We All Muddle Through in the End

Cape Breton is not an easy place to get to. It took me a five hour ferry ride (much of which I spent sick) and a seven hour drive to come to the causeway that separates Cape Breton from the mainland of Nova Scotia, a causeway that's spanned by a rickety metal bridge that was not erected until the 1950's. As you travel up the interior of Nova Scotia from the ferry landing in Yarmouth, you get the sense that you're traveling closer and closer to the ends of the earth, and when you finally cross into Cape Breton, this cutoff is complete. To me, this feeling is slightly alarming, but to any Cape Bretoner the crossing is coupled with the comforting sensation of "coming home."

The people of Cape Breton are strongly rooted to their history, and as you travel through the Island, this history lays itself bare before your eyes. The villages speak of the people who traveled across the oceans years before to thrive or just survive, and before that, of those who called this island home for a millenia. Along with a myriad of other cultures, the natives are still here. I pass through a number of villages, with the title, "First Nation" painted beneath their greetings. The houses are modest. Women sit out on the steps weaving, reading, or just staring down onto the roads, dilapidated pit stops advertise "Mi'kmaq Crafts For Sale." It's not until you travel further into the interior of the island, or up along the Western Coast that the Scottish settlements begin to crop up like sentinels, their anglicized names undercut with their original Gaelic titles. Traveling to my new home in Glace Bay I pass the villages of "Iona," "Inverness" and "Ingonish." These towns are predominately poor farming and fishing communities. On one side of the road, rolled hay dries in the sun, while on the other brightly painted fishing boats peel placidly beside their wharfs, seeming to rest themselves in preparation for next summer's brief and frenzied lobster season.

All across the island life seems paused. Maybe it's the holiday weekend, or maybe it's something else...I learn from my host family later this evening that the young people are leaving Cape Breton in droves. It's a common enough phenomenon, they want more than their parents lot in life, more than the back breaking work of hauling lobster traps or the endless dark of days in the mines.

The French have left their mark here as well. My new home town, Glace Bay, was named so for its tendency to freeze in the winter. Once home to a booming coal economy, the mines shut down long ago. Old men shuffle along its potholed streets, watching the rain fall down from darkened store fronts. Their surprisingly youthful faces stare vacantly out onto the main road, they seem unaware of this one gift that decades of work underground has allowed them. On my second day on the island I stop off at the Miners Museum, where an ex-miner by the name of Abbey takes me down into one of the old mine shafts. He tells me of the men he worked with, men from Poland, France, Italy, Scotland, Spain and Ireland. He worked in the mine for thirty five years, his greatest accomplishment is sending his children to school, and though he doesn't look a day over fifty, (he's 72) the years in the mines are stored inside him, and he is reminded of this in his father and uncle's concession to black lung. I ask him where the most music in Cape Breton can be found, and he tells me to head out to Inverness County on the western shore, to the seaside farms and small community halls where people gather to dance on the weekends and play music until the early hours in their kitchens, "just listen for the fiddles and knock on the door," he advises me, "they'll take you in."

Traveling across the Cabot Trail the following day I pass through the French settlement of Chetticamp before dipping down into Inverness. The Acadian French dominate here, the music is French, English is only used to converse with the tourists, and I'm reminded in the landscape of the village of Dun Quin on the Dingle peninsula. The houses look as though they might fall into the sea, the salt adds a translucent glimmer to the air. The fields are an otherworldly green and the sky impossibly blue. A moment later I'm in Inverness, where Abbey tells me, "people still sit out on their back steps with fiddles."

I don't hear any of this back porch music today, but a few evenings later, at a wharf pub in North Sydney, I attend my first Cape Breton session. It starts off slow, but by the end of the evening, twelve fiddlers play together at lightening speed. The legendary Jerry Holland sits next to a lean old man by the name of Paul Cranford, one of the last lighthouse keepers in North America, a walking encyclopedia of tunes and local lore. Stuart MacNeil of the Barra MacNeils plays the piano accordion, while his mother listens on the edges before taking her honored place at the upright piano. Later, she tells me of visiting Scotland and the castle where her people came from, while her son continues to play the music that was more than likely carried across the sea from this site, coveted and passed along like and old wedding photograph or tarnished engagement ring.

This connection to the homeland is nothing unusual, most Cape Bretoners seem to know exactly who their people are and where they came from. What amazes me most, is how splendidly everyone seems to get along. I'd say the rest of the world could do worse than to take a cue from Cape Breton. When the Scottish were kicked out of the highlands in the 1700's, they came in exile to the island, and for once, these new world settlers chose not to repeat their empire's cruelty, and settled alongside the Mi'kmaq peacefully instead. The French, the most zealous and intrepid of the new world explorers, intermarried freely with the Mi'kmaq. This history could be directly linked to the alarming friendliness of Cape Bretoners today, I mention this to Abbey at the coal mines before I leave, and his youthful face beams in response: "it's like you've known us your entire life."