The Cabot Trail is a road that runs in a loop around the top of Cape Breton Island, about a hundred and eighty-five miles of it, climbing up over the highlands and dropping down to the sea and climbing up again. Everyone who has driven it will tell you about the views. They'll get a look on their face. They'll say you can see forever from up there.

I can't tell you about the views. I didn't see any.

I flew into Halifax, rented the smallest car they had, and drove north and over the causeway onto the island in a gray drizzle that turned, the next morning, into fog. Not a patchy fog. A total fog, white and thick and still, as if somebody had packed the whole island in cotton for shipping. I drove the Trail anyway, at twenty miles an hour, with my headlights on at noon. At every lookout I pulled over, because you do, and got out, and stood at the railing next to a sign that told me what I was looking at. The sign would say something like OCEAN AND CLIFFS, 1,200 FEET. Beyond the railing was white. I looked at it anyway. After the first day it started to seem important to look at it properly, the way you'd sit through a whole sermon out of respect even if you couldn't hear it.

In Chéticamp, on the west side, the people are Acadian and they speak a French that the waitress told me, laughing, even the French can't follow. I had a bowl of seafood chowder there that I still think about, and I bought a small hooked rug, a seagull on a blue ground, from a woman who had made it over the winter at her kitchen table. It's hanging over my desk at home. It's the only clear view I brought back.

At Pleasant Bay I went out on a whale boat because I'd paid in advance and it wasn't refundable. There were eight of us in rain gear on a small boat in the fog, and the captain cut the engine, and we sat there, rocking, not seeing anything, for what felt like a long time. Then we heard them. Before we saw anything, we heard them breathing: a big soft whoosh, then another, then a whole family of them all around us, close, the sound of something enormous and calm letting its breath out. Pilot whales, the captain said. Then their backs came up out of the white, black and shining, ten feet from the boat, and went down again. Nobody on that boat said a word. A lady from Ontario next to me was crying. So was I, a little. I've seen whales on television my whole life. I had no idea they breathed.

That night, in a parish hall, there was a fiddler, a young fellow with a piano player behind him, and the whole room got up and danced a square set that everybody but me seemed to have been born knowing, and a grandmother in sneakers took me by both hands and hauled me in. I have no idea what the steps were. It didn't matter. You just went where you were pushed.

On my last morning I was driving back down the east side toward the causeway, early, and near the top of a long climb the fog simply stopped. I drove out of it the way you'd walk out of a room. I pulled over at the next lookout with my heart going, and there it was, all of it at once: the headland running down into the water, the water going out and out, blue and flat and shining, a fishing boat, a line of gulls, the whole coast behind me I'd driven through blind for four days.

I stood there for a long time. In my work we say "let the record reflect." Let the record reflect that I saw it, once, for about ten minutes, before the fog came back up the hill and took it away again. Let the record reflect that it was enough.