Jaywalking with the Irish

by Lonely Planet

  Wellington Road’s sidewalk was equally depressing as I steered my sons down the slope toward Christian Brothers. Crisp bags, cigarette packets, “Scrumpy Jack” cider cans, even soiled nappies, lined the pavement. The most repulsive droppings came from the local “chippers.” Half-finished sprawls of discarded french fries and flattened hamburgers were coiled into cornucopia-like paper wrappings oozing grease in the rain. A Fermoy car dealer named Tom Monaghan had recently become so disgusted by the ugliness on Ireland’s streets that he was trying to turn the feel-good national “Tidy Towns” competition on its head by launching a “Filthy Towns” award. On this godforsaken morning, Cork deserved first place.

  We picked our way onward. As usual, Laura had been dropped off at 7:20 at Cork’s unspeakably grim bus station for her hour-long trip to Bandon. The maturity with which she was handling this challenge was extraordinary. I prayed the boys would be so resilient, as I hugged Owen goodbye and ushered Harris toward his classroom. Suddenly, a bloodcurdling scream of “SILENCE!” erupted from the other side of the closed door. My feet recoiled and my body froze. The shriek sounded like the work of a mad Celtic chieftess prior to a ritual beheading, yet the source was a sweet-looking woman of no more than thirty. Wow.

  “Go on Harris, it’s okay. She’s just clearing her lungs,” I nudged the ten-year-old forward into the waiting circle of tribal sacrifice, trying not to connect with the dread in his eyes. One scream at children like that and a teacher most anywhere else would be blacklisted for life. But our bearings were by no means solid yet, and I wasn’t sure how I was supposed to respond to this sort of challenge in Ireland, what with all the warnings about keeping meanings carefully clouded. So I straightened Harris’s tie, wished him luck, and tripped over myself to get the hell out of there.

  “Silence!” the shrew bellowed again. And people say there are no banshees left in Ireland.

  That night, Harris began to sob as I tucked him into bed. “Why do we have to be in Ireland? I hate it here. I hate my school and I hate my teacher, and I want to go back home now.”

  Our presence on this isle felt utterly delusional. What good had we accomplished by yanking our children from the security of their contented former lives? Much wiser and braver than us seemed the dinner-party talkers from Sidney to Richmond-Surrey and South Hampton and god knows where else who shrugged off their wine-happy promises to set off for exotic shores soon, knotted their ties, and put their responsibilities back in place every morning, whether they liked it or not.

  “I’m worried that we’ve made a terrible mistake. I feel sick with guilt,” I said to Jamie, before reluctantly dialing the home number of Síle Hayes, the principal of the boys’ primary school.

  “I heard the screaming again today and I was appalled,” Mrs. Hayes said, interrupting my hesitant complaints. “It will be sorted.”

  A week later, a shaken Harris announced that his teacher had been fired and then stormed from his classroom in tears. Seventeen other parents had complained, which was remarkable, in that the Irish until recently simply acquiesced to whatever harsh treatment their children received at the hands of school authorities, since these usually were meted out by an all-dominating clergy. Nonetheless, people were beginning to “stand up for their rights,” as Americans call it. But the process is still conducted very quietly. In fact, in Ireland most complaints are made with a whisper.

  Return to beginning of chapter

  Chapter 12

  Writers love nothing more than to picture themselves slaving at work, especially in some romantic garret in a faraway land. What they hate most is doing it. So it was that I would wander the shady lane outside our house, pretending I was thinking, while looking up with a mixture of fondness and revulsion at my office window with the panoramic views that were supposed to imbue me with inspiration. But Cork is not a place that allows lonely cogitators to take themselves too seriously, not, at least, when the annual jazz festival blows in at the end of October.

  Cork’s four-day celebration of jazz is the mother of all Irish parties. The city turns into a carnival as 50,000 revelers arrive on trains, planes, and cars to hear the offerings of a thousand musicians, a good few from distant lands.

  The Hi-B was not listed as a venue. Yet one afternoon I discovered a cigarette-thin, elegantly smooth pianist called “Professor” Peter O’Brien playing an electric keyboard that had materialized out of nowhere, with his girlfriend bowing a fiddle madly at his side. Bebop, big band, and the blues began breaking out in hotels and pubs all over town, much of it first-rate. Cork people use the word “ballhop” to describe a particularly riotous extravaganza. The jazz festival was a ballhop alright, despite ceaseless torrents banging on every venue’s window. One of the best sessions involved a swinging homage to Jelly Roll Morton, masterfully executed by a blue-eyed, graying Kerryman called “Stride” O’Brien (no relation to the professor), with a few numbers added by his Dublin friend Brendan Lynch. A chat afterward resulted in the mention of Professor O’Brien’s performance in the Hi-B the day previous.

  “Pete actually played there?” the Kerry musician questioned.

  “Yeah, it was superb.”

  Pause. “Do you think I might give it a go tonight?”

  “I don’t see why not,” I offered grandly.

  A phone call had the music-loving Brian O’Donnell at our side in minutes, the arrangements sealed. A slender young Audrey Hepburn look-alike who did Ella Fitzgerald like nobody’s business wandered by, so I invited her too.

  “I’m just saying, now, isn’t it remarkable that you’ve been here such a short time and can arrange these things as if you lived in Cork for years,” Brian said.

  In short order, there commenced in his den one of the most inspired and intimate concerts of the entire festival. By the end of the evening, Stride O’Brien and Brendan Lynch were playing side-by-side duets as a delighted Brian thanked me profusely.

  The next afternoon, I returned for my bouquets of praise. Jamie had been informed that I would be celebrated for all time in the Hi-B. But something felt off as soon as I walked in the door. The Mahler at that moment was loud enough to make a man beg for Brahms.

  “Too bad you weren’t around last night,” Brian said, his memory of the session evidently gone sketchy. “There was the most beautiful piano playing in here and you would have loved it.”

  Ouch. Suddenly the Hi-B did not seem the carefree clubhouse that I’d imagined the night before. I left abruptly, reminding myself that Ireland, except for the dance of certain young tormentors and the Noh masks of certain potential employers, was treating us kindly. True, Harris’s second teacher had just quit without warning, although Christian Brothers quickly found another replacement. The boys were nonetheless settling in well, playing rugby on weekends and endless games of “tip the can” in our park. Laura was glued to her new mobile telephone, nurturing burgeoning friendships; and Jamie, having by now successfully shrunk every shirt in the house, had developed some possible contacts for obtaining work, and was primed for new challenges.

  Now three months into our adventure, we decided to celebrate our various blessings with a trip to a place in County Kerry called Sneem. And why Sneem? Because we liked the silly sound of it, suggesting as it did a peaceful holding ground for phantasms like sneetches. The name is thought to derive from the Irish Snaidhm na Cailli – the knot of the old woman or hag – though nobody knows why. The true meaning could in fact be obscene. Leering from Ireland’s buried pagan past are numerous stone reliefs, some embedded in medieval church walls, called sheela-na-gigs, which show enough knotted female circularity to boil the blood of a prurient priest.

  Anyway, Jamie and I had some Sneem history ourselves, having happened upon the village during our honeymoon after getting hopelessly lost in the badlands of the surrounding mountains, which are called MacGillicuddy’s Reeks. After escaping this fastness, Sneem had seemed like a tranquil haven, with its rows of brightly painted limestone terrace houses sweetly stacked b
efore a pair of broad central greens that are called squares, even though they are triangles. Between the two, the Sneem River surges under a narrow-arched stone bridge, then spills down into a harbor and the great Kenmare bay beyond, which is also called a river though it is not.

  As we wound for the second time down through Kerry toward Sneem on an early November evening, the village seemed little changed, although a strange welcome materialized in the form of a wild goat sailing off a ledge and nearly landing on the roof of our car.

  After making arrangements at the Bank House B&B (“Welcome to my home,” said the kindly proprietor), we went out to savor the vista of spectacular russet brown mountains, feather dusted by drifting wisps of white clouds with an artfully applied crescent moon glowing in the inky dusk behind them. We had our walk, our meal, and a deep sleep in a dimension of pure silence. The next morning broke in glory, the sun raining light upon the river, the sky a filmy blue above the ring of surrounding peaks with their curious names likely harkening to the ancient Celtic mother goddess, Brigid: Coomcallee, the hollow of the hag; Maulcallee, the knoll of the hag; and Clouncally, the meadow of the hag.

  Suddenly, a rainbow materialized between two distant pyramid-shaped peaks, then intensified as it plaited all the primary colors and some afterthoughts into a vast arc that misted onto a nearby field. Moments later, a second, even more gorgeous rainbow magically came to life a few parallel feet away, or so it looked in rainbow reckoning, beside the first. Laura, hanging close like the younger child she had been only yesterday, began hurrying with me toward their side-by-side landing points so tantalizingly close to our path. To our amazement, the beginnings of yet a third rainbow began to shimmer into place alongside the fellas overhead, and Laura was shouting wonder when the entire display abruptly disintegrated into the ether. Nope, the Kerry morning said, you imagined the whole thing.

  Jamie and the boys joined us as we passed a sixteen-foot, stainless-steel tree sculpture, “planted” for some reason by the president of Israel in 1985, and drew up to an intriguing sign at the other side of the village. It read: “The Way the Fairies Went.” Hmmh. The sign pointed down a narrow lane with a small, drab nineteenth-century church decamped at its end, under the altar of which is said to lay the remains of one of the laziest and most outlandish priests in the history of Kerry, Father Michael Walsh, R.I.P. 1866, who eschewed sermons and spent his days hunting the hills in Wild West buffalo skins. In front of it sits a white marble sculpture of a giant panda, with an inscription explaining that this was a gift from the Chinese People’s Association for Friendship with Foreign Countries in gratitude for a visit by Cearbhall Ó Dalaigh, prime minister of Ireland from 1974 to 1976, and a proud Sneem man. Odd forces were definitely at play.

  Beside the church lay a park where the grass wove thick and the birdsong sweet, but no fairy chatter could be heard. Instead, there waited a black, voluptuous sculpture of the Egyptian god Isiris, she the incarnation of fertility renewing without end. Beyond lay a mysterious series of fifteen-foot-tall pyramids of blue-gray Kerry slate, rising improbably beside the river and before the open water of Sneem’s harbor.

  With an uncanny sense of Bun’s presence, I craned through an opening into the first pyramid. Inside, it was cramped, dark, and mesmerizing. Here and there, the walls were interrupted by narrow window slits of gorgeously colored stained glass, smooth as shards washed onto lonely strands, and these ascended like stepping stones of light toward the soaring pinnacle. The sun streamed its whimsy onto these exquisite prisms and the dripping-wet, cell-like inner walls. The effect was disorienting, as profound as Monet’s chapel in St. Paul De Vence or Mark Rothko’s mysterious shrine in Houston. The maker of these stone poems had conjured together all the world’s most soulful prayers and blended them into a universal harkening to the divine – the inside of an Egyptian pyramid, of a Kerry hermit’s beehive cell speaking of a devotion beyond modern comprehension, of a Gothic cathedral reduced to its bare oratory essence, of a prehistoric cave ridden with ogham swirls and animal paintings crying out to the supernatural. Of every one of these dimensions, these creations by an artist named James Scanlon breathed.

  I wandered into the next three pyramids, as transfixed as a supplicant at Ballinspittle. The last was deliberately unfinished, partially open-sided, as if to invite viewers to fill in what was missing with their own imagination and faith. The place felt holy, drawing power from the church beside it and making the Mass proceeding there all the more profound. I walked by the river, which now seemed to be coursing with light instead of water, turbines of light churning under the stone arches of the venerable stone bridge, before fanning into a broad sluice in search of the sea. There were salmon in there, running back to the stream of their birth after a journey of thousands of miles. Wherever my old friend Bun had wandered in the dusk since his death, I felt that he too had revived, that he was sharing in this vision of James Scanlon, a seeker who had somehow eradicated the divisions between stone, glass, light, and psalm.

  As I stood there, the Kerry mountains began to release a further curl of rainbow. The remote west of Ireland has been celebrated through centuries of legend and poem – for a unique power to renew the magic of apprehension, for shattering noise into the fundaments of silence. The ancient Irish poets used to seek inspiration by lying for hours with stones on their bellies in the chilling pools breathed up by springs. Here in Kerry, that would have been unnecessary. All one has to do is wake up and gaze upon visions that lie close enough to touch. Doing nothing more than that, I began to experience an inner jubilation, for the gift Bun had given me, for the gift of being alive, for the gift that is Ireland in its glory and that I hoped my children were absorbing well. Without thinking, without intending, I found my arms beginning to lift in exaltation.

  The kids examined me strangely. I came back to terra firma and enlisted them to help collect some of the mindlessly dropped garbage that infested even this hallowed place. Then we went into the church to catch the end of the Mass.

  Owen must have been affected by all this, because he asked to visit one of the local keepsake shops catering to the coach tours that choke Kerry in summer. Therein, he disappeared. After a minute or two he resurfaced with a tweed tam-o’-shanter on the top of his blond head.

  Never mind that half of this Irish woollen tourist-market stuff is now made in Indonesia or China, or that few natives under the age of sixty wear it. Owen’s intentions and his own visions were pure. He emerged grinning broadly, with his freckle-nosed, blue-eyed, mop head crowned by his budding Irishness, whispering, “It’s my Paddy hat.”

  The purchase was made instantly.

  Return to beginning of chapter

  Chapter 13

  Where oh where had my own protective Paddy hat gone? A ride on a golf cart is supposed to be a tame affair, but the one I found myself enjoying a couple of weeks later should have been kitted out with some form of helmet and perhaps a parachute and crampons. A sheer cliff dropped 250 feet into the ocean from about four feet to my right and the treacherous gravel path was suddenly veering in that godforsaken direction as well. Why was I here? An American magazine had commissioned an article regarding the ultimate Irish Xanadu, the spectacularly situated and steeply priced golf course on the Old Head of Kinsale.

  Jim O’Brien, the unflappable manager of the place, was at the wheel, proudly pointing out the sights as I held on for dear life. The surf roared below us, and a squall fluffed and vanished a few miles off, close to where a German torpedo rent the Lusitania on May 7, 1915, sending 1195 drowned passengers floating toward the Old Head, and the U.S. careening into World War I.

  “Look there,” Jim said, jamming on the breaks and pointing to an opening in the cliffs that was surrounded by countless bickering gulls. “It goes from one side of the head clear through to the other. There are fifteen caves out here that do the same thing.”

  Among other things, the Old Head is a national bird sanctuary, home to untold thousands of Arctic skuas, stor
my petrels, great and sooty shearwaters, pomarines and hoopoes. It is also an isthmus of stunning beauty upon which generations of Cork people used to freely walk and picnic, a natural treasure that spreads into some of the most stunning and storied vistas that can be created by water, stone, and sun. In 1989, Jim’s boss, a tough and controversial Kerryman called John O’Connor, bought the whole shebang from a local farmer for about £225,000 and, despite agreeing otherwise with the local planning authorities, began to seal off public access to what rightfully should be an Irish national park.

  Jim led me to the dilapidated remains of a seventeenth-century “brazier” lighthouse – only three others exist in Ireland – which once featured open fires on its roof. “It was later said to do service as a whorehouse,” he laughed devilishly. “Some of our guests have asked if we could restore it to its former glory.” And the wallets and attitudes that come with those visitors make it possible that they were not joking.

  Back by the Old Head’s narrow neck, one could see the crumbling remains of a twelfth-century stone tower that once reigned over a castle belonging to the Norman de Courcy family who called this place home for centuries. Somewhere close by supposedly lay the ruins of an Iron Age fortress called Dun Cearmna, which the course’s brochures link to the mythological origins of Ireland. The claim is that it was the home base of the second-century B.C., pre-golfing Erainn tribe who gave the country its name, although Ptolemy’s map reference to that crowd was as vague as would be expected for a man who never set foot on Ireland’s shores and couldn’t handle a mashie or wedge.