Wanderlust – with all its romantic, nerve-rattling buzz – is not for everyone. Routine and certainty are not despotic, but can be a framework that, for some, feels comforting. Adventure requires a certain attitude: the urge to take risks, to embrace change. The thrill of not knowing where you will sleep, each night unveiling a different sky, stars pockmarked in indigo. It is easier to stay than to go.
Adventure suggests off-the-cuffness, taking off without a moment’s thought and not looking back. In Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs – a pyramid of human needs, beginning at the bottom with physiological needs (breathing, water, food, shelter), moving upwards to safety, love/belonging and esteem, and finally to self-actualization – adventure ranks close to the top. The ability to travel the globe, undertake a balloon flight or round-the-world race, is a luxury of the highest order. For the poor and working classes, adventure was linked to capital: the only chance of thrill-seeking was an act of self-creation. To volunteer for ship work in exchange for passage, to work as servants to rich travellers or assistants to explorers, to undertake the spadework of building American interstates. In the 1960s, the Irish government offered trips to Australia for fourteen pounds, on the condition that travellers stayed for two years. Too long for a holiday, not enough time to become an exile, but an immersive enough timeline to head for outback sands, or the hot brick of city paths.
When Irishwoman Dervla Murphy was ten, she was gifted an atlas. Transfixed by its maps and borders, she made a vow that one day, she would cycle to India. In 1963, aged thirty-two, she set out from Ireland on a bike (which she nicknamed Roz). On account of the two wheels, Murphy took only essentials with her – a map, a compass, a 0.25 automatic pistol, various practical items of clothing, a woollen balaclava, leather fur-lined gauntlets, a bar of soap, and a knife – and made her way across Europe. Her medical supplies included one hundred aspirin, ‘sunburn cream’ (six tubes), paludrine tablets (to ward off malaria) and ‘an ounce of potassium permanganate (against snake bite)’. For reading materials, she packed a copy of William Blake’s poems and Nehru’s history of India.
The route took Murphy through France and Italy, on to the former region of Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Iran and Afghanistan, and over the Himalayas to Pakistan. She often relied on the hospitality of strangers, some well off, others hugely impoverished, reciprocating their kindness with offers of work. There were obstacles too – broken ribs after being hit with the butt of a rifle, poor diet, and close calls with sexual assault. Murphy’s account of the trip, Full Tilt: Ireland to India with a Bicycle, was published in 1965, to an Ireland that wouldn’t have understood her motivation; that would have liked to chastise her. Her home country of the 1960s would not have thought exploring permissible for women. The walls of a home, or a garden, were the perimeter of most women’s lives. Murphy refers to her travels not as adventuring but as ‘escapism’, and the dual meaning is clear. When she set off on her bike, she was saying goodbye to a country that viewed solo, curious women as dangerous.
Murphy later had a daughter, whom she took with her on the road. Navigating Baltistan in Pakistan, she bought a retired polo pony to carry the child and their supplies, including sacks of flour, as food was scarce among the local villagers during winter. Three years later, when Rachel was nine, she travelled the first six hundred miles of a journey in Peru with her mother, on a mule. Murphy said people were kinder to her because she had a child with her, and her presence was an opener to conversation and connection. Imagine having a mother as fearless as that? Demonstrating in actions and deeds that women could do anything, and that independence and solitude were to be prized.
Ireland has a long tradition of the seanachaí – public storytellers who captivate crowds. Over the centuries, they moved from house to house, telling stories for entertainment, in return for food or drink. Women who were equally adept at the craft told their stories instead at firesides and in kitchens. They were largely forbidden to leave the house and venture into the night, and there was definite disapproval of women who ‘ceili’d’ (went visiting). The most important storytellers, skilled in complex tales (such as hero tales, and long wonder tales) were predominantly men. Many of their stories were historical, featuring old lore or tales of the land. The stories told by women also featured wanderers, but they themselves were discouraged from wandering far from home. Women had their own complicated tales, committed to memory and retold without notes. Fireside, shawl-wrapped, they recounted them to other women, and to children. Names like Peig Sayers and Bab Feirtéar emerged, but in the traditional communities – where storytelling was a key form of entertainment – men were primarily at the centre of it. I have learned from editing two all-female anthologies of short stories that there is an assumption made about the content of women’s writing. That by virtue of being female, the focus of a writer’s gaze will land on subjects supposedly connected to women. Even if they write about love, relationships, families or death, these are deemed lesser, a pocketful of domesticity. Men writing on the same subject are naturally considered the instigators of the great American/Irish/British novel. They are the flag-bearers of the human condition, and no one dares utter the word ‘domestic’ about their work. Don’t we all fall in love? Have families? Die? Fuck? Why the distinction in reverence based on who the teller is?
The adventurer’s body is a totem. In tintype photographs, gaunt faces stare at the lens. Eyes give nothing away about the distance crossed, but mud-clogged boots house blistered heels, and fabric layers hide malnutrition and scurvy. Accessorised with a gun, compass or telescope. The closer we get to modernity, the harder it is to guess at the health, gender or endured hardship of an adventurer. Today, emaciation has been replaced by slick sinews, and smears of white sunblock. DIY ensembles in khaki and brown give way to garish neon, as clothing becomes Patagonia’d. What stands out most about present day photographs is that there are more women in the pictures now.
To set out for the horizon is to head towards its shimmering line. Every time I arrive in a new place, I drop my bags, turn on my heel and begin to walk. There is alchemy in being an outsider, of passing locals who don’t know you’re not from a place. Blending in with every block, each corner turned. There are choices: use Google or buy an actual map. Go outside, turn left or right, cross traffic junctions past honking cars; stick to the circular path of a small town, or veer to the outskirts, to the sea or fields, to the hinterland. Seek out the borders. In new places, there is a natural gravitation towards the edges. I feel uneasy until I’ve walked a place. Long journeys can deplete and disorientate, but as soon as I start to wander, I acclimatise. I crave transactions, buying coffee or gum just to hear new accents, to feel unfamiliar currency.
With adventure comes anticipation, a necessary kind of blindness, facing into the unknown miles ahead. The lure of unplanned travel is its own mystery. On the parallel track of discovering new people and paths, there is a part of every traveller waiting to be revealed. Departing requires physically leaving behind an old part of yourself. Perhaps this residue – physical or emotional – is too painful or precious to carry with us and necessitates being discarded. Leaving something familiar behind can be a beacon to light the path back home, a candle in the window. Each footstep on a journey moves the traveller away from one life and into another, and perhaps the memory of the piece left behind sustains even the weariest nomad. Untethered to us, that part of ourselves that stayed back might have changed. There is always the option of reclaiming it, certainly, but new paths and red hills may have already begun to nudge it out of the frame. It may feel magnetic, at least in the mind, when it has already been displaced by something newer.
On my own, in Malin town, in the very north of Donegal, I experience two very different days. One is bright cyan in every direction, the small village green bathed in rays so hot they almost singe the grass. Out at Five Fingers Strand, a pale spine of sand, there are warning signs not to swim due to dangerous currents, and more warnings for collapsing dunes. The
danger in nature is never subtle, even in places of great beauty. 360 degrees of eye-watering brightness. Twenty-four hours later, rain is firing down onto the street in spears. I set out for Malin Head, site of a famous weather station known from the shipping news and sea area forecasts, and the most northerly point on the island of Ireland. Circling the town, there is a harbour, where waves scale up four metres, like a skate park bowl. The wind is strong, orchestrating a shrill howl, but the bulk of the noise is from the fishing boats jostling against each other, port and starboard abutting. The weather station takes a while to find, eventually located because of its visible masts. I’d been expecting a mini fortress, austere and remote, but it’s small and unimposing. My imagination had conjured up something more mysterious, not a modest civic building in a quiet, sea-battered town. There is an old coastguard’s office, the arrival point of many long-ago radio conversations, calling out to lost ships on the Atlantic. A place of Morse-coded rescue.
I am a complicated traveller. The lure of it, the distance and the promise of unfamiliar views compel, but often the reality or the shortness of the trip disappoints. It has changed too, since becoming a parent. I always long to ricochet home. I miss my children too much if I’m away for more than a handful of days. Every ticket purchased is a return one. Jumping ship. Stowing away. As Mark Eitzel once sang: on the highways, there’s a million ways, if you want to disappear. And all of us do, sometimes, to seek out either chaos or calm, to eschew all demands made, to release ourselves from technology, to hide from grief. There is possibility in being lost; of being unlocatable. Of being lifted without ties, like Lilian Bland’s glider casting shadows on Carnmoney Hill; Dervla Murphy freewheeling over the Himalayas; Beryl Markham’s first glimpse of the coast of Nova Scotia. Adventure operates in the realm of unpredictability: a storm at each crossroads, a cartographic blind spot. But we orient ourselves towards it, bending to the horizon, with all that it offers and conceals.
Twelve Stories of Bodily Autonomy
(for the twelve women a day who left)
Until 2018, it was impossible to talk about the body in Ireland and not discuss abortion. It is especially difficult to avoid it if you are a woman, and write about the body and what it can encounter and endure. The experience of a body, of one person’s life, is an existential arc; a solitary set of circumstances affecting just one individual. Before a referendum in 2018 Ireland did not see the individual as a distinct being. Legislation was predicated on one-size-fits-all laws, blanketing all women with the same legal restrictions. Until the results of that referendum came into effect no woman in Ireland could obtain a medical termination, without a very specific and strict set of parameters. In many of these scenarios, the request could still be turned down. Someone else, someone not in the midst of unwanted or crisis pregnancy, decided what was best. If you are not an Irish woman, some context is required here, because these situations don’t rear up out of nowhere, a towering mass of control and constraint.
The year 1983 saw a referendum on abortion, the impact of which stretches its tentacles into all subsequent votes and debate on the issue. People voted to insert a clause – the Eighth Amendment – into the constitution that gave equal right to life to a pregnant mother and her unborn foetus, whether it is a week-old embryo or approaching the twenty-three-week viability mark, making them physically – and legally – umbilical. Think of those early days and weeks, the clump-of-cells stage, the not-a-baby stage. This law impacted the lives of many girls and women. Since 1980, over 150,000 women have left Ireland to seek a termination. The lines between body and womb have become blurred, a vessel inside a vessel. The physical body does not fully belong to its owner if the womb within it contains an unplanned or unwanted pregnancy. There are all kinds of people ready to queue up and remind a woman of that.
July 2017, on a Dublin street, hundreds of people are marching. The demographic is striking: mostly old men and women, who pucker their faces in anger at the pro-choice protesters that line the road. One old man shouts ‘Murderers!’ at women on the kerbside. The march, organised by an umbrella of anti-abortion groups, is dubbed the ‘Rally for Life’. Clutching posters claiming to ‘love them both’ – mother and foetus – this is a group of people in fear, but not due to the perceived demise of ‘the unborn’. And that use of the definitive ‘the unborn’, which is collective, is important. The anti-choice movement have always equated ‘foetus’ with ‘baby’, but use the vagueness of the term ‘unborn’ politically, a catch-all that doesn’t come close to capturing the complicated specifics of each pregnancy.
Amid banners of the Virgin Mary (patron saint of humanity, not chastity and virginity) and Our Lady of Guadalupe (patron saint of the unborn), they rumble down the street, a collective relic of the past. Their age is not the problem – many contemporaries their age are pro-choice – but they represent a 1950s time capsule of pronouncements on women’s lives. For all their religiosity, their lack of compassion for pregnant women is breathtaking. The holiest of holy believers see nothing inappropriate in carrying graphic posters, or telling women that they’re going to hell. The crowd is an irate representation of a mindset that opposed contraception for decades, resulting in thousands of crisis pregnancies. Pregnancies that were a collective millstone for generations of young women, burdened with ‘illegitimate’ infants, shamed for life, and forcibly shipped off to Magdalene laundries and mother-and-baby homes. In these pseudo-prisons, there was commodification of both mother and child. Irish newborns were currency; forcibly removed from bewildered young mothers and adopted or sold. These women were an added source of bounty for nuns and private nursing homes, who worked them to the bone for profit. Come on in, girls! Here’s your overalls, hand over your babies!
A couple of years ago I attended a literary festival and read some of my work, fiction and non-fiction, that both happened to reference abortion. Afterwards, during the Q&A, another writer on the panel – a smart, funny sometime New Yorker – tells me that I’m a political writer. I am? I never knew this, and in response to my surprise, the writer thinks that I am offended (I’m not). She asks if I reject this idea (I honestly don’t), or that the anatomical themes in my writing connect to the politics of the body. They clearly do. No matter what or how you write about the female body – from reproduction to sexuality, illness to motherhood – it is politicised. Women are reduced to the physical: to make it easier to disregard them. To decide, rule and legislate for them. But things are changing. The crowd has swelled; the voices are louder. In the run-up to the referendum campaign, friends go public with stories of abortion, to show the reality and impact the decision had on their lives.
It’s 8 May 2018, seventeen days until the referendum on abortion, and I am standing at a stranger’s front door. Somewhere inside, a dog is issuing an assembly line of barks. I take a deep breath and wait for the shape of someone to appear behind the frosted glass. I am canvassing ahead of the referendum later this month. Standing at this door, like many I visit tonight, the occupant says that they will be voting Yes. The only hard No is from a young woman who says abortion is murder.
‘Even if the mother’s life is in danger?’ I ask.
‘God is good. He will decide,’ she replies.
I thank her for her time and move on. On other nights the ‘No’s are disheartening, even more so if they come from women. Most of my canvass tallies on these nights are overwhelmingly ‘Yes’, but none of us want to be complacent about the outcome on 25 May.
In 1992, the news was dominated by the story of a fourteen-year-old Dublin girl, who was pregnant. The situation – a child carrying a child – was frightening and bewildering enough, without the horror that it was the result of rape. A forty-something-year-old man, known to her family, had sexually abused the girl for years. I thought about this girl a lot. Tried to picture her: long hair or short hair? Did she own a pet? Love music? Was her face a smattering of freckles? She was undoubtedly small, but her smallness did not protect her. Faced with an
unspeakable situation, she and her parents decided on a termination – but this was Ireland: Catholic, traditional, reactionary Ireland. The rape was reported to the police, and after consultation about a paternity test, her family informed them of the girl’s wish to travel to the UK for an abortion. When they departed, police liaised with the Attorney General, who issued an injunction based on the Eighth Amendment. An appeal was lodged with the Supreme Court by the girl’s legal team on her behalf, while in London, the teenager told her mother she wanted to take her own life. The court eventually lifted the injunction, permitting the abortion to go ahead, but the stress and trauma of the previous weeks had been too much for the girl and she miscarried.
Later that year, a referendum was held proposing three more amendments to the constitution. I had just turned eighteen and it was my first chance to vote in any kind of democratic process. The experience was three-dimensional. Walking through it in my head, there were courts and civic buildings, gavels and ballot boxes, a black tick in a white box. People shouting with placards containing images of dead foetuses. On Saturdays in the city centre they collected signatures, flanked by those same placards of what resembled pygmy seahorses, fragments of life. The images are – as they are meant to be – imposing and sinister, inky eyes in boundary-less flesh. But what of this fourteen-year-old girl? Less than a decade and a half older than the foetus. I thought only of her: the fear, the horror of the situation, the silencing of her views. What it’s like to be treated as both a sexualised adult and a child, at the mercy of the judiciary. How a system can brutalise and betray its youngest citizens. And that’s the difference between this girl and the cells she was carrying. Personhood. Citizenship.
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