Washer Toss
Dedicated to the brother-in-law I never met, the annual tournament is a distillation of life in all its joy, sorrow, competition, and community.
It was almost midnight and the band was about to start playing its fourth long set.
A bunch of people were already gone—the last fishing boat for the mainland had left at 11 p.m.—and new audience members were still arriving.
The late crowd arrived from the wooden tents by the wharf and cottages down the island. They came down Pictou Island’s lone east-west road by way of Frankensteined pickup trucks, dusty side-by-sides, and old bicycles. I think a few people walked in from the woods. Adventurous tourists, overnighters from fishing and farming families, and Pictou Island year-rounders watched from camp chairs and crowded the grass dance floor as the Haliwood duo of Joey Taylor and Shawn Taylor (no relation) tuned up for their fifth hour of music.
What brings a person to Pictou Island, Nova Scotia? There’s no singular answer.
What brought this group of people and more to Emelyne and Matt’s cottage on Saturday? The 10th Annual Washer Toss Tournament in support of the Noah Russell Return-To-University Bursary at St. Francis Xavier University. The scholarship is in memory of Hayley’s younger brother, who died in a motor vehicle accident in 2014, two years before she and I met.
In one of those little winks from the universe, Noah and I share the same birthday.
Emelyne was Noah’s best friend and is a de facto member of Hayley’s family. Noah owned some land and an old lobster trap shack on Pictou Island that Emelyne and her husband, Matt, have turned into a beautiful cottage.
(Want to make a donation to the Noah Russell Return-To-University Bursary at StFX?
You should. Click here, fill in the “other” option, and note the name of the bursary in the comment box.)
Things got started around 1:30 p.m. when Emelyne drew names for team assignments as Matt filled in a double-elimination tournament bracket. By the time she was done calling names, there were 29 teams. With 58 competitors and even more folks there to watch, the 10th annual tourney was the biggest ever.
But wait.
What is washer toss, some of my American friends may ask. It’s a lawn game, similar in some ways to corn hole or ladder golf.
Two 15-inch by 15-inch boxes are connected by a 20-foot string. The open boxes are about four inches deep and centered in the middle of each is a pipe with a four-inch diameter. The goal of the game is to toss your three painted metal washers so they land in the box 20 feet away.
Tournament rules dictated that your team received two points if your washer landed in the box and three points if it ended up in the center pipe. There were two people on each team, and games were played to 15 points instead of the usual 21—we wanted to be done before dark. We played on six “courts” to keep things moving.
My partner carried me through our first game, then I figured it out just in time for us to beat Hayley and her partner in a 15-13 nailbiter. We were 3-0 and feeling good when we got dismantled by a pair of sharpshooting women and dropped to the losers’ bracket.
Between games, people hung out in the shade, visited with old friends, and consumed performance-enhancing substances in the form of beer and Coldstream coolers. These generally had the opposite of the intended effect, but people didn’t seem to mind. In the afternoon, a few attendees circulated through the crowd handing out egg salad, chicken salad, and cucumber sandwiches. They were cut into little triangles that lent a garden party air to the decidedly informal event. Pictou Island is not Martha’s Vineyard.
That being said, at least one politician was in attendance for the afternoon.
As the MLA for Pictou West, Marco MacLeod is one of 55 elected Members of the Legislative Assembly in Nova Scotia. The role is a combination of state representative and state senator back in Minnesota. He was good friends with Noah. At one point, I looked over and saw Marco with his hands on his knees, leaning over a guy who was sitting on the lawn lamenting a ripening sunburn.
“Yeah, sure is a hot one today,” Marco said. “I’ll see if I can find you some sunscreen.”
He disappeared for awhile after being eliminated from the tournament. I learned later that he’d rented a bicycle to tour the island and see the new roof of the community center that had received provincial funding.
There’s a sign on the wall in Marco’s office in downtown Pictou that says “All politics is local.”
It’s a cliche, sure. But even those phrases that become so overused as to be devoid of meaning began with something truthful.
It’s nice to spend time with a politician who actually lives it.
My team battled back through the losers’ bracket and even managed to play Hayley and her partner again before we ultimately fell in the consolation final to the same pair that beat us the first time. I guess they had our number.
Someone fired up the grill for a dinner of burgers, hotdogs, and sausages alongside a wide variety of salads and desserts. After the championship match and a bite to eat, people scattered to the island for a break. They went down to the wharf to check lines on boats, off to the beach for a quick swim, or back to their cottages while the band set up.
Matt had run a heavy-duty cord across the lawn to power the amplifiers and lights with a generator. Remember, everything takes extra steps on Pictou Island. Earlier in the day, he’d been ready to sail back across the Strait to retrieve a forgotten mic stand before being rescued by a Pictou Islander who lent one that she had in her cottage.
Guitar player and vocalist Joey Taylor had played hockey with Noah when they were youngsters. The Haliwood duo and their entourage were in it for the long haul, having arrived on the 11 a.m. boat and pitched tents for their overnight stay—let’s be honest, it ended up being more of a early-morning nap—in the yard behind the cottage. The band was part of the fun all day, from playing in the tournament to taking song requests all night.
A few joyful toddlers on the brink of exhaustion got the dancing started when the band opened with a cover of a Nova Scotia anthem, “The Road to Guysborough.” Soon after, Hayley’s washer toss partner was called to the stage to provide vocals for “Fast Car,” a favorite of Emelyne and Matt’s older daughter.
After the young ones were coaxed away to a nearby cottage with the promise of a movie and a slumber party, the party got going for real.
The dancers spanned a half century and most of the continent. High-school dropouts and PhDs spun each other through the grass while others sang and clapped along from lawn chairs around the perimeter. A couple had a quiet argument off to the side at the edge of the darkness. Matt made the rounds to make sure everyone was having a good time. A nurse grabbed her fisherman husband and pulled him onto the dance floor. He resisted for a moment before giving in to the relentless driving beat that carried through the pines and echoed across the water. I stood at the back and took it all in with an arm around Hayley.
As 11 p.m. approached, I rode down to the wharf and gave her a kiss goodnight. She was returning to the mainland to spend the night with our dog, Duke, who is bouncing back nicely from his first knee surgery. Looking at the crowded lobster boat, it was clear that washer toss had gotten the best of a few people. Others looked like they were game to continue the revelry in Caribou or wherever they landed next.
When the band started again around midnight, they turned the dial to 11 and the crowd responded by calling for more. Everyone who was still there was staying on the island for the night or, at the very least, had a solid plan in case they needed to yank the ejection handle and return to the mainland.
At some point, I ended up talking with Emelyne. She’d returned from the other cottage where she’d finally gotten her younger daughter to fall asleep.
She’d organized trips across the Strait for literal boatloads of people and managed to feed a hundred hungry guests while juggling a nursing infant throughout the day. Emelyne has good people around her, but she really can do it all.
The band started playing “Yellow.”
“Coldplay’s been in the news,” she deadpanned. Emelyne’s funny, too.
We talked about how stressful and tiring and crazy and perfect the whole day had been. She pointed out the location of the first aid kit in case anyone needed anything, then disappeared into the night to be with her girls.
I found myself standing next to Rob, one of the 2025 washer toss champions. A year-round Pictou Islander who works as a carpenter and fixer of those things that have been broken, Rob’s been trying to convince me to volunteer as a member of the Pictou Island Fire Department next summer. Says it’ll look good if I eventually apply for Canadian citizenship. I found myself nodding along to a spiel I’d heard before. It sounds a little better every time.
Rob noticed a bunch of empty cans and bottles on a nearby picnic table.
“Shit, come to this great party and nobody helps clean up,” he said. I grabbed a recycling can and helped him straighten things out.
“Back home they think I’m a fuckup, just some dumb asshole,” a different guy had told me earlier. “Up here I’m like an upstanding citizen or something. People rely on me. I get to help, and they help me too.”
So what does bring a person to Pictou Island? Lots of things, I guess.
Marriage, in my case. Saltwater and sand. The off-grid lifestyle. Dodging the draft. Impressing a girl. The peace and quiet (nocturnal concerts notwithstanding). Homesteading. Family. Community. Acceptance. Freedom.
The stars were endless in the sky over Emelyne and Matt’s cottage, over Pictou Island and the Northumberland Strait, over us all. The Big Dipper was framed perfectly by the pines that stood guard at the edge of the lawn.
The band started playing “Creep” by Radiohead. The late-night audience leaned in, straining to hear every word, consuming every note of that slow-burn first verse.
When the chorus hit, the crowd exploded.
“But I’m a creep. I’m a weirdo. What the hell am I doing here? I don’t belong here.”
They were screaming along with the band at full volume, drowning out the vocalists on the stage. They do belong here, I thought. Maybe I do too.
“I don’t care if it hurts. I want to have control. I want a perfect body. I want a perfect soul.”
I get it. I wish I was special. I think we all do.
The pressure that had been building all evening had been released safely, thank goodness, in that cathartic howling chorus. Parties on Pictou Island are somehow both the most caring that I’ve ever seen and the closest at all times to spinning out of control.
The band played a few more songs as people slowly drifted off into the night.
Matt was exhausted. It had been two days of frantic preparation followed by a 20-hour day that somehow went off without a hitch—at least as far as the guests knew.
I thanked him again. For everything.
Then I walked slowly down the lane to Hayley’s family cottage through a canyon of evergreens silhouetted against the starlight and a three-quarter moon, patted my mother-in-law’s dogs, and climbed the stairs to bed.
Life is a beautiful, wild, and precious thing. How lucky and cursed are we to get to experience all of it?
And that, my friends, is the washer toss tournament.
This one made me smile, laugh out loud, and cry, JJ! Thank you. 🙏
I'm looking forward to reading of your introduction to volunteer fire fighting.