Beyond the Six String Nation #60: Thinking of PEI
A devastating harvest
I travelled to Genevieve Labobe-Phillips’ little house on Lennox Island, PEI on an early spring day in 2006 - accompanied by videographer Geoff Siskind and PEI songwriting legend Lennie Gallant to retrieve the oyster shucking knife belonging to the late oyster shucking champion Joe Labobe that had been pledged to the project by his family. Although she passed away in 2009, I think of Genevieve all the time because of that video we shot with her reminiscing about Joe and his oyster prowess.
We went back to nearby Tyne Valley later that summer – once Voyageur had been completed and made its debut – to set up our portrait station at the arena during the Canadian Oyster Shucking Championships held there every year, with teams from oyster bars across the country coming to compete. Teams from Toronto we photographed included Starfish, Oyster Boy and Rodney’s Oyster House. It was PEI-native, the late Rodney Clarke, who’d steered me in the direction of Joe to begin with. Best of all, though, was getting to do portraits with Genevieve and her children and grandchildren and festival organizers Gary and Anna Mackay and so many folks from the community and beyond. We felt right at home and it was a real celebration.
Now, I happen to love oysters – as did everyone else on the Six String Nation team (Doug, Sarah, Gabriel - joined later by Andrea, Gabriel 2 and Sally) – so we felt very fortunate to be set up right next to the booth run by the PEI AquaCulture Council. They were shucking free oysters throughout the event so we partook frequently. PLUS, after each competition on the nearby stage, volunteers would take the freshly shucked oysters from each heat and circulate through the arena floor distributing the spoils. We figured we might have eaten several dozen oysters each over the course of a day. It was paradise for ostreaphiles like us! We were saddened to hear when Genevieve died and when her daughter Jaqueline died in 2015 and when the arena burned down in 2019. I have kept up with daughter Mary and son Leslie as well as Gary and Anna and we were honoured when daughter Sandy got married a couple of years ago and they played David Leask’s “The Legend of Joe Labobe” at the wedding.
There will be no competition at the newly built arena this year. Nor next year. Nor probably the year after that. And I couldn’t go down to Rodney’s or anywhere else and order up a platter of Malpeques or Raspberry Points or Pink Moons – or oysters from pretty much anywhere else in Atlantic Canada right now. Oyster farmers are reporting 100% mortality rates after hauling in their cages at the end of winter to find that two highly infectious diseases had swept through the populations: MRX and Derma. The diseases are harmless to humans but fatal to the oysters.
While income replacement programs have been announced by the government the loss to the community is incalculable and not so easily replaced. Fishermen are becoming truckers or whatever else they can do for work until the oysters bounce back (they will bounce back with a stronger resistance to these particular strains but oysters have no resistance memory so every new infection is like the first one).
So, how can we all help?
I urge you to eat PEI mussels and PEI lobsters and PEI cheese and PEI potatoes and - even better - go to PEI this summer. It’s a wonderful place for a made-in-Canada holiday, easy to get around and full of charming sites - including 5 places with roots in Voyageur: the Doucet House in North Rustico, Lucy Maud Montgomery’s grandparents’ house in Cavendish, Tyler Aspin’s family’s B&B in Pinette, J.R.’s Bar in Charlottetown (no longer there but right by the historic train station downtown!) and of course the beautiful Tyne Valley and Lennox Island First Nation. I know they’d all love to see you and welcome you with bounty other than oysters.