Muse Droppings
By:
C.C. Youngren

Sea Stories II

The midnight sun dips below the northern horizon as we cross the Arctic Circle headed south on an island hopping journey to Belfast,  Headed “south to the islands” doesn’t usually mean the Faeroes, Shetlands, Orkneys & Hebrides, but that is the case here. 

Fog is often the rule up here when the air is relatively mild (60+ F) and the water very cold (<40).  But there are clear days and these islands of fairy tale legend do really summon the Viking ghosts.  Crag-sided rock cliffs and grassy plateaus are the norm, with the occasional wide green gully leading down to the sea cradling a small village.  And the names!  The wonderful names.  Thorshavn, the capital of the Faeroes when pronounced in a deep-throated Old Norse, gives goose-bumps.  As we close in on the British Isles there is the deceitfully titled “Merry Men”—a treacherous stretch of shoals—and the faux-raunchy isle, “Muckle Flugga.” (What are the inhabitants called, I wonder?  Scotts probably—hopefully.)  At the crack of dawn we pass a promontory in the Hebrides called “The Butt of Thomas.”  The irony does not go unnoticed. 

I could only conjure up one memory from the last time I was in Belfast, 1965—before the “troubles.”    I had met a girl named Bernadette at a dance hall called The Mecca.  All I remember about her was she had a David Letterman tooth-gap.  And I only remember that because some years later there was a rabble-rousing, Catholic, woman member of (British) Parliament from Ulster named Bernadette Devlin with a similar gap.  Always wondered…

I wandered around the town as is my practice, taking a long, circuitous, all-afternoon route back the port area from the City Hall.  All was peaceful and busy as I passed through Republican and Unionist neighborhoods explicitly stamped with flags & murals (not graffiti, real folk art).  I found myself walking down a “border road” dividing these enclaves which lead to the gated port area and the now deserted Harland & Wolff shipyard just beyond.  In its heyday, H & W was a thriving place—the Titanic was built there (that particular dry dock is visible from my cabin window, about 100 yards away across the Victoria Channel as I type this).  Its infamy was that only Unionists could hold management or skilled labor jobs.  Catholics were relegated to menial labor.

I stopped in a Pub near the port gate, and for the first time found myself in a familiar surrounding.  There was a young family dining on hamburger & chips, and a few older gentlemen (i.e. my age) watching the horse races from England (the bookie joint was next door).  A conversation was struck up as in a large living room.  Some of the race-watching gentlemen had been seafarers and we swapped stories.  I mentioned that I must have been in this room nearly a half century ago.

A woman came in who was to take over as bar-maid for the evening shift.  The racing fans introduced me and told her that my last visit to this pub had been in 1965, the year she was born.  Her youth and young adulthood had been dominated by the “troubles.”  Her father had been killed on the border road outside this very pub in 1972   One of the things she told me was that at her brother’s christening (shortly after her father’s assassination) the priest had said, “I baptize thee Christopher Patrick O’Sullivan, and with a name like that you’ll never get a job in the shipyard.”  Yet she seemed genuinely convinced that today is indeed a better day in Belfast.  Given her background, her optimism (and another conversation later with the first Catholic president of a predominantly protestant rugby club) gives me some small hope for resolution of the sectarian divisiveness that plagues our planet.  Anyway the Pub-folk invited me to return the next night when there would be live music.

So the next night I went.  The warm-up was an array of magnificently amateurish & local talent.  There was a small group of singers accompanied by fiddle and lap-type bagpipe (exquisitely mellow, not the “axing the cat” sound I feared), and banjo strumming bellowers reminiscent of my Clancy Brothers period, who included a rousing version of “Finnegan’s Wake” in their repertoire with the audience joining in for the chorus.  The headliner was a local folk singer of the Tom Paxton mold who finished up around 1 AM.

Walking home, I fell in behind some very “happy” shipmates.  We got to an intersection which, as most do, displays the admonition “LOOK RIGHT” in 3 foot high letters at the curb.  This kid (anyone under 40 is a “kid” to me, but this one was under 20) was staring down at the instruction in apparent bewilderment; he nodded approvingly but kept glancing left.  The light was long, and the hour late, and with his neurons firing in the screen saver mode, the kid went unto a full windup as if about to cross the street. I grabbed a fist full of shirt and yanked him back as a bus breezed by.

On the remaining half-hour walk back to the ship, the bus incident and “Finnegan’s Wake” became thoroughly mixed (shaken and stirred) in my brain.  Now “Finnegan’s Wake” needs another verse about as much as “Kumbaya”, or “99 Bottles of Beer,” but by the time I walked up the gangway, I pretty much had one. (If you don’t know the reference, see YouTube: Clancy Brothers, Finnegan’s Wake.)  I few minutes with pencil and yellow pad in my stateroom yielded the following:

Tim Finnegan about to cross the street,
Read the instruction to “LOOK RIGHT.”
Dressed well! he thought (his lass to meet),
This tweed’s survived another night.
But Tim, desiring to look more prep,
Hand-combs his hair to un-muss,
Two-blocks his tie and takes that step--
Smack in front of the Dun Laoghaire bus!

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