Travel by DAR

Belfast: Gunpoint Diplomacy

(First published in Outside's Go, Aug-Sep 2008)

After seven years of a presidential regime that has turned the word American into invective around the globe, it may be timely to recall an era when the word still had a noble ring. For me, that time was the summer of 1969.

The Troubles in Northern Ireland were just beginning, or more accurately they were resuming after several decades’ quietude. I was in Dublin acting in a student production of a Yeats play at the Abbey Theatre, but mainly learning how to drink with grown-up actors. I saw nothing of the Troubles except a couple of sympathy marches along O’Connell Street. But I was curious, and as soon as my play folded in mid-August, I dumped my earthly possessions into a denim laundry bag, tossed the bag over my shoulder, and hitchhiked north to see for myself what a war looked like.

At the start, my journey was pastoral. I was singing to the cows behind the stone walls off the hilly country roads, which I had all to myself. But my first ride revealed a more bleak reality. A man in a convertible sports car told me that the pub he owned in Belfast had been firebombed the night before, and he was down south raising money for weapons. After that, three women in a stunted little car thought it a lark to drive me a little farther north, but when they found out I was aiming to cross the border, they started keening for me. A succession of other rides consumed the rest of the afternoon, and finally an old man in a tractor drove me over the border and dropped me off on Falls Road, in Belfast.

It was the first city I had ever seen that smoldered. Brick walls had been toppled. The neighborhood of Falls Road gave up puffs of smoke from buildings that had met the torch. Streets were barricaded with chairs and sandbags and upended kitchen tables and anything else the residents could get their hands on, with barbed wire spun out across the top. The graffiti, like the general atmosphere, was violent in a loopy way. In this most affable of nations, people tucked their chins down and withheld greetings until they had established whether you were Catholic or Protestant. If I had told them I was Jewish, they would have said, "Fine, but are you a Catholic Jew or a Protestant Jew?"

It was getting dark. I had nowhere to sleep. I noticed a large park behind a stucco wall about eight feet tall. Not seeing an entrance, I swung my laundry bag up over the wall and scaled it. Inside the park, oddly deserted except for trees and grass, I wandered around until I found a gazebo that didn’t smell too strongly of old urine, swept the wooden bench clear of things I didn’t want to look at too closely, and settled in for the night.

I awoke before dawn with the point of a bayonet at my neck. Four nervous British soldiers were poised in attack stance, demanding to know what I was doing there. From their garbled cries and commands, I caught on that the park was the headquarters of the British army in Belfast, and I had unwittingly infiltrated it. I threw my hands over my head.

"Noncombatant!" I yelled. "Neutral! Innocent!"

They looked dubious, with weapons still raised.

"American!" I yelled.

Never before had I seen the word have such an effect. The soldiers lowered their bayonets, slumping with relief in a manner that seemed to say, "Why didn’t you say so?" The word American was both escape ticket and magical charm, conferring instant friendship. They clapped me on the back; I clapped four bottles of Guinness, from inside my bag, into their palms. They escorted me to the entrance of the park and bid me safe passage.

By day, I was fed greasy white-bread sandwiches of butter and cold ham that tasted ambrosial; by night, I was given a cozy couch to sleep on in the spinster sisters’ cramped front parlor. Both nights, falling asleep before the little enamel fireplace radiator, the word American shone in my mind with a special luster, and I was glad to hail from a place that had this impact. How many times in history had a passport been able to serve as hallowed hall pass to all sides of a deep and bitter conflict? America had a sanctity that I was privy to, merely by accident of birthplace. I could travel the globe and be regarded—not everywhere, but almost—as blessed.

Going to sleep now, nearly 40 years later, with the song of political change ringing in my head, I see it that way again, coming untarnished, the word American. It’s still only a glimmer, but I find myself yearning for the day soon when it may bestow, upon travelers from this land as well as those around the globe who greet us, a shine of hope once more.