 Reverend Francis Mabey, who moved to Campobello eighteen years ago, is pastor of the United Baptist Church at Wilsons Beach. An easygoing, yet ebullient man, he also oversees the operation of a church-affiliated summer camp for Charlotte County, New Brunswick, youngsters, including children from Campobello who wish to attend. Besides the Baptist church at Wilson's Beach, there is another unaffiliated Baptist church on the North Road, both a Catholic and Anglican church at Welshpool, and a Pentecostal church at Wilson's Beach.
"I'll never forget it," he recalls, "I came here on a November, Wednesday night. Blustery and cold. It was a bitterly cold November night. Unusual really. And, of course, like everybody else who comes to Campobello for the first time, I had my time all fouled up.
 "I walked in the church. Walked in the side door, the belfry door. Here was the door all fastened and all caulked so it couldn't be opened. Course I wasn't living here very long before I understood why that was. The wind in the winter is a prevailing northwest wind and that door faces right in that way and it will blow you right off the seats. I thought to myself, 'My sakes, what kind of an outfit am I getting myself involved with here?'
"It was such a casual thing. I came to talk to the deacons and wound up preaching in the church. I moved here on the sixteenth of February in 1964 and been here ever since.
"The islander doesn't take new residents seriously because they're used to people coming and going like the tide. It takes awhile before they're convinced you're going to stay.
"I was here five years. I remember it just as clearly as if it were yesterday. I used to have a habit, on Monday nights, after my young people's group, my teenage group. Rather than come right home, I'd go down to one of the local service stations that stayed open. I'd walk in and all the men would be standing around talking and kibitzing about. I'd walk in, walk to the pop corner and take a bottle of pop and get a bag of chips. And just talk to different ones. Maybe half an hour. Maybe three-quarters of an hour. 'See ya later fellers.' Then I'd go home. I did that for a long time.
"One day one of my men came to me. He said, 'I guess you've arrived. I was down at Jackson Brothers' today and so-and-so came over to talk to me. Right in the middle of the conversation, he interrupted himself and he said, "You know, that Mabey is not a bad fellow, is he? He comes down by Earl's and talks to us and so on." I guess you've arrived.'
"I was here just five years, almost to the day.
"Then, we've had a problem here. I've tried to explain it to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP). We've sort of been an afterthought to the politician. We've been an afterthought to the education department and to the policeman. Consequently, there's no respect for those authorities. For many years, when I first came here, there were many people who drove around here without driver's licenses. Never had a driver's license in their life, because Campobello has been a law unto itself for so many years. It's been just left to itself, and so it established its own standards of law.
"So many of these situations, like Campobello, Deer Island, Grand Manan, or country areas outside the cities, have been way stations for young ministers getting a start. Or seminary students who go there in the summer and then, maybe, go back every Sunday through the year. Consequently, they got the idea, 'They don't take us seriously. We're just a stepping stone for something greater for them.'
"And, again, why wouldn't there be resentment? The minister is no better then than the mountie who says, 'Well, when I get around to it I'll come.' Or the government agency which says, 'Well, if there's anything left over maybe we can give it to Campobello, or Deer Island, or Grand Manan.'
"But, I don't blame people, you see. If the establishment doesn't take them seriously, seriously enough to commit themselves to them, why should there be respect for them? Why should there be respect for the church, if the church doesn't take them seriously?
"The Baptist Church went into Newfoundland somewhere around twenty-five years ago. They built a little church on posts. It was a sort of comme ci, comme ca operation. One day they decided it was time they put a basement under the church. The pastor was working away, all alone, one day getting ready to put the basement under the church, when one of the locals came along. He stood there and he looked for awhile and scratched his head and said, 'Are you really planning on staying?'
"There was no foundation. The pastor understood right then what that comment meant. Hadn't taken them seriously. You build a place up on posts, that's a temporary thing. Are you not serious enough to come and build a foundation?
"It's important right now that out here on the road they've built a home for the mounties. There will be a permanency. Then, I think, they'll realize a sense of respect for them. Right up until recently we've never known whether the mountie was going to be here come Monday morning or not.
"We're strange here in our habits on the road. You're driving along through Wilson's Beach and, all of a sudden, you have to stop because there's another car stopped in front of you and there's a car stopped the other way and they're talking. They don't want you to blow your horn at them. They'll move on when they're ready. So you're patient because you might see somebody, just the next car, that you want to talk to.
"It's hard for people off the island to understand the casualness. The frustration of tourists when they come here in the summer that they can't get in the bank, they can't get into anything from twelve until one. Even the bank is closed right up tight. Terribly frustrating for people off the island. That's the way we treat life, you see, 'It's noon time; let's go eat.'
"Here I've found a very much less formal group of people. On Prayer Meeting night, the men all come with a shirt and sweater. Consequently, I now go to Prayer Meeting in a shirt and sweater. I don't know where you'd find another Baptist minister, cause we're supposed to be very staid and straight-laced, who would go to Prayer Meeting in a shirt and sweater.
"'Time and tide wait for no man.' If you're doing tide work, when the tide comes up you might as well go home. There s no sense standing there. 'Well, I've got another hour's work to do.' You can't do it until the tide goes back down again. Consequently, there's a completely different appreciation of time here. When the tide is right, you go. Never mind what you're doing. Never mind what you'd like to do or where you'd like to go. The tide is there.
Your trawl has to be hauled. Your traps have to be pulled. 'If we don't go now, we're gonna miss the daylight seine.' It's not a matter of, 'Well, let's hang around another couple of hours and then go.' You go because you know that if you don't go you might as well stay home because you're gonna miss the tide. Whether it's the slack you want, the high you want, or the low you want. You go when the tide is going to be there.
"At the same time we treat time a little more casually, time also becomes more our master. If you went to work at 7:30 this morning because the tide was right, tomorrow morning you're going to go to work at 8:30, and then 9:30, and so on, so your appreciation of time is different. You have to do all you can while you have that time because when the tide goes or comes, whether you've got it finished or not, you're not going to finish it until the next tide.
"Everybody on this island is invited to weddings here. There are no formal invitations, usually, because everybody is related to everybody else. Where would you start? They usually have invitations printed and send them to people off the island. Usually, the Sunday before the wedding, the minister will announce that so-and-so's wedding is coming up and everybody's invited.
"I get so involved with funerals sometimes. With people who've been off the island for twenty-five, thirty, forty years, and they come back for a funeral. For mother's funeral or dad's funeral. And they don't know what to think of us when they get here, because they're used to the impersonal nature of a funeral and a funeral home in the big city.
"And all of a sudden they get back here and they go back to the old homestead. The casket is in the living room. And the door doesn't stop swinging. Somebody comes with a salad. Somebody comes with a potato scallop. Somebody comes with a pie, and everybody's stopping to say, 'Now, we've got a bed, if you need a bed, or we've got this, we've got that. Whatever we've got is yours; use it.'
"How many times people have come to me after it's all over to say how they forgot what it was like to live on Campobello. They had just forgotten because in their circumstances they don't know who lives in the apartment downstairs, or upstairs, or even next door. Here, if you stub your toe, everybody knows and everybody's concerned.
"It's a different way of life than so many people are used to today, and they're so much the poorer because of their way of life. Maybe they have more conveniences than we do, but our young people are closer to one another. Our older people are closer to one another.
"We are three distinct communities. If you be here long enough, you can tell even by the voice, diction, whether they're from North Road, or Welshpool, or Wilson's Beach. It's sort of a never-the-twain-shall-meet concept.
"The people at Welshpool always, by and large, have worked for the tourists. That's where all of the large homes were: the Roosevelts, the Coopers, and all those people. That's been their work.
"Whereas Wilson's Beach, for a long time, for want of a better way of expressing it, was a lot of tar-paper shacks on the bank. That was the concept. At Wilson's Beach the people worked at fishing, and you didn't make anything at fishing thirty years ago.
"Folks at Welshpool were having a regular salary come in from these folks who came, whereas the people at Wilson's Beach basically had nothing. You fished all day and if you got a dollar for your catch when you got back, never mind that you had two or three thousand in the bank. If you got a buck, or so, you did all right.
"Then North Road is sort of a throwback to both. There's sort of a rivalry there. I don't know whether it will ever be stemmed.
"Somebody suggested here a couple of years ago -- one of the politicians; I don't know which one -- that Campobello should be incorporated as a village. I said, 'That would be the worst thing in the world that you could do. Maybe it worked on Grand Manan; it won't work here. If you want to incorporate three villages, go ahead, but don't try to incorporate one village on Campobello, because it just won't work. We're three distinct communities; always have been, and, I think, always will be.'"
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