A Book of Migrations

by Rebecca Solnit

  But traveling, being in motion, is itself profoundly satisfactory. Most stories are travel stories, and in traveling our lives begin to assume the shape of a story. It may be because a journey is so often a metaphor for life itself that journeying is satisfying. In motion it seems that time is not slipping away from us but we are pursuing it, measuring its passage in the rhythm of the road, the metaphor become literal. Perhaps if we didn’t imagine life as a journey rather than some other metamorphosis—the growth of a tree, for example—roads would not seem like destiny itself, but we do and they do. To move along the road is to encounter all the loose elements, the dangers and possibilities, to slip out of a settled destiny in pursuit of stranger fates. The road is a promise as simple as what lies ahead, never failed and never delivered, and the road is a strange country itself, longer than all the continents and narrow as a house, with its own citizens, its own rules, a place where the solid and settled become fluid.

  There are domestic dramas in which all the turmoil passes with in the walls of a home, but the romance is the central literary form of Europe, one that may have reached its apotheosis in America: the romance as quest, adventure, pilgrimage, crime spree, road trip, travelogue. And however celebrated the notion of home, however fixed an idea of the Irish as a sedentary people uprooted only by crisis, Irish literature seems particularly immersed in the charms and potentials of the journey. The ancient queens, kings, and heroes wander from host to host and from battle to home; the saints are mostly voyaging saints; the Gaelic-speaking poets who composed much of the literature before the nineteenth century were themselves wanderers; displacement and exile became principal poetic themes; and the centerpiece of twentieth-century literature, Ulysses, regenerates the travels of Odysseus in the details of a Wandering Jew’s day in Dublin, compressing the resonances of travel and exile into the compass of that city. J. M. Synge celebrated the road and its turn-of-the-century population of tramps, vagrants, balladsingers, and flowerwomen in his plays and essays and often roamed himself. “Man is naturally a nomad . . . and all wanderers have finer intellectual and physical perceptions than men who are condemned to local habitations,” Synge wrote in his notebook, adding “But the vagrant, I think, along with perhaps the sailor, has preserved the dignity of motion with its whole sensation of strange colors in the clouds and of strange passages with voices that whisper in the dark and still stranger inns and lodgings, affections and lonely songs that rest for a whole life time with the perfume of spring evenings or the first autumnal smoulder of the leaves.”

  There was a tale, “The Destruction of Da Derga’s Hostel,” that had stuck in my mind from the time when I yearned for a prehistory of my own and read lots of Celtic myths; it was one of those balladlike tales weaving together wandering, the supernatural, bloodshed, doom, and a skein of place names. An impacted myth, my translation called it, as though it had been crushed together by a collision of disparate elements, or as though it was jammed below some literary gumline like a wisdom tooth. An ancient story when it was written down in the twelfth century, it begins with the famous beauty Etain’s daughter, who was abandoned, raised by cowherds, and then chosen by a barren king to be his bride. The night before she was to be taken, “she saw a bird coming to her through the skylight; it left its feather hood in the middle of the house and took her and said, ‘The king’s people are coming to destroy this house and take you to him by force. But you will be with child by me and will bear a son, and his name will be Conare and he is not to kill birds.’ ” When the king died, his men prepared a bull feast, a method of divination whereby a bull was slaughtered and a man “ate his fill and drank its broth and slept, and an incantation of truth was chanted over him. Whoever this man saw in his sleep became king . . .”

  While the bull-dreamer was dreaming, the young Conare was playing with his foster brothers on the Liffey. There he saw huge white-speckled birds and chased them until his horses grew tired, then pursued them on foot until he reached the ocean. They flew over the waves but he overtook them at last. “The birds left their feather hoods, then, and turned on him with spears and swords; one bird protected him however, saying ‘I am Nemglan, king of your father’s bird troop. You are forbidden to cast at birds, for, by reason of birth, every bird here is natural to you . . . Go to Temuir tonight, for . . . the man who naked comes along the road to Temuir at daybreak with a stone in his sling, it is he who will be king.’ ”

  Temuir was Tara, the royal hill not far northwest of Dublin, and of course Conare went there, naked as he had stripped to hunt his kin the birds, and became king. He was bound with a great number of taboos and, in the protection of his foster brothers from justice, he managed to break them all. War broke out, he became the king “whom the spectres exiled,” and the fighting closed off all but one road to them, the road to Da Derga’s Hostel. Da Derga was a red god of the underworld, and one taboo forbade Conare to follow three red men to this god’s house. But even the teeth of the men he and his retinue followed were red, and at the house with seven doorways and a road and a river passing through it, Conare met his fate in a siege. One of his followers who had left to find water to sate Conare’s thirst came back to find him decapitated, and poured the water straight down the throat of the headless torso, while the head recited a few lines in praise of his thoughtfulness. Severed heads, like birds, talk a lot in Celtic myths. But it was that moment in which Conare was walking naked along the road that spoke of the power of roads, those places where one might be anything and nothing. Roads are a no-man’s-land, a leveling ground, the place where one is no longer one thing and not yet another, the paradoxical place the crippled beggar from the Famine occupied as a home. There’s a nearly straight road from Dublin to Tara now, and a golf course when you arrive, in case the contemplation of ancient majesty is not sufficient. Perhaps the eighteen holes of a round of golf signify a journey too, a secular Stations of the Cross, but not for me.

  I was travelling from Ballydehob to Bantry, and I crossed the bridge over the Bawnaknockane River where it enters Roaringwater Bay, passed Knockroe, Knockaphukeen, Coosane, Ballybane, Barnaghgeehy, Letterlicky Bridge across the Durrus, Hollyhill, Cappanaloha, to Bantry Bay—a fine collection of names for a ten-mile walk over a range of modest hills. The road had no shoulder, so that what was most of the time a sedate pastoral became a racetrack whenever a car whizzed by. It was lined with low stone walls and hedgerows full of flowers profoundly familiar and subtly different in equal measure: owl clover, buttercups, violets, ferns, bluebells, fuchsias (an introduced species gone wild), gorse, the occasional tall foxglove nodding its specklethroated bells, and tiny pink and blue flowers I did not know. Cows bellowed, sheep bleated, birds chirped, and occasionally cars roared, all under a sky that seemed distended and sagging with its burden of water, though it only dripped a tear or two here and there. By the time I was almost in Bantry the clouds had grown thinner and then worn out like rags and the sky shone through in patches. My shadow suddenly leapt into existence ahead of me on the road, as I passed an anchor about a mile before town, an anchor like a huge rusted cross with a rocking base. A plaque said it had been fished out of Bantry Bay in 1964, a relic of the French fleet’s unsuccessful invasion in 1796, instigated by Theobald Wolfe Tone.

  Son of a Dublin carriagemaker, Wolfe Tone had been an idle and charming young man galvanized by the American and French Revolutions. He founded the nondenominational United Irishmen (and United Irishwomen) in Belfast in 1791, in that spirit of universal brotherhood which had stirred the revolutionaries of the time, and made it too into a revolutionary instrument. Like a great many Irish patriots, his love of justice and homeland exiled him, and he spent much of the last years of his life marshaling support from abroad. The invading French fleet he recruited in 1796 had the worst possible weather: calm when they needed wind to cross the sea from Brittany to Bantry, foggy when they needed vision and clear when they needed stealth, and finally, wrote Wolfe Tone that Christmas Day, “It blew a heavy gale from
the eastward with snow, so that the mountains are covered this morning, which will render our bivouacs extremely amusing. It is to be observed, that of the thirty-two points of the compass, the east is precisely the most unfavourable to us.” Having lost their element of surprise and some of their ships, the French gave up and sailed out of Bantry Bay without a battle. The invading fleet was made up of forty-three ships whose names convey something of the optimistic momentum the French Republic still possessed: Indomptable, Nestor, Droits de l’Homme, Patriote, Pluton, Constitution, Révolution, “and the unfortunate Séduisant,” Immortalité, Impatiente, Tartare, Fraternité, Fidélité, Atalante, Justine . . . Captured by the British and sentenced to be hanged as a common criminal rather than shot as a rebel, Wolfe Tone slit his own throat in a Dublin prison in 1798.

  It isn’t Wolfe Tone and the events of 1798, but St. Brendan and the legends of the sixth century that have pride of place in Bantry, a quiet little town whose streets all ran down the hillsides to converge near the harbor, where a big modern statue of St. Brendan the Navigator stood looking out to sea. St. Brendan, says his biography, written a few centuries after his death circa 577, set out to sea a few bays north of where the French fleet entered. He and his monkish crew journeyed west of Ireland and found various wondrous islands, which make a list as pretty as that of the French fleet: a barren island which turned out to be a resting whale who swam away when they built a fire on it but came back and became the island on which they celebrated Easter for the seven years of their travels; an island called the Paradise of Birds, where the birds, of course, spoke; an island of fellow Irish monks; an island of filthy giants who threw lumps of burning slag at Brendan and his crew; and, after many other islands, the Land of Promise. Some interpreters of the Voyage of Saint Brendan have asserted that the Land of Promise is North America, even to the extent of identifying the river flowing west the saint encountered, after walking inland for fifteen days, with the Ohio River. Others hold that, though the Voyage is merely part of an Irish literary genre of miraculous sea voyages, it does indicate Irish familiarity with the cross-Atlantic west in the early middle ages, and that other evidence—including the Norse sagas documenting pre-Columbian Viking encounters in the New World—suggests that the Irish preceded them.

  I dumped my pack in the first hostel I came to, not red like Da Derga’s, but pink: I had a room to myself with ten beds in it, each with a pink coverlet printed with huge cabbage roses. At dusk, which fell at half past nine or so in those late May days in that northern latitude, I went walking along the quay, and at its far end found about five trailers—or caravans as I later found most of the Irish called them—parked in an uneven row, the old-fashioned kind made to be towed by cars, though the cars parked nearby hardly looked adequate for the job. Some of these spindly pastel-enameled tin homes had generators sputtering nearby; one, gleaming and black like an idol, sat on a scrap of carpet whose floral pattern was almost blacked out by spewed oil. Another had a tiny chimney with a thin strand of smoke unwinding itself into the darkening sky. One front window was filled by a row of tall pink and white china vases with handles like swan’s necks, vases that seemed to defy the unpredictable gravity of lives in motion, and most of the windows had lacy curtains. When I turned around at the end of the gravelly quay in what had almost become night and passed them again, two small boys in red sweaters were crying by the side of the road. A woman in a red van told the wailers, Get in the back and hide, and they scrambled in. As she grabbed a strap to brace herself against an abrupt three-point turn, her sleeve slid up to show an extensively tattooed forearm, and when the van passed me a man was sitting where she had been. They sped off, only turning their lights on as they reached town. That first glimpse of the Travellers was the only hurried motion I saw during my time in Ireland.

  I had stayed up to listen to the blues in a tiny bar—very good blues, as it turned out, played by a handful of local youths who seemed to understand the melancholy of the songs as though it were their own. In the morning I woke up in my bed of roses and looked out to see a sky as cloudless as the heavens of home and all the buildings in the harbor waving gently upside-down in the bright calm water of the inlet. I looked again, and the gleaming image was gone; while I’d closed my eyes for what had seemed a moment, the tide had gone all the way out, leaving a bed of gravel, trash, and mussel shells. Nothing was open for breakfast that Sunday morning but two small hotels, and I was the only one who wanted to eat at nine in the one I settled on. They held me off with gallons of tea while the cook began the day, and then with piles of bread and butter. The food of Ireland could be called monotonous were not its essentials so inexhaustibly good, topaz-colored tea compounded with rich milk and demerara sugar and small loaves of bread, mealy and fragrant and crumbling, to say nothing of beer and whiskey. My brownshelled eggs came, and I cracked one and turned a pepper shaker over it. A fine brown dust floated down. It smelled so unlike pepper and so powerfully of hay and stables that I immediately saw the hayloft where I had learned to ride, the haybales in it, and the dusty path and the dusty oaks around it, the corrals and pasture beyond, a scene I had hardly visited and certainly not smelt in twenty years. I lost my appetite for the eggs, but the scenes the pepper had brought back hovered around me that day.

  Bantry to Glengarriff was longer than the day before, but not as interesting, a long sinuous loop around Bantry Bay to its northern side, much of it with pleasant vacation houses to my right and the bay to my left. But for much of that day, I moved through the landscapes recovered in a dusting of pepper. From six to fourteen, as I’ve mentioned, I lived on a street full of suburban houses that was the last frontier of suburbia, and up the road called Seventh Street, on which our cul-de-sac was just a final spur, the country itself began. The worlds I lived in before that one were too vaguely remembered to leave more than a few epiphanies, the crumbling foundations of my memory, and the worlds after that came when my mind was largely formed by the world around Seventh Street.

  My mother was from New York City, my father from Los Angeles; they had nothing to teach us about the countryside past the fading of the road, and perhaps the place was more vivid to me as one where things often came before words and where no adults arrived to interpret and regulate. In retrospect, my world then seems inside-out: home was an explosive place, and the hills Seventh Street took me to were a refuge in those days when children were allowed to go where they pleased. Children see with a peculiar intensity of vision; it is rare that a new sight or object can convey to an adult the hallucinatory power in which recollected experiences are bathed. What the very young see is literally incomparable—nothing like it has come before—and these encounters are the raw material, the imagery of their psyches. It often seems to me that all one’s creation is done in that first decade and a half, when an internal landscape comes into being with the force and activity of primordial volcanos and plate tectonics; the rest of one’s time on earth is spent retracing, mapping, deciphering, excavating. Everything else one will see is seen in comparison with this formative landscape.

  I am bemused that such an Eden could wrap all around the chill of my childhood home. Childhood is often such a mixture of wonder and horror, a world the child is born naked into and out of which she makes a world around her—a more amenable one, with luck, and I have had luck. The outside world is no larger than the pores of one’s senses, but the internal one is vast and shadowy, full of everything that has formed, been remembered, much that seems forgotten. Seventh Street, and books, are the first elements of the world I chose, my first refuges from the world into which I was born; Seventh Street is where I revert most often in my dreams, the road to anywhere and everywhere, the road all roads resemble.

  The eastern side of Seventh Street sloped down, and a stud farm took up much of its length. Directly behind our backyard the old stud himself was pastured, a chestnut quarter horse of dignified and incurious bearing, even on those occasions when he dutifully heaved himself atop some mare. The
western side of the street rose up in a small steep hill, on whose ridgeline was a blasted oak with an enormous dead limb resembling a stag leaping against the sky (when I returned recently it surprised me by looking that way still—twenty years is not a long time in the life of an oak). Up on the ridge itself were rocky outcrop-pings covered with lichens, the seats on which in my first years there a brother and I devoured stolen candy and in my last, we smoked pot. The local kids occasionally went cardboardsliding—what coastal Californians have in place of sledding—down the hill when the grass was slick and dry. The old pieces of cardboard would moulder on the hillside along with abandoned lumber and fallen limbs; under them would develop grassless dark, damp patches in which centipedes, skinks, and alligator lizards lived.

  These were neither so common nor so interesting to us as bluebellies, however, and a huge procession of bluebelly lizards passed through my childhood. I was always annoyed that the Golden Guide to Reptiles and Amphibians, the bestiary of our kingdom, called them by the plebeian name of Western Fence Lizards. They had a penchant for fences and other sunny spots, true, and their backs were a dust-colored mosaic of tiny jagged scales, their eyes like tiny ballbearings, but two bars of purest azure ran the length of their bellies on a creamy ground, a blue as pure and elevating as the sky. Snakes too were abundant in that landscape, the huge gopher and king snakes my fearless middle brother caught, and the tiny ringnecks I loved, slate-colored little things hardly thicker than a child’s finger and perhaps six or seven inches long with a thin coral band just behind the head.