Man on the Ice

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Saunders, Rex, 1942-

Man on the ice: the Rex Saunders story / Rex Saunders.

Electronic monograph issued in multiple formats.

Also issued in print format.

ISBN 978-1-77117-037-6 (EPUB).--ISBN 978-1-77117-038-3 (Kindle).--

ISBN 978-1-77117-039-0 (PDF)

1. Saunders, Rex, 1942-. 2. Shipwreck survival--North Atlantic
Ocean. 3. Survival at sea--North Atlantic Ocean. 4. Sealers
(Persons)--Newfoundland and Labrador--Biography. 5. Northern Peninsula
(N. L.)--Biography. I. Title.

G530.S39 2012       910.9163’4       C2012-903293-X

© 2012 by Rex Saunders

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copyright hereon may be reproduced or used in any form or by any means—graphic,
electronic or mechanical—without the written permission of the publisher. Any
request for photocopying, recording, taping, or information storage and
retrieval systems of any part of this book shall be directed toAccess Copyright,
The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency, 1 Yonge Street, Suite 800, Toronto, ON
M5E 1E5. This applies to classroom use as well.

Cover Design: Adam Freake

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We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the
Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP) for our publishing
activities; the Canada Council for the Arts which last year invested $24.3
million in writing and publishing throughout Canada; the Government of
Newfoundland and Labrador, Department of Tourism, Culture and Recreation.

I AM SIXTY-NINE YEARS
old, and I will be seventy on
December 8 of this year. I was born in the small town of St. Leonard’s, now
known as St. Lunaire, in Newfoundland, in 1942, to Fred and Olive Saunders, and
I am the second-eldest of ten children, my brother Herb being the oldest,
followed by me, Mary, twin sisters Gladys and Isabella, Ezra, Sherwin, Alma,
Wade, Maxine, and Glenys.

When I was about two years of age, my father moved our family to a nearby town
called Main Brook, White Bay,
where he worked for a woods company
called Bowaters during the fall and winter seasons. I remember starting school
and being taught by my very first teacher, Miss Jean Boyd. Dad would live in camp
with his fellow woodsmen during the weekdays and come home on the weekends. We
would return to St. Lunaire during the summer months to fish for cod and make our
living off the sea.

When we became of age, about twelve and thirteen years old, while our dad was
away at work my brother Herb and I would often venture into the woods ourselves
to collect firewood and bring it home to keep our family warm during the very
cold winters. We made sure we kept a steady fire in the house, our water barrel
full, and our five dogs taken care of.

I have many memories of my childhood, especially the trouble Herb and I would
often get ourselves into. I remember one specific time that still makes me laugh.
Myself, my brother Herb, and our friends Ray and Roy Ollerhead, who were also
brothers, had stolen some gunpowder from Freeman Green’s motorboat. We filled a
rum bottle half full with the gunpowder and wondered what would happen if we lit
a match to it. We figured we had better do a test run first, so we put a little
gunpowder on an old chopping block and lit it with a match. It was fun for us to
watch that bit of fire and black smoke, so we
thought if we did
the same with the rum bottle, it would be a little more exciting. We dug a hole
in the floor of the old wood house. Actually, there wasn’t really a floor, just
the bare ground. We put the rum bottle down the hole half-filled with gunpowder,
leaving just enough room for the neck of the bottle to stick out of the ground.
We stuffed a few wood chips and mud around the bottle and then stood there
looking at one another. Who was going to be the one to light the match?

Of course, I was known to be a little brazen, even a little “evil,” if you
asked my mother, but I liked to refer to myself as the bravest, so Herb, Ray,
and Roy all crowded together in the doorway as I lit the match and poked it down
the neck of that rum bottle. And that’s all I remembered until the smoke had
cleared. I looked around and saw that the wood house I was standing in now had
only two supporting walls instead of four. I think the whole community came out
to see. The wool cap I was wearing was shrivelled and burned, my face was
covered in cuts and scrapes, and I had somehow lost my eyebrows. Now that was an
exciting day for the small town of Main Brook!

However, the excitement quickly shifted when my dad returned home from the
woods and learned what I had done. I don’t think I was able to sit on my bottom
for a week after it had met the hand of my dad! Now, I know
what
you may be thinking, but I don’t consider my father to be hurtful or abusive in
character. In my upbringing, a stern punishment was meant to teach me a lesson,
and I truly felt loved and respected by both my parents.

My mother and father were Christian people and diligently attended a little
Pentecostal church with a congregation of about thirty-five people. I remember
being there with them as a young boy, Sunday after Sunday.

On one particular Sunday morning, I was sitting there with Mom and Dad, staring
out the window at six goats. Now, that brave character I spoke of earlier was
definitely getting some ideas at that moment. I sneaked out the back to carry out
my plan. The church was built upon wooden shores, about three or four feet off
the ground. It was boarded around and contained a small hatch used to store wood
for the building’s wood stove. I grabbed two fistfuls of grass, threw it in the
hatch, and herded the six goats underneath the church. I quickly closed the
hatch while the goats ran around aimlessly, hitting their horns and heads on the
bottom of the church floor. That was probably the most noise that little church
had ever heard, and I wasn’t about to stay around when someone came out to open
up the hatch and let the goats free.

I was at home when my parents arrived following the morning service. My dad
walked in the door and looked
straight at me and said, “You
barred them goats under the church, didn’t you?”

I denied it, of course, and, well, my behind had another brief meeting with
Dad’s belt. As a young boy, attending church Sunday after Sunday wasn’t the most
fun activity I could think of, so I found other ways to amuse myself.

On another Sunday afternoon, as I sat next to Mom and Dad, watching the pastor
prepare for his sermon, I decided again to sneak out, trying not to let anyone
notice. I walked around the building as I planned to go home, and I came across
a stick about five feet long. I could hear that the pastor had begun preaching,
and the whole congregation was silent. I dragged the stick down across the
clapboard of the church, just behind where the pastor was standing. BAM! BAM!
BAM!

It sounded awfully loud inside that little church, and I’m sure the whole
congregation, including the pastor, had no idea what had hit them. As usual,
when Dad came home he gave me that very same look.

“What did I do now?” I asked, attempting to sound innocent.

“You know what you did,” he replied.

On my last attempt at denial, I responded, “No, I didn’t do anything.”

With that, he looked at me and said, “Well, I’m still gonna give
you a trimmin’ ’cause you probably did something that I don’t know about
anyway!”

By now my behind was used to a few smacks from the belt, and this one didn’t
even hurt.

My final tale of my many church adventures takes place in a small Sunday school
class. Aunt Mary Simms was my Sunday school teacher. She had a finger missing on
one of her hands. Aunt Mary was telling us a story from the Bible about the
giant Goliath and David with his slingshot. She began to sing a song, “Only a
boy named David, only a rippling brook; Only a boy named David, but five little
stones he took . . .” She held up her hand of four fingers in action to the “five
little stones,” and I was thrown out of Sunday school for pointing out the
difference. I had to face Dad and his belt again. It didn’t hurt, though. I
think I was shaping into something tough for what was to come later in my
life.

Dad had a small sawmill where he would often take my brother Herb to help saw
the logs. Every time I would go into the sawmill house while they were busy at
work, he would yell at me and tell me to get out; he must have thought I was a
pest or something. One day, while Dad and Herb were sawing logs, I managed to
sneak in without them noticing. Dad had an old five- or six Acadia make-
and-break engine, not very useful for sawing logs, but it was
the best they had during that time. I remember turning the shut-off valve in the
gas tank. It wasn’t long before the old engine started to sputter and backfire,
and then it stopped. I watched Dad pull the rubber hose off connecting the gas
line to the carburetor and suck on the end in an attempt to siphon what he
thought was dirt clogging the hose. I then quickly turned the tap back on, and,
well, Dad got a mouthful and was gassy for the rest of the day! He never did find
out what had really happened.

Mom could bake beans like no one else. Her baked beans were so good we just
couldn’t get enough of them. I remember watching my mom open the oven door one
Sunday morning and pull out a beautiful pot of baked beans, placing them on top
of the stove.
They look so good, nice and brown, layered with strips of salt
pork
, I thought to myself. Now, before Sunday breakfast, we always said
a family prayer. We would all gather around in the kitchen: myself, Herb, Mary,
and Ez. Gladys and Isabelle, my twin sisters, were just infants.

Mom and Dad would alternate reading the Bible and saying a prayer. On this
particular Sunday it was Mom’s turn to pray. We all bowed our heads and knelt
before our chairs and benches while Mom began her prayer. I crawled over to the
pot of beans and grabbed a nice piece of pork.
Just as I was
about to devour that delicious piece of meat,
whoppo!

I felt the back of my dad’s hand across the back of my head. It didn’t hurt,
but I dropped the pork, and I had to wait until our prayers were done before we
all enjoyed baked beans and fresh homemade bread.

During that time, there were only four families of the Saunders name in Main
Brook. There was Sid Saunders and his family, and Pad Saunders and his family.
There was my family, and Uncle Aubrey Saunders, who was married to Jessie, who I
can barely remember, as they had both died when I was quite young. Together they
had three sons: Bill the eldest, George—both boys were born with developmental
disabilities—and the youngest was Rube. I remember Rube Saunders was responsible
for taking care of his brothers, Bill and George. Bill wasn’t much like George.
He was known to be the calmer of the two, and George would often be found
everywhere around town when he was supposed to be at home. It seemed that
everyone in our community had taken a special liking to Bill.

George was different. He needed to have more attention most of the time, and
when Rube wanted to go out with his own friends, he would often bring George to
our house. George was the kind of fellow, if he wanted
something
and couldn’t have it, he would fake a convulsion. We used to call it “the fits,”
now referred to as a seizure in medical terms.

One day when Rube left George with us, my brother Herb and I let George hammer
nails into a large log of firewood using my dad’s hammer. We all took turns
hammering four or five nails into the wood, then passing off the hammer to one
another. When it was George’s turn, he wouldn’t give up the hammer to either
Herb or me. I recall grabbing the hammer from George. He became upset, threw
himself on the floor, and began to kick his legs and waved his arms around. My
mom said, “You had better give that hammer back to George ’cause he might have a
fit.”

Just as the words came out of her mouth, George acted out a convulsion. Mom and
Herb grabbed hold of his arms and legs and lifted George up onto a daybed. I
threw the hammer onto the pillowcase as Mom and Herb were placing him on the
bed. He hit his head on the hammer and jumped up, rubbing the spot that was hit,
and walking around the house cursing and swearing. Mom got mad at me, but I knew
George pretty well, and that proved that he wasn’t having a fit. That was the
last time George ever had a “convulsion” at our house.

Shortly after that incident with George, our small town
of Main
Brook experienced a terrible tragedy. The coastal boats used to bring freight to
the local merchants. There were only three merchants in Main Brook at that time:
Mr. Pad Saunders, Mr. Joe Cooper, and Mr. Don Hillier.

During one specific delivery, the
Northern Ranger
arrived in the bay, but
it could only reach in to about three miles from shore due to the frozen waters.
The men with horses and dog teams headed out onto the ice to haul the freight in
manually. In those days, everyone in town would help with the freight. George
knew about the coastal boat being stuck out in the bay, and somehow he got away
from home on his own and went looking for the boat. It was late in the evening,
dark was beginning to fall, and the boat had already left. George was lost and
it didn’t take long for the news to get around our community.

Everyone was on the lookout, with gas lanterns, flashlights, and dog teams. The
weather began to get stormy, it started to snow and drift, and it was very cold.
George wasn’t found until late the next evening. He was partially covered in the
drifted snow. His uncle Reuben Pilgrim found him, but it was too late for
George. He had frozen to death. The poor fellow was only sixteen years old. It
was a very sad day in Main Brook. With a population of less than 300 people,
everyone knew one another, and George was greatly missed by our community.

One more detail about George: he was a very smart fellow. I
remember a time when George went to Mr. Cooper’s store and somehow managed to
get behind the counter and steal two apples, one in each hand. Mr. Cooper
grabbed hold of George’s arm in an attempt to get his apples back, but George
was a bit too strong for him. He finally got an apple to his mouth and took a big
bite. Mr. Cooper let go and grabbed his other arm, but George got that apple up
to his mouth and took a bite of that one, too. So away goes George with two
apples!