If you set out on an adventure, you may, without changing your
route, find yourself on a very different journey. This is what
Dick Wheeler discovers in Jay O'Callahan's masterful true story,
The Spirit of the Great Auk.
Jay O'Callahan is one of our national storytelling treasures.
He has performed everywhere that stories are heard, including
the Clearwater Festival, the National
Storytelling Festival, The Christmas Revels, NPR, and at kitchen
tables from his home in Marshfield, MA to the Maritimes. His seventeen
recordings of original stories -- which divide fairly equally
into stories for small children, for older children, and for adults
-- are filled with a Dickensian richness of characters, a cascading
world of voices so irrepressible they seem always on the verge
of grabbing the story away from the teller. Whether richly comic
or heart-achingly poignant, O'Callahan's stories are always stories
of community, of how we care for and about one another. Yet for
the last four years Jay O'Callahan has devoted most of his creative
energies to honing and performing a tale of a man paddling a kayak,
alone in the North Atlantic. A very different journey.
Dick Wheeler had arrived at late middle age still clinging to
a young man's dream. He dreamed of a long paddle in a sea kayak.
Jay's telling of the story begins at the end of that journey,
as he points out Wheeler, exhausted but exultant, kayaking down
the Cape Cod Canal at the end of a 1500 mile solo voyage. By beginning
at the end, Jay O'Callahan tells us something very important.
This is more than just an adventure tale of human endurance. Dick
Wheeler's long paddle, with its hardships and dangers, is only
the background for the real journey. To take us on that journey,
O'Callahan almost imperceptibly shifts the narrative from observing
Wheeler to experiencing his journey directly. It is an epic journey
that has everything to do with the sea, and very little to do
with the specific rigors of long-distance kayaking.
The impetus for Dick Wheeler's long paddle was the story of
the extinct Great Auk, a flightless bird that migrated by swimming
from its rookery on Funk Island in Northern Newfoundland 1500
miles to Buzzards Bay. The last of the Great Auks was clubbed
to death in 1844, a scene that O'Callahan presents with brutal
directness. The tragic history of this magnificent sea bird is
one of systematic exploitation, an industry created for its wholesale
slaughter, a tale that echoes with those of the buffalo, the passenger
pigeon, and the whales. It is a history that ends in awful irony,
as the last Great Auks were killed on behest of a natural history
museum, specimens for their collection. But O'Callahan does not
dwell on historical finger-pointing or environmental self-righteousness.
Stories have power. The Great Auks' story sends Dick Wheeler to
sea in a tiny kayak, following its path.
Along the migration route of an extinct species, one is likely
to encounter ghosts. Dick Wheeler is never quite alone; his solo
voyage is filled with the presence of the sea and its creatures,
past and present. The sea is not a dead obstacle to traverse,
but a living presence; not an adversary, but a severe god that
tests and tests again to determine if one is worthy.
Dick Wheeler's first day of paddling, forty miles from Funk
Island to the mainland, is a trial of epic proportions -- icebergs,
high seas and the wind against him. The word of this feat goes
out on the fishing radio, and the fisherfolk of the Maritimes
throng into O'Callahan's story. "You come all the way in from
the Funks in that t'ing? I won't go cross the harbor in that t'ing,
boy." Jay O'Callahan's skill in creating vibrant quirky characters
in a few words is marvelously in evidence here. He fills what
might have been a canvas of lone kayaker, sea, and sky with an
entire society of people, men and women who live with and from
the sea. Though no one says it, Dick Wheeler has been found worthy
of their respect. The Newfoundlanders treat Wheeler to what he
calls "aggressive hospitality": they give him more food than he
can possibly eat, talk until he falls asleep at the table, then
the best bed in the house and an early send-off to the next fishing
outport, marked on his map with their "x".
Most importantly, they give Wheeler their trust. They tell him
the thing that they hardly dare to speak to each other. Too many
fish are being caught too young. The sea cannot replenish itself.
Soon the fish will all be gone, and none can stop himself, for
the necessity of their livelihood and fear of their neighbors.
The Newfoundland fishers give Wheeler a grave and urgent responsibility:
"Tell them."
The journey that began with "just a guy out doing a dream" has
taken on a new complexity and urgency. As Wheeler paddles south
he struggles with this unsought responsibility, experiencing the
sea and the people who know it, and fear for its future and their
own. O'Callahan offers no pat analysis, no easy answers. What
he does is makes us feel the sacredness of our connection with
the sea, its palpable presence, its majesty and its fragility.
In O'Callahan's spare images the spirit of the Great Auk challenges
each of us as a living presence, many-tongued as the sea. In the
story Dick Wheeler is transformed by its call, and in its telling
Jay O'Callahan has been as well. If you listen, you may be too.
The man who set out to "do the long paddle" arrived a different
person, one who has learned that "it's not our journey any more."
The Spirit of the Great Auk, 70 minute cassette tape. $10 plus
$1.75 shipping and handling (Massachusetts residents add 5% tax),
checks to Jay O'Callahan. (800) 626-5356. PO Box 1054, Marshfield,
MA 02050. Email: jay@ocallahan.com.
This review appeared in the New England Folk Almanac
Reprinted by permission of the author.
top of page
|
