The Mary Ellen Carter Rise Again

In these difficult times I think of the Mary Ellen Carter. In Stan Rogers’ song the Mary Ellen Carter, the craft piloted by a drunken captain and smashed first mate runs aground in a gale and sinks below. The owners of the Mary Ellen Carter announce that they are done with the wreck, collect the insurance monies, and laugh derisively at those who loved the Mary Ellen Carter who pleaded with them to raise and recover the ship. Refusing to do, the owners cast out them out of the office. But the friends loved that boat that often saved them through a gale, and they vow to raise the Mary Ellen Carter again.
     Well, the Mary Ellen Carter might be a sunken boat, it serves also as a vital and potent symbol of resistance to power and of loyalty to community. Refusing to accept her defeat, the friends of the Mary Ellen Carter spend the Spring months preparing the submerged boat to surface again despite the difficulties that confront them in that task “Three dives a day in hard hat suit and twice I've had the bends./Thank God it's only sixty feet and the currents here are slow/Or I'd never have the strength to go below./But we've patched her rents, stopped her vents, dogged hatch and porthole down./Put cables to her, 'fore and aft and girded her around.” The work was arduous and dangerous and painful, but the Mary Ellen Carter had been their strength over the years and now they would work to save the ship even with an awareness that it would no longer head out onto the seas but would rather do service at the dock: a restaurant, a coffee house, a place of community, quiet and rest. She must not be forgotten!
     The Mary Ellen Carter, abandoned as useless junk by “the laughing, drunken rats who left her to a sorry grave” had to be recovered not for its future service on the seas but for her places in the hearts and minds of those who loved her. They could not let her suffer ignominious defeat. Nor would they allow themselves to be beaten. Rogers sings:
     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.

I gain strength and hope every time I hear that song, and for more than thirty years I have listened to Stan Rogers sing it. Today I sit in social isolation in the attempt to arrest the spread of Covid-19. The world has come to almost a complete halt and the economies of nations are near collapse. I wonder what the world will be like when this iteration of the plague will end. Oh, it will end eventually one way or another and we will again return to the streets and the coffee houses; to doctor and dentist offices; to supermarkets and clothes stores; to hair salons and barbershops. “But what does that mean—'plague’? Just life, no more than that,” says Dr. Rieux in Camus’s novel The Plague. Even before the Mary Ellen Carter, there was the plague of Oran, and Dr. Rieux’s chronicle of it “could not be one of a final victory. It could be only the record of what had had to e done, and what assuredly would have to be done again in the never ending fight against terror and its relentless onslaughts, despite their personal afflictions, but all who, while unable to be saints but refusing to bow down to pestilences, strive their utmost to be healers.”
     Rise again, rise again - though your heart it be broken
     And 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.
I don’t know to what extent I can have the strength still to go below and patch her rents and stop her vents . . . I wonder what strength I have yet to raise the Mary Ellen Carter. But I am weary of the smiling bastards lying to me everywhere I go: in the newspapers, on the televisions and radios. As Father Paneloux urges,  I must choose to at least be the one who stays, whatever that could now mean, and despite adversity and lying bastards, do what I can to raise the Mary Ellen Carter.