Simple Gifts, Essex NY

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

 J. Brackett, Simple Gifts

We now go from The Big Apple (see previous post) to one of my favourite areas within a day’s driving radius of Toronto: Lake Champlain, the historic trading route and once the scene of many international battles that runs north-south between Vermont and the state of New York.

A generous offer to hang out for a couple of days at a friend’s family cottage in Essex on the New York side of the lake came through just before leaving Toronto, and I didn’t fully realize what a welcome resting spot this would be after driving hither and yon throughout New England. (In a way this is like jumping to the last page of my story about visiting Tanglewood for the first time, but rest assued that I won’t give away too much of the plot!) 

Situated on a verdant promentory on the New York side of the lake, this charmingly understated and historic cottage offered views of the Green Mountains of Vermont across the glistening waters, as well as glimpses of the local ferry plying back and forth every half hour. What better way to catch my breath after ten days of recording adventures and exploring the open road?

During my stint at cottage-sitting - as if exploring local shops, admiring the incredible pre-Revolutionary War architecture of Essex’ historic downtown, cycling on my Brodie through the countryside and even hitting the links at a nearby century-old golf course weren’t enough – the icing on the cake came early on when I discovered a wonderful collection of books on a shelf in living room of the cottage. The book I randomly pulled off the shelf was Nabokov’s Pale Fire.

On that first morning of my return to the shores to Lake Champlain, transported to some childhood place by the comforting, faintly musty smell of the cottage and the gentle sound of the waves, I dove into Nabokov’s four incredible Cantos.

During intermittent breaks in my reading, I assembled one of the flutes I had taken with me on my travels, a wonderful antique wooden flute made of lustrous rosewood replete with glowing patina, and worked up a few tunes. This slightly undersized, single-keyed flute of indeterminate age and origin appears to be at least 150 years old and seemed the perfect instrument for this rendition of Simple Gifts. This is arguably the most popular of the hundreds of Shaker hymns, melodies written in the area I had found myself travelling through. 

If you listen carefully, you can imagine my moving out onto the open-air verandah where the muted sound of the waves lapping on the shoreline can be heard, a ’canvas’ to paint sound upon. The short song of a nearby bird signals the end of the piece as the distant ringing of bells announce high noon.

Note: You can thank Canada’s own Leonard Cohen for the inspiration to assemble this post…speaking of fantastic literature, I have taken a break from Pale Fire, a copy of which I secured immediately upon my return to Toronto, to read Cohen’s Beautiful Losers. An amazing read, it can be somewhat gruelling at times, although just now an amazing chapter presented itself like an oasis in the midst of depravity:

Chapter 32 (insert text here, describing early encounters of European explorers with Native culture and individuals, including Kateri Tekakwitha, the visionary daughter of a Mohawk chief.)