The Field Behind The Tractor

Yesterday was my first day of work at the replacement farm I found in Donegal. After my first one cancelled, I signed on with the goat farm in County Cork, but that left me with a lot of time to fill. Soon after, I received an invitation from a couple who keep a smallholding in County Donegal, the far northwest of the country, to fill the full time I needed. I apologized to the goat farm man for being wishy-washy and signed on with the northwesterners. I arrived on Saturday afternoon, after several long hours on a bus from Dublin. Brid (pronounced “breedge”) picked me up and just as quickly dropped me at the house, as she was on her way to Belfast for a hen night. She did take me up to the little apartment I’d be staying in and introduce me to Mair (Meyer/mire), an English wwoofer who had been here a week already. Brid hurried off and I was alone in the bright, quiet room I’d have all to myself for the next three weeks.

At 5:00, Mair took me around to feed the animals. We fed some French hens, being raised for their meat; some more colorful hens, being raised for their eggs; a variety of ducks and a few dappled South African Guinea hens; Polly the very pregnant pig; and Jethro the boar, in a distant enclosure across the field. Also resident but not always on the wwoofer task schedule are Rua, a lovely red sow and the five piglets she had the night before I arrived; four or five grown goats and their four or five offspring; three lambs; some tiny baby chicks in an incubator box; seven other pigs who live in a field down the road; one cat, who is always in the house; and five dogs, who are always everywhere.

At dinner, I met Brid’s partner Conor, a mumbly but energetic fellow who grew up in Belfast at the height of the Troubles. In the kitchen hangs an evocative photo of Conor and his brother as children, standing in the rubble before a burning building. It’s striking, like a bit of photojournalism, not something you imagine your host to point out as a personal photo. I thought he seemed a little mopey until the bells of the church nearby rang and one of the dogs outside started howling in sympathy. “Listen,” Conor said, pausing his fork in the air to silence the conversation, “Hear tha’?” and cracked a lovely little smile.

A couple of hours later, Brid’s father Tom, who lives in the flat adjacent to ours, knocked on the door and offered to take the two of us for a little spin around the area. He drove us up to Bloody Foreland, so named for the red color of the rocks at sundown, not due to some historic battle, and down again, past the few shops and the pub and over to wee Bunbeg Harbor (“Innit cute?” he said.) He told us all kinds of stories--stories about the area, stories about his travels to visit friends in America and stories about his travels with them when they visited Ireland. I wished I had a microphone to record every word.

The following day, Mair and I got a lift from Conor to the trailhead to climb Mt. Errigal, the highest peak in the county at a lofty 752 meters. It looked quite high from the kitchen window, but when it only took us twelve minutes to drive to the base, I realized it was much closer than I’d thought. There wasn’t really a trail at the beginning, just little bits of well-trodden grass here and there which may have been made by human feet or maybe by sheeps’ hooves. In any case, they didn’t make a clear, continuous path, so we were pretty much just finding our way up the hill to the point where it got rockier. The approach was all marshy bog, spongy grassland with long, muddy scars running all through it where the peat had been cut for fuel. Mair was wearing rubber boots (her only other option being sandals), so she wasn’t terribly concerned about where she stepped, whether her footing was solid or would sink her six inches. But I was wearing the hiking shoes I bought new for this trip and didn’t really want to sink to my calves in mud. I was slightly alarmed to come across a foot-sized hole, deeper than I could see; Mair told me a local had warned her to be careful because you might just step in the wrong place and fall through clear to your hip. After some twenty or thirty minutes of very cautious perambulation, the peat thinned and a definite trail was visible in a steep slope of scree--the tables had turned and I was the one with appropriate footwear.

It took us about an hour and a half to clamber the five kilometers from the car park to the top, pausing here and there for photos and water breaks. The view was nice enough, but a steady brown haze prevented us from seeing the ocean a few miles away. We had a little snack and started down again, back over the sliding rocks to the green-brown expanse of peat. I felt like a timid foreigner, watching the local kids run down the hill in leaping bounds, breezing past me. Mair reached the road long before I did and waited patiently as I navigated my way back through the bog, hesitating on the edge of every muddy cut like a dog dancing along a river’s edge trying to figure out how to get across without getting in. We had planned to hitchhike, but Brid showed up just as we were about to start walking and whisked us back to the house in her SUV.

My legs were a bit sore the next morning, but not as sore as I thought they might be. Perhaps that’s because I’ve been walking several miles most days, to get where I’m going or just for the sake of getting out and about. I stretched them while I ate a leisurely breakfast and checked my e-mail. Our first task of the day was to fill in the shallow ditch around the polytunnel and tidy up the yard while Conor tilled a new bit of field for planting. Then we went in for a bit of tea, like they do here, before spending most of the rest of the day planting potatoes in the newly-turned plot below the house. It’s simple enough work, taking the sprouted potatoes from the little shed where they’ve been living, stacked in neat rows in a piece of corrugated steel, and planting them six inches deep and a foot apart. By the time we finished that up, it was time to feed the animals again, though this time we also fed Rua and the pigs across the road--two full-grown sows and five about six months old--who are so eager you have to distract them with a bucket of feed thrown on the ground while you run the other bucket to the trough in the middle of their enclosure to escape being knocked over. I watched.

Around 10:00, Conor honked the horn below our window and we jumped in to head with him down to the pub where he plays the uilleann pipes in regular Monday night sessions. That night they had a guitar, a bouzouki, a fiddle, two bodhrans, a tin whistle, and Conor on the pipes.  It was lovely stuff, but I only took the one picture. There were a lot of people there taking photos or video and I could see the players weren’t terribly pleased, so I put my camera away.

Today was similar to Monday, finishing up the potatoes, hauling wheelbarrows of manure down to the freshly-turned and -raked field and planting cabbage and sprouts to supplement the pigs’ feed in the winter. We did have one bit of excitement at the end of the day, when Brid and Conor were away and the goats came clambering across the creek below the potato field, on the opposite side of the property from where they’re meant to be. We let them graze there for a while, but once they started over into the neighbor’s yard, we had to do something. Mair got a bucket with a little feed in it to lure them into the barn until our hosts returned. We had them nearly there when the van came rolling down the driveway and Conor hopped out, cussing and fuming about the bloody stupid goats, wrangling them back through the gate to their end of the field. Brid decided it was time to stop thinking about it and sell them for sure, all but the two milkable females.

By then it was feeding time and the day was done. In the two days I’ve been here, I’ve found that although this work is much more physically demanding then the bank tellering I was doing before I left, it’s also ten times as rewarding. I feel like I’m doing something good and natural and contributing to something honest, something healthy. I don’t even mind that I won’t be here to see the crop come in, to eat the harvest I’m planting. I spoke to Conor about this after lunch today. He really gets going when he’s talking about the land, about self-sufficiency. He works odd jobs around the area but would much rather work at home, on his land and with his animals. He looked out the window at Polly in her pen and the dogs running in the yard. “We’re not meant to be in office blocks and tha’, y’know. We’re meant to be growing our food and raising animals like, d’y’know? It’s what we’ve been doin’ fer ages, like. I hate having to go and work [elsewhere], I just want to be here, doing this with the land and reading, learning about this stuff, y’know?”  He gestured to the stack of books on the coffee table, books about smallholdings and chicken coops and herbs.

At the moment, I couldn't agree more.

  

Continuing Adventures on the Emerald Isle

   
Well, compared to Wednesday’s whirlwind of activity, Thursday’s tour of Connemara, though scenic, was anticlimactic. We left late and returned early, despite being hurried through the one stop at which we could have stayed longer. Our guide was an older fellow named Joe whose sentences tended to sort of drift off and then abruptly resume, often with story-enders like, “...and.. she died.” Martin’s commentary the previous day had been clear and appropriate to the location, not too hokey, and though I imagine he’s said it a thousand times at least, it didn’t sound tired. This Joe fellow's commentary had the Canadians in the back of the coach howling like kids in the back row of a dotty English teacher’s classroom.

We headed out of Galway to the east, up into scenic Connemara, which looked just like northern Scotland: rocky brown hills dotted with sheep who graze there year-round. Joe told us how the farmers all mark their sheep with streaks of color and turn them out into the mountains. Then they all get together with their sheepdogs and collect up the flocks to be sorted by their markings and then bred, shorn or eaten. We drove past field upon field of neatly stacked peat, cut to be dried and used for heating fuel. We passed “Quiet Man Bridge,” where some pivotal scene of the John Wayne/Maureen O’Hara fill'em (it’s a two-syllable word here) was shot. Every shop had Quiet Man postcards and calendars, though I can't imagine the passage of the sixty years since its production hasn't somewhat decreased its marketability.

We stopped for lunch in the village of Leenane on Killary Harbor at the inland end of Ireland’s only fjord. Joe parked in front of a little pub and strongly discouraged us--practically forbade us, in fact--from going into the next one down, telling us the proprietor was “not a very nice man.” I got the impression it was some personal beef resulting in unwavering loyalty to the other pub.

From there, we continued on up to Kylemore Abbey. Usually when you come to Europe and visit an abbey, you are visiting the crumbling ruins of what was once an abbey. This was somewhat the opposite, an abbey founded in the former home of the very wealthy man who built it and still inhabited by a bunch of nuns and the girls who attend the fancy private school there. It is situated in a valley, on a lake with magnificent mountain views. There’s a little gothic cathedral, a mausoleum containing the remains of the original owner and his wife, and a meticulously manicured walled Victorian garden. You can only go into a few rooms of the house because most of them are still being used as abbey and school, and the ones you can go into are all chock-a-block with Victorian furnishings. With more time to stroll the garden or enjoy a leisurely cup of coffee in the Tea House, it would have been a nice enough spot, but we were given a limited amount of time to see everything. Joe told us some days it’s possible to stay longer but today, since we got a late start, we’d have to get going. So I was irritated when we returned to Galway 30 minutes early. And that’s why I am not a fan of bus tours.

The next day, I took another long walk, across the grossly polluted River Corrib (those are cans, not fish, in the picture below) to the Claddagh and up to the Catholic Cathedral. It wasn’t all filled with gold-leaf bric-a-brac, but the pomp was certainly there. It was built just 45 years ago, but seemingly made to look older, all bare stone and polished marble.

Back in town, I sorted out my transportation for the next few days, my ferries to and from Inis Mór (Inishmor) and the bus to Killarney on Monday. After a quick pizza dinner, I made my way to the King’s Head, a pub I was promised would have great music. The band was a cover band, playing Johnny Cash, Greenday, and the Strokes, as well as Steve Earle’s “Galway Girl,” which is quite popular here. They were pretty good, as generic cover bands go, but I’d been hoping for something a little more traditional. If I’d have met some Irish folks, I might have lingered, but they were all in little inebriated groups and the only person who approached me and struck up a conversation was an accountant from Washington DC who aimed to make his job sound really exciting with sentences like, “I mean some days, it’s like, I feel good, I know what’s up, like, I totally get this, but some days it’s just like, gotta go, bam bam bam, so much work to do, you know?” 
I didn’t stay long.

Saturday, I got up and showered, only to find that while I had plenty of underwear, I had all but run out of clean shirts. I was trying to make it to Killarney before having to do the washing, so I decided to check out Dunnes, the Irish department store I’d heard had rock-bottom prices.

It’s amazing. I can’t think of a comparable store in the States. It is arranged like any department store, but with uglier clothing and much lower prices. You can buy a pair of shoes for three Euro, a swimsuit for four. I got two extremely tacky screen printed t-shirts for 6 Euro. And some of the clothes there were incredible--unlike anything I’ve ever seen except in yellowed photographs from thirty or forty years ago. Garish floral prints like your grandma’s sofa and pastel shirts with “Je t’aime Paris/Cherie Amour” in scripty writing with an Eiffel Tower for the ‘a’ in ‘Paris.’ Also very common were sweatpants and shorts with the names of American universities (real or imagined) emblazoned on one hip, sometimes peculiarly abbreviated: “NY Univ.”. I am fast losing my appreciation for “ironic t-shirts,” but I like my new ones for how awful they are.

That evening when I boarded the ferry for the 45 minute ride to Inis Mór, the largest of the three sparsely populated Aran Islands southwest of Galway, I should have understood why all the locals were grouped together in the lower deck’s rear seating area and all the tourists filled the front. As soon as we left the shelter of the harbor and got up to full speed, the boat started pitching up and down, back and forth and in twenty minutes I was slouching down so as not to see the horizon line rising up and falling below the edge of the window opposite me. I still felt sick when I got off but made it up to the hostel safely enough. At reception, I was greeted by Marco, a wiry, ebullient Italian who runs the hostel more or less by himself most of the time. Up in my room, I met Christina, a photojournalism student from St. Louis who had just finished a semester abroad in Dublin. We chatted a bit about Ireland and the Irish before making it an early night.

In the morning, we joined forces, since we had similar plans on how to spend the day. We grabbed some food from the Spar, the only grocery on the island, and hired bikes from the shop on the road just below the hostel. I had long-since resigned myself to the possibility of wind and rain and spending my day reading and drinking tea in the common room, but we were blessed with a gorgeous sunny day. Not a drop of rain and hardly a cloud in the sky until late afternoon. We pedaled out along the coast road, past seals playing in the ebbing tide on one side of us and the most tightly-knitted series of dry stone walls I’ve seen yet on the other. Cows looked up to watch us go by and we passed a couple of cyclists going back the other way, but other that that we saw very few other faces until we reached the visitor center at Dun Aengus, the ancient ringed hill fort which is the island’s main tourist attraction.

Unlike the Cliffs of Moher, Dun Aengus has no barrier whatsoever between the visitor and the cliff’s edge. Granted, it isn’t 700 feet up, but it’s got to be at least 150. And it’s windy up there, with gusts that could send a person over (and occasionally do). Most visitors who actually approach the edge to look into the water do so on their bellies. We walked around there for a while until a couple of tour buses flooded the site and we decided it was time to start riding again. I’d wanted to take a more southerly route back to town which, on the small, rudimentary map I had, would take us past a couple more sights. But we must have missed the turnoff because half an hour later, we were back in Kilronan. We had a little lunch at one of the picnic tables on the hostel’s patio and soaked up the sun and the warm wind of the gulf stream.

Fed and rested, we tried to take another route to see the second fort recommended in the brochure, but there was hardly any signage and we eventually turned back because the roads we guessed were right were too rough and too steep. That afternoon, Christina took the 5:00 ferry back to the mainland and I went upstairs for a nap before dinner. When I woke up, I went downstairs to ask Marco if there was a restaurant or a pub he could recommend for dinner. I found him in the kitchen with Ted, an Australian, and another Italian, a girl whose name I never caught. When I asked him about food, he looked doubtful. “Mmmm.. No… You eat here, with us. Plenty of food. Free. Issokay. Sit.” He insisted. So I sat around talking to a German woman who was staying in my room while the others cooked.

As we sat down for our first course, a delicious pesto pasta, we were joined by three Spaniards, a young woman, her friend Saul (Sah-OOL), and his mother Maria, who spoke no English. While we ate, they busied themselves preparing their contribution, some sort of cured ham and a fancy cheese, both brought from Spain and sliced up there in the kitchen. Marco brought out some wine and a carafe of water fashioned from a 2-liter Coke bottle. With the ham and cheese course came the “Australian” contribution, Australian only in the sense that it was a mish-mash of whatever was in the kitchen, which turned out to be rice, broccoli, onions, and cream of chicken soup mix. It wasn’t bad, especially as part of a meal in true Mediterranean style, taken in several courses stretching late into the evening. For hours we talked and laughed and ate and drank.

Maria had heard there would be salsa dancing at a nearby hotel, but insisted that if we went there, everyone had to dance, no wallflowers. A couple members of the party voiced their preference for having a pint at the pub, so we walked up to Joe Watty’s, reputedly the best pub on the island. The place was packed inside and a gust of warm air hit you when you opened the door. We ordered a round and took everything out to a vacant table just outside the front door, where we could hear the singer inside (covers again, but just one guy with a guitar this time; ‘Galway Girl’ made another appearance) at a comfortable background volume while we continued our boisterous conversation. At closing time, the crowd from inside the bar poured out and a couple of haggard locals joined our group for some inebriated, confused chatter. Saul’s banter with the more grizzled, toothless local fellow was priceless.  In the wee hours, exhausted, we all piled back into the main building and into our various rooms for some much-needed rest.

In the morning, I got up and showered and packed my things before returning to the kitchen for a little breakfast of toast and coffee. I stood on the patio with my mug, watching the harbor. I dreaded my ferry coming in to unload another group of day-trippers and take me back to Galway. When I arrived, I didn’t understand how someone from a big city could choose to spend his life on a little island where life is so quiet, so slow. Marco came to Inis Mór four years ago with hardly a word of English in his head and never looked back. He visits his family in Napoli now and then, but the island captivated him and he’s become a contributing member of their tight little community. But by the time that ferry came in, I really didn’t want to leave. The hostel runs a deal where you can work a couple hours a day in exchange for a bed, with a minimum stay of one week. I’d considered it initially when planning my trip but decided I wouldn’t want to stay that long. I was wrong. I wanted nothing more. Suddenly I wondered why I had been so bent on seeing Killarney and Cashel, my next two stops. Yes, I had an exceptionally good time with the very international crowd who happened to be at the hostel that night, but I think it was more than that. Saul even tried to get me to stay, but ever the planner, I felt I had to stick to my itinerary.

I went on, south to Killarney and from there to Cashel two days later. I saw Killarney National Park and the Rock of Cashel, but it all felt kind of wrong, like I’d spent far too much time and money getting all the way down there only to be dreaming of Inis Mór. Every little town was starting to look the same. Same little butcher, same disgruntled café woman who’s had enough of tourists misunderstanding her menu, same hostel with the same wonky shower, same historically significant pile of rocks, same bus station, same everything.

From Cashel, I got on a bus back to Dublin to make the connection to my first farm, but suffered a frustrating transportation snafu and ended up staying in Dublin that night and catching a morning bus instead.
 

   Inis Mór

Westward Movement

 
My final day in Dublin was spent much like the previous three: walking around. Exploring. Most museums are closed Mondays, which I’d forgotten until Sunday at about 4:00.  When I finally got up and out of the hostel the next morning, I just took off walking again, starting with the north side, across the bridge from Trinity and up O’Connell Street, where a parade of statues commemorates the heroes of Irish independence. I ambled along the river, poking my head into little book shops, and then north and east, peering in the windows of the specialty stores that cater to Dublin’s sizable Polish population. Aside from O’Connell Street, a major shopping arterial, the area north of the Liffey is noticeably dingier. If you go even a block up from the river, the streets are grubbier, the storefronts less inviting, the activity more day-to-day and less geared for weekend visitors. All the areas that guidebooks warn women to stay away from at night--Gardiner Street, Phoenix Park--are on the north side.

Returning to the south, I finally strolled the narrow, cobbled streets of Temple Bar, a Mecca of tourist tat during the day and a Mecca of inebriation by night. Its shops are brimming with plastic trinkets and tacky Chinese-made Ireland shirts. Its pubs, old as they may be, cater so thoroughly to tourists that they feel no more genuinely Irish than the Irish pubs at home, Blarney Stone this and Tir Na Nog that. I find it unfortunate that so many visitors to this lovely city never really leave this neighborhood. But I suppose that’s true of any major city. I’m sure tourists in my hometown don’t see the same Seattle I do, just the ferry magnets and the souvenir-sized pieces of Portlock salmon, cunningly hidden in boxes which greatly exaggerate the size (and arguably the quality) of the contents.

Late in the day, at the end of my walk, I found myself at City Hall, the basement of which has been whitewashed and fitted with a relatively engaging multi-media exhibition chronicling the history of the city, from the Vikings to the Celtic Tiger. There are artifacts, swords and ceremonial garb and unearthed Viking coinage, and a series of videos which cover specific periods and events and are all incongruously narrated by Englishmen. But it was worth my 2 Euro (student price) and a decent use of my idle time. I climbed the stairs to the main entrance, where the lovingly-restored rotunda gleams above a polished marble floor.

I considered taking an afternoon bus to Galway, leaving time for the National Museum of History and Archaeology the next morning, but decided it would be best to get going. I found a bus service that runs back and forth on one route, Galway-Dublin non-stop, departing every hour most of the day, and booked the 10:15 from Georges Quay. Galway lies almost due west of Dublin, on the opposite coast, nestled along the northern edge of Galway Bay. Though it is certainly big enough to call a city, it manages to feel quite small, probably owing to its rapid growth. Thirty years ago, this was a town of 20,000--but the population has since quadrupled. Despite the recent economic troubles felt the world over, Galway’s booming tech and medical-supply industries keep it thriving.

And it may be that seaside-town feel that makes Galway so immediately welcoming. Its little center boasts a network of pedestrian-only lanes which put Dublin’s Grafton Street to shame, all dotted with brightly-colored boutique storefronts with cutesy names and carefully hand-painted signage. Of course, it also has a McDonald’s and a Domino’s and a Subway, but it can’t all be charming. I stopped in to a cathedral which I can only assume was the Protestant cathedral--it was sans-pomp, sans gold leaf bric-a-brac, sans grim Madonna and Child paintings--and spent most of my short time there looking at the local kids’ Mother’s Day art. The grotesque crayon portraits and brutally honest poetry were highlights of my day.

I returned to Kinlay House and booked coach tours for the next couple of days. I am generally not a fan of organized touring, as I like to be allowed to decide how long I spend in a particular place and not feel like I’m just being herded through the same series of photo opportunities and gift shops as everyone else. But the last time I refused to take day trips in order to avoid organized tours, I ended up spending one night here and one night there in order to see the things I wanted to see and as a consequence spent way too much time traveling between towns and booking transportation to get me from town center to monument. So this time I decided not to spend fewer than two nights anywhere and to try my best to make a base somewhere and take daytrips to minimize transportation costs and increase the number of sights I might be shuttled to by a knowledgeable local guide.

Wednesday was the Burren and the Cliffs of Moher tour, south of Galway in County Clare. I boarded a small coach with a dozen other young people, many of whom I recognized from the common rooms of the hostel, and together we wound our way through the southeastern suburbs of the city and down along the edge of the bay. Our guide, Martin, a friendly gent of 55 or 60, introduced himself and the day’s itinerary and told us he’d have to focus on the road for the next 20 minutes and then we’d turn onto a smaller road and he’d resume his narration. He also introduced the music he put on, an Irish singer-songwriter playing in a fairly traditional style. I watched the houses go by for a moment before turning my nose down into my book.

I looked up from Frank McCourt just in time to see the signs for Limerick as we turned west, following the edge of the bay. The further we drove into the countryside, the more it looked like the Ireland in my mind, the Ireland of postcards and calendars, of verdant pastures grazed by slow-moving cows and their offspring and hemmed in by dry stone walls. Zipping along the N67 we passed a school where children in matching sweaters and clean white collars ran and jumped rope in the yard. Under blue skies and great billowy clouds, donkeys lazed in the sun in front of whitewashed thatch-roof houses and crumbling stone cottages.

We rounded a corner and before us rose the Burren, a broad area just across the county line made up of huge hills of limestone, a karst area long-since exposed by millions of years of sea-floor uplift followed by glacial sculpting and centuries of wind and water. The glaciers that scraped across this landscape left the same sort of “erratics” as we have in the Pacific Northwest, the boulders that the ice picked up elsewhere and deposited in otherwise flat terrain. The little bus clattered up into the hills, providing a view back across the bay to Galway City and the countryside through which we’d just driven. Up in the rocky hills, there was a little grass and some little pink alpine flowers, but in the valley below, it was all lush grass and bright yellow gorse. We stopped in the town of Doolin for lunch, a lovely chowder full of seafood collected from the bay right across the road.

Ten minutes more brought us to the famous Cliffs of Moher. It’s easy to see why they are so popular, both with tourists and with filmmakers (Cliffs of Insanity, anyone?). The official pathway is pretty short, only offering a full cliff view from the northern end and hence lit only from behind at midday. I followed the path to its southern end, where the four-to-five-foot wall curves around and ends and two large signs on the other side warn of private property in several languages. A well-worn path continues between the signs and I could see dozens of people beyond, walking on out of view or picnicking in the grassy patches. I hesitated a moment but soon clambered over the low point in the wall where I saw people coming back the other way. My disobedience of posted ordinances was rewarded with a long sunny walk along the cliff tops and stunning views from the south. At times, the path came dangerously close to the edge, within a few feet, and I took my time. When it was that close, a second path ran in the space between enormous upright stones and the barbed-wire fence, both probably put in place by the property owner to keep his livestock from stumbling off the edge. At the cliff tops both north and south, there were herds of scruffy cows grazing and looking sideways for anyone coming too close. You’d think with the constant flow of people, they’d be used to it, but they were quite alert. All in all, I greatly enjoyed my visit to the Cliffs. The visitor center, which I didn’t get a chance to explore, is tastefully set into the hill below the path, so unobtrusive you might not notice it there if it didn’t face the carpark.

Our next stop was Poulnabrone Portal Tomb, a small dolmen (as dolmens go) with a capstone of about 5000 tons. It was interesting and all, but I found I was far more intrigued by the surrounding landscape, as this was my first chance to get out of the coach and walk around on the moonscape of limestone. The surface of the Burren is composed of a series of clints and grykes, flat or pocketed sections of limestone and the deep, water-carved crevices which created them. The grykes (also spelled with an i) can be quite deep, up to several feet, and are home to a surprising variety of plant life. A couple of years ago, while preparing for my last trip, I checked out all the DVDs I could from the library about Britain and Ireland. Though I didn’t make it to the Burren on that trip, I remembered a Rick Steves bit about it where he visited with a botanist or a geologist or some such expert who told him about all the arctic, alpine and Mediterranean flora that find a home in the limestone. It’s quite porous and also holds heat much better than other types of stone. That, combined with the warming air of the gulf stream, makes it an ideal habitat for some flowers originally from warmer climes, their seeds brought here in glacial deposits or on the wind.

Our final stop was at the underwhelming Aillwee Caves, the ½ kilometer tour of which they’re only able to stretch to 35 minutes by moving and speaking very slowly. When we left the caves, Martin popped out the Dubliners CD we’d been listening to and announced that this next one is the new album from the first artist we’d heard, the lady folksinger. I looked out the window as we made our way down out of the hills and thought back on my day. I was just wondering what my family at home were up to while I was out doing this and what song should come on but "River" by Bill Staines, as sung by Lady Irish.*  I nearly cried. A great wave of nostalgia and love of home and family welled up in my chest and in my throat and I couldn’t help but smile, turning my wet eyes west, across the bay to the Aran Islands, the only land between this coastline and North America.

Some day when the flowers are blooming still

Some day when the grass is still green

My rolling waters will ‘round me bend

And flow into the open sea

I sat there listening, marveling that I may be the only person in the entire country who would react to that song in that way, when what should come on two tracks later but "Field Behind The Plow". What a way to end my day.

* For those unfamiliar: I grew up listening to Bill Staines and Stan Rogers ("Field Behind the Plow"). Their music is some of the first I can remember hearing as a child, at home, on camping trips and driving to visit family in Oregon. "River" was the first song I learned to play on the guitar, when I was about 11.

Liftoff!

 
The night before my departure, I finished packing around midnight. I was exhausted but I couldn’t sleep; I probably got about three hours altogether. Then it was up at 5:00 and off to the airport at a quarter to six. Got through security with no fuss and had some coffee and a bagel while I waited.

Near the end of my first flight, I started feeling nauseous. Since I’ve never had any trouble with motion- or air-sickness, I wrote it off as hunger. So I got some water and some ginger ale when the little cart came bumping down the aisle and started thinking about what I might find to eat at the airport in Philadelphia during my four-and-a-half-hour layover. But when we started our descent, it got worse. By the time we touched down, I was sure I was going to need the little bag poking out of the seat pocket in front of me. As we taxied to the gate, it was all I could do not to throw up. The woman to my right eyed me nervously when I clamped my hand over my mouth. I tried to distract myself with bland, boring thoughts in hopes that they would be like mental saltines and calm my stomach. It worked well enough that I managed to keep it all down, but the first thing I did after disembarking was buy some Dramamine.

Had a little lunch and went to sit at my gate for the next few hours. The Dramamine labeling warned of “marked drowsiness” as a side effect and I didn’t want to take it if it was going to cause me to fall asleep there in the terminal. I was already pretty markedly drowsy from too little sleep and feeling ill earlier, and kind of wanted to save up all that tired and just sleep on the plane to minimize my jetlag. So I checked my e-mail and hummed a little lullaby for Eyjafjallajokull, the Icelandic volcano that has been wreaking havoc on European air travel recently. If it would just rest a bit, I wouldn’t be stuck in Philly.

I like to think it worked. We boarded on time and shortly after liftoff were greeted from the cockpit with an announcement that the flight would be a little longer than scheduled due to the volcano’s ash cloud shifting, forcing us to fly a more southerly route than usual. As I had no connection to miss in Dublin, I was happy to have the extra time to sleep. I chewed up a couple of chalky, orange-flavored Dramamine tablets but managed to stay awake long enough to eat. About an hour into the flight, we were served a little dinner, some unsurprisingly mediocre chicken accompanied by half an ounce of lettuce (with two tablespoons of dressing on the side) and a small field stone masquerading as a multi-grain dinner roll. Got about six hours of sleep, arriving in Dublin shortly before 10am, more than an hour later than scheduled. The man at passport control was skeptical when I told him I’d be in the country for two and a half months but had no intention of earning any wages. When asked what I’d be doing all that time, I said, “Vacationing. Farming.” He looked at me. “Fairmin‘? What kind of fairmin‘?” “Vegetables, animals, whatever needs doing.” “And why would you do that, work for free on someone’s farm? What do you get out of it, besides the experience?” I told him it was in exchange for room and board and he asked if I knew anyone else who had done this. I assured him it was part of a large organization, Willing Workers on Organic Farms (alternately Worldwide Opportunities on Organic Farms) and that I’m really only in Ireland as a stopover on my way to Nepal to volunteer in an orphanage. He shook his head a little as he stamped my passport with a 90-day entry stamp and said, “Ye’re wonderful people. Enjoy yer stay.”

Once in town, I left my larger bag in the luggage room at the hostel and took a brisk walk around the neighborhood in an attempt to wake up a bit and burn time until 2:00 check-in. I was trying so hard not to sleep at all, to just push through that first day and get on Dublin time, but once I’d settled into my room, I couldn’t resist allowing myself a one-hour nap, followed by another long walk, west along the quays in the late-afternoon sun and back down Dame St. to the hostel for supper.

The next day, I spent a long time wandering around Merrion Square and down through Georgian Dublin, with its tidy frontages, street after street of light brown brick with white trim and brightly colored doors. Many of them still have old-fashioned fixtures, centered brass doorknobs and decorative knockers. Most of these are lion’s heads or women’s faces, with a couple sleeker, simpler designs and one particularly phallic exception. Stopped in to the National Gallery, lingering over the prints on the mezzanine level and skimming over all the awkward religious allegories and painterly landscapes of Connemara that I had seen last time I was in town.

Continued my stroll east, across the canal to Beggar’s Bush, a neighborhood second only to Dolphin’s Barn as Dublin’s most amusingly-named. There I visited the National Print Museum, housed in the one large room of an old chapel, packed with old printing presses and boxes full of metal type. Inside, I could smell the ink still stuck in the crevices and serifs of the characters, the same warm, oily scent from room 210 in the Art Building at the University of Washington. I thought of Larry Sommers, the printmaking technician and my papermaking instructor in college, who passed away very suddenly last spring. I could almost hear him there, whistling to himself, shuffling slowly amongst the presses, happy to explain their history and operation to anyone curious enough to ask.

From there I found my way back to the canal and followed it north toward the river, pausing to watch stubbly men lower barges through the locks. When I stepped out of the shadows of the new Docklands high rises, the green-brown water of the Liffey brought to mind an oil painting I’d just seen at the National Gallery, of spectators watching people swimming in it. Maybe it’s because I grew up on the Duwamish, but I wouldn’t dip my big toe in that river, much less my whole self. Sure is nice for a walk, though, with its bridges and its boardwalks. Sometimes I wish our river was like that, central and social and attractively tree-lined, like the Thames or the Willamette, what I’ve seen of them. All we’ve got is Superfund status and a little park full of toxic mud, romantically named “T-107.”

While the other girls in my dorm (and the rest of the city, no doubt) were out on the town, I spent my Saturday night trying to figure out what to do with myself for the several days I have open after one of my farm-stays cancelled on me just days before my arrival in the country. I found another farm to take me for the first ten days or so, leaving me with 11 or 12 to sort out. Slept in this morning and took a leisurely stroll back to Merrion Square before visiting the Natural History Museum. Called the “dead zoo” by many, this museum was closed altogether last time I was in town due to a large staircase collapsing. My Lonely Planet book, which was printed only a couple of months ago, claims it’s closed until 2011, so I was a little irked to find it was up and running and I’d wasted the longer-opening-hours days not going because I thought I couldn’t. So I went today, Sunday, when it is open from 2-5pm and packed to the gills with small children.

Which was fine, really. If I’d been a child in Dublin, this would have been a favorite place to visit, and it was actually kind of fun to watch them squeal over the scale or strangeness of the Grizzly and the elephant, the mandrill and the pangolin. The density of taxidermied creatures and the skeletons of their brethren was quite a spectacle. Most were packed nose-to-tail in large cases, with larger specimens on stands on the creaky hardwood floor or hanging from the ceiling. From the second floor, you could see up to the third and fourth, which were closed due to the high volume of visitors and relative lack of emergency exits. The heads of various antlered animals hung around the railing above, glass-eyed and patchy-haired. Most of the collection was obviously quite old, their hides cracked from the combination of aging and antiquated preservation technology.

One more day in old familiar Dublin and it’s on to new territory, to Galway, to the rugged, wind-beaten Atlantic coast, to the true beginning of my new adventures in Ireland.

P.S. Happy Mum’s Day.