Rough and Plenty

As a commercial fisher in Nova Scotia in the early 1990s, Raymond Rogers experienced the collapse of Canada’s East Coast fishery first-hand. Afterward, while preparing to leave the province to find work elsewhere, Rogers noticed a lone gravestone across the road from his home in Shelburne County that commemorates the life of Donald McDonald, a crofter from the Isle of Lewis in Scotland, who “departed this life” in 1881. Rogers wondered if there might be a connection between the necessity of his