The Gandy Dancers...
“I believe that imagination is stronger
than knowledge,
That myth is more potent than history.
I believe that dreams are more powerful than facts,
That hope always triumphs over experience,
That laughter is the only cure for grief,
And I believe that love is stronger than death.”
-- Robert Fulghum
Chapter 1: A Framework to Contemplate the Extraordinary
I’ll never forget the day I followed that plume of smoke into the forest and saw the mountain door for the first time. I gasped and almost puked, so overwhelming was the smell of burning something. Flesh?
The door stood at about the shoulder-height of giants—if three giants were standing on top of one another—and looked like it was made of wrought iron, painted ice-cream pink.
Years later, I left detox and headed straight to my mother’s stack of photo albums. Next to the photographs of the moose and the mountains of the Cape Breton Highlands, she’d written: Our family vacation, 2006.
It was during my recovery that the memory came back to me. And although that pink mountain door left a huge impression on me, it wasn’t the door so much as the memory of the youngest of the three sisters that I couldn’t let go. I never doubted she was a witch, a prophetess. And when my childhood fascination turned into adolescent fantasy, she haunted my every waking, and sleeping, thought.
“Who are you?” she demanded.
“I’m Justan.” I replied meekly. “You?”
“My name is Sabine Poulain. I am the youngest prophetess in this forest, but also the most powerful.” Her startling blue eyes rattled me when she shook that shock of black hair from her face.
“What’s behind that pink door?” I’d asked.
“If you promise not to tell your parents, I’ll let you peek inside,” she said, then added an emphatic “promise?” to which I nodded vigorously.
One of the other two sisters, the older one with the elongated neck, had stopped chanting to try to prevent Sabine from opening the door. She had the same blue eyes as Sabine, but her face was so narrow that they protruded like an insect's above a nose shaped like a long, whale-shaped hill of debris. Ignoring her sister, Sabine took my hand and led me to the door. Beside their black cauldron the other two sisters resumed their chant at a feverish pitch:
“Double, double toil and trouble;
Fire burn and cauldron bubble.”
I crossed the threshold and took in the enormity of the staircase before me. Three times the width of the door and made of what I think was polished limestone, the risers were each meticulously etched and painted in delicate flowers and green leaves that intertwined into one another and pulled the eye up and up and up, in spirals. A stairway to heaven inside a mountain.
“What’s at the top?” I asked breathlessly.
“When you get up there," she wagged her finger skyward, "there’s a garden, and if you go down the path, you’ll find our hammock rooms.” Sabine spoke matter-of-factly, as if a staircase leading inside a mountain to a garden and a series of hammock rooms was the most natural thing one could expect beyond a wrought-iron door painted ice-cream pink.
It was then I heard my mother calling: “Justan, Justan! Where are you?” Her voice cracked with the hysteria of a mother who thinks she has lost her only son. “You know you’re not supposed to wander off without me.”
Sabine pushed me out the door with a warning:
“Remember your promise.”
As I prepared to dart into the woods in the direction of my mother’s voice, Sabine grabbed my hand. “Wait, I need something to seal your promise.” And with that, she’d wrapped her finger into my hair and yanked.
“Ouch,” I cried, “what was that for?”
"It's for the curse we’ll place on you if you ever breathe a word of this place to anyone."
Of course I should have heeded her warning.
* * * *
Chapter 2 – Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town
“I don’t know whether you know Mariposa. If not, it is of no consequence, for if you know Canada at all, you are probably well acquainted with a dozen towns just like it.”
--Stephen Leacock
When I was four years old on a flight from Paris to Canada, my mother read Leacock’s Sunshine Sketches to me. How ironic she told me that the town she grew up in was the French translation of Mariposa. Through the words of Stephen Leacock, I thus began to imagine wings growing upon my mother’s hometown, Papillion.
Later still, I would question this matter of consequence in Leacock’s quote. Perhaps Mariposa could be compared to a dozen towns just like it, but Papillion, it seems to me, is unlike any other Canadian village I’ve visited since. It was the polar opposite of Paris with the lone exception being the presence of eccentric characters like those I’d come to know in my four years of living at Villa Rose. Only in Papillion isolation amplified eccentricity reminding me of the process whereby millions of years of pressure on coal produces a diamond. In Papillion this pressure of isolation compressed their eccentricities into pure gems of madness.
We’d been on the road a few hours and already crossed the Canso Causeway—the bridge with the large sign that said 'Welcome to Cape Breton'—when I began noticing these strange and friendly people were all waving hello to us as we drove through the towns between the Causeway and Papillion.
"What’s up with that?" I asked.
Mom explained that there were two factors at play here. The first was that people truly were friendly here, but moreover it was November and everyone they passed simply assumed they knew us. Tourists didn’t venture here at this time of year.
During the rest of the drive to Papillion my mother related the history of the Acadians who settled the village and taught me the first two of many lessons she’d learned from living there.
In the first lesson—based on an Acadian saying extrapolated from the certainty that if you spit in the air, it would hit you in the face—my mother warned me that I should never, in any circumstance assume or hint that having lived in Paris rendered me in any way more worldly than anyone in the village. In fact, the mere mention of anything resembling worldly, or, for that matter, even naming cities like Paris was ill-advised. Furthermore, in Papillion the spit expression took on a deeper religious meaning. To spit toward the heavens could reap the wrath of God upon not just yourself but also upon your entire community. So no talk about atheism or agnosticism here. High falutin’ ways and words were cause for deep suspicion in Papillion! They would prove the ultimate cause of your demise.
My mother’s boyfriend, Gianni, who’d been unusually quiet piped up then. He was about to give up on driving due to the sheets of rain forcing us to drive at a crawl, but my mother insisted we were almost there. And so we drove on.
Driving north from Inverness, along the coast of the Gulf of St. Lawrence, the ocean rolled to our left, making the air smell of salt, even with the car windows shut tight.
The rain started to abate just as I spotted what might have been the strangest sight of the entire drive. In a field by the side of the road, near a little trailer and a shed, stood a circle of sticks that looked like they had clothes on.
“What was that?” I asked.
My Mom explained they were scarecrows which I’d never had occasion to encounter in Paris. And despite the fact that we were already running late my pleas met with success this time. Gianni turned the car around and up the dirt road we drove.
Scarecrows, dozens of them, wearing masks and dressed mostly in vintage clothing stood, arms outstretched, in a giant circle, sort of like I’d imagined witches or goddesses might look like during solstice.
Most of them had pieces of paper pinned to their chests, papers that, upon closer inspection, told odd little tales about whom they represented, including presidents and prime ministers alongside local tradesmen. Also their ‘faces’ were actually masks which was a little creepy, but cool too.
“This place is weird and wonderful!” I exclaimed.
“That it is, my love. Now back in the car you go. They’re all waiting for us.”
During this final stretch, Mom told me about the second lesson, which I argued was more of a corollary of the first, and had to do with the process of acquiring a quality called ‘natural’. In Papillion, natural was not an adjective, but a noun, so well-known one could almost classify it as a proper noun. And by the time you'd reached your teens, 'natural' was something you either had, or not. Parents cultivated this trait into their children from the moment they slipped out of the womb. Those who had ‘natural’ always had time to visit with their relatives and to stop to listen to anyone who wanted to chat about this or that; to not stop would simply confirm self-importance and a wretched absence of ‘natural’. Habits like reading and writing were deemed to exacerbate this wretched absence of natural and so any reading or writing would have to be done strictly in secret. In Papillion, there were only two valid reasons for writing stuff down: either you were writing your will or you were a little soft in the head. As for stories, they were meant to be told, not read. And once you were gone, the others would come up with their own stories.
I remember thinking at the time that this was a very strange philosophy. Later I would revisit that conclusion as I watched people around me communicating more and more through mediums like computers. In Papillion, meanwhile, people would continue to stop and talk to everyone, learning about them. It was as if it were part of their genetic code.
The November wind howled and the waves roared as we made the turn onto the slushy stretch of road known as Main Street to visitors and Par-en-Bas to locals. This was the strip along the harbour boasting the commercial part of Papillion. To the left, on the harbour side, was the Coop grocery store, one of the two restaurants (appropriately named Evangeline and Gabriel), a fish plant, and a fish & chip shack by the fish plant; on the right side, flanked by the Cape Breton Highlands, was the hospital, the post office, a tavern called The Deportation (which English patrons nicknamed the Gandy Dancer), and smack in the middle of the strip dominating the scene was a large cathedral-like church. In Papillion the church still dominated over commerce.
“It’s almost as big as the churches in Paris, but why is it the only big building?”
“It denotes the importance of religion here. That church was built with stones that men like your great-grandfather hauled across the ice that forms over the harbour during the winter. And they did all this hard labour for free.”
I followed my mother’s finger and gazed across the harbour to a spit of land with a few houses on it. Most of the land was pasture, Mom explained. Because the rain had almost stopped altogether and the fog had lifted, I could see a dirt road that seemed to curve along the bank and how the water looked like it had washed in along it. I vowed to go check it out someday.
My mother’s finger stiffened all of a sudden and she pointed to an old “Bienvenue a Papillion” sign lying next to a gaping hole in the ground. She explained how she’d helped to design the welcome sign as a school project. “They must have pulled it down to make space for a new one. Kind of looks like Papillion lost a front tooth.”
Compared to the buildings in Paris, more like crowded, at times crooked teeth that overlapped, this “downtown” seemed more like a gap-toothed grin anyway.
“I like it here,” I said.
“Well, take a good long look,” Mom said to me, “this could be the last time you see the downtown for awhile.”
We pulled into a driveway near one of the restaurants that led to a large yellow house. Despite the frigid weather, people of all ages and sizes began pouring out the doors and circling the car making it near impossible for Gianni to park. Everyone wanted to hug me (whom they’d never met).
By the time we were all introduced and explained, the sun had melted away behind the island across the harbour, and I’d become used to a kitchen with nine doors with almost as many people crammed into it as I’d seen in all my four years in Paris.
That myth is more potent than history.
I believe that dreams are more powerful than facts,
That hope always triumphs over experience,
That laughter is the only cure for grief,
And I believe that love is stronger than death.”
-- Robert Fulghum
Chapter 1: A Framework to Contemplate the Extraordinary
I’ll never forget the day I followed that plume of smoke into the forest and saw the mountain door for the first time. I gasped and almost puked, so overwhelming was the smell of burning something. Flesh?
The door stood at about the shoulder-height of giants—if three giants were standing on top of one another—and looked like it was made of wrought iron, painted ice-cream pink.
Years later, I left detox and headed straight to my mother’s stack of photo albums. Next to the photographs of the moose and the mountains of the Cape Breton Highlands, she’d written: Our family vacation, 2006.
It was during my recovery that the memory came back to me. And although that pink mountain door left a huge impression on me, it wasn’t the door so much as the memory of the youngest of the three sisters that I couldn’t let go. I never doubted she was a witch, a prophetess. And when my childhood fascination turned into adolescent fantasy, she haunted my every waking, and sleeping, thought.
“Who are you?” she demanded.
“I’m Justan.” I replied meekly. “You?”
“My name is Sabine Poulain. I am the youngest prophetess in this forest, but also the most powerful.” Her startling blue eyes rattled me when she shook that shock of black hair from her face.
“What’s behind that pink door?” I’d asked.
“If you promise not to tell your parents, I’ll let you peek inside,” she said, then added an emphatic “promise?” to which I nodded vigorously.
One of the other two sisters, the older one with the elongated neck, had stopped chanting to try to prevent Sabine from opening the door. She had the same blue eyes as Sabine, but her face was so narrow that they protruded like an insect's above a nose shaped like a long, whale-shaped hill of debris. Ignoring her sister, Sabine took my hand and led me to the door. Beside their black cauldron the other two sisters resumed their chant at a feverish pitch:
“Double, double toil and trouble;
Fire burn and cauldron bubble.”
I crossed the threshold and took in the enormity of the staircase before me. Three times the width of the door and made of what I think was polished limestone, the risers were each meticulously etched and painted in delicate flowers and green leaves that intertwined into one another and pulled the eye up and up and up, in spirals. A stairway to heaven inside a mountain.
“What’s at the top?” I asked breathlessly.
“When you get up there," she wagged her finger skyward, "there’s a garden, and if you go down the path, you’ll find our hammock rooms.” Sabine spoke matter-of-factly, as if a staircase leading inside a mountain to a garden and a series of hammock rooms was the most natural thing one could expect beyond a wrought-iron door painted ice-cream pink.
It was then I heard my mother calling: “Justan, Justan! Where are you?” Her voice cracked with the hysteria of a mother who thinks she has lost her only son. “You know you’re not supposed to wander off without me.”
Sabine pushed me out the door with a warning:
“Remember your promise.”
As I prepared to dart into the woods in the direction of my mother’s voice, Sabine grabbed my hand. “Wait, I need something to seal your promise.” And with that, she’d wrapped her finger into my hair and yanked.
“Ouch,” I cried, “what was that for?”
"It's for the curse we’ll place on you if you ever breathe a word of this place to anyone."
Of course I should have heeded her warning.
* * * *
Chapter 2 – Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town
“I don’t know whether you know Mariposa. If not, it is of no consequence, for if you know Canada at all, you are probably well acquainted with a dozen towns just like it.”
--Stephen Leacock
When I was four years old on a flight from Paris to Canada, my mother read Leacock’s Sunshine Sketches to me. How ironic she told me that the town she grew up in was the French translation of Mariposa. Through the words of Stephen Leacock, I thus began to imagine wings growing upon my mother’s hometown, Papillion.
Later still, I would question this matter of consequence in Leacock’s quote. Perhaps Mariposa could be compared to a dozen towns just like it, but Papillion, it seems to me, is unlike any other Canadian village I’ve visited since. It was the polar opposite of Paris with the lone exception being the presence of eccentric characters like those I’d come to know in my four years of living at Villa Rose. Only in Papillion isolation amplified eccentricity reminding me of the process whereby millions of years of pressure on coal produces a diamond. In Papillion this pressure of isolation compressed their eccentricities into pure gems of madness.
We’d been on the road a few hours and already crossed the Canso Causeway—the bridge with the large sign that said 'Welcome to Cape Breton'—when I began noticing these strange and friendly people were all waving hello to us as we drove through the towns between the Causeway and Papillion.
"What’s up with that?" I asked.
Mom explained that there were two factors at play here. The first was that people truly were friendly here, but moreover it was November and everyone they passed simply assumed they knew us. Tourists didn’t venture here at this time of year.
During the rest of the drive to Papillion my mother related the history of the Acadians who settled the village and taught me the first two of many lessons she’d learned from living there.
In the first lesson—based on an Acadian saying extrapolated from the certainty that if you spit in the air, it would hit you in the face—my mother warned me that I should never, in any circumstance assume or hint that having lived in Paris rendered me in any way more worldly than anyone in the village. In fact, the mere mention of anything resembling worldly, or, for that matter, even naming cities like Paris was ill-advised. Furthermore, in Papillion the spit expression took on a deeper religious meaning. To spit toward the heavens could reap the wrath of God upon not just yourself but also upon your entire community. So no talk about atheism or agnosticism here. High falutin’ ways and words were cause for deep suspicion in Papillion! They would prove the ultimate cause of your demise.
My mother’s boyfriend, Gianni, who’d been unusually quiet piped up then. He was about to give up on driving due to the sheets of rain forcing us to drive at a crawl, but my mother insisted we were almost there. And so we drove on.
Driving north from Inverness, along the coast of the Gulf of St. Lawrence, the ocean rolled to our left, making the air smell of salt, even with the car windows shut tight.
The rain started to abate just as I spotted what might have been the strangest sight of the entire drive. In a field by the side of the road, near a little trailer and a shed, stood a circle of sticks that looked like they had clothes on.
“What was that?” I asked.
My Mom explained they were scarecrows which I’d never had occasion to encounter in Paris. And despite the fact that we were already running late my pleas met with success this time. Gianni turned the car around and up the dirt road we drove.
Scarecrows, dozens of them, wearing masks and dressed mostly in vintage clothing stood, arms outstretched, in a giant circle, sort of like I’d imagined witches or goddesses might look like during solstice.
Most of them had pieces of paper pinned to their chests, papers that, upon closer inspection, told odd little tales about whom they represented, including presidents and prime ministers alongside local tradesmen. Also their ‘faces’ were actually masks which was a little creepy, but cool too.
“This place is weird and wonderful!” I exclaimed.
“That it is, my love. Now back in the car you go. They’re all waiting for us.”
During this final stretch, Mom told me about the second lesson, which I argued was more of a corollary of the first, and had to do with the process of acquiring a quality called ‘natural’. In Papillion, natural was not an adjective, but a noun, so well-known one could almost classify it as a proper noun. And by the time you'd reached your teens, 'natural' was something you either had, or not. Parents cultivated this trait into their children from the moment they slipped out of the womb. Those who had ‘natural’ always had time to visit with their relatives and to stop to listen to anyone who wanted to chat about this or that; to not stop would simply confirm self-importance and a wretched absence of ‘natural’. Habits like reading and writing were deemed to exacerbate this wretched absence of natural and so any reading or writing would have to be done strictly in secret. In Papillion, there were only two valid reasons for writing stuff down: either you were writing your will or you were a little soft in the head. As for stories, they were meant to be told, not read. And once you were gone, the others would come up with their own stories.
I remember thinking at the time that this was a very strange philosophy. Later I would revisit that conclusion as I watched people around me communicating more and more through mediums like computers. In Papillion, meanwhile, people would continue to stop and talk to everyone, learning about them. It was as if it were part of their genetic code.
The November wind howled and the waves roared as we made the turn onto the slushy stretch of road known as Main Street to visitors and Par-en-Bas to locals. This was the strip along the harbour boasting the commercial part of Papillion. To the left, on the harbour side, was the Coop grocery store, one of the two restaurants (appropriately named Evangeline and Gabriel), a fish plant, and a fish & chip shack by the fish plant; on the right side, flanked by the Cape Breton Highlands, was the hospital, the post office, a tavern called The Deportation (which English patrons nicknamed the Gandy Dancer), and smack in the middle of the strip dominating the scene was a large cathedral-like church. In Papillion the church still dominated over commerce.
“It’s almost as big as the churches in Paris, but why is it the only big building?”
“It denotes the importance of religion here. That church was built with stones that men like your great-grandfather hauled across the ice that forms over the harbour during the winter. And they did all this hard labour for free.”
I followed my mother’s finger and gazed across the harbour to a spit of land with a few houses on it. Most of the land was pasture, Mom explained. Because the rain had almost stopped altogether and the fog had lifted, I could see a dirt road that seemed to curve along the bank and how the water looked like it had washed in along it. I vowed to go check it out someday.
My mother’s finger stiffened all of a sudden and she pointed to an old “Bienvenue a Papillion” sign lying next to a gaping hole in the ground. She explained how she’d helped to design the welcome sign as a school project. “They must have pulled it down to make space for a new one. Kind of looks like Papillion lost a front tooth.”
Compared to the buildings in Paris, more like crowded, at times crooked teeth that overlapped, this “downtown” seemed more like a gap-toothed grin anyway.
“I like it here,” I said.
“Well, take a good long look,” Mom said to me, “this could be the last time you see the downtown for awhile.”
We pulled into a driveway near one of the restaurants that led to a large yellow house. Despite the frigid weather, people of all ages and sizes began pouring out the doors and circling the car making it near impossible for Gianni to park. Everyone wanted to hug me (whom they’d never met).
By the time we were all introduced and explained, the sun had melted away behind the island across the harbour, and I’d become used to a kitchen with nine doors with almost as many people crammed into it as I’d seen in all my four years in Paris.