Midlife Irish (9 page)

When we got to the bottom we noticed several parked vans selling CDs and T-shirts. Paulette went off to the bathroom. When
she was gone I struck up a conversation with a guy in a CD van. He was about six-six with tight curly black hair. His T-shirt
said “Manhattan, The Greatest City in the World.”

I asked him all about the cliffs and his life. He was from Bunraty. He played rhythm guitar in a band. They played in bars.
I asked him a lot of questions. He answered them politely. Then he asked me a question.

“Why are you asking me all these questions?”

“I’m writing a book,” I said. “I just need the facts, sir.” I tried to sound like Jack Webb in
Dragnet
as a friendly, bantering thing. He didn’t get it.

“Do you know
Dragnet
here?”

“Sure.” A pause. “Oh, you were doing a Jack Webb thing. That’s funny.”

I saw Paulette returning from the bathroom. The wind was lifting her hair. It was now just starting to rain.

“I gotta get out of here,” I said. I shook his hand.

“There aren’t any facts in Ireland,” he said. He waved goodbye.

But there are some facts. William Faulkner said that the past wasn’t really past. There is no place on earth where Faulkner’s
statement is truer than in Ireland. But first, let’s just look at the physical place.

Ireland is an island, “John Bull’s other island.” It’s set out there apart from the rest of Europe next to that other island,
England. But Ireland is its own little, intensely green place.

The oldest definition we have for the word “Eriu,” the source of the word “Ireland,” is often translated as something like
“the most beautiful woman in the world,” which is pretty appropriate because Ireland is really good looking. If we personify
countries, and the United States is Uncle Sam, and Russia is either a bear or a rotund “Mother Russia,” Ireland is “the most
beautiful woman in the world.”

If Ireland were a woman, she would be a very good one to date. She is a knockout. The most beautiful woman in the world. She
walks down the street and breaks hearts.

Ireland is known by many names, but none of them, except “Eriu,” is a woman’s name, although sometimes, in songs, they refer
to Ireland as “she.” The country is sometimes called “The Emerald Isle,” “The Old Country,” “The Old Sod,” or “Erin.” My dad,
who referred to England only as “jolly old England,” called Ireland all of those names and a few other less pleasant ones.
But my dad never referred to it as a warm, inviting place. He often referred to it like a place he escaped from, an old woman
whose clutches he evaded.

Whatever you call it, magical land or penal colony, when
you approach the island in an airplane, or look at it from a boat far offshore, it seems like an enclosed, very separate entity,
a different world, a theme park made by God. “Mist Land.” “Planet Green.” “The Land of Saints and Scholars.” “Island of the
Religious Drinkers.” Too bad “Greenland” is taken.

Ireland’s coastline is 2,000 miles, pretty remarkable when you consider how little the country is. From the tip of Ulster
to the shore of Kerry, it’s only about 350 miles. From northwest to southwest, it’s about 200 miles. A little place, really.
A little bigger than New Jersey, smaller than Georgia.

Planet Green is a theme park with a lot of water. Eight hundred lakes. The River Shannon, its main river, is really a huge
interlocking network of rivers and lakes. So, if you add in the fact that it rains almost every day, you can safely say that
if you are in Ireland, you are close to water no matter where you are. In fact, if you are in Ireland, you are probably wet.
When people speak of the “Shannon dampness,” they are describing the place very well, and they are very close to the heart
of Ireland. The average yearly rainfall in Ireland is over thirty inches a year, and the idea of dampness comes up in countless
Irish sayings.

Irish people are wet a lot, although they, as a rule, don’t do much swimming. Ireland, for all that water, isn’t big on water
sports. Oddly, Irish people aren’t that fond of fish. I met an Irish surfer, two words that don’t seem to belong together.
I asked him how he did that, and he said, “Drunk.”

There is not a spot in Ireland more than a hundred miles to the sea, and you would have to look very hard to find a place
in Ireland ten miles from a river or a lake or a pond or a stream. Unless you stay inside all the time, it’s hard to stay
completely dry in Ireland. I took a lot of pictures when I was in Ireland, a lot of pictures of wet people.

It almost never snows there. If it does, it’s gone in an hour or two. No skiing. But lots and lots of mist. Wake up early
in
Ireland; look out the window at the green mist. It does seem like another planet.

Because of all that water, Ireland looks really, really, well, green. But there are many shades of green in Ireland. How many
shades? The standard answer is “forty.” I was told “seventy-one” by a man in glasses in a pub in Longford. I believe him.
The preciseness of “seventy-one” convinced me.

Whatever the number, the sheer
greenness
is overwhelming, and if you stare at green for a long time it begins to affect your vision.

In Ireland, there are always gray skies and gray rocks that seem to set off the green, so the landscape almost glows when
you look at a long horizon. I have lived for a long time in the rural South of America, and I have seen lots of pastures and
farms. But Ireland doesn’t look like the American South. I told a man in Ireland that Ireland looks a lot like Scotland and
he looked at me as if I was insane or just really, really stupid. Ireland or Scotland? Apples and oranges. If you can’t tell
them apart you are a sad case.

The Old Sod has a very distinctive look. The green is broken up on the ground by—always—some rocks, some gray rocks. There
are gray stones everywhere. And where there aren’t gray stones, there are gray ruins, of ancient buildings. And on the sides
of the ancient crumbling gray walls there are green ivy vines. And where there aren’t rock or ruins there are little winding
gray roads. And there always seems to be the ocean, or a stream, or a lake, or a pond, somewhere in the background to add
some hazy, vaguely mysterious blue.

I am not a poet, but when I looked at Ireland I started to have what I called “poetic thoughts.” (I kept these, largely, to
myself.)

Anyway, trust me. Ireland doesn’t look like anyplace else.

Ireland has what geography people call a temperate climate. Parts of the southwest actually have some tropical flora stuff
that wouldn’t look out of place in Florida.

The average temperature, for the whole year, in Ireland is
fifty degrees Fahrenheit, but, as I was told, “Every day in Ireland is all four seasons.” It will be freezing in the morning,
but you will sweat before the day is through. After a few days in Ireland I went with the “layers” strategy: a T-shirt, a
regular shirt, a thin sweater, a thick sweater, a coat. You get the idea. It worked pretty well. You are always putting things
on and taking them off in Ireland. You sweat and shiver three hours apart.

“Ireland is a natural simulacrum of a detox center.” I was told this by a man in a bar near Athlone. He had a huge, bulbous
nose, and it looked as if he knew what he was talking about.

Ireland was an island before Britain became an island. Because of this, there are certain plants in Ireland that do not appear
in Britain. This also accounts for certain differences in the animals found on the two islands. And, Yes! There are no snakes
in Ireland! I wasn’t able to establish whether there had ever been any there. I was told, of course, that the island was crawling
with snakes until Saint Patrick got rid of them. Scientists believe that there never were any there to start with, but I wouldn’t
necessarily buy that.

Irish people have an odd relationship with the weather. Most Americans think that a rainy day is bad, but the Irish people
I talked to actually seemed to like the rain. The best day to Irish people is a day where the rain is misting, a “grand soft
day.” You see happy faces when it’s raining in Ireland, something you would never see in, say, Philadelphia. You don’t know
what dark thoughts the Irish may be thinking, but the Irish people do smile a lot.

Almost all of the houses in the Irish countryside seem to be white. This also serves to set off the amazing glowing greenness
that surrounds everything. If you are a fat slob in Ireland, dark green is a good fashion choice (avoid white or gray at all
costs).

In fiction and movies, Ireland seems to be a hilly place. It is, but not many of the hills get very big. I was surprised to
find out that only three of Ireland’s mountains exceed three thousand feet. They aren’t big hills, but there are a lot of
them; you are never far from a hill or a mound or a small mountain, and there always seems to be one looming in the background.
It’s hard to take a picture of the Irish countryside that doesn’t have some little mountain or hill behind whatever you’re
taking a picture of.

So it’s gray and white and green. Everything else is just several different shades of green with dots of gray and white. After
a whole day of rambling around the Irish countryside, you get very used to long uninterrupted green. When you close your eyes,
it’s still green. Then you drink some Guinness. Walk outside. Close your eyes. Open them. The green doesn’t go away.

Whatever else it is, Ireland is great to look at, one of the great places in the world to go for a long bike ride. Throughout
history, God’s deal with the Irish seems to have been, “You get a really pretty country, but that’s it. You get no optional
equipment.”

The Irish people have always worked extremely hard for very little. The land is tough farming because it’s so damn rocky and
hilly. Most of the land requires a whole lot of preparation before you could even think about farming.

Irish people consider a field without any rocks to be a wonderful thing. A man can be proud of his field because it took him
countless hours to get all those rocks out of it. There is no farmland in Ireland like the great wide-open plains of the Midwest
in America. Farming Ireland has always been absolutely brutal work.

Unlike Wales and Britain and Scotland, Ireland has almost no coal or iron ore. The Industrial Revolution in Ireland was a
very quiet affair. The country does have more peat (sod that is burned for heat and not for electricity), than anyplace else
in Europe. You can always see huge fields of peat being cut in vast thin rows. The smell of burning peat instantly evokes
home for anybody who grew up in Ireland. If there is an “Irish smell,” it’s peat burning.

At one time Ireland had as much as 311,000 hectares of bogland, land you could cut up for fuel. Today these boglands are disappearing
fast. In twenty years, people told me, the bogs and the peat will be gone.

Peat fires are a big part of the “romantic” picture of Ireland’s past that movies have helped to produce, but I’m sure that
Irish people would rather have had the unromantic coal, or, better yet, oil.

But if the peat will be gone soon, no one in Ireland seems overly concerned. If you mention “the peat crisis,” you are met
with no alarm. You are told that Ireland has continually run out of things throughout history. The things it didn’t run out
of, it didn’t have. So don’t sweat it.

A woman in Cashel told me, “We’ve never had enough of anything, ever. We don’t even know what it’s like to have enough of
anything. So big deal with no peat.”

There never seems to be a “Plan B” in Ireland. The dominant attitude of the Irish people is definitely more grasshopper than
ant.

The West of Ireland is still basically a land of country people. The houses tend to be pretty far apart because most of the
people used to, or still do, have farms of one sort or another. The archetypal west Irish person’s neighbors live maybe a
half-mile away.

I think some Irish people tend to like it that way. That may have something to do with the “Cold Irish” thing. My uncle John
told me, when I was a kid, “If an Irishman is all warm and huggy, he’s drunk.”

Maybe. Other people told me that the houses are far apart so that the women won’t talk to each other all day. Both of these
theories need work.

Ireland’s geography is not complex. There are four provinces in Ireland: Leinster in the east, Munster in the southwest, Connaught
in the west, and Ulster (home of the
“troubles”) in the north. “The north” as the home of the “troubles” isn’t quite accurate. People are quick to tell you that
the northernmost point in Ireland is actually part of the republic. Long ago, in the Middle Ages, they wrote about a fifth
province in the middle, Meath or Midland, but that distinction is long gone. “There are four provinces in Ireland” is a truism.

In ancient times, the northern half of Ireland was known as Leth Cuinn (“Conn’s side”: Conn was a mythological hero). The
southern half of Ireland was known as Leth Moga (named after another mythical personage, Mug Nuadat).

(“Mug Nuadat,” by the way, sounds like a character in a James Cagney gangster movie. While I was writing this book, I stopped
and looked through cast lists of old movies to see if some Irish-American screenwriter decided to be a wise guy, but I never
found a “Mug Nuadat” in any of those Dead End Kids/Gangster movies.)

Speaking of “Mug Nuadat,” the Irish approach to names is a lot different than the American. My name, “Francis Xavier Gannon,”
passes for an “Irish name.” But a
really
Irish name is something like “Aoife Cullinane.” And Irish people pronounce a lot of names much differently than you might
think. “Kathleen” is always “Katt-lean,” for instance. You come across unpronounceable first names like “Ciaran” (“Key-er-un”),
“Aine” (“own-ya”), and “Siobahn (“shy-von”) on a regular basis. When confronted with an unpronounceable Gaelic name, I found
a simple solution. Speak fast and slur.

They’re used to a language called Celtic (KELL-TIC). I had heard it was dead but I was assured by several people in Ireland
that it is as alive as Britney Spears. It’s spoken in small areas all over the world, but in Ireland it’s still used in Donegal,
Mayo, and Galway.