Nichol Dance : Who are you?
Ollie Slatt : Who are you?
Nichol Dance : Nichol Dance. I asked you first.
Ollie Slatt : Oh, I’m Ollie Slatt. I mine for subversive coal in the Bull Mountains. Yeah, we have to blast through 20 feet of sandstone to reach the coal vein. We have two spoils banks and they have two striver arrangements. And I am damn proud of it!
Nichol Dance : Why are you telling me this?
Ollie Slatt : Because of my unparallel subterranean work performance, my union local has awarded me this trip and this certificate for one days fishin’ with you. And god damn… fishin’ is what I am all about.
Nichol Dance : Well, I sure hope it works out that way. But you may have bothered to call me sooner, ’cause I’m booked up 16 days straight.
Ollie Slatt : Sixteen days… what’s that mean?
Nichol Dance : That means that the sooner you can fish with me is 17 days from today.
Ollie Slatt : Well, what about my damn certificate?
Nichol Dance : Now just a damn minute, Mr. Slatt. That certificate is good for one day’s guide. Now, you can go with one of these boys on the dock here. They learned everything they know from me.
Ollie Slatt : Yeah? Well, where do I find this other one to take me fishin’?
Nichol Dance : Talk to Carter over there in the big shack.
Ollie Slatt : Now look at me. Do I look like a rich man? Do I look like the man who can afford to pay the local Howard Johnsons for 16 days in a row to wait until I fish on the 17th? What kind of queer breed of odds and ends to ya have to get around here to think like that? I’m just a tourist and coal miner from North Carolina down here for only a few days to relax and fish and ya all just don’t get it.
Nichol Dance : Well, you go over there and ask for Captain Farren Carter. He’s a regular fish hawk, Mr. Slatt. If it swims and it’s in Monroe County, he’ll put in a boat for ya
And some time make the time to drive out west
Into County Clare, along the Flaggy Shore,
In September or October, when the wind
And the light are working off each other
So that the ocean on one side is wild
With foam and glitter, and inland among stones
The surface of a slate-grey lake is lit
By the earthed lightning of a flock of swans,
Their feathers roughed and ruffling, white on white,
Their fully grown headstrong-looking heads
Tucked or cresting or busy underwater.
Useless to think you’ll park and capture it
More thoroughly. You are neither here nor there,
A hurry through which known and strange things pass
As big soft buffetings come at the car sideways
And catch the heart off guard and blow it open.
“Postscript” by Seamus Heaney, from The Spirit Level. © Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1996.
THIRTYARDS 
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