by Frank Gannon
After about ten minutes, ten minutes of nearly hitting a person, a building, a sign, or an animal (even bets in the West of Ireland) Paulette’s face tightened a little. At twenty minutes she had the frozen stare of Mister Sardonicus.
Driving in Ireland is problematic. The main problem is all the two-lane roads look like lane-and-a-half roads. This makes driving in Ireland, especially in the rural west, a white-knuckle rock ’n’ roll death trip. Most of the roads would not be able to handle John Goodman, Roger Ebert, and Marlon Brando walking along with arms linked like the Rockettes (this is, I grant you, an alarming image in its own right).
This is the Irish driving experience in short: You step out of a pub in the afternoon. You get into your car. You drive off through the beautiful, enchanting Irish countryside. All is well. Then you hear a voice next to you.
“Get on the left side!!!”
Then you die. At least you picked a good spot.
I found driving around in Ireland to be filled with neardeath experiences. I thought they were stimulating after the plane ride. But, after just missing a little BMW outside Bally-vaughn, I was relieved of my driving duties.
“Let me drive!” Paulette finally screamed.
I could see that she was “concerned.” “Sure,” I said, and handed her the keys. I never felt better handing over anything. For the rest of the time, Paulette drove. We still had near-death experiences but since I wasn’t driving I wasn’t paying that much attention.
I had always thought that the outside scenes in movies about Ireland made the place look staggeringly beautiful, but I figured that the director carefully set up shots to emphasize that. The truth is, if you just walk around in the West of Ireland, everywhere you look there is a rare and beautiful view.
I am not a man who is very sensitive to that kind of thing: I walk with my head down, but it’s just impossible not to notice how beautiful that place is. Mountains rising into the mist. Lakes and loughs seem to be placed for ultimate aesthetic effect. As they say, if God is an artist Ireland is some of his best work.
But things seem a little altered in the West of Ireland, a little unreal. Then you walk over a hill and a hundred sheep come walking up to you. Sheep seem to be wandering all over the place, and they never seem to be fenced in. I asked a young farmer about it.
“Are sheep allowed to just wander around?”
“Yes,” he said, “them and the tourists.”
We started out with a plan. For months we had talked about what we were going to do, how many trips we were making. (This part of the plan survived. We took one trip together, and I returned solo for a few weeks.) We planned this thing like they planned D-Day. We sharpened pencils and sat around the kitchen table drinking coffee, looking at maps, writing things down, drawing little lines, adding numbers, and calculating distances. By the time we were ready to go we had checked everything out big-time. We knew what the average temperature was, what the weather was likely to be. We knew where we were staying; we knew the precise exchange rate. We knew what things are supposed to cost in Ireland (so we didn’t get cheated by any shifty Aran Island boys). We knew what we were doing. We were as prepared as Sir Edmund Hillary heading up Mount Everest.
We were dead set against any kind of preset “tour” or “itinerary.” We had seen brochures and scoffed at their titles. “Finding the West,” “Exploring Tipperary,” “The Hidden Wonders of Innisfree.” But we read a lot of travel guides and debated the details.
Once we got over there, however, everything changed. “Look at that,” someone would say. Or, “Let’s see what that is.” And we would change our intricate plan. Then we started abandoning whole pieces of the plan and replacing them with spontaneous whims. We started to do this a lot. Then we started modifying our modifications.
Then we said something that is very easy to say in Ireland. We said to hell with the plan. After only two days, the plan was like the 1969 senior prom: a big hazy memory that you actually try to forget.
So we drove on, not quite senselessly, but much more randomly than we had anticipated back when we were looking at brochures and sharpening pencils. If you accept “make it up as you go” as a sort of “antiplan,” that is the way to approach Ireland. Ireland itself was, after all, made up as they went.
Ireland is, however, a little country, so if you spend three weeks there, you could say that, generally speaking, you’ve seen the whole country. You wouldn’t have spent much time anywhere, but you at least would have seen every place in the country. However, that is absolutely the worst way to see Ireland. The best way to do it involves, for many Americans, a little mindset work, but it’s worth it.
The first step involves getting rid of almost any plan. Just imagine that you are getting into an inner tube and drifting around a big lake. You drift around anywhere the lake happens to take you. You don’t rule anything out. You start each day not knowing where you’re going to be sleeping that night. There is no goal, no plan. This is a dance, not a race.
So we knew we wanted to find out about my mom and dad. Except for that, we were in the lake drifting around and enjoying it, and that was the only plan. Our neatly plotted itinerary, drafted weeks before, staying in the bottom of my suitcase.
Early in our trip we went out to the Aran Islands. We had wanted to see them since our college days when we watched Man of Aran, Robert Flaherty’s famous documentary. That movie left a lasting impression on Paulette and me. At the time, we were staying in a little house out in the country outside Athens, Georgia. We were attempting to survive on the seventy-five dollars a week I made as a security guard at Anaconda Wire & Cable Company.
That was the late hippie era, and when I worked for Anaconda, I had hair down to the middle of my back and was politically slightly left of Marx and Engels. They would have never hired a guy with my Julia Roberts-like hair, but I “disguised” my hair. Every afternoon before I left for work Paulette would methodically bobby-pin my flaxen locks. Then I would cover them with a deluxe Kmart wig. I looked ridiculous. Of course I could have just gotten a haircut, but that was unthinkable for me in those days. Cut my hair? No way, man! I’m not selling out to the military industrial complex, man! Nixon cuts his hair.
Instead I wore the ridiculous wig at work. I looked like an idiot but my political ideology was intact.
At any rate, I think we were feeling a little underprivileged at the time. We already had our first daughter, Aimee, and it wasn’t Ritz-type living. Our car cost $250, and every time it made a funny noise, my heart skipped a beat because I knew that my net worth was usually in the mid two figures. If the car went, I would have to consider a career in slavery.
I remember listening to the Sinatra album My Cole Porter during this era and thinking, Hmm. These songs really aren’t about the life I’m living, are they?
The house we were living in rented for sixty-five dollars a month. It wasn’t a bargain. There was a two-foot hole in the floor in the living room. The heating was not state of the art. I remember sitting in the living room in winter and noticing that whenever I talked, steam came out of my mouth.
Anyway, despite our financial situation, it was a lot better than living in the Aran Islands. We watched Man of Aran on PBS’s Film Odyssey, and we felt that we were living in comparative comfort. For an Aran Islander, I was a guy in a Cole Porter song fighting vainly the old ennui.
In the film, the Aran Islanders have it very tough. There isn’t any dirt to grow potatoes, so every year they walk down to the shore and get the dirt. They put it in buckets and carry it back. Then they dump it into the cracks between the rocks and go back for more dirt.
This takes them a while. The film explained why they have to do this. Every year the ocean washes away all the soil, so the next year they have to put it back. This was farming where you had to go get the dirt first.
Then we see these men who go out in these little boats, called, I think, “curraghs,” and catch sharks. These boats look very flimsy. They catch the shar
ks, which look like Jaws-size sharks, for the oil, not for the meat. A great number of the men get killed every year. But nobody complains. These are tough people.
After the film was over we cuddled together on our nine-dollar sofa. We had a two-foot hole in our living-room floor, but we felt plenty privileged. Life, I thought, is easy on a cool seventy-five a week.
Today, tourists go out to the Aran Islands. I think kids on MTV Ireland go there on spring break. It’s quite beautiful but still a bit scary. You can still feel the presence of all the people who have lived and died there. Some people say Flaherty exaggerated in his film. Not by much, I think. Old Aran Islanders talk about how tough it was back then. These young Aran Islanders don’t know how easy they have it, I was told. I knew. I saw it on Film Odyssey with Charles Champlin.
I met an ex-Aran Islander in Georgia. He plays guitar at a faux-Irish pub in the Virginia Highlands area of Atlanta called “Limerick Junction.” I asked him why he left his home.
“Are you kidding?” he asked, answering a question with a question in the classic Irish style.
The Aran that Paulette and I saw in that film has stayed in our minds. “Aran” has become for us shorthand for a truly bad time. When things were really awful—when the car broke down and we had no money or when it snowed and everybody got stomach flu at the same time—we could say to each other, “This is getting like Aran,” and look at each other. Or one of us might say that a bad party was “like Aran” and be sure that one person understood. Now we were going to see the real Aran. I was almost sad that our little Aran was coming to an end. What if Aran was nice?
We headed out to the Aran Islands on a cloudy, windy day. It wasn’t the best weather but if you wait for a sunny day in Ireland you may have a few birthdays before you get one.
I didn’t get along well with water. I blame my dad for this. His theory of swimming education was this: Throw the kid in and see what happens. My older brother thrived with this plan, so my dad was pretty convinced of its efficacy by the time I showed up.
I remember my dad walking with me into the ocean. I was about five, but that day is permanently burned into the template of my mind. He kept walking until the water was up to my neck. The he picked me up and kept walking. When the water was up to his neck, he stopped.
“You’re not going to throw me in, are you, Dad?” I asked nervously.
“Oh, no,” he said, “I’m not going to do that.”
Then, of course, he threw me in.
Thus I was B. F. Skinnered into my lifelong fear of water. I can swim, but I dream of drowning and I can’t float on my back because I can never “trust” the water.
So the trip out to the Aran Islands was not a lot of laughs for me. Paulette wanted to do it, so we went.
“Just like in the movies,” she said.
The Aran Islands are three little islands at the mouth of Galway Bay. They run a sort of ferry out to them (it’s a couple of miles). The ferry is always pretty full.
We got in the ferry-type boat and headed out. Everyone seemed to be smiling. I heard people around me speaking English and French and Spanish and German. When we got about a hundred yards from the shore a little voice in my brain started telling me that I was about to die. I remembered that John Synge’s play Raiders to the Sea is set in the Aran Islands. In the play there is an old woman. Many of her sons have drowned in the past. At the beginning of the play she has one son left. He drowns right before the curtain.
I looked over at Paulette. She was smiling like a kid at the circus. I watched nervously as we approached an island. I was horrified when we kept going to a more distant island. Why couldn’t we take the first one, for God’s sake? One Aran Island is as good as another, isn’t it? Give a hydrophobic guy a break!
I was very happy to get off that boat, and we stumbled out to inspect the island. I looked around. I had never heard of an island sinking, so I felt a little better.
We had landed on Inishmore, the largest of the islands. I was surprised to see that there were people who lived there. Somehow I had thought that everybody would have moved (or drowned), but there were a lot of people there. Most of them are (still) involved in fishing, although, truth be told, tourism is the main source of income there.
A lot of the boats that aren’t carrying tourists are carrying peat. The boats are called “hookers.” I heard the word used by a guide, and I was, for a moment, extremely confused. I spent most of my time on the island confused. In the Aran Islands Gaelic is the everyday language. I kept trying to overhear conversations because Irish people have the same bouncy cadence to their voices no matter what language is spoken. I’d have to get pretty close to tell it wasn’t English.
The island is very beautiful. It doesn’t look typically “Irish” there. It also doesn’t look anything like Man of Aran. I started to wonder if Flaherty had faked the whole thing. Maybe Man of Aran was shot on the same soundstage as the faked moon landing?
On the Aran Islands the “gray rocks” have taken over, and green is a rare sight. There are a lot of ruins of ancient forts, a few churches, and a medieval monastery. I was surprised to see cows and pigs. I was startled to see that there was a small landing strip. Soon, I thought, I will come across a theme park.
Through body language I was able to convey to Paulette the idea that I didn’t want to stay long. I also wanted to see if I could avoid boats for the rest of the trip (and, with luck, the rest of my life).
After getting back on land, I resisted the temptation to bend over and kiss it. We got in the Punta and drove. Our destination was a famous Irish landmark, the Cliffs of Moher.
The ride there was pretty spectacular. A lot of Ireland’s coastline is cliffs and promontories, and this particular little trip is a cruise right on the edge of a rocky coastline with a drop of several hundred feet. We stopped a few times and got out of the car and looked out at some seriously mysterious stuff.
There are a lot of little islands out there. Nobody lives on them—too rugged for even an Aran Islander. The islands are called “the Blasket.” They look like the peaks of submerged mountains right after the Noah incident.
Sidetracked at the Burren
On our way to the Cliffs of Moher, we got sidetracked. “Sidetracked” is a strange word, but it conveys almost exactly what most of our driving-around time was like. We might as well have driven sideways.
Asking for directions in Ireland is a remarkable activity. When we stopped to ask somebody how to get to someplace, the guy would usually try to anticipate why we were going there. If we asked to go to the bathroom a rappin Irish guy might say:
“Is it urinating you’re anticipating?”
We stopped and asked an old man with a red cloth jacket directions to the Cliffs of Moher. He may have been looking after his sheep or cows, but there was only one sheep in sight. The sheep had a dab of blue paint in his wool. (You see that a lot in the West of Ireland. While I was in Ireland I asked three people why they color the sheep. I received three completely different, complicated answers. Suffice it to say, the Irish color the sheep for “reasons of their own.”)
The man was very friendly. He started to tell us how to get to the Cliffs of Moher. He kept asking questions that began, “Are you familiar with…” We would shake our heads with a vacant stare. He kept trying.
He kept mentioning a place called “the Burren.” I asked him if the Burren was good to see. I remembered it being mentioned in one of the guidebooks.
“Oh, yes,” he said.
So we went to the Burren. It wasn’t far.
It turned out to be a very good sidetrack. The Burren is one of the oddest places I have ever seen. It’s a large (116 square miles) area of rolling limestone hills that doesn’t look like anyplace in Ireland. It really doesn’t even look like earth. Except for a tree here and there it is absolutely nothing but flat rock as far as the eye can see.
“Burren” means “rocky land” in Gaelic. The place may have been formed out of the skele
tons of animals that lived here millions of years ago. A walk across the Burren is a very strange experience. If you ever wanted to “get away from it all,” this would be the place. You see an occasional little plant growing out of the limestone; otherwise nothing. By “nothing,” I mean “Nothing.” Less than Samuel Beckett’s emptiest room.
There are caves all over, but the only one we inspected was the one with the handrails installed for touring cavern fans. They’ve built an environment-blended building around it, so today it looks like an ancient subway entrance. I didn’t go far. One cave is as good as another.
They offer tours of the cave, the Ailween Cave, although business seemed slow on that particular day. I was not shocked. You rarely hear, “I went to Ireland for the caves.”
There are (as in a whole lot of places in Ireland) a lot of megalithic tombs and Celtic crosses around the Burren and there is an actual monastery, a twelfth-century one called Corcomroe. As you walk around you see the remains of little villages that were deserted during the potato famine. If you spend enough time in the Burren you can forget what century it is. We walked around for an hour or so, and I started to feel I was in an early scene of Planet of the Apes: The Irish Part.
SIX
Brave New World
Ireland is this:
Connacht—Galway, Leitrim, Mayo, Roscommon, Sligo
Leinster—Carlow, Dublin, Kildare, Kilkenny, Laois, Longford, Louth, Meath, Offaly, Westmeath, Wexford, Wicklow
Munster—Clare, Cork, Kerry, Limerick, Tipperary, Waterford
Ulster—Antrim, Armagh, Cavan, Donegal, Down, Fermanagh, Londonderry, Monaghan, Tyrone
Antrim, Armagh, Down, Fermanagh, Londonderry, and Tyrone are technically part of England, but they’re attached to the island, so I include them. “Northern Ireland” is a really confusing concept. It’s not really “Northern Ireland”; it’s part of Northern Ireland. At any rate, it’s a little country. I am not Daniel Boone by any means (I get lost walking in my neighborhood) and I had all of the counties snugly in my cranium after just a few days.