Belfast Castle

 Belfast Castle

              We are now sitting together, in chairs and on the floor in the Fishwick Room of the Belfast Castle, a place that has had several incarnations starting in the 12^th century and that passed through various barons and lords and all this implies, but now seems, by its stackable convention-style chairs, to serve as a wedding and conference center of sorts. No historical tours today—just a hike up Cavehill and a lunch on a bluff overlooking Belfast Harbor and the estuary of the River Lagan, the yellow cranes Samson and Goliath nestled below.

              While some of the students on the hike looked sadly at their white shoes getting spattered in the wet Irish mud, the arrival at the cave of Cavehill was joyous, students facing the basalt cliffs in one direction, and the rolling hill that drops away to the view of the trees and water below in the other. Several bouldered up to the mouth of the cave while we cheered them on; and then we ate lunch up the layered slope, a terraced garden of us planted with the sacks of sandwiches, Toto crisps, and Double Decker candy bars the hostel prepared for us.

  

              This morning was also a jubilant group exertion for students who joined me on a run to the Titanic museum, stopping at churches and public art and a vivid sunrise just behind the twin cranes we were to see again from above. 

              Yesterday at tea time, Janine, Barbara, and I sat before a large window at the Ulster Museum, a wall separating us from the others. Janine marveled at the way Michael so happily communed with the students, at which point I became hyperaware of that wall and sought to come out from behind it.

              I joined the students just as Michael was explaining the tech metaphor of bug-versus-feature, and then gave an example that was its own provocation to interrogate the culture at Roosevelt High School: before we left, a couple students vandalized the room of a gay teacher with clear homophobic and misogynistic intent. We discussed with urgency and heat, but over an intimate table and cups of tea, so different from a classroom with its power dynamics and captive assembly.

              One of the important things about a trip like this is the way it changes the texture of relationships between younger adults and the older ones. As I was discussing with Chloe and Makayla earlier in the morning, there’s now such competition for university admissions and scholarship money—thus for the accolades of pedigreed programs and sports clubs as well as upmarket course titles—grades necessarily supersede curiosity and learning. Chloe was surprised that teachers notice and are saddened by students immersed in an unreflecting grind. But it grieves us. And no small result of this grind is that teachers are more gatekeeper than fellow learner, fellow citizen.

              Here in our travels, where we eat at tables together, wait on buses together, walk the streets and trails, lounge on stones and chairs together, we weave casually in and out of conversations about the world that affect us all as well as the school and classrooms that are a deep common experience. The falling barrier is an entry into adulthood—fellowship and the ability to approach authority, and no less our shared responsibility to unfinished communal existence.

              In the Fishwick Room, we reflect on what we’ve observed in Northern Ireland so far. Taylor and Halle remark how little they’ve seen of the unionist-nationalist tensions. But Barbara reports how women on our train ride told her it’s time to move forward, move forward, move forward: perhaps we don’t know what we see (or don’t) as new visitors to a place, but perhaps, too, there’s much hidden in the attempt to move on. Barbara later will tell the story of a cab driver who, when hearing why we are here, says, You want the Irish history? I’ll tell you the history. Stop studying it! In a few hours, we will discuss this over dinner: how do divided peoples in a nation steeped in trauma begin to heal? Might it, in fact, need a can’t-we-all-just-get-along moment before honestly acknowledging and addressing pain?

              Below us, about forty men and women in their forties to seventies have gathered for traditional Irish dancing while we, upstairs, go around the room with our solemn thoughts, reels and jigs vibrating the floor. In a moment, we will go downstairs and then be beckoned into the ballroom to watch. A man will tell Sayre and Steffi about the couples and pairs dancing, about the steps and history; we will think about what it means to have Irish dancing in what was many times a lord's manor house. For the few minutes at the wall of the ballroom, taking in this unexpected, rousing gift, we will smile and lightly stomp along.