Pour le moment, j'ai abandonée mon recherche pour la musique Breton. J'ai trouvé deux choses, mais l'un est loin du transport publique, et l'autre est accessible seulement par autocar, et il n'y pas d'endroit pour dormir. Donc, je suis maintenant á St. Malo, une ville sur la mer à la cote du nord du Bretagne.
For the moment, I've given up my quest for Breton music. I found two things, but one is far from public transport, and the other is accessible only by bus, and there is nowhere to sleep. So I'm now in St. Malo, a town on the sea on the north coast of Brittany.
And as I sat down to write this, the words started coming out spontaneously in French instead of English, until I got to a word that I didn't know and realized what I was doing. The gears are starting to turn a bit more easily, although of course still in their infancy, if I may so brazenly mix metaphors. I did have the miracle of an extended spontaneous conversation today. Sitting at a crêperie, eating une galette saucisse – a Breton buckwheat crêpe with sausage – the couple at the other end of the table asked me something that I didn't understand. I smiled benignly, apologized, and told them that I spoke only a little French. Not dissuaded, they stayed and talked to me for twenty minutes or so. Monsieur had spent a couple of years in London, and was pretty easily able to manage my poor accent and limited vocabulary. His partner was equally patient and twice as sweet, had spent some time in South America, and knew well the displacement that comes from being a stranger in a strange land. We spoke mostly of travel and languages, but it was nonetheless meaningful human contact, which I haven't really had in a few days. Funny how I can spend three days in the mountains without seeing a soul and feel fine, but put me in a city and I start getting lonely.
St. Malo itself boasts one of the highest tidal ranges in the world. Looking out over the ramparts at the fort this afternoon, one could easily walk across the rocks to the fort that stands on the outcrop into the sea. Walking those same ramparts tonight, the passage would be utterly impossible. The tide was in, the wind was up, and the sea crashed against the ramparts, sending spray over the tops, some 40 feet above the water. The fort was impossibly out to sea, the rocky promenade invisible beneath tens of meters of ocean.
So I think I'll stay a couple of days in St. Malo. Its narrow winding streets, its walled interior, and its proximity to the sea appeal to me. I don't expect to find music here, but I'm not bothered by that. The place itself has enough history and enough magic to remain interesting.
It seems like I hit Quimper (or perhaps France) at not-quite-the-right-time. I thought that finding music in Brittany would be easy; it has turned out to be kind of tricky. The first barrier has been that pretty much everything is closed Sunday and Monday. Even if my language skills were completely up to snuff, the shops aren't open, so there aren't many likely parties to ask. The pub culture in Ireland has given way to the café culture in France, and the cafés don't really have sessions. Of course, I only partly came to France for the music; I mostly came for the language.
I've been getting some practice, in that while navigating the essentials, I don't have much trouble booking places to stay, getting directions, riding public transport, or things of that nature. I managed to buy a pre-paid cell phone to make getting around a bit easier. But actually conversing is as difficult as I knew it would be. Once we get beyond the basics and folks try to make idle chatter with me, I have to respond with a blank stare more often than not. I'm just not there yet – I know the words, but I can't process at conversational speed. The effect is isolating, and will no doubt wear on me over the coming weeks. The natural tendency is to stay quiet, avoid awkward conversations, which is of course exactly the wrong thing to do.
In any case, I've found a pub in Quimper with an Irish session on Fridays, but I almost certainly won't stay here that long. I also found out about a couple of festivals this weekend, which I will check out if I can get to them. One is (I think) exclusively Breton, and only a few hours long. The other looks to be world music, and goes all weekend. Not sure if I can get there by public transport or if there is anywhere to stay, but I'll look into it.
It's boring to speak of the weather, but at the moment, I can't help myself, as I'm reveling in it so thoroughly. After another sleepless night (the third in a row; I must get some rest in Quimper), the ferry arrived in Roscoff, about an hour before the break of dawn. It being a Sunday, nothing was open, no trains were running, so I walked along the quay until I found a boulangerie that was open early. I procured a bagette, filled my water jug from a municipal spigot near the fishing boats, and sat on a bench to watch the sun rise over the harbor.
I've not seen a sunrise in some time – the habits of an itinerant musician makes it improbable. But I didn't mind this one: enjoying fresh bread and fresh water, seeing the first rays illuminate the steeple of the Renaissance cathedral, the town dead silent around me, except for a few scattered fishermen untethering their boats before the tides sucked the water from the harbor. I am in France again. The gravity of it settles on me as the sun gains buoyancy.
Over the next couple of hours, I was able to watch the tides recede. Here in the relatively flat land of Brittany, the tides aren't measured in feet, but in tens or hundreds of meters. The boats that were anchored at 6am sat in mud by noon, far from the water. While the boats became stranded, I became mobile, catching the 13h27 train to Morlaix, where I now sit on the terrace at the brasserie outside the station, absorbing magnificent sunlight and awaiting the train that will take me to Languadec and connect me to Quimper, seat of Finistère and heart of Bretange.
Good god, I'm not even off the boat yet and already I'm meeting musicians from Brittany. There was a world music band playing the cabaret, mostly Bretons. I talked to the accordionist after their set, to ask about Breton music opportunities. He told me that I'd find music in pretty much any town in Brittany, and dances pretty much every Saturday. Later in the evening, a couple were playing harp and violin together in a corner of the restaurant. I talked to them for a bit, and they gave me their phone number and told me to call tomorrow night once they were home, and they would see what they can find for me.
The hard part of it all is that I'm conducting these conversations in French. It's good to know that I can conduct them, even if I'm only catching about half of what's being said to me. Hopefully that percentage will increase as the weeks go by. (While writing this, I committed cross language typos for musiciens and musique. It looks like context switching might be tricky.) Right now, it feels like I'm lifting weights with my cerebral cortex, and I have to suck up a bit of courage and swallow a bit of pride every time I open my mouth. Of course, I'm not actually even in France yet...
As expected, Ireland has conspired hard to keep me. The fiddle sprung another leak yesterday morning. Pete & Dily offered me a gig next weekend that would put 100€ in my pocket and a place to stay for the week. While busking this morning, I got invited to an old-time jam on Tuesday, and pulled in 28€ in about two hours. All of it means that I could stay in Cork for the week, and probably come out about 200€ richer by week's end. Tempting, indeed. But I am on my way to France.
I met up with Eileen yesterday morning to trade CDs, and she gave me directions to Bertrand, the finest luthier in Cork City. He was less than impressed with our drunken glue-and-clamp job, but offered to make things right if I would leave the violin for the day. While it sabotaged my busking plans, it seemed better than having the instrument continue to fall apart. So I gave it over to Bertrand and set out to do my chores for the day.
The first order of business was to lose some weight. Eileen had brought me a cardboard box, into which went the tent, the stove, some CDs from people I had met, and all of my Ireland maps. It cost a fortune to ship it all back – only slightly less than it would have cost to replace it all. But it probably dropped nearly ten pounds from my pack weight, which was most welcome. I donated my Ireland books to the hostel, losing another couple of pounds. I feel light and mobile now. I also purchased my ferry ticket, thus making my commitment to France binding.
After a quick nap, it was back to Bertrand, who had glued the top of the violin the whole way around, thus saving the instrument from destruction. We spent a while talking about violins and music in general, and he played some CDs of his non-classical recordings. Bertrand, as it happens, is French, and has a friend who runs a café in Brittany. I now have her name and number, too. I'm still not sure where I'll end up tomorrow night – I need to spend some time with my guidebook and contact list.
So after my morning busking, I caught the bus to the ferry port. I had expected the ferry to be something more basic – a car deck, a couple of outdoor areas, maybe a lunch counter. It is, in fact, a full-on cruise ship. Casino, cabaret, shopping center, kennel, the works. Guess I now know why the ticket costs so much. As I write this, the coast of Ireland is falling away from me, until next I return. It gets a bit easier every time, and a bit harder to leave.
Ensuite, France...
Geez, what a whirlwind couple of days. The dilation of time during extended free-form travel is astounding. It's hard to believe that yesterday I woke up on a remote beach on the Dingle. With the sunrise at my back, I packed off to the town of Ballyferriter, where the bus only runs on Monday and Thursday. So getting to the bus on time was kind of a high priority. According to the timetable, the bus stopped at the post office. I made it to “town” (which was just a cluster of buildings on one street) and walked up and down the block a couple of times. No post office, and not a soul in sight. Finally I wandered into an open church door and asked the resident church lady. No post office in town, she said. Had there been one in the past? Oh yes, but the fellow who ran it died.
Fortunately, the bus did still stop in town, outside of the shuttered building that had been the post office before the postman made his final delivery. I rode all the way to Cork City, dropped my bag at the bus station, and went into town to check e-mail. Traveling without a mobile phone in Ireland leaves one separated from the goings-on: session information travels by text message, and I'm outside that stream. I had an e-mail from Mick in Cork; he was out of town for the weekend, but I'd find a session at Gable's on the unfashionable side of town. So I checked into a hostel and wandered about the city until dark.
The session was an odd one. Hosted by members of a band called The Critters, it was a mix of Irish trad, Americana, and gypsy music. And apparently a paid gig – the regulars were good enough to kick me 20€ at the end of the night. Which may be a good thing – the top of my fiddle, after two weeks of wet mountain travel, has come unglued.
Dily, the guitar player, invited me back to his house for red wine and repair work. So a few of us went back to his place and started uncorking bottles of wine and tubs of glue. We smoked, drank, made music and fiddled with clamps until 4 in the morning. Upon waking sobriety, there's still a bit of a seam that needs more glue, but I think the rest will hold. Until then, there's a home-made clamp fashioned from a screw, a nut, and two cross-sections of broom handle holding the crack together.
Other interesting happening of the evening – the other guitarist at the session was Mike, husband of Rhiannon, banjo player for the Carolina Chocolate Drops. Small world, indeed. I don't know how non-musicians manage to meet anybody...
I'm currently enjoying the luxury of a beer on the beach at Smerwick Harbour, on the northwest side of the Dingle Peninsula. I'd like to think it's a pretty well-deserved beer. Had a beautiful morning, the sun arching up over the hoods of those Renaults. I was out of water, so I struck camp and hiked on up the mountain, where I came upon a fabulous set of waterfalls rolling down the hillside. I sat there and made breakfast, refilled my water jug, and headed off again, but not before slipping and putting one foot into the stream and my arm into a patch of nettles. Drat and ouch.
The next couple of hours of walking rate as some of the best in my hiking career. Up over Mount Eagle toward Slea Head, the views kept getting more and more beautiful. From the crest, I could see Great Blasket Island laid out in the sea, and past that the islands if Inishbro and Inishvickillane – the westernmost point in Ireland. After that, your next stop is Iceland, if you can get that far.
The head is rich with sea cliffs and dizzying peaks. I stopped at a café near the head and played ball with the resident dog, whose name I later found out to be Banshee. Unfortunately, I sent the ball over the fence into the sheep pasture, Banshee went up over the wall after it, and then couldn't get back. I ended up going over the fence myself, and hoisted the not-at-all-small dog back over, under the concerned gaze of Banshee's owner. Apparently it's legal for sheep farmers to shoot dogs that wander into their pastures, and they sometimes do it. Sorry, Banshee.
After a few more hours of stunning cliffs and prehistoric ruins, I just stopped taking pictures. There was just too much. It's a funny thing that happens in Ireland. Ruined castles are so commonplace that eventually you just stop noticing them. They're still interesting, but you've got all of the pictures of castles that you really need.
So tonight I'm camped at the edge of the sea, and will fall asleep to the sound of the surf. I've walked up the main road a way and found some food and beer, and will make my way into town in the morning for the bus to Cork. Then a day to wash some clothes and start making plans for France before I get the ferry to Roscoff.
Today was the day of walking for which I came to Ireland. I woke up in Ennis and caught the bus to Dingle, then started walking the Dingle Way. The first couple of kilometers were uninspiring hiking on asphalt roads, but then the trail cut dramatically up the side of a mountain, with fantastic views of the Dingle Bay and west Kerry. The sun was up, the birds were singing, and I was feeling good to be alone and walking. I composed a little song as I went (“Galway Girl”). Then the mountain dropped back down to the sea and the town of Ventry. And I found myself walking barefoot in the sand, my house and my food on my back. I lingered a long time on that beach, recorded “Galway Girl” into my portable field recorder, and finally struck back into the hills as the sun was dropping into the ocean.
Because I had lingered so long on the sand, I didn't get too far back into the hills before dark. Tonight I'm camped out in a sheep pasture, nestled in the bush and hidden behind two abandoned cars. The hood of the Renault makes a fine table, as I write this and wait for the stars to come out.
Woke up this morning and had a cup of coffee with Frank (still a king among men), and then got a lift from him to the bus in Gort. Then a short ride to Ennis, where the hostel turned out to be closed for renovation. After some walking back and forth across town, we managed to negotiate a fair price for a B&B, dropped our bags, and made our separate ways back into town. My mission was simple -- find some Irish set dancing. I went to the public library and used the Internet (cheating, but still..) and found a number for one Mike Mahoney. I gave him a call, and he directed me to a set dancing workshop on the other side of town. After a short picnic dinner in the park, we walked a couple of miles to the dance.
The sets themselves aren't completely unlike American squares. It's a four-couple set, lady on the right. The footwork is different (no jigs in American old-time music) and the dances more regimented. A dance will have a name (e.g., Kilfenora) and be composed of six or seven parts. Each part has its own figures that you do in sequence. The dances aren't called, so learning a dance means memorizing all six or seven parts in order. Kind of daunting. The parts are repetitive, of course, but not identical, which kind of makes it worse. So we fumbled along through the workshop, at least enough to get a feel for the thing. The instructor gave us some worksheets, which may be interesting source material for writing some square dances later.
Tomorrow Marie is off to Stockholm, and I continue south probably to the Dingle peninsula for a few days of hill walking. If the sun holds out like it's been, it should be some amazing hiking. Otherwise, I'll be back to being soggy.
After waking up in Doolin, Marie and I made our way down the coast by bicycle to the Cliffs of Mooher, tourist trap extraordinaire. Thing is, the cliffs themselves really are spectacular, but the gift shop called "The Gifts of Mooher" kind of spoils the thing. So we took a few pictures of the cliffs, then headed back to Kinvarra by bus, listening to the recording of the session from the night before.
Back in Kinvarra, we returned the bicycles to Hayden and walked back to Frank's place for dinner and tunes. Frank is a king among men -- he fed us, made some music with us, and then packed us off to an old-time session that he had assembled. Some of the tunes were familiar standards; others I had never heard. But it was some good craic, the pub kept us watered, and we wound up back at Frank's for the night, sacked out on the floor.
Tomorrow it will be on to Ennis, hopefully for some set dancing, then Marie is back to Stockholm, and I'll be going south. Maybe to Cork, maybe to Kerry; I don't know. Wherever the tunes take me, really.
It's hard to believe that only 24 hours have elapsed. It may as well have been weeks. I met up with Anna last night, a friend of a friend of a friend, who offered a place to sleep solely on account of my being an old-time musician. Turns out that the house was full of German fiddle players -- three or four of them all together. Had supper with Anna, and then went off to the bus station to pick up Marie, bringing the total number of German fiddle players to five. That's a lot of Teutonic Tunesters. But rather than playing music, we took a walk out on Galway Bay, swapping stories and getting re-acquainted. This morning we got up and caught the bus to Kinvarra, to meet up with expatriate Hoosier fiddler Frank. Frank was, as expected, a wealth of knowledge and contacts. Within the span of time it took for us to drink a cup of coffee with him, Frank had found us a likely set dance in Kilfenora, located a couple of bicycles to get us there, and started lining up a session for us tomorrow. We went down the road to get the bikes from a fellow name Hayden, who (incidentally) had a fantastic rose garden.
Frank had an angel's intentions, but the devil's in the details. The bicycles were rusty death traps, and the 12km to Kilfenora turned out to be about 20 miles. We stopped in the Burren on the way over the mountains, swapped some fiddle tunes, and hiked a bit on the rocks. By the time we reached Kilfenora, my ass was aching and my legs were exhausted.
Except that there was no dance in Kilfenora -- it's tomorrow night. No sessions in town, either, so we pushed on another 8 miles to Doolin, found beds in the hostel, and went to the pub for some tunes and some much-needed fish & chips. Almost 30 miles of biking in one day on a borrowed bike that doesn't fit me. I'm not cut out for that.
Anyway, the session was brilliant, the beer much-deserved, and Marie contributed some Swedish folk tunes. I held my noise, preferring to wait for tomorrow. Plenty of time to play old-time then...
I went out last night in Galway town, walked around the tourist pubs, and saw it at its worst. Drunken teenagers from across Europe careening about, shouting at each other, and getting sick in the streets. Not an appealing first impression. It was like a mile-long frat party. I was immensely glad that I had sprung for a B&B for the night; sleeping in the hostel in the middle of all that would have been impossible.
This morning, I started making some calls. I had the number of a fiddler in Kinvarra who gave me the number of a fiddler in Galway. I rang her up, and she offered me a place to stay for the night. So it looks like one more night in Galway town, and then either south or west -- south to Kinvarra and Clare, or west to the Aran Islands. Either sounds fantastic. Meanwhile, I've had another friend of a friend feeding me contacts in France. Music is truly a wonderful thing.
Music also put some money in my pocket again today. I busked the tourist district in Galway for about three hours, and came away with 43 euro and change. Not bad. I think my busking routine is improving, as well -- it's not enough to just play; you have to perform. Dancing while I play, hamming it up to the children, playing under the leg, whatever. No rain today, either, which makes the busking better.
I also opted to retire my old boots today. (May they rest in peace.) In Glenveigh, I realized that not only did they have holes in them, but the soles were so thin that I could feel each stone, which resulted in a blister on the bottom of one foot. So I'm now sporting a new pair of boots that will hopefully get me through another few years. I got a new (and lighter) head lamp, too, to make up for the one that breathed its last in Glenveigh. I'm also looking forward to shedding some of my camping gear in Cork -- I don't think I'll have as much use for it in France. Here's to having better gear, and less of it.
Two things made Glenveigh a bit more of an annoyance than it needed to be -- the rain and the midges. The rain I was of course expecting, and it hasn't been too bad -- constant, but I haven't ended up walking in any real downpour (unlike in the Wicklow Mountains a few years ago). The light rain hasn't been so bad, except that the boot that went into the bog won't be drying any time soon. The midges, on the other hand, I didn't know about. If I stood still for more than a minute in the park, they were all over me, biting and crawling into every available orifice. The only think I had to keep them off of my face was tobacco smoke, which helped, but has a price of its own. Chain smoking my way through the hills seems vastly wrong.
When I finally got to Glenveigh Castle, it was full of English tourists and a German film crew. The two were clearly at odds -- the director kept shouting for quiet, and the English tourists kept merrily shouting "Cut!" and bellowing with laughter amongst themselves. I somehow went into the castle through the out door, and must have looked like a guy who just hitched and walked his way through the mountains in late September with 45 pounds on his back. As I came up the (down) stairs, one of the castle staff looked at me wide-eyed and said "Are you okay?" Unaware of my apparently disturbing demeanor, I didn't really understand the question, so she repeated it, and I assured her that everything was fine. Anyway, the castle wasn't much, but the surrounding gardens quite lovely. They've clearly had some trouble with poaching, as there are signs everywhere reminding people not to pick the flowers. Given what I saw of the English tourists, I could understand why.
The castle itself was build by John Adair, whose name engenders much cursing and spitting in County Donegal. Adair held most of the land in the northeast part of the county in the nineteenth century, and was notorious for evicting most of the families in order to import labor from Scotland. The woman at the Dongal Ancestry Center suspected that my family were probably tenant farmers under Adair, and probably relocated further south on Fanad once Adair was finally killed and the land redistributed. Like so many Irish from Fanad, they would have eventually set sail from Derry to America. She also said that there was a monument on Fanad Head to the fellows that finally killed Adair. The castle changed hands a number of times after that, including a brief stint of being occupied by the IRA. It finally was turned over to the Republic, and is public land today.
Not keen to hitch back to Letterkenny in the rain, I called a cab to pick me up at Glenveigh and take me back to the bus at Letterkenny. The driver was one Liam Gallagher, a kindred soul in both name and spirit. He told me about some Kellys in Church Hill, and also said that Church Hill and Fanad were the only two places in Donegal where the British wouldn't go. "The people there were just too bloody," he said. "Too dangerous." He also recommended a book of local history called The Other Side of Ulster, written by a schoolteacher in Tamney, where the Kellys were baptized and buried. He said it was a great source for local knowledge, if a bit hard to find. Maybe a good project for the university library back home.
I'm writing this at Mr. Chippie in Letterkenny, where the fish-and-chips are artery-bustingly bad, and the tea is surprisingly good. Much better than the coffee that I made from boiled bog water yesterday morning. (Note to self -- discard remaining bog water, and replace with something not the color of whiskey. Unless it is whiskey.)
I had intended to write last night from the mountain, but my head lamp seems to have retired. After a mediocre Tuesday night session in Letterkenny, I hitched my way out to the back side of Glenveigh Park and headed up the mountain. One fellow who gave me a lift was a stone mason who had left Donegal and grudgingly came back. He didn't think much of it -- poorest county in Ireland, no infrastructure, no public transport, no chance to develop. "They've forgotten about us", he said. "Sometimes I think it'd be better if we were part of Northern." I didn't ask if his family was Catholic or Protestant.
Up in the mountains, finding a flat spot that wasn't bog was nearly impossible. I put my foot through the sod into a knee-deep underground stream -- that boot will take a couple of days to dry. I finally set up camp next to the deer fence that surrounds the park, with an extraordinary view of Lough Inshagh and the Derryveagh Mountains. With no light, there wasn't much to do but sit and think.
St. Columbkille was born on these hills about 1500 years ago. He had a vision, which was to transcribe holy writings. Long before the monks moved inland to Kells and created the famous book there, Columbkille penned the oldest know Irish manuscripts, illuminated with ink made (mostly) from materials found locally. Not much survives of the parchments (thank the Viking raiders for that), but St. Columbkille is well-remembered, and a stone commemorates his birthplace.
I had no visions of my own, but sitting in the dark on an isolated mountain on a near-moonless night does clear the mind and infuse a certain power. And, as I write these words, perhaps I am not so unlike Columbkille, except that the power of the words is not the Lord's, but my own.
Amen.
I had some luck today, a bit of it good and a bit of it bad. I woke up, had the ridiculous artery-stuffing of the deadly Irish fry, and then went down to the Donegal ancestry center, armed with the information from my great aunt. They were able to track down the baptism record of my great-great-grandmother, enough to start doing some preliminary research. Susan, the researcher at the center, was also able to give me directions to Massmount Chapel, where my great-great-grandmother was baptized. The challenge, of course, was getting there without a car. Back at the pub, I asked the barman who might have a bicycle I could rent or borrow. He made a few phone calls and gave me some typical Irish directions (down the road, then right, then left, then down the stone drive) to a B&B that rented me a bike for the day. The chapel should have been about 16 miles away, except that I took a wrong turn and ended up in Rathmullen, then had to go back across the mountain to Kerrykeel. It turned out to be a lovely wrong turn. While I make no claims to be an accomplished cyclist and pushed the bike over some of the larger crests, the view from the mountain was beautiful, and the trip down the other side exhilarating. After a couple of hours, Massmount Chapel, perched on the edge of the lough, appeared over the hill.
My hope was to take a few photos of the chapel; I got that and a bit more. Walking around the graveyard, I found a whole plot of Kellys, including that of Daniel B., a name that I had as the brother of my great-great-grandmother. He was buried with his father and wife, neither of which were names I had known. I had hoped to speak to a priest, but instead I got the undertaker, which was even better. He took a break from grave digging to point me to some more recent Kellys in another part of the graveyard, so I photographed those stones, as well. All in all, a pretty successful visit.
An then, the bad luck. As I pedaled away from the chapel and turned around to take one last photograph, I heard the hiss of the air leaving my back tire. Fifteen miles from town with no patch kit and no pump, I was kind of stuck. I pushed the bike to the next petrol station, and put a call back to the pub, who gave me the number of the fellow from whom I had rented the bike. While waiting the little old lady at the petrol station came out with a cut of hot tea for me.
Back at the pub, the boys speculated as to which surviving Kellys might be my kin. One red-faced fellow insisted that I must be from Ramelton, related to one Patrick Kelly there. "Just look at 'im -- he's red like Pat, and he's got the same arms! I'm not bullshittin' you!" I think he probably was bullshitting me, but it made for some good pub craic, anyway.
After another fairly sleepless night, I decided to get out of Dublin to make for County Donegal. Over the course of a five hour bus ride, the city fell away into countryside, and finally into the northern mountains of Donegal. It's a touching mixture of old and new -- stone cottages sit beneath mountains ridges lined with modern windmills.
From Letterkenny, I rode the Lough Swilly bus full of uniformed school children to the tiny town of Ramelton, home to the Donegal Heritage Center and Ancestry Project. In the morning, I'll pay them a visit, armed with the family information from my great aunt, to see what they might have. The outcome of that will determine what happens next. If they can find anything interesting, I may stick around on Fanad for a day to see whatever there may be to see. If not, then it's probably off to Glenveigh for some hill walking. If my legs are still any good, I should be able to walk through Glenveigh and the Poisoned Glen in a couple of days to Dun Lewey, and from there hopefully to catch a ride to the next stop down the road.
And as I write this, into the pub pours the local boys Gaelic football club, who have apparently just won the county championship. Dozens of teens file in past the sign that says "No admittance under 16 years of age after 9pm". (The rule sheet in the hostel room says smoking is prohibited; the sheet was held down by the biggest ash tray that I've seen in a long time.)
The accent is a bit more difficult to understand up here than in Dublin, but not nearly so difficult as it is in the Western Country, where I'll go next. It's a mere warm-up for France, where my brain will be racing the entire time.
I landed in Dublin today, jetlagged as hell, having slept for about an hour on the plane. Riding the bus from the airport, I remembered the last time I made that trip in reverse, cutting short the journey to come home to find the damned cat. (I love that damned cat.) The room at the hostel wasn't ready yet, so I did what I do -- I dropped the backpack at the front desk and walked the fiddle down to Grafton Street for some busking. As it happened, the timing was about perfect -- it was Sunday afternoon, the shops were just starting to open, and I got a prime spot right across from Bewley's tea house. None too soon, either. Mere minutes after I set up, the other buskers began to arrive. Since I was already honking away on the fiddle, my neighbors were a human statue and a magician from Texas. The statue was doing James Joyce, and seemed to be making a fair bit of coin at it. Not that I did so bad, either -- 26 euro in about two hours: enough for two nights in the hostel and the bus fare from the airport.
For whatever reason, I seem to do best playing to children. Almost without exception, they're completely transfixed by the sight and sound of old-time fiddle music. Probably half of my take was from kids tugging at Mum's sleeve for some coins for the fiddle player. Even two young gypsy girls, who were out begging themselves, dropped some copper in the case. (I have a feeling I'll be seeing a lot more of the gypsies on this trip.) And maybe best of all, an old woman with three or four rotten teeth remaining leaned over my shoulder and croaked in my ear, "My father played the fiddle." She gave me an affectionate pat on the shoulder, no coins, and went on her way. It was lovely.
After two hours, the rain drove me indoors. Writing this with a cup of espresso at Bewley's, I feel the crash coming on. Time to find my way back to the hostel for some badly-needed sleep.
Susan Orlean (ed.)
Best American Essays 2005
I had a night off while in Washington, DC a couple of weeks ago. Like a salmon returning to its spawning ground, I found myself disembarking the metro at the Pentagon, with the intention of walking past my old apartment, now ten years past. Upon exiting the station, I saw nothing familiar. The events of September 11, 2001, have transformed the facade -- what was once a sidewalk in front of an oddly-shaped office building is now a closed corridor encased in bulletproof glass. I found myself not quite able to orient myself. The building itself is of course identical on all sides. Only by spotting the the Sheraton hotel at the top of the hill was I able to tell which way to walk.
But as I did walk, things became quickly more familiar. I remembered riding my skateboard along the sidewalk home from work every day. Here was where I used to hop the curb head into traffic. Here was where I wiped out at the bottom of the hill on the way to my second week at my new job, arriving at work torn and bloody, silently passing into my office without a word from my colleagues after dabbing the congealing blood from the stinging wounds with a paper towel in the bathroom. (I flex my wrist as I pass the spot; it still cracks, echoes of the impact ten years later.) The weight of those ten years is stifling as I walk, makes it hard to breathe. Ten years gone. How many of those years was I really happy? How many was I just running away?
I arrive at what used to be my front steps, and I picture Jane, smoking a cigarette and waiting for me to come home. And I picture myself, not wanting to be home, passing her by without a word, getting a beer from the fridge, and taking it upstairs to the shower, staying under the hot water much longer than needed, until the bottle was empty, resigning myself to those few minutes alone that life had seen fit to leave me before it was time to shut off the water and return to an existence that I didn't want. Twenty-one years old, no longer able to be a kid, not yet able to be an adult. Those days set me on a wrong course for years to follow, always running away from life because I had never learned to sculpt it, fleeing my reality instead of recreating it. Washington, Chicago, Pennsylvania, Stockholm, Pennsylvania again, and finally the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, where I learned that contentment was something I needed to make, not find. All those years, I was running away, but never towards. Jane pulled it neatly from the lyrics of "Spider in the Snow" -- you're afraid to not let go. I guess I knew even then that she was right, but I didn't know how to not let go. The curse of the military brat: letting go was the only thing I had ever known.
The impression that I get from Best American Essays 2005 is that essayists are gay New Yorkers obsessed with food. I think that can't possibly be right. While I'm willing to believe that a gay New Yorker is more likely to write essays than a straight farmer from Kentucky, I'm less willing to believe that it makes for a very compelling book of essays. Or maybe it's just compelling to other gay New Yorkers interested in cooking. And truth be told, they probably buy more books than the farmers in Kentucky, anyway. I guess it's a closed system.
On Saturday, I leave for six weeks in Ye Olde Countrie. I expect I'll have a few essays of my own at the end of that rainbow. Watch this space for updates...
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