The Night Swimmer (4 page)

The town of Baltimore tips a finger of land in the southwest corner of Ireland that forms the southern border to the wide rock-filled channel known as Roaringwater Bay. Baltimore is clustered along the gently curved bow of a small inlet surrounded by a sharp set of hills, more pronounced at each end, like a pair of shrugging shoulders. On the edges of Baltimore Bay are steep limestone cliffs, stretching hundreds of feet above the thrashing ocean below. A half mile inland and it is all pasture and grass, muddy roads and lopsided cattle.

Baltimore has the immediate aspect of an isolated, rugged outpost and a pedestrian, quaint, domestic town at the same time, a testament to the amount of time that people have been living and working there. We parked the van in the public lot in the tight little harbor, which consists of a set of concrete piers laid out in a rough semicircle, the northern end dominated by abandoned warehouses, an impromptu boatyard, and the Baltimore Sailing Club shed. Fred was immediately interested in the sailboats.

Takes a hardy type, Albert said, to sail Roaringwater Bay. This is a rough stretch of water.

We walked up the short hill to the strip of a dozen row-house shops centered above the harbor, three pubs, a few restaurants, and holiday accommodations. Our pub was in the middle, the concrete exterior painted a deep garnet with black shutters, a carved wooden sign, The Nightjar, arched over the threshold. The slate roof, with its attic gables, was covered in a patina of blue-green lichen.

The Nightjar had a long, low main room, with the bar along one side and a short passage directly opposite with a pair of bathrooms and a step-down into another small dining room. When we got there the main room was filled with stacked furniture and rusty kegs. The carpet in the dining room was a faded gray-green affair, torn and
stained beyond recognition from the multitude of boots and fishing rubbers and a permeating stench was squeezed from the floor with each step.

Fred had done research, consulting with pub owners and reading books about the finer points of preparing and maintaining a business like an Irish pub, and so he trotted Albert the Murphy's representative and his clipboard through the rooms, pointing out things and demanding certain repairs and changes as if he had been running a pub all his life. Fred always was good at this kind of deception.

All the dining room carpets had to go, the hardwood floors had to be rebuffed and treated, as well as the paneled walls. The main bar was still in good shape, a hulking mass of Irish maple covered in a glossy layer of heavy shellac, with an angled armrest running along the top and a metal foot pipe. All the beer lines would have to be replaced, as well as the carbon dioxide holders and primers. The kitchen was in a narrow back room with a utility sink, a squat little steel oven, and an ancient range with gas burners, crusted like a coral reef with the scars of a thousand fry-ups. Soon the kitchen was jammed with crates of bottles and paddocks of beer kegs, packages of napkins and bar straws, boxes of pint glasses and shot glasses, stacking up in the back storage area, the old walk-in freezer, as well as spilling into the main bar. Albert brought a crew in to strip the floors and plumbers were punching holes in the walls to wrench out old pipes.

That first evening I discovered that out the front windows you could see Sherkin Island a mile off to the west and the dozens of small rock islands of Roaringwater Bay. Cape Clear Island was just a smudge a few miles beyond that, only neatly visible on a clear day as the setting sun descends behind it into the ocean.

To stay out of Fred and Albert's way I spent whole days at the old Baltimore Beacon, which stands on a promontory a half mile outside of town, a whitewashed brick thimble on a cliff two hundred feet above the water. In the old days local fishermen called the beacon Lot's Wife. It seemed absurd, a candle in the wild dark, but apparently it kept ships from smashing into the rocks for a couple hundred
years. Flocks of gulls screamed and swooped, circling back to the cliff face and then suddenly congregating on the water, deep blue and flocked with foam.

*  *  *

We were temporarily bunking in the rooms above the pub, which were drafty, damp, slope-ceilinged affairs, Fred's stacks of sailing books and pub papers on every surface, books in long rows on the floor awaiting shelving, already warping in the damp, our laundry in an old tin bucket. Outside the windows the intermittent hum and beat of the harbor. In the bar Albert and Fred paced out distances and shouted into mobile phones, pints in hand. By the early afternoon the music downstairs would come on and I would go down and find Fred with the dartboard demonstrating his winning form to Albert.

I was thinking, I said, I could scout out some good spots. The islands are supposed to have the best entries. They have actual beaches.

Fred walked over and put his arms around me and gave me a series of intermittent squeezes, the air wheezing out of my lungs. He was deliriously happy.

Explore the islands, he said. Stay a few days. Come back and tell me all about it.

I wish you were coming, I said.

No, he said, you don't.

Fred knew that long-distance open-water swimming isn't something you can really do with another person. After a few minutes you are consumed with the roar and crackle of the sea, and after an hour you are swimming in the ocean of your mind, alone.

Albert had booked a room for the next six months at a bed-and-breakfast on Cape Clear Island, as a kind of bonus to use until the pub was finished and we had found proper housing. He gave me a map of the island and a ferry schedule.

Have to stay out on Cape Clear, he said, if you want to know the
real
Irish.

There were few points of entry around Baltimore unless I wanted
to go in off the docks in front of the small crowds of sullen locals waiting for the ferry. So I packed up my gear in my rubberized duffel, along with a backpack with a sweater, jeans, underwear for a week, my tourist map of the island, small laminated sea charts of Roaringwater Bay, and my hardback copy of
The Journals of John Cheever
sealed in a Ziploc bag.

Sitting on the seawall in the harbor waiting for the ferry I spotted a small dark head in the water just off the pier. A lone gray seal, with its sad dog eyes glossy and deep, quietly watching me. I walked to the end of the pier to get a closer look and it seemed unperturbed by my approach, regarding me with its unblinking eyes, then with a liquid movement it dipped its head and was gone.

*  *  *

I don't mind the term
blow-in,
Stephen shouted to me over the noise of the ferry's diesel engine. The wind brought sea spray over the gunwale and into our laps, soaking my jeans. Stephen, wrapped tight in his parka, didn't seem to notice.

However, Stephen said, I do mind the use of the word
fucking
placed before it. That's what they call you around here:
fucking blow-ins.

The ferry rocked in the choppy swells, and the other passengers, about a dozen people, most dressed in various kinds of flimsy coats and carrying satchels and boxes of groceries wrapped in plastic, huddled together at the midsection taking refuge behind the pilothouse. I could not tell if they were speaking Irish or just the gravelly, heavily inflected English of West Cork.

Stephen wore a knit cap, his round face bordered with a neatly trimmed beard. He was like a large rotund badger wrapped in human clothes.

Ah, he said, what can you do? It's a beautiful place all the same.

His accent was not Irish, rather pleasantly English. The ferry threaded its way through strands of rock and barren half islands, the green slopes of Sherkin Island ahead, Cape Clear a murky shadow beyond.

You see, Stephen continued, if you weren't actually
born
on the island, then you are a fucking blow-in. Meaning you've blown in on the winds, not a real islander. I've been here for
eighteen years
and I'm
still
a fucking blow-in.

I tried to smile, my cheeks wind-blasted and stiff.

Stephen told me he had a six-acre plot on the northeast side of the island, where he ran a small farm with his wife. A few cows, mules, and hens, nothing fancy, he said. His daughters lived on the mainland. They had come to Cape Clear Island on holiday when the girls were children, and returned many times over the years. When the girls were firmly ensconced at school, pursuing the public school fencing championships in foil and épée, Stephen and his wife purchased a small farm on the island and returned for good.

You a twitcher then? Stephen said.

Sorry?

A birder? Here for the birds?

No, I said, I'm actually looking for some good swimming spots.

Stephen looked askance at me, concerned.

Or I may just hike around.

Plenty of good walking on Clear, he said. Figured you for Irish, what with the ginger hair. You sure got the map of Ireland on you.

*  *  *

As Baltimore and Sherkin Island dropped away astern, Cape Clear loomed up in front of us, brilliantly green and black, rising out of the sea like an unhinged edge of the earth. The swells grew as we left the leeward protection of Sherkin, and at times we weaved through channels bordered by sharp chains of black rock no more than twenty feet from the side of the boat. Looking back and confronting the array of outcrops and peaks in the pitching sea, I realized that I couldn't point out the direction of mainland Ireland if my life depended upon it.

Though there were only about a dozen bodies on the boat, I didn't notice Highgate and his dog until we were nearly in the North Bay of the island. This was the first time I saw Highgate, in his yellow slicker and watch cap pulled down low over his eyes, talking to some
of the other passengers sitting in the midsection of the boat, a massive German shepherd sitting between his legs in a harness. Despite his cheerful grin and animated face, there was a somber hue about him, like he was encased in an aura of dull light. Or perhaps that is a trick of my memory, influenced by what I know about him now.

When we chugged into the North Bay of Cape Clear, another ferry was attempting to unload a backhoe on the dock. The boat captain, obscured by the murky glass of the pilothouse, was racing the engines then quickly reversing, the steel loading ramp slamming rhythmically on the concrete boat launch. The driver in the backhoe cab was looking to time the swells. A large wave retreated, drawing the boat back, and the captain gunned the engine and the boat surged forward. The loading ramp slapped down and the backhoe driver raced off the boat and onto the pier, its shovel whipping back and forth like a scorpion's tail. Just when the next swell was about to carry the boat onto the ramp the boat roared back, and in one movement spun its front around and powered out of the harbor.

That'd be Kieran Corrigan at the wheel, Stephen said. That's his backhoe, his construction site, his island.

I don't know where I'm going, I said.

Stephen pointed up the main road that led out of the harbor.

There are really only three roads, he said, and they all connect. If you keep walking you'll be bound to arrive eventually.

*  *  *

The first thing you notice about Cape Clear Island is the wind. It howls mostly from the west but changes directions constantly and never lets up for more than an instant. On Cape Clear you are always leaning into the wind. There are no discernible flying insects on the island, and the native birds tend toward small chattering things that fly low in and out of the underbrush, or large, strong-backed and wide-ranging seabirds, the kind that could carry off small pets. But as Clear is the first landfall for birds coming east over the Atlantic, you are likely to see nearly any species of bird at any time.

I walked up the quay past a few corrugated sheds and prefab
structures and an old stone building perched on the water in the east corner that was the Siopa Beag, or general store. Just up the hill the stacked stone remains of a church and a walled graveyard containing a jumble of worn and slanted tombstones. Cars in various states of decay were parked on the pier and around the harbor, some with motors running, waiting for passengers. A pub called the Five Bells stood on the hill facing the docks, a few men standing on the flagstone patio watching the harbor proceedings, pints in hand. A reedy young boy with a mound of red curls rode a bike along the top of the narrow seawall. Other than him, there was a distinct lack of young people. We were the only people there under the age of fifty.

The ferry crowd quickly dispersed, Stephen bundling off to the island cooperative store, where they sold tourist maps, books, and a paltry collection of island handicrafts, roughly knitted shawls, carved driftwood, CDs of traditional songs sung in Irish Gaelic, shell art. I found myself following Highgate up the road. Halfway up the hill from the harbor he took a detour up an extremely steep path through hip-deep weeds and brambles, walking with a deliberate step and his chin into the wind as if he was smelling his way. His German shepherd drove like a sled dog and he lurched up the hill, hanging on to the dog's harness, until he disappeared over the crest.

I passed the Corrigan construction site, piles of stone, concrete mixers, twisted nests of rebar, the backhoe already at work clawing at the ground. The driver was a vast specimen in a canvas jacket, square-jawed, his face red from wind, the levers like toothpicks in his hands. The sun was glowing low over the western hills, and all the road signs were in Irish and impossible to decipher. Albert had written down “Ard na Gaoithe” on a slip of paper and told me if I had any problems I needed only to ask for “Nora's place.”

The two harbors on the island are separated by about two hundred yards of land, referred to on the island as the Waist as it nearly bisects the island. Just past the construction site the road descended to the South Harbor, called the Ineer in Irish, an hourglass-shaped harbor with a short swatch of rocky beach and stone seawalls lining
the inner bay. I walked along the road that rims it on the eastern side, and even on a brisk September day it was extremely inviting, the water green and surprisingly smooth. The visibility was excellent, up to twenty feet at that hour, with a low particle load, small patches of seaweed and kelp. A few fishing boats rolled gently in the light swells that came through the wide harbor mouth. The eastern side of the harbor had a large stone quay built into the rising hill and a wide set of steps descending into the water, the curve of the harbor stretching out a quarter mile on both sides like encircling arms to the open sea. The sound of wind and water, the hillsides rolling in ripples of green, clean wet rocks, the ocean stretching off to the west over the bend of the blue horizon. It was just the kind of spot that I would expect to be crawling with people. But there was no one there. I sat on the wall for an hour with tears in my eyes. I couldn't have dreamed up such a place. I've often thought that a swimmer views the world as an endless succession of potential entries, and on that day the Ineer seemed to me to have been created for me alone, the entry I had been searching for my whole life.