Notes from Cape Breton

© 2020 Donna Hébert, all rights reserved.

We live inland from the coast about five miles as the crow flies. It’s a bit longer in a car and there are multiple ways to get there. Yesterday, we took the back way south around Broad Cove and came out by St. Margaret’s of Scotland, where the big concert has been held for years every July but the past one. 

There are often clouds in the sky and facing west into the sun from St. Margaret’s, we saw a sun-bow to the left of the sun. One of the last photos shows them together in the sky. I’m not that skilled a photographer. These are iPhone snapshots of our life here and I’m relying on the landscape to speak for itself – and does it ever!

We live on the sunset coast, so when the light is good, we jump in the car and look for pre-framed photos waiting for us in the landscape. Bob drives and I direct – “over HERE!” I say, jumping out of the car when he stops and trying to grab multiples of what I think I see. The sun is in my eyes but shades don’t help me see the phone screen, so I take as many as I can and sort them out later. I just try to hold the camera still when I shoot. Really, till I get them home and start straightening out the horizons, it’s a mystery. 

Since roads in the neighborhood are often rough, we had avoided this one. Still gravel, it’s been re-graded and widened since last year, with new drainage as well, so we checked it out late yesterday afternoon, allowing me to further my obsession with Margaree Island, just off the coast of Dunvegan. You’ll see how close the island is from McLeod’s campground, where Bob and his family first fell in love with the island.

I can’t get around rough ground easily, so we stick close to the road. I’m avoiding shooting homes that look occupied for obvious reasons but abandoned buildings are fair game and there are plenty of those waiting for another photo essay. We also noted how close to the cliff edge some of the fancy new houses are. Money doesn’t make you smart, now, does it? They might just end up with a mermaid on their doorstep one of these days. 

The slideshow music, the Scots air The Mermaid, is from my recording with Jane Yolen, Lui Collins and Max Cohen, The Infinite Dark. (CD download link)

© 2020 Donna Hébert, all rights reserved.

The post-hurricane skies yielded a sparkling day along the Margaree River. The slideshow features Orange on Blue / Long Distance, from my CD with Max Cohen, Orange on Blue. Max and I wrote the first tune together and he wrote the second and plays guitar on both.

The skies have been washed clear of the rain and the salty hurricane that drove it here. On the west coast of Cape Breton, the ever-present wind only becomes noticeable by its absence. That busy wind clears things pretty fast, be they fog or cloud, the latter racing across the sky to an imaginary finish line.

The latest storm introduced itself with a lot of wind and only spatters of rain. That wind blew at more than 60 kph, around 40 mph. It sounds worse in kph but as a constant, it’s a roar. Prior to the storm, Bob checked the yard for possible flying debris and the next day it rained buckets. Then, suddenly, the wind stopped moving. It was a moment of calm, literally the center of the storm. I sat down with a notebook to describe the phenomenon.

Eye

© 9/23/20 Donna Hébert, all rights reserved.

Still, damp, warm

I sit in the eye of the storm

Windless now

but at dawn

the trees danced,

bending not to break

We rest

within the vortex

still, calm at the center

while Nature

holds her breath

A whispering in the trees

says it’s not over

this one has

a lot of ground to cover

© 2020 Donna Hébert, all rights reserved.

The slideshow music is my waltz-clog, Little Birds, written for Molly in 2007. I recorded it with Max Cohen playing guitar in 2009 for In Full Bloom. Dancing to this track is Québecois step-dancer Marie-Soliel Pilette.

– – – – –

Our language is ripe with apple metaphors – the apple of my eye, apple-cheeked, American as apple pie, the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree and of course there’s the trope of the apple offered by a designing woman: “Adam ate the apple and our teeth still ache,” in a Hungarian proverb. Apples have also long been associated with mysticism. Cut into an apple and you’ll find a five-pointed star, rich with symbolism. Such tempting fruit the apple is, with juice both fresh and fermented, with that tart-sweet crunch in your mouth when you bite into it. Indeed, the apple has sustained us and our domestic animals for centuries.

I live half the year in the north central part of Massachusetts that was home to John Chapman, better known as “Johnny Appleseed,” whose mythology is firmly implanted in the story of America’s westward expansion. Wagons heading into the wilderness of the Ohio River valley carried what was necessary to survive and cuttings and grafts for apple trees –  and cider presses – made that trip. Disney glorified this expansion, implying that folks made pies with all those apples and that the land was empty, just waiting for them (it was not, as they unhappily discovered). What the settlers were doing was fermenting apple juice and making safe drinkables like low alcohol cider before the advent of the germ theory told them why their water was unsafe or why it made them so sick.

Now I live on an island with so many apples that I think of it as Avalon. Let’s just say that if Martha has a vineyard in Massachusetts, Aphrodite has an orchard on Cape Breton. On the west side of Cape Breton, from Mabou to Margaree Harbour, the many colors of the apples line the road like sugar maples do in Massachusetts. As a lifelong gleaner of wild food, they beckon to me but as we’ve learned, they also look better than they taste. Even though we have two of these ‘found’ trees here, we also have four grafted apple trees. The taste difference is marked. One is yummy, one is meh.

Of course the apple doesn’t breed true. It can’t. It has one root and a fruiting graft from another variety. Unlike an oak, where you can plant an acorn and an oak tree will grow like the original, apples have to be grafted to viable rootstock. Every apple we eat today is a clone, so planting the seeds of an apple won’t give you the same fruit. Pretty trees maybe, nice colors, but the apples will taste unremarkable, meh. 

With the hurricane aimed straight at us, we picked ours a little earlier than planned this year and on Monday, we stripped the trees. Tuesday, while the wind blew, Bob chopped a batch of apples up for sauce but when we tasted the cooked mash before processing it, neither of us liked it, so we tossed it out for the fox. Sounds drastic but these came off our trees so we aren’t out any cash and whatever we put up has to taste good by itself. No amount of sugar or cinnamon will make blah apples better or worth the work of canning them and then there’s the fact that we already have more than a dozen delicious pints from previous years.  It’s a drought year, so I’m not surprised. What surprised me was this batch of apples tasted much better fresh, like tart Ida Reds. So now we have our fingers crossed for the second batch, this one of Scotia Golds. Wish us luck!

© 2020 Donna Hébert, all rights reserved.

We went for a long and healing ride Saturday afternoon. I couldn’t bear to read another word about Ruth Bader Ginsberg’s death and the opportunity it gives to the evil in office to replace her on the Supreme Court. Every woman I know is grieving her death and fearing her replacement. To comfort myself and to offer it to others in this moment, I made a slideshow of the photos I took. 

May your name forever be a blessing, Ruth Bader Ginsberg. 

The music is “Ode to Brigid,” in Irish Gaelic, sung by Molly Hebert-Wilson on “The Infinite Dark,” a 2018 recording with poet and reader Jane Yolen, singers and instrumentalists Lui Collins, Max Cohen, myself, Molly, and Sarah Bauhan, who plays “Fisherman’s Song For Calling the Seals” with me here.

© 2020 Donna Hébert, all rights reserved.

The music for the slideshow is Québecois artist Michel Faubert’s composition “La valse des jouets.” I played it with pianist Keith Murphy on this track from my 1999 CD “Big Boned Beauty.” The island in the background is Margaree Island, inhabited until 1971, when the last resident lighthouse keeper, John MacLeod, left. In 1982, Canada established Margaree Island as Sea Wolf Island National Wildlife Area. 

I’m born and raised in New England. Mountains, lakes, streams, and mixed forests have long been part of my landscapes, while beaches were less appealing. As an adult, I didn’t want to plant myself on a crowded strip of sand and listen to someone else’s boombox while getting a toxic sunburn.

Now, in my seventh decade, I live for half the year on a far-away island in the North Atlantic, perched at the top of Nova Scotia, itself largely an island. As someone who grew up here once told me, “Y’know, Canada’s so damn long and narrow and we’re at the arse end of ‘er.” He forgot to mention the wind, which can knock you down. Cape Breton sits where several weather patterns meet and do battle and the sky can change in a moment, as in “Hurry up and get the clothes in; it’s raining while the sun is shining!”

New England gets more full sun than we do here but unless you live near the ocean, you won’t get the kind of light that we see in Cape Breton. Silvery, shimmering with the movement of waves and wind, the light is hypnotic and a bit fey, as though a selkie might leave her skin on that empty shore or dolphins and mermaids emerge from the waves at any moment.

We walked the Inverness boardwalk yesterday in that shimmery afternoon light. In winter, I’ve seen kite-surfers playing games with the wind there but today it was largely empty. Kudos to the town association, which made both the boardwalk and beach accessible to wheelchairs. The boardwalk has railings on both sides, with sheltered places to stop and sit.

Walking over what were once coal mines, it’s difficult to imagine that gritty history amid the golf-course dunes and beach vegetation. The mines closed in the 1950s and decades later, Inverness went from a declining mining town to a world golfing destination. Facing the beach, there will soon be fancy vacation homes built over former mine tunnels. With my working class roots, it pleases me that the wealthy golfers from away who buy them will still have a public beach and boardwalk fronting their very expensive ocean view. 

As for the rest of us, we are looking out to sea anyway, daydreaming about Margaree Island. 

© 2020 Donna Hébert, all rights reserved.

Southwest Margaree, where we live in Cape Breton, is part of the larger Inverness County, which stretches south to the Canso Strait and north past Cheticamp to the top of the Highlands. In spite of the distances involved among and between communities here, most people know a lot more about their neighbors than we would in the States and even though Bob’s lived here since the mid-90s, locals still know our house by the original owners’ name.

The neighborliness of island residents is very sweet. There’s a fabric of caring that goes beyond what Americans might consider nosiness. Of course people here want to know everything about you. You might be related, after all, and they never stop hoping you might turn out to be Scottish! Their grapevine for communicating with each other about you is also as legendary as their scenery. I think Bob knew this already from his years of living here but in the story I tell today, I was about to encounter this.

My second summer here, I was determined to make more jams. It was early July and I was looking for someone who grew strawberries, asking the Co-op if they knew anyone. We wanted flats, not little punnets.

The previous summer, I had met one of Inverness’s “women of the clan.” A retired nurse, Alice Freeman runs The Bear Paw, a very interesting gift store in downtown Inverness. As much a cultural center as a commercial enterprise, in The Bear Paw, you can explore the island’s cultural and musical heritage and even watch Alice weave throws in authentic island tartans. She doesn’t stop there but also sings in Scots Gaelic and has a fine singing voice. Alice is my senior by some years and she sports a black streak in her otherwise white hairdo. To call her anything but magnificent would be an understatement. Alice and women like her are the lifeblood of the community, running events, raising money, putting on shows, cooking, baking, and chivvying others into helping and doing what they can.

When I met her for the first time, within about three minutes, Alice had gently interrogated me about who I was, where I came from, and what was my mother’s mother’s name? And my father’s? The following summer, we stopped in to ask her if she knew anyone that grew strawberries. The store was closed but the sign said she’d be back soon. Alice keeps a bench outside the front door and we sat there to wait for her return. The view from the bench is of the Inverness beach so it’s no hardship to set awhile.

A good time later, a friend of hers joined us on the bench and proceeded to chat us up like a trained agent, asking where we lived in the Margarees and just kept us talking. Alice didn’t return and we had to leave, but we had left the important snippet of information behind. We were looking for strawberries.

The photo you see above is what greeted us on the kitchen porch the next morning. Bob and I put two and two together, looked at each other, and said, “Alice!” She admitted that her friend had mentioned we were looking for them, confirming what Alice already knew. Where we lived. She also told us the Co-op would have strawberry flats in a week.

I want to be Alice when I grow up.

© 2020 Donna Hébert, all right reserved.

There’s a swing to the seasons here. People wait-wait-wait-wait and then wait some more for summer to finally arrive but when it does, BAM! They plant things, travel, go dancing (sadly not this year, though), eat out (many restaurants close in the off-season) and remind themselves why they put up with the long, dark winter. They also work their tails off all summer because this is a tourist destination. Still, summer is worth the wait. 

On Sunday, Bob and I took one of our favorite drives up the Cabot Trail through Cap Lemoine and Chéticamp, where we had coffee at the Frog Pond Cafe, going on through the Cape Breton Highlands as far as Pleasant Bay, where we stopped at the Rusty Anchor for a truly magnificent dinner. We drove over the mountain where, in winter, the snow can get to 20 feet and the school bus still has to get through. 

Bob likes to tool along on the Trail imagining he’s a British race car driver but I threw a spoke in that, asking to stop every few minutes when I saw something to photograph. Today’s essay is largely photographic and musical. All photos were shot with my iPhone. Looking for photo ops gave a nice feel to the trip. There were a lot of other people with the same idea – it’s Labour Day weekend up here too – but we managed to stay away from them. The most magical moment was at day’s end, when we stopped along the Margaree River. The play of light was magnificent. 

My 2002 solo version of “Neil Gow’s Lament” fit as a theme for this YouTube slideshow. Bob is wearing his “dance Cape Breton” tee and that’s a homemade blueberry lemonade on the table at the Rusty Anchor in Pleasant Bay. The treeless landscape at the beginning is Cap St. Joseph LeMoine and opening photo is the Mi-Carème center there. The Cabot Trail runs inland of this peninsula. The Frog Pond Cafe just north of Chéticamp is a great place for espresso and mouth-watering oatcakes. The grandeur of the landscape from there on makes me wish I could paint. I’ll have to be satisfied with my iPhone camera. The sweet Margaree Valley in the fading light at the end is simply stunning.

That’s why we live here.

© 2020 Donna Hébert, all rights reserved.

I come from generations of Québecois and Acadian farmers and millworkers. Even if my original Acadian ancestors were pioneers, their descendants worked in mills in New Hampshire, Massachusetts and Vermont from 1870-1970 and many also sent their children to work until the law put a stop to such things. Historically, education was for the wealthy, while the children of farmers and millworkers were expected to work as soon as they were able. We like to close our eyes to this reality, but child labor and effective slavery still exist in other parts of the world, where too many children make the clothes that fill our stores while simultaneously our own coddled darlings are taking music lessons. 

Until the U.S. Fair Labor Standards Act in 1938, children under 16 could be hired for factory work. Some states made education compulsory long before that but what really changed education was that 1938 law. Massachusetts led the states in instituting public education in 1852, while Mississippi, the last, took until 1918 to require it but after 1938, children stayed in school until at least age 16. 

The barons of industry that America spawned were empire-building, not underwriting reform and they weren’t concerned about educating their workers. They wanted productivity, reluctantly granting Sunday as a day of rest. Anyone who thinks that mill or factory work was or is easy, or that you wouldn’t choose to do something else if you could, needs their head and their privilege examined. People were regularly injured, maimed and killed with no compensation. My own grandfather was injured in his sixties as a mill repairman in the factory that had employed him for decades and they let him go, no compensation, nothing. He spent almost a year in the White River Junction VA Hospital recovering. Pre-OSHA, no Workmen’s Comp, of course. Injured, he still had to get another job when he got out of the hospital. 

In my youth, I tried factory work and failed three times. At age 17, I lasted only a few months in the basement of the Braverman shoe factory in Haverhill, and a year later, less than a summer in the Foster Grant sunglasses plant in Leominster. They took me to the emergency room halfway through my first shift at the D.D. Bean match factory in Jaffrey NH when I had an asthma attack from the particulate matter in the air. I’d have been dead of TB before puberty a hundred years ago in the mills. As it was, my father, who worked in mills and factories his whole life, was deaf by his mid-fifties, while his later dementia could be linked to the chemicals he handled for decades. And let’s talk money: millworkers, factory workers, the people who actually finish the job someone else started, are not getting rich. Since the ‘80s, the U.S. has been on a union-busting spree, so in fact, it’s getting worse, not better, for workers. 

The people who physically built this country – slaves, indentured servants, construction, steel, railroad and factory workers – didn’t get much back in return, nor did they accumulate enough wealth to enrich their inheritors as the/their owners did. Their collective labor, taken for little, if not taken altogether by slavery, also collectively enriched a powerful few whose own descendants continue to influence our lives today in ways large and small.

Mamie Laberge, in the photo above taken by muckraking photographer Lewis Hine, has inheritors who may not work in an American factory but you can bet they work in factories somewhere in Sri Lanka, Vietnam, China or Indonesia and that companies in America sell what they make. It wouldn’t surprise me to learn I’m wearing an item of clothing from a questionable source without knowing it. In fact, I’d bet on it. 

Maybe I should go back to making my clothes again. I owe it to Mamie.

PHOTO CAPTION: Mamie’s photo, taken in 1913, struck me hard when I first saw it. She could have been me but instead of being a millworker, I’m a songwriter. I wrote “The Shuttle,” when I was singing with Josée Vachon and Liza Constable in Chanterelle. This track is from the Smithsonian/Folkways CD anthology “Mademoiselle Voulez-Vous Danser?”

To learn more about the history of Franco-Americans in New England, see:

David Vermette’s “A Distinct Alien Race: The Untold Story of Franco-Americans.” Baraka Books, Montréal

Charles Scontras in the Lewiston Maine Sun-Journal, “Society Turned to Prejudice to Justify Exploiting French-Canadian As Labor”