 Until he moved to neighboring Deer Island a couple years ago, Asa Brown, at ninety-three, was Campobello's oldest resident. He is still its "most renowned talker, but on the page his words are like the lyrics of a song without the music. Like all the islanders, his speech depends to an extraordinary degree on timing, intonation, facial expression, gesture and, most subtly of all, on implication: what is said is often less meaningful than what is deliberately left unsaid."
 Several other people I interviewed mentioned Asa and had stories to tell about him. Bud Mitchell recalled that "The tourists come here talkin' to Ace one time and asked him how old he was. 'Well,' he says, 'I'm eighty-five.' They said, 'What do you owe it to fer living so long?' Well, Ace says, 'I'll tell ya. I never smoked 'til I was nine year old. An I never touched alcohol in any way, shape nor form 'til I was twelve. An I been smokin' and drinkin' ever since."
Mazie Mathews says that after Asa's wife died, his sons asked him to go live with them on Deer Island, but Asa told them, "I've set in this chair for ninety years. I'm gonna sit here the rest of the time." However, he finally gave in to their requests, but hopefully, for the rest of us, he will carry on the tradition of his story telling.
Asa's recollections blend easily with his acute observations on human nature: "My grandfather, well, he was a fisherman; he was a boat-builder, a sail-maker, he was a jack-of-all trades, he could do any damn thing. He used to make masts for all the boats. They used to bring the big things here from Grand Manan and upshore for him to make masts for them boats, and he made sails for 'em. Lots of 'em. They had a building right down here with a fish house underneath and upstairs he built boats. They used to build dories and dinghies, or any damn thing anybody wanted, and he used to go around those years caulking vessels. He was all the time doing something. He never lost no time.
"You might say, and you know it has to be, everybody on this island, and the first of 'em, they're all foreigners, wasn't they? They didn't come from here cause there was no one here to have them, was there? They come from some other country. My grandfather, my mother's father, come from Ireland. And my other grandfather, he come up on the St. John River. I don't know, I forget just why. Anyway, he come here in a log canoe. Come with his father. And they're all the same.
"I think the tourists are a wonderful thing. Course, some people don't. I'll tell you the reason they don't. Now this world, and you know just as well as I do, this world is nothin' but money. It don't make a damn bit of difference how you get it or where you get it.
"There's people here don't get no money out of the tourists. They say, 'Them damn things takin' all the highway road. You come down on one of the breakwaters. The breakwater's full of cars. Them damn things fishin'. Never spend a cent.' While there's other people who's gettin' a lot of money out of 'em, and they say it's lovely. And that's just what I tell 'em. I say, 'You're jealous. Yes, you're only jealous because you ain't gettin' no money out of 'em.' And it's the truth.
"Money is the ruination of this world; in one sense of the word. Look at people today. Goddamn it, they'd murder me or you or anyone to take a chance; no difference whether you got any money or not. They'd murder you to search you. See if you did have any money. And if you haven't got no money out amongst that crowd of people you ain't noticed very much are you? No.
"And you don't have very much to say. This here running the country. They say, 'Well, why don't you say something?' What the hell would be the good of me to say how the country was run? Well, they'd laugh at you, say, 'Well, that damn, ignorant fool up there doesn't know what he's talkin' about.'
"It's just like these fish inspectors. I've forgotten more puttin' my boots on than any one of them knows about fish. They don't know no more about takin' care of a fish than I would about running an airplane. Not a damn bit more.
"I see one here last summer. Hired as a government inspector. Well, she was a girl. She was talkin' to me down on the wharf. Every day I'd have a yarn with her. I talk to everybody. One day she come to me and she says, 'Mr. Brown, what's them fish in there with the yellow specks on 'em.' I said, 'Them's codfish.' She said, 'How do you know?' I said, 'You can tell by lookin' at 'em. Look at the spots on 'em; freckles on 'em. She said, 'I thought they's hake.'
"Here from the government, mind you; inspectin' fish. I guess she was about eighteen. College girl. Half of them they send down, that's what they are: college students. Send them down here and they tell us how to catch fish and what to do with them.
"People down there, tourists, about every other one of 'em, I don't know why, they come talk to me. One day I was comin' in. I had a string of herring, big herring. I was bringin' 'em home to cook. Had my old pipe, had an old crooked stem on it, in my mouth. Man and a woman stopped me, said, 'You're Mr. Brown?' I said, 'Well, I'm one of 'em, I s'pose.' Well, she said, 'I think you're the one we're lookin' for. We was down here about two weeks ago and you showed a friend of ours how to catch fish, and fixed their lines for 'em, and they told us when we come down first thing to do is inquire for you. What's the matter with takin' your picture before we go?'
"I said, 'Yes, I s'pose you can take a picture. I'll lay this old pipe down.' She said, 'No! Put that pipe right back in your mouth and hold them fish in that string!' I did. They sent me a picture, too. They send me pictures all the time, different ones that take my picture.
"I don't care nothin' about lobsters. I don't. My wife, she's crazy over lobsters. From the time I was big enough to see one, my father was off lobster fishing, and all of us had funny lobsters. I s'pose one reason is I didn't care nothin' about 'em count of just fishin' 'em or something. 'I don't know.
"I'd get some lobsters somewhere, set down to the table, and my wife would say, 'S'posing somebody come in the house. You eatin' bologna; me eatin' lobster.' I'd rather have the balogna, and that's the worst stuff ever made.
"Years ago, when I was growin' up, these stores, well that's where people went to loaf; all these old fellers. I used to be a kid. I'd go up to listen to the old fellers tell these yarns, you know. They all had chairs around. Had a big spittoon in the middle of the floor. Anybody wanted to could chew tobacco. Everybody fillin' up their pipes or smokin'. Wasn't interfering the customers cause they was away from the counter, you know. Ah, they stayed there all day and, well, about nine o'clock at night they'd close up. And there's where everybody used to go. All the old fellers. And us kids used to like to get in there and listen to 'em. Half the things they told us was things that happened to their neighbors. Didn't amount to much.
"Yes, everything's changed. When I was growin' up here... when I was a man, as far as that goes, if I ever was one... why, your neighbors used to come see you. There'd never be an evening there wouldn't be seven or eight people in here. Now, we never see nobody. Never a soul ever opens the door.
"Cars, now. That's the trouble. Any time we ain't got nothin' to do we take the old car and go to Lubec, or Calais, or St. Stephen, or somewhere. If we didn't have a car, there we'd be, set-tin' right here all day and all night, wouldn't we?
"First car owned on this island was owned by Harry Jackson. Side curtains on it. There was one here before that. There was a doctor come here and rented a house. Stayed here a year or so, and he had a car. First time it come down the road, kids were chasin' it, and even men. Thought it was a curio, which it was.
"We had telephones here quite awhile before we had electricity. Had telephones fifteen years, twenty years before we had electricity.
"When you look at it now you wonder how you lived [before modern conveniences]. And you didn't live. You just existed. You just stayed here. But you was all in the same boat. You was just as well off as the other feller and the other feller was just as well off as you. You was all neighbors and friendly and sociable. Course you didn't know nothin' about this life [we have today]. You wouldn't imagine it.
"Had an old kerosene lamp. Half the time that would smoke up so you couldn't find it. If you wanted a bucket of water, you had to take your bucket and go to the well somewheres. In the wintertime, you'd go to the well. Well would be froze up. Go home and get an ax. Go down and cut a little hole. Squeeze the bucket down and lots of times you'd have to take a dipper with you. Went in the woods and cut your own wood. Never was such a thing as a kerosene stove, or anything like that, or electric stove. Oh, it's a great life now. If you can afford it.
"You want to get up in the night, you just reach out over the side of the bed, snap a button, and she's all lit up. If you want to come downstairs, you come down and the fire's all a'going. If you want a drink of water, you go over there and turn the faucet. You want some hot water to wash yourself, you just turn the other faucet. Oh, it's wonderful. No gettin' over it. It's really wonderful.
"I've often thought that if some of the old people come back, I don't know but they'd go crazy. Just see all these gasoline boats, and all these fish houses and buildings all lit up and all these street lights. Now I'll tell you, it would be some surprise, wouldn't it? You couldn't imagine it, of course."
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