Off to Work with Seamus Carr

Seamus Carr (pictured left) works with wood, drives trucks, refurbishes old tractors and tells great stories. Seamus lives and works out his parent's house near Newry, Northern Ireland, a town near the border with Ireland.

Today he was proudly wearing his Missoula Club sweatshirt picked up on one of his 10 trips to Missoula since first arriving in 1997 with the Building Bridges program. Seamus is still very close with his Missoula host family Skip and Jodi Harden and their family.

In fact the week before John and I left for Ireland, Seamus was in Missoula. He came this time to surprise Jodi on her birthday. He said, "She couldn't talk for about 45 minutes."

Montana isn't the only place that Seamus has visited. He's traveled across Australia in an old bus, still has a 500 rubel note from a trip to Moscow, has been across Europe and hopes to get to Africa soon.

Seamus and his brother Paul (called Bubba by his siblings) are working on a few details at St. Patrick's Church (our fourth St. Patrick's shown at left) in the small town of Loughbrickland. The church was originally build in 1825 but had become rundown. Over the past year, the inside of the church has been complete refurbished in an almost contemporary look with dark wood and intricate tile work.

A few of the doors on the north side of the church have expanded, so Seamus is there to make them fit together better. He takes the doors off their hinges, uses a saw to rip off an old piece of molding and then glues and nails the new molding into place. There's also a problem with one of the new sky lights. Seamus and Paul lift a 30 foot ladder into place being careful of lights and items on the altar. Seamus shakes the ladder as Paul heads up to the top. Brothers will be brothers. Seamus then takes his turn at the top and fixes the problem.

After he takes us to lunch in Newry, a light drizzle begins. Seamus shows that he had slowed down for us. He moves into his normal speed and has the doors fixed and re-hung in no time at all using some of the tools he's picked up on his trips to Missoula where he says tools are much cheaper.

Seamus then takes up a very narrow road to the Flagstaff Viewpoint (see the view at left) overlooking Carlingford Lough, a busy port near Newry between the Mourne and Cooley Mountains. He points out where he lives, where there are castle ruins as well as the flashing light from the lighthouse that's the final point before ships enter the Irish Sea.

He shows us the quarry where he crashed while four-wheeling in 2006 and almost lost his leg. This is where Northern Ireland (on the left of the river) and Ireland (on the right of the river) come together.

He feels at home at this place. He talks about a trail he goes running on, the forest where he takes friends to a little known castle and about the transport ferry taking trailers to Liverpool, England. He smiles when he talks about it. While he loves to tell stories about the places around the world he's visited and hopes to visit, this is home.