A Book of Migrations

by Rebecca Solnit

  The world called home, often a world one has carefully constructed, continually summons a particular version of oneself into existence, the version made up of what one speaks of, does, sees, eats. In traveling, this insulating construction is pared back to something so basic that such modifications and elaborations have not yet been called forth, or the unfamiliar world calls altogether unfamiliar selves into being. I remarked sometime before I arrived here that the external world is no larger than the pores of one’s senses; the internal one so much larger, full of everything that has happened and been imagined. The opposite is equally true: the self sends out tendrils into its world and becomes far larger than the body, which is only its core. To know something is to have it enter the little unseen kingdom under one’s skin, to love it is to have it become one of the enlargements of the boundaries of self.

  If skin is a boundary, it is an open border across which a vast import and export business of sensation, secretion, passion, and consumption passes. Skin is a literal border too: the body is two-thirds liquid, a liquid that longs to spill into the larger world and reunite with its sources, and only skin keeps the body discrete, a self-contained country rather than part of the fluid substance of the world. Solitary travel radically reduces the self, pares it back to the proportions of the body, seals it inside the country of the skin. It’s good to know what is portable, independent, what survives translation to an unknown country; and it’s good to know that one could start over again, build up from scratch acquaintance with the languages, weathers, customs, roads, and friends that extend one into the world. Pared back to essentials on the road, one is also severed from the present and thereby free to wander through the past and taste other destinies. The rest lies dormant, unrecognized, an interior life that may not be called forth again by the outside world. The world one builds for oneself, whether prison or palace, is a world one can partially exit—not in the mind, but in the body—by traveling, by going to a place where nothing calls it into existence, where one is stripped back to the boundary of skin. Or so I thought.

  So I was walking up a road, no one who knew who I was knew where I was, and I didn’t know what lay ahead, though I did know that I was on the road that would take me across the border between Cork and Kerry. Or so the map said, and a road-sign said the next town was twenty-five kilometers away. Up high, there were no more trees, and I could see further—down to Bantry Bay, the islands around Glengarriff, and, far below me like a map itself, the checkerboard of scrub-gorse, stone, cleared fields, real forest, pine plantation, and houses of a model rural landscape. Sheep wandered freely across the road, climbing the tumbling stone fences at my approach and bleating mechanically. When most frightened, the lambs ducked under their mothers to take refuge in nursing as though they could return to the tiny secure world of the womb, and their tails jerked back and forth like furious metronomes in apparent synchronicity with their suckling. Twin lambs dived upon a ewe with her back to me, one on each side, and she looked like a grounded airplane as their tails moved like fuzzy propellers. I walked past innumerable tufts of their glossy white wool, smooth as hair and more wavy than wooly, caught on sticks or laid on the ground, looking like locks yanked from the heads of old women.

  I walked, one foot then the other, connected and disconnected to the ground beneath my feet, toward the top, moving at the pace of my body, which seems idiotic to point out, except that it’s a rare speed nowadays. Paddy remarked that before the Famine, the average Irish peasant probably never went more than ten miles from home, the distance of a day’s walk and return. It suggests either a terrible monotony or an intimacy of astounding depth, an existence in which the world and the self were so interfused they would hardly seem separate phenomena, and self would be indistinguishable from its circumstances (which might help explain the extreme trauma of emigration for those who had not yet, as beggars and laborers, become migratory). Without machines (and horses, but who travels by horse now?) most human beings would be limited to about fifteen or twenty miles a day in progress across the surface of the earth, perhaps twice that for practiced ramblers and runners. Human scale is a term most often used in describing objects rather than motion, but the mind still doesn’t absorb a sense of place at any speed much faster than the human body moves. Faster than that, at the speed of machines, the world becomes a stage set and only the largest changes register. Only residency entitles one to claim to know a place, but slow and leisurely progressions give one an inkling.

  The motion of walking, this rhythmic rocking, seems to set the mind loose to wander on its own paths. The weight of baggage on my back, the weight of history in my head: the picture of a world bereft of everything but a walker on a road is nothing more than that, a picture, the picture I set out with, the fantasy of travel as an opportunity to clear my head rather than rearrange it. I went walking through concentric rings, the largest one called Europe, then Ireland, then the West, then the road to Kenmare, each with its own associations, towards literal rings, to stone circles. There are more than a hundred such stone circles in west Cork and southern Kerry.

  The rocky ground became a ground of rocks: great slabs tilted and breaking through the earth, rough, a darker granite than the granite I knew. It was a big, wild landscape, and for the first time I felt satisfied rather than merely charmed with what I saw. At the crest the rocks rose up almost like mesas, with sheer vertical faces perhaps twenty feet high, on which lots of lovers, travelers, and one “Kentuckey chicken” had painted their names. They had no inkling of spraycan style, these brushy souvenirs of passage, and they looked instead like giant epitaphs. At the very top was a tunnel through the rock, full of drips and puddles gleaming in the stony darkness, and I walked through it. Out past the brief dark I arrived in another world, in Kerry, where a totally unexpected and even more magnificent view dropped out from under my feet on the heights, an inland view on the east side of the crest, high above farmlands nestled between this and further ridges in every direction. The sheep changed too; their haunches were no longer inscribed with red letters but with marine-blue As; and I imagined that when enough flocks come together they must look like alphabet soup or a printer’s type box overturned.

  An hour or so later, down at the bottom of the slope, across a little river, I took the secondary road, because it passed, said another one of my red maps, a circle of standing stones I hoped to find. This road was truly remote, two parallel tracks of crumbling asphalt with a grassy middle strip on which I walked, hoping that it would please my feet. On this third day of walking, the shortcomings of my boots or the slight extra weight of the pack—twenty pounds of water, clothes, and papers—had begun to grind my feet down. Poor feet, intricate architecture of half the bones in the human body: I could feel every bone in them with every step, clearly enough to draw a map of them, an x-ray of pain. They felt like twin larks, these fragile metatarsal fans of bone being flattened and splintered more with every step, and it came to seem peculiar that the solid architecture of the human skeleton with its sturdy pillars for legs should have instead of a solid foundation the fine bones of birds at bottom. The last ten miles would be excruciating, but in summer’s long light, there was no hurry. I walked, and noticed every step.

  An old man looked up and said incuriously, It’s a grand day, as he dragged some branches out of a pasture. He was the only person I saw, his the only inhabited house on the way up this slope. Water sang everywhere on it. Little Stonehenge-style post and lintel structures framed the trickles coming out of the hillside itself, trickles that shone as they emerged from the darkness. Everywhere in Ireland the boundary between architecture and landscape blurs, and sometimes it seems that the walls and lintels and ruins are wholly natural, sometimes that the earth itself is consciously evolving more elaborate structures of stone. The doorways into the hillside made it look inhabited, a subterranean home. The second pass was even more magnificent, abandoned even by sheep, flanked by waterfalls, wild again, and then it too descended into the rust
ic: another farm valley on the other side, with roads, the roar of a tractor, trees, and buildings. Down low the rough scrub gave way to hedgerow flowers: tiny warm purple orchids clustered on stalks, violets, vivid blue things like forget-me-nots, and every once in a while bluebells, primroses, and foxgloves.

  I hid my pack and turned off on what my map seemed to say was the cul-de-sac leading to the stone circle, past some houses and some barking, but then the road dead-ended at a farm tucked down in a hollow. Yips came from the farmhouse and more barks from a weathered shack off on the other side of the end of the road. An old woman came out, wearing a print apron over her lace-trimmed sheer nylon blouse and tiny red basketball shoes on her feet, and I told her what I was looking for: one of those small stone circles that are so scattered and unattended across the land of Cork and Kerry. She said she didn’t think she’d heard of any stone circles in the area, but she was the kind of person people tell things to, but she forgets. Her husband might know, but he was off tending sheep, or the people up the road might. Where was I from then, she asked, and then she remarked on how nice and comprehensible my English was for an American and added that it was probably going to rain anyway—she had heard a thunderclap. So I thanked her and gave up and walked back to the car she thought I had. For me the country around her house was a picture labeled Europe: case in point, rural Ireland, from the neolithic onward; for her it might not be a picture at all, and the label would be something like Where we live and labor: Home, a landscape made not out of ancient artifacts but of contemporary sites of work and resources, where water comes from, where the sheep go, where she resided.

  Crunch, crunch, crunch on the larks, downward to the slow-rolling Kenmare River, which disappeared again when I dropped among trees, and with a few thousand more steps, I arrived at the bridge across the broad river estuary in the town of Kenmare. Kenmare used to be called Neiden, which means nest in Irish, and it is a nestlike place, small and sheltered. It was still called Neiden, or Nedeen according to Arthur Young, when he passed through in September of 1776; Kenmare was a name applied by Lord Shelburne around that time in honor of his friend of that name, who owned much of the land to the north. Shelburne owned, says Young, “above 150,000 Irish acres in Kerry.”

  Young was a man with aristocratic ties and a consuming interest in agriculture; his two-volume chronicle of his lengthy journey around Ireland deals largely with its current and potential farm industries. The accounts would make fascinating reading if only for explaining what all those aristocratic men in the novels of the period would have been up to when they weren’t playing whist or flirting in the drawing room. The conventions of fiction show us these men in their social rather than their economic roles, and so agriculture and the concomitant relationships between landowners and landworkers is rarely mentioned. But Young’s is not a novel, and his treatise tells us they were captains of agriculture overseeing experiments in manuring with burnt limestone, seaweed, and dung, clearing fields of stone, working bullocks by the horns, draining bogs, and planting them to clover—if they were diligent and in residence on their estates. Irish landlords were famously absent, dissipated, and brutally exploitative, but a surprising number of them were at home to host Young and to show him around the farms on their estates. They did not always succeed in convincing him that the peasantry was lazy rather than oppressed—Young is also notable for his evenhandedness in deciding why the peasants were hungry, ragged, and abysmally housed. Lord Shelburne himself must have been off in a drawing room somewhere when Young came by, but his representatives seem to have been carrying out a fairly enlightened regime. Kenmare is still idyllic looking, and still shaped by the model cottages Shelburne had made.

  The whole town appeared to be made up of nothing but pubs for the locals, restaurants and shops for the tourists, and picturesquely cramped homes. After a late afternoon repast—the usual tea and bread, unusually welcome as the first meal of the day—I followed the model cottages down the main street to a triangular town square. Two middle-aged women there passed each other, and one said, Evening. Bit of rain, not a question or an opening or a revelation, only a fact. And when I went up a back street to the stone circle on the edge of town and into the alley that angled off it, I ran into a stout woman taking admission for it. Her nose and cheeks were a cluster of red bumps and she said, It’s raining, and then that it rained forever, ceaselessly in the winter and spring, a complaint I heard often. Homing in on defenseless me, rocking on my mangled feet, she collected my fifty pence and imparted detailed information from her television about the weather in Scotland, in Waterford on the opposite coast, about everyplace on the island, and the showers expected for the morning. (Kerry is the wettest part of Ireland. When Noah’s ark went by Ireland, Paddy told me, there was a Kerryman sitting on top of Mount Brandon, the waters all about him. He hailed the ark and asked Noah for a lift, but Noah turned him down, explaining he had his orders. Never mind, said the Kerryman, “Tis only a bit of a sprinkle.”)

  Weather is one of the two perfect subjects for strangers, being perpetual and apolitical, and as I don’t follow sports, I was confined to discussing the weather throughout my journey. Few neglected to tell me that it had rained for a hundred days straight before I arrived or how they felt about that. Fortunately if it isn’t raining it has probably just ceased or is about to begin raining in Ireland, and the variations on this theme nurture endless smalltalk. Weather is itself a perfect article of faith, being both utterly inevitable and utterly unpredictable. There’s almost a ritual quality about weather talk; it may be that paying homage to its existence is how strangers acknowledge their common existence and vulnerability under the same unfathomable sky.

  This one was dropping a light drizzle on everything as I proceeded down the alley, past hanging laundry and a drowsy liver-colored spaniel, to where it forked off into a construction yard on the right and a bank with a sheep-proof gate on the left. Up the bank and through the gate was a perfectly mown and weeded green lawn with fifteen rough boulders arranged around a central boulder. They were of two colors, gray and brownish, and all shapes, from slablike to rounded, and none of them was as tall as I was. The whole circle was small, perhaps twenty-five feet across. My compass made it clear the stones were neatly aligned according to the cardinal directions, and they also seemed to echo the mounds of the surrounding hills—but that was speculation. This and the dozens of other stone circles in the region, surmises the great scholar of such circles, Aubrey Burl, were built about thirty-five hundred years ago by a wave of invaders or emigrants who came from the coasts to the heavily wooded hillsides to settle—came perhaps from Scotland where similar but older and larger stone circles survive, but that’s speculation too. “The builders penetrated inland up the river valleys until they came to soils light enough to cultivate with the equipment they possessed, probably no more than the spade,” he writes, suggesting that each ring corresponded to a community inhabiting about one square mile of land, and that no more than thirty people would use such a ring at any given time—hence their diminutive scale, by the standards of English and Scottish rings. (When Young came through three millennia later, the plough had still not come into general use.) “These largely forgotten stone circles deep in the Boggeraghs or along the storm-drenched rocks of the western bays once were the most needed centres of people’s lives, places that combined the mundane earth with the imagery of the night-sky . . . where people trod or danced along the portal stones . . . looking toward the darkening, lowering horizon and the setting of the sun or moon. Now only the stones and the secrets survive.”

  Stonehenge is impressive because its builders, possessing minimal technology, defied both stone and gravity to create such regularity of form and verticality of structure, with the massive lintels pressed up to the sky. But it also seems to imply, as does all more elaborate architecture, that the world lacks order and needs order imposed, that defiance is necessary, that an inhabitable world must be made rather than found. Such stone c
ircles as the one in Kenmare are more modest, imposing only a minimal amount of order on the stones and the surrounding landscape. A kind of nonchalance permeates the site, as though such a circle of unrefined unmatched stones were good enough for the now forgotten purposes and its makers were uninterested in being any better. There’s an ease in the sense of labor and of landscape such a casual grouping gives, and perhaps in a culture that could chart the celestial bodies with unimproved lumps from the earth like these. They testify too to an immobility which may have been the fixedness of agricultural society—and nothing could be more fixed in place than a boulder, save a boulder aligned with the heavens. A millennium later the Celts invaded and the precise functions of the stone circles were forgotten; for all the archeological discoveries of the last decades, the uses of such circles remain speculative. Like maps, like names, like conversation about the weather, they seem to have been, in the broadest sense, diagrams with which to navigate the recurrences and changes of the years, the tangibles which alluded to and kept track of the articles of faith.

  9

  A Pound of Feathers

  Perhaps people travel for pleasure because the visual is much more memorable than the tangible, the seen than the felt. At the time, traveling may be nothing more than a series of discomforts in magnificent settings: running for the train to paradise in a heat wave, carrying an ever heavier pack in alpine splendor, seeing sublime ruins with stomach trouble. Yet it is the field of images and not the body of sensations that lingers. My mother once remarked that if women remembered what childbirth felt like, no one would have more than one child. And so I, third child of a third child, owe my existence to forgetting and my taste for travels to the dominance of the eye. I got up in Kenmare to find that a knee, a muscle, both feet were inexplicably wrecked as no previous walk had ever wrecked them, and they told me of it with every step. The marvelous walk over the mountains to Killarney which I had anticipated for three days turned into a bus trip. Small waterfalls tumbling over rough rocks and into sinuous streambeds flashed by, shadowed by oaks whose branches spread at the same abrupt and undulating angles, invaded by rhododendrons, all among a complex of passes that shifted the view around in unexpected, abrupt ways. The whole landscape had in its very lines a kind of intricate, tangled wildness I saw nowhere else in Ireland, and I had no chance to sort it out.