By 1900, the herring were running so thick through the Bay of Islands that Woods Island stopped being a hard place to scrape a living and started being a good one.
Herring had always been in these waters, but something shifted around the turn of the century — bigger runs, more boats working them, more markets to sell into. A fishery that had once fed a handful of families through the winter was suddenly producing more than any one household could use. That surplus is what built the rest of this chapter. Where there's more fish than one family needs, there's trade. Where there's trade, there's reason for more families to come. And they did.
The island grew into something it had never quite been before: a real, self-contained world. At its height, close to five hundred people called Woods Island home — on a piece of rock and spruce barely two thousand acres across, in the middle of a bay, with no road connecting it to anywhere. Five hundred people needed more than stages and flakes. They needed a school, and they got one. They needed somewhere to bury their dead, marry their children, and mark the turning of the year, and they got that too — a Roman Catholic church serving the majority of the island, a smaller Church of England congregation alongside it, both doing the quiet work of holding a community together. Stores went up along the shore to sell what the fishing boats couldn't produce themselves. By 1953, it was formal enough, permanent enough, established enough to be incorporated outright as its own community — a status that doesn't get handed to a place that isn't really there anymore.
Think about what that actually looked like on an ordinary summer morning. Boats going out before light. Nets and stages full of herring by mid-morning, the smell of it everywhere, more than anyone could dry or salt alone, so neighbours worked neighbours' catches too. Children walking to a one-room school instead of learning the water straight off a wharf. Two churches ringing whatever bells they had, on whatever schedule their own congregations kept. A store where you could buy something you hadn't grown, caught, or built yourself — a small, ordinary miracle for a place this remote. Irish and Celtic voices threaded through all of it, carried over from families who'd crossed generations earlier and never stopped sounding like where they came from.
It was, by any honest measure, a good life. Hard, still — nothing about an island with no road off it is ever not hard — but full. Full of people, full of noise, full of the kind of permanence that makes a family stop asking whether they'll stay and start asking what they'll build next.
None of them had any reason to think it wouldn't last.
This is the part of the story we'd choose to live in, if we got to choose. A place busy enough, full enough, alive enough that nobody staying there could have imagined it any other way. We didn't get to keep it. We got to remember it, and to put it on a shirt so it doesn't stop mattering.