, I was stoked. I had just used lobster shit as dip for my fries- and it was in all seriousness the tastiest part of that meal. Well, if I get killed by a grizzly up in the Yukon later this summer, I hope it will do me the courtesy of eating my tomalley.
We spent a few minutes walking around the town’s coastline, with the Atlantic lapping calmly against huge rock formations of windswept, sun-bleached granite. In the summer, Peggy’s Cove is jam-packed with tourists, and according to a few prominently placed plaques, a few unwary visitors have fallen to their deaths on the rocks. I did not see how this would be possible in the summer, though in the winter, those rocks would quickly become slippery and treacherous.
Most of my friends know that I love the ocean, but few know that I hate beaches. I have traveled on three continents and a dozen coastlines, and not once have I lounged on a fake beach and sipped a cocktail while ogling at scantily clad bimbos, and I never will. I hate the sheer artificiality of the Cancun or Bali-style beach: the white grain sands, and the tourist bars and Pina Coladas, and palm trees and bikinis. So false, so contrived, so tame. The ocean should be wild and beautiful, with a beach to match. A real beach should have rocks, damn it... rocks! Rocks, and a strong salt wind, and a crashing tide.
So I was gratified that I got to see something of this at Peggy’s Cove (calm and touristy as it was), and was able to appreciate the Atlantic without having to resort to a beach. With any luck, I might have the opportunity to head up to the Bay of Fundy, which has the highest tides in the world, and see a wild and rugged coast- nature as God intended, not man.
The town itself is a gem. It consists of a couple of dozen tiny, brightly painted wooden houses that probably have not changed in design since the first Scots-Irish colonists cast their nets off the coast. There are no fences, and Paul told us that the locals have a lot of trouble with tourists wandering into their backyards. Down by the little harbor were a few fishing boats, and masses of lobster traps piled up on creaky wooden wharves.
Paul stopped by the house of one of his family members, and over a round of Buds, I learned a few interesting things about the Maritimes’ present-day fishing culture. One of the guys I talked to was a lobster fisherman- a bluff man with a thick accent, bright eyes and a booming, genuine laugh. He had that peculiarly unhinged disposition unique to small-town folk- capable of switching his mood and manners from calm reserve to manic joy at the drop of a hat. I have seriously never heard a man laugh as hard at his own jokes.
According to this jolly tar, Peggy’s Cove has two industries. From November to May, they fish for lobsters, and from June to August, they fish for tourists. A good third of the buildings in town house no residents- they are souvenir stores and restaurants. The fishing and tourist industries don’t necessarily overlap; by the time the tourist season begins, the lobster season is over. So when the tourist industry is just kicking up, most of the lobster fishermen are living off unemployment insurance, which can be a few hundred bucks every couple of weeks. This was interesting to me, as in BC, I don’t think that anyone is covered for doing seasonal work. I figured that this was a quirk unique to the Atlantic, whose strong maritime traditions perhaps demand that the provincial governments cover the fishing industry during the dead months.
Anyway, this also means during the summer, all the lobster at Peggy’s Cove is actually imported from PEI, whose season is still ongoing. All those tourists are, in fact, not eating the local lobster as advertised.
I was unwilling to ask the man about the future of Peggy’s Cove. It would have been impolite to parry his hospitality with rude questions about how he would feed his kids if the lobster disappeared, which we all know is likely to happen within the next few decades. It is highly likely that Peggy’s Cove will then become reliant on the tourist industry... or they will disappear entirely. I think that soon there will be a tollbooth set up at the town’s entrance, and the fishermen will convert their warehouses into gift shops, maritime museums, and bases for tour boats.
I have seen this happen many times before- how traditional lifestyles become obsolete because of resource scarcity or some quirk of consumer demand, and communities have to pimp their culture out to the tourism industry in order to survive. I saw it on Santorini in Greece, where out-of-work fishermen set up gift shops and donkey-rides. I saw it in the highlands of Chiang Mai, Thailand, where Karen villagers weaved scarves and sold Pepsi. And I am seeing the beginnings of this in Peggy’s Cove, Nova Scotia.
History is a cruel god, and cares little for the cultures that fall by the wayside. Culture evolves just as species do, and just as the neanderthals died so that humans could live, a million vibrant cultures have been born and have died so that humanity could look the way it does now. And many more cultures will be born and will die in turn as the modern processes of globalization grind on ceaselessly, shaping and reshaping traditions, lifestyles, peoples, and nations.
I am reminded of a song, Fisherman’s Wharf, by Stan Rogers. Here are some lyrics.
“It was in the spring this year of grace, with new life pushing through.
That I looked from the citadel down to the narrows and asked what it’s coming to.
I saw upper Canadian concrete and glass, right down to the water line
I have heard an old song down on Fisherman’s Wharf; can I sing it just one time?
And haul away and heave her home; this song is heard no more.
No boats to sing it for, no sailors to sing it for.
There rises now a single tide of tourists passing through.
We traded old ways for the new,
Old ways for the new,
Old ways for the new, for the new.”
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