Response to Accusations made by Zoe Lucas
Shortly after Cruising World’s publication of my recent article on Sable Island (“Skirting the Sands of Sable”, pp. 62-67, October 2008), the magazine’s editor, John Burnham, received a letter from one Zoe Lucas, a long term resident of Sable Island and one of the important subjects and principal voices in the article. In this letter (and its prologue) she accused me of numerous counts of “sloppy and superficial journalism,” “mangled or invented facts,” and “careless and misleading reports.” Soon after the letter was mailed, Lucas continued her attack with a lengthy list of additional “errors, fabricated quotes, and misleading comments” which she published on her Sable Island website (www.greenhorsesociety.com).
I have no idea why Lucas felt constrained to make such an attack, especially as I had attempted as I wrote the article to create a portrait of her that was truthful and fair and that communicated what I understood to be the fundamental message and meaning of her work on the island. In light of her subsequent actions, however, I am left with no other choice but to refute her accusations point by point. As readers will see, her listing of transgressions does turn up two factual errors and one inaccurate quotation. As I will elaborate below, these were honest mistakes that were in no way intended to “mangle” the facts or mislead readers. I apologize both to Lucas and to my readers for allowing these errors to find their way into the published manuscript and I welcome this opportunity to correct the record.
The rest of Lucas’s accusations range in importance from silly to potentially libelous, and I refute them herewith as follows:
I. Letter to the Editor
First as to the letter to the editor at Cruising World: many of Lucas’s accusations therein are repeated in the longer website document, where I will take them up in the order that they reappear. A pair of points that do not find their way into the later document, however, have to do with certain words and phrases that she denies having spoken during our conversations. This is the type of disagreement that is the most difficult to resolve, as it pits my memory against hers, my method of careful note-taking against her “certainty” about what she would or would not say.
She denies ever saying that Sable would “be around for many more thousands of years,” even as I have recorded in my notebooks that she did indeed offer such speculation. She denies describing “a gyre turning like a huge centrifuge around the island,” even as I’ve discovered that she uses words that are tantalizingly similar in her own Green Horse Society website, where, in her section on “The Beach,” she describes “a large, persistent, and slow-moving anti-clockwise gyre, roughly centered on Sable Island”—the same “gyre,” I would argue, that we talked about with respect to the movement of the sand.
With the exception of the letter’s final point about the details surrounding the Merrimac wreck, all the rest of the letter’s accusations are to be found in more elaborate detail in a document entitled “The Media and Sable Island.” in the Green Horse Society website. I will return to the matter of the Merrimac after having dealt point by point with the accusations in this document.
II. The Media and Sable Island
1. “…the only two permanent inhabitants…” Lucas is splitting hairs here with her notion of “permanent” when she suggests that workers, scientists, and other visitors who come and go season to season and year to year should somehow be counted as “permanent residents” of Sable Island. Many other current descriptions of the island’s human population agree with my assessment that, in light of each one’s roughly thirty-year tour of duty on the island, Zoe Lucas and Gerry Forbes are indeed the island’s only two permanent residents.
2. “Gerry Forbes is the… resident agent for… the Sable Island Preservation Trust.” My sources for the statement about Gerry Forbes quoted above are to be found in Sable Island: The Strange Origins and Curious History of a Dune adrift in the Atlantic by Marq DeVilliers and Sheila Hirtle, Walker & Company, New York, 2004, p. 4, and p. 234. After reading Lucas’s letter, I contacted Rick Welsford, Executive Director of the Sable Island Preservation Trust, in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Mr Welsford explained that Forbes was indeed resident agent for the Sable Island Preservation Trust at the time DeVilliers and Hirtle wrote their book (2004). Forbes’s official role changed shortly thereafter, when the government of Canada assumed oversight and governance of Sable Island and Forbes became, as Lucas states, “an Environment Canada employee” (or as I state in the article, “the government-appointed manager of the island station”). My error is therefore one of timetable, for which I apologize to my readers.
3. “Zoe Lucas is the steward of the Sable Island horses…” Once again, Lucas is splitting hairs with her notion of “stewardship” of the horses. She is the primary enforcer of the “hands off” policy. She knows each animal on the island as an individual and is said to have given most of them names. During the initial environmental briefing given to visitors, her name is invoked repeatedly as the one who must be answered to as regards any interference with the animals. If she is not official “Steward” with a capital “S,” she certainly functions as “steward” in the generalized sense of “a person who is morally responsible for the careful use of… resources, esp. with respect to the principles or needs of a community or group: / Our responsibility as stewards of the earth’s resources/ ” (Webster’s New World Dictionary, Third College Edition).
4. “Boasting an average of 250 days per year with reported visibilities of one mile or less…” On the subject of the incidence and duration of fog on Sable Island I stand corrected. The figure of “250 days per year” is inaccurate, based as it is on an erroneous computation in which I multiplied the average number of fog-days reported for the month of July (21) by the number of months in a year (21 x 12 = 252 ). The actual number of annual fog-days on Sable is something less than this number, for as I have since become aware, the records for the spring and summer months show a comparatively high incidence of fog (peaking in July and August), whereas the records for the autumn and winter months show a comparatively low incidence of fog. Lucas’s number of 125 fog-days per year is therefore probably closer to the correct one, especially if one accepts the definition of “fog” commonly employed by Environment Canada climatologists as “an atmospheric condition which reduces visibility below 1 kilometer.” (The answer becomes somewhat more difficult to pin down when employing the definition of fog used in American Sailing Directions and Coast Pilots, in which fog is defined as a condition reducing visibility below 1 nautical mile (or approximately 2 kilometers). Under this more liberal definition, the incidence of fog at any given location would be somewhat greater and the number of fog-days per unit of time would be somewhat more.)
It should be noted here that no matter how one defines or measures the incidence of foggy days, the underlying point remains the same, i.e. that “meteorologists consider Sable Island to be one of the foggiest locations on Earth.” For some reason Lucas attempts to debunk this assertion as well, suggesting that other places in the Canadian Maritimes may be foggier. Perhaps she should look again at Environment Canada’s own reference, in its article on “The Climate of Sable Island,” to “[Sable’s] reputation as the foggiest place in the Maritimes,” an area generally acknowledged to be one of the foggiest locations on Earth.
5. “I quickly realized that he was indeed the commander of this ‘ship’…” As Lucas herself points out, I make eminently clear in the sidebar (How to Plan a Voyage to Sable Island) the central role of the Canadian Coast Guard in granting permission for any person wishing to visit the island. My description of Gerry Forbes as “commander “of a “ship” who invites you on board “entirely at his invitation and convenience” is thus by way of a metaphor—one that I propose to be entirely accurate.
The impression begins with Forbes’s clothing—the black tunic and trousers, the Sable Island logo on his cap—for it is much like the uniform that a ship’s officer might wear at sea. This impression is soon followed by Forbes’ guided tour, from the power plant to the fuel storage facilities, from the bunk rooms to the pantries, from the garages to the machinery sheds and other supply depots. As he leads you from place to place, he does indeed seem to be giving you a tour of his “ship,” a self-contained and surprisingly self-sufficient little vessel that he proudly commands. Finally, as he takes you up to the office area, you realize that you have entered a central command post, a ship’s “bridge,” if you will, filled with desks and work stations, radios and computers, and overlooking much of the rest of the station by means of a row of windows along the front. Here your dominant impression is that of being a guest on a ship of sand, just as you might be on an actual floating ship, “entirely at the invitation and convenience” of her captain…
6. “I’ll look for you back here at the guest barrack…” Lucas was not present during this conversation and therefore could not know what any of us said or did not say.
7. “I came here in the 1970’s…” It might well be that Lucas came to the island first to work with a seal research team from Dalhousie University, but this is not a subject she talked about the morning we met with her. It was her work in “terrain restoration” that she focused upon as she told us about her work on the island.
8. “With the abandonment and seeming failure…” As with many such restoration projects, the most effective repairs may often be the ones that become invisible, as would appear to be the case with “the closure and repair of old roads” which Lucas mentions here. On the summer morning when we visited with her, however, she did not tell us about mending old roads but about the years spent attempting to repair eroded dunes. She described the installation of rows of snow-fencing and the transplanting of plugs of marram grass in attempt to hold the moving sand. This project was eventually discontinued, she indicated, when it became evident that natural forces (tide, storms, wind and wave action) were far more powerful and persistent than the human attempts at thwarting them. Indeed, when my shipmates and I later walked out along “Highway One” toward the western end of the island, we saw for ourselves several places where the repaired dunes had been broached once again and the old lines of snow fencing lay broken and scattered across the sand.
9. “The danger is from us…from the draining of the lakes…” Lucas is right: she did not use the phrase “the draining of the lakes” in her discussion of the impacts of human activities on the island. The phrase erroneously made its way into the article because of a misunderstanding on my part of Lucas’s description of yet another aspect of the “terrain restoration program”: a building project involving the construction of large debris dykes along the edges of the island’s lakes and ponds for the purpose of reducing salt water washover during storms and keeping the (relatively fresh) pond water from becoming brackish. The fact is, rather than being a mechanism for draining the lakes and ponds, these debris dykes represented an attempt to maintain their integrity as sources of fresh water. “The draining of the lakes,” to the extent that it has occurred over the centuries, has been an entirely natural process caused by the breeching of dunes during storms and the inevitable movements of the sand.
10. “the abandoned lighthouse at the west end of the island.” The word “abandoned” as used here is a technical term typically employed in English language pilots, sailing directions, and nautical charts (and therefore quite familiar to the readers of magazines such as Cruising World) to designate an aid to navigation whose light has been extinguished or otherwise discontinued. In this sense, and in spite of other uses to which its physical buildings and towers may have been dedicated, the West Light on Sable Island has indeed been abandoned.
11. “Zoe’s policy of non-interference…” Please see my remarks in paragraph 3 above about Lucas’s “stewardship” of the Sable Island horses. Regardless of what agency may have originally penned the rules, it is Lucas (and not the Canadian Coast Guard) who personally embodies them and who stands as their enforcer.
12. “Gerry took us for a fast ride along the surf line…” Lucas was not present during this episode and therefore has no way of knowing what transpired. “Fast” is a relative term, of course, but the ride certainly felt fast as we rumbled along the sand watching wave after wave of seals scatter into the ocean before us, then turn and stare at the moving vehicle from their new vantage points in the breaking surf.
As to the “vast herds of grey and harbor seals,” Lucas seems once again to have purposely misconstrued the meaning of my phrase. I did not say (nor did I mean) “vast herds of grey seals” combined with “vast herds of harbor seals,” as she would have had me say . Instead, I referred to the “vast herds” in a collective sense, populating them in the following phrase with both species but without indicating what percentage of each might have been present. Another instance of splitting hairs, to be sure, but one that illustrates the lengths to which Lucas seems willing to go to pick an argument…
13. “In these larger buildings you’ll find…” Lucas was not present during this conversation and therefore has no way of knowing what was said or not said. With this brief preamble, Gerry Forbes introduced me and my shipmates to the island’s large and somewhat daunting array of scientific measuring apparatus. When he spoke of the buildings used to house the instruments, he was not referring to the structures used for accommodations and “life support” (as he had already shown us these, in any case, in an earlier tour). Rather, he was referring to various sheds and shelters used to house instrument packages (such as helium-filled radiosonde balloons deployed each day to make high altitude measurements of Earth’s upper atmosphere, troposphere, and stratosphere). During the tour, which required the better part of 45 minutes to complete, Forbes led us from structure to structure and instrument to instrument along a series of wooden boardwalks, during which time he provided a commentary far too detailed to include in a short article such as the one I was planning to write.
14. “But when they blow from the west… Sable might as well be at the end of a huge continental sewer pipe.” Lucas was not present during this conversation and therefore has no way of knowing what was said or not said.. In fact, these were not my words but Gerry Forbes’s words, who spoke them as he is quoted here. True, the notion of a “sewer pipe” does not quite work as a metaphor for atmospheric pollution, yet spoken as it was on the spur of the moment, the image was powerful and dramatic—an image that neither I nor any of my shipmates who were present that day will soon forget.
III. The Wreck of Merrimac
Two months before the Cruising World article went to press, one of the copy editors emailed me with a question about my sources for the sidebar entitled “The Wreck of Merrimac.” As I was sailing in eastern Labrador at the time and unable to access a computer, I was not able to answer her querie until some weeks later. When I did, I indicated that my sources were “secondary,” having come not from the owner or crew of the shipwrecked sailboat but from conversations with Gerry Forbes and others on Sable Island. The editor then made the erroneous assumption that these “secondary” sources included Lucas’s www.greenhorsesociety.com and referenced this website as a source in the text of the sidebar.
Cruising World has apologized to Lucas for this reference in a special Editor’s Note, published in a subsequent issue.
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