November 1997
Shoal Point Oil
Wildcatters are drilling for oil on Shoal Point. Shoal Point on Port au Port Bay is Boswarlos' own private bakeapple marsh and a source of oil and wealth speculation since the late nineteenth century. The news is splashing all over the Newfoundland papers as speculation that started when seismic ships prowled the bay last year is now showing some signs of a practical oil industry reality.
The oil business is based on chance, luck, speculation and the application of smarts to all of the preceding. It is also based on the application of tried and true geological rules. These rules state that if certain rock formations and peculiarities of the earth's crust are present in an area then there are reasonable, though remote, chances that commercial oil reserves are there as well This is the case with the entire Port au Port Peninsula.
In the case of Shoal Point there is the unassailable reality that successful oil wells were sunk there back as far as the 1890's. It takes only a probe into the memory banks of any reasonably conscious resident or even former resident of Boswarlos to tell the world that there is oil on that there peat bog and bakeapple marsh.
I became a native of Boswarlos as of November 26 , 1953. This Boswarlos expatriate and patriot is hoping that this whole speculative business about Shoal Point goes one of two ways . The first and most preferable is that gushers are found all the way from Strawberry Head right around the tip of the point and down the far shore to Picadilly. The second way is for speculation to explode in honest, though Busang style, frenzy. In that case the whole oil industry goes crazy sinking oil wells all over Boswarlos, Aguathuna ,Felix Cove and the rest of the peninsula if the drillers care to do so.
The key is that the speculative boom will produce just as much local wealth and jobs as the real thing. If either of these two forks in the road puts an industrial park in Nat Eddy's field and a deep sea loading dock down by Teddy Harvey's old dory slip then all of we Boswarlos people will be very happy. The people of Boswarlos and the Port au Port Peninsula will be working and prosperous and mightily proud of the place.
Either way will be a perfect opportunity to get government out of the wet nurse business down on the peninsula and elsewhere on Newfoundland soil. Government can go back to having its politicians and its bureaucrats work on ways of providing services while keeping out of the way of ordinary folk and business as much as possible. That is the role that government should play. In Newfoundland it plays nursemaid and loves its job. If Shoal Point oil can put the wet nurse from St. John's and her bigger sister from Ottawa out of business and give the crypto- mammaries in Ottawa a few withdrawal pains then bring on the drilling rigs. Let the pipefitters, petroleum engineers and truck mechanics rule the day.
There are few ways to haul yourself out of the abyss of chronic poverty and unemployment. The oil business is one of these precious methods of doing a full tilt Jed Clampett. I nominate myself for the role of Jethro Bodine. Look up his Harvard transcripts if you must. Jethro chucked aside his stage name and went as Max Baer in his college days. But I do digress.
Lots of Boswarlos people have spent their working lives in places like Fort McMurray, Alberta where big oil puts out production big time and on time. Do not think for a second that the people of that small Newfoundland settlement will have any problem adapting to wealth, and twenty-four-hour-a-day jobs. Boswarlians are made of the sternest stuff and we are more than ready to seize the day.
If this all comes to be then Jethro will be asking the Boswarlos Chamber of Commerce to twin Boswarlos with Odessa, Texas. Look it up.