Never mind that the unions were necessary to fight working conditions so poor as to be hardly conceivable. Let’s celebrate for a moment the heyday of the labor movement, in the first decade of the 20th century, when bakers and union advocates successfully struck for shorter hours and better working conditions.

Among the unions that rose victorious was the Local 338 Bagel Bakers union, a part of the much broader Bakery and Confectionery Workers International Union of America. More a guild than a traditional union, the Local 338 dominated the New York bagel market through the mid 1960s. Everything changed with the development of reliable bagel-making machines, and the union faded into irrelevance. But just think about what it must have been like before that happened. Imagine the picket lines outside of the non-union Bagel Boys shop in Brooklyn. Imagine the hullabaloo caused when bagels from an out-of-state bakery started showing up in shops and markets. Just imagine.

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The government was Joseph R Smallwood’s at the time, and the Wildlife Division had virtual free reign, unfettered by paperwork, and limited only by its small budget. Even that was not a huge obstacle. When the division needed a new Microtome sectioning instrument they got in touch with Al Oeming’s Game Farm in Alberta and bartered a caribou for the machine. That was just how you did things in the ‘trading days.’

That kind of frontier approach was evident in the way environmental science was conducted, too. One project aimed to establish the home range of the Island’s moose. So they went out with tranquilizer guns and began darting, tagging, and affixing targets and cowbells to moose found walking down the trail. The cowbells made it easy to find the moose in the woods, and targets made it easy to identify individual animals.

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Consider that before air travel was passé enough to undertake in sweatpants, looking down on a landscape was something the average person could only accomplish by climbing something really tall. Maps, with their imagined ‘god’s eye view,’ were just that: guesses as to what our continents looked like from a raised perspective.

And even in the glorious jetsetting heyday, satellite images were still very much the territory of the military. And really, outside of amateur cartographers and conspiracy theorists, what civilians actually lamented the dearth of satellite photos?

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Newfoundland is often called simply “the rock,” and though the metaphor is unintended, it’s a hard place, too. More than anything, things are changing. With all the wealth creation of the last decade, it’s easy to forget that many island communities didn’t get power lines until the ’60s. On the west coast, dog sleds were used into the ’70s as a primary mode of wintertime transportation. There’s a tangible sense of nostalgia for simpler times, never mind that they were lean times.

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“Clarence Riggs (“Clar” to his friends and “Sir” to me) has had a place up on the Terra Nova River since 1960. Born in Burin, Newfoundland, he moved to Glovertown, jtmarust north of Terra Nova National Park, some years before confederation, before there was a “national” anything in Newfoundland.

The original cabin, a field office bought from a completed government building project, burned down in the late 80s. The cabin we visited one grey Saturday in June was the new one. It’s just a kitchen, split bunk rooms and a porch with “Fish ’n’ Fur” written on a sign hung upside down. But you can tell that it has been home to weeks and weeks of good summer, year after year.

The walls are lined with plaques poking fun at fishermen—the kind they sell in rural gas stations. “Old fishermen never die,” said one, “they just can’t raise their fishing pole!” On another, with what looked very much like a sketch of the cabin: “There is no place anything like this place, anywhere near this place, so this must be the place.”

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My wife and I thank each other often. Thank you for doing the dishes, for going to the grocery store, for making tea. Thank you for the kisses, thanks for a nice weekend. I have never been as thankful, and I don’t really know why. Perhaps this will fade—we are, after all, not quite a year married. But it could also be that there’s something bigger at stake. I wonder if the near-constant thanks are way to keep the balance books close to zero—if we are always shoring up our thanks, always saying you’re welcome, then neither of us will ever end up with liabilities skewed way beyond our assets. We’ll be even, so we’ll be happy.

There are days when I’m not as grateful, or attentive, as I should be. Days when I sit at my computer for “just five more minutes” for more than an hour running. Days when I sit and work instead of getting up to say a real goodbye as she heads out to work. But luckily, our debt ceiling sits right around 16 hours. Which is to say: it’s hard to go to sleep without settling up accounts. I have yet to model the number of apologies that equal a thank you, but I’m sure it would be possible with the proper data.

So far, though, we’ve been good. Neither of us has gone into the red for more than a day or two, and, children of America, we both understand the value of good credit. I can pay back apologies over time, if it comes down to that. Emily knows I’m good for it. Just as long as these things don’t get out of hand.
Because the goal is still where it was before, balancing those books in the name of marital bliss. Never mind that it’s silly to thank your partner for kisses. It does the trick.

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The authors of Professor Mommy (Link) — one of which happens to be my own mother — needed a website to promote their new book. The wanted it to be simple, content focused, and to include conversation as a key aspect of communication.

This book is autobiography amended, expanded and explicated, replete with buckskin, bar fights and encounters with boat thieves. But Di Silvestro transforms the pulp of the classic Western adventure into a richly textured document that helps the reader understand the deep respect afforded to Roosevelt — evidenced by the fact that in the spring of ’85, when he disembarked from the train in Medora, N.D., still wearing his Eastern “city garb,” nobody shot the derby hat off his head.

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A simple WordPress design (Link) to house information and videos for a continuing project to create an oral folk epic in Newfoundland.

Designed without colors to avoid party connection, this was a site (Link) built to highlight growing inequality in Newfoundland and Labrador.