The Winding Down of Summer

Cape Breton has changed in the last few weeks. The leaves are gone from the trees, the young people have returned to Calgary and Edmonton to work in the oil camps, and only the most hardy of tourists dare to circle the Cabot Trail at this time of year. On Saturday nights, when I return from the Mabou dance, I'm passed again and again by massive freight trucks, hurtling down the 104 with their mysterious loads from Newfoundland. They don't bother to stop. Shutters are closed, signs removed from their posts, fluorescent lights blink out, and they elderly prepare for their habitual hibernation.

I went to the Rollie's session last Thursday not expecting much. There are no visitors left for the musicians to entertain, and many of the players players hate driving the long distances between towns after the first frost sets in. I went anyway though, to keep the spirit alive, and perhaps, to keep my own failing spirits up. The first sight to greet me was that Jerry Holland and J.P. Cormier smoking at the front entrance of the restaurant.

A veritable giant, J.P. looms about a foot above anyone else at a party. He wears cowboy boots, heavy gold jewelry, and bolo ties. While he would fit in well at a rodeo or Harley convention, his massive fingers grip a fiddle neck delicately, and he pens beautiful songs about tired old Newfoundland towns and divine intervention with a human face. Despite the darkness and the wreath of cigarette smoke, I don't have to do a double take to know who it is, it is unmistakably JP, and it is unmistakably going to be a brilliant night.

Inside at the session, J.P. decided to sit next to me.

"I'm not playing next to you." I assert.

"Fine! I'm not playing next to you either!" Comes his good-natured response.

But sit next to me he did, and after a while, I got over my nervousness enough to get a few tunes out, and better yet...to unabashedly gawk at his brilliance. Looking around, I realize there is something different about tonight's session. Many of the usual suspects are here, but the restaurant is nearly empty. A few old timers doze by the bar, the incorrigible spoon player materializes and then mercifully disappears as suddenly and briefly as he always does, and Papper, as usual, steps outside more than once to smoke the mysterious hand-rolled cigarettes that he refuses to share. One thing is different though, J.P. Cormier and his wife Hilda are at the session, and they are playing with friends they've known for years. There were no tourists around to bother them for autographs, really no one is showing them any special attention, and J.P. assuming I'm local and therefore safe, plays my fiddle, gives me a ten minute lesson, and probably would have given me a cigarette if I had asked him.

Jerry Holland doesn't play for much of the evening, like many of the older folks in Cape Breton, he's sick, and like many again, can't give up the habits that may have contributed or caused his illness. He's wonderfully kind, modest, and seemingly healthy most times I've seen him. I recall a picture of him in one of his fiddle books, where he's young and happy, smiling broadly under a mop of brown hair and a thick mustache. At Rollie's tonight, Jerry's eyes are tired beneath his now-silver hair. He's leaving to go to New Hampshire on Wednesday to gig, but before the evening ends, he'll join the circle to play with his friends. I find out today that Jerry is "from away," that he grew up outside of Boston, but that he listened to Cape Breton fiddlers play in his kitchen as a child, heading up the island himself as soon as he graduated high school.

My friend Paul MacDonald likes to say that the idea of Cape Breton's isolation is really a myth, and that there's another phenomenon that hasn't been given its due consideration, and that's the island's seeming magnetic draw for all the vagabonds and outcasts of society. Somehow, we find our way up the arm of Nova Scotia, and across the Causeway to the rugged shores of the island, to build a home amidst those who washed ashore before us. Like it or not, we're all from "away" in some way or another, and in the end, it's up to the individual to decide where they want to mark those lines in the sand. Ultimately, I think it's not geography, but passion that unites us. Here in Cape Breton, the sad and the beautiful exist side by side, making for an intoxicating dichotomy, and maybe even a little poetry.

The young people don't stay here, the winter's are long and quiet, and cancer seems as common as a cold. Still there is beauty that makes even the lengthiest winter seem not only bearable, but enjoyable. I like to think I've become an expert at spotting it. I love the old barns that still remain, even though there adjacent farmhouses have long since crumbled. I love the brightly painted seaside homes, flecked with long dried sea spray, and I love the the inexplicable talent of the people that have chosen to stay or come here, the music that pours out of them as freely and easily as water through the levies of a broken down dam.

When the session finally ends around one, Hilda and J.P. are right behind me on the way out to the parking lot. It will be an almost three hour drive for them back to the French seaside village of Cheticamp where they live when they're not on tour.

"Keep at the fiddle," J.P. instructs, "she's a beauty."

Then he turns to his wife, "Great night, huh? Glad we came."

I can tell he means it.