Channeling Ashley

The Celtic Colours festival began the Friday before last with a performance honoring the Galician bagpiper Carlos Nunez in Port Hawkesbury. I missed the first performance. My mom arrived in Glace Bay earlier that day, and we spent the night at the Vespers by the Sea Bed and Breakfast, in a part of town I have never seen, where the shoreline shelves abruptly out into the sea, and the houses stagger haphazardly towards that sudden drop off into the ocean below. I imagine I'm walking through a half-empty library with no bookends. My mother tells me she has never seen a place so like Bethel Alaska, making me wonder if that was the reason why it all seemed so strangely familiar at times.

Every night for the next eight days there was a concert to attend in a different village around island. On Wednesday evening, after my mother left, I drove to Glendale to attend the, "ceilidh in the glen." At the time, I couldn't remember who was scheduled to play, and I had just about had my fill of driving. At the start of the show, when the lights dimmed, an elderly man shuffled up to the mic and sighed dramatically, "Well folks we've got some great music for you tonight, some Gaelic singing, some dancing, and some fiddling. Unfortunately our scheduled pianist broke her arm a few days back and it isn't quite healed yet, but don't worry, we've brought in Ashley MacIsaac in to sub for her. I think he brought his fiddle too."

Out came Ashely MacIsaac and my bad mood disappeared as quickly as the complimentary oatcakes at intermission. For the first half of the concert, Ashely backed up on piano a young Cape Breton fiddler who was making her first festival appearance, and who subsequently, was shaking as intensely as any one of the hydrant colored leaves along the well-traveled cabot trail ...nothing like baptism by fire, I thought. After all the rumors and controversy I'd heard surrounding one of the island's most famous fiddlers, I expected Ashley to a: either mouth some profanities, or b: expose himself before the night was over. In the end, he behaved like a perfect gentleman, cracked a few g-rated jokes, and brought the crowd to their feet with a blast tunes at the end of the show.

Three days before I'd started the Buddy MacMaster School of Fiddling, and later that evening, I made the sagacious decision not to go to the festival club almost two hours away at the Gaelic College in St. Anne's. I had a lineup of teachers I just couldn't sleep through: Jerry Holland, Andrea Beaton, Wendy MacIsaac, Mattie Rankin, Kyle MacNeil, Duane Cote, Colin Grant, Glen Graham, and Dave MacIsaac. During lunch and after the classes, Kinnon Beaton led group jams until the students scattered at dinnertime for the evening concerts.

At the end of the week, I made it to the after hours festival club, and after four hours of staged performance, three hours of back-stage jam sessions, and five greasy fried breakfasts at five a.m. I became adept in rooting out empty dorm beds that were otherwise reserved for bands. The first night, my fellow freeloaders and I found a room wide open with four empty beds. At one the next day there came a knock on the door, disgruntled, my neighbor stumbled out of bed to answer it.

"Good afternoon! Have the girls left yet?"

Blink..."uh...yes?"

"Great!"

Two hours later the bagpipers ceilidh started under our window.

"I forgot that was today." mumbled a voice to my right, "I wonder, is it Nunez?"

"I think it's later than that." Came the response from above.

Three hours later, I got out of bed and went to another concert.

Saturday evening was my last night at the festival club, after the show, all the performers gathered in the backstage room, where a massive session ensued. For more than two hours, some of the best traditional players from Cape Breton, Scotland and Ireland entertained the dwindling party goers. Too shy to join in, I watched a séan nós singer in a trench coat and Kurt Cobain-style mop, bang on a bodhrán, while a Cuban bag piper attempted to revive my high-school level Spanish. After receiving one too many responses in Gaelspirish, he gave up and wandered off.

"You know, you can see where the stories of playing music all night in the fairy fort came from, these people are just in a trance." My Gaelic teacher roared above the din. He had been in a milling frolic performance earlier that day.

"By the way, you how I told you the Gaelic midterm is on Thursday? The bad news is...it's on Monday. The Good news is...you don't have to write it...want a beer?"

At five I found a bed on a couch in an empty lounge on the second floor that doubled as a classroom during the Gaelic language weekends. At two the next day, housekeeping started their rounds, eventually busting in on my makeshift bedroom.

"Good afternoon! When are you heading out?"

"Thirty minutes?"

"Great!"

An hour later, after toweling off with the complimentary bathmat in the communal shower, I headed down the road to the lakeside restaurant to get a slice of German apple pie and free refills on my coffee. Celtic Colours was over, my head was pounding, and even the dimming leaves seemed to reflect the aura of anti-climactic gloom that was settling upon the island. Winter would be here soon. A few minutes later the front door opened and in shuffled the Cuban bagpiping band.

"Buenas Dias. Here alone?"

It would be a good day after all.