The caption underneath a rather nice picture of a country road: “Somewhere in County Kerry. If the author knew exactly where, he wouldn’t be lost, would he?” The opening paragraph:
“THE place was called Cronin’s Yard, and it was somewhere around here — it had to be. Off to my right, past the barbed-wire fences that bordered intense green pastures, rose the first russet foothills of Macgillycuddy’s Reeks, the highest mountain peaks in Ireland, swathed in a fog punctured in rare spots by the pale morning sun. In there — somewhere — was the Yard, supposedly the best starting point for hikers in the Reeks, and now, after four days of driving southwest from Dublin to County Kerry without a map, GPS or, really, any sense of Irish geography, I was so close. All I had to do was find it.”
The Kerry Mountain Rescue Team might have something to say about hiking without a map in the Reeks, but notwithstanding that implied fecklessness, it’s a fascinating piece. (And, to be fair, the author is trying to get lost “sort of”, and was equipped with at least some gear) The Kerouackian grandeur of his trip is also a means of revealing the tension between familiarity and isolation, or ignorance:
“… After all, this really was why I’d come to Ireland in the first place: to lose myself, over the course of a week, in a country I knew nothing about.
Or rather, to lose myself in a country so familiar to me (and, I’d argue, to anyone who grew up in the United States) that its reputation had eclipsed its reality. From St. Patrick’s Day parades to the peace process, from Guinness fetishism to the potato famine, from “Dubliners” to “The Commitments” to “Riverdance,” Irish history and culture have been such a steady backdrop that I never felt the need to think about Ireland as an actual place …”
And interestingly - perhaps unsurprisingly - he finds the Irish less garrulous and friendly than usually expected. Rather than acting the tourist, he tries being the outsider; which is a strategy that those in the know about Irish conservatism, insularity and distrust of the ‘blow-in’ would easily find fault in:
“I carried myself in an open manner. I dressed not like a tourist, but like my regular New York self, which I hoped would peg me less as an outsider than as an unusual outsider, an object of curiosity. I wasn’t expecting a hero’s welcome, just a little interest.
And then I’d walk into somewhere like the Blackwater Tavern, along the back roads of Kerry, just as the all-Ireland football finals between Cork and Down were beginning. Had I been among the roomful of locals, I would’ve wanted to know more about this odd foreigner watching the televised match with such intensity. Instead, I was the odd foreigner no one spoke to.
The worst was the night in Enniscorthy, a pretty, hilly town on the banks of the River Slaney, where I spotted on the street a bearded guy wearing a trendy straw hat. An Irish hipster! When he walked into Stamp’s pub, I followed, and found the high-ceilinged, elegant room full of people like him — which is to say, people very much like me. Yet, as I drank yet another rapturously smooth Guinness, it seemed impossible to chat up anyone, so tightly knit were these groups of cool friends. I felt lonely, and desperate, and I knew everyone could sense it.”
An interesting (and literate - see this post) insight stems from this isolation, before of course the “travel loneliness” dissipates and circumstances change:
“Often, I wondered whether I’d been misled about Ireland. This was, I’d gleaned from books and movies, a nation of loquacious gabbers, silver-tongued schmoozers, ostentatiously oratorical pub-dwellers, but were they as mythical — and dismissibly stereotypical — as leprechauns? Or was their replacement by taciturn introverts telling me something else? The FM radio D.J.’s — my most constant companions — spoke almost every day about the implosion of the Irish economy, the lack of faith in government and the increasing departure of Irish people for other lands. I seemed to have driven into a country mired in depression both financial and emotional: Beckett’s world, not Joyce’s. Even the D.J.’s pope jokes fell flat.”
In the end, he doesn’t find the Macgillicuddy’s Reeks*, but he does find entertainment, conversation, and “a lobsterman from the rugged Aran Islands whose droopy mustache made him look like the fashion photographer Terry Richardson.” As well as a bit of peace. Read it!
*a poetic result, yes, but hardly a practical one. Just buy a map!
