A window on Marches Point Editior's note: 13 years after this story, Mr. Alphonsus Benoit is retired and still lives in Marche's Point, Newfoundland. At 61, Phonse Benoit has seen 25 years' fishing, both good and bad, but lately he's convinced his will be the' last generation in Marches Point making any kind of living from the water. "I never had a chance to get any learning when 1 was a young fellow. At 14 I went fishing with my father, and we had no motors, just the old oars. When 1 was 15. we got 120 quintals of dry fish that spring. Now that was fish." Phonse's wife Alma says she recalls what it was like, too. "My family was from Deer Lake, and I met him when he worked in the lumber woods out there," she says, gesturing in Fhonse's general direction. "When I came here, his father had 100-lb. sacks of flour piled up for the winter, and there was no unemployment then." Phonse goes on, his words often overlapping those of Alma, "We used to dry fish in July and sell to Abbott & Haliburton for probably oil or $12 a quintal, whatever you could get, and you'd take it up in stuff for the winter-flour, tea, sugar and so on. There was no cash." Still, the fishermen and their families considered themselves reasonably well-off because there was always food, and the fishing was good. They kept cattle, sheep and hens, supplying their own meat, milk, wool and eggs, and the commuinity looked after its own. Recent changes in the fishery, however, have Phonse convinced things will never be good again. "The last couple of springs we've been tormented by the ice and high winds. I was lucky and didn't lose any |lobster| traps, but fellows in Lourdes and some other places lost a lot. Some were cleaned out. We were a week late starting this year, and the price was way down. I put out 200 traps, what the licence calls for, there's nothing good in it this year at all." Some fishermen in the community anticipate finishing the season in the lumber woods instead of their dories, but Phonse says he's too old tor that now. "Maybe if I was a younger man," he says, "I'd go somewhere to find work, but I was born here and I intend to die here. We haven't much, but what we've got is our own. Nobody can touch a little thing of it, and nobody can drive us out of it." All but two of their eight children have already left for greener pastures on the mainland. Donna, 17, is in French immersion at Notre Dame du Cap, and is warned by her parents she'd better finish school to have any chance at all. Octave, 19, (named for an uncle whose name Alma said would have otherwise disappeared since no one else in the family would bestow it on an infant boy), wants only to fish with his father, but Phonse doesn't know what will happen to him, starting out in a failing fishery at the worst possible time. Meanwhile, they just keep doing what they've always done. "We grow a few vegetables, and me and my two brothers who live close to here still have horses-I use one of those old-fashioned plows to the ground. The closest community pasture is in Piccadilly, and I have enough land for either a cow horse, and 1 needed the horse to get firewood. It's harder and hare get wood all the time, we had to keep going farther back every year,so a few more years and we'll be burning oil." Perhaps hardest of all, thou the differences Phonse and Alma see in out their front window. They live in a small black-and-white house looking lush green pasture and of the roughest shoreline in Newfoundland. He sits with his binoculars trained on what he says is the best view in Marches Point and watches things change. "Before they built the store across there I could see him come ashore about a mile down the road and have his lunch all ready," says Alma. Alma. "He looks out at his nets to see if they're tangled up or something. Most everybody who comes here, that's where they want to sit' she says, indicating the best seat in the house. "I watch the Russians, too, their lousy factory boats taking the capelin. There won't be any soon," says Phonse. "They used to come right into the cove, and we'd get barrels of capelin in a few minutes. Now you can't get enough for a lunch." Even in Marches Point, the world eventually comes to your doorstep, and the Benoits haven't been immune to its effects. While Alma has never been on a plane, now in the evenings she likes to watch movies, rented at the same little store that blocks their view of the beach, and Phonse finally bowed to media pressure and gave up smoking two years ago-although Alma says he's since become just as hooked on peppermint knobs, and she watches for sales and shops in Stephenville. Things have changed since fishermen took up their catch in winter provisions from the merchant, but the cost has been high in the loss of a way of life.
Photo courtesy of Alphonsus and Alma Benoit Source: Decks Awash, Vol. 19, No. 4 July - August 1990 issue |
