I learned a song in Margaree.
It rang inside my head:
Wrap me up in dungaree,
This morning I am dead.
THE CANSO CAUSEWAY was built in 1952 between the low mainland of Nova Scotia and the hills of Cape Breton Island and it took ten million tons of granite blasted from the face of Cape Porcupine to do it, the ocean breached and the ferry service gone like that; it was the lifeline but also the blood-letting of music, the time of strathspeys who took it upon themselves to be the first to step out upon the roadbed ginger-haired, and in the peace that followed upon this no-man’s-land excursion into the more-solid world, a stream of reels giddied down upon the steam of asphalt laid there by the yellow machines that called out jobs for us, the trucks, the wheels the size of boulders strewn by the same shake-up in the landscape of green, the morning clouds of jagged rock, the reels impetuous but off to a late start from the night before, slurred and graced and staccato’d into air still tanged up with the vapour blows of oil and diesel and the shouts of the gulls who multiplied with all the fuss, like showgirls they were that fluttered on the flow of the whitecaps now divided by the rubble that lay there S-shaped from shore to shore, and the workmen pounded in the guardrails for the slow airs to insinuate upon, which they did, the breath-notes twined in and out and stayed there as locked in time as any simple thought you ever had, vanguarding for the slip-jigs that then came down, rockets and flares in 9/8 time, their sixteenth- and thirty-second notes shredded and torn and flung from Bras d’Or high up there in the thunderstorms of August, the ozone heavy in the air, the line painters, the man with the steady hand who had to wait for the weather to change, the ribbon cut, the banshee cry, the wild scratch of horsehair whipped from the stammered bow, the fiddler himself anguished and stepped-out, the keening, back-lit kilted traditional furious pummelling of notes that rolled on down the Causeway, now unimpeded by the Strait surpassed, straight past all of us to the downtown city of New York.