The Country Mice

Last night I attended a fundraiser on the island for the people of Sendai, the place of the recent earthquake, tsunami and worrisome nuclear leaks.

The event was held in Cates Hill Chapel, a modest cedar-lined pitched roof building, tucked between towering cedar trees and Homeboy’s A-frame school. Driving up to it in the night the chapel glowed with the activity within — no street lights on Bowen. Darkness doesn’t just fall here, it crashes.

Inside played some beautiful Celtic folk music with various tin whistles, a bodhran (Irish drum) and a lovely Celtic harp.

Midway thru the little coffee house-style evening. a woman who, like me, lived and taught English in Japan for about a year, rose to read a letter from ‘Michiko,’ a friend in Japan.

Michiko relayed a series of stories about life in the Sendai area since last month’s earthquake: A four-year-old boy who falls asleep in the day because the aftershocks make him too afraid to sleep at night.

A boy who found his grandmother, lifeless, on top of a muddy wardrobe.

A schoolbus full of kindergarten-age children who were to graduate the next day, clasping one another, gone.

“They are now stars in the sky,” said the letter.

Michiko wrote that there are hundreds of stories like that. I cannot imagine. I don’t want to imagine.

The woman here has kept in touch with three of the people she met while in Japan. She’s been able to track down only two of them since March.

The fragility of life.

Following the reading of the letter, a musician approached the mike saying, ” I know only two songs with the words, ‘Rise Again.’ ”

And he sang The Mary Ellen Carter,  an inspirational song about triumphing over great odds. It was a hugely popular Canadian folk song circa 1979, by Nova Scotia singer Stan Rogers.

In looking for a link to post here this morning I learned that one man credited the song with saving his life. A rust-bucket ship was carrying a load of coal from Virginia to Massachusetts and when a storm rose up the ship went down. The man struggled to keep afloat and when he thought he would finally lose consciousness the words from the song came back to him:

And you, to whom adversity has dealt the final blow
With smiling bastards lying to you everywhere you go
Turn to, and put out all your strength of arm and heart and brain
And like the Mary Ellen Carter, rise again.

Rise again, rise again—though your heart it be broken
Or life about to end.
No matter what you’ve lost, be it a home, a love, a friend,
Like the Mary Ellen Carter, rise again.

The man shouted out the words, “Rise again, rise again,” as the waves washed over him. In the morning a coast guard pulled him to safety. He was one of three survivors of the wreck.

Stan Rogers died of smoke inhalation in an airplane fire in 1983, returning to Toronto from a folk festival in Texas.