Nordik Express

I'm now on this fabulous, stumpy little Nordik Express boat, surrounded by containers of cargo and happy Québecois.  We are preparing to leave for the three day journey back along the Québec coast, into the heart of Lower Canada.  There really is a thoroughly North American, Francophone culture - it's easy to assume that the Québecois would reject everything North American, as the French pretend to.  Not so, the Québecois ARE North American - they're not interested in football (soccer to them), they eat MacDonalds but of course, THEY have the Canadian Grand Prix - in Montréal this weekend.

Cecil, when he heard me say I was from New Zealand, looked stumped and asked, is that in Canada?  No, it's down near Australia.  Ah, nodding slightly.

In Tête-à-la-Baleine, I laid down out of the wind in the sunshine, on a mixture of white-green moss and stunted, heather-like ground-growth - springier than a good mattress.  Paradise, I thought, lying there embraced by the rocks and earth.

My life is like music playing, one song after another.  The time passes, the music changes, sometimes the spirits soar, sometimes they sink.  Sometimes it's boring.  But the music doesn't stop - the sequence continues, on and on.  People here have built wooden towns on unforgiving rock, surrounded on all sides by the chill blue.  Their music plays for them, without ceasing, until they reach their varied ends.  My music continues, each passing second of it irretrievable, irretrievably lost once it has been uttered.

The land now, seen from the boat, is the same colour as the water; it seems doubtful, a greyed-out mirage, ghosted-out like an unavailable Windows menu option.

In Natashquan I walked into Nicole, bilingual, from Ottawa.  We escaped the driving wind and rain by catching a ride with a local man in a pickup.  He chatted in French with Nicole about the town - one of Québec's most famous sons, the Chanson singer/poet Jean Vignault is from here.  He sings and writes about life here, each township an island of settlement in a vast sea of rock and ice and endlessness.  The man's son had just graduated, from 'igh School and he was very proud.  He wasn't keen about the road that has already reached Natashquan - money would be better spent building a crab processing plant to create jobs.  He was 46, a classic, heavy-featured, moustached Québecois - truly a son of the peasants of the revolution.  And he had never been away from Basse Côte Nord, never even to Québec City or Montréal.  Why should he?  It is nice here, here he has everything he needs.

Québec City was founded in 1608, which means that some of it's inhabitants could trace their family further back than I have and still not know where in France they came from.  The New/Old World divide blurs further.

Throughout Québec there are French-speaking towns that are populated by people of Scots Gaelic descent.  In Gould, they even organise a Gaelic Festival each year, complete with ceilidh, Gaelic poet, music and food.  There are many people in Québec with non-French names who speak only French, for example "Mike Harrison".  In Rimouski a dental practice proudly displayed the name of the senior dentist: Georges MacDuff.  The "Quiet Revolution" began in 1960 and reversed the erosion of the use of French as a community language.  The famous law 101 was eventually passed, prohibiting the displaying of signs in English.  There are 7 million inhabitants in Québec, 85% of which are Francophone.  Earlier, it was possible to grow up in Montréal and speak only English.  No more.  So, Francophone Québec is larger than German-speaking Switzerland, population-wise as well, of course, geographically.  Or Scotland for that matter.  A land, a nation, a culture in its own right.

Words, weaving

For I have lived a thousand lives, the old-young man said,
stoking again the fire.

And any one of them would break your heart.

There are memories, memories, memories, so deep and etched and woven

I dare not speak of them and their loss,

loss more profound than this gathering silence

that waits for all of us at the ends of our varied roads.

The weaving never stops.

Every moment, the sweeping of the loom.

Every encounter, a new thread,

woven in then just as quickly snipped off

and exiled into memories.

Two threads together, twining ever closer.

Or, a man travelling endlessly,

his only companion a mirror, held close to his heart.

A man travelling in a sandied desert,

an endless sandied desert.

He has forgotten what it was he was searching for

in the mirror.

But these are just my words, weaving themselves into silence.

So, where was the quiet revolution for Gaelic?  Historically, it was impossible, it's fortunate that it has happened at all in the Hebrides.

The voyage by sea is over and now the bus carries me towards Québec City.  Mireille and Veronique from the Nordik Express are going home after two weeks along the coast conducting a feasibility study for the planned road.  It is strange to think that this is home territory for them - like me riding a train from Zürich to Bern, or a bus from Apollo Bay to Melbourne or Bristol to Bath.

The end of a journey brings sadness, relief, uncertainty, lightness of heart.  But a new road opens up already - soon the trail continues along the Celtic shores of the Old Continent.  Back, back, to where we came from.


Follow my journey through the Celtic countries of Europe: Air Cladachan Sìorraidh (On Ever-Living Shores)

L'Anse Amour

The drive today up to Red Bay was magnificent - through the big, wide, open land of Labrador. A rocky landscape filled with stunted, weather-beaten fir and spruce and everywhere moss and lichen. A wolf crossed the road in front of us just before we started following the torrential Pinware River.  Cecil used the word "wonderfa" to move any adjective into the superlative: the road is wonderfa curvy here, the road is wonderfa straight there, the sky is wonderfa clear today.  We passed boat yards on the way - most of the fishing boats are built here.  I mentioned to Cecil that I've always dreamed about crossing the Atlantic by boat and that the most difficult leg of that journey, with no ferry service whatsoever, seemed to be the Canada - Greenland stretch.  He looked at me slightly surprised and waved at the boats we were passing.

"If you really want to go to Greenland, just talk to those fellows.  They're up in Greenland all the time fishing."

Red Bay was the site of a Basque whaling station in the first half of the 16th century, subsequently forgotten and only rediscovered in the 1970s.  The marine archaeologists working here had to use special suits filled with warm water - normal dry-suits were not enough.

In the evening, I walked from the B-and-B in L'Anse Amour (original name L'Anse-aux-Mort - Cove of Death) to the nearby lighthouse and was met there by a petite, smiling young woman with striking light aqua eyes.  Christine, Francophone from Montréal had decided to spend the summer in L'Anse Amour working for QLF, the Québec Labrador Foundation.  When she heard where I was staying she said, we are neighbours.  Later on I popped in on her and Lisa (the daughter of Cecil and Rita, living next door to the B&B) and met numerous siblings, plus Dave from Red Bay who had spent some time in Zurich as a postgraduate.  We spent the evening sitting and chatting like old friends.  At midnight they drove me to the boat in Blanc Sablon and farewelled me, encouraging me to return and visit them again.

L'Anse-aux-Meadows

The coast of distant Labrador barely makes itself visible across the Strait of Belle Isle and between the icebergs.  In June, the snow still lies in patches on the slatey rocks.  Waves splash, the sun shines.  I am part of it.

I spent yesterday wandering amongst the excavated remains of L'Anse-aux-Meadows and reading everything I could find - the Groenlinga Saga and Eirik's Saga and The Norse in America by the discoverer of L'Anse-aux-Meadows, Helge Ingstad.  Who knows, perhaps there were even a few Norse Greenlanders cutting trees in the forests of Labrador as Cabot made landfall a couple of days south of here in the New Found Lande.  It was cold yesterday, bitterly so with the howling wind.  It seems very likely that this is indeed the Leifsbrüðr of the sagas, everything fits so well.  Vìnland - "vìn" meaning meadows, not "vin" which means wine.  Ingstad's idea that the Western Settlement from Greenland emigrated here in the mid-14th century seems to be at least possible and is utterly intriguing.  Where would they have settled exactly?  How many were there, probably no more than 150-200?  Where are their remains?  Where is Thorvald's grave and Keelness?

At the B-and-B, Thelma, like other locals, pronouces "th" and "r" in the Irish manner, drops any "h"s at the start of words and calls everyone "dear", often.  She says "goodday" as a standard greeting and uses the third person singular conjugation for all cases - "I takes", "they takes".  And months are referred to as "in May month", "in September month".  During the spring, polar bears come over on the ice from Labrador - there were 35 this year, including one around this house.  Thelma's husband remembers when the Ingstads first came here.  As a boy, they had all thought the mounds were Indian - there are other Indian sites nearby.  He has often fished over along the Labrador coast:

"I've been as far as 36 hours in a boat down North.  I mean, up north ... or however you say it."

A road here was first built in the 1970s, there is a road being built along Québec's Basse Côte Nord or Lower North Shore and along the Labrador coast - the end of an era.

Thelma's husband dropped me off back on the main road to catch the bus to St. Barbe and the ferry to Labrador.  "Da time'd not be long goin'", he said as we set off, which I think meant he felt we needed to get a move on.

The New Found Lande

North, north, ever further north.  The bus hurtles on, the road lies straight and flat between the grey sea and the sullen land.  Snow still lies on the steady slopes of June.  Onward, onward, in droning imitation of those obsessed explorers straining towards the pole.  From one end of the New Found Lande to the other, in one overcast, chilly day.  There is a strange, sad song in this fierce, frontier place.  It is sad, soft, whispered - a rhythmic chant of galley oars and unfurling sails.  And in the background, barely heard, the litany of an even older people, flitting amongst the shadows under the spruce trees.

Susanna is from Maine and has come to Newfoundland for the first time this summer, between years of her public health degree.  She is going as far as Rocky Harbour and Gros Morne National Park. She is small, attractive and has an enormous backpack. We laugh together about how obviously foreign we both look in this place.

When we realise that we have to catch different buses, disappointment flickers across both our faces.  It has been nice chatting and laughing together in the bus terminal, thrown together by our otherness.  All the best for your travels, then the newly woven thread is snapped off and becomes a memory of beauty and nothing more.  Time's relentless harrying pushes me out the door and onto the bus, into the north.

Darkness comes slowly, almost unnoticed under the grey-clouded sky.  Another stop at another gas station in a silent, lightless, wooden town.  Then onward again, into a northern night.

There are those of us for whom movement is the natural state, as much as sedentary lack of mobility is natural for others.  Travel, always leaving and arriving and leaving again, opens for some a door to ecstasy, to a sense of being alive and at one with self, earth, universe that is utterly intoxicating.  And with it, the bitter taste of loneliness, which, when chewed and swallowed, fills the senses with a strange, melancholy joy, a fierce, shining oneness.  Travel, always moving, flooding the senses, burns the wick more quickly, fills time with more than it can really hold, ages the traveller beyond his or her years, brings at the same time a weariness and a hunger.  A hunger for movement, animation, proof of life.  So onward, into the night ...

Slàinte Mhath

Earlier today I went to a fiddling session in Port Hood.  Mike and Candy from Austin were there too and they proved to be more than enough for the simple, overweight locals.  The dynamic really didn't allow a softly spoken New Zealander to participate. I wasn't asked who I was or where I was from.  Mike and Candy continued their "I'm a dumb American" style of relating, which the locals seemed to be quite used to and comfortable with.  A combination of shyness from the locals and loud dominance from our Texan friends meant I would have had to have stood on the table and shouted, Moulson-style "I AM A NEW ZEALANDER!"  Perhaps the best moment was when Candy mentioned that they were looking at buying real estate on Cape Breton Island and would therefore soon be more than just honorary Cape Bretoners.  There was no response from the locals, they remained silent and politely avoided her gaze. Nevertheless, the music was brilliant and evoked a deep sense of longing. No one addressed a single word to me and my only attempt at conversation was met with startled surprise and nervous hesitation.  I walked out of the place anonymous, full of the sweet sadness of the music.

Slàinte Mhath played the Capri Caberet in Sydney last night.  I ended up sharing a table with John and Howard, filmmakers working on a documentary about a group of 30 coal miners between the ages of 40 and 60.  The mines were closed in December 2001, even though they were still profitable.  By so doing, the payment of pensions was avoided.  John was originally from Toronto but married a Nova Scotian so tries to spend as much time as possible out here.  Howard grew up in Nove Scotia and Montréal.  He was in New Zealand about 12-14 years ago and managed to finish the filming he was doing within 3-4 days.  The rest of the time there he spent hanging out on beaches north of Auckland.  John said he'd been a troublemaker at school but one teacher had got through to him - a New Zealander, so he has always been fond of New Zealanders.  Niev joined us for a while - tall, black-rimmed glasses and blond spiky hair.  John and Howard told me later that he is a world famous director and in Cape Breton doing a documentary about the next child prodigy fiddle player.

I talked to Howard about Switzerland and how I was heading back there.  I tried to describe to him the feeling I have there, that something vital is missing from the culture, the psyche, the spirit of the people.  I ended up saying it was spiritually dead, then pointing at the dancing crowd and animated band, the opposite of this, I said.  He smiled and understood.

John and I discussed Alistair MacLeod - he described his writing as having a "brutal clarity".  He also mentioned the very Scottish attitude of almost overwhelming emotion being held just under the surface, barely constrained.  I realised how well this describes me and my heritage.  We talked about Gaelic.  A girl was serving when I first sat down - long, black locks, slim, attractive and very friendly, almost flirty.  When the band started I was surprised to see her on stage.  All members of the band were incredibly talented, swapping instruments at will and all dancing at the end.

The ferry to Newfoundland is leaving soon.  During the war, the Germans torpedoed a ferry, the Caribou on this crossing, with the loss of 135 souls; hopefully no re-enactments are scheduled for tonight.

Tapadh Leibh

It is raining and foggy, the coastline looks as I imagine it must have looked to Leif Eriksson or John Cabot.  I am looking at my credit card receipt from the Esso service station in Mabou - at the bottom, "Tapadh Leibh".  One of only a handful of reminders that the blood of the Gael runs in the veins of the people here.  But the blood of the Gael has been overcome by boring, everyday practicalities.  The blood of the Gael!  What is wrong with us all?  How can we just watch as beauty dies, is there no force operating for good, beauty, love, understanding in the universe?  What about what Siddhartha learnt?  What of all the beauty and wonder, where is it now?  Where are the people of good-will, gentleness, love?  Are we all hiding behind the walls that pain has built around us?  Why am I sitting here alone?  Where are you, Great Spirit?

A raven, jester-creator, perched on the fence, cocks his eye at me, twinkling.

Giovanni Caboto

I found Cabot's Landing at the third attempt.  His bust is staring out across the sea back to Bristol.  All along the Cabot Trail, the shoreline is rocky and wooded: pink boulders and cobblestones interspersed with settlements of brightly coloured, wooden houses.  At South Harbour I kayaked across the inlet to the sandbar and the deserted ocean beach on the other side.  The view from there was of the New World, of the Norse, of Cabot.

Pleasant Bay was settled by Irish and everyone here still speaks as if they arrived from the Emerald Isle about three months ago.  Jeff is the local jack-of-all-trades - computer technician to the local community, hostel owner, tourist guide.  He pronounces "th" as "d" and says "loife" for "life". The other three towns in the area have totally different accents.

"Bay St. Laurence, now there's a rough town, as rough as it gets!  They're all pretty in-bred up there."

Like everyone else along this coast, he has been involved with fishing all his "loife".  When he was 19 he was caught in an open fibreglass boat with his brother as a storm hit.

"The winds were so weird - one wave we just had to go up and up and up and over the crest at the top.  Then we just headed straight for the shore, forget the harbour!  Then there was the fishing boat lost a few years ago in a freak storm, or that time a captain drove his boat back into harbour and straight into the wooden wharf at full throttle!  The cabin and bridge were gone, all the windows blown out - they had to prise his fingers off the wheel!"

In winter, the water across to Québec is totally covered by pack ice.  According to Jeff, five men have tried to cross the ice in winter but all were lost.  Two were trawled up later by fishing boats.

Celtic Twilight

The flat, deep blue Atlantic stretches out before me, next stop: Europe.  And it's really not that far.  John Cabot and 1497 don't seem so far away either.  I belong to this great movement of people.  It's really not that far.  The world in my mind is being at last knitted together - this place an important link.  Nova Scotia, New Scotland.  Truly this is a new Scotland - a Scotland renewed.  The evening sun slants onto the tree-clad coast, the low, buttressing hills.

Last night, at the bus terminal in Sydney, a local girl heard me calling my hotel and asked me where my accent was from.  I hesitated and said Australia.  She looked slightly disappointed and said she thought I might have been from New Zealand because my accent was nicer, softer.  I smiled and told her that actually I was from New Zealand but my accent had been influenced by living in Australia and elsewhere for most of my life.  She brightened considerably and told me she had spent an exchange year in Dunedin and still had a number of good friends there.  My father was from Dunedin, I said.

Hector is Gaelic Director at the Gaelic College, St. Anns. We chat for over an hour about the language. His father was Gaelic-speaking but didn't pass it on. There are only 200-400 fluent speakers of Gaelic left in Cape Breton.  In 1900 there were 75,000, in 1920 60,000 - that number has halved each decade since. Hector remembers old men when he was young, talking to each other behind their hands in the back corner at a party or some other do - there was one main party and then they were having a party of their own in their language. The last 20 years have seen the effective end of Gaelic as a community language.  So-and-so, he was important, he knew the traditions handed down orally, he knew the whole Finnian Cycle, oh, well he died in 1996 or '97.

Hector was the last MA Celtic Studies from St. Francis Xavier University, Antigonish.  He learnt Gaelic as a second language - it is very possible to become fluent in it, it is a myth that it must be the mother tongue.  His wife is Acadian and a staunch supporter of that culture.  He spoke only Gaelic with their two sons until four years ago.  It took 16 months to fully switch to English and now they speak no Gaelic, much to the chagrin of his wife.  The boys attend a French school.  Their Gaelic fluency and improvement dropped off slowly from about the age of four.  They weren't able to express complex ideas in it so eventually Hector reluctantly decided to make the change to English.

"Yes, but your relationship with your children is vastly more important even than a beautiful and ancient language", I say quietly.

He nods and smiles.  "Yes.  Yes that's right."

I mention my experiences learning my mother's language as an adult in Switzerland, that I often felt like a baby, dumbed down, unable to show people my real, full self.  That's a good way of putting it, he says.  He is tall, thin, has a full ginger-white beard and wears glasses.  His "r"s are, like most people's here, very Irish - car is said "care" but with the top teeth almost touching the bottom lip.

Gaelic learners in Cape Breton do so mostly due to their own family history but increasingly also due to the revival in Celtic music here.  Hector recommends that I spend a maximum of 20 minutes a day learning the language but every day.  Leave the table hungry so that you come back for more.

Once again, night has fallen.  Venus and Jupiter, low in the western sky, mimic, mirror, parody Castor and Pollux above them, so much fainter, so infinitely more distant.

Being a student of Celtic is to embark on a journey of longing, of yearning.  I am here as an eyewitness to the death, slow, painless, quiet, of a great and beautiful language in this place.  What passes into shadow can never be brought out again into the light.  My one-man crusade against the dying of the light has its limitations in the practicalities of everyday life.  The student of Celtic must ever struggle in the twilight, the gloaming, der Dämmerung.  My small, unheroic contribution is to master an ancient, heroic language, perhaps more than one, then to flicker briefly and be extinguished, as all will be one day.

There are 500 fluent speakers of Manx Gaelic, even though the last native speaker, Ned Madrell, died in 1974.

The road goes ever on

You know that sound of distant radio music? You can hardly pick up what it is but you know it must be a radio. Then there are the bus noises - the hum of the tyres, the squeaks, rattles and vibrations and the faint sound of a low voice chatting to the driver.

This morning in Yarmouth, Nova Scotia, I missed all the buses north so I hitched a ride with June the truck driver to Bridgewater, after walking for over an hour to Highway 103 from the ferry terminal. June is probably a few years younger than me and has been driving this big old 53 foot rig for eight months now. It is full of recycling material - he gets $12 an hour and works 110 or more hours every eight or nine days. He has a drawl I would've associated with somewhere further south but when he says anything ending in "r" he sounds distinctly Irish. His wife is from Newfoundland but he's a Nova Scotian.

"So you're heading for Cape Breton and Newfoundland? Now there's two places with some of the friendliest folks in the world."

June finished school after grade 10 and quit logging after he tore a rotator cuff. He had two years off on workers compensation and retrained in 12 weeks at a well-respected school as a truck driver. He got a job straight away.

"I live outside of Bridgewater - I'm not much one for towns you know, I need space and quiet. Those Bridgewater and Yarmouth folks are some of the most hateful I've met anywhere - lucky I came along, I wouldn't have expected you to get a ride! Last week in Bridgewater I was sitting at a table at a bar with my wife and there was this black guy sitting with us. He was looking the whole time at this girl over the other side and later on they started talking and well, he picked her up. Four or five white guys there started pushing him around and in the end they started a fight with him. Kicked him senseless. I guess they didn't like him with a white girl."

June the Canadian asks me about New Zealand - he knows forestry and fisheries would be important there. I can't help being reminded of a question from Chu the American on Nantucket, "What language do you speak in New Zealand?"  I tell June that, due to the treaty of Waitangi finally being honoured at least in part by the government, much of the fisheries and forestry in New Zealand is being placed in the hands of the Maori people. He nods approvingly and says they'd probably treat it properly. He tells stories about the new logging machines that strip an acre or more in eight hours. Men aren't needed anymore. He mentions the environmental guidelines that were supposed to be followed, like a 200 foot buffer zone around any lakes.

"Not with Bowater there wasn't - you either cut to the shore or got fired. Kimberley-Clark was much better, though - they even got us to leave wildlife corridors and that sort of thing."

It is unnerving for me to talk to this drawling truck driver and to be allowed to be honest, not to have to pretend I'm a redneck.

Mile after mile of young forest. There are blue skies now, and bright, yellow sunlight.

June has white-tail deer grazing at the front of his house. He and a buddy built a log-cabin up in the woods for a local guy done well, now a millionaire (but you wouldn't know it). June's ideal job would be cabinet maker - he does this in his spare time already.

He tells me about how the natives, before the treaty was enforced, should've only done the logging themselves but they contracted it out and destroyed acres and acres of forest. Half a game park was destroyed by Bowater in a "commercial thinning" operation.

"Commercial thinning is just another word for destruction. But things are better now, what with the treaty being properly followed."

Acadian Bus Lines.

From Bridgewater I get a lift with Irving, a Church of England clergyman from Lunenburg.  He is short, round and bald and reminds me strongly of the character "Rastapopoulos" from the Tintin comics, minus the cigar and monocle.  His church in Lunenburg was badly damaged in a fire that started on 1st November last year, at 12:15am.  The insurers say it was an electrical fire, the townspeople believe it was Halloween.  The insurers are prepared to pay $2.5 million, it would cost $2 million to build a replacement but $7 million to fully restore the old building.

"This is a time of testing and growing for us", he says, looking across at me quickly and smiling.  "What is the meaning, the importance of this building?  It is the second oldest Protestant church building in North America but what is our rôle?  Are we called to be preservationists or should our efforts be directed only towards building a kingdom 'not made with hands'?"

In schools in Lunenburg, history lessons start in 1749 with the coming of British-sanctioned settlers to the region.  But in the French graveyard in the centre of town there are gravestones much older than that - the first French settlers arrived in the 1630s.  They were later deported in the Acadian displacement of 1755 and thereby seemingly lost their right to be mentioned in any official history books.  And what of the Mic-Mac?

Irving grew up in Blanc Sablon, Labrador, two miles from the border with Québec.  Smugglers would stop at their home before continuing over into Canada. There had been a ranger in the village but he had pretty much turned a blind eye to these activities.  Irving was born in 1944, five years before Newfoundland and Labrador joined the Canadian Confederation.  At the age of 13, he saw his first motor car.  There were no roads and no electricity.  The family fished from June till September, otherwise they were occupied with seal hunting, cutting wood for fuel for the long winter, caribou, seal pups.

"We were slaves to the fishing company, really!  They've made a CBC documentary about it now.  During the summer we would live on credit from the merchant and at the end of the season repay him with the earnings from the fish.  But the fish money would only ever just cover the credit so the next year would be exactly the same and so on."

Irving's accent has no drawl to it whatsoever, it could perhaps be best described as "Atlantic", with noticeable Irish intonation.  The settlers to the Labrador Straits area from Blanc Sablon to Red Bay came from the Channel Islands in the early 19th century.  At that time there were no Inuit there.  Previously, people had been forbidden from settling there year-round.

We talk about the church, about the decline of institutionalised forms of religious expression.  I talk about my move away from institutionalised religion towards a freer, more gentle form of spiritual expression.  He mentions Religion in Exile by Dermott O'Murchu and the difficulties he or any other clergy face in de-institutionalising the church.  It could be argued that the church has caused its own downfall through its building of power structures which inevitably, in time, must fall.  He also mentions his interest in the Baalism of the Old Testament and sees a parallel with the old earth religion of the Celts.

"We need to look at this in a new light - Baalism was not all bad, there was good in it too.  This dualism in Christianity is not right - Earth is tolerated instead of being celebrated."

I nod silently and look out the window at the green of forest and field and in the distance the sparkle of the sun on the blue water.

"I have been using the New Zealand Church of England liturgy a bit in my services", he says, glancing over and smiling again.  "It's wonderful!  So progressive and so much Maori influence."

"I think New Zealand, for all its faults, has managed more of an interchange or an exchange of cultures between indigenous people and new settlers, rather than the new culture completely obliterating the old."  I'm sounding a bit dreamy, speaking quietly whilst the sun falls warm on my face.  "And yeah, there are lots of parallels between the Celtic beliefs and those of the Maori."

Iriving is on his way to Halifax to visit a friend recovering in hospital.  We talk about Cape Breton author, Alistair MacLeod - I am reading a collection of his short stories at the moment.  Irving's friend had Alistair MacLeod stories read to him while lying in his hospital bed.

The bus's windscreen is entirely covered by an astonishing collection of splattered bugs.  It is now dark and only 10 kilometres remain to Cape Breton, to this last corner of Gaeldom, to the final stop on my Gaelic pilgrimage, my confused search for my own identity.  Music is playing on my walkman, music from Old Scotland, from the Highlands across the narrow, turbulent sea.  Songs about leaving, about leaving and coming to this unknown place.  60 years ago, during the war, my father, a lonely young airman from Aoteoroa, sat one sunny afternoon on a flat stone somewhere in those Highlands, on a day off from his pilot-training.  He scribbled a few words in his diary, as I do now.  And somehow, he is with me here.  And not only he, but so many others who have walked with me along my often lonely journey to this point.  They are all here now.  Even she is here, the one I loved so deeply, with whom I shared this music.  Our love, singing so deep and true, until it slowly distorted itself into something else, until it broke, a thing that cannot, should not, ever break.  And still the road goes on and on and on, the destination forgotten, irrelevant.  Hurtling forward into the gathering darkness, the gathering silence that waits for all of us.

And what have I done with Scotland?  For my father it was a brief, limited visit in wartime and a romantic love for the Auld Country, the beloved country of his ancestors, three generations back and 59 years before he was even born in that other Gaelic colony of Otago.  What have I done with Scotland?  Tracked her down ruthlessly, dissected her, torn her limb from limb in a desperate search for my lost, elusive identity, something that she cannot give me.  And still I hunt her, even here.  I will always be a foreigner, here or anywhere else, I will never truly belong.  There can be no home for us.  Foxes have holes and birds have nests but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.

The sun has set behind the low Cape Breton hills.  Darkness.

We are the worm in the wood!

More water slides past. I am surrounded by swirling fog, gazing down at the black, black water, tickled white by the ship's swift passing. A line from Kipling's Pict Song keeps coming back to me: "We are the worm in the wood!" I am very much the outsider on this boat full of Americans: hovering just out of sight, in the shadows, disappearing as soon as I'm seen. I am the worm in the wood!

A Pict Song - Rudyard Kipling

Unbeliever


Don’t turn your head

when shadows flicker,

deceiving the eye.

By the time you turn,

I’ll be gone.

Who am I? You know,

you’ve always known.

I am

the young one, carelessly laughing

        at your fear.

I am

the lost one, wilfully straying

        from The Path.

I am

the old one, fiercely living

        where you have bowed your head.

I am

the grim one, always alone,

        facing the storm

                embracing the gale

                        smiling into the teeth of the tempest.

I am

the forgotten one, remember me?

How you could have been …

Memorial Day

Memorial Day and I'm in the place where the revolution started, the most Old World of all American cities, Boston. It wasn't Americans against British - it was a clash of two world views; working and middle class against ruling class and old privilege. I would've fought and died against the redcoats, without once feeling I was betraying the countries of my forefathers. Ironically, those red-coated soldiers were as much victims of the abuses of the powerbrokers as the men they killed and were killed by. And surely the revolution here succeeded because of simple geography - the same sentiments were present in Scotland and Ireland but they were too close to England to be allowed similar success.

Farewell Nantucket

Last night at the hostel Chu, Brenda and Valerie called me into the kitchen and we ate corn-on-the-cob together. All three were from New York City - Chu, a Vietnamese immigrant at the age of eight, Valerie Irish Catholic who grew up in Queens, Brenda planning a shift to Alaska soon. They were good company; we chatted and laughed as we ate. They were wary of the three, young, confident Sydneysiders sharing the kitchen. One of them, Shannon, drawled her vowels out so much after three months in the U.S. that I didn't recognise her as Australian until she gloated about "us" doing so well at the Olympics.

Later, Brenda and Chu and I sat on the beach looking at the full moon. I talked with them about September 11th - a number of buildings near the WTC site had just been reoccupied, undoubtedly by people such as those I overheard in South Ferry Park a few days ago.

This morning I said goodbye to the three girls - all three of them good, unpretentious Americans.

And now, farewell Nantucket, where few people bother to say hello as they pass by.

A Broken Man's Broken Sonnet


If I should pass before my destined day
beyond the misty veil with bare a sigh,
if I should sail till then this wand’rer’s way,
this rolling sea, this blessed, empty sky,


think oft of me as in your rocky keep,
the gusts, the gales, the towering crests, whipped white,
alarm you less than me, upon the deep
beyond the reach of laughter, love and light.


There is a place! that through desire breathes
its warming glow to wearied travellers’ eyes,
its hope an everlasting image weaves
from threads of longing cast into the skies.


Her eyes’ light, her neck’s curve,
softness of her breast,
promising what I cannot grasp.

Looking east

The wind from the bitter North has eased, the sun is not far above the horizon. Surf crashes again and again and again. Birdsong. I am home. It's been a perfect day but I'm not satisfied with Nantucket. No ancient mariner stopped me, I don't feel like I will go away a sadder and a wiser man. Except, perhaps, for moments like right now.

Mention was made in the whaling museum of the story of the Essex which is a fascinating basis for Melville's Pequod. The whaling descriptions in Moby Dick are overwhelmingly accurate, not the least due to the fact that Melville himself was on a whaler for a while. Other than that, there is nothing here that is a solid link to the book. Melville didn't visit Nantucket until long after he had written his masterpiece. There is no Spouter Inn, no Chapel. As so often happens with me, I have out-literalised the creators of my romantic visions. It all started with the exploding of my romantic notions in Africa and hasn't slowed down since. My father was the main source of so much of my romanticism and yet I am already, at 36, far more a citizen of the world than he ever was.

Moby Dick - Herman Melville

The oldest house on Nantucket, built in 1686, is lovingly guarded by Tim and Susie from the Historical Society. Tim, a recent Minnesota graduate in archaeology has an interest in marine archaeology (involving, of course, lots of diving) and is off to Southampton after the summer on Nantucket. Susie enthusiastically explains everything within the house and also mentions in passing that the original inhabitants of Nantucket were Christianised long before the first 10 settler families arrived in 1659. Their language was documented, the Bible was translated and they ceased to exist.

Sitting here now, I look across this ocean and smile. Across this water lies ... home. WE crossed this ocean and arrived in this place and changed it, utterly. Yes WE - the sea-faring, adventurous ones from Europe - the Norse, the Scots, the English, the Basques, the Bretons, the French. What of the Spanish and Portuguese? Their legacy seems to be one steeped in squalor and corruption - things not greatly evident here in this rich man's playground. But perhaps that just means the rape in the North of the Americas was more brutal, more complete than further south. But no, I don't think so. On Nantucket there is no mention of conflict between native and newcomer except for a small fort built by the settlers in case of attack. Ultimately, though, it is too easy to be serene about such things when no indigenous people remain.

It seems the early explorers preferred the apparent safety of islands over the unknown vastness of the mainland.

Sailing to Nantucket

The 21st century yuppie is an impressive being - big biceps and a big portfolio. Just a bit light on when it comes to quietness, gentleness. The crowd boarding the Nantucket ferry look well-heeled and smug in their Ralph Lauren Polo Shirt world. Most of the men on board are chunky, the women well-groomed, straight blond, tanned and toothy. All of them, men and women, are drinking Becks beer from small green bottles. And Nantucket herself? Soon to be taken over by a well-loved American icon and renamed Disneyland Maritime Inc.? My reflection in a grimy porthole startles me - I'm looking more and more like a Mexican desperado every day, just a little bit too blond. What I'd give to run into old Ahab here, or even just the mad guy who warned Ishmael off boarding the Pequod.

Well-heeled and smug they may be, but they're also, like so many Americans, friendly. The man in front of me in the slow-moving queue in the galley laughs and asks me if I've finished my soda yet (I poured it when I passed the soda machine at the start of the queue). I tell him he's lucky he didn't pour his beers back there, otherwise he'd already be under the table. Later, he says "enjoy" before walking off.

NYC

The city slowly changes as the street numbers increase, like a dancer moving slowly, imperceptibly from one position to the next - past and through Central Park then at 119th Street into Harlem, the houses becoming more dilapidated, the shopfronts roller-doored. Further on and the Continental Airlines sign tells only those who understand Spanish to work hard and fly right. Across the bridge and into The Bronx, "All-America City". 

Last night I caught the subway back to the hostel on 103rd West. A quartet of young guys got on, heading home to Harlem, and sang "Under the Boardwalk" in perfect, tight harmony. Another man got on and explained that he was out of work and had a family to feed. "Money, food, anything", he said in a clear, strong voice. Then "God bless you all" as he disembarked.

Manhattan is, of course, an island. Coming in from Newark Airport a few days ago, I shared a cramped minibus with a cheery group of visitors - four of us on a three-seater bench-seat. A woman from Los Angeles chatted animatedly with a man from Portugal, perched politely forward on the edge of the seat. Waiting for the bus in the terminal, a young guy next to me said "that's a good looking sandwich". The whole airport but especially the baggage claim area smelt strongly of stale sweat. The same young guy next to me on the bus was a Pure Math major at UCD, in New York visiting friends. He talked about abstract algebra and quantum computing, which involves using the quantum effect of a single particle following multiple simultaneous paths to provide massive computing power, enough to crack RSA encryption, they think. His professor is working on this, cracking the encryption on which all internet security is based.

Manhattan, former island home of the Manhattan Lenape indigenous people, who sold the island in 1626 to the Dutch Governor Peter Minuit for goods to the value of $24. Being a society that lacked a concept of landownership and thinking that they had simply granted the settlers the right to use the land, imagine their astonishment and outrage when they were then driven off the land which now no longer belonged to them.

Opposite me on the bus are sitting a young white guy and a young black girl. They have been talking together wide-eyed and laughing a lot since boarding. He is showing her photo after photo of friends of his and the places in which his band has played gigs. Now they are starting those contact games - simulating an egg-shell breaking on his thigh, "does this tickle", he asks her as he squeezes her leg just above her knee. In the end, she holds his hand, massaging it.

Ground Zero

I walked here from South Ferry Park after lunch. Sitting on a park bench on the water, the Circle Line Ferry appeared mysteriously, almost empty, and floated by, bobbing like a kitschy Marie Celeste, "New York, New York" blaring, distorted, from her loudspeakers. Three office workers sat next to me and discussed evacuation procedures for the building in which they were working. I sat for a long time, perhaps almost an hour, and their topic of conversation did not move to anything else.

I walked here down Wall Street and passed Federal Hall, where George Washington was sworn in as the first president of the United States of America in 1789. New York was the first capital city of the new, idealistic republic, potent symbol of a New World Order.

I walked here up a side street and saw the word "triage" spray-painted in black, dripping, on a wall, with an arrow pointing around the corner.

It's just a huge, matter-of-fact hole, it looks like a construction-, not a destruction-site. There are not that many tourists - just a few here across the road and behind barriers. The subway rattles on under the grid beneath my feet. The Burger King on the corner of two one-way streets has "NYPD Temp HQ" painted on the wall. It is the only building with visible scars, the rest are surprisingly intact. WE WILL NEVER FORGET on a pedestrian shelter beside the work site. The scribbled numbers on the concrete barricades in front of the site look almost Arabic. The surrounding buildings are scaffolded or covered or have enormous cables hanging from them. Creer-Boma New York Disaster Relief Fund. It seems that every nationality is working here. One of the neighbouring glass towers with cables hanging from it has even floor numbers painted on its windows: 14, 16, 18, ... 22, then 27. It is empty, like all the others. At the front of the construction site is a cross constructed from iron girders. From every direction, orange Ferrara Bros cement trucks approach and rumble past.

Photo Album

Click here for photos