A SPORTIC COLUMN by Bill Reid
Beelike, I was constructing shelving and wondering what to put on them, when I received a phone call from someone who wanted to present me with a plaque; specifically, a plaque in the shape of a bluenose. Beelike, I wondered whether it would stand up on my shelves, or depend from my wall. The caller, Michael Cartwright, informed me that he had been presenting bluenoses to people who accomplish noseworthy things for the past 10 years. While perusing last week’s Review, he had chanced upon my remark, quoted in Janet Clermont’s column, to the effect that I was distraught about having been in Vankleek Hill for six months without having received a plaque. He then burned to the sports page, read my bone chilling account of white water rafting on the Rouge River, and decided that I, Bill Reid, was deserving of a nose, blue hued. How could I refuse such an honour? Cartwright informed me that Rick Hansen, W.O. Mitchell, Rita McNeil, Helen Creighton, Gordon Pinsent, Maureen Forester, Don Harron and Catherine MacKinnon had all been benosed at one time or another. The next day I found myself (without the assistance of a search party) in Cartwright’s studio, a recent construction which stands on the precise location and is a precise replica of the old Henry School House that burned down in 1977. While Cartwright prepared the tripod for the ceremonial photograph, I examined the nose that was to be mine. My initial impression was that it was a clever bit of visual paronomasia, but as we talked I came to understand that the nose, like the house in which we stood, reconnects us with an historical and cultural heritage that time and chance has severed. The term “PRIVATE bluenosetc \l 1 “bluenose”" originally denoted the deep blue painted bows of Nova Scotia whaling ships. It may also have been used in reference to the blue noses of hard drinking, sea bitten fishermen, especially after they had wiped their noses on their blue sleeves. A strain of 19th century potatoes exported to the New England States came to be called Nova Scotia Bluenoses. Finally, the ship on our dime, Bluenose I, was launched from Lunenberg, Nova Scotia in 1921, and came to be regarded as one of the world’s fastest fishing vessels. Time after time. Bluenose I vanquished its rivals in international races held in Halifax Harbour. In a letter published in 1953 in the Chronicle Herald, Angus Walters, the Captain of the Bluenose, writes that when the racing was over, the Bluenose went to work and earned its keep,” but, when the war began in 1939 and I was in another business, she was tied up. Efforts were made to sell her to the provincial government because she had brought so much fame to Nova Scotia and they failed, and … no one in Lunenberg offered to take her off my hands. I had to sell her, and she was disposed of in the West Indies, to which she had taken a cargo of fish.” According to Cartwright, Bluenose II, which carries tourists about in Halifax Harbour, is a cheap imitation of the original; a seaworthy Bluenose III been projected, which could carry the name of the original on its prow with more dignity. The bluenose plaque that I have been presented with taps into and preserves our cultural heritage as a sea faring people. The bluenose on my shelf also represents something else that has been preserved: my life from the cruel rapids of the Rouge River. And in my declining years, I shall preserve my skin from the sun’s cruel rays in the cool shade of my overhanging bluenose.
