We ate outside at a picnic table, listening to the bakers chatter in French through the screen door. Then, to save for lunch later, we picked up a baguette and date squares, which we know (thanks to our favorite French-Canadian relation) are a traditional treat in these parts.
Most of the charm of Cape Breton Island is this wonderful mix of cultures, as well as the fascinating (and sad, really) history of the area. Cheticamp and surrounds are a little Acadian pocket in this mostly Scottish part of Nova Scotia. The French were among the first white people to settle in this region, in the early 1600s. They named it "Acadia," or "Peaceful Land," and flourished here for many years. When the British forced their way in, they claimed the area for themselves and named the area Nova Scotia (New Scotland), and ultimately forced the Acadians out (this is, of course, a dramatically abridged version of events). Later, during the Napoleonic War in the early 1800s, the French blocked the British ports, and the English, in desperate need of food, forced poor Scottish farmers off their land, burned their homes and turned their fields into cattle and sheep pastures. In return for this inconvenience, the Crown offered the farmers free land in Nova Scotia, and thousands took them up on the offer, bringing their Highland culture and traditions with them to the New World.
So, a big part of the Cape Breton culture is traditional Gaelic music. Keith and I have read that a stretch of the highway that runs along the western shore of Cape Breton Island is known as the Ceilidh (pronounced KAY-lee) Trail. According to our guide book, ceilidhs are informal gatherings at the local pub or hall, where townspeople turn up for an evening of lively Celtic music and, often, dancing. The ceilidh tradition was brought to the New World by Scottish and Irish immigrants in the 1700s, and has been preserved by these Cape Breton Highlanders, who have fiercely clung to their old ways of life. In fact, we've heard that many Celtic fiddling superstars hail from this area.
When Keith and I realized that we had the opportunity to experience live Celtic music, we didn't want to pass it up. The original plan had been to leave Cape Breton Island today, and to drive to Nova Scotia's Northumberland Strait shore, within shouting distance of the Confederation Bridge to Prince Edward Island, where we'll end up tomorrow. But it's Saturday, and we figured we'd have a good chance of finding some traditional music here, so we stayed on Cape Breton, and drove only about 50 miles to Inverness, right smack on the Ceilidh Trail.
We ended up at McLeod's Beach and Campground before lunch and had plenty of time to set up camp before spending the rest
of the beautiful, sunny afternoon down at the beach, a long, sandy strip nestled between grassy dunes and hills that glowed high-voltage green in the sunlight.
This place is ... interesting. It's nice to imagine that it was, a few generations ago, a lovely little farm, with neat stacks of hay dotting broad fields that slope gently down the the shore.
Today, it's like someone mowed down those fields to make room for a parking lot. As if folks came for a football game, or a festival, like Lollapalooza, parked their cars here and then decided to stay and make a weekend out of it. It makes Shubie Campground near Halifax look like the Redwood Forest. And we are in the "overflow lot," which is exactly as scenic as it sounds. We don't even have a site -- it's just "find whatever space you can, and if you need a picnic table, give us a shout."
Normally, this is not the kind of camping that excites me. But you know, today I don't mind. The whole place has a party atmosphere. It's packed with RVs and trailers, most of them with permanent decks and patios, porch swings and barbecue grills. The campers here -- and I use that term loosely -- are friendly as heck, and everyone's milling around, grilling and hanging out, chatting and making new friends, their faces all sun-kissed, their hair all windswept. It's like a great big tailgate party.
(Oh. Well, Keith has just informed me that he thinks all RV parks are like this. But it's all new and novel and exciting to me, so thanks for indulging me.)
Anyway, so we'd been asking around about live music tonight, and one of our new friends, Marie, a 60-something Cape Breton native with personality-plus (she's from Sydney, but summers here in her "sugar shack"), said that we MUST join her at the West Mabou Hall for the music and dancing. It's the BEST around, she said, and it starts at 7:30. Perfect!
Of course, we were game, thrilled for the chance to mingle with locals and experience a true Cape Breton tradition. This would easily make up for a couple of days flying across Nova Scotia on the Trans-Canada expressway. Mabou is about 20 miles south of Inverness on Highway 19, and we figured we'd just have to drive to Mabou and turn right to get to West Mabou. We told Marie that we'd meet her there.
We set out after dinner. It was dusk as we turned off for West Mabou. Marie made it sound like it was just off the highway. "You cross a little bridge and then you're there." But we kept going and going. And going. We passed a sign for West Mabou, but the village itself, it turns out, is nothing more than a crossroads. It's not even a place. You just drive right past without stopping, or even noticing.
Dusk deepened into twilight and beyond, and when we passed a sign for Collindale, we knew we had gone too far. On the way back toward the highway, we drove slowly, peering into the darkened yards and fields, searching for some kind of a gathering spot or community hall. And the farther we drove, the deeper our spirits sunk. It was looking more and more like we would miss the music tonight.
At one point, we had to slow down for a car stopped in the middle of the road, and as we approached, we noticed that the driver was flagging us down. Is that obvious that we're lost? we wondered. We got closer and realized that it was Marie -- along with her son, Todd, his 7-year-old daughter, Fiona, and her little friend Sarah. Even in the dark, Marie had recognized our car-top carrier.
As our eyes adjusted to the light, we realized that we were directly outside the West Mabou Hall, a small, plain building set back from the road through some trees, dimly lit with one small light at the front door. How would we ever have found this place on our own? We followed Marie's car into a large yard -- not even a parking lot, but a grassy clearing near the hall -- and our spirits sank again: no cars, no lights, no people, and no music coming through the trees. But Marie seemed optimistic, and we all followed her into the hall to find out what was going on.
Inside, we found a large, long room with well-worn wooden floors, and chairs and several long, heavy wooden tables set up around the perimeter. The walls were decorated with snap-shots of fiddlers and dancers. At the end of the hall, there was a small stage with a beat-up upright piano, a couple of chairs and a microphone. The entire place was a couple of clicks up from a picnic shelter and a couple shy of a church basement.
An older, expressionless gentleman standing at the pass-through to a small kitchen was the only person around. Marie questioned him, and through a series of one-syllable answers, the man told us that yes, there is music tonight. But no, it doesn't start until 10 p.m. And yes, children are welcome. No, there's no other ceilidhs anywhere else tonight.
By this time is was already 9:15. Keith and I started to rationalize: The music would start in only 45 minutes, which at home would only be 9 p.m., anyway. Sure it would be a late night, but hey, how many chances to we get to experience this?
We went out for ice-cream back in Mabou, along with our new friends. The grocery store was the only place open. This cute little town is big enough to have a smallish supermarket, and quaint enough to have a giant moose head hanging over the cart corral inside the front door. Cracks me up.
We returned to the hall at 10 to find cars in the clearing and the place filling up with people. We claimed a table in the back and waited for the music to begin. Soon, a young woman took a seat on the stage with her fiddle, and a man started plunking out chords on the piano. Within minutes, the fiddler was sawing away in a full-blown jig, and people got up from their tables, moved toward the middle of the room and started dancing in formation.
Marie pulled us up, too, and we all danced together in a kids' circle in the back of the room, obviously the space where amateurs are relegated. The first two dances involved, loosely, holding hands in a circle and going this way, then that way, moving together toward the center of the circle, then moving back. But by the third dance -- Marie called it a "figure" -- we found spots right on the stage where we could sit and watch the more experienced dancers (read: everyone else) maneuver through the more complicated steps.
What a thrill it was to watch these people -- regular folks of all ages, from grade-school and high-school kids in flip-flops to young parents with babies and middle-aged couples in Birkenstocks and loafers -- perform this contradance together, everyone bobbing and weaving together, sashaying and reeling in unison while moving their happy feet back and forth in quick little steps and taps. Marie pointed out that everyone there knew exactly what they were doing -- even the school-aged kids -- because they had all being doing it their entire lives.
We figured out that the dances are grouped in sets of three -- two simple circle dances followed by one much more intricate dance that involves the entire group sashaying together down the length of the hall, two by two. By the next set, an very tall older gentleman (think Peter Boyle) pulled me out on the floor to be his partner, and I quickly realized that I was committing to the entire set, not just the easy dances. By the second dance, Keith and Natalie joined us on the floor and stayed there for the start of the third figure. I tried to catch Keith's eye to tell him to get out of the way. I was out of my league, too, but at least I had an experienced partner who would guide me through it. Keith and Natalie did not have that advantage.
I still don't know if they were being ignorant or bold or what. During that third figure, as the women skipped from man to man around the circle, Keith claimed he got some hairy eyeballs from the other men when he was in the wrong spot, or took a wrong step. But they stayed in it, following along as best they could, with Natalie bouncing gleefully the entire time.
As my partner and I skipped down the aisle of dancers toward the back of the hall, I was amazed to see a toddler in a jogging stroller, sleeping through all the whooping and foot-stomping -- until I looked past the stroller to see Clare and Charlie passed out on a bench under the window. Time to go.
What a fabulous evening! As we left the hall, Natalie proclaimed that, when she gets back to school in the fall, she will teach everyone in her class those dances.
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