Kilt-Deep in Song in Nova Scotia

A couple of lobstermen had the locals on their feet at the Thistledown Pub last June. It wasn’t the day’s catch they were brandishing but guitars. Everyone sang along as they sipped frosty mugs of Alexander Keith’s ale. Suddenly a teenage girl with flaming red hair burst into their midst. As Tracy Cavanaugh strummed his guitar at a feverish pace, the girl’s legs became a blur of Highland plaid socks.

Bartender Jason Fownes slid another Gaelic coffee laced with Drambuie and Scotch toward me. “Tracy was almost killed a while back when a rope wrapped around his arm and darn near pulled him overboard,” Fownes shouted above the music. “Managed to get it off just in the nick of time.”

After sunset most days, Cavanaugh and fellow guitarist Larry MacAskill trade their lobster traps for musical instruments. By day they fish the waters off Cape Breton; at night they sing about them.

It was my first evening in Cape Breton, and already I was kilt-deep in the songs, dances and salty romance with the sea that characterize this easternmost corner of Nova Scotia. Like many overseas settlements long marooned from the mother country, Nova Scotia -- Latin for “New Scotland” -- is often more Scottish than Scotland. That’s especially true of Cape Breton, where the lilting tones of the Gaelic language are commonly heard and tartans are seen by the acre. The Nova Scotia outpost of Canada’s favorite doughnut chain, Tim Hortons, even serves oatcakes.

From 1773 to 1852, the Scottish immigrated in great numbers to Cape Breton, and it’s no wonder that they stayed in this wind-swept part of the country: Its craggy coastline resembles the Hebrides, and its long-fingered lakes and inlets look like Scottish lochs. It must have felt sweetly like home. Coal and fish were abundant, as were mist and fog. Cape Breton is still the largest Scottish Gaelic-speaking community outside Britain.

I live in Quebec, another wedge of Europe cast adrift in North America, where traditions long ago abandoned in France live on. Curious what Scottish idiosyncrasies survived in Nova Scotia, I planned a weeklong road trip around Cape Breton, an island connected to the mainland by a causeway. I flew into the town of Sydney and headed for the Cabot Trail, a scenic route that I would roughly follow -- but for a few detours -- around the western lobe of the island, which has been voted by readers of Conde Nast Traveler magazine as one of the world’s most scenic isles.

The route, named after 15th century explorer John Cabot, was completed in the 1930s and is now more famous than any of the places it runs through. I was after the scenery, of course, but also the famously friendly folk of Cape Breton and their furiously fast fiddle music, which has become internationally renowned the past two decades. And then there is the road itself -- one of those curving, swooping, fun-to-drive byways that is a favorite for bicyclists, motorcyclists and road-trip fiends.

You can drive the jagged 185-mile circuit in as little as six hours, but I planned to putter and follow the advice of a Cape Breton friend. “Go to a village and find the wharf. Ask questions,” Parker Donham had told me. “They won’t approach you, but they’ll love to talk. The experience will yield rich dividends.” The barman at the Thistledown Pub in Baddeck was more pragmatic: “Watch out for moose,” he said. “They’ll make your car into a convertible pretty quick.”

It didn’t take long for my road trip to gain a local soundtrack. On my first morning I headed west from the airport to St. Anns, where I had planned to sit in on a language course at the Gaelic College of Celtic Arts and Crafts. At the heart of a recent cultural revival in Cape Breton, the college offers courses as diverse as step and Highland dancing, Celtic harp and weaving, as well as a museum where you can delve into your clan connections.

I never made it to the classroom. In the parking lot, the distant moan of bagpipes lured me around to the back of the college, where 12 pipers, three drummers and a 20-year-old drum sergeant, Gregor MacLean, were practicing for an upcoming marching band competition. I almost melted at the soulful cry of the bagpipes. They are the musical equivalent of a wolf howling at a full moon, and they flooded me with the loneliness of the Scottish Highlands. I lay in the grass watching as these earnest youngsters -- “Bonnie, laddie. Ready!” -- paced and puffed on their tartan bags of wind. When I finally dragged myself off the campus, a sign urged: “Will ye no come back again.”

The nearby town of Baddeck, on the shore of Bras d’or Lakes, often is considered the official starting point of the Cabot Trail. Alexander Graham Bell fell for this spot in 1885 and built an estate called Beinn Bhreagh, where he spent many summers. From the window of the Thistledown Pub, I watched the Elsie, the sailing boat that Bell had built for his daughter, skim across the lake -- the same waters where he had tested his early hydrofoil, the HD-4, which hit 71 mph, at the time the world’s fastest water vehicle. There is a replica at the museum in the Alexander Graham Bell National Historic Site in Baddeck.

From Baddeck I veered off the Cabot Trail and headed farther south, then crossed the island via tiny Aberdeen and Skye Glen to the west coast and the village of Mabou -- “Home of the Rankins,” as the welcome sign put it. The Rankin Family, along with vocalist Rita McNeil and the spirited family group the Barra MacNeils, are among the island’s favorite musicians. I had arrived smack in the heart of one of Cape Breton’s thriving music scenes: the Red Shoe Pub.

Stepping out of a driving rain, I ducked into the white clapboard former grocery store, its windowsills lined with old red shoes. The pub is a Cape Breton hot spot, and on this Sunday, as usual, it was standing room only for the afternoon jam session. I squeezed my way to the back, ordered a beer and leaned against the bar. The floor shuddered with couples dancing reels to the fiddle-and-piano tunes of husband and wife Kinnon and Betty Lou Beaton. It was a wicked, toe-tapping whirl that soon steamed up the pub windows.

Throughout Cape Breton, in venues from kitchens, barns and firehouses to community centers, locals gather for “ceilidhs,” pronounced “kay-lees” -- informal gatherings where music is played and the well-worn floors display the “plank’er down” look from years of lively jigs. Every weekend somewhere on the island there are rigorous square dances rated by a local expert as “one shirt, two shirt or three shirt,” according to how much sweat has been shed.

As the Beatons slowed for a waltz, a man I’d been chatting with introduced himself. “Donald MacIsaac,” he said, shaking my hand. “You might have heard of my nephew, Ashley. He fiddles too.” Does he ever. Known for a breakneck style -- as well as risque revelations about his lifestyle -- Ashley MacIsaac is the bad boy of Cape Breton fiddlers and one of its best-known musical exports. He has worked with composer Philip Glass (who lives on the island part of the year) and performed with Paul Simon at Carnegie Hall. I’d first seen Ashley in Montreal, where the punk-fiddler strode across the stage in a kilt and combat boots. But he’d clearly retained his down-home maritime roots. “If you come to Cape Breton, drop in,” he had invited the 2,000-strong audience, and proceeded to give directions to his “blue house on the hill.” You just knew that if you made the effort, he would take the time for a chat. Cape Bretoners are like that.

Donald pointed across the room. “And that’s Natalie’s father over there by the door.” Natalie MacMaster is another great Cape Breton fiddling star, a wholesome-looking, talented blond who step dances as she ferociously fiddles with the likes of Santana and Pavarotti. Both Ashley and Natalie occasionally perform at local venues such as the Red Shoe. “Tourists come to Cape Breton and drive right by our country festivals where there’s 100 fiddlers because they think it’s some local event with amateur talent,” Donald said with a chuckle. “But some of the world’s best fiddlers are often there.”

Cape Breton’s music revival was spurred by a 1972 Canadian Broadcasting Corp. documentary about old-time fiddling dying out in Nova Scotia. The film jolted locals out of complacency. Young people picked up bows and began tutoring under the legends. The music has inspired a new generation of players. One of their biggest venues is the Celtic Colours International Festival, an annual October series of concerts. “These days,” Donald said, “you shake a bush in Cape Breton, and a fiddler falls out.”

The skies had cleared and the stars were out by the time I reached Glenville and my unique accommodations for the night. Glenora Inn and Distillery is North America’s only single-malt whiskey distillery, and it offers lodging in chalets set amid wooded highlands where 22 springs feed Mac- Lellan’s Brook, the soul of Glenora’s golden brew. In 2000, Glenora launched its first product, an 8-year-old Glen Breton Rare Canadian Single Malt, which is exported to Japan, New York, Chicago, Iceland, Bermuda, Switzerland and Germany. The operation is small, distributing only 2,000 cases of 12 bottles per year.

“We wanted to produce traditional Scottish whiskey in a Scottish setting,” said Bob Scott, Glenora’s vice president. The Bowmore Distillery in Scotland helped him obtain equipment such as the copper pot stills that he had seen on display for the country’s 500th anniversary of single malt.

From Glenville, the road curves northwest toward the coast and the town of Inverness, a beach community still quiet in early June as it awaited summer crowds that would fill the white sand beach and 75-degree waters -- the warmest north of the Carolinas. In the Coal Miner’s Cafe, on a main street lined with pickup trucks, I had what constitutes fusion cuisine in Cape Breton -- lobster quesadillas.

Dodging in and out from the coast, the road finally meets the Cabot Trail again near the tranquil country lodge of Normaway Inn. Owner David MacDonald is a fierce defender and promoter of all things Breton- esque -- especially music. On the way to my cabin, he pointed out the barn, where in the 1980s he started barn dances to get kids interested in fiddling.

“Ashley danced there when he was this tall,” he said, holding his hand to his waist. He ticked off a roll call of Cape Breton talent who still shake the rafters of the Normaway barn on summer weekends. When Natalie MacMaster played one recent night, 900 people showed up.

After a dinner that included Cape Breton rack of lamb and a juicy rhubarb pie -- “We get it from there,” said the waitress, pointing to a patch growing wild outside the window -- I took my coffee to the living room, where guests had gathered in front of the fieldstone fireplace to listen to Louis Arsenault, hardware store employee by day, guitarist by night.

The next morning, after a perfect bowl of oatmeal that only a Scot could make, I stumbled upon the Margaree Salmon Museum -- one of those places you run into now and again that is dedicated to a subject in which you have no interest but still stops you in your tracks. In a small, gray former schoolhouse near the Margaree River (where Atlantic salmon swim along the 20-mile length of pools), I lingered over a lovingly presented collection of vintage fly rods and reels, including one handmade from the piston of a 1945 Model A Ford. There was a century’s worth of poachers’ paraphernalia and flies with such names as Yellow Dog, Orange Blossom, Black Bomber and the Rat.

At the fishing village of Margaree Harbour, a two-lighthouse town, I followed the shoreline north and soon noticed a shift in the linguistic terrain. I’d left behind Rear Dunvegan and Chimney Corner and was heading for Terre Noire, Cap Le Moine and Belle Cote -- areas settled by the French in the 16th and 17th centuries when they established a maritime territory called Acadia. But 42 years after Nova Scotia was handed to the British through the 1713 Treaty of Utrecht, the French settlers were exiled around the world. Those who were shipped to Louisiana became known as “Cajuns,” a derivative of the word “Acadians.”

The main town here is Cheticamp, a waterfront collection of brightly painted houses and boats where French is spoken with a 17th century accent and there is a disproportionate number of hookers -- rug hookers, that is -- who create traditional floor coverings at the local artisan’s co-op. The works of one particularly well-known regional artist, Elizabeth LeFort, hang in the White House, the Vatican and Buckingham Palace. Folk art is a booming cottage industry along this stretch of coast, and I stopped at many roadside shops, including that of Jean Marc Poirier, where colorful stickmen and polka-dotted fish competed for my attention. I couldn’t resist a carved wooden rooster in high heels. Artists such as Poirier ship their work to galleries around the world. In the sunshine outside a cafe, an elderly man practiced the tradition of spoon playing, clicking out a lively tune on his knees, thighs and shoulders with two spoons held in one hand.

Cheticamp is the gateway to Cape Breton Highlands National Park and the start of the roller-coaster ride that makes the Cabot Trail famous. The road wound ever higher onto the highland plateau and, at a viewpoint overlooking the sea, I was reminded of a local expression: On the first day, God created Cape Breton. On the second day, he threw rocks at it.

And so it seemed. Heaps of boulders were scattered along the shoreline, washed by an ocean sprinkled with the fluorescent confetti of lobster traps. The sun shone on banks of fog swirling and shifting in the pleasant breeze as I climbed hairpin curves -- until suddenly I came face to face with a great bull moose standing smack in the center of the road. I screeched to a halt. He glared. I blinked first and inched slowly around him, trying to still my racing heart.

The park stretches across the lobe of the island from the western to the eastern shore -- 367 square miles of hiking, biking and camping terrain so serene that Gampo Abbey, a Tibetan Buddhist monastery, was established near the park boundary at Pleasant Bay.

The northern tip of Cape Breton is outside the park. I drove narrow side roads through fishing communities with armies of lawn gnomes and whirligigs. I chatted wharf-side with weary lobster fishermen who had set out for sea at 3 a.m. that day to make the most of the eight-week season. At day’s end, a lobster appetizer started the best meal I was to eat in Cape Breton, prepared at the Markland Resort by Danish chef Lars Willum. The restaurant is certified as a “Taste of Nova Scotia” establishment by the provincial government, which means it serves regional cuisine featuring high-quality local ingredients -- from mussels, smoked salmon and scallops to local strawberries, apples and asparagus. For a main course I chose Willum’s signature dish: halibut with smoked salmon and Aspy Bay oysters that had been plucked that afternoon from nearby waters.

The next morning I set out early, heading south and into the eastern corner of the park. I hiked a forest trail through jack pines, a tree known for cones that burst and release their seeds with extreme heat such as from a forest fire. A driving rain pelted my coat. Damp and numb, I ducked into the Keltic Lodge, a grand old Canadian hotel set in a brilliant location above Ingonish Beach. A kilt-clad gentleman came to my rescue. “Coffee,” I implored, shivering, “a Gaelic coffee.” Some Scottish traditions are easier to fall into than others.

My next stop was the Fortress of Louisbourg National Historic Site, a fortified town where, in the 18th century, the French ran a trading empire based on cod fishing, which produced 30 million pounds a year. In the 1960s, Canada began reconstructing a part of the fortress, eventually having it inhabited every June to September by authentically clad Cape Bretoners living a typical day in the life of Louisbourg in 1744, the year before the first British siege.

One of the artisans the park has called upon is leatherworker John C. Roberts, whose workshop in Indian Brook, north of St. Anns, is located amid a hive of potters, stained glass craftsmen and ironwork artists. Roberts’ work for the park has included leather buckets for carrying water for firefighting, sponge buckets for wetting down cannon barrels, gunpowder buckets and leather cartridge boxes with patterns he created based on archeological artifacts. He has made thread from scratch and baked the buckets in an oven. “The heat hardens the protein just like when you cook an egg or a steak,” he said of his beautiful rigid “baked buckets.”

At the fortress gate I was interrogated by a bayonet-wielding guard with a strong French accent. “English? And I see you are wearing a red coat,” he pointed at my windbreaker. “Are you on a suicide mission?” I assured him my red coat was a weather choice, not a military garment, and he grudgingly let me in. Throughout the fortress, houses were being cleaned, clothes mended, cannons fired, bread baked. Children played 250-year-old games, workmen passed with primitive wheelbarrows and I ate a simple stew from patterned porcelain produced by the same Chinese factory that supplied the Louisbourg French. Not one detail -- from eyeglasses to flintlock muskets to the glass-laced mortar to keep out rats -- revealed the existence of a century past the 18th. I chatted with the fort’s “architect” as we walked through his home, and with the tavern waitress. They told me about their day, their dreams.

It all became eerily real just as my camera and cellphone began to look somewhat unreal on the table alongside my pewter mug of spruce beer. Asking directions to the washroom, my waitress pointed upstairs and whispered, “Please make sure there’s no one in the street below.” I opened the toilet door warily, relieved to walk into the 21st century as my eye caught a sign: “Many people have wondered if our authenticity extends to the washrooms. So did the health inspector. . . . But here the rules of the game are temporarily suspended.”

Although written on a washroom wall, it did seem a fitting close to a trip around an island where the rules of our too-fast modern lifestyle are temporarily suspended. A place where world-class fiddlers play in simple barns, where there is always time to stop and chat, and where there is un petit peu de France and a wee dram of Scotland.

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GUIDEBOOK

Fiddling Around Cape Breton

Telephone numbers and prices: The area code for Nova Scotia is 902. All prices are in U.S. dollars. Room rates are for a double for one night. Meal prices are for dinner for two, food only.

Getting there: Air Canada offers connecting service from Los Angeles International Airport to Sydney, Nova Scotia.

Where to stay: Inverary Resort, 368 Shore Road, Baddeck; (800) 565-5660 or 295-3500, fax 295-3527, www.capebretonresorts.com/inverary.asp. Family-run waterfront lodgings on 11 acres with two restaurants and the popular Thistledown Pub. Rates: $100; from $250 for cottage suites. Open May to November.

Glenora Inn & Distillery, Route 19, Glenville; (800) 839-0491 or 258-2662, fax 258-3572, www.glenoradistillery.com. A nine-room inn stands in the distillery courtyard, while chalets with Jacuzzis are in the nearby highlands. Visitors can find good hiking in the area. Rates: $115; chalets from $169. Open May to November.

Normaway Inn and Cabins, 691 Egypt Road, Margaree Valley; (800) 565-9463 or 248-2987, normaway.com. A quiet country lodge with inn rooms and rustic cabins, some with wood-stove fireplaces and Jacuzzis. Nearby canoeing, bicycling and hiking. Rates: from $99; cabins from $139. Open June to October.

Markland Coastal Resort, 802 Dingwall Road, Dingwall; (800) 872-6084 or 383-2246, fax 484-5762, marklandresort.com. Pine cottages overlook the beach. A nearby performing arts center offers regular classical and fiddling concerts. Rates: $128 for lodge rooms; cabins from $202. Open May to October.

Keltic Lodge, 383 Middle Head Peninsula, Ingonish Beach; (800) 565-0444 or 285-2880, fax 285-2859, www.signatureresorts.com/keltic. This grand Canadian resort sits on a bluff adjacent to the Highlands Links golf course. Rate: from $243 per person, including breakfast, dinner and one round of golf, July 1 to Aug. 31. Open May to October.

Louisbourg Harbour Inn, 9 Lower Warren St., Louisbourg; (888) 8888-INN or 733-3222, louisbourg.com/louisbourgharbourinn. This charming century-old, harbor-side sea captain’s house is furnished with antiques. Louisbourg National Historic Site is less than a mile away. Rate: $83, including full breakfast. Open June to October.

Where to eat: Restaurants at the Glenora Distillery, the Normaway Inn and the Markland Coastal Resort are certified “Taste of Nova Scotia,” and the quality is good. Seafood, local lamb and pork are the regional specialties. Reservations are recommended. Average: $65.

What to see: The Celtic Colours International Festival. Events take place across Cape Breton; (877) 285-2321 or 562-6700, fax 539-9388, www.celtic-colours.com. Oct. 8-16.

Alexander Graham Bell National Historic Site, 559 Chebucto St., Baddeck; 295-2069, www.pc.gc.ca/lhn-nhs/ns/grahambell/index_e.asp. Open daily year-round. $6.50 adults; $3.25 children.

Margaree Salmon Museum, Northeast Margaree; 248-2848. fortress.uccb.ns.ca/historic/marg.html. Open daily June to October. $1.

Fortress of Louisbourg National Historic Site, 259 Park Service Road, Louisbourg; 733-2280, www.louisbourg.ca/fort. Open daily June to September. $13.50 adults; $6.75 children.

For more information: Nova Scotia Tourism, (800) 565-0000, www.novascotia.com.

Cape Breton Tourism, www.cbisland.com.

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Researcher Jessica Gelt contributed to this story.