At the Edge of Ireland Page 18

  And talking of the Skelligs—we shall also miss all those interludes and characters that brought so much depth, resonance, and humor to our daily adventures. For it was the Skelligs that were the key focus of our reunion with Seamus Gleason, whom we’d met in Dublin shortly after our first arrival in Ireland. He was a swarthy, bearded man somewhere “on the top side of forty—make that forty-five,” so he told us. He was also a fine raconteur with a rich brogue, and he promised to look us up when he made one of his occasional visits to the southwest. When he arrived on his first of two trips we happened to take him up to O’Neill’s in Allihies for lunch and a bit of sunshine on the pub’s outdoor tables, which crowded the roadside. By chance we were sitting next to a group of rather rowdy punkhaired youths from the north of England, and Seamus, with a sly grin, whispered to us: “Watch me stir this little lot up a bit…”

  O’Neill’s—Allihies

  He cleared his throat, winked at us, and started speaking with a distinctly bombastic bellow. “So that’s how the story of the Irish saving civilization emerged: the Irish—we Irish—saved your whole bloody world, y’know!” said Seamus with a menacing laugh, inviting rebuttals.

  There was a silence that was indeed pregnant at the punks’ table. But it was obviously one of those premature pregnancies—quickly followed by a gush of sprayed Guinness and a series of full ejaculatory exclamations.

  “You bloody what?”

  “Flippin’ stupid sod!”

  “Crawl back to y’ bog, y’old Celtic clod!” (And other random pleasantries.)

  Then silence. Until someone—presumably seeking to cast a little more fuel on this fire of furor—piped up: “Oh, well—pray, tell us more, Mr. Philosopher.”

  I was expecting Seamus to raise a two-fingered gesture of dismissal and adjourn to a friendlier environment. But he didn’t. Instead he smiled an inscrutable smile and continued. “Yes, I will. I will indeed. When you gentlemen have piped down and shown yourselves capable of listening to a little common sense and a modicum of undisputed history. Not philosophy. But fact. Granite hard facts!”

  More silence.

  “Okay,” said someone else. “Cool it, lads. Let the man have his say.”

  And his say was indeed worth saying. At least, Anne and I thought so. And the others certainly remained silent and semirespectful throughout Seamus’s intriguing discourse.

  “No one, I don’t think, would ever link the word civilization with fifth-century Ireland…,” he began.

  Nods and grunts all around.

  “But if it hadna been for our little colonies of monastic scribes inspired by our St. Patrick, carrying the Gospel of Jesus Christ to this pagan wilderness in the fifth century and beyond, it’s likely that all the thinking and writing that had been collected in Rome from their empire, the early Judeo-Christians and the Greeks and the Egyptians and the Etruscans and many other wonderful cultures—all of it would have been torched and decimated by the barbarian hordes that sacked the Roman Empire and most other parts of Europe and Asia…and all would have been lost forever.”

  Seamus paused for a long swig of his porter and then smiled slyly at his (apparently) captivated, or maybe just confused, audience. “And all because these few righteous men could write and could copy and could then start to spread all these wonderful words and thoughts back to a broken, burnt-out Europe…and you’d know the kind of place that these remarkable men lived in…? D’y’know?” (“Behind Paddy O’Shea’s Pub on Limerick Street in Dublin!” said one wise-acre, but nobody even so much as sniggered. Seamus seemed to have this rowdy bunch in his hand.) “Where they lived was places like Skellig Michael off the Iveragh Peninsula—the Ring of Kerry. Go down the road here and you’ll see the island. A terrible broken pyramid of rock twenty miles off in the Atlantic. Seven hundred feet high where they had to climb seven hundred steps to their tiny little beehive huts—their clochans—made of dry-laid stones. And there they led lives of absolute asceticism, and for most of their relatively short and hard existences, scribbled copies of these books rescued from the pillaging and plunder of the barbarians…”

  Silence. Until someone finally felt he had to challenge the adamant Seamus.

  “Clochans” on Skellig Michael

  “So, you’re saying these little guys—these monks or whatever—stuck up on this rock and other places around Ireland ‘saved civilization’?”

  “Well done!” said Seamus. “That’s precisely what I said. You’re obviously listening.”

  “And so everything we see around today—books, libraries, universities, churches…all these things—they’re here because of these scribbling guys stuck on mountaintops and whatnot?”

  “Yes—everything!” said Seamus. “Everything.”

  “Makes y’ think,” said one young man, obviously impressed by Seamus’s ideas.

  “Makes y’ thirsty too,” said another. “Whose round is it now?”

  “Saol fada chugat! Long life to you all!” said Seamus with a wide grin.

  “An’ now I suppose you’ll be expectin’ a pint too after all that history stuff,” said one of the punks with something like a smile.

  “A splendid idea indeed, my friend—Bail ó Dhia is Muir duit.”

  “An’ I bet that’s something really rude…”

  “On the contrary—I am asking God and Holy Mary to bless you for your spontaneous generosity!”

  AND THUS WISDOM AND insight is passed—or not—on your typical Friday-evening get-togethers at the local in Allihies. But Seamus had opened a little door of perception and insight in my head, and I decided to do some research of my own, starting with Thomas Cahill’s delightful book How the Irish Saved Civilization. And what I found was utterly intriguing and for the most part, reinforcing of Seamus’s basic premises. It seemed that tiny Ireland had indeed saved civilization as we know it. Cahill writes:

  Had the destruction been complete—had every library been disassembled and every book burned—we would have lost Homer and Virgil and all of classical poetry, Herodotus and Tacitus and all classical history, Demosthenes and Cicero and all of the classical orators, Plato and Aristotle and the Greek philosophers and Plotinus and Porphyry and all subsequent commentaries. We would have lost the taste and smell of twelve centuries of civilization…All of Latin and Greek literature would almost surely have vanished without the Irish, and illiterate Europe would hardly have developed its great national libraries without the example of Irish, the first vernacular language to be written down…The weight of Irish influence on the continent [of Europe] is incalculable.

  Cahill describes how, as the Irish monks and missionaries moved eastward from their lonely Eire outposts, proselytizing the Catholic faith, they also carried copies of “the great books.” In 870 Heiric of Auxerre, France, recorded that “almost all of Ireland, despising the sea, is migrating to our shores with a herd of philosophers.” Wherever they went, the Irish brought with them these books, many of them never seen in Europe for centuries…They reestablished libraries and breathed new life into the exhausted, virtually extinguished literary culture of Europe. “And that,” concludes Mr. Cahill, “is how the Irish saved civilization as we know it today.”

  WE’RE GOING TO MISS these kinds of spontaneously bizarre episodes, but God willing and fate being fortuitous—we shall return in a few weeks, once the rush and crush of summer has faded. Of course we should emphasize that our beautiful, secluded peninsula bears few of the touristic burdens and the hullabaloo of holiday hordes that descend on Killarney and the Ring of Kerry, the next peninsula north. And the one after that too, the Dingle, which has increased dramatically in popularity in the last two decades. But even here—while our roads are far too narrow to permit the scourge of bumper-to-bumper tourist buses that plague the Ring of Kerry in particular—Beara seems to be attracting more and more discerning “backroading” travelers. So—we decided to share the bounty of our peninsula with others and offered our little cottage to them for a while. So they could enj
oy the briny breezes, the infinite greens in our sheltered nook, and sunsets splashed like scarlet fire on the surrounding crags and ridges. We’ll come back when they leave—hopefully calmed and nurtured by this amazing place. Just as we have been.

  SUMMER

  The Season of Beltaine (“Bright Fire”)

  FINALLY, SUMMER SURGES IN. GREEN AS only Ireland can be. Iridescent greens that sting the eyes with their brilliance. So many greens that a painter could go mad trying to capture their permutations. And humid-hot too. Particularly in the southwest and Beara, where the Gulf Stream nurtures palms and hosts of exotic species once planted by eccentric, decadently rich “intruders.” (Lands given away to the English elite by Oliver Cromwell back in the seventeenth century are still indignantly decried by some indigenous locals.)

  In this season the sap races faster and smoother than stout and porter from the pulls in the pubs. It’s a time of increasing abundance—stacks of fresh-cut peat turf (although far less than in the past), vast catches of seafood, sweet “salt-meadow” lamb, a furious surging of vegetables “in the sod,” a surfeit of praties (potatoes), and the searing sheen of newly golden grain fields.

  By this time, the menacing midges of May are being forgotten, festivals are being organized, the Garda (police) are preparing themselves for controlling “excessive displays of exuberance,” and villages are being repainted and dolled up with hanging flower baskets for the Tidy Towns Competition. Eyeries is invariably the odds-on favorite. Allihies is pretty colorful too—particularly the bloodred walls of O’Neill’s pub (now with a fancy new restaurant upstairs)—but Eyeries has gone all-out rainbow. This tiny community seems to be determined to match the abundance of colors in the landscape all around—golden gorse, brilliant green ferns, explosions of fuchsia and honeysuckle, carpets of cornflowers, and the sprawls of moor-hugging purple heather.

  Butterflies are everywhere—Red Admirals, Tortoiseshells, Speckled Woods, and the ubiquitous (but still virginally dainty) Cabbage Whites. That beautiful blond beach of ours at Allihies entices us once again to abandon projects and productivity and go flop down by gently lapping, lolling wavelets and thank whomever we normally thank for the soothing pace of summer, the glories of golden-honey days, and the sepulchral silences of those long velvety evenings.

  Although—and we hate to break this flow of hedonistic images—summer is not always so. Our summer was punctuated with a return to England to celebrate Anne’s father’s ninety-fourth birthday. Although his health was not good, his Yorkshire humor and determination to enjoy each day was an inspiration to us all. And for those who were on Beara in the summer of 2007, we can only empathize with their perseverance through “one of the worst wet summers in living memory.” And the old Irish adage about “if you don’t like the weather here, just wait five minutes” didn’t quite reflect the reality of day after day of downpours, mud, and murk.

  But—eternally optimistic—our Beara friends assured us that next summer would be superb, and, anyway, there was still the mellow autumn to come…

  14

  Days with Carey Conrad

  CAREY CONRAD IS A GLORIOUSLY EXTROVERTED blow-in (with distinctly introvert tendencies too, but she keeps these under wraps) who brought great energy and insight to our lives on Beara. And Carey’s voice is not one that goes unnoticed in the librarylike quietude of the Internet store across the square from MacCarthy’s Bar in Castletownbere. Invariably there’s a somnolent silence in here. The owner whispers into his phone behind the counter (either conducting complex counterintelligence campaigns or plotting nefarious number-crunching business schemes—we never knew which, although his tales encompassed both possibilities). And users of the dozen or so computers gaze raptly at their screens, mesmerized by their scrolling downloads.

  But then this buoyant ball of energy rolls in, her blond hair piled up into a loose bun, her long coat flapping around her ankles like a hyperactive bat, and her face flushed with her perpetual aura of vivacious enthusiasm.

  “Hi…,” she calls out, oblivious to the owner’s intense phone conversation, and then, as heads stir and lift from flickering screens around the room, she issues another, more generally collective “Hi!” to the huddled customers. There’s a kind of grunty mumbling of responses, which seems enough to keep Carey’s smile bright and buoyant. Then she spots the two of us snuggled together in a corner, crouched over a computer and trying to frantically compose e-mails to resolve a number of issues that need to be dealt with urgently back at our home in New York.

  Why is it that traumas always seem to occur there when we’re not? At home, that is. In the USA. Why is it, for example, that our refrigerator has chosen this particular week, after over sixteen loyal years of uninterrupted service, to suddenly die and spill its lifeblood of minilakes of de-iced water and less savory fluids all over the kitchen floor. Fortunately our dear friend Celia, guardian of our domestic affairs and just about everything else during our absences, was around to do the mopping up and to add a few more unwelcome but, alas, necessary warnings about our gas stove (“I think there’s a bit of a leak there somewhere…”), our deck (“It may be just me, but I think it’s starting to look a little lopsided…”), and our car (“I tried starting it up, but it didn’t seem to want to cooperate…”). Poor Celia. She hates giving out bad news and she knows how helpless we feel three thousand miles out here in the Atlantic with normally not a care in the world and no decisions of any import to be made except which pub to grace with our lunchtime presences.

  “I know who you two are!” cried this woman as she pointed to us with the certainty of a witness at a criminal suspect lineup. We were right in the middle of deciding which domestic trauma we should attend to first, and suddenly, here was this strident lady, obviously very American in attitude and ambience, rushing toward us with an outstretched finger, determined to tell us and everyone else in the room exactly who we were and what we were doing here on Beara.

  And the odd thing was that she got most of it right. I suppose we could have done the British thing and become all huffy and puffy about such an unexpected invasion of our privacy. But she was obviously the kind of individual who wouldn’t even notice such an Anglophilic rebuff. So we laughed instead, invited her to sit down and tell us how she had managed to accumulate her remarkably accurate data.

  And that was the beginning of a most entertaining and valued friendship. Carey’s long love of Beara, her second home now for over sixteen years, and her extensive knowledge of the people here was intriguing, particularly when it encompassed reclusive celebrities who sought safe havens in and around Beara.

  Later on in our relationship she even tried to arrange interviews for us with such notable “locals” as Maureen O’Hara (star of The Quiet Man, that classic Irish film with John Wayne), who still lives up in Glengarriff; Julia Roberts; the filmmaker Neil Jordan; and a little farther beyond Bantry, Jeremy Irons in his ancient castle, which on some odd whim he painted a joyous pink. In the end, and for a bizarre range of reasons, none of the interviews materialized, but Carey’s other bulwarks of knowledge of local history, folklore, and all the rest of the Celtic-Gaelic-Gothic fantasy world here provided a sound foundation for a mutually enduring relationship.

  A couple of days after our first meeting at the Internet center, she invited us to her seashore home in Adrigole, a few miles from Beara’s infamous Hungry Hill. Over tea and homemade cookies, she regaled us with tales of how she and a friend had created this enticingly intimate and richly handcrafted retreat. Carey’s talents and enthusiasm seemed boundless. She was particularly enamored by “our wonderful local characters here—Old Peg at the store, and Jim, the shoemaker. Real Beara people.” And then she set about telling us her life story. It certainly seemed that our new friend had enjoyed a vividly kaleidoscopic kind of existence encompassing a multiself array of interests, from real estate and property refurbishment, ceramics, jewelry making, and art, to Buddhist meditation (yes, the Dzogchen Center again), spiritual healin
g, architectural design, and occasional bouts of “amateurish” (her expression) writing.

  Hungry Hill

  Rather than put her vivid life story into my own words, it’s possibly best merely to offer a partial transcript of the tape that we made of her colorful summary:

  “I was born in Ashland, Wisconsin. And I was born rear end first…I always felt that was significant, as I seem to like to look at the ending of books first and then start reading from the beginning. My mom saw her dead father the moment I was born. Must have been the drugs…Leaping ahead, I graduated from Sun Prairie High School in 1969. I decided to become an X-ray technician and studied at the University of Wisconsin and practiced at the University Hospital in Madison. I learned quickly how to deal with death, and how to live with it.

  “My husband and I got married like my mother and father did. During a war period—Vietnam—in a hurry and without really knowing one another. We were friends originally. We would have been better off if we’d stayed friends too. But then again, that’s not really true because my beautiful daughter, Melissa Marie, came from that union. She I would never give back.

  “After Brian and I got divorced, I moved to Milwaukee, Wisconsin. I went to hock my wedding ring when I met this jeweler who was selling his store and had an inventory to get rid of. I told him that maybe we could do some business together. So that’s when I started selling jewelry in bars. I’d hit nine bars a night, and soon the word spread and women would gather around me when I came into a place to see what new jewelry I had out. It was the 1980s and everyone loved flash and sparkle and bling! Lots of ba-roque ’n’ roll stuff. They called me ‘The Jewelry Lady from the East Side,’ and my following grew. An article in the Milwaukee Journal about me brought some notoriety, and soon I had a line of people waiting to see me in a little office I was renting. Word of mouth is great in Milwaukee, and a couple who acted as agents booking major acts into the city started hiring me to make jewelry thank-you gifts for the visiting stars. I was commissioned to make Eric Clapton a tiny guitar that had strings you could pluck. Also Sammy Hagar, Mario Andretti, Paul Newman, Air Supply, the Moody Blues, Cher, Gladys Knight, Lou Rawls, even Liberace, and especially Tom Jones, who I kissed onstage. I made for him a little charm of a bra-and-panties tie tack.