"Like a sailor it'd go with the wind"

Stewart Parrill reckons you could tell which way the wind was blowing just by looking at his father-in-law’s store.

“Oh, yeah, which ever way the wind would blow the store would lean,” the life-long Eddies Cove resident grinned.

“Like a sailor, it’d go with the wind.

“If the wind was western the store’d be leaning to the eastern ... has done for a couple years now.

“It wasn’t really hard to go, you could push it with one hand to move it.”

But there’s no lean to it anymore.

Possibly one of the most photographed subjects along Route 430, the shed had character, oodles of it in fact.

Its oblique angles, the way it seemed ready to topple over made it an unofficial tourist attraction of the Northern Peninsula.

During summer cars would be parked perilously close to the shoulder of the road, seemingly ready to topple into the ditch, hazard lights blinking in time with a photographer’s camera shutter.

“I should have gone to the tourism people and got some money to do it up,” he laughed.

“A few people have stopped as I’ve worked on it. They’d come down here and have a chat.

“A lot of people thought no one owned it. Thought it was abandoned I guess.”

Built 40 years or more ago by Gordon Coates, the shed was used to store cod after it had been dried on the rocks right along side.

“That was a long time ago now,” Mr Parrill said as wind gusts whipped the ocean into a bubbling mess, buffeting our backs as we stood looking at his handy work and that of his son Bob.

Like many things up this way, after the cod moratorium in 1992, the shed’s original function was altered from storing cod to housing ‘stuff’, some of which was last week laying outside the shed.

With most of the siding now complete, the peak roof replaced by one slanting down away from the Strait, you wouldn’t have recognized it as the same structure.

“I’ve got another window to put in yet, it’s goin’ on the back there,” he said, pointing to the far wall.

“(I’m) trying to do it with what was there. That’s why I put the roof down, I was trying to do with the materials I had there, part of the roof is now the wall.

“There was times I thought about letting it fall over. There were times I thought it would. Flat roof on it, couple more windows.”

Now that it no longer holds the shape of a parallelogram it looks smaller.

“No. It’s the same size,” he said.

“I’ve got lots-a-stuff want to put in it. It used to leak all the time, so I fixed that up as well.”

Strangely enough it wasn’t the weather he feared would relegate the shed to oblivion but human intervention.

Mr Parrill said he was forced into fixing the shed or losing it all together because of, staggeringly, people wanting to push it over.

“Someone started getting at it, beating at it, trying to push it over,” he said.

And what of its unofficial fame?

“Yep, there’s a lot of photos of this shed about the place,” he said, “a lot of photos.”

“A boy came past here the other day and said ‘you’re finished now, no one’s going to stop now and take photos’.”

“I guess he’s right you know.”

jgraney@northernpen.ca