Midlife Irish (7 page)

He reached over to one of the side mirrors and clicked it back.

“If that happens, just do this.”

He popped it back.

I would later learn that the pop-back mirrors are a very good idea if you are going to drive around in Ireland. I popped a
lot of mirrors driving in Ireland. Sometimes going by stone walls, sometimes going by cows and sheep.

“You drive on the left side of the road, so when you get to
a roundabout remember that the cars to your right have the right of way. Good luck.”

And with that, we were off.

I have never been much of a driver. I didn’t have a license until I was twenty-three, and I am not skilled in the motor arts.
Once I drove my friend Andy up to get some pizza. I had, at that time, a brand-new Toyota.

“Do you mind if I drive back?” he asked.

“No,” I said. “Are you thinking about getting one of these cars?”

“No,” he said. “I just don’t want to sit in a car that you are driving.”

That has happened to me many times since then. I have had people offer me money if they could just
“please, please, drive the goddamn car!”

So I do not inspire confidence when I am behind the wheel. That was why I was surprised when Paulette wanted me to drive in
Ireland. We drove off smiling.
What an adventure!

After about ten minutes, ten minutes of nearly hitting a person, a building, a sign, or an animal (even bets in the West of
Ireland) Paulette’s face tightened a little. At twenty minutes she had the frozen stare of Mister Sardonicus.

Driving in Ireland is problematic. The main problem is all the two-lane roads look like lane-and-a-half roads. This makes
driving in Ireland, especially in the rural west, a white-knuckle rock ’n’ roll death trip. Most of the roads would not be
able to handle John Goodman, Roger Ebert, and Marlon Brando walking along with arms linked like the Rockettes (this is, I
grant you, an alarming image in its own right).

This is the Irish driving experience in short: You step out of a pub in the afternoon. You get into your car. You drive off
through the beautiful, enchanting Irish countryside. All is well. Then you hear a voice next to you.

“Get on the left side!!!”

Then you die. At least you picked a good spot.

I found driving around in Ireland to be filled with neardeath experiences. I thought they were stimulating after the plane
ride. But, after just missing a little BMW outside Bally-vaughn, I was relieved of my driving duties.

“Let me drive!” Paulette finally screamed.

I could see that she was “concerned.” “Sure,” I said, and handed her the keys. I never felt better handing over anything.
For the rest of the time, Paulette drove. We still had near-death experiences but since I wasn’t driving I wasn’t paying that
much attention.

I had always thought that the outside scenes in movies about Ireland made the place look staggeringly beautiful, but I figured
that the director carefully set up shots to emphasize that. The truth is, if you just walk around in the West of Ireland,
everywhere you look there is a rare and beautiful view.

I am not a man who is very sensitive to that kind of thing: I walk with my head down, but it’s just impossible not to notice
how beautiful that place is. Mountains rising into the mist. Lakes and loughs seem to be placed for ultimate aesthetic effect.
As they say, if God is an artist Ireland is some of his best work.

But things seem a little altered in the West of Ireland, a little unreal. Then you walk over a hill and a hundred sheep come
walking up to you. Sheep seem to be wandering all over the place, and they never seem to be fenced in. I asked a young farmer
about it.

“Are sheep allowed to just wander around?”

“Yes,” he said, “them and the tourists.”

We started out with a plan. For months we had talked about what we were going to do, how many trips we were making. (This
part of the plan survived. We took one trip together, and I returned solo for a few weeks.) We planned this thing like they
planned D-Day. We sharpened pencils and sat around the kitchen table drinking coffee, looking at maps, writing things down,
drawing little lines, adding numbers,
and calculating distances. By the time we were ready to go we had checked everything out big-time. We knew what the average
temperature was, what the weather was likely to be. We knew where we were staying; we knew the precise exchange rate. We knew
what things are supposed to cost in Ireland (so we didn’t get cheated by any shifty Aran Island boys). We knew what we were
doing. We were as prepared as Sir Edmund Hillary heading up Mount Everest.

We were dead set against any kind of preset “tour” or “itinerary.” We had seen brochures and scoffed at their titles. “Finding
the West,” “Exploring Tipperary,” “The Hidden Wonders of Innisfree.” But we read a lot of travel guides and debated the details.

Once we got over there, however, everything changed. “Look at that,” someone would say. Or, “Let’s see what that is.” And
we would change our intricate plan. Then we started abandoning whole pieces of the plan and replacing them with spontaneous
whims. We started to do this a lot. Then we started modifying our modifications.

Then we said something that is very easy to say in Ireland. We said to hell with the plan. After only two days, the plan was
like the 1969 senior prom: a big hazy memory that you actually
try
to forget.

So we drove on, not quite senselessly, but much more randomly than we had anticipated back when we were looking at brochures
and sharpening pencils. If you accept “make it up as you go” as a sort of “antiplan,” that is the way to approach Ireland.
Ireland itself was, after all, made up as they went.

Ireland is, however, a little country, so if you spend three weeks there, you could say that, generally speaking, you’ve seen
the whole country. You wouldn’t have spent much time anywhere, but you at least would have seen every place in the country.
However, that is absolutely the worst way to see Ireland. The best way to do it involves, for many Americans, a little mindset
work, but it’s worth it.

The first step involves getting rid of almost any plan. Just imagine that you are getting into an inner tube and drifting
around a big lake. You drift around anywhere the lake happens to take you. You don’t rule anything out. You start each day
not knowing where you’re going to be sleeping that night. There is no goal, no plan. This is a dance, not a race.

So we knew we wanted to find out about my mom and dad. Except for that, we were in the lake drifting around and enjoying it,
and that was the only plan. Our neatly plotted itinerary, drafted weeks before, staying in the bottom of my suitcase.

Early in our trip we went out to the Aran Islands. We had wanted to see them since our college days when we watched
Man of Aran,
Robert Flaherty’s famous documentary. That movie left a lasting impression on Paulette and me. At the time, we were staying
in a little house out in the country outside Athens, Georgia. We were attempting to survive on the seventy-five dollars a
week I made as a security guard at Anaconda Wire & Cable Company.

That was the late hippie era, and when I worked for Anaconda, I had hair down to the middle of my back and was politically
slightly left of Marx and Engels. They would have never hired a guy with my Julia Roberts-like hair, but I “disguised” my
hair. Every afternoon before I left for work Paulette would methodically bobby-pin my flaxen locks. Then I would cover them
with a deluxe Kmart wig. I looked ridiculous. Of course I could have just gotten a haircut, but that was unthinkable for me
in those days. Cut my hair? No way, man! I’m not selling out to the military industrial complex, man! Nixon cuts his hair.

Instead I wore the ridiculous wig at work. I looked like an idiot but my political ideology was intact.

At any rate, I think we were feeling a little underprivileged at the time. We already had our first daughter, Aimee, and it
wasn’t Ritz-type living. Our car cost $250, and every time it
made a funny noise, my heart skipped a beat because I knew that my net worth was usually in the mid two figures. If the car
went, I would have to consider a career in slavery.

I remember listening to the Sinatra album
My Cole Porter
during this era and thinking,
Hmm. These songs really aren’t about the life I’m living, are they?

The house we were living in rented for sixty-five dollars a month. It wasn’t a bargain. There was a two-foot hole in the floor
in the living room. The heating was not state of the art. I remember sitting in the living room in winter and noticing that
whenever I talked, steam came out of my mouth.

Anyway, despite our financial situation, it was a lot better than living in the Aran Islands. We watched
Man of Aran
on PBS’s
Film Odyssey,
and we felt that we were living in comparative comfort. For an Aran Islander, I was a guy in a Cole Porter song fighting
vainly the old ennui.

In the film, the Aran Islanders have it very tough. There isn’t any dirt to grow potatoes, so every year they walk down to
the shore and get the dirt. They put it in buckets and carry it back. Then they dump it into the cracks between the rocks
and go back for more dirt.

This takes them a while. The film explained why they have to do this. Every year the ocean washes away all the soil, so the
next year they have to put it back. This was farming where you had to go get the dirt first.

Then we see these men who go out in these little boats, called, I think, “curraghs,” and catch sharks. These boats look very
flimsy. They catch the sharks, which look like Jaws-size sharks, for the oil, not for the meat. A great number of the men
get killed every year. But nobody complains. These are tough people.

After the film was over we cuddled together on our nine-dollar sofa. We had a two-foot hole in our living-room floor, but
we felt plenty privileged. Life, I thought, is easy on a cool seventy-five a week.

Today, tourists go out to the Aran Islands. I think kids on
MTV Ireland go there on spring break. It’s quite beautiful but still a bit scary. You can still feel the presence of all the
people who have lived and died there. Some people say Flaherty exaggerated in his film. Not by much, I think. Old Aran Islanders
talk about how tough it was back then. These young Aran Islanders don’t know how easy they have it, I was told. I knew. I
saw it on
Film Odyssey with Charles Champlin
.

I met an ex-Aran Islander in Georgia. He plays guitar at a faux-Irish pub in the Virginia Highlands area of Atlanta called
“Limerick Junction.” I asked him why he left his home.

“Are you kidding?” he asked, answering a question with a question in the classic Irish style.

The Aran that Paulette and I saw in that film has stayed in our minds. “Aran” has become for us shorthand for a truly bad
time. When things were really awful—when the car broke down and we had no money or when it snowed and everybody got stomach
flu at the same time—we could say to each other, “This is getting like Aran,” and look at each other. Or one of us might say
that a bad party was “like Aran” and be sure that one person understood. Now we were going to see the real Aran. I was almost
sad that our little Aran was coming to an end. What if Aran was nice?

We headed out to the Aran Islands on a cloudy, windy day. It wasn’t the best weather but if you wait for a sunny day in Ireland
you may have a few birthdays before you get one.

I didn’t get along well with water. I blame my dad for this. His theory of swimming education was this: Throw the kid in and
see what happens. My older brother thrived with this plan, so my dad was pretty convinced of its efficacy by the time I showed
up.

I remember my dad walking with me into the ocean. I was about five, but that day is permanently burned into the template of
my mind. He kept walking until the water was up to
my neck. The he picked me up and kept walking. When the water was up to his neck, he stopped.

“You’re not going to throw me in, are you, Dad?” I asked nervously.

“Oh, no,” he said, “I’m not going to do that.”

Then, of course, he threw me in.

Thus I was B. F. Skinnered into my lifelong fear of water. I can swim, but I dream of drowning and I can’t float on my back
because I can never “trust” the water.

So the trip out to the Aran Islands was not a lot of laughs for me. Paulette wanted to do it, so we went.

“Just like in the movies,” she said.

The Aran Islands are three little islands at the mouth of Galway Bay. They run a sort of ferry out to them (it’s a couple
of miles). The ferry is always pretty full.

We got in the ferry-type boat and headed out. Everyone seemed to be smiling. I heard people around me speaking English and
French and Spanish and German. When we got about a hundred yards from the shore a little voice in my brain started telling
me that I was about to die. I remembered that John Synge’s play
Raiders to the Sea
is set in the Aran Islands. In the play there is an old woman. Many of her sons have drowned in the past. At the beginning
of the play she has one son left. He drowns right before the curtain.

I looked over at Paulette. She was smiling like a kid at the circus. I watched nervously as we approached an island. I was
horrified when we kept going to a more distant island. Why couldn’t we take the first one, for God’s sake? One Aran Island
is as good as another, isn’t it? Give a hydrophobic guy a break!

I was very happy to get off that boat, and we stumbled out to inspect the island. I looked around. I had never heard of an
island sinking, so I felt a little better.

We had landed on Inishmore, the largest of the islands. I was surprised to see that there were people who lived there. Somehow
I had thought that everybody would have moved
(or drowned), but there were a lot of people there. Most of them are (still) involved in fishing, although, truth be told,
tourism is the main source of income there.