The Best American Essays 2013 (39 page)

That memory found me last year, as I sat outside a hotel on the Aran Islands, off the west coast of Ireland, talking to the night manager and having the first cigarette I allowed myself in a long time. For once I’d given in not out of anxiety but from sheer excellence of mood. After four days in the country, my jet lag hadn’t corrected by as much as an hour, so it was pleasant to find that the manager, Chris, made good company. Not just that, but he had keys to the bar. In fact, he was also a bartender. If any locals wandered in at 3:00
A.M
., as happened more or less nightly, Chris would open the bar and serve them. And if they caught him in the middle of a short nap on the sofa in the lobby, they knew to shake him awake. “It’s great,” he said. “It makes my night go faster.”

He was one of the most authentically Irish-seeming guys I’d ever met, apart from the lone fact of his being Ukrainian. His family left before the Orange Revolution, and now they were scattered all over. A lot of his (very good) English was perfected in Ireland: his Ukrainian accent had an Irish accent. I can’t describe it, but it suited him. He seemed to be going through life quietly, good-naturedly laughing at how charming he was. He set up two chairs in front of the hotel, with a view of the harbor and the moon, which was either full or almost full, the moon over the dark jutting silhouette of the Aran Islands, a thing I’d always hoped to see. He told highly convincing wee-hours bar stories that can’t be printed but that had a way of involving “beautiful, insane” tourist women who nearly caused him to be late for work.

A couple of older gentlemen showed up at one point, in jackets and caps. We went inside, so he could take care of them. I sat at the other end of the bar and tried to spy on their conversation a bit, but they spoke in low, grumbly tones, and the English in the western part of Ireland can be so heavily inflected with Gaelic rhythms that it’s often hard to tell it apart from the Irish language—you see tourists, having passed some natives and overheard a chance remark, turn to each other and whisper, “That’s Irish,” when what the woman said, if your ear had been given time to adjust, was something like “Don’t open the gate yet, idiot!”

Back outside, I asked Chris about the men, who they were. “Well,” he said, “they
used
to be fishermen.” But the fisheries had been declining for some time, partly due to overfishing, and “when the Tiger came”—by which he meant the Celtic Tiger, the mainly technology-fueled economic boom that began in the mid-1990s and transformed Ireland before the collapse three years ago of a catastrophic housing bubble—“a lot more tourists were coming here. So a lot of the fishermen sold their boats and bought minibuses.” It was the easiest fishing on earth: you just picked them up at the dock. But it didn’t come naturally to the men, dealing with outsiders. “These are island people,” Chris said. Often they would all but forcibly herd the dazed and newly arrived visitors onto the minibuses, drive them to a few main sites, mumble some unintelligible words, and drop them off again, demanding payment. Folks complained, but the ex-fishermen complained harder, at the bar. Many of them regret giving up their boats, Chris said, especially now that tourism, post-Tiger, has gone back to the old decent-but-sleepy levels.

The day before, on the way from the dock to the hotel, I had passed rows of these minibuses, each with its own bored-looking owner standing by the open driver’s-side door, on the way from the dock to the hotel. One man gave me the look, asking if I needed a ride, but when I said, “I’m just going to the hotel,” he said, “Aye,” and looked relieved, folding his arms back and looking off, even though it turned out that the hotel was farther than a person would want to walk with an awkward, heavy suitcase and he could easily have talked me into it. Something in him hadn’t wanted to. That something is part of what draws travelers to the Aran Islands: it takes an independent and even perverse character to live the way they do, on three spits of barren limestone in the North Atlantic, in a place where you couldn’t even grow spuds unless you created your own soil-scrum with a kind of layered-kelp composting. If they were to suddenly offer to braid your hair or be smilingly hustling you onto group tours, it would spoil the effect. You go to the Aran Islands expecting to keep a certain distance from the population. You go to observe their indifference.

There was an obvious affection in Chris’s voice as he spoke about the locals. He saw that they could be funny, but he never made fun. He didn’t sound like an outsider. “I feel Irish now,” he said. More than that, he felt like an Aran man. “Even Galway seems strange to me now when I go to the mainland,” he said. Everyone there looked to be in a hurry. “And I don’t know,” he said, “they’re just different.”

He wanted a house, was the thing; he was feeling maybe too old for roommates. And it was frustrating, he said, because there were empty houses on the islands, more than ever in fact. During the Tiger years, many people built and acquired second homes here, and since the crash plenty of these places were empty, “just standing there for years,” Chris said. He and some of the other “blow-ins” had approached certain owners and asked to be caretakers, to live there purely in exchange for upkeep. “We said, ‘We’ll sign a paper that says: “I give up all right to the house once you come back. You show up, I’m out.” Plus, your property isn’t falling apart.’” But most owners weren’t interested. They wanted what was theirs and were clinging to it. Chris looked out at the water thoughtfully, but I gathered he wasn’t too worried. His patience was right for this place. He would stay until something happened.

“Marry a girl from Galway?” I asked.

“Or not,” he said, and twinkled.

I’d landed in Dublin a few days before, not having been in Ireland, other than the airport, since living there as a twenty-year-old restaurant worker, during whatever you call the life phase in which you try to reconnect with your roots—though what ended up happening, as is common in those cases, was I had my whole idea of “roots” and “heritage” and “blood wisdom” and whatnot smacked out of me in a useful way and exposed for self-serving sentimentality. “Jesus, Johnny, you’re more Irish than I am,” said Liam, the little red-cheeked, red-haired chef for whom I chopped vegetables in a railroad kitchen in Cork, after I’d unspooled for him once more the glory of my Celtic lineage: Sullivan, Mahoney, O’Brien, Cavanaugh, Considine, my Fenian grandfather, my . . . until he began to berate me for having screwed up the tartar-sauce mixture again, for drinking seven “minerals” on the job one hungover day, or for having brazenly lied about knowing even the most basic, life-sustaining things about food preparation when he hired me.

Nobody cared about “Irish American”; nobody wanted to hear about it. Were you born here? Then you’re not Irish. I remember the first real Irish bar I ever entered, an old man gave me grief about it. I’d landed in Shannon with my friend and traveling partner Ben. We had big Barney-looking purple backpacks. We started hiking out of the airport parking lot. Ben’s backpack had a small orange foldable shovel hanging from it, of uncertain purpose. Our plan was to camp in farmers’ fields; we’d read that you could do this, and probably Ben meant to dig trenches and latrines with it. Unfortunately it looked sort of murderous—he described it as a “cacking tool”—and this made us appear, I realize now, rather unappealing to passing drivers, who might otherwise have happily picked us up. Finally a young hippie couple did. I don’t call them hippies derisively; they were real old-school flower children; the woman had beautiful gold-brown hair that should have had twigs in it. They told us that recently there had been a terrible murder in the area—a man had killed a priest, and a child? I don’t remember the details. Nobody wanted to mess with hitchhikers, much less with two carrying a poorly concealed little shovel.

Apart from those helpful hippies, hardly anyone stopped for us. We walked ourselves into blisters and cramps, but through magnificent, shining valleys, vistas of greens upon greens. Our money, which had come from selling my car, ran out so quickly that it was as if someone had put a curse on it, maybe the old Kerry woman back at the airport in New York, an impishly tiny person who told us how she’d won a great deal of dough off some airline after she fell asleep in her seat on a flight and her upper torso tilted out into the aisle and a beverage cart came along and smashed into her face. Ben and I kept re-doing the math on where the money had gone but finally just stopped talking about it.

We did go into this pub, near Killarney. Classic place, dusty, great wan light. A likely old fellow sat there, with a cane beside his stool. I was ready to get drunk with him and embrace him as my kinsman. At one point, while the man was pouring our pints, I put my hands together behind my back and wiggled around a little, stretching. I was all messed up from walking so much without any preparation and sleeping in hard places.

“Oh,
foine
,” he spat, holding his whiskey before him. “Do your exercoises.”

We told him our names. We were Irish too!

“Sullivan’s an English name,” he said, looking down. “O’Sullivan—that’s an Irish name.”

I was stunned. I told him (as was true, as if it mattered) that my great-grandfather Patrick was a stonemason in Bantry, County Cork, like his father and grandfather before him—I’d seen their illiterate
X
s on parish birth certificates—and their names were Sullivan, not O’Sullivan, and if they weren’t Irish, I don’t know who—

“I don’t know about any of that,” he said. “But Sullivan is an English name.”

We shouldered our purple packs and kept on toward County Cork. Ben had the decency never to speak of the incident.

This more recent trip was different. When I landed, the first thing I did was rent a car, a tiny violet-colored vehicle called a Micra. It was the smallest car I had ever been inside. I admired its austerity-measures economy and the fact that when I got lost, as frequently happened, I could turn it 180 degrees in about a four-foot radius, like turning yourself on a spinny ride at the fair. As I drove, I kept seeing recent-looking houses and subdivisions, many of which had empty parking lots, as in, all empty. The developments were uninhabited, and they seemed to be everywhere. The phenomenon had actually impinged on the countryside, visually. Large swaths of Ireland had turned beige.

These were the outer fringes of the notorious “ghost estates,” tens of thousands of structures, half built and abandoned, or finished but never occupied and swiftly falling apart. They had colonized the island in clusters during the Irish housing madness. One finds them especially near the entrances into cities, where they would (the thinking went) be most conspicuous and status-confirming. Or else they appeared out along the edges of smaller roads, where developers had hoped to plant new townlets (many estates were born with their own ghost pubs and ghost post offices).

In the letters sections of the local newspapers, citizens were offering modest proposals for what to do with these structures. Give them free to returning emigrants and bring the exiles home. Give them to the poor. Or else—and probably most practicable—bulldoze them back into green grass, remove them as eyesores and safety hazards.

I pulled off the road at a few points and walked around in the ghost estates. They were melancholy and menacing-feeling places—the weeds had started advancing, cracks and holes were opening in the pavement. There was a lot of mold, which couldn’t help reinforcing the fungal quality of the estates themselves. Boarded-up windows. In a lot of places the authorities were having a hard time keeping people from stealing building materials from the sites. Stealing from whom, after all? Half the developers responsible for these aborted projects had left the country after the crash. You would hear stories (the Irish relish as topics the hubris and comeuppance of their own) about onetime wheeling-dealing rural builders, having lived high on tax trickery and borrowed money, “and now they say he’s living in New Zealand, swinging a hammer like he did before they gave him all that cash!” One of the worst had supposedly gone to Jordan. Meanwhile all these estates were left behind. It had been a dream, like something in a Celtic Revival play: faeries built thousands and thousands of houses in the night. In the morning everybody was poor again, and the houses rotted away.

It was hard to see why the government would allow the ruination of so much open land, which after all is one of Ireland’s principal commodities, the “unspoiled” landscape. People go to Ireland for all sorts of reasons, but they mainly go there because it’s
pretty
, because it’s “not all built up.”

From the point of view of the rural Irish themselves, though, this can look quite different. One has to remember that the greenness of Ireland is a false greenness. Not that it isn’t green—its roadside views can still make you have to pull off and swallow one of your heart pills. It’s that the greenness doesn’t mean what it seems. It doesn’t encode a pastoral past, in other words, much less a timeless vale where wee folk trip the demesne. The countryside is not supposed to look like that, to be that empty. Ireland was at one time one of the most densely populated places in Europe. In the 1830s there were more people living there than today. What you see in the wide-open expanses the island is famous for are hundreds and hundreds of years of Irish dying and fleeing in large numbers. Famines, wars, epidemics, and a wretched postcolonial poverty drove them into the ports by the millions. It’s perhaps not strange that such a people, experiencing their first flush of disposable income, would undergo a mania of home building and land development.

In the Aran Islands, in different places including on some of the farms overlooking the ocean, there are curious stone huts, invariably described in guidebooks as “beehive-shaped.” They are made out of flat rocks piled atop one another and expertly joined (
corbeled
is the term). Anthropologists aren’t in complete agreement about what they are—much less have been the generations of pub-stool antiquarians who’ll lay a theory on you for free—but many think that early Christian monks built them. What the monks were doing on three barren slabs of limestone in the freezing sea, why they couldn’t pray somewhere near Galway, is unclear. The islands seem to have been an ancient pilgrimage site. Perhaps the huts were shelters for pilgrims. Or maybe people just used them for smoking fish. Or are they tombs? They are as mysterious as they are humble.