Wanderings
O’Shea said he wasn’t
going, and he didn’t, but everyone else on the island went,
and I was almost left behind when I got down to the pier, and
all the punts had departed and were crossing the sound, everyone
on their way to Gortahork for the Graveyard Mass...
Inishdooey is a small island off
the coast of Donegal Ireland. It had been lived in for over a
thousand years, and then in 1920, Daniel Coll left the island.
No one has lived on it since, though it has been used as a place
to graze sheep. And John O'Shea, who lives on the adjacent island,
Inis Bo Finne, goes out to Inishdooey with his dog, June, on the
odd fair day, and collects periwinkles in the wrack at low tide...
The Salmon run is coming to an end
along the northwest coast of Ireland as it does each summer and
has for thousands of years. Morris Dan Coll and his two sons,
Donal and Sean, have been out on the sea for fourteen hours each
fishing day since this year’s run began the beginning of
June...
"Today will be clear, a high
of 55 degrees, wind from the northwest at 10 to 15 miles per hour....",says
the weatherman. A day to play hooky. There will not be many more
days like this, this year. It is the tag end of October. Soon
the daylight won't be worth saving anymore. Two phone calls and
Im free of meetings and appointments. The papers on the desk,
the phone calls can wait.
By ten-thirty I'm at a quiet Gregg Neck Boatyard, on the Sassafras
River, a northern tributary of the Chesapeake
I'd see my dad look out to sea. We
would be on the beach in Wildwood, for a vacation week in August.
He'd tell me that were we able to see past horizons, we'd see
Ireland and the places of his growing up. He would scare my sister
and me, by saying that he was going to swim there to his home
- we had to chase after him in the water to beg that he not go
so deep, so far...
Crossing
- video files showing each of the legs of the voyage: from Philadelphia
to the Azores; from the Azores to the Southwest coast of Ireland;
from the SW coast to the final destination at my father's birthplace,
Falcarragh, County Donegal, Ireland.
Link
to photo book of voyage
Still Pictures
from voyage of May-July 2006, from Philadelphia to Falcarragh.
Big John Coll called it a ‘coffin’
- a boat so lacking in seaworthiness that it would likely become
the coffin of anyone foolish enough to take it out on the sea.
He said it would be suitable for a lake or a pond, but much too
tender for ocean work. This statement from a seventy-five year
old man that went out in the ocean alone in an eighteen foot open
rowboat with an outboard engine as reliable as is sunshine in
Donegal. I had seen it sitting on the pavement at the back end
of the car park by Magheraroarty pier...
“Twice a year,” he told
me, “once in early spring and then at end of summer, Inis
Bo Finne, is not an island.”
But Inis Bo Finne is an island two miles offshore of Falcarragh
strand where my Uncle Hughie and I would walk some nights when
work was done and the long light of Irish summer held to near
midnight. At its closest point to the Magheraroarty sand banks
it is still a full mile of open sea out to Inis Bo Finne. Hughie
said the sea goes away, and there comes a path, “dry as
good turf”, over which you can walk to Inis Bo Finne. He
told me that the blacksmith in Falcarragh would accept no jobs
on those days the sea departs...
There had been a hurricane that destroyed
Honduras this past fall. My friend Noel Palma, from Honduras but
working around Philly, had a truck. We decided to beg for whatever
relief supplies we could fit into the truck. He would then drive
truck to Honduras, to his village of Ocotepeque, be home with
his family for Christmas, and give out the goods to the people
around Ocotepeque that had been hurt by the awful storm...
The Soviet Union was collapsing,
we didn't know it in the winter of 1990, as a group of us social
workers set off to go there. An old Quaker peacemaking organization,
The Fellowship of Reconciliation, organized a delegation of people
from around the US, that were involved in providing social services
under private auspices and support. Russian church groups were
witnessing the retraction of state social services, and were seeking
advice on how they might respond in their communities to the needs
in their communities that were no longer tended by socialist system...
The
End of the Run
Grounded
Voyage
of Falcarragh
The
Coffin Boat
Roarta
Mor
Transmigrante