Large Fierce Mammal

Clem Hiltz died on the 17th day of April, 2008. Dying was the last thing he ever did, but in all 96 years of his accomplished life, it was the least notable. Dying doesn’t make anyone unique because sooner or later everybody is going to do it. It’s the challenges living brings, how they are met, and the degree to which the lessons learned from coping with them are absorbed by the individual to be passed on to the group, that tells the tale; and Clem’s life was second to none in telling the tale.

Growing up in Lunenburg, Nova Scotia, I can’t remember a time when I didn’t know who Clem Hiltz was, but I only came to know him personally during my six years service as Emergency Measures Coordinator for the Municipality of the District of Lunenburg, from 1988 to 1994. At the time, a mere kid in his seventies, Clem was filling the same role for the Town of Lunenburg, so we got to talk a lot.

Clem had a style of illustrating his point with a story, and with a history like his, he rarely had to step outside his own life experience to find one. My reason for bringing him up today has to do with one of his stories.

As a teenager, Clem had sailed aboard the famous schooner Bluenose out of Lunenburg, under the equally famous Captain Angus Walters. Bluenose was the cream of the Lunenburg fishing fleet, and she was built for speed. In those days, Cod was king, and the salt banking schooners raced to the banks for pride of place, deployed their crews daily in two man doreys from which they fished with baited multi-hook lines, often at their peril, until the ship’s hold was full for the race home again, with the first vessel landing its catch bringing the best price. Speed was important.

Clem told me of a moment from back in those days when, as a young man, he stood in the office of his employer. An owner of fishing schooners, the man was a vocal opponent to the new trawling methods that were just coming into vogue – techniques that involve dragging a net behind the ship that gathers everything in its path, and then sorting through the contents, keeping the fish you came for, and throwing back the carcasses of the ones you didn’t. By comparison, the hand line method used by the salt bankers permitted a fish by fish sorting of the catch, so that anything found on the line as you pulled it in that wasn’t what you were looking for could be immediately thrown back alive. Don’t get me wrong, in those days the motivation wouldn’t have been about kindness or conservation. This was business, and doing it was hard work, so fucking around for more than a few seconds with anything that didn’t get the job done simply wasn’t on. Nevertheless, the sheer fish catching efficiency represented by the trawler cast the shadow of impending extinction over the old and time honoured way of doing things.

Clem’s reason for being in his employer’s office that day is unimportant, but I recall that his seated superior was speaking, and the wide window behind him afforded an expansive view of the harbour. As he spoke there came a sound from the water – the throbbing cadence of an engine as a trawler motored into view on its way to the fishing grounds – at the sound of which the other man stopped talking mid-sentence and swivelled in his chair. He watched the vessel from the moment of its appearance to its passing from view before he swivelled back to look at Clem, pointing at the wall in the direction the vessel had gone.

“That, young man,” he said, “Is the beginning of the end.”

A man of his times with a personal fortune built on fishing for Cod, the gentleman addressing Clem no doubt spoke those words as much out of resentment at having his comfortable position in the scheme of things so easily dislodged by the upheaval represented by a sudden turn of technology as he did from any concern for the potential extinction of his prey. The current bureaucratic buzzword of “sustainable” as it’s applied to human practices of consumption would not have been part of his vocabulary. None of that stops him from being right, and from this singular observation much can, and should, be learned.