OTR Dispatches - April, 2004

It is probably worth it for the smell alone: peat, clay, coal, moss. River. In Cork, where I lived seven years ago, there is also the smell of car exhaust, and the rude burnt sugar of the hops and barley in the air around the Murphy's distillery along the south branch of the River Lee. It's a smell, Ireland's smell, at least to me, that is some mixture of all these things, and I'd forgotten that I'd forgotten it until I smell it again last month. One should probably not, on the eve of one’s thirtieth birthday, return to a foreign country where one has lived at the age of twenty-two. Many things will have changed; and some will remain the same. And that is precisely the problem.

It would last only nine days. I would go with my girlfriend of seven years, call her J., when in ’96 I’d traveled alone. We’d rent a car, an electric blue VW, to be precise, where previously I’d walked (I’d walked a lot), or trained, or bussed, or remained solitary in my room. I still have hair on my head; though I’m heavier by ten pounds now. I’m broke, still. Still a writer, though I’ve written a lot since then. And a lot of what I’ve written—usually the more useless stuff—has been about Ireland.

Our first night we stay in Galway, in a hostel I’d lived in for a few weeks while looking for a room to rent in the winter of ’97. I remember it as luxurious, this hostel: I had a private room, and could write J. letters late at night while other young writers smoked and drank cheap wine and made friends with each other in the kitchen downstairs. Now, this first night back in Galway, the heater doesn’t work. The communal bathroom stalls don’t close. Two busloads of Australian teens (at least I think they’re teens) keep us up half the night with their merry friend-making. We sleep fitfully in our cold room with foam plugs in our ears.

The next morning we drive to Doolin. An American girl, a fiddle player (she’s an obstetrician now in Atlanta), had told me back in ’96 that Doolin was where you went for music. Trad music, she called it. She couldn’t believe I hadn’t been there yet, seeing as Galway was so close.

J. and I stay in a B&B in Doolin (no more hostels for us), and that first afternoon I watch through the bedroom window as a herd of cows come gamboling down a hill. I’ve never seen cows run before; I wonder if they’re ill. And two dogs too, on my side of the fence, are even more entertaining: the border collie barks and wants desperately to make a herding impression on the cows, who are no longer running now but milling, chewing, glancing perturbedly from time to time through the fence at this eager-to-please dog. The other dog, a spaniel mutt, has eyes only for the collie. He brings him a deflated spleen-shaped ball, over and over again, but the collie’s never interested. His work is the cows. And at this point J. gets out of the shower.

Nightlife in Doolin consists of trad music in two or three pubs on either side of a bridge that over-spans a creek. In one pub, where we have our dinner (shepherd’s pie), a consumptive-looking man plays a penny-whistle. We head for the other pub—and this is where the action is: young people, mostly, students and young writers (how old are they?); a few middle-aged couples on weekend romance getaways; we listen to an old white-haired man sing Arthur McBride:

Me and my cousin, one Arthur McBride
As we went a-walking down by the seaside…

I am glad I know the words; but I think Dylan sings it better (Good As I Been To You, 1992), and I tell J. so.  We leave after a pint, and the night ends disconcertingly with the discovery of a long stain in our bed.

Day Three we drive for Dingle. Like Doolin, I’ve never been here. There’s supposed to be a famous dolphin in Dingle named “Fungie,” though I’m not sure why they call him that. I suspect it’s because he’s famously fun-loving—he loves tourists! Americans, especially. If you sign on for the boat tour you’ll get to see Fungie up close, out in Dingle Bay, or you’ll get your money back, begorrah. We don’t risk it. We walk along the water beneath a wintry red sunset, calling out to the air for Fungie; but he doesn’t come.

That night we get suckered into a B&B run by one Sheila O’Hanrahan. If ever you find yourself in Dingle, don’t go there. Sheila O’Hanrahan will talk your ear off—within an inch of your wallet, the Irish will say—and before you know it you’ve spent 60 Euro for a night in a concave bed, clutching the mattress edge like a life raft to keep from toppling into the center.

“Dan O’Ryan!” she likes to say, again and again, and at breakfast the next morning: “Dan O’Ryan! A Kerry-man indeed!”

Over eggs and sausage (and black sausage, and white sausage), and bacon, and toast, we meet another guest, a photographer who says he’s from outside Providence, Rhode Island. He comes here every year, he says, to Dingle, and to Sheila O’Hanrahan’s B&B. He speaks a little Gaelic with her, for our benefit. He wears a goatee, thick glasses; shorts, though the temperature is not warm. He’s fat. Unmarried, most likely. He likes to glance at J. when he thinks she’s not looking. She asks him: “Where exactly ‘outside Providence’ are you from?”

“You’re probably thinking of Province-town,” he replies, though we’re not, and he never answers our question. It’s clear to me now he’s insane.

After breakfast J. and I walk along the bay through a field of occasional cow shit and have a meltdown about our lives, separately and together—our future primarily. The sun is brilliant. But no Fungie this morning.

After lunch we drive down into Kerry, and up into the mountains. Our moods improve because the scenery is so strange, bizarre and beautiful, at once harsh and lush, almost tropical. At sunset, the mountains turn a taciturn, smoldering orange; sheep, their asses sprayed red and blue by farmers (for the sheep’s own protection), wander along and through roadside wire fences, dawdle childishly in the narrow roadway.

The Ring of Kerry, for the uninitiated, is a roadway coiled within the Iveragh Peninsula, famous for its vistas; buses full of heavyset Midwestern Americans come barreling around the blind corners of this road, which is actually more of a squiggled loop than a majestic ring, and not much wider than your average suburban driveway in the U.S., with no shoulder at all and a precipitous drop off cliffs down onto rocky crags.

By nightfall we’ve made it to Kenmare, a “tidy-town,” the street signs proclaim, and they’re right. It’s clean, and cute. We eat in an Italian restaurant, because already we’re feeling the effects of too much Shepherd’s pie and sausage and curried chips and stout. Our lasagna of course comes with chips.

That night, in a decent bed, we dream of spices.

And in the morning we try on rings in a jewelry store on Main Street. The jeweler is an artist, from Kilkenney. He drives down here on the weekends. He can custom design one for you, says the saleslady, who may or may not be his girlfriend. (It’s unclear.) I should say J. is the one trying rings on; I watch. Though it would clean out all my savings, I find myself wanting to buy her one, a ring—the ring, I suppose—and I almost do.

It’s raining today; it’s sunny; rain, sun, rain again. We see a double rainbow and take pictures of it above an ancient Druidic stone circle.

Then south we drive to that lower finger, geographically speaking, that lesser known peninsula, the Beara. A friend back home in New York has read of a town called Allihies in the New York Times travel section. She says it’s beautiful; it’s quiet, writer-country; she would go if she could afford it, she has said. We can’t afford it either, this trip, but we’re here so we go to Allihies.

Beara turns out to be every bit as beautiful as Kerry, but somehow more forlorn, neglected, sunken and weedy on the northside, rocky and barren to the west. Across the Kenmare River, Kerry’s mountains rise up like a picture of Japan.

We stay in the only B&B in town, a few doors down from the only pub. The woman who runs the B&B is austere, to say the least, furious at someone in her life, or in her past. She’s very Irish, just like Sheila O’Hanrahan, but in an opposite way—I suppose in that West-of-Ireland way. “We heard about you through the New York Times travel section,” says J. “You must be very happy about that.”

The woman is descending the stairs ahead of us. Her hair is cut short like a boy. Mmm, she murmurs, without turning her head, and then, as if we have offended her, disappears deeper into her house, where we hear children.

In the pub that night, the bartender and his wife speak Irish to the locals. They make no eye contact with us. Shepherd’s pie.

But the cliffs at Allihies! White spume leaping! Crashing off and up the copper-colored rocks. Wind-whipping. Blue depths in the relaxing foam.

The wind nearly blows us off the cliffs.

We wonder why we have not had children yet. What exactly are we waiting for?

As we drive up a sheer cliffside above the town, rain has begun and will remain for the rest of the day. We do not think we should be driving where we are. The road is gravel now, no wider than the width of our car. Signs say beware neglected mine shafts. There are sheep droppings on the spongy earth, but no sheep.

Allihies was a copper-mining town; that’s what the mine shafts are all about, the copper-colored rock. Many of the Irish from Allihies and the Beara moved to Pennsylvania, West Virginia, for the mining work. They’re not here anymore, they’re in America. The town and the earth below it feel emptied out.

At sea level again we drive past a burnt, empty manor house, the home of a 19^th century Protestant copper-baron. The house was destroyed by Republicans in 1921 and never demolished, never rebuilt. That night, in our too-large room, between walls papered in a pale, floral-patterned pink, I want to dream of the ghosts of copper miners. But like Fungie, they don’t come.

That next night, in Union Hall, in County Cork on the more southern coast now, I tell J. we have a poltergeist in our room. I only half believe it. We’re staying at the supposedly (according to our guidebook) world-renowned “Maria’s Schoolhouse,” a hostel converted by hippies from an old one-room schoolhouse, naturally, and our shower won’t work. It goes from hot to cold of its own accord and back again. And once it’s on the water won’t go off. Hence the poltergeist. The Maria (of “Maria’s Schoolhouse”) may well be eponymous. Because no one’s around to help. No one else is staying here.

It’s the night before Halloween, and someone has hung a dummy high up from a wire across the road outside; and above his head the night sky is full of the Northern Lights. It’s like an infrared sunset, from green to red, festive, a touch ghoulish, undulating gently from horizon to horizon.

* * *

I’d have to say I’m remarkably unaffected by my trip so far, wouldn’t you? No crippling bouts of nostalgia. No clarity of perspective. Ireland seems merely familiar to me, old hat, like an old friend you reunite with and realize he’s grown boring in all that time apart. Or maybe you’re the one who’s changed? and your friend is just the same. He was always boring, perhaps—you’re just noticing it now.

And what does he think of you?

I’ve grown up, I tell myself, and J. This has been really good for me.

Until we come to Cork, Cork City to be precise, where I spent most of my year in Ireland. The beginning of that year, my first months in Ireland, my first months alone, out of school, trying to write. You never forget your first love, your first heartbreak. We take in all the sights, J. and I. And of course I know my way around so easily. All those long walks I took: the panicked awakening at dawn, at dusk, sending me out in search of calm, somewhere populous and loud and full of coffee and young waitresses and other peoples’ conversations, a camouflage from which to write another letter to J., to write poems in my precious journal, or stories, or plays. I was a figure deserving of ridicule.

Cork comes back to me now in the fragmented phrases, the dispossessed images of all those old poems and stories and plays. Swans at night glide down the black-green River Lee. The river at low tide through my narrow window on Pope’s Quay. The quayside hung with mossy slime, the rails above festooned with drunks; that drunk with the bleeding face in the doorway of the button factory in the rain at mid-day.

A church I liked to sob in. A theatre where I acted in two plays, one a comedy. That statue of Mick Collins in Fitzgerald Park where I realized, two months in, that I liked it here. I liked it here in Ireland. “What’s wrong with you?” asks J. “You’re in such an awful mood.”

I wonder which is better—better for you, I mean: to seal up your past, when choice or circumstance seal it for you first. This is what I do in my life. I let it remain undisturbed by visitation; let it fester or molder back into the earth, or blossom and ripen into something else entirely, something new and mythic and above all my own. But is it real? That’s called romance to some.

Perhaps it is right to revisit. To look back at yourself as you were then, and, perhaps, as you may be now.

But what exactly comes of the backwards look? What’s it worth?

We went a few more places after that, but this was when we both decided that next time we’d go someplace new.

Dan O'Brien is a playwright living in New York City.