Around Cape Horn

 Go my way, and I'll be good to you.

Gordon Lightfoot, "Go My Way," Summer Side of Life, (1971)

"Person on the street interviews" are an iffy proposition, at best. Recently, individuals (or small groups, to make the answers attainable) were asked who was the first person to walk on the Moon. No one gave the right answer, but the most common wrong answer was Lance Armstrong. But, I would venture to say that if the question was posed simply: "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald," 90% of subjects would blurt "Gordon Lightfoot!"

Gordon Lightfoot was born nearly eighty-five years ago in Orillia, Ontario, Canada. At that time the town's population was not yet ten thousand. He began performing at age four, singing over the intercom system at his elementary school. After high school he lived briefly in Los Angeles, but returned to Ontario and lived there for the rest of his life.

The string of Lightfoot songs spans nearly seven decades, with his most memorable (the ones that made the music charts) coming in the Sixties, Seventies and Eighties. "If You Could Read My Mind" still gets airtime on mainstream FM stations, "Sundown" a staple of legacy channels (I refuse to call them oldies stations) and even now someone occasionally covers "Carefree Highway."

The depth of his work, of wanderlust and the accompanying loneliness, of whimsical children's characters and the inescapable memories of lost love are where any Lightfoot fan goes for his best work. "Mother of a Miner's Child" speaks of the rigors, and rewards, of loving a hard-working man. "Bells of the Evening" contains the line I'm caught by the minstrel's misfortune, of being forever displaced. "Song for a Winter's Night," covered by other artists repeatedly, paints the subtle portrait of a man sitting on a cold night, smoking a cigarette, finishing a drink (whiskey, more than likely) and rereading a letter - searching for between-the-line meanings - he had received from a love so far away. He played "Alberta Bound" at the opening ceremonies of the 1988 Calgary Winter Olympics.

November 1977, my then-girlfriend and I (she is the answer to the question "Jim, what brought you to Colorado?") attend Mr. Lightfoot's concert at the Denver Arena. He plays many of the old favorites, but sprinkled here and there material from an album that would be three years in the works - his Dream Street Rose. He begins a spirited sea song as only Gordon Lightfoot might:

All around old Cape Horn
Ships of the line, ships of the morn
Some who wish they'd never been born
They are the ghosts of Cape Horn

It is a brighter song than the lyrics suggest, it's tempo and reliance on a picked guitar carrying the listener along merrily. It's a beautifully-crafted piece, full of the sailor's love of the sea, the freshness of an ocean breeze. He sets it all up with, discordantly in a minor key:

See them all in sad repair
Demons dance everywhere
Southern gales, tattered sails
And none to tell the tales

And then he stops. It isn't exactly a pause so much as a long moment for an audience to contemplate where Mr. Lightfoot's genius has taken them. Within the venue there is total, absolute silence, as though at a request for the memory of the lost. Finally, the gathered at the point of emotional collapse, he makes his point.

Come all of you rustic old sea dogs
Who follow the bright Southern Cross
You were rounding the Horn
In the eye of a storm
When you lost her one day
And you read all your letters
From oceans away
Then you took them to the bottom of the sea

It was breathtaking, to be there to experience it. My relationship with a crucial person in my growth as an adult was waning (by the time he returned to Denver in 1983 I had married someone else, and we'd had a daughter) but it was something special we would always share.

Gordon Lightfoot, proudly Canadian, gifted in the manner of a painter or poet passing through, wrote the soundtrack for many of us who lost and then found. Writing this, I remember him not as the author of disaster songs (his own formulation - "I often wondered if disaster was a noun, or an adjective.") but of those very human emotions that make finding, and holding onto, the love of one's life that much more gratifying. He wasn't responsible for the outcome. All he did was lend a few carefully-crafted words that helped me understand how fortunate I was.

For that, I am forever grateful. May he be forever at peace.