08/31/05: Enter the luggage, and the tall ships
I woke this morning to the sound of an idling diesel engine outside my window. A truck door slammed and I got up to check out the cause of the racket. A nervous man in his thirties shifted though some paperwork and looked up. There, lying inconspicuously at his feet, was my long-lost backpack.
Running out to the street I did a ceremonial jig, thanked the nervous courier and then hauled it up to my room. Everything is intact and I jubilantly write to you wearing my own clean, well-fitting CLOTHES, freshly arrived from out of the mysterious global transport ether a full six weeks late. Unparalleled service, really.
I poked the bag for answers, a story or two, or some explanation of its journey. But it's not talking, apparently under some sort of oath of silence agreed to with Air France. Luckily my private investigators (sister Annadeene and mother Edie) are hot on the trail of the bag's mysterious disappearance and reappearance.
From what they've deduced, my bag made it onto the plane to Paris, waaaaay back on July 16. In the mysterious confines of Charles deGaulle Airport, something happened. Somehow the baggage tag was ripped off, probably on some conveyor, maybe as it was coming off the plane itself. At precisely the same moment I touched down in Paris that fateful morning, one Radouane Nasry of Branford, Connecticut, decided to send home an extra backpack full of stuff from his travels in Europe. He brought it to the airport and somehow got Air France to send the baggage to JFK in New York, where his nephew picked it up and brought it home, sticking it in a bedroom to await his uncle's return. Or so Uncle Nasry thought.
In fact, somewhere deep in the bowels of Paris' luggage transfer infrastructure, Uncle Nasry's luggage tag also ripped off his bag. Someone picked it up and, guessing, stuck it on my bag. So when the young Nasry picked up a backpack with the Nasry sticker at JFK, he had no reason to think it was the wrong bag. It was unceremoniously dumped in a bedroom in suburban Connecticut, not terribly far from where I actually started my own voyage.
When Uncle Nasry returned home last week, he found, to his dismay, my luggage and called our answering machine in Maine. But his number was chopped short, so my sister did a nifty reverse look-up of all of the possible number combinations for Nasry, found him and called him. He cleared up most of the confusion and Air France picked up the bag and sent it here.
But there are still lots of questions, mainly, why didn't anyone see the oversized tag on the bag that has my name and address on it? If my checked luggage tag ripped off, then it should have been easy to read my info, look me up and slap a new tag on there. And who knew that you could get Air France to send stuff home for you? I though you had to be on board with any luggage since 9/11! And of course, where is Uncle Nasry's bag now? Still missing.
But that's not my concern, thankfully. My concern is making and recording music, and there has been a surprising amount of that going on in the last few weeks. I wrote about Danish Fish Stepping, but I didn't mention the shanty festival, which was almost but not quite as raucous as the German festival. Lots of wandering around in packs between performances and taking over of Irish pubs to sing bellicose shanties into the wee hours.
This was followed by Sail Amsterdam, purportedly the world's largest gathering of Tall Ships. It happens only once every five years, so I count it as a rare piece of Bennett Luck that allowed me to spend four days in Amsterdam checking out firsthand the environment in which shanties really developed.
If you have never seen a true full-rigged tall ship in person then it is hard to get the picture. You've seen them in dark, dramatic paintings over the mantle in old seafood restaurants, or in calendars in the bathroom of your great-uncle's summer place ... but to stand on deck is something entirely different. These are the ships that carried the whole world's trade from port to port when our great-grandparents were young, and the amazing part is it was done only with the wind, the sweaty backs of men, and a whole barquentine's worth of creative engineering. To look up at the rigging and to look down at the hull design of these boats is to witness the cumulative work of some of the world's finest artists, architects, and mathematicians merging in the very picture of Good Design: form and function merging in ways both beautiful and practical.
And of course there was music. One glance though Stan Hugill's enlightening bookShanties of the Seven Seas shows the diversity and power of the shipboard chants once used to help with the hardest tasks aboard these ships. There were short drag shanties, used for quick tasks like shortening or dropping sails. There were long drag shanties, used when work was more difficult and sustained. These shanties typically have a chorus section at the end of a series of verses, giving sailors a time to rest in between pulls on the halyards or other heavy lines. Capstan shanties are typically long and repetitive, matching tasks like heaving up the anchor or pumping out the bilge. The steady rhythm of these songs kept pace for the workers over the duration of the task. And forecastle shanties were the songs the sailors sang after work while relaxing between watches. Often less rhythmically driving than the other shanties, the subject matter is more diverse, ranging from love to war to humor.
Of course, even though I write about these songs in the past tense, people still sing them, and some even sing them while working. But the wholesale move to bulky tankers and cargo ships, fueled by oil and not the wind, has shifted the shanty, and the good design of the old ships, into the realm of almost pure recreation. The work of carrying the world's commodities is now done without shipboard music and without the practical beauty I saw in Amsterdam a week and a half ago, a fact that should make anyone question our ideas of progress. Yes we now can buy lots of cheap stuff ... but at what cost?
Lecture aside, I am glad that at least a few people are still maintaining these old ships, and even figuring out how to sing on them. There is a man in northeast Holland who is a musician and a skipper on an old Dutch "scootje" who I am visiting for a sail on Friday, and I'm interested to see if he sings while raising sail or hauling anchor. Also, during the second week in September I will sail around the western Baltic sea with a group of eight or nine shanty choirs, all on old sailboats. It is these people who will teach groups like the Boekaniers (who have never actually sung shanties while doing shipboard work) how to work and sing, and I hope it will spread.
I meant to tell you about the best way to see the tall ships: from a barge with a rowdy brass band—dressed in garish blue jackets and long underwear—serenading the ship-packed harbor. That's how I did it, but the description will have to wait until next time. It is a beautiful sunny day here and I can sit no longer. My newfound duds need a tour of Harderwijk!
All of my photos are online! Check them out at: www.watsonyear.shutterfly.com .
