Jaywalking with the Irish (17 page)

Gulp. “Name rings a bell somehow.”

“They say he put up one of those stones for each of his former mistresses and wives. I think for a while he was scouting me as the sixth, but I said, ‘John, you are not going to turn me into another one of your megaliths!’”

Drive on, coachman, drive on. The road narrowed into a single
lane, with the eroded left side hugging cliffs that sank in a freefall two or three hundred feet down into the crashing Atlantic. I frantically clung to the door handle, then jammed my feet onto imaginary passenger-side brakes. All the while, Noelle blithely barreled into blind hairpin turns, talking nonstop, even though it would spell certain death if so much as a sheep materialized from the opposite direction.

Finally she stopped.

“You look a little green,” said Jamie as we climbed onto the gravel lane, the wind whistling off the ocean and burnishing the sinewy pastures and rocks of the magnificently desolate headland named, peculiarly, Bolus.

“Never felt better,” I gasped. This was partially true, because the incandescent afternoon sun threw a silver fire on the sprawling bay with its surrounding mountains, gleaming strands, and far headlands all exhaling vapors of mist. Whorls of the stuff breathed around the bony pair of islands called Scariff and Deenish; and miles out, the hulking Skellig rock, home to otherworldly monks for centuries, soared up like a hallucination. The most accomplished painter would despair of ever doing justice to such grandeur.

A single whitewashed cottage, possibly still beyond the reach of electricity, nosed up from a sheep-clotted hollow. It in itself was art, a portrait of life at its most elemental, listing in harmony with the landscape. A stringy old man appeared at its door and waved with the unhurriedness of someone tied to this place for untold generations and who likely had never wandered more than ten miles in his life. Ruined hovels lay a bit closer, the kind of dark, dirt-floored two-room dwellings where the fellow’s ancestors would have shivered through the ages past. Noelle called hello to the farmer, with whom she was doing a Kerry dance about her flirting desire to purchase these last remnants to complete the resurrection of the nearby Famine-era village.

“A lovely man,” she said. “But he’s a cute one when it comes to selling the patch.”

We walked back to her artists’ retreat, a succession of five sensitively restored stone cottages at the edge of creation, all discreetly
warmed by simple modern conveniences and bright skylights over airy studio spaces. They were stone heaps before Noelle shouldered into the place, one pile having been home to Séan Dhónail Mhuiris Ó Conail, an illiterate nineteenth-century fisherman, farmer, and famous
seanachi
, or traditional Gaelic-speaking storyteller, who spellbound listeners with his stories from a clockless world that effortlessly preserved tales passed through the centuries. One of this father-of-ten’s gems was translated and written down thus:

Improbably, another celebrated
seanachi
named Pats Ó Conaill inhabited the same settlement until the 1920s, his stories also magical. Undoubtedly not yet familiar with either fabulist, a freshly arrived, willowy German artist with mesmerizing green eyes invited us to her temporary new residence.

“It is out of dis vorld,” she sighed. “But my easel posting is the screwed up. It has not been here.”

“Just ease into things, everything in Ballinskelligs comes in its own time,” Noelle said, breezing past. After noting the neatly modern appointments in the kitchen, she led us up to the loft bedroom with its stunning vistas. One could not dispute that this charismatic woman had indeed brought replenishing
life to an ancient world, so very like the one I had sampled in Dingle with Bun, only just across the waves from where we now stood.

Noelle’s ten-times larger stone house lay a couple of miles back toward the village. Commanding sweeping views of the same dreamscape, it boasted a fifteen-foot-tall, nineteenth-century anchor resting against its front wall. The sunken foundations of some ancient dwelling on the lawn provided the setting for summer garden parties. Inside, she’d kitted out her own homey pub at the eastern end of the house. Every room was fraught with quirks, including narrow winding stone stairs suggesting passages to castle keeps. Fine paintings and sculptures nested everywhere in the front reception rooms, with graceful statues fingering towards grand portraits. A cavernous rear banquet hall boasted an enormous oaken table designed to weather heaping platters and goblets for twenty revelers at a time. Bronze candelabra hung from the cathedral-like ceiling, one end of the mead hall featuring a galley kitchen reached by an iron spiral staircase. The walls, with sconces for more candles, were done up in terracotta embossed with runic whorls and ancient Celtic gods and goddesses in relief. The scene was fit for Irish chieftains, and Noelle naturally could not resist commissioning a mural featuring herself languishing on a throne, merry-faced in medieval robes and surrounded by similarly costumed friends, among them a beaming Terry Keane, stage left.

Noelle’s house is the kind of place wherein one can imagine secret chambers behind bookcases, and intrigues playing out in the wee hours of the night. Our hostess made a point of showing us a distant guest bedroom whose door and walls were done in the kind of kaleidoscopic flourishes that ennoble classic gypsy caravans, and, sure enough, she had commissioned a nearby “traveler” to let his imagination run wild in this boudoir. Marvelous old circus artifacts and creepy masks sprung up in every corner.

We retreated to her home’s pub, which altogether redefined the notion of a “local.” While Noelle fetched a bottle of sherry from behind the mahogany bar, I eyed a collection of photographs that showed her in the full exuberance of youth, beside sleek sports cars and arm-in-arm with swell friends.

Meanwhile, she rattled on, mostly about her visions for the blossoming of the Kerry art scene. It became clear that the true purpose of our visit had been kept secret until now – it was to promote
her
quest and not mine.

“I don’t mean to interrupt,” I finally interrupted as the shadows began to darken in her quaint pub. “But we have to get back to our children soon because it’s a long drive, and I was wondering what prospects you see in my magazine idea.”

“Drive back to Cork? But that’s crazy. You must spend the night here,” she pronounced, looking slightly crestfallen as if the discussion of our project had been reserved as a highlight for the evening’s dinner party.

“That’s very kind,” I said, wavering slightly. “But we have no babysitter lined up and really must go shortly. So I just thought I’d ask about the magazine.”

“Oh yes, your magazine. Unfortunately, it’s been several years since I’ve had anything to do with publishing. I’ve left that world behind,” Noelle started hesitantly. Suddenly, an invisible gear turned. “I told you that Irish publishing is a murderous business. You wanted to deal with Cork, right? I have great time for Cork. You said something about having done up a proper business plan. Good. On the other hand, you might as well forget everything in your plan. Success isn’t about plans. It’s about one’s force of will. But the local Cork market is teensy, maybe three thousand subscribers if you’re lucky. The thing everybody starting a magazine forgets is that the editorial content is almost irrelevant. It’s about advertising, advertising, advertising. You have to hire someone who can sell advertising in their sleep.”

“That sounds good, but I was wondering . . .”

In full guru mode now, Noelle brooked no interruption. “You might have to give this person a stake in ownership, say 5 percent. No more than 10, certainly. Go for the national players, the ones with deep pockets and cachet – Guinness, Irish Distillers, Aer Lingus, maybe luxury car manufacturers, Waterford Crystal . . .”

High in the dusky sky outside, one could see a sliver of emerging moon. It would soon get interesting on those hairpin mountain
turns, especially if we were subjected to nocturnal versions of Kerry’s flying goats.

And the message was by now clear. Advertising – and more advertising. Fair enough, for this woman clearly spoke from experience, and her enormous vitality spoke for itself. “It’s been splendid, but I’m afraid we really must . . .”

“That’s mad,” the lady of the House of Imagination and Desire insisted.

The sherry was refreshed. “John O’Connor will be joining me for dinner. I’m sure he would love to meet you both,” Noelle pressed on. “He might even advertise in your magazine.”

Feet shifted, eyes darted, embarrassed thoughts swam like fish seeking cover under rocks. There was no place left to hide. “Well, I’ve met him already, actually, and once was enough.”

I said that we really must go and nudged Jamie out the door, imagining errant golf balls falling like apocalyptic hail onto the bonnet of our fleeing station wagon.

Return to beginning of chapter

The great thing about dreaming up a regional magazine is that it creates excuses for explorations without end. Cork is the largest county in Ireland, running about 110 by 60 miles at its longest and widest reaches, though about as regular in dimensions as a cloud. It has arthritic long fingers of stone probing the wild Atlantic to the west, knobby formations poking toward Kerry and Tipperary’s mountains to the north, while to the south scalloped bays and craggy promontories undulate and switch directions and moods in a slow sojourn east toward County Waterford. In short, the place is such an improbable land mass that a precisely drawn map of it looks like the work of a drunk.

West Cork alone offers a nearly inexhaustible feast for the traveler: out of sight lie hollows where potato whiskey (
poteen
– the little pot) is made; high lakes and primal Gaelic-speaking mountains; tractor-shaved farm valleys; fishing villages; holiday havens; biker paradises; hippie colonies; curious offshore islands (one of them reachable only by cable car). All of these, and more, polka dot the endlessly fascinating region. Being fairly thorough in our weekend tours of our new land, we’d about covered two-thirds of West Cork by now. But Mid-Cork, with its market town of Macroom, which is populated by Macrumpians, and its tiny overlooked encampments with names like Drohideenaclochduff and Inchigeelagh, beckoned, precisely because they were off the tourist charts.

A typical January Saturday or Sunday ran as follows: “C’mon boys, it’s time to hit the road.”

“Where are we going this time? Why don’t we just stay here? Can Connor come? Scott? Feidhlim? No? Well, I want to stay here and play. Why not? I’m not going!”

“But Mommy’s packed lunch.”

Hands on her head, Laura, a finalist at this point in the slowest- dresser-in-Ireland competition, would stare in disbelief as I loaded the car with fishing gear, bicycles, baseball mitts, skateboards, cameras, slickers, Wellington boots, and why not a sketch pad. “Laura! Would you grab the binoculars please?”

“Aren’t you forgetting the pole vaults and trampoline?” Jamie would ask.

So off we sallied for a while to the megaliths, woodland walks, and backwaters of Mid Cork, until the family had its fill there.

After a week’s pause, there dawned a troubling realization that our little ingrates knew nothing about North Cork. This seemed unforgivable, because here waited another exploration, and perhaps even a cover story for the new
Cork Magazine
.

So we set our sights on a region that boasts the gorgeous River Blackwater, running through a valley of verdure and great houses, and attracts aristocrats the world over to this day, with British toffs champions of the social set.

At the ungodly hour of noon, our daughter rubbed sleep from her eyes. “North Cork? Why?”

Hadn’t I stayed overnight, Laura, with foxhunting Anglo-Irish holdovers on a sprawling estate outside Mallow, still measuring about eight thousand acres? Hadn’t I helped them muck out their stables, because we shared a dear mutual friend? Hadn’t I savored fine whiskey at their kitchen table afterward?

“Why didn’t you ever mention this before, Dad? Why don’t you ever talk about some of the fabulous people you have met?” asked Laura, finally grasping the depths of her father’s Irish connections.

Cough. “Because they charged me for that drink.”

“You’re a regular lord of the manor,” said Laura.

Winding through the back roads outside Kanturk about an hour later, I slowed before an ivy-entangled plaque asserting that seven thousand Irishmen had died in the next field during the mother of all battles in the Williamite wars. A quick check with the mental calculator confirmed that this amounted to more fatalities than were suffered in about every other battle in Irish history combined, even including the exploits of that most supreme warrior,
Cuchulainn, hound of Ulster, who could lop off as many heads as the day is long, park his chariot, down a quaff of mead, and disembowel a few captives while he blathered around the campfire to a circle of obsequious bards.

Harris, lifting his eyes from the dementia of some electronic game, suddenly got picky.

“Wait. We just learned in school about the battle of Kilmichael. My teacher said maybe twenty-one British soldiers died there, but that this was the most important battle in the history of Ireland.”

“Right.”

“But that doesn’t make sense,” the ten-year-old said, peering at stupefying rows of cabbage without so much as a commemorative spear sticking up between their green heads.

“Well, nobody in the entire world understands the Williamite wars, and the good and bad guys are impossible to sort out, so I guess they’re easy to forget.”

The sun meandered higher for another week and at last we arrived at Firbolg, which is (very) nominally regarded as the beginning of spring in Ireland, although it is but the first day of February.

“Where are we going now?” whined Laura, as I began ferrying the Wellies, cameras, binoculars, and the rest toward the miserably claustrophobic car.

“East Cork,” I muttered with a “don’t defy me” look back over my shoulder.

And, of course, the entire family snickered.

“Dad, you’ve got to stop trying to provide for our every second over here,” said Laura.

For a man with a hurling stick, remote-controlled toy car, and skateboard under one arm, an eight-foot salmon net under the other, and a map in his mouth, this little chorus of know-it-alls took the biscuit.

At least the scoundrels climbed into their appointed seats without protest, and toned down their ridicule as the Opel, the “estate” car, for the Lord’s sake, coughed onto the open road. The first stop was Midleton, a bustling market town with decent restaurants, a splendid farmer’s market, and some very oddly named enterprises.
The sign over Wallis’ Bar, for example, said “Auctioneers, Valuers, Monumental Sculptors, Undertakers,” while at the other end of the decorous main street there was Hyde’s (“Funeral Services, Children’s Ware”). In Midleton, they can take your money coming and going. But then again, in Fermoy, a half-hour’s drive north, one can comparison shop at Jackie O’Brien’s (“Lounge Bar, Undertakers”) and idle away one’s final hours after a last supper at the local ersatz McDonald’s – Supermacs – whose sign says “100 percent Gaelic” and “
mainstir fhear mai
” (perhaps meaning “special sauce”). “Are you okay?” the clerks in these places may ask waiting customers in the customary Cork way. “Yes, thanks, I’m dead.”

Midleton, as Laura well knew, boasts another venerable Protestant secondary school, an arch rival of Bandon Grammar. The chief building there proved to be a three-story affair shored up with enough finely cut stone to fit out a castle for a British earl, though the satellite buildings are a mishmash of thrown-together cubby holes and bright new classrooms. The gentry not enjoying the same clout they once did, the place also holds forlorn, cramped dormitories that Irish kids nonetheless accept more or less cheerfully.

On the other hand, Midleton College happens to boast the only outdoor school swimming pool in Cork and expansive green playing fields dotted with interesting sculptures. These are dwarfed into inconsequence by a ring of nearby exhaust towers wafting peculiarly attention-getting fumes over the tranquil campus. Their job, I explained to the boys, is to vent the by-products of pastoral Erin’s most potent industry – distilling whiskey. Gargantuan aluminum tanks holding that stuff – Paddy’s, Power’s, Jameson’s, even Cork Gin (all owned now by the French Pernod Ricard conglomerate) – loom over the campus like a brace of Apollo moon rockets. Irish tourist brochures tout other awe-inspiring sights like the Cliffs of Moher and Giant’s Causeway, but not one of those inspires the imagination like the eighty-proof firepower arrayed beside Midleton College’s Jameson Hall of Science. “What did you study in chemistry class today, Finbarr?” asks a local father. Young eyes roll dreamily. “Cripes, dad, how could I remember, yerrah?”

Flann O’Brien had further thoughts on this subject, suggesting that his newspaper columns be printed in a special alcoholic ink, to be called Trink, in order to mesmerize the wandering populace into more attentive reading.

Drive five miles in any direction in East Cork and one encounters shocking contrasts between the garishness of modernity and the timelessness of the past. The imagination can barely square the scenes the English writer William Cobbett described two hundred years ago:

Just a couple of miles south of Midleton now lies one of the ghastly modern housing developments springing up across Ireland with the vengeance of mushrooms after an autumn rain. Invariably, they are called something like Celtic Woods, though
a prospective resident would have to execute one of Cuchulainn’s gravity-defying salmon leaps to land in the nearest copse. Every dwelling is inevitably an identical stucco and polyvinyl-chloride affair with a prissy front sitting room, a television-dominated entertainment room, and a mod-con happy kitchen in the back. Under the eaves will run the inevitable plastic dipsy-doodle molding, the notion being to add an infantile Hansel and Gretel touch of “character,” often reinforced by a few would-be Tudor boards and gaudy stained-glass Dutch tulips flowering in the front door. The tiny lawn in front of the tenth-of-an-acre lot – soon to be enchanted with insidious prefab leprechauns – will undoubtedly be dressed with a mean concrete wall, and capped by a pair of four-foot columns fronting a tiled drive, with this touch meant to suggest a great house of grandeur. The cost: a quarter of a million pounds, or about enough to buy an eighteenth-century château surrounded by olive groves in the south of France.

Prospective purchasers will not utter a word of complaint about this crass homogenization. Somehow, the mod-con Irish are strangely inured to their physical surroundings, perhaps due to a collective memory of the deprivations described by Cobbett and of the eighteenth-century days when Catholics weren’t allowed to buy property at all, and owned only 5 percent of their native land, while paying 98.5 percent of the country’s rents.

How a people with such visionary powers could be so architecturally blind nonetheless remains one of Ireland’s abiding mysteries. Despite being rooted in one of the most beautiful landscapes on earth, the Irish do not fret much about blighting jaw-dropping panoramas with phoney, slapped-together haciendas. Of course, until recently people didn’t have the money to worry much about the niceties of aesthetics, and the Irish government perniciously proffers substantial tax deductions to anyone who invests in a horrid concrete-block rental scheme by the sea.

An architect friend put it this way: “This country creates some of the most ungodly building horrors on earth, and the only way I can explain it is that people were so poor and oppressed for so long that they put all their imagination into other things – like ballads, hurling, and horse racing – because a good house was
the one thing they knew could never be theirs. Yes, we as a people therefore remain architecturally blind.”

One bitter anomaly amidst the gaudy new developments is that haunting reminders of the past will inevitably lie in the next field – because in Ireland ancient mysteries lurk everywhere. So some abomination of a faux-Mediterranean bungalow will sprout beside a four-thousand-year-old circle of standing stones. Outside Clonakilty, a come-hither hotel advertisement lists against the edge of one such mystic circle. Another unspeakably ugly development has been flung together beside one of the thousands of “mass rocks” that epitomized the oppression of yore. These were crude fieldstone altars from which priests offered the Eucharist to secret assemblies after the English, during the Penal Law period in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, bolted Papist churches shut, banned the speaking of Irish, and forbade natives from owning horses worth more than five pounds.

Incongruity is forever Ireland’s magic card. Only minutes down the road from the gleaming Celtic Woods slumbers the village of Cloyne, seemingly eternally gloaming in the mist and haunted by a vast underground cave with its only access through a wishing-glass hole in the gardens of the local big house. Cloyne’s bungalows huddle together as if praying for warmth, and the place whispers of an earlier Ireland – closed in, with no hint of the hectic pace that has taken over the remote metropolis of, say, Midleton.

The first of its resident bishops was one St. Colman, who was persuaded to give up his pagan ways by St. Brendan the Navigator, the famous sixth-century voyager who is said to have waved goodbye as he sailed across a sea strewn with flowers. In searching for the Isles of the Happy, Brendan purportedly reached Iceland and perhaps Newfoundland, then pointed his animal-skin boat back to his happier homeland. In 1976, the explorer Tim Severin successfully reenacted the Newfoundland voyage from Dingle, County Kerry, in a similar craft. Not to be outdone, in 1998 a team of Rastafarian-styled dreamers from Toronto raided their local dump for salvage timbers and discarded tarpaulins and set off for Ireland in a vessel that looked like a floating squatters’ camp. Transatlantic freighters circled in disbelief at the sight of this outlandish junkheap
bobbing its merry way toward Cork. Ireland being a place where the make-believe can easily pass for truth, the crew announced after arriving in Cork that they would soon circumnavigate the rest of the globe in a hot-air balloon constructed out of “found” scrap objects in the surrealist tradition of Marcel Duchamp.