Midlife Irish (8 page)

A lot of the boats that aren’t carrying tourists are carrying peat. The boats are called “hookers.” I heard the word used
by a guide, and I was, for a moment, extremely confused. I spent most of my time on the island confused. In the Aran Islands
Gaelic is the everyday language. I kept trying to overhear conversations because Irish people have the same bouncy cadence
to their voices no matter what language is spoken. I’d have to get pretty close to tell it wasn’t English.

The island is very beautiful. It doesn’t look typically “Irish” there. It also doesn’t look anything like
Man of Aran
. I started to wonder if Flaherty had faked the whole thing. Maybe
Man of Aran
was shot on the same soundstage as the faked moon landing?

On the Aran Islands the “gray rocks” have taken over, and green is a rare sight. There are a lot of ruins of ancient forts,
a few churches, and a medieval monastery. I was surprised to see cows and pigs. I was startled to see that there was a small
landing strip. Soon, I thought, I will come across a theme park.

Through body language I was able to convey to Paulette the idea that I didn’t want to stay long. I also wanted to see if I
could avoid boats for the rest of the trip (and, with luck, the rest of my life).

After getting back on land, I resisted the temptation to bend over and kiss it. We got in the Punta and drove. Our destination
was a famous Irish landmark, the Cliffs of Moher.

The ride there was pretty spectacular. A lot of Ireland’s coastline is cliffs and promontories, and this particular little
trip is a cruise right on the edge of a rocky coastline with a drop of several hundred feet. We stopped a few times and got
out of the car and looked out at some seriously mysterious stuff.

There are a lot of little islands out there. Nobody lives on
them—too rugged for even an Aran Islander. The islands are called “the Blasket.” They look like the peaks of submerged mountains
right after the Noah incident.

On our way to the Cliffs of Moher, we got sidetracked. “Sidetracked” is a strange word, but it conveys almost exactly what
most of our driving-around time was like. We might as well have driven sideways.

Asking for directions in Ireland is a remarkable activity. When we stopped to ask somebody how to get to someplace, the guy
would usually try to anticipate
why
we were going there. If we asked to go to the bathroom a rappin Irish guy might say:

“Is it urinating you’re anticipating?”

We stopped and asked an old man with a red cloth jacket directions to the Cliffs of Moher. He may have been looking after
his sheep or cows, but there was only one sheep in sight. The sheep had a dab of blue paint in his wool. (You see that a lot
in the West of Ireland. While I was in Ireland I asked three people why they color the sheep. I received three completely
different, complicated answers. Suffice it to say, the Irish color the sheep for “reasons of their own.”)

The man was very friendly. He started to tell us how to get to the Cliffs of Moher. He kept asking questions that began, “Are
you familiar with…” We would shake our heads with a vacant stare. He kept trying.

He kept mentioning a place called “the Burren.” I asked him if the Burren was good to see. I remembered it being mentioned
in one of the guidebooks.

“Oh, yes,” he said.

So we went to the Burren. It wasn’t far.

It turned out to be a very good sidetrack. The Burren is one of the oddest places I have ever seen. It’s a large (116
square miles) area of rolling limestone hills that doesn’t look like anyplace in Ireland. It really doesn’t even look like
earth. Except for a tree here and there it is absolutely nothing but flat rock as far as the eye can see.

“Burren” means “rocky land” in Gaelic. The place may have been formed out of the skeletons of animals that lived here millions
of years ago. A walk across the Burren is a very strange experience. If you ever wanted to “get away from it all,” this would
be the place. You see an occasional little plant growing out of the limestone; otherwise nothing. By “nothing,” I mean “Nothing.”
Less than Samuel Beckett’s emptiest room.

There are caves all over, but the only one we inspected was the one with the handrails installed for touring cavern fans.
They’ve built an environment-blended building around it, so today it looks like an ancient subway entrance. I didn’t go far.
One cave is as good as another.

They offer tours of the cave, the Ailween Cave, although business seemed slow on that particular day. I was not shocked. You
rarely hear, “I went to Ireland for the caves.”

There are (as in a whole lot of places in Ireland) a lot of megalithic tombs and Celtic crosses around the Burren and there
is an actual monastery, a twelfth-century one called Corcomroe. As you walk around you see the remains of little villages
that were deserted during the potato famine. If you spend enough time in the Burren you can forget what century it is. We
walked around for an hour or so, and I started to feel I was in an early scene of
Planet of the Apes: The Irish Part
.

SIX

Brave New World

Ireland is this:

• Connacht—Galway, Leitrim, Mayo, Roscommon, Sligo
  
• Leinster—Carlow, Dublin, Kildare, Kilkenny, Laois, Longford, Louth, Meath, Offaly, Westmeath, Wexford, Wicklow
  
• Munster—Clare, Cork, Kerry, Limerick, Tipperary, Waterford
  
• Ulster—Antrim, Armagh, Cavan, Donegal, Down, Fermanagh, Londonderry, Monaghan, Tyrone
  

Antrim, Armagh, Down, Fermanagh, Londonderry, and Tyrone are technically part of England, but they’re attached to the island,
so I include them. “Northern Ireland” is a really confusing concept. It’s not really “Northern Ireland”; it’s part of Northern
Ireland. At any rate, it’s a little country. I am not Daniel Boone by any means (I get lost walking in my neighborhood) and
I had all of the counties snugly in my cranium after just a few days.

Out in the West of Ireland things look pretty much the way it looks in that picture that forms in your mind when someone says
“Ireland.” There also seems to be a quality that is floating in the general atmosphere: “Irishness.”

“Irishness” is discussed as if it were an actual palpable thing. You hear people in little pubs in Galway saying things
like, “We’re losing our Irishness,” or, “He lost his Irishness.” “Irishness,” when lost, is always an occasion for sorrow.
People express fear of losing their Irishness. If you’re lucky enough to have it, you want to hang on to it.

Having observed people talking about Irishness, I draw certain conclusions:

• Irishness, when put into words, sounds poetic. It often involves sheep, heather, rainbows, stone walls, and thatch-roofed
  cottages.
  
• Irishness can be faked. Americans can’t tell fake Irishness from real Irishness, but all Irish people can. The fake Irishness
  is so obvious to them they often laugh derisively when they see it.
  
• “Irishness” is an endangered species.
  

The southwest of Ireland is a place you could stay forever. It was there that I first felt that little hand on the shoulder
telling me that even though you’ve never been here, this is the place for you. Paulette, who is 1 percent Irish, felt the
same thing. There are many startling things there.

On a cliff edge in a place called Liscannor there is a pretty spectacular tower. It’s what is left of a castle built in the
fifteenth century. It was originally built as a place to spot the enemy, who were, at that time, the Spanish. The Spanish
never showed up, but the amazing tower is still there. The rest of the castle is, as the kids say, history.

The view from the tower is beautiful. It looks out over the Atlantic Ocean. This is appropriate because, I was told, the man
who invented the submarine was from the little village of Liscannor. There is a plaque that commemorates the man. He thought
that his invention would help the United States in their fight against…guess who? (England. Shocked?)

Not far from there we saw a monastery at Dysert O’Dea. There is a wall that is decorated at the top with little carved faces.
They’ve let this one deteriorate. This isn’t surprising
when you consider just how many ancient ruins there are in Ireland.

The monastery is almost thirteen hundred years old, but the Ozymandias-like faces are still up there: an arc of ancient faces
staring at you. Almost all of them are frowning. One face looks as if he’s about to laugh. Whenever there are ten Irish faces
together there is always one wise ass.

Paulette had to make me leave. There was something in the faces that riveted me. Did the sculptor make that guy smile? Or
was it just erosion? I like to think that erosion produced the smile, like God correcting the artist’s work.

Near the Cliffs of Moher there is a little place called Lisdoonvarna. This is the place, I think, that evoked the Janeane
Garofalo movie,
The Matchmaker
. In Lisdoonvarna, the ancient elaborate mate-finding ritual is still “followed” (at least it is an excuse for a festival).
The movie left a lot to be desired, but there is a beautiful tower that looks just like the sort of tower they use in Errol
Flynn movies. Like so many other Irish towers, it looks out over the ocean. I don’t know what invader they had in mind. It
should have been used to prevent the producers of
The Matchmaker
from ever getting a foothold.

The ride to the Cliffs of Moher is really beautiful. If I had had a convertible I would have put the top down. (We would have
gotten wet, but we were beginning to accept “wet” as the usual Irish condition. You get wet, you sit in front of a turf fire,
you get dry, you go outside, you get wet. Rinse. Repeat.)

We enjoyed that beautiful ride so much that we forgot, for a second, that we were driving along on a two-lane road that was
twelve feet wide. We cruised around Liscannor Bay and, as we went along, we saw more and more signs for the Cliffs of Moher.

The Cliffs of Moher are a great natural phenomenon and, like all great American natural phenomena, it has a parking lot. We
parked at a visitors’ center and got out of the Punta, glad to get the chance to straighten our legs. I looked back at the
Punta. It looked like the kind of car twelve clowns get out of.

The cliffs are quite amazing. They go seven hundred feet straight out of the ocean, and, at every level, they are covered
with tourists. When we got there, there were at least three hundred people there. There are railings so tourists don’t fall
into the Atlantic Ocean. I asked a guy at the snack shop and he told me that, as far as he knows, only one tourist had ever
taken the big plunge, and he believed it was intentional, although he wasn’t sure.

Paulette doesn’t like heights, but she accompanied me to the highest points of the Cliffs of Moher. There is a very impressive
tower up there, built by MP Sir Cornelius O’Brian in the nineteenth century. They let you go up into the tower and the view
from up there is quite spectacular. Paulette let me know, in a subtle way, when it was time to leave the tower and its spectacular
view. She let me know by hitting me in the ribs in a Jake LaMotta manner.