Jaywalking with the Irish (12 page)

As a result, rebel chieftains named Hugh O’Neill and Red Hugh O’Donnell were forced to lead their six thousand soldiers from the still unvanquished northern kingdom of Ulster on a brutal sixteen-day winter march south. They would have been wise to bide their time to test the strength of the British army upon arriving, but instead quickly launched a mass frontal attack. For fighters accustomed to hit-and-run raids, this was a bad mistake, and the results were tragic. If only the Spanish had joined the action from the rear, the Crown’s forces might have been pincered and the course of history changed. But Don Juan de Águila’s three thousand soldiers blithely stayed put as a powerful British cavalry attack crushed the Irish rebels. The Spanish packed off and, after a few more flare-ups elsewhere, organized resistance to British rule essentially collapsed for two hundred years.

The Irish remnants retreated to the lunar landscape of West Cork’s Beara Peninsula. The British, aided by traitorous locals, caught up with them there and hung eighty captives in the square of today’s quiet fishing village of Castletownbere. One by one, the remaining defiant Irish chieftains abandoned their motherland in an exodus to the Continent known as the Flight of the Earls. Quickly, the British consolidated their rule, and carried on with destroying the country’s great abbeys and ancestral castles, seizing prime acreage for their distant nobility, and generally driving the local peasantry off to land fit for goats. They referred to the native Irish as “foreigners” and forbade such types from selling so much
as a potato on Kinsale’s pretty streets. The sadness of Ireland’s history, ancient and recent, is evident throughout the southwest for anyone who cares to pause.

Nearby lay the village of Ballinspittle, which is a sleepy crossroads with perhaps a hundred houses and three pubs. Mick and Hylda took us there next to view a famous grotto with a life-sized, blue and white cement statue of the Blessed Virgin set into a steep hill. In the mid-1980s, this spot teemed with supplicants praying for miracles. The word had spread throughout a still backward and mystical Ireland that the statue perceptibly swayed as if imbued with a numinous inner life. God’s hand was to be seen touching Ballinspittle.

We all stood before the shrine with a kind of rapt consternation. It did not move a centimeter, perhaps thanks to a hammer attack (since repaired) by a crazed Californian a few years earlier.

Every few minutes, passing drivers would slow, roll down their car windows, bless themselves, and hurry on.

“Drive-by blessings,” I said to Dr. Buckley.

“This county has changed fifty years in a decade,” he replied wearily, “and religion has gone to hell.” But he made the sign of the cross himself, and his faith had clearly never wavered.

We came down to a headland that spilled into the Atlantic with cliffs pushing out from either side like arched wings. The entrance to this promontory was guarded by a stone wall topped with barbed wire, and a man at the gate moved forward suspiciously.

“What’s this?” I asked Mick.

“It’s one of the most exclusive golf courses in the world, called the Old Head of Kinsale. They say this place was one of the first ever settled in Ireland, and people used to come fishing and walking here from all over, but the owners have stopped that. The course is said to be fabulous, but very expensive.”

“And very hostile,” I said, filing this item for further investigation.

The next weekend we ventured to Paddy and Anne Wilkinson’s distant Carlow refuge. Hidden by the rioting growth of pine trees
they had planted nearly two decades before, their mountainside home had always seemed to be curtained off from the intrusions of modernity.

But a new car sat in the steep drive; and the ever-thoughtful Anne, who had recently been promoted at her work for the department of the environment, looked different, more modern and self-assured than I remembered. She and Gwen opened a bottle of Sauvignon Blanc and swirled it in their glasses, sniffing to decipher hidden aromas. Broiled salmon in a soy-ginger sauce, wild rice dotted with local mushrooms, and a nicely sautéed medley of fresh garden-grown vegetables were heading our way. It was delicious, and why not? Ireland had had it up to here with the donkey-cart images of old. Gwen had traversed the world’s oceans with a South African boyfriend who had become a star on the global sailing race circuit. She had enjoyed local wine in places I couldn’t even find on the map, being a citizen of a culture unimaginable at her birth.

“The changes have been good for us, you know, and I would never want to go back to the way things were before,” Paddy said, sprawling his long, loose limbs in various directions from his kitchen chair, just as his father might have done. “Sure, it’s troubling, too. This entire country is only one or two generations away from the soil. We never had any time to prepare for the modern ways that have come in almost overnight.”

Paddy gazed out to a field upon which neighboring farmers used to fleece bawling sheep with lightning-quick hand shears, a practice now thoroughly electrified. “We’re all much better off, there is no denying that. Just back in the eighties, it was hopeless here, with unemployment over 20 percent, maybe even five times worse than today. Those desperate days did nobody any good at all.”

“What would Bun feel about all these changes?” I asked.

Paddy, who still draws his water from a hose stuck into a spring farther up the mountain, didn’t hesitate. “He’d be glad to see the hardship and the emigration ending, that is for sure. But I don’t know that he’d love Ireland quite the same as he did. He’d know too well what we have lost.”

“But where on earth is life as much fun?” I questioned, and Paddy grabbed my arm.

“Well, I wouldn’t live anywhere else myself,” he smiled.

Return to beginning of chapter

The idea of shape shifting between one identity and another runs deep through Celtic legends, but we soon discovered that “going Irish” is nonetheless an exceedingly tricky quest, even when blessed by the continuity of my Wilkinson connections. Challenges to our every sense of self materialized constantly. Our perplexed small-town American bank, for example, addressed a major fund transfer to “Cork, Thailand,” leading to a four-week detour of vital moneys through the Far East. Meanwhile, the cash cow – the corporate newsletter meant to support our curious adventure – suddenly got snuffed. One thought of Roger Miller: no home, no food, no pets – ain’t got no cigarettes. So some local publications were touched for assignments and possible employment for Jamie, who had lately been writing for the august
New York Times
; but business leaders and feature editors alike, evidently all graduates of the gnomic Office of Motor Taxation, flatly refused to return phone calls or letters, or otherwise confirm that we existed. You might think that the booming Irish economy would welcome arriving hopefuls with open arms, but, when money is involved, that is not always the clannish Irish, and particularly Cork, way.

We were, as the Germans call it,
fremd
, which means both foreign and circumspect – at least professionally. Making our status as “outsiders” even more acute, the adolescents messing about on our lane outside our gate seemed to share the feeling on a much more personal level. They set with an autumnal vengeance to the challenge of driving us out of Ireland, often devising techniques of inspired virtuosity. Pissing on our gate in broad daylight; hurling water balloons at our door; and tossing pebbles at our car, the ammo finely selected so that it was just small enough to scratch
the windows and paint without smashing glass and committing an obvious crime – these boyos were accomplished.

Their malevolence seemed so unpredictable that we worried over the safety of our kids, especially Harris who, though considerably smaller, was still closest to their size. In the face of their taunting harassment, he soon took to retreating behind our protective hedges at the first shambling sight of this bunch who, despite our fervent wishes otherwise, had now stepped up their sport.

A number of times we tried talking to them, but they would not even meet our eyes. Their looks toward us were ever blank and utterly fearless, as if there were no common rules of humanity – or law – linking us together. We felt like targets and nothing more.

“I can’t stand it anymore!” Jamie, who had repeatedly tried to reason and even plead with the adolescent smirkers, finally erupted one day.

“That’s it for me, too!” I said, and finally called the ringleader’s father.

“Look, we are obviously not from Cork, but we just want to fit in. Everybody knows that adolescents the world over like to act up, but what is happening to us feels like an assault. How this started is irrelevant. Can you please help see that it ends?”

The man, sounding as worn down as any father of adolescent boys, said he would look into it.

A few nights later, a stranger approached me in a pub. “I understand you have been making accusations about certain individuals. If I were you, I’d cease this intimidation and insinuation instantly, or there could be difficulties.”

What in the name of halitosis had happened to the spirit of Ireland, I wondered. What toll was all the new affluence and indulgence taking on the next generation? Perhaps I’d totally failed to grasp the sinister aspects of the country’s intractable defiance of order, the rancor of willful anarchy noted by writers from Joyce and Flann O’Brien to Patrick McCabe.

The more important question for the moment was how to protect ourselves. Calls to the police proved fruitless – because where was the evidence? Wheels turned, and click: we decided to build an irrefutable record of the puerile pursuits at our door. So whenever
the group appeared, a barrage of snapshots greeted them. What a marvelous sight it was to see these little blighters run.

But the combination of adolescent mayhem along with the chilly indifference of potential employers sometimes depressed us, suggesting that delusions lurked in our dreams of building fresh Irish identities out of thin air. The early welcomes by our neighbors and new friends like Owen McIntyre had been heartwarming, but it now felt like this land of our forebears, from which we somehow expected to be accepted as if returning kin, might take its sweet time in letting us fully through the door.

I had an old habit of seeking solace in solitary fishing expeditions. On certain early October afternoons, I therefore wound my way to nearby streams. One of these toppled out of a charming waterfall and purled through a green glade, unspoiled enough to make one think of a mercurial ancient Ireland where a cornered soul could lie in the water and turn into a salmon and then swallow a hazel berry full of divine wisdom and soar off as an eagle. The place was gorgeous, but, alas, fish bereft and a little short on supernatural intervention.

So I worked my way downstream, coming to larger pools, and more promising riffles and runs, and over these I unfurled my long lasso casts. Here, the desired transmogrification finally succeeded. Behind me, I discovered a pack of Aran sweater-bedecked Americans oohing and aahing and busily photographing my every move, as if I now was the embodiment of Ireland’s timeless bucolic ways – the original postcard Celt. Such was the barminess that had taken over my identity.

Further shape-shifting awaited at Cork’s annual traditional music festival, as Laura and I discovered upon entering a pub called the Corner House one drizzly afternoon. Inside, eight grizzled musicians plucked away at banjos, guitars, mandolins, an upright bass, an auto-harp, and a gleaming Dobro resonator guitar – just about every instrument upon which man has tacked on a string – in a foot-stomping Irish interpretation of old-time Appalachian bluegrass. Laura hunched beside me at the back of the place, where younger crisp-swallowing kids sprawled on the floor, the homier
Irish pubs being locales where three generations can mix without a bother.

The unique Celtic cultural experience on tap consisted of feverish renditions of the “Yellow Rose of Texas” and “Are You From Dixie?” This was clearly your basic mad-hatter mix of Irish incongruity all over again, making one feel for a moment most peculiarly at home, especially when the group launched into a lonesome-voiced, twangy number called “Give Me Back the Five Dollars I Paid for My Wife.” Every thirty seconds, a Cork dude in cowboy boots and a ten-gallon hat screamed “Yeehaw!” None of these Willy Nelson look-alikes were remotely from Dixie, unless you look at life through Cork’s unique lens. The province being called the Rebel County for reasons of both temperament and history, a good many of its citizens internalize some imaginary Mason Dixon line so deeply that they show up at local hurling, Irish football, and soccer matches waving Confederate flags. In fact, a truck driver at the top of Military Hill has an enormous rig with Rebel flags painted on the doors and his road tag of “Big Jim” emblazoned between the headlights.

Jamie came by to collect Laura at the end. Curious, I ensconced myself into the post-session company of the Lee Valley String Band, whose core members have been playing together for thirty-three years. Here was a leather-capped butcher named Mick who sings ballads as he chops carcasses, a banjo player named Mick but more often called “Black Dog,” and another Mick who pens drawings and writes original songs when not driving a forklift. Perhaps because their older brothers were “Micked” first, others were dubbed lesser names like Hal and Kevin, and in one wizened, white-bearded case, Christy. That one had a magical ability to strum a steel guitar, chain smoke, serial drink, and sing with the piercing heartache of a bereaved mountain man – at the same time. My kind of lads, and they had just come back from a rousing session before seven thousand folk festival fans in Denmark.

“They’re so good, they could draw crowds like that any time they want in the States,” I said to the Corner House’s owner, the redheaded and impish Fergal MacGabhann, which is the Irish spelling of McGowan.

“Just getting the eight of them out to Denmark was one of the biggest organizational challenges Ireland has ever faced. It was Cork’s Dunkirk,” Fergal laughed as he artfully dribbled a perfect G clef into the creamy head of my dark pint of Murphy’s. He entices the band to play for free every Monday night – they’ve missed only two sessions in the last decade – by offering as much free drink as they can down while performing. From what I saw, Fergal might want to check this arrangement with his accountant.

Black Dog laughed, “It’s a bad habit for a bad group.” He shook his salt-and-pepper beard dismissively at the idea of Lee Valley exporting, as so many others have done, the Irish song and dance routine for fame and fortune abroad.

“We just don’t give a fuck!” roared Christy, fingering his double-fretted contraption called an auto-harp. Christy’s preferred nutrients had left him so thin, he looked as if he was drawing sustenance from the aftereffects of calories ingested in his school days. A purist, he told me he had always revered the great American bluegrass singer and songwriter Bill Monroe.

On a visit across the pond a few years back, the famous folk man asked to be brought to Christy’s house for a late “Sunday morning” introduction (in Ireland, two o’clock on that particular afternoon is referred to as “Sunday morning”). Christy, who had been imbibing the night before, heard the knocking and the halloing at his doorstep all right, but refused to vacate the therapeutic folds of his bed.

“But it’s Bill Monroe,” one of the musical Micks shouted.

“And I’m Adolf Churchill,” Christy bawled and pulled a pillow over his head.

No matter.

“We’re getting older, and we still don’t give a fuck – and you can quote me on that,” Christy chuckled.

Alright now. If these fellows could drive forklifts and chop mutton with an adopted song in their hearts, then why couldn’t we?

Autumn was passing – the season is never called “fall” in Ireland, where deciduous trees remain sparse, having done most of their falling to build British masts a long time ago. One November afternoon, a horrible rumbling commenced outside our door. It sounded like a Zeus job. The sky grew frightfully dark and we saw trees in our tranquil garden suddenly bending sideward as though intending to shimmy in the windows and doors. Then our house high on Military Hill seemed to tremble, which was impressive considering that its walls were nearly two feet thick. Amazed at how winds surely topping seventy miles an hour almost instantaneously blasted into foment, I hurried upstairs for a better view. The black maelstrom overhead held whirling branches and, for all I could tell, the limbs of stray cats. Then volleys of thousands, no millions, of pellets of water began to tattoo our windows, and the sound was like something out of the Charlton Heston sections of the Old Testament.

“I guess this is what they mean by ‘lashing,’” said Jamie.

“It’s scary,” Owen whimpered.

Instead of huddling with the family, I was seized by an urge to venture out into the storm, like the fools who race to the beach to witness an incoming hurricane. After arriving in America, the Norwegian novelist Knut Hamsun set off for Minnesota on the roof of a late-nineteenth-century railroad carriage in order to experience the full wildness of the continent. Joseph Turner had himself strapped to the top masts of British frigates to refine the veracity of his paintings of howling seas.

Myself, I walked down the hill toward town. The experience was like a Gene Kelly stroll in the rain as reinterpreted by the producer of a Hollywood horror movie. It instantly brought back the true flavor of working on Bun’s cottage in Kerry, those halcyon days spent sinking calf deep in mud while rain without end ran down our noses and ears.

This was worse. The torrents were not only pelting the top of my head but coming in sideways, endless sheets of water blasting laterally just above pavement level and into my calves, thighs, and groin. Exhilarating, I told myself, that was the word. But as I stumbled onward through the gusts, the wind kept yanking the tails of
my raincoat up toward my shoulders and exploring what lay south of there. After a short while, my trousers were soaked to belt-level and water dripped from a region normally considered private.

Like a shipwrecked mariner, I at last lunged soaked and shivering into the Hi-B, where a blazing coal fire beckoned from the corner.

“I wouldn’t linger there too long, if I were you,” warned Kieran, the carpenter extraordinaire.

“Why not? I’m drenched.”

“Because Brian will think you’re blocking the heat from everyone else, or more importantly, from him. He has ideas about how much heat everyone is entitled to,” said my friend with the fierce chin, glittering eyes, mad wit, and long, graying, swept-back hair of an Irish chieftain.

“That’s absurd.”

“That’s what you say. But c’mere. Brian once caught a man shivering on that very chair who had the nerve to throw a couple of extra bits of coal into the hearth. The prick instantly pulled the pint out of the man’s hand – a nice brimming fresh pint, like. ‘That’s my pint, Brian, and I paid for it,’ your man said. ‘Well that’s my coal, and I paid for it, and you’re barred for life.’”