My Minke Summer (Tamar)

In the early 80’s, we lived in Trinity, a small coastal community in Newfoundland. A few years previously, the Village Inn had been purchased by a marine biologist and turned into a successful whale watching tour business.

The Inn, which was near our little house, became a gathering point of both locals, or as one American so lovingly called us, natives, as in “The Natives sure love baloney,” and cfa’s which was short for come from away’s. These guests came from all corners of the world, and it was probably the first time in 500 years the town had harboured so many different accents and cultures.

Fran came as a guest in the early 1980’s, with her kind, sun-weathered face, two short Pippi Longstocking pigtails, and the desire to study the minke whale. Minkes are as hard to track as mosquitoes, as when they breach you can only see the tips of their dorsal fins. On a choppy sea, they look just like another wave, same colour, same height, and same variety. However, Fran chartered a 16’ wooden boat, christened it the SS Merry Open Bottom, and hired its owner, Ephraim, to be the skipper. She offered me a place on the crew, taking notes of sightings as she scanned the waves looking for that elusive fin. The other member of the crew was Bob from Holland, who was smart and kind, and usually remembered to put film in the camera.

If our days were sunny and calm, we would drift with the waves, playing hide and seek with the minkes. Other beauties of nature would amaze us – schools of dolphins playing alongside our little boat, puffins bobbing on the waves, or underwater masses of tiny white jellyfish, puffing and panting their way through the clear blue water. Rainy or windy days would find us high on the bluffs above rocky coves, waiting for the humpbacks to follow the schools of tiny silver fish that would become their lunch.

Now I live in a city, where the street in front of our house sometimes overflows with screeching tires, honking horns, and wailing sirens, and our neighbours cannot seem to tear themselves away from their lawnmowers and weed-whackers in the evenings. However, we can hop in our car and within ten minutes, be at a beach, breathing salt air and listening to seagulls, the realities of our new life mingling with the memories of the old.

It seems every day we live, we are making memories for the future.