Two Ferries Out: Growing Up on Brier Island by Ben Robicheau was a memoir of the author’s early years living on this isolated southwestern Nova Scotia island. He wrote about the period from his birth in the late forties to when he left Brier Island in the early seventies, however he started by writing a short family history on how his parents met and settled in Westport, the island’s only community.
Robicheau shared memories of how island children used the landscape to create their own amusements, like jumping the dunes, biking while avoiding the muddy ruts, and bobsledding down icy hills. The memoir was written in 2021, so children of today would be biding their time dulling their brains indoors on virtual preoccupations, a point he lamented several times over the course of his story. Back then he had to make his own fun, and had such a great time doing it. In the winter activity above, not only did his friends have to ice the hills at night, but these enterprising little carpenters even made their own bobsleds.
The author grew up in a family of seven sisters yet thankfully didn’t make his memoir all about himself, being one of only two boys in a brood of nine children. In fact, I don’t think he grew up treated any differently from his sisters, and the chapters had a feminist slant, which one might even expect from a boy growing up amidst so many girls and strong women. I read with fondness about a widow named Annie Moore, who was one of the island’s “odd ducks” and “eccentrics” who was “differently thinking”. In the chapter devoted to her called A woman ahead of her time, he writes of her now as one “of those people who we looked on as being slightly outside the norm were in fact, exemplifying attributes that we now tend to admire and encourage.”
Robicheau grew up with parents who gave him the same freedom to be as differently thinking as he wanted to be. I was amazed that he never suffered any life-altering injuries bases on all the accidents and mishaps that he got into, whether behind the wheel of a boat or car, or on his motorcycle. He and his siblings were given an entire island as a playground. I witnessed the same behaviour when talking with parents while I was on Tristan da Cunha. They viewed their island as the safest place for children to be. Parents didn’t worry about their children playing too close to the water or getting lost. On Brier Island, the people treated the local children as their own (which is what I witnessed on Tristan). All islanders’ eyes were looking out for you, but not hovering like helicopter parents. According to Robicheau:
“On the Islands, we were probably allowed more freedom to roam than most kids. It was not uncommon on a summer’s morning to take off for the back shore or Pond Cove and be gone all day. As long as you were home for supper, your parents usually wouldn’t give a second thought to your whereabouts. If they did want to find out what you were up to, everyone on the island knew everyone else so there was usually someone who could fill them in on where you were and what you were doing. If a kid was doing something he shouldn’t, any adult could order him to ‘get the devil out of there’ and most kids would obey without question; if you didn’t, that bit of information always seemed to have a way of beating you home, and you would have to explain yourself to your parents.”
Several chapters were devoted to holiday celebrations, including Halloween, but I enjoyed the numerous chapters on Christmas the most. Islanders would cut down their own trees and shop for gifts at the limited stores on the island. The trick was to be a store owner whose stock was from a different supplier than everyone else. I wish Robicheau had written more about the mysterious young woman named Anne from Texas whom he met at the Strawberry Fields music festival held at Mosport Park in August 1970. Robicheau and Anne hit it off yet in the chaos of the concert, they lost each other. With only the knowledge of his first name, Ben, that he had seven sisters, and that he lived on an island in Nova Scotia, Anne managed to track him down on Brier Island! And this was decades before the Internet and social media. I felt that Robicheau left us all hanging, for aside from relaying her journey from Mosport to Brier Island, he didn’t write anything further, other than that he was astonished when she suddenly walked into the Brier Island poolroom where he was working. What happened next?
The book was filled with colour photos, most taken by the author. Its 361 pages were divided into 45 chapters and I sped through this book in three days, however I know that if I had all of Saturday to myself I could have read it all in one sitting. I found the font on white paper easy to read and even the photo captions, in italics, were in a larger font so I could read them without a visual aid. I would have appreciated a larger map, or even additional maps, as the small solitary map at the front of the book offered no help at all, sorry to say. That map merely pinpointed where Brier Island was in relation to the whole province.
Now a word about the editing. Two Ferries Out was published by Moose House Publications, a small company that centres on topics relating to rural Nova Scotia. There are dozens of titles in their catalogue, so this is a reputable company. In other words, Robicheau did not publish this book on his own. He credits an editor, Andrew Wetmore.
Oh, Andrew. You should have let me have a look at the book before you published it. Although I rave about this book and recommend it as a charming document of Brier Island history, I cannot let this review go without pointing out the editing gaffes. That is my schtick, after all–exposing faults in what should be pristine pages–so perhaps Moose House will correct later editions.
I was taken aback from the very first quote on the back cover, of all things. Look at it here:
The name of the island is Brier and is rendered such on the second line of the quote, yet is misspelled as Briar on the last line. How could that slip by? And then on page 252 the island is misspelled again, as Bier Island.
Over five pages I encountered three different spellings for a local place. Which is correct: Point d’Field (p. 12), Pointe D’Field (p. 14) or Pointe d’Field (p. 16)? This could be an informal local name with no standard spelling, but if it is used in this book, should have only one form.
Robicheau committed the common error–I see this all the time in print–where he referred to his parent’s house when he obviously meant parents’. However on page 32 he avoided the apostrophe altogether. On a single line he misspelled the first name of one of his father’s colleagues. The line on page 127 looks like this:
“Dad invited Sidney Melanson along. Sydney was”
That was such a glaring error I cannot let it pass. There were other minor gaffes, such as a reference to Marie’s husband-to-be as the feminine fiancée (p. 24) and sentences that ended without punctuation. My eye perceived every capital O as a mischosen 0 (zero) from the printer’s box. A subtlety that would go over most eyes, but those narrow capital O’s weren’t right. These mistakes sullied the experience of the overall good read. I say this time and time again: a poorly edited book can detract from an othewise pleasant reading experience.