Our house began its life about 50 years or so ago when a native young fella built him a fish house on the shore of Sands Cove, right on the banking. Not a very large fish house, about 16 feet long and 12 feet wide, sufficient for building wooden traps and rigging fishing gear. By and by, the old man needed a fish house and bought it from him to build his own wooden traps and rig fishing gear in there.
Fish houses have a particularly pleasing ambiance, at least to fishermen, and to me. They smell good from all that sawing of wood and from the smoke of the wood stove burning up the scraps. There’s a faint fishy smell from used warps, the aroma of the sea. There are pot buoys hanging from the rafters in various stages of construction or repair, colorful and pleasing to the eye. Lots of rope is piled around and maybe there’s some trawl tubs filled with line and hooks.
Fish houses are comfortable retreats, if you’re not too fussy about amenities — a place to escape from the family when the uproar drives you out, or to sit around with cronies who drop by to talk fish talk. After years of this usage, the building itself becomes imbued with the essence of the fishing business.
One day about 25 years ago, the old man and I needed a place to live. We were down and out then — not a pot to piss in or a window to throw it out of. We had a pickup truck (old) and the clothes on our backs. We were also young then, full of energy and hope, ridiculous as that may sound under the circumstances.
So we moved into the fish house. We cleaned it out, piling the gear outside, built a bunk in one corner, got a table and some chairs, got a gas and coal stove from somewhere. We made a sink in the workbench, using the rest for counter space. Windows over the bench looking out over the cove gave us a spectacular view. Some days we could look down into the ocean at high tide, watching eider or bufflehead ducks diving for green crabs. We had no running water so it was lug a couple of five-gallon buckets in the house every day, use the outhouse for the necessities, and wash in the sun shower we rigged outside. The knick-knacks were odds and ends of fishing gear hanging around. In no time we felt right at home.
We hadn’t lived in the fish house very long before we decided we needed just a little more room. That 16- by 12-foot space didn’t take much to fill up. Winter was coming and the outside shower was going to freeze, as would we trying to use it. We built on a 12-foot addition, one half of that for a sauna and the other half bunks for the boys.
A sauna is the perfect solution for bathing when you don’t have running water. Put a woodstove (small) in a “closet,” a little cement on the floor with a drain, a couple of benches (preferably cedar), two clean five-gallon buckets for water and there you have it. Get a good fire going in the stove, get the temperature up to 180 or even 200 degrees, get in there and sweat, scrub up with a stiff brush and plenty of soap, and you’ll come out refreshed, and clean as a whistle.
Thus we lived in the fish house, warm and comfortable all winter. Plenty of time to think about how we could make some money to live on. We had some new ideas and next thing we knew we were running a clambake out of there in the spring. Simple shore dinners — crab, clams, lobsters — served on tables and benches we built, scattered around the shore. That worked fairly well until it really caught on and then the hassles started coming.
We couldn’t do much when it blew a gale and poured down rain, with outdoor seating. That, however, did not deter some people knocking on the door demanding clambakes. “It’s raining,” we’d say. “That’s OK, we will wear our oil gear,” some boaters would say. So we cooked, and they ate, in the rain.
Another such day, three people knocked on our door. I tried to turn them away, but they moaned pitifully that they had to go back to New York tomorrow, so couldn’t they please come in and get fed. In they came, two of them sitting on our bunk on one side of the table and the third person sitting on a milk crate on the other side of the table. I cooked for them. Money is money.
We became high profile with all the comings and goings in the fish house. The townspeople started getting bristly about it. There are rules about living on the shore in fish houses. You’re not supposed to do it. Who were we to live in such a choice location when everyone else couldn’t? Hmmm…this won’t do. It’s not politic to rile up everybody in a small community on a fairly remote island, if you want to live in peace.
We decided negotiation would be better than war. The terms were, “you can live there during the day, but can’t sleep there.” That didn’t make much sense, but we obeyed and took a room with the old man’s grandparents who lived next door, for sleeping. That served far longer than we liked, but we started lamenting our privacy after a while and started figuring out what we could do about it.
What we did about it was move the fish house to the old man’s woodlot. Hired a guy with a backhoe, got the fish house up on skids, dragged it right through town one day at noon and put it on the woodlot about 50 feet from the road in the midst of the trees, blowdowns and rocks. There. No one can complain about that. Nor did they. We didn’t need any choice location anyway — we just needed a place to live. Now we had it.
That’s how our house began. With a 50-year-old fish house set down in the woods. We still had to lug water from our well, and still have an outhouse, but we had plenty of privacy and peace. We were soon to expand (another story) but the fish house is still here and we still live in it. q
Rusty Warren lives on Vinalhaven.