Christmas Lights

On Wednesday evenings, I drive an hour to the small village of Christmas Island to attend an evening Gaelic class. When I leave the Sydney highway and drive along the winding road that eventually leads into Iona, the signs gradually begin to appear in both English and Gaelic while the houses become more spread out. When the lake laps uncomfortably close to the road, I can see the lights on the opposite shore blink wearily like the bulbs on some, distant toppled-down pine tree.

Christmas Island is the last village before Iona, the parish my host-father once called, "the axis of all things Celtic." Iona is in the near heartland of Cape Breton, home to the highland village, and whose shores the Barra people first settled after noticing its uncanny resemblance to their own homeland. The old name for Iona is "Barra" in Gaelic, years ago a zealous priest changed the name of the town to mirror its spiritual counterpart in Scotland, and now only the elderly remember the original identity of the parish.

Not many people live in Iona today. In the summer, the Highland Village attracts a slew of tourists, where the intrepid time-traveler can walk through the architecture of nearly three hundred years, beginning first with the Scottish highland clochans, and ending with the near-modern wooden clapboards that have now been replaced by duplexes and trailers. From every angle and perch the view is spectacular. The Bras d'Or lake, fringed with forest, is more colorful in its autumn reflections than even the grandest Chetticamp hooked rug, and the highland chapel, uprooted and brought by barge to the heights of the village, commands it all. Inside the church there are photographs of the transport of the building, where the imposing chapel face, coming by barge through the mists of the Bras d'Or, would give any sinner the creeps.

Christmas Island might not have the views and architecture of its Western neighbor, but it does have as equally as rich culture. Many of the elderly in the village still speak Gaelic as their first language. Every Wednesday morning they meet at the local takeout to eat chicken wings and converse in their native tongue. After two hours of class on Wednesday, the beginner and advanced classes meet over tea to share songs. Usually, the beginning class trickles out after the tea runs out, leaving behind the native speakers and a handful of struggling beginners behind, myself included.

While I can mutter along with the best of them to the vocables of a Gaelic song, the stories more often than not leave my clueless. Tonight though, I am excited and proud. I ask my teacher across the song circle, what song we had learned last Monday in song workshop.

"De orainn bha sinn ag ionnsachadh De Luaine?"

He promptly launched into "Leis a Mhaighdinn," the haunting Cape Breton version of an old country song about French sailors, diamond brooches, and maidens disguised as ships. Afterwards, Roddy C., the tenth in the long line of Christmas Island Roddy's, launched into a Gaelic story. I cocked my ear and listening closely, hearing the repetition of a word that sounded like "coin," the plural of "cu" or "dog" that I had learned the other day.

This is great. I think. I'm really starting to pick things up. Roddy's telling a story about dogs.

Unfortunately the story had nothing to do with dogs, and my only consolation was that Roddy assumed I had Gaelic, and neglected to translate the story until asked specifically by my teacher. The word that sounded like "coin" was in fact a word for "porch," and the story had been more about children than anything else. Roddy recalled a friend of his back near Boisdale, who, on the porch, would always hear the kids say, "rathad, rathad," road, road, and once on the road it was always, "baile, baile," or town, town.

"You see, it's always in the nature of the young to be moving forward."

Everyone laughed at the conclusion of the story, but I couldn't help but think of the melancholy truth to it. I doubt that when the Barra people came to Iona's shores years before, they thought that their children, at one point, would be eager and willing to leave the land of plenty. I doubt they thought that someday, their native language would be lost in the handful of years between father and son, and later, that their industries would die, and with them, the final, and only reason to stick around.

This past weekend, I went to Halifax, one of the cities that extended its siren call Northward to the shores of Cape Breton and to the ears of its restless youth. I was briefly tempted to turncoat myself. Unlike Sydney, Halifax's shops stay open past four, there are countless bars and clubs, and museums that cater to more than the fickle summer crowds. There is a vitality in Halifax that is lacking in Cape Breton. Still, I have to wonder why, when Saturday night rolled around, I wanted to find the Cape Breton dance. The island is not my home, but I can understand why the young in Boston and Halifax, and now in Calgary and Edmonton, live with fellow Cape Bretoners, why they console each other with stories of home, and why many of them are willing to commute across a continent to work and return. I think that the lights across the water on the way to Christmas island are just as dazzling, and alluring as the bright lights of Halifax, and the stars above, infinitely brighter.