Why Song for the Mira touches us all
What is it about Cape Breton’s unofficial anthem, Song for the Mira, which was inducted into the Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame about five years ago?
It has a simple melody. Not much really happens: old-timers wet a line, kids flirt, ancient stories and a moonshine bottle are passed around by campfire light.
Yet, it packs a punch beyond mere words and music and its plain-spoken themes of loneliness and homesickness, and the power of place, touch something deep behind the breastbone.
That is the mystery of timeless songs like this one, which has been recorded hundreds of times, in several languages — it is so beloved in Ireland that at one point two different versions of it were in the Irish top 10 — by people who have never heard of Marion Bridge and can offer no reliable opinion on whether a stretch of river just 20 minutes from Sydney is, in fact, “a piece of the universe, more fit for princes and kings.”
I grew up mostly in Halifax and was middle-aged before I saw the Mira in person, but I heard about the river anyway because every summer while growing up, my dad, his parents, and his brothers would get on the train in Glace Bay — cars being hard to come by in the coal town in the betweenwar years — and head for a rented cottage on the Mira.
On my wall, I have a grainy black-and-white photo from that period, a frozen moment from a golden summer nearly a century ago.
On the edge of a small bridge on the river sit the Demont boys — my father Russell looking serious like the stockbroker he would become, his grinning brother Eric, Earl, the baby in the family, who peers back skeptically at the photographer — clutching fishing poles.
On the edge of the photograph, beyond some trees, stands a rustic bungalow, for all I know the very one they rented every summer when my grandfather Clarence Demont (he spelled his name differently than we do) took vacation from his job as a pressman and later production manager at the Glace Bay Gazette.
All of them are gone now, but I like to think that bridge and the spot on it from which the brothers once caught trout remain.
I know for sure that on hot days they dove off the bridge, along with a visually impaired friend Doug Holmes who also summered in the Mira area.
My dad and his brothers would float along with the current yelling, “over here, Dougie,” to keep their friend from coming to harm.
By now, I have forgotten most of the stories my father told me, yet that image — the hot summer afternoon, the cool river, the four boys making their leisurely way along it like characters in a Mark Twain novel — endures.
So does the fact that when they grew older, they would sometimes go to a dancehall near the Mira known as Spain’s Pavilion. Afterwards, a bunch of them would walk back in the early hours of the morning.
I feel like I can hear their voices in the dark, laughing as they relived the night’s adventures, and see Holmes lightly touching Russ, Eric, or Earl’s elbow to not lose his way.
I know the Mira River meant a lot to my dad because he spoke of it like it was an innocent, frozen-in-aspic place, just as Allister MacGillivray described it sitting down, young and homesick, to write a song about the stretch of water.
It seemed fitting, then, that, on the eve of the funeral of my uncle Earl, I waded knee-high into that river where my dad and the others once happily swam.
I had company: some of Russ DeMont’s ashes and the ashes of his Sydney Mines bride, the former Joan Briers, both of which I had held onto awaiting just the right moment.
It was sunset, on a warm summer night, just as it is in the MacGillivray song. There was no breeze, not a hint of current, as I emptied handfuls of their ashes gently into the Mira River.
The emotion of the moment hit me hard, I am not going to lie. I feel it still, the sense of something beyond words, when I hear a few bars of the song.
That is the universal power of art, isn't it, which doesn't fade and transcends time, and can even transport you to a place — a river, for example, on a hot summer afternoon — that only exists in your imagination.
John DeMont is a Halifax-based columnist with SaltWire.