We fish, we farm and log, and are willing to try just about anything else.

Since my grandfather, William Henry Bruce, died in 1934, the year I was born, we never met but I now own what was once his homestead, on Chedabucto Bay in Nova Scotia, and it tells me a lot about him. A rusty two-man saw, a half model of a vessel's hull, and a photograph of Will on a hay wagon remind me that he was a bit of a pulpwood-cutter, a bit of a fisherman and a bit of a farmer. Like so many Atlantic Canadians of his time, he belonged to what New Brunswick historian Stewart MacNutt called "a land-sea economy of intense diversity."

"When I was a small child, my father and brothers owned a pulpmill," bluenose author Helen Dacey Wilson once wrote. "When this was lost during the depression, Papa supported his family by lobster fishing in season, and by cutting and hauling wood in the winter. We had a farm, too, just large enough to keep the family in meat and potatoes."

In 1830, William Moorson, a captain in the British army who toured Nova Scotia on horseback, wrote that some of the colonists should have concentrated entirely on farming and others entirely on fishing. Too many, he complained, depended for their survival partly on land and partly on water. These bluenose dullards and yokels failed to grasp "the great principle of the division of labour."

Thomas Chandler Haliburton, the humourist, judge and politician, also disapproved of the way Nova Scotians "applied themselves alternatively to farming and fishing." Your typical Nova Scotian, he wrote, "is often found superintending the cultivation of a farm and building a vessel at the same time; and is not only able to catch and cure a cargo of fish, but to find his way with it to the West Indies; he is a man of all work - but expert at none."  Neither Moorson nor Haliburton had ever forked manure or spilled a cod's guts on a stony beach. Moorson was an officer-gentleman from a tame land where roofers built roofs, bricklayers laid bricks, weavers wove - and that was that. Everyone stuck to his trade. Haliburton was an affluent Tory with soft hands, a writer who parlayed his international success into a comfortable retirement in England.

"They both missed the point," my father, Charles Bruce, once wrote. "There are regions and times and circumstances in which a man must turn his hand to anything. Diversity, adaptability: they are the Maritime inheritance."  My father had only one occupation. He was a wordsmith but, within his field, few were as diverse and adaptable. He was a newspaperman, wire-service editor, and writer of magazine articles, radio plays, short stories, novels and poems. He spent most of his life in Toronto, but understood Atlantic Canada as well as anyone ever has, and enjoyed "a fine mirthful satisfaction in now and then getting back home."

Until I stumbled on something K.C. Irving once said, I saw no connection between Irving and the struggling farmer-fishermen-woodsmen my father often described in print. After all, Irving and Will Bruce weren't exactly at the same economic level. In 1969, however, the industrialist appeared before a Special Senate Committee to defend his controversial media monopoly, and one of the things he said was this: "Almost any New Brunswick corporation subject to national or international competition must, if it is to survive successfully, either diversify its activities or itself become national or international in scope. If the latter happens, the head office will no longer remain in the Maritimes. I prefer diversification. Call it conglomerate or what you will, in New Brunswick it contributes to survival."

"A matter-of-fact willingness to try anything still marks the Nova Scotian," my father noted half a century ago, but it also marked a certain New Brunswicker. Irving was famous for his matter-of-fact willingness to try anything. His sons and grandsons inherited this characteristic, which is one reason why their hugely diverse empire continues to thrive. I see the same willingness in some of my neighbours on Chedabucto Bay. After working in Ontario as an auto mechanic for four decades, one fellow came home, bought a sloop and taught himself how to sail. At 74, he now has his pilot's licence, and he's building an airplane in his garage. Another neighbour, whose son was taking flying lessons, purchased a tract of forest, rented some heavy equipment, and single-handedly built the family's very own airfield.

While there aren't as many farmer-fishermen-woodsmen as there once were, I believe that, all over the Maritimes and Newfoundland, you can still find diversity, adaptability and the willingness to try anything. They're part of who we are.