By Patrick Taylor

Turn the map of Ireland through 90 degrees and you will see the silhouette of a small, shaggy dog. The animal’s legs and body form the sovereign nation of the Republic of Ireland. Lying in the dog’s head are the six counties that owe allegiance to the British crown. Belfast, Northern Ireland’s capital, is 10 miles as the crow flies from Newtownards, a busy market town set at the head of the largest salt-water inlet in the British Isles. It marks the little dog’s ear. Strangford Lough, 33 kilometers long by six kilometers wide, the largest sea inlet in the British Isles, is one of Ulster’s most popular tourist destinations.

When I left Ireland for Canada thirty years ago, Strangford was a wild place, a lonely place of mudflats, islands left behind when the last great ice age retreated, and pladdies, low rocky reefs, sea wrack covered and hidden at high tide. Strangford Lough was where two young men, friends since boyhood, spent their Saturdays in their own private retreat away from the bustle and grind of the weekday city.

Neill, stockily built, darkly completed, a superb shot, skilled helmsman, and I, fair skinned, slight, shared an unspoken love for the place where our pleasures were dictated only by the changing of the seasons.

In autumn and through the bitter winter flocks of migratory waterfowl, buff-pated widgeon, clanging battalions of Brent geese, arrived to feed on the eelgrass and provide sport for wildfowlers. Early mornings would see us, accompanied by Grouse, Neill’s big, black Labrador, huddled in the lee of a ruined sheepcote that stood above the shore of the Long Island.

When southerly gales churned the water into dark, steep white caps the hurled spume stung our faces and the wind numbed our fingers. Strangford was showing the face that led the Viking invaders of the Tenth Century to call it, Strangfjorthr, ‘the turbulent fjord’. And yet we waited, careless of the cold, straining to hear the whicker of pinions in the dawn’s gloaming.

On summer days, when Strangford lived up to its old Celtic name, Lough Cuan, ‘the peaceful lough’, with the sea azure, the air as warm as fresh buttermilk, we’d leave the moorings at Kircubbin, take my 26-foot sloop, Tarka, to race or simply go where the wind blew, only returning to the anchorage when the distant Mourne Mountains scrawled an indigo line against a star-filling, velvet sky.

The Mournes, heather-covered granite, solid and enduring as the Ulster folk, are the background to two water colors that hang in my home on Bowen Island. When my working day has been too long, the British Columbia skies primed with a monotonous undercoat of flat gray, I sit and let the paintings draw me back to what was, and always will be, a magical place.

The last time I returned, in May 1997, Ireland and Strangford seemed to have changed. The Republic of Ireland, once a poor country, now boasted one of Europe’s fastest growing economies. In the North of Ireland, after 30 years of internecine strife, a truce had been in effect for three years. On Strangford, tourists who before the Troubles had not even heard of Audleystown Neolithic cairn or Castle Espie, home of Ireland’s largest waterfowl collection, now visited the Lough’s historic sites, bird sanctuaries and wild life interpretive centers.

Americans, many searching for their Irish roots, cycled from Greyabbey to Portaferry, stopping at churchyards to read the names from moss-grown headstones that stood tilted among long grasses beneath somber yew trees. Sailors on skippered or bare-boat charters explored the myriad islands the locals will tell you there is one for every day of the year and sheltered inlets.

The years had indeed changed Strangford and two men, friends from boyhood.

Neill was to collect me from my hotel in Belfast. We’d planned, for old times’ sake, to drive down to Strangford and make the short voyage to the Long Island.

I hardly recognized him when he walked into the lobby. His once jet hair was streaked with gray, a bulge at his midriff accented his stockiness but his eyes shone the way I remembered, his smile when he saw me was the smile I’d seen so many times when he’d made a difficult shot, or beaten a competitor’s boat across the finishing line.

“How the hell are you?” His handshake had lost none of its power.

“Good to see you Neill. How’re Jenny and the kids?”

“They’re grand, and I’m off the leash today. At least until six. We’re supposed to be taking you out for dinner tonight and she’ll roast me if the pair of us are late home.”

“Like the time when we stayed too long in the ‘Mermaid’ in Kircubbin?”

Neill laughed. “Mind you, that was a great night. The crack was ninety.” He glanced at his watch. “We should get moving. The dinghy’s on the car’s roof rack, picnic’s in the boot do you still like a drop of Harp?” I nodded, thinking of the tart, chilled lagers we had drunk together on Tarka in the warmth of the summer evenings, the race over, the sails furled. “Come on, then.” He turned and I followed.

“Last time we went to the island, you had a brace of mallard,” Neill said, as he stowed a knapsack under the inflatable’s seat.

“And you had three widgeon.” I remembered that morning, the one we both had known would be our last together on the Lough. The wind had howled and kicked the water into vicious, short waves.

“It’s a better day today,” said Neill, clambering in. “I don’t think those clouds over the Mournes mean much.”

“I hope not.” As I climbed aboard I stared at the distant thunderheads. “I don’t fancy trying to get home in this thing if it howls up out of the south. And you know how quickly it can.”

“It’ll never happen,” he said, hauling on the outboard motor’s starter-cord.

I knew it would be pointless trying to chat over the clattering of the noisy little engine so I sat quietly, drinking in the well-remembered sights, breathing the sea weed-salted air, content to let Neill steer out into the Dorn Inlet and down past the Castle Hill.

On the crest of the hill great elms, bowed with the spring-green leaves, sheltered the ruins of an old church that had been constructed from the ancient stones of a castle built there by Baron le Savage in 1180. I saw Neill staring up at the hillcrest and wondered if, as he had said years ago, he still imagined he could hear the ghostly ring of Viking ax on Celtic shield, hoarse Irish battle cries of, ‘Erin go bragh’, and ‘faugh a ballagh’.

We left the Dorn to cross Ardkeen Bay, its glassy surface rippled only by our wake and the splashes of seals that the racket of our engine had disturbed from their basking on the wrack-covered Seal Rocks. Three oystercatchers, black and white and scarlet billed flew in line astern. Ahead lay the Long Island, a shingle-shored wishbone. Off to my right I could see the long, low shape of Gransha Point, bent like a crooked finger, for ever beckoning towards the turrets of Scrabo Tower solitary on its promontory above the town of Newtownards. I heard the liquid calls of curlew high overhead.

I felt a breeze on the back of my neck and glanced to my left. Catspaws riffled the water and cumulo-nimbus clouds bore down on us like great gray and black teams of horses unharnessed from their cannons that now flashed and roared in the sky.

I could tell by the urgent increase in the engine’s racketing that Neill had pushed it to full throttle. He bent toward me and I had to strain to hear him over the growling of the wind, the slap, slap as the boat’s flat rubber bottom smashed over the chop that had come up out of nowhere.

“Hang on. The sooner we’re out of this the better.”

“Right.” I grabbed the rope that ran round the top of one of the pontoons and hunched against the blown spray and the rain that soaked my shirt and jeans and plastered my thinning hair to my scalp. What, I wondered, would it take to overturn our little boat? I found myself humming the air of Anac Cuan, an old song about a boat sinking and the drowning of people and frightened sheep.

One of the Long Island’s points, low and coarse grass covered made a lee and blocked the waves’ force We sought sanctuary there like the early Christian monks fleeing to a round tower.

The boat’s motion eased in the more sheltered waters and I felt my clenched fingers relax as Neill ran the bows up onto the shingle and cut the engine.

“Hop out,” he said. “We’ll beach her.”

We stepped into ankle deep water, took one side of the dinghy each and hauled the inflatable ashore, the bottom crunching on the shingle, slithering over the tide-line of glistening kelp.

“That’ll do.” Neill straightened, flicked his head back and shook himself as I remembered old Grouse the big Labrador, now long gone, shaking himself after a water retrieve. Neill grinned. “Bit lumpy there for a minute or two.”

“Told you it could come up fast,” I said, glad to be on dry land.

“Aye, but these summer ones usually blow over pretty quickly.” He frowned. “It had better. It would be daft to try to get back until the sea’s gone down a bit.”

“And Jenny wants us home for six.”

Neill shrugged and grabbed the knapsack from the dinghy. “Come on. We’ll get a bit of shelter in the old sheep pen.” He set off at a smart trot and I followed, feet sinking into the springy grass.

We were both short of breath when we rounded one of the ruin’s tumbled walls, but behind the weathered-smooth stones the wind was less and the rain seemed to be slackening.

Neill puffed. “Not as fit as we used to be.”

Nor as reckless, I thought, as I hauled in a lungful of moist, salty air.

“Still,” he said, pointing to the south, “I think the worst of the storm’s over. I can see the Mournes.”

“If you can see the Mournes, it’s going to rain, and if you can’t see them it’s raining.”

“Canada’s not changed you that much, has it?” he said, laughing at the old chestnut. “Still the same old Ulsterman.”

“We all change,” I said quietly, and I knew it was the truth.

“I so,” he said, uncertainly, “but Strangford doesn’t. Not really.”

“What do you mean?”

“It’s seen the Celts, Saint Patrick and the monks, the Vikings, the United Irishmen, the Troubles, the truce. They’ve all left their marks and those are mostly tourist attractions today. Places you and I used to go wildfowling are bird sanctuaries. Some of the old pubs are swanky roadhouses.”

“So it has changed.”

He shook his head. “Strangford’s like us Ulsterfolk. We wear jeans now, not kilts and caubeens, but underneath we’re still the same. The Troubles like the storms here blow over us, but like the islands and the mudflats, the green of those little fields over on the mainland, the birds and the seals, badgers and the foxes we’ll still be here no matter what.” He took hold of my arm. “And Strangford will always be here for you to come home to.”

Home, I thought. There was moisture on my cheeks and not only from the dying rain.

“Speaking of home,” he said, “we will get back to mine in time for dinner. Just look at that.”

A strip of blue stretched from the hilly horizon to the base of the passing clouds. Bright rays of sunlight streamed down like the beams of heavenly searchlights, dappling the waves that even then seemed to be growing smaller. The rain had stopped.

“Here,” Neill said, offering me an open bottle of Harp and a ham sandwich. “What’ll we drink to?”

I looked around from the Mournes in the south, over islands and the white sails of yachts to Scrabo Tower, still mist shrouded, in the north. I tasted the salt of the air, heard the piping cries of knots of dunlin that whirled low over the beach like spores blown from a puffball mushroom, raised the bottle and said, “How about, ‘To Strangford and home’?” 
 
 

Patrick Taylor, who grew up in Northern Ireland, is a physician and writer who now lives on Bowen Island, BC. His published works include, Only Wounded. Ulster Stories, Key Porter Books. Toronto; and Pray for Us Sinners; A Novel, Insomniac Press. Toronto. He can be reached at editere@shaw.ca