Ireland on £40 a Day (or £80 a Night...)
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How to Dance the Foot-and-Mouth on One Foot.

 

1 March 2001

My first real pint of Guinness came at the end of successively narrower motorways and roads past the hedgerows, at an old place called Boyle’s in the town of Slane.  I was trying to make it to Armagh, the Holy City of Saint Patrick, but Armagh and Ulster were far to the north, and my arrival in Ireland had been delayed by the worst snowstorm in a decade, the fields checkerboarded in white as the plane descended into Dublin.  Only three inches of snow the day before and they’d closed the airport; how like Los Angeles, I thought, the fear these people have of snow.  But navigating the microscopic Micra down the left side of the road, I was glad the sun was out and melting; my first impression of European country lanes took the form of inches, a few inches from the hedgerows on the left, and a few inches from the grilles of huge, lumbering Scania trucks on the right.  A car was close on behind me running only its parking-lights in the pitch-dark, and a tractor lumbered along in front, swerving to the opposite side of the road to avoid a car parked directly in traffic, that driver having stopped to chat with a friend walking his dog through the muck.  But for all that, I navigated the Micra through everything, around Ireland in high gear and back to Dublin, and never once saw an Irish driver so much as scowl.  On the contrary, the efficiency of their driving flowed effortlessly, like the way English flowed from their mouths, direct but in no great hurry to get anywhere.

Slane, a tiny crossroads north of Dublin, is famous for Slane Castle and infamous for an ancient stone bridge crossing the River Boyne.  Just a few weeks before, a family had been killed when a truck-driver chatting on his cell-phone rear-ended them at this bridge, where the N2, a main highway between Dublin and Derry, suddenly doglegs to the side and narrows to two lanes.  Slane Castle is still owned by the eccentric Lord Conyngham, Earl of Mountcharles, whose ancestor was a favorite mistress of King George IV.  The Earl likes to throw giant rock-fests every summer, even after his Castle was nearly burnt down in the early Nineties.  During my trip, tickets went on sale for that summer’s concert featuring U2, and broke a record when 80,000 tickets sold out in 45 minutes.

Saint Patrick, whom as you will see really got around Ireland, supposedly lit a fire at the crest of the Hill of Slane in 433 CE, announcing his arrival to the Irish and defying the High King, Laoghaire, who had forbidden any fire to be lit within sight of his keep on the Hill of Tara.  Although only sporting about 800 people, the combination of holy fires, killer bridges and crazy rock ‘n’ rollers seems to have prematurely aged the residents of Slane.  The owners of the B&B I stayed at, the Old Post Office, looked exhausted in anticipation of “their gorl from Australia...grand place that,” and the lady serving pints at Boyle’s noted that “money is no good if you can’t have a minute’s peace.”  She then asked what we Americans put in Budweiser, because “two of those and my ‘usband’s gone mad.”

On the way to Slane I detoured to Trim Castle, built by the Norman invader Hugh De Lacy in the Twelfth Century.  It was a perfect castle, round, squat, thick and black in the twilight, so Hollywood I was almost disappointed, but this castle was the real thing; the local chieftain, Rory O’Connor, burnt it to the ground, and in order to rebuild it, Hugh De Lacy married his daughter.  De Lacy then was exiled by King John, bribed his way back into Ireland after John was cornered into signing the Magna Carta, and finally suffered the ultimate indignity; while building another castle on the site of a sacred monastery, one of his Irish workers took umbrage at Hugh and suddenly whacked his head off with an axe.  This was probably the first action of the Irish labor movement.

As I contemplated this castle, an old man came out of the butcher’s shop across the road.  “Do you know any stories about the Castle?” I asked him.

“Oh yes!  That was the castle in “Braveheart”!” he said.  So much for great moments in Irish history.

 

2 March 2001

The bottom floor of the Old Post Office must be the most popular restaurant in Slane, a constant stream of men with closely-shaved heads talking on cell-phones and chatting up the “gorl from Australia,” a young and very handsome colleen who seemed pretty happy for someone serving plates of bacon, sausage, eggs, tomatoes and blood-pudding in a one-road crossroads.  Still suffering from jet-lag and the culture-shock of breaking my record of distance from Los Angeles by a factor of two, I kept my mouth shut and soon headed east, to Newgrange, the largest Neolithic passage tomb in Ireland.

Newgrange was enormous, so large it looked like another grassy hill, but the ring of brilliant white quartz around the base identified it as artificial, another great ring of stones surrounding it and crossing the interior, lining the passages and the tombs, the entrance partly blocked by the largest stone of all, decorated with interlocking spirals and swirls.  And this was to be the closest I came to Newgrange, because at the gate along the road a sign had been posted, one that would haunt my trip:  “WE APOLOGIZE FOR THE INCONVENIENCE...”  An epidemic of foot-and-mouth disease had spread rapidly across England, and just before my Aer Lingus jet came into Dublin hours late, one infected sheep had been found in Meigh, County Armagh, just a few miles from the border inside Northern Ireland.

Both sides of Ireland, the Republic and the North, were thrown into a panic that consumed almost all of the radio and television news, pushing aside normal stories of horrific road accidents and the Troubles.  Unlike England, an urbanized nation of nearly 60 million, the entire island of Ireland holds only about 5 million people and remains mostly agrarian.  Sheep and cattle were everywhere, even grazing atop the Newgrange tomb, and the Irish were well aware that 9 of every 10 animals are exported out, meaning that an outbreak of foot-and-mouth there would devastate the country.  So while the English allowed the disease to go unchecked for days, the Irish immediately put checkpoints on all the roads out of the North, canceled all public events, including the Saint Patrick’s Festival in Dublin, and closed every historic site in the country, no matter how popular or how remote.  I wondered if somebody had put a curse on my holiday, but I’ve had worse.  I’d chased a snowstorm crossing the Navajo Nation in 2000, so in 2001 I would chase a snowstorm and see the country from the parking-lots if I must.  As many people complained on the radio, the museums might be closed, but the pubs most certainly were not.

It was hard to be disappointed on such a beautiful day, the sun shining through the light clouds, and in a place so rich with legend and history.  Newgrange is supposedly the home of the Celtic god Aengus, where the warrior Cúchulainn was conceived, and also where the leader of the Fianna, Fionn McCumhaill, found his wife Gráinne in a tryst with his finest knight, Diarmuid, a story that the Irish claim was the basis for the Arthurian legend.  On either side of Newgrange are two other passage tombs, even larger but unexcavated, Knowth and Dowth, the trio extending back six centuries before the Pyramid of Khufu in Egypt.  Just a few miles west is the Hill of Tara, the seat of all Ireland for thousands of years, where in 1843 the Liberator Daniel O’Connell held a rally for 750,000 people.  And below all of them is the site of the Battle of the Boyne, where William of Orange defeated James II in 1690 and sealed the fate of the Irish for the next three centuries.  Even with the hoof-and-mouth, I felt my trip was off to a good start.

I drove east into Drogheda, a port city just north of Dublin, known for being the first town destroyed by Oliver Cromwell in the mid-Seventeenth Century.  The Irish defenders were shown no mercy, and nearly the entire population, 3000 people, men, women and children were massacred.  Their leader, Sir Arthur Aston, was beaten to death with his own wooden leg and the few survivors sold into slavery in the West Indies.  Drogheda is also the frontier of the Pale, the area around Dublin colonized by the English, and beyond here, you travel “beyond the Pale” into the land of the Wild Irish.  I would not return within the Pale for a fortnight, and much the worse for wear.

Just north of Drogheda is the small monastery and round tower at Monasterboice, but the Men from Dúchas (the equivalent of the Smithsonian and the National Trust) pulled up just as I parked the Micra, and put up the signs:  “WE APOLOGIZE FOR THE INCONVENIENCE...”

“Can’t I just look around for a minute?” I asked.

“No!  No!” one fellow said in honest panic.  “We must be out of here.”  He indicated two fellows in the cemetery, digging a grave.  “Get them out of there, will you, Doug?”

Expelling the grave-diggers...now I was taking the hoof-and-mouth seriously.  I decided not to cross the border into the North at Dundalk, the main route between Belfast and Dublin, but sought a stealthy entrance somewhere further inland, avoiding a jam with the Gardaí.  I turned back west, weaving down tiny country lanes to the N2, a lovely highway that winds easily north across County Monaghan, a beautiful place rarely visited by tourists.  At the town of Castleblayney, the streets jammed by Friday afternoon shoppers, I turned onto a small rural road northeast to Armagh.  A huge truck nearly crushed my tiny Micra while the driver admired a young woman dashing across the road in black vinyl pants, then blew his horn directly in my ear.  My head was still spinning when I hit the security checkpoint at the border, just south of Keady.

“Is this the way to Armagh?” I asked.

The three Gardai standing there were waiting for somebody smuggling sheep the other direction, and one was genuinely amused by my question.  I was probably the first tourist of the day.  “Just head on,” he said with a wink.  “And good luck.”

A minute later I passed a huge steel structure topped with razor-wire.  A patrol of young, nervous men in camouflage moved slowly down both sides of the road, machine-guns at the ready.  I hadn’t seen so many guns since a trip to México during an election, and even then they hadn’t been pointed directly at me.  They didn’t get too many tourists up here, and everyone, soldier and citizen, looked plainly ill-at-ease.

South Armagh is the ground zero of the current Troubles, where guns and explosives flow over the border into the North, and members of the IRA on the run head south into the Republic.  British forts like the one at Keady dot the border, and two dozen soldiers have been killed in the town of Crossmaglen alone, the heart of the Bandit Country.  But there is the Good Friday Agreement, and peace, and while I saw some of the peace in Derry, along the coast, and even in Belfast, in South Armagh I saw only an occupied state.

Every historic landmark in the holy city, Armagh itself, stank of the Troubles.  The oldest church in Ireland is here, Saint Patrick’s first and last, the seat of his bishopric, high on a hill, and across from it on another hill the new Saint Patrick’s Catholic Cathedral, the great Gothic spires slicing the sky.  Between them is the Robinson Library of 1771, where a first edition of Gulliver’s Travels is on display under original engravings by Hogarth, and below that, the Shambles Market, full of fresh vegetables and flowers.  Just a few miles west is Navan Fort, a huge Iron Age temple so famous it appears on Egyptian maps of the Second Century.  It is a lovely place, Armagh, tiny and hilly, but walking around the subtle caution of Northern Ireland manifested itself.  I am not generally a paranoid person, but people on the street were definitely staring at me.  I hurried along to the Mall, a park three blocks long, anchored by two great Georgian buildings at either end.  One, I learned, was Armagh Gaol, where children were imprisoned during the Famine for stealing food, and during the Seventies, it became the C Block, where female IRA prisoners were kept until 1988, the year Mairead Farrell was released, only to be shot in the back by the British in Gibraltar.  At the opposite end of the Mall is the Armagh Courthouse, just rebuilt after being blown up in 1993.  And just along the middle, on the east side, I turned to see the local home of the Orange Order.  Two women walked past me and actually stopped, turned, and stared at me.  I was now officially unnerved and left, heading east.

After getting stuck in a traffic-jam in the town of Portadown, famous as the center of the “marching season” for the Orange Order, I drove along the shore of Lough Neagh to the tiny village of Ballinderry.  Ballinderry was the home of my fourth great-grandfather, John Patterson.  John’s father James Patterson owned a linen factory in Ballinderry, but John had no interest in linen.  At fifteen he ran away to sea, and in 1800, at twenty-one entered a school of navigation in New York City.  He eventually became the captain of a slave-ship, wealthy enough to retire at twenty-six, marry Rebecca Troutman, daughter of the largest plantation owner in Lexington, Kentucky, and spent the next fifty-two years running a large plantation himself in Grayson County.  He never saw his family once after 1794.  To my amazement, the first person I asked, a woman standing by a church, had heard of the Patterson Mill, and after asking two more people, slowly drawing closer, there it was, unseen by my family since John turned his back on it to go into the skin-trade 200 years ago.

As I walked down the muddy lane towards the house, a two-story stone mill along an icy pond, a woman about my age came out to greet me, what looked like a dozen little kids at the windows, amazed by the sight of me in my long duster and my dirty Arizona hat with its rattlesnake band.  A little blonde girl ran out to gawk at me between the woman’s legs.  She told me the mill had been built in 1760, abandoned, converted into a house in the 1980s, and she had bought it only the year before, making it over into a day-care.  A lot of Pattersons still lived in Ballinderry, she assured me, but no one knew of their long-lost relatives in the States.  Then she directed me up the road, to a tiny but extremely creepy old cemetery, where most of the graves were eroded beyond recognition or covered with snow, but upon one I did make out the word PATTERSON and a date, 1787.  That’s good enough for me.  I followed the country lanes to the east, and they grew in size, until I was on the backbone of Northern Ireland, the M1, heading into the center of Belfast.  On one side, the sunset glowed dull red on the snowy hills, and on the other, the light sparkled off the steel walls of the Long Kesh, also called the Maze, the huge prison where dozens of IRA prisoners have starved themselves to death over the years.

Within twenty minutes the motorway drops through a series of roundabouts into Belfast, my first European city.  The lights were just coming up in Shaftesbury Square, the Times Square of Northern Ireland, fashionable couples strolling under the neon lights and a giant advertising screen flashing above it.  I had learned a hard lesson — there are no street-signs in Ireland — but a good Ordnance Survey map and an unerring sense of direction led me to Eglantine House, a B&B among a row of tidy Edwardian brownstones, on the south side of Belfast near Queens University.

After settling in and meeting the pleasant older couple running the place, I went out for a walk and learned that Belfast is not the friendliest place.  On the contrary, on a scale of 1 to 10, with most of Ireland being a 9, Los Angeles being a 3 and New York City being a 4, Belfast would rank at most a 2.  Everywhere I walked, most of the passerby consciously averted their eyes from me or stared at me with open hostility; on several occasions I stopped and found people had turned to glare at me.  Did they have some kind of X-ray vision?  Could they see the word CATHOLIC emblazoned somewhere, or was it the usual misplaced anti-Semitism?  To this day, I still don’t know.  I walked by upscale shops, bars, restaurants, packs of students ready to rave on a Friday night, one of who yelled at me, “What’s this lot, then?”  One club featured “Latino Night”, blasting Cuban music into the street, while a jolly woman on stilts waved a sombrero.  In twenty minutes I made it to the Crown Liquor Saloon, the most famous (and most bombed) pub in Europe, just across Great Victoria Street from the Europa, the most famous (and most bombed) hotel in Europe.  The hip patrons eyed me like some kind of scum, and I wondered if somebody back in Slane had pinned some kind of ugly note on my back.  I ordered a pint of Guinness — the sourest in Ireland — drank it, suffered another verbal insult from a fellow being catty with his date, and left.  I passed a cute black girl by the entrance, looking more out-of-place than me, and smiled at her.  She looked terrified.

 

3 March 2001

I wrote a postcard to Crissy Sullivan in Oakland that said, “Let no one talk to you of peace.”  My experience in Belfast had completely radicalized me.  Before I had harbored some doubts about the zeal that Irish-Americans regard Northern Ireland, the quick urge to react with violence when the Irish in the Republic seemed more circumspect about the partition of their country.  As a descendent of Ulster Protestants, I thought the prejudice of the country was ridiculous, just as I thought the prejudice in México City against Central Americans ridiculous and hypocritical.  Hell, I’ve thought all the prejudice I’ve encountered was pretty ridiculous, except for my own family’s, which makes perfect sense.  But Belfast is something special.  Take what would pass in any outlying suburb of an American city as pure White Trash, mix in poverty, high unemployment, high powered weapons, explosives, an oppressive government, a brutal police force.  Stir.  Catholic and Protestant all look alike, eh?  I can tell the difference now.  Before I went to Northern Ireland, I had a joke ready:  to take a side in their little war, I would have to kill myself.  The Pattersons versus the Kellys.  Now I don’t think it’s so funny.

Over a rich Ulster fry I met some of my fellow guests at the Eglantine:  a missionary couple from Melbourne, Australia and a couple on a walking holiday from Utrecht in the Netherlands.  The Dutch couple and I pored over our maps, trying to find a secluded place in County Antrim not shut down by the foot-and-mouth, but we didn’t have high hopes.  I couldn’t help but ask why a couple from the Netherlands decided to spend their brief weekend holiday in Belfast, and the man laughed.  “We came to go for a walk, but not in Belfast,” he said.

I went for a walk myself in the Botanic Garden, and then crossed the older and lonelier part of the Centre, where windowless walls face streets still protected from a war that started thirty years ago.  After passing the Royal Courthouse, surrounded by cameras and a thick steel fence, I came to the River Lagan, and then into North Belfast, where empty buildings looked down on streets littered with abandoned, burnt-out cars.  This city I knew.  The people didn’t stare at me here; they were too busy staring at the ground.  Of course, the Belfast Central Library is in this neighborhood.  I chatted up the staff, and then walked the few blocks to the Linen Hall Library, a private library with the best collection in Northern Ireland on the Troubles.  Because of suspicion of the Government, the Linen Hall gets most of the donations from the Catholic community, has a better facility and it appeared a collection twice the size of the Central Library.  During the 1798 Rising, the librarian, Thomas Russell, was a leader of the United Irishmen, which made this librarian rather proud.

Finally I took a breath and went off to West Belfast.  I was worried; if I got the same treatment there, my whole excursion to Belfast would be a waste, and a negative blot on the map of my life’s adventure.  To get there you catch a black taxi in a parking-lot on Castle Street, just past the Opera House in a lonely part of the Centre.  Taxis waited everywhere in the cold afternoon, with signs indicating their final destination, the drivers reading newspapers or listening to sport on the radio.  I didn’t recognize any of the names.

“Where are you off to, then?” one fellow asked.  It was the first time anyone in Belfast had tried to be helpful.

“Milltown Cemetery.”  It was the perfect thing to say; as if a stranger came up to me and asked for a ride to the Watts Towers.  If there’s one thing I would learn, it’s that the Irish like a little effort from the tourists.  Anybody can drink Guinness, but it takes something special to pay homage to the IRA dead, nearly get blown off the Slieve League, fall off the Croagh Patrick and still think you had a grand time.

The cabbie brought me over to a particular cab and put me in the back.  In front, the skinny driver and his enormous friend were yelling at the radio, where a distant Manchester United was thrashing an unidentified opponent.  Also in the back of the taxi were a nervous teenage boy and a sad young woman with a bag of groceries in her lap, both silent, but they both acknowledged me with faint smiles.  It was a sea-change; I was back in Ireland.  Many days later, a drunk raver in Cork revealed the secret to me; I was an American, and that, I would admit, recognizably so.  In Northern Ireland, the Protestants assume that Americans support the Catholics, and the Catholics assume the same.  It may not be true, but their assumptions cling to their hatreds, and it colored my holiday in their country.  In the rest of Ulster it was only an impression of caution, but in Belfast, it was palpable.  I relaxed in the taxi.

The drivers wait until the taxis fill up — understandably, as the fare is only £1 a person.  It’s reputed that many of the drivers are old IRA volunteers, and this one seemed no exception.  Taped up on the glass divider between us were Xeroxed drawings of Bobby Sands, Mairead Farrell, Sean Savage, decorated with hand-drawn flowers and Irish tricolors.  He didn’t wait very long, because no one else came.  During a lull in the Manchester game, his friend slid out, and the taxi rolled down the Falls Road into West Belfast.  The Falls Road has the same Edwardian architecture as the rest of Belfast, but more people are in the streets, kids, plenty of women pushing their prams, men in caps.  The buildings are decorated with tricolors, murals of the IRA dead, birds erupting through broken prison-bars, and graffiti.

To leave the taxi, you tap on the glass with a pound coin, get out, and pay them through the passenger window.  But I stared out the window, relying on him to guide me.  “Milltown,” he called back to me, where the Falls Road splits in two climbing the icy hills.  The arch of the cemetery was off on the left, rows of Irish crosses dropping down the slope towards the M1; across the street, behind a high fence, the towers of the Royal Ulster Constabulary, the observation decks wrapped in protective layers of wire mesh, one of several “forts” scattered across West Belfast.  Northeast of the Falls Road I saw parts of the Peace Wall, built between the Catholic ghetto and the poor Protestant neighborhood along Shankill Road, although the doors in the Peace Wall are usually open now, not because of the Good Friday Agreement but the spread of poor Catholics to both sides of the wall.

Milltown is like any other cemetery, full of graves and mud and dying grass.  At the far end of the cemetery are two monuments, rimmed by green railings, a pair of mass graves for the IRA dead.  One dates from the Anglo-Irish War of 1916 to 1921, the other from the Troubles that began in the late 1960s.  The latter monument is larger, a cross laid flat with each side engraved with names, dozens of names, many followed by “KILLED IN ACTION”.  One plaque on the ground commemorates all who died on hunger-strike in the Maze, while another lists those hung in Belfast Gaol whose bodies were never released to be buried.  All told nearly two-hundred names line the newer memorial.  But just as sobering, a slow walk back across Milltown Cemetery reveals many dozens of other graves, standing in family plots, where the person died young, often between 1970 and 1990.  While standing by one grave, a man walked up with his son, about ten years old.  “See there,” the older man said, pointing out a name.  “They shot him in the back.”  And the pair walked away, hardly even seeing me standing there in my duster with a video-camera.

As I did in the Republic of Ireland, I greeted everyone walking down the Falls Road, and unlike the Centre of Belfast, everyone responds.  About halfway back downhill is the Rock, a pub contemporary with the Crown, built during a strike against the construction of the City Hall by the Catholic strikers.  A bit further down, blasting Irish rebel tunes into the road and surrounded by tricolor bunting, was the Sinn Fein office.  Now, you know I went directly into the place.  Two teenage kids were behind the counter, regarding me with some friendly curiosity.  I bought some books and then an older fellow came out smiling, so naturally I vented about the treatment I’d gotten in the rest of Belfast.

Later on I felt ridiculous, complaining to these people about something they lived with every day, but they seemed genuinely amused by it.  The man directed me across the street to the Cultúrlann, a Gaelic bookstore and cafe built into an old church.  “They’ve got good food,” he said.  “Have that and a cuppa tea, have yourself a pint, and you’ll feel better.”  Kinder words were never spoken, and my decision to go to Belfast was vindicated.  I followed those instructions precisely.  The Cultúrlann was warm and bright, full of books and polished wood, with three musicians playing at a table in a corner, people bobbing their heads to the music and little kids tearing around the room.

“Try the lasagna, love,” the woman at the lunch counter said, “it’s got three kinds of Irish cheese in it.”  That and a pot of tea, a few minutes spent looking at books and talking to the manager of the bookstore, and I was ready to step back out into the Falls Road.  Outside the window, spray-painted along a wall across the street, it said DISBAND THE RUC.  I was back in the Ireland of the Welcomes.

A block down I walked into the Red Devil Pub.  The entire place was crowded by men and smoke and yelling, with three televisions over the bar displaying that very same match, Manchester United.  Now, the bar didn’t suddenly go silent like a cheap Western (that had already happened to me once in remote Rachel, Nevada), but I did have a lot of eyes on me.  In Los Angeles I would have turned around and walked out of a “sports bar”, but I had to give the IRA version a chance.  I went up, ordered a pint and took it back to a table.  “Whaddya think of this, then?” a fellow yelled at me over the noise, pointing at one of the televisions.

“I don’t know much about it.”

“Ay, you don’t know what yer missin’.  It’s a bloody massacre.”

I sat down and drank my pint in peace.  An older woman came in, the only one in the pub, took a table next to me and started smoking.  After a minute she got up, opened the door and helped her husband bring in an ancient man, barely able to walk, and sat him down at the table.  His hands shaking, he took off his cap and ordered a pint, his eyes glued to the screen.

I walked back into the Centre, past the high fences and the guard-towers along Grosvenor Place, back to the University District.  I went by the Ulster Museum and took a look at their dinosaurs and their artifacts.

That night it was an easy decision where to go; I went back to West Belfast, driving into the more middle-class neighborhood of Andersontown.  Armed with a tourist guide from the Cultúrlann, I stopped around at the local restaurants, but they were a rarity and all had long waits for reservations.  Obviously tourists were rare, especially librarians by night, and at a Gaelic restaurant called An Cupla Focal, one couple offered to let me go ahead of them just to “give me a peek at real Irish cuisine.”  I had stumbled into the boxty-biting poiton-swilling intellectual hang-out on the Falls Road, but declined; even with their generosity, the wait was still over an hour.  I ended up at a shopping-center up in “Andytown”, buying some shrill Catholic tabloid with a huge explosion on the cover and asking the two teenage girls working at the candy-counter for advice.

“A place for a bite!” one said.  “O, you could try Goodfellas, it’s got a grand pizza, just up there!”

“That’s where everybody goes,” the other said.  “We’re going there right after work!”

“Or you could go to McDonald’s!” the first girl said, with genuine enthusiasm, and pointed it out.  Since it was right across the parking-lot, yes friends, I went to the McDonald’s, and no, there are no Shamrock Shakes in Northern Ireland.  Only two people in the McDonald’s, a couple on some kind of date, were over eighteen, and not by much.  Everybody else, including all the employees, were between five and sixteen, running around and yelling across the Village of the McDamned.  One boy kept calling friends on his cell-phone and bellowing, “I’m at MAC-DONALD’S!”, then laughing hysterically.  Two other girls nearby dumped all their French-fries out into a big pile and leaned towards each other, having an intense conversation about some boy while they picked at the fries.  The skinny, nervous girl who served me kept trying to restrain a pair of wild toddlers, and twice asked me if I needed anything else.  About ten kids, bored out of their minds on a Saturday night, jumped up and down on the outside benches with their skateboards, flying in and out the doors and disappearing into the night.  As I drove home I saw more kids, walking aimlessly but full of excitement, with nothing to do at midnight in Andytown.  Maybe peace isn’t such a bad thing after all, if the bored kids can take over the streets.

 

4 March 2001

Belfast was completely silent on Sunday morning; you could have fired a cannon across Shaftesbury Square and hit nothing.  I was the only car in sight at nine AM as I took the M5 north along Belfast Lough to Carrickfergus.  Carrickfergus was the first perfect castle I saw in Ireland, even more picturesque than Trim Castle, the great round tower perched on the rocks overlooking the Lough, the fishing-boats lining the quay below it.  Like everything else, the Castle was closed, and with similar language as Dúchas used in the Republic:  “WE DEEPLY REGRET ANY INCONVENIENCE...”  There were two cars in the parking-lot besides mine, both with men sitting and reading the newspaper.  For the rest of my holiday in Ireland, I saw these men everywhere, even on remote headlands and in lonely villages, sitting in their cars and reading.

After Larne, an industrial port covered in Union Jacks and UVF graffiti, the road turns north along the coast, the Glens of Antrim.  The coast undulates for over an hour, much like Big Sur, through tiny fishing villages where the only people in sight were the crowds wearing their black Sunday best to church.  The only radio station receivable was broadcasting a brimstone and perdition sermon from Scotland, visible across the sea, and when I stopped in Cushendall to see the ruins of the Leyde Church and the ring-fort at Ossian’s Grave, the people had blond hair and strong Scottish accents.  Finally on a strip of asphalt more rollercoaster than road, I made it to Torr Head, the most northeastern point of Ireland.  The Mull of Kintyre was easily visible, twelve miles across the water, and the coast turned towards the bluffs of the Giant’s Causeway to the west.  I climbed up to the abandoned signal tower, one of many built along the coast of Ireland during the Napoleonic Wars, and enjoyed my first taste of real Irish wind, blowing at gale force from the southwest.  Driving past a golf-course in nearby Ballycastle, people — and I mean a lot of people — were playing in that wind.

The foot-and-mouth finally took two real casualties on my holiday, the Giant’s Causeway and Kenbane Castle, both closed and both invisible from the road.  I also saw my first Americans in several days, a family who naturally were arguing with the guard at the Visitor’s Centre for the Causeway.  “But why can’t we just take a peek?” the father said.  “I mean, we came so far!”

The guard was unmovable.  “Now, then, just go down to Portrush and have a pint and a nice lunch, you’ll be fine.”

After Portrush and the ugly college town of Coleraine, the coast road passes the huge abandoned estate of Downhill, alone in a meadow above the sea, with a lonely mausoleum at one end and Mussenden Temple at the other, a domed cylinder high atop the cliffs.  Downhill belonged to an eccentric Bishop of Derry during the American Revolution, and as I read about him in my car, a military convoy rolled slowly up the hill.

I drove out to the tip of Northern Ireland, Magilligan Beach, and saw where the convoy had come from:  an enormous military prison, larger than any prison I had ever seen before, the size of San Quentin and Folsom side-by-side.  And just a few miles across the Lough Foyle from the beach, where the Lough meets the sea, I saw County Donegal.  I was almost back in the Republic, God bless it.

Derry is at the other end of the Lough, where the River Foyle joins it.  The high, narrow steel bridges across the River reminded me of the Cooper River Bridge in Charleston, South Carolina, and in fact Derry reminded me of the South in many ways.  Unlike Belfast, Derry reveled in the contradictions of history, and it showed.  There were no harsh looks awaiting me in Derry.  The Old City, about ten square blocks, covers the top of a small hill along the Foyle, surrounded by one of the only intact city walls in the world.  I drove through the Catholic ghetto, the Bogside, and up the side of the valley where I could see the Old City resting at the bottom, a perfect slice of history, right down to the dead cannon along the walls, below which was painted:  WHEN THE LAW MAKERS ARE THE LAW BREAKERS THERE IS NO LAW.  At the base of the hill along the highway into the Bogside was a concrete wall, bearing a more famous saying:  YOU ARE NOW ENTERING FREE DERRY.  This was the site of the Bloody Sunday Massacre, where the British Army machine-gunned thirteen people during a rally in January 1972.

I stayed at the Saddler’s House, an old Victorian B&B on Great James Street, two blocks from the Old City.  The place is run by the Pynes; Joan Pyne came downstairs like a Seventies jet-setter, short hair, a navy pants-suit and a scarf tied around her neck.  “So,” she asked right away, “are you mad or a romantic?”

“What?”

“There are only two kinds of people who come to Ireland in the winter, especially Northern Ireland, either mad or romantic.”  She paused.  “Or looking for their genealogy, but you don’t look that type.”

“Maybe a little bit of all three.”

“That’s good.”  She pulled out a map and started my rapid history lesson, and in twenty minutes she gave me an itinerary for my entire stay in Derry.  Mrs. Pyne especially encouraged me to sit in on the Bloody Sunday Inquiry, a months-long affair being conducted by the British Government (courtesy of Prime Minister Tony Blair) at the Guildhall just outside the city walls.  Her accent was more British than Irish, but she didn’t let on her sympathies if she had any other than change; her final comment to me was, “You’ll see a lot of change in evidence, and we can’t go back.  We’ve made a lot of progress.”

There’s a Chinese place just inside the walls that makes really authentic Szechwan cooking, rather surprising, but the streets around Waterloo Square were lined with all sorts of take-away, movie theatres, fine restaurants, and pubs proudly competing with music.  On the river side of the Old City, new hotels and even a few American-style malls looked recently finished, and the city was swarmed with Irish from the Republic; the border is only a few miles away, and Derry is the largest city in the northwest, attracting students and others from all over County Donegal and County Fermanagh.  After dinner I went into the Gweedore, a pub where two fellows earnestly played covers of the Beatles and Neil Young.  Although not exceptionally friendly, the younger crowd here let me drink my two pints in peace, and on the way out a couple pleasantly offered to decipher some of the IRA graffiti for me.  The three of us were standing by the fountain at the center of Waterloo Square, full of broken vodka bottles, when a loud fight broke out the other side of the street.  A huge bloke smashed a beer-bottle over a woman’s head, and stood there very stupefied while she wailed at him, “What the ‘ell did I ever come out for?”  His friends were also yelling at him, and the couple with me, leather-wrapped and nicely drunk themselves, reacted in horror.

“Bloody fook!” the fella called across the street.

“Spot on run or have yer arse thoomped!” his lady added loudly.

“Jaysus, that aren’t typical, now,” he told me.

“That’s okay,” I said, only slightly alarmed.  “In Los Angeles no one would even give a shit.”

They both liked that idea, that Derry had something on L.A., even when it came to street violence, and they cheerfully bade me farewell and went over to comfort the injured girl and give her mate a further tongue-lashing.  That was quite enough for me, and I went back to the Saddler’s to watch an Irish soap opera, “Ros Na Rua”.

 

5 March 2001

The other guest at the Saddler’s was a Jackie O look-alike from Galway who picked nervously at her Ulster fry and went on about the foot-and-mouth.  The younger Miss Pyne, home from college, made breakfast and cleared the table, looking a little amused by my adventure of the previous evening.  “Small place, Derry,” she noted, “but there’s always something on.”

I walked across the Bogside, observing the murals and the pillar commemorating the Bloody Sunday Massacre, then climbed up the city walls and walked around them, the old cannon pointed out strategically over the Bogside, thick with black paint from being constantly graffitied.  In 1688 the forces of Catholic James II tried to take the city, but the gates were shut by thirteen boys and the siege of Derry began.  The walls of the “Maiden City” were never breached, even though the bombardment was constant and disease ravaged Derry for over a hundred days.  Thirty-thousand people were trapped in those few blocks within the walls, but would not make peace; they offered to eat the Catholics first, then each other, rather than surrender.  Over seven-thousand died before the city was relieved by the ships of William of Orange, who used the distraction while James was at Derry to assemble his own army, which crushed James a year later at the River Boyne.

I passed another heavily fortified RUC station at the south end of the walls, and then came down by the river, to pay a courtesy-call to the Derry Public Library.  Although Derry is about a quarter of Belfast’s size, the Central Libraries are the same size, and for me that was the final stroke in Derry’s favor.  The librarians were having a slow morning and gave me a long quiz about the Los Angeles Public Library and California in general; I then crossed to the Guildhall, on the northeast side of the Old City, to take a look at the Bloody Sunday Inquiry.

They held onto my cameras and put me through a long search at the metal detectors, but finally I went up the long flight of stairs to the observation gallery.  About ten people were intently watching the proceedings on the floor below, including the Jackie O from Galway, taking notes.  The floor was a great maze of desks, computers, rows of binders, legal books and video-cameras, lights and monitors hanging from the ceiling of the ornate room, lit by stained-glass on three sides.  A fellow involved in the march, 29 years ago, was being cross-examined by something like twenty lawyers, clarifying his written statements concerning who had shot a certain friend of his.  The friend had gone after one of the British soldiers with a broken bottle.  One lawyer questioned why so many people would be following the actions of this single man in the middle of a chaotic riot.

The bloke on the stand, casually dressed for an afternoon of pints at the Bogside Inn, shrugged.  “Because ‘e was a tough, a greaser I would call him then, an’ everyone knew ‘e’d raise some ‘ell.”  Most of the people in the gallery started laughing.

Trials are the dullest events imaginable, even when murder and world geopolitics are at stake, and after fifteen minutes, I went back to the Saddler’s to pack my bags.  I talked for a while with Dr. Pyne, who betrayed more than his wife when he talked about the Irish-language school next door, where they had sent their daughter.  Then I drove northeast, along the north bank of the River Foyle and into the Inishowen Peninsula of County Donegal.  The Gardaí checkpoint delayed me only a few minutes, and I was more than willing to wait.  After confirming that I had no cattle, sheep or pigs in the Micra, I told the Garda I was very pleased to be leaving such a dark place.

“Derry?” he asked.

“Belfast.”

“Ah,” he said, straightening up.  “Belfast, then.”  And with a flourish he waved me over the border, across the disinfectant mats and back into the Republic of Ireland.

It was a beautiful day, and the drivers all gave me the “one-finger salute”; even racing down a tiny country lane at 100 kph, when drivers pass they lift one index finger from the steering-wheel in greeting.  I drove up through Carndonagh to Malin Head, taking a brief detour to Five Finger Strand, a beach where giant waves from the Atlantic break across the mouth of Trawbreaga Bay.

Malin Head is the northernmost point of Ireland, and at slightly over fifty-five degrees of north latitude, a new personal best for me, as far north as Hudson’s Bay or the southern part of Alaska.  As at Torr Head, the wind blew gale-force from the southwest, up the Donegal coast past the distant Fanad Head.  I crossed back above Carndonagh, spread out in the sunshine, the Cathedral lording over the town on a small hill like some Italian village.  I followed the Atlantic coast through Clonmany and into the Mamore Gap, a tiny mountain road winding high up across the Raghlin More, then dropping down into a wide valley facing the Lough Swilly.  Across the Lough Swilly is Rathmullan, a tiny village with a dark history.  Rathmullan was where Theobald Wolfe Tone was captured marching on Derry after the 1798 Rebellion, but also where the Flight of the Earls took place.  In 1607 Hugh O’Neill and Rory O’Donnell boarded a ship at Rathmullan and sailed for Spain, never to see Ireland again; their lands were confiscated by the English and became the first Ulster Plantation, beginning the division of Ireland that still cleaves the country with steel fences and hard stares.

Down at the shore is the popular holiday resort of Buncrana, a pleasant little town on a wide beach.  I picked up two “gorls” hitchhiking back to Derry and gave them a ride as far as the crossroads at Burnfoot, having successfully circumnavigated the Inishowen Peninsula.  I couldn’t resist torturing them just a little bit.  “Shouldn’t you guys be in school?” I asked in my best Young Adult Librarian tone.

One of the girls got offended.  “I’m outta school, and my friend here is in college.”  Oops.

I turned back west, following the rugged coast of County Donegal.  I stopped at the huge stone ring-fort, the Grianán of Ailech, at least 2000 years old.  The seat of O’Neill power in Ulster until the King of Munster, Murtogh O’Brien whupped them about 800 years ago, the fort has a fantastic 360 degree view of Derry, the Foyle Valley, Inishowen, the Lough Swilly, and the direction I was headed, the forested interior of Donegal.  After dense forests and bug-infested inlets, I reached the coast at the Bloody Foreland, where islands followed the coast southwest as far as I could see.  The country turns flat and brown, rivers and streams cutting the stone everywhere, across Gweedore and the Rosses, dropping down off Mount Errigal, the highest peak in the County.  The stark beauty of this country is difficult to describe, but at the River Gweebarra it stopped me long enough to enjoy an entire sunset, watching the sun drop into the Atlantic (another first for me) at the mouth of the River while flocks of birds zigzagged about the water, the wind whistling through the forest, only occasionally disrupted by huge trucks rumbling across the River behind me.

In the darkness now, the Irish raced down their tiny roads with infectious confidence, and I drove on into the lights of Ardara, a tiny place famous for its tweed, at the head of Lough Ross More.  I spent the night at Brennan’s Hotel, where the old lady running the place showed off the hotel-register, a thick book going back to 1930.  I was the first American they’d had in two years.  For dinner I went downstairs into the hotel bar, redecorated sometime in the Seventies with orange and white vinyl, now faded from cigarette-smoke to a pleasant beige.  One guy was passed out on the bar, while the bartender chain-smoked and watched Formula 1 racing on the television.  “What’ll you have, then?” he asked.

“What’ve you got?”

“Well, me brother caught some trout this morning.”  And for £6 I had a whole trout with all the trimmings, two pints, shared a Sherman with the bartender and finished another long day in Ireland.

 

6 March 2001

The owner served up breakfast in the “lounge”, an incredibly dusty room with a fireplace and the biggest television I’d seen yet.  We chatted about the old days, and how all the fashionable people in Ardara used to gather at Brennan’s, until Mrs. Brennan sent me on my way to Glencolumbcille, a Sixth Century religious outpost at the western extremity of Donegal.  The landscape could best be described as Nordic, barren hills and valley dotted with snow, an icy wind blasting down.  At the coast is Saint Columba’s Church, with dolmens and ancient graves, ring-forts and spectacular views of the sea.  At the tip of the peninsula I found Trabane Strand, a small cove ringed by high bluffs, with a wide beach and a waterfall at one end, pretty as a postcard, and desolate except for a mysterious group of teenagers idly walking up the road, headed nowhere.

I started back east, towards Donegal town itself, and stopped for my first real nature hike (the Causeway being closed) at the Slieve League.  The Slieve League is the highest cliff in Europe, over 300 meters high, a bit shy of the Empire State Building.  An Irish couple from the South on holiday was slowly walking up the trail ahead of me; the trailhead itself was atop some pretty high cliffs, looking south over the empty Atlantic.  More gale-force winds were blowing, this time directly off the cliff.  The trail climbed for over a mile.  We tried to communicate, but the wind was blowing too strongly; some parts of the trail were guarded by a wire mesh fence, one that did not look capable of taking the force of an overweight librarian.  The wind picked up, until we were leaning over at an absurd angle.  I pulled ahead of the couple and about twenty minutes later reached the turn in the trail where the Slieve League became visible.

It was truly an awesome sight, the entire side of a mountain sheared off, plunging straight down a thousand feet into a broiling sea, giant rocks barely visible in the ocean below.  I cautiously edged forward on my butt, my feet braced against the wood fence, trying to get a better camera view of the cliffs.  The wind blew straight through four layers of clothing.

I expected to see the Irish couple edging up slowly, but they were nowhere in sight, nor did I pass them hiking down the mountain.  I began to seriously wonder if they had been blown into the sea, but at the trailhead, their car was gone.  It was the first time I had seen the Irish turn back while I continued on.  It would happen again, and I ignored them at my peril.

The coastal road winds through many small, fishy villages until it reaches Donegal town proper.  A quaint little place, Donegal was not much compared to the other historic towns I’d seen, so I kept on, following the coast as it turned back south towards Sligo, stopping of course for the ring-forts and the historic houses.  I love Neolithic ring-forts!  Just north of Sligo, I went by Lissadell House, the ancestral home of the Gore-Booth family, a gray blocky Victorian mansion much like Downhill, in the middle of Lissadell Wood on a beach facing Sligo town.  The poet William Butler Yeats was a frequent guest of the Gore-Booths at the turn of the last century, and on the front of the building is one of his poems, “The light of evening, Lissadell, Great windows, open to the south, Two girls in silk kimonos.”  One of the sisters, Constance, became the Countess Markievicz and a prominent member of the Easter Rising in 1916; the country around Lissadell is full of burned farmhouses which the locals blamed on marauding English soldier during the Anglo-Irish War.

Across the highway, at Drumcliff Church, is Yeats’ grave, in the shadow of the great mesa of Ben Bulben.  By now an icy rain was falling, and a guy from Dublin rapidly took two photos of the grave.  “Fook this bullshit,” he said to me, and quickly sought shelter.

I put in at the Renate House, a B&B on John Street, where a nervous young woman, apparently watching a movie in the living-room, quickly shooed me upstairs, rapidly quoting the rules of the house, and then ran back down to her movie.  It was a tiny, wonderful room, up in the peak of the house with a slanted roof and a tiny double-glazed window, streaked with rain, so I felt like I was up in Anne Frank’s attic.  Instead of Nazis, I huddled in fear from the crowds of Irish teenagers, just released from school, crowding the streets below in their uniforms.

 

7 March 2001

You know, the woman running the Renate House reminded me of Deni Margo, completely high-strung but good-hearted.  “Oh, off to Lough Gill, then, very good, very good,” she barked, staring at me and then suddenly disappearing into the kitchen.  I drove around the Lough Gill, just east of Sligo and about ten miles long.  Supposedly Gille was the daughter of an Irish chieftain, and easy to look at, and her father’s best friend happened to see her bathing down at the lake one day, and thought she was something special, and Gille thought he was pretty cute himself.  Well, anyway, her dad didn’t think too much of that, so he started a fight, and his best friend and he fought for so long they both died.  Gille was so upset she drowned herself, and her nanny was so upset that she cried and cried and filled up the Lough Gill.  Nice story, eh?  Well, wait.  There’s more coming.  At the other end, I stopped in the tiny village of Dromahair to see Creevelea Abbey, the last abbey built in Ireland before the time of Henry VIII, when all the abbeys were put to the torch.  It was a lovely ruin, and to reach it the path crosses a beautiful wild river and a pasture full of sheep, and a dotty old fellow on a bicycle, looking just like the dotty fellows you see in pictures of Ireland, went by.  At the abbey itself, a group of men were digging a grave.

I recrossed Sligo and drove west, to Knocknarea.  The locals call it Queen Maeve’s Tomb, although the legend of Medb, Queen of the Connacht, is a thousand years more recent than the tomb.  The tomb itself is a very large passage-grave, like Newgrange, but still buried under tons of rubble, and on the top of another large mesa, which was great fun to climb, slipping on the grass and the sheep-shit.  The wind at the top was again blowing gale-force, but the tomb has a tremendous 360 degree view of Sligo town, the beach, the ocean, the Lough Gill and the mountains that run south all the way to the Connemara.

At the bottom I tried to get into the even older collection of dolmens and ring-forts at Carrowmore, but the foot-and-mouth confounded me again.  I drove back to Sligo and walked around the town in daylight.  The community theatre was doing “The Odd Couple” that night and I was sorely tempted to go, but they were also showing one of my favorite movies about Ireland, “The General”.  I saw my first busker, a hipster-looking guy playing a fiddle on the waterfront.  I walked down the crowded main street, people just closing up for the evening, and stopped to take some pictures of ruined Sligo Abbey.

Two young girls, probably about ten or eleven, came up and stared at me.  “Why are you taking a picture of it?” one asked.

“Because I might never see it again.”

“Where are you from?”

“Los Angeles.”

“Isn’t that where Hollywood is?”

I nodded, and they demanded I take their picture as well.  I did and went into a place called the Bistro Bianconi, where I had one of the best Italian meals I’ve ever had, watching the Irish eat pizza with a knife and fork and a cigarette in their mouth.  California wine was more expensive than the French.  The fellows behind me spent most of dinner discussing the most horrible road accident they’d ever witnessed.

Across the street I stopped in for a quick pint at Hargadon Brothers, the most famous pub in Sligo, and the closest I’ve ever gotten to a real saloon outside Tijuana, a room full of snugs lined with ancient, rotting, rich wood, a hundred shades of brown plus the black pints of Guinness.

 

8 March 2001

A very sullen hesher dude from Dublin slowly and silently ate breakfast for the second day in a row; his complete silence seemed perfectly natural to our nervous host, whom I now know as Ursula.  Apparently I’ve grown on her in two nights and she seems genuinely sorry to see me rush off to Ballina; little did she know, only twenty-four hours from my doom.

The coastal road from Sligo to Ballina goes through Easky, where along the beach I spied the sign NORTHWEST SURFING CENTRE.  Here was a town not even in the travel-books, but all along the street were cars with Dublin plates and surfboard racks.  I pulled over to check this out.  The waves were pretty good, about the same as Trestles on a hurricane day, my friends.  And like surfers anywhere, the dudes on this beach moved around town still wearing their wet-suits, ignoring the tourists and the locals completely, moving directly from car to wave and back.  After Easky I passed through the large, nondescript city of Ballina, stopping only for more ruined abbeys and round towers, and rejoined the coast briefly at the high cliffs around the Downpatrick Head, near the northwestern tip of Ireland.

County Mayo is the most sparsely populated place in Ireland.  I drove for an hour without seeing a soul, just the empty plains, deforested, devoid even of sheep.  The road turned south and came out on the shore of Clew Bay, where Grace O’Malley had her castle in the Sixteenth Century.  Grace was a real Irish hellion; she commanded an army and navy both, brutalizing the ships of the English and their Irish supporters.  When Elizabeth I offered to make her a countess, she scoffed; in her eyes, she was already the Queen of the Connacht.  At the head of Clew Bay is Westport, a small, rather tacky little place built up around the English plantation at Westport House.  Just to the west, on the south shore of Clew Bay, is the tiny town of Murrisk, at the foot of the Croagh Patrick, and I pulled into the home of Ruth and George Fair, a B&B where I planned to spend the night.  In the morning I would climb the Croagh Patrick, and then drive south to the Connemara in time to take the ferry to the Aran Islands the next day.  Or so I thought.

 

9 March 2001

In the year 441, Saint Patrick climbed the Reek, which would later be called the Croagh Patrick, and spent the forty days and nights of Lent at the summit.  It was here, according to legend, that he supposedly drove all the snakes out of Ireland.  Every year thousands of people make the ascent, some barefoot, and some all the way from Ballintubber Abbey, forty kilometers to the east.  How hard could it be?

The ascent is broken into three parts, a steep trail leading halfway up the mountain along a stream, rocky and treacherous, reaching a saddle where a trail comes in from the east, proceeding in a mostly flat ridge to the foot of the volcanic cone, and then the last third goes straight up the cone to the summit, composed entirely of loose scree, football-size chunks of volcanic rock.  It was the most challenging climb I’ve ever done, and many were the times I thought I must be crazy and should turn back.  But I couldn’t face the Irish empty-handed; it was the summit or bust.  After two hours I reached it, and as a token of my piety left my great-grandfather’s hat at the church built up there.  The view of Clew Bay and the surrounding mountains was spectacular, but an icy wind blew thick mist up from the south, and so I quickly descended.

About halfway down, along the flat ridge, I slipped and landed right on my left ankle.  My first thought was that I could not have picked a worse place to sprain my ankle.  The Fair’s B&B and my car were both clearly in sight at the bottom of the mountain, but to get there I had to navigate a steep, rocky trail.  Dragging my left foot, I made it about 300 yards in half-an-hour.  My foot didn’t hurt, but I couldn’t put any weight on it, which made me wonder how much damage I had actually done.  At least I had told Mrs. Fair where I was going that morning, so I had no fear of being stranded for long.  With a huge sigh of relief, I spotted two men working their way up the trail towards me.  They were two cops from Chicago on vacation, and they went back down to get help, while I sat down on a rock and waited.

About halfway back down, they ran into a third fellow with a cell-phone, who called for assistance, and then all three came up.  He was French, working as a bartender in Galway.  They waited with me for a while, but rescue would take a while, so I encouraged them to go to the summit.  Two other guys came up, these two from Saint Louis.  A regular tour group tackled the summit, but they were not as Catholic as your friend here, and also the weather had turned distinctly nasty, a thick mist engulfing the whole mountain, and even Clew Bay was invisible.  They turned back and came down to where I was.

It took three hours for the mountain rescue team to come up the back side, from the east, and reach us.  At the same time we saw a helicopter circling in the mist below, and I began to feel extremely embarrassed that a sprained ankle had brought out so many resources.  The Irishmen on the rescue team were positively jolly, though, cracking jokes and showering us with hot tea and sandwiches.  The medic turned my ankle carefully.  “Sprained, eh?”

“I think.”

“Maybe not.”  They strapped me into a gurney, so I was completely immobilized, and in that state lowered me slowly down the mountain.  All I could see was the misty sky and the six of them.  The leader, behind my head, was an older fellow named Colm, who didn’t stop joking the whole way down.

“Here’s a tricky spot,” he said.

“Didn’t you go over the side here last summer, Colm?” another said.

“Ay, I was all right, but I lost the two I was with.”  I had to laugh at that.  The Irish have a dark sense of humor.  They told me the secret history of the Croagh Patrick, a history of broken necks and limbs that would definitely have changed my plans if I’d heard them a day earlier.  During the previous year’s pilgrimage at the end of July, the team had taken fifteen people off the mountain in stretchers on one day, and not too long before me, they’d rescued a woman who went up on her wedding day, still wearing her wedding dress and heels.

“What did she break?” I asked.

“Lucky gal, just ‘er arm,” Colm said.  After about an hour they reached a small foothill below the mist, and the helicopter landed to take me to the nearest hospital, about fifteen miles away in Castlebar.  “All right, boys!” Colm yelled, after they slid the gurney in the helicopter.  “Off for a pint!”

The Irishmen in the helicopter were just as jolly.  One slipped a pair of headphones over my ears so we could communicate over the deafening roar.  “First ride in a helicopter, then?”

“That’s right.”

“Ah, such a pity.”  He took down some information, including my next-of-kin.  “That’s in case Sean tips ‘er over into the drink.”

“The ‘ell you say!” the pilot replied indignantly.  The three men in the helicopter then regaled me with stories of near-misses and mysterious airborne disappearances, until I was almost sorry when they landed at County Mayo General Hospital.  Now events went into slow motion, as they usually did at a hospital.  Once it was determined that my neck and back were not broken, I was left to linger for hours.  I begged to go out into the waiting room, where at least there were some other people, and a kind nurse gave me a pair of sleek crutches which I kept until my cast was off two months later, not the under-arm kind but the ones that you slip your arms through; they told me later at Kaiser Permanente in Hollywood that only people with permanent disabilities in the States get such crutches.  Well, that’s another one for the Irish.  I spent the next six hours in the waiting room, drying my wet coat on the radiator.  The place was full, kids with broken skulls and cut fingers, a crazy old woman yelling about her arm, a concerned daughter whose mother had chest pain, and all of them waiting for hours longer than me.  All of them, of course, had to talk to the American bloke who fell on the Reek, and I got a taste of what was in store for me during the rest of my trip.  “It could have been worse,” they all agreed.  “You coulda broke your neck.”  All of them, at some point, also complained about the dismal state of Irish healthcare.  One woman whispered forcefully, “You’ve got to go up to that desk and demand what’s yours!”

The triage doctor on duty, an Iraqi, brought out my X-rays.  “Listen,” he said carefully.  “Would you please tell George Bush to stop bombing my country?”

“Sure.  But that’s a family thing, Doc.”  He agreed, and began to set my leg in a temporary plaster splint, and watching an Iraqi doctor communicate with an Irish nurse was strange if not outright amusing.  To my complete surprise, my leg was broken in three places, at the back and on both sides of my ankle.  County Mayo General had no orthopedist, so I would have to get to Galway, a round-trip of over sixty miles, and see a specialist at the regional hospital there, Merlin Park.

Shortly after this, Mr. Fair’s sister Phyllis showed up in a whirlwind, yelling at the staff for not notifying the Fairs of my condition, and for not sending me to Galway in an ambulance.  Apparently their older brother had died in the hospital the year before, so there was no love lost between her and Mayo General.  She started a loud, acrimonious fight with the nurse.

“My father died here as well,” the nurse said, “and I still work here.  I beg to differ with you.”  The fight got uglier, and I found myself in the ridiculous position of quoting “Barfly” at them, “Ladies, ladies, let’s not fight.  We hardly know each other.”

Phyllis arranged a taxi back to Murrisk from Castlebar, and then in the morning to Galway.  It would cost me a pretty penny, nearly 150 punts all told, but I had little choice.  Now I had to consider whether or not I could remain in Ireland at all, hopping about the country on one leg or flying home in disgrace, my vacation not even half-done.  The taxi to Murrisk stank of liquor; the driver was shuttling people back-and-forth between a wedding in Castlebar and the reception in Westport.  The two of them didn’t shut up for a minute.  Phyllis was an angry woman; she herself had moved to London decades before, and this was to be her first Saint Patrick’s back in Ireland in over twenty years, but the hoof-and-mouth had taken care of that.

 

10 March 2001

A man named Willie Fahy drove out from Westport to drive me to Galway, a long, boring drive through farm country.  The outskirts of Galway were composed entirely of ugly suburbs, not the charming city that I had read so much about.  Mr. Fahy kept me regaled with stories of life in Westport as he drove, and the place sounded even more silly than it looked, a hub for those too slick or too fashionable to live in Castlebar to come to the coast and fleece the tourists.  I waited around the Regional Hospital, Merlin Park, about three hours to get a cast, which was applied personally by Doctor O’Sullivan.  The orthopedist at Kaiser was also flabbergasted by this; a doctor, putting on a cast?  Made of plaster?  Wow.  But it was a good, heavy cast, and I learned weeks later that O’Sullivan had set the bones perfectly by hand.  His assistant cut the cast, so I could travel by car and air without the leg swelling up, and they let me go.  Unlike all the other doctors I had seen, at Mayo and at Merlin Park, O’Sullivan seemed pretty blasé.  “Just don’t put any weight on it,” he said.  “You’ll need a few screws in your ankle, but it won’t be any trouble.  Just see your doctor in the States within two weeks.”

“Two weeks?”

“That’s right.”

Doctor O’Sullivan had just saved whatever was left of my Holiday from Hell.  I had eleven days before my flight back to Los Angeles, and I resolved to make the most of it.  Everyone told me to rush back to Dublin and take the next flight home, and for what?  So I could get screws put into my ankle and spend a month in my apartment?  Uh uh.

Mr. Fahy drove me back to Murrisk, and I spent the afternoon learning how to get around with twenty pounds of plaster on my left leg.  The Fairs most generously invited me in for dinner, a fine homemade bacon and cabbage.  They had the television turned up about as loud as it would go, and yelled over it, telling me about their trip to Turkey and asking where they should go in Arizona, a subject that usually keens my interest.  Their grandson, about six years old, ran around adding to the mayhem, but at one point he stopped and whispered to me, “I dreamed I was a fairy.”

“Really?”

“Yes, I was a fairy, and I flew up in the air and saved you from the Reek.”

Just about then a game-show called “Winning Streak” came on.  The English game-shows are brutal, nasty affairs; I saw one called “Weakest Link” where the host harshly berated every contestant who couldn’t answer the questions in the time allotted.  “Winning Streak”, however, was far more Irish, with a joking, suave host, and a panel of local Irish celebrities, each representing a contestant out in the countryside, who send in postcards to get a place.  The game is all spinning wheels, lottery balls and drawn cards, purely chance, and everybody wins something.

Mrs. Fair screamed.  “Oh my God, Georgie, it’s Marie!”  It turned out that one of the postcards selected for that week’s contest belonged to George Fair’s Aunt Marie, a pensioner living in Dublin.  Now this was exciting, and I had every reason to root for my hosts, who had treated me exceptionally well.  All told, Aunt Marie won £11,500, or nearly $15,000.  At one point she was up for a brand-new sports car.  “Ooh, Georgie, look at that!”

Mr. Fair had been pretty enthusiastic about his aunt winning a mint, but the car gave him pause.  “Well, Jaysus, I dunno what Marie could do with that.  I mean, she’s 85.”

“Posh, she can still drive!”

But the car went to another contestant, who was pretty old herself.

 

11 March 2001

According to my itinerary, I was supposed to be in Galway, waking up with a severe hangover and going out to buy Crissy Sullivan a Claddagh ring.  Instead, I left Murrisk and drove rapidly through the Connemara.  I had to make up two days of driving, but besides that, I decided to follow my plans to the letter.  I would be in Doolin that evening, broken leg or not.

The drive through the Connemara was pretty but not spectacular, certainly not in comparison to Donegal.  I drove west along the coast to Louisburgh and then south into the Doolough Pass, a narrow canyon of lakes and icy mountains.  During the Great Famine, 600 men, women and children walked across this pass, seeking food from their landlord in Delphi, at the south end.  He shut them out, and they turned around and walked back to Louisburgh.  Only 200 made it home, the rest dying of exposure or starvation.  I stopped to contemplate this tragedy about halfway through the pass, by a large waterfall, and my cast didn’t feel like such a burden.

The highway crossed into County Galway, past the Twelve Bens into the town of Clifden, where everyone seemed to be on their way to church.  I was trying to find the site of Marconi’s radio transmitter, where he broadcast the first regular transmission across the Atlantic Ocean.  I had to ask three people, but I finally found it, a bit of wreckage along the ocean, in the middle of a fen.  Nearby was a monument to the flight of Alcock and Brown.  In case you’re wondering, they were the first humans to actually fly across the Atlantic, today nearly forgotten.  Lindbergh was the first person to fly across the Atlantic alone.  A fellow in a pickup truck came by to look at my leg.  “Ay, nasty bit that.  Where’d you get it?”

“The Croagh Patrick.”

“Ay, God be praised!  You’re blessed then.”

I asked him if anyone said anything to Alcock and Brown when they crashed into the Connemara fens.  There’s a story about Amelia Earhart, the first woman to solo the Atlantic.  She landed in Derry, and the first man to reach the plane gave her a typical Irish welcome:  “Well, what would you be wanting, then?”  But as to the reception Alcock and Brown received, it’s lost in time, like the wreckage of Marconi’s transmitter.

The road follows the coast, a lovely, sunny coast, through tiny villages until the town of Rossaveal, the ferry-port for the Aran Islands.  Then you come into something like Malibu, about thirty miles of beaches leading into Galway, the shore crowded with summer homes for the bourgeoisie in Galway and Dublin.  I circled Galway itself; I was bound for Doolin, and I didn’t even have time to look at Galway from a car.  Galway would be my sacrifice to the Croagh Patrick.  After Galway, the road turns west again, along the south shore of the bay, into County Clare and the Burren, a huge area of uplifted limestone, a gray, barren country.  When Oliver Cromwell invaded Ireland and tried to exterminate the Irish in the Seventeenth Century, one of his generals forced the citizenry into this corner of the Connacht, complaining that he couldn’t find “water enough to drown a man, nor a tree to hang him, nor soil enough to bury him.”  They charitably let the Irish keep this part of Ireland for themselves.

In the center of the Burren, high above the sea, is Poulnabrone Dolmen, over 5000 years old, with two large supports and a capstone.  When you see pictures of a portal dolmen in Ireland, it’s probably Poulnabrone, the most photographed ancient site in the country.  Barren as it is, the Burren teems with ancient ruins, dozens of ring-forts and dolmens, but most are far from the road, so the foot-and-mouth and my own foot kept me away.  I did pass by Leamanegh Castle, an ugly stone shell just outside the town of Corofin.  The castle has a dark story attached to it; built by the O’Briens, the last of whom, Conor, was killed in 1651 fighting the Cromwellians.  His wife, Maire Rua McMahon, refused to allow his body back into the castle, and instead married one of the English soldiers, hoping to save her land.  She eventually murdered the Englishman.  Leamanegh is the only castle I saw in Ireland that has an intact “murder hole”, a long vertical shaft above the main door, which was used to repel uninvited guests with boiling oil or heavy stones.

Corofin also had a dark past.  During the Famine the Burren was decimated, losing over half its population, and Corofin was the center of the destruction.  After Corofin I drove through Lisdoonvarna, an ugly spa-town famous for the Matchmaking Festival in September.  I didn’t even get out of my car here, but kept on for the famous Cliffs of Moher.  The Cliffs were magnificent, huge walls of limestone dipping down into the sea, populated by swarms of circling sea-birds.  It wasn’t a completely pleasant experience, though, because this was my first time really working out on my crutches, and also the first place in Ireland that I really saw a lot of foreigners.  I was exhausted getting out there, and the hordes of Americans, Germans, English, French, Japanese and other visitors had much less sympathy for a fellow on “sticks” than the Irish.  One of the fellows selling junk souvenirs followed me out, just to keep me from falling over.  “That’s a tough break there.  How’d you get it, then?”

“Croagh Patrick.”

“Ay, Saint Patrick wasn’t looking out for you proper.  Did you fall going up or down?”

“Down.”

“Well, that’s fine then.”  I offered to buy some of his junk, some kind of fake tartan, but he demurred.  “Nah, you can get a bolt of this in Doolin for half the price.”  I began to see how breaking my leg might actually come in handy.  In a lot of cultures, being disabled carries a certain stigma, but not in Ireland.  In fact, breaking a leg up on the holiest mountain in Ireland might even be a boon...when you start to think this way, you know you’ve been in the Emerald Isle too long.

Driving down from the Cliffs of Moher into Doolin, I got my one and only good look at the Aran Islands, just off the coast in Galway Bay.  Ah, that was my tenderest sacrifice to the Croagh Patrick, and I wonder if I’ll ever get to walk around those tiny islands, around the ancient stone fort of Dún Aengus and in the shadow of the wreck of the Plassy.  But you can’t cry over spilled milk or your Holiday from Hell, so I went on my merry way, staying at a farmhouse in Doolin just across the road from one of the local pubs, McGann’s.  The town was crawling with English college students on spring break, and oddly enough, there was no music in a place famous for nothing else.  I went into McGann’s and found the only place to sit was next to the cigarette machine, which meant that my leg got kicked a lot.  A bored looking Irish fellow sitting next to me examined my leg.  “That’s nasty.  Where’d you get that, then?”

“Croagh Patrick.”

“No shit.”  It turned out he was one of the owners, and I soon found a bowl of Irish stew and a pint in front of me.  He then started talking about New Orleans; he’d just come back from Mardi Gras, and he couldn’t get over it.  We talked for a while about that fine Southern city, and then spent a little time mulling over the differences between Southern Catholics and Irish Catholics.  All the while, drunk kids were shoving punt coins into the cigarette machine.

 

12 March 2001

The west coast of County Clare is lovely but unspectacular, composed mainly of tiny Victorian resorts and wide beaches, famous only for the number of dead Spaniards who washed ashore from the wreckage of the Armada in 1588.  I was also in something of a hurry, trying to make the morning ferry across the River Shannon.  The car ahead of me and behind me accelerated as we approached the town of Killimer, so could assume they had the same goal.  We all made the ferry with five minutes to spare.  It’s a pricey ride; £10 for a ten minute trip, but the only alternative is to detour almost a hundred miles to the first bridge, at Limerick.  The ferry crosses the Shannon and deposits you deep in County Kerry, less than thirty miles from Tralee and the start of the Dingle Peninsula.

Just north of Tralee is the Banna Strand, a long lovely beach.  In 1916 a German submarine unloaded a shipment of guns and Sir Roger Casement here, in anticipation of the Easter Rising.  But Casement and the guns were betrayed by a British spy.  A few miles inland is Ardfert Cathedral, another one of those bombed-out churches left by Henry VIII as a monument to his need to give the world an heir to the Tudors.

Dingle is a truly rugged part of Ireland.  Even though a narrow peninsula at the western extremity of the island, it boasts some of the highest mountains and the most spectacular pass.  I followed the north coast of the peninsula into that pass, the Conor Pass.  A tiny, often one-lane road hairpinned up the face of the Slieve Mish.  At the top, the wind blew so hard that the rain was blown completely sideways.  I drove down and through Dingle, on the south coast, and then circled the tip of the peninsula.

Dingle Peninsula has the highest concentration of Early Christian ruins in Ireland; it also has some of the most spectacular sights, all packed into an area between Dingle and Dunquin, less than ten miles apart.  Ring-forts, tiny stone churches, narrow bays with enormous waves rolling in, crashing on the rocks, Dingle had it all.  Of all Ireland, it’s the images of this coast that I’m keeping in my apartment, waiting for my friends to gawk.  Finally I came to the Slea Head, a cliff that is the most westerly point in Ireland, and all of Europe, and off the coast, the Blasket Islands, pointed at the horizon like the jagged spine of a great sea-beast.  These were not rocks like the coast of California, but islands, the most distant faded in the mist, a massive pyramid of stone changing from gray to green with the clouds.  It was the most magnificent thing I think I’ve seen in a long while.

Past the Blaskets is nothing but ocean and after a few thousand miles, Canada.  Supposedly Saint Brendan the Navigator set sail in his little curragh from here to the New World, five centuries before the Vikings, a thousand years before Columbus, and even before the Chinese who wrecked on Palos Verdes a thousand years ago.  Those who’ve seen “Ryan’s Daughter” already know this landscape intimately.  Words don’t do it justice, but I found the pinnacle of the trip, and it made me glad I hadn’t gone home early.  Nothing can match the sight of those waves, some thirty feet high, shaking the cliffs and rolling up and down the coast of Ireland.  I was also at the physical half-way point of my holiday; Dingle is also the furthest point I had been from Dublin.  From now on, I would be heading back home.

I found a really charming B&B up in the Conor Pass, Duinin House, which had a lovely view of the town and Dingle Harbour.  They had built a solarium on the side of the house facing Dingle, and the rain blew against the glass in spectacular gusts.  I drank tea and watched the gale, enchanted by it, while the owner’s daughter, about thirteen, watched “The Real World” on MTV.

“Do they still ‘ave “The Real World” in the States?”

“Of course.  What city are they in now?”

“London!  What a bore.  I liked it so much better when they were in New Orleans.”

I then told her about the plot we’d hatched in Berkeley during the late Eighties to get onto “The Real World” in New York City, and I could tell from her expression that I was the best guest her folks ever had.  She told me how the “scads” were doing in London, and I told her some stories about New Orleans that I probably should not have told a teenager.

I had dinner down in a swanky place called Lord Baker’s, the juiciest mussels on the half-shell ever, sitting next to a bloke in an Irish Army uniform, stiff and proper.  He studied my leg.

“Ah, that’s looks like a tough one.  How’d you break that?”

“On the Croagh Patrick.”

Now here was a unique response.  “Really, then?  Do you know which helicopter they used?”  It seems that the Irish military only has five helicopters, which made me feel honored to have tied one up for an afternoon.  The fellow was just back from Bosnia on leave, getting ready to go to the Middle East; although Irish, he thought Ireland was “a trifle stale” for someone looking for excitement.  I patted my leg; I couldn’t agree with that.  Afterwards I went across the street to a popular Dingle pub, the Small Bridge, and watched two guys play some traditional music for a crowd of adoring women.  It seems amazing, but in retrospect, the Small Bridge and the Cultúrlann in Belfast were the only two places I saw any live music in Ireland.  Bah.

 

13 March 2001

On the way east along the south side of the Dingle Peninsula, I passed the most famous surfing beach in Ireland, Inch.  The sand-spit juts straight out into the bay, perpendicular to the coast, and huge waves curl up from far out on the shallow bottom.  International competitions are often held here and, from what the local told me, almost as often canceled due to inclement weather.  At the end of Dingle Bay I turned west again, this time driving into the Iveragh Peninsula, known world-wide as the Ring of Kerry.

Now, let me say that the Ring of Kerry is fabulous, it was a fantastic, sunny day, the ocean was a pleasant greenish-blue, the sky dotted with light clouds, the horizon sharp and solid, highlighting the mountains and the many islands off the coast.  In the center is snowy Mount Carrantuohil in the MacGillycuddy Reeks, the highest mountain in Ireland.  That said, I couldn’t figure out why the Ring of Kerry is so much more famous than so many other places in Ireland, and why so many tour buses go around it, even during this time of year.  I finally asked a farmer near Cahirciveen why so many buses go around the Ring of Kerry and not, say, to Dingle.

He smiled at me.  “Because the road’s big enough for the booses.”  Genius, absolute genius.  Outside of Cahirciveen I saw two excellent stone-forts, huge ones, and was briefly delayed by a funeral crossing a bridge, a lot of people walking behind the hearse, and looking strangely happy about it.  Then the road hooks south and east toward County Cork, winding along high cliffs.  Far away off the coast is the Skellig Michael, nothing but a tall rock where a monastery was established in the Sixth Century.  Isolated from the pillaging of the Roman Empire, this was one of the outposts where the Irish supposed saved Western Civilization from the ash-heap.  You can take a boat out there, but certainly not in the winter; I could see the waves hitting the rock from the Hag’s Head in Kerry, over ten miles away.

Today was my hard-driving day, a couple hundred miles twisting and turning through Ireland.  I couldn’t touch my personal best, a twenty-one hour marathon from El Paso to L.A., but I was going to accomplish something on the wrong side of the road.  After the Hag’s Head, I followed the River Kenmare into Kenmare itself, the seat of the O’Sullivans.  In honor of my dear Miss Crissy Sullivan I stopped to photograph the main square of the town, and backed my poor Micra into a pole.  Another tick mark on the Holiday from Hell.  After Kenmare the road rises into a bleak country, through some amazing tunnels blasted straight into the mountains and out into County Cork.  Then I crossed West Cork and some of the most beautiful villages in Ireland, each one at the head of a bay, the streets lined with multicolored Victorian houses:  Bantry, Skibbereen, Rosscarbery, Clonakilty, and Timoleague.  I lived on a diet of Coca Cola and Cadbury Mint Crisps, enjoying the fine highway, racing through the woods until I stopped in Kinsale, a resort on the coast just south of Cork.

Kinsale is famous for two things, a lot of gourmet restaurants and the Charles Fort, the best preserved Seventeenth Century coastal emplacement in the world.  Something about Kinsale made me uneasy, maybe its resemblance to Newport Beach, but after gawking at the Charles Fort I was on my way.  There are several roads leading north to Cork, but you can’t get lost; just watch for the commuting cars going the opposite direction.  I was coming into the third-largest city in Ireland, only slightly smaller than Belfast.  Cork is also well reputed because of its connection to Europe; the ferries from Dublin go to England and Wales, but the ferries from France come here, so Cork is far more Continental than larger Dublin.  In hindsight Cork lived up to its promise, broken leg or no, and it would be here that I came the closest to having a real nutty adventure.

Between Kinsale and Cork is a chain of hills, and at the top, the Cork Airport.  By the airport, looking down on the lights of Cork, I stopped to get a room at the White Lodge.  The host was a fairly dotty fellow with a strange accent; the house was full of cuckoo-clocks.  “Are you German?” I asked.

He seemed pleased.  “Ja, ja, aus München.”  I disappointed him by not taking the matter further, but unpacked my bags and set off for Cork.  I wouldn’t be able to really enjoy the city, I thought, but I decided to check out the Kino, the only art-house cinema in Ireland outside of Dublin.  The highway dropped gently into the city, spread out on the River Lee, and past a bridge and a roundabout were the narrow streets of the Centre, built on an island about two miles long in the middle of the river.  At that time, and even now, I believe that Cork is the most European city in Ireland, the streets close in, then suddenly spinning into roundabouts and wide boulevards under yellow sodium lamps.  With very little effort I found the Kino, just outside of the Centre on Washington Street, the main road west out of Cork and towards the local university.

The lobby was deserted, except for a young woman with dreadlocks behind the candy-counter, who also sold the tickets.  They were showing “Shadow of the Vampire”, which I’d already seen.  So instead I struck up a conversation with the woman, and I recognized her accent immediately.

“You’re American,” I said in disbelief.  Cork was living up to a reputation as a home for exiles.

“I’m from Orange County,” she said reluctantly.  I informed her that absolutely nothing had changed in the two years she’d been gone, but she already knew that.  We had the sort of brief, intense conversation that two Southern Californians should have in the lobby of an art-house in Cork.  I finally asked if there was a place nearby with Internet access.  “Sure,” she said.  “It’s right around the corner and down the alley.”

I followed her directions and hobbled into a place called the Raging Bull.  It was the wrong pub; the Internet was across the street.  Exhausted, I decided to have a pint anyway, and a young guy in a black suit with a white tie started talking, beginning of course with my leg.  But we soon moved on to other subjects, and pretty soon we were exchanging cigarettes and rounds of Murphy’s, talking about the roads up in Montana.

A strange ritual took place at the other end of the bar.  The bartender set down a martini-glass and filled it with Kahlua and Sambuca, then put a shot of blue Curaçao on one side, and a shot of Bailey’s on the other.  She put two straws in the martini-glass and lit the drink on fire.  The guy sucked it up as quickly as he could, and when he hit the bottom of the glass, she poured in the two shots.

“What the hell is that?” I asked my companion, whom I now knew as David Saint John Malpin.  Dave grinned and called over another fellow, who turned out to be the owner of the bar.  I soon found the same drink set up in front of me, and it wouldn’t be the only one.

“That’s a Flamin’ Lamborghini,” Dave said.  “Bottoms up, mate.”

They’re pretty sweet.  After three of them, I still didn’t know why the bartender lit it on fire, but I didn’t care.  The owner, Ken Casey, started matching us drink for drink, taking us down the menu of exotic drinks available in the Raging Bull.  He was also a promoter, so we had fun talking about all our favorite bands, and I promised him a CD of my friend Geri’s band, the Supreme Beings of Leisure.

“Right on, but you’ve got to send me some Crystal Method.  You can’t get the Crystal Method for shit in Ireland.”

After a few more drinks, Dave really began to loosen up, and the bar was getting very crowded with Cork hipsters, just as chatty but not as self-consciously beautiful as their American counterparts.  “Say, man,” he said, “how’d you like to go for a spin and a smoke?”

That sounded like a perfectly plausible idea, the exact sort of thing I might do at home, hop into a car with a really drunk stranger and smoke a joint.  I eased through the crowd on my “sticks” with Dave and another guy, and slowly lowered myself into his car, a small and very sporty Alfa-Romeo parked right in front.  Dave immediately revved the Alfa up to about eighty miles per hour, racing out of Cork on a narrow country lane.  My whole body was like a spring.  “Hey, take it easy, Dave.  You’re scaring the American,” the fellow in the back said.

“I’m cool,” I squeaked, holding on for dear life as the car swerved.

“Well, I’m tryin’ to roll a bloody spleef back ‘ere.”

Dave ignored both of us.  “There’s a little jump coming up,” he said matter-of-factly, and sure enough, the car became airborne and came down hard.  I could see sparks out the back window.

“Jaysus, what’s with yer fookin’ suspension?”

“Ah, it’s the second bloody set of struts I’ve gone through in a year.  I can’t believe ‘ow shitty they make these things.”

The guy in the back lit the joint and passed it to me; it was easily the worst dope I’d ever smoked in my life, like some kind of hay cut with wood-chips and scented with marijuana.  No wonder the Gardaí don’t bust anyone for it in Ireland, or so they both told me.

We took a hell-ride out to see Dave’s old house where he grew up, a mansion on the outskirts of Cork.  Now everything made sense.  I really had fallen in with the Cork jet-set.  How lovely.  We drove back to the Raging Bull, and Dave tried to give me a handful of the weird weed, which he kept in a manila envelope.  “C’mon, take it to Dublin.”

“No, that’s cool,” I demurred.  I had a feeling even then that the best nightlife in Dublin would not be nearly as friendly.  “But I’ll send you something really good from California when I get home.”

“Oh, that’s fookin’ smashing.”  We went inside, and I retook my seat at the bar.  The place was jumping now, packed on a Tuesday night.  I exchanged contact info with Ken and Dave, promised them CDs and other good things, and staggered out into the street.  “I’ll be back,” Dave yelled, and gave me his cell number.  “I’ll get some birds and we’ll go clubbing.  You call me in an hour.”

I drunkenly hopped to my car and tried to find my way out of the Centre of Cork, narrow streets crossing at odd angles and sudden bridges without a sign in sight.  I felt like Terence Stamp, leaning out the window and flagging down the locals.  “Hey, how d’ya get...how d’ya get to Roma?”  I finally got directions from an old guy chatting with a middle-aged couple making out in their car, all three of them far more drunk than me.  Ah, Tuesday.  And with a great clatter of crutches and slipping on rugs, I returned to my little German enclave up by the airport and went to bed.

 

14 March 2001

I’ve never woken up with a broken leg and a vile hangover before, and I don’t want to try it again.  The Flaming Lamborghini may be a tasty drink, but that much sugar leaves a bad taste in your mouth the next morning.  Mr. Bayer served me breakfast in that politely confused way that Germans have about them, and I struggled through a gloomy gray morning past Cork to Passage West, where you catch the ferry to Cobh.

Cobh is the ideal Irish coastal town.  Narrow rows of Victorian buildings, brilliantly colored, parallel the waterfront up a steep hill topped by Saint Colman’s Cathedral, one of the largest Gothic churches in Ireland.  Along the waterfront is the primary port for Cork and a train into the city; at the main landing is a memorial to the Lusitania, which was torpedoed just off shore in 1915.  Many of the passengers of that ill-fated ship are buried in the cemetery up the hill.  Cobh was also the last port-of-call for the Titanic, the site of the first yacht club in the world (1720), the home port of the first steamship to cross the Atlantic, and the primary port of debarkation for Irish immigrants; it is said that over three million people, more than half the total, last saw Ireland from the Port of Cobh.  Most recently the city was celebrating the victory of Sonia O’Sullivan, a runner who earned Ireland’s only gold medal in the Sydney Olympics.

Crossing a causeway from Cobh towards Midleton, I saw my first family of Travelers.  They were living in a trailer dropped on the side of the highway, surrounded by junked cars.  The Travelers are Irish, but culturally they are Roma, or Gypsy; they used to be called Tinkers.  The Irish debate about the Travelers a lot, mainly because they treat them like shit and it probably embarrasses them, in a country where the entire population was treated like shit for so many centuries.  But as I was learning, Ireland is a homogenous place; any kind of stranger sticks out.  You don’t see the kind of cautious racism you do in Los Angeles or New York, or the polite kind you get in the South, or certainly not the fiery anti-racism you see in San Francisco or the Southwest.  Ireland is a naive country; they complain about the Travelers and stare in open amazement at blacks (except in Dublin), but tolerate all foreigners except for the English, whom I noticed get polite but certainly not gracious treatment.  Anyone who asked, which were not very many people (the Irish are terribly private) were surprised to find out I was Catholic, since I look Jewish, and when I described my Southern-German-Irish-English-Ukrainian-Italian mix to them, it amazed them.

Midleton is the home of the Jameson whiskey distillery, which produces 24 million bottles of whiskey a year.  When you consider that the population of Ireland is barely 5 million, it makes you wonder.  After that I drove north, into County Waterford and the heart of Ireland, a land of hedgerows and empty fields, crossed by narrow roads reminiscent of “The Avengers”.  I took full advantage of the lonely roads, pumping the Micra up to 100 kph.  Soon enough I reached Lismore, an ancient university town on the banks of the River Blackwater.  On the outskirts of the town is Lismore Castle, hidden behind high walls and tall trees, and beside it a magnificent garden, the largest I saw in Ireland.  Lismore is a Norman castle, but the town itself dates back to the earliest days of Ireland, and was a favorite spot for a good Viking sacking.

Between Lismore and Tipperary, you cross the Knockmealdown Mountains, surrounded by thick forests of pine trees.  I understand at one time all of Ireland was covered by magnificent oaks, as was Britain, but they were nearly all gone by the Seventeenth Century.  Then the English planted pines for lumber, until much of the country was covered by pine forest, and now almost all of the pines are gone as well.  You would see them on hills in patches, a mile wide or so, but in some of the mountains, like the Knockmealdowns, there were still a lot of them.  At the top of the pass the view opens up, and green farms extend to the horizon.  I was finally seeing the center of Ireland, the flat heart that many tourists avoid.  But it was magnificent, and this corner of it, near the ancient seat of Munster, was littered with ruins of the Norman age.

Just north of the mountains is Cahir, and Cahir Castle, which more than any other castle in Ireland looks like a movie set, dropped right at the center of the village alongside a wide creek.  After the way the Earl of Essex, Elizabeth’s “good friend”, beat the Irish here in 1599, they handed it over to Cromwell with little resistance in 1650.  Just down the creek are the ruins of Cahir Abbey.  I continued north into the plain and met up with a wide, modern highway here, the main road from Cork to Dublin, but soon got off in Cashel.

One of the finest bits of crumbled stone in Ireland is the Rock of Cashel, which easily rivaled Newgrange in my esteem.  It was fortified at the top of small hill by Welsh invaders over 1600 years ago, and conquered by Brian Ború in the Tenth Century.  The Rock was home the kings of Munster for centuries, rivaling even Tara itself, until a descendent of Ború handed it over to the Church in 1101.  The Church built successively larger cathedrals and chapels at the top until the forces of Cromwell destroyed it in 1647.  The day was perfect, sunny and warm, and the Rock stood out like a medieval dream in the middle of the plain.

Between Cashel and Clonmel, I took a tiny side road and passed an ancient parish church near Fethard, like so many others just four walls and a floor facing the sky.  I also saw my first authentic Sheila-na-gig, carved into the town wall, and if you don’t know what a Sheila-na-gig is, she’s a very friendly Celtic goddess.  From here the road follows the River Suir down to the sea, and back into County Waterford.  The last city in Tipperary is Carrick-on-Suir, a small but lively place, and tucked away next to a park on a dead-end road I found Ormond Castle, the only true Tudor house in Ireland.  The Earls of Ormond were ancestors and cousins of Queen Elizabeth I, and the Irish suggest that Anne Boleyn, her mother, was born in the Castle.  Like everything else, the Castle was closed for the foot-and-mouth, and I drove on to Waterford.

Waterford, like Cork and Cobh, is a classic European port city, a row of colorful Victorians lined up along the river quays.  Between Carrick-on-Suir and Waterford was a tremendous amount of roadwork, evidence that I had again reached the most populated part of Ireland, around the Pale.  Waterford was crowded with afternoon traffic, and after passing through the Centre I drove to the famous crystal factory, on the southern highway to Cork, amidst fast-food joints and strip-malls.  I hobbled into the Waterford Crystal Factory like a bull in a china shop, and quickly obtained the goodies I’d promised Dave and Ronna for their wedding; a set of four glasses only cost about $200, the same as going out to dinner with Kim and Tom.  Wow!  The Bord Failte keeps an office in the factory, and for once I took advantage of their booking service to find a proper accommodation in Waterford.

They directed me to a pleasant B&B in a big suburban home, sprinklers running and kids playing soccer, just past the glamorous Waterford Castle Country Club.  The Country Club is on an island in the Suir, and a ferry full of new BMWs and Jaguars unloaded while I enjoyed a fast-food snack nearby.  Then I drove over to the B&B, run appropriately enough by a family named Kennedy; our Kennedys come from just over the river, in County Wexford.  The Kennedys had the most American-style house I saw on my trip, and I could have been hanging out in the Valley or Phoenix for all I knew.  I’d had a good drive so I retired for the night, but not before I had one more treat, a fake documentary from the early Seventies about the drug trade in Dublin, called “Nowhere to Run”.  It brimmed over with cheesy psychedelic music and footage of Irish hippies lighting incense and sitting in Phoenix Park looking stoned.  What really amazed me is that this film, which would have been part of Peter Beckman’s camp repertoire in Los Angeles, was being broadcast at eight o’clock on a weeknight by RTE, the national network.

 

15 March 2001

The countryside east of Waterford is lonely and layered with history; the mouth of the River Suir has seen most of Ireland’s invasions, from the Normans through Cromwell and even the forces of the Irish Free State, trying to cut off the IRA during the Civil War.  On one side is the village of Crooke, and on the other the peninsula of Hook Head, which inspired Oliver Cromwell’s rather dry comment, “by Hook or by Crooke”.  I crossed the Suir just north of here, by ferry from Passage East to the town of Ballyhack, in County Wexford.  Ballyhack was a tiny place, a few houses and old boats jammed up against the ruins of a Norman tower like toys.  Down south at the Hook Head is probably the oldest functioning lighthouse in the world, over eight centuries old.  A year after their first invasion in 1169, the Normans beat an Irish army seven times their size by stampeding a herd of cattle into them, and then threw many of the survivors off the handy cliffs.

This sorry story was matched in every town I saw in Wexford, where the ruins had not been burned just once, but some many times.  By late morning I reached Enniscorthy, the center of the 1798 Rising.  The Enniscorthy Castle, right in the center of the city along the River Slaney, was once given as a gift to the poet Edmund Spencer by Queen Elizabeth I, whom Spencer had honored with The Faerie Queen, but like most poets, he needed money and sold it soon after.  By 1580 it was owned by Henry Wallop, who beat the Irish tenants so severely his name ended up in the dictionary.  During the 1798 Rising the Castle was used as a prison by the revolutionaries, and now houses a small museum.  On the other side of Enniscorthy is another museum, built in 1998 to commemorate the Rising and said to be the finest museum in the country; here my broken ankle handed me another loss, but as the Irish kept saying to me, “It coulda been worse.”  Just out of town, by Vinegar Hill and the site where the Rising was put down, I joined the main highway from the busy port of Rosslare to Dublin, and headed north, on a beeline now for the capital.

I stopped briefly at Ferns, once a major city in Leinster, until Cromwell’s forces burned the castle and put almost the entire village to death.  This ruin was the most unnerving I saw, only the shattered half of one tower, a tall curved wall open to the sky, something like the Peace Dome in Hiroshima.  Then I got stuck in a huge traffic-jam at Gorey, a very Sixties-looking place with hordes of teenagers running around in their school uniforms, described even by the travel books as “grim”.  But mountains were visible ahead of me, and I turned off the highway, heading into the heart of the Wicklow Mountains.  The suburbs of Dublin start at the south end of County Wicklow along the coast, where the commuter trains also start, but the wild mountains are still empty, the same mountains where bandits preyed on travelers from Dublin for centuries.  The road was built by the English to hunt the bandits, and it winds along the bottom of deep valleys, some still sporting stands of the native Irish oaks.

Above the Vale of Avoca, past the Meeting of the Waters, is Glendalough, one of the best monastic ruins in Ireland and popular with field trips from the Dublin schools.  But like so many other sites, the foot-and-mouth had shut this one, and proceeding up a narrow valley as it did, the closure meant that I saw very little of the oldest ruins, only the famous round tower.  The hermitage of the founder, Saint Kevin, is at the bottom of a cliff along a lake, reachable only by boat, and no boats were running.  The only things moving were a few bored-looking backpackers loafing in front of the large Glendalough Hostel.

To my surprise, the drive from Waterford to Dublin did not take two days; in fact, it barely took five hours, detours and all.  With Glendalough completely closed, there was no reason to stay overnight in Arklow or Avoca, so I pressed on to Dublin a day early.  I crossed the high, barren country of the Wicklow Gap, where an enormous movie set was under construction.  The traffic increased exponentially as I dropped into larger and larger roads.  I was on the final approach to the Capital of Ireland, and pretty soon six lanes pulled me in, high-speed motorways, traffic lights, enormous roundabouts, and in the distance, skyscrapers.  Not many of them, but there aren’t many in Ireland.  Other than the few I’d seen in Belfast and Cork, this was it.

With my excellent maps, I quickly found my B&B, Parknasilla, in the suburb of Drumcondra about a mile north of the Centre.  I passed Glasnevin Cemetery, where the heroes of Ireland are buried, and the Botanic Gardens.  Drumcondra itself was all red-brick Edwardian row houses, no end to them, nearly identical.  By now, however, I was used to the tricks of Europe, and found the street and the number without asking a soul.  I hopped up to the front door on my crutches and begged to be admitted a day early.  Mrs. Ryan, the proprietor, was out, but her husband was working on a car in the driveway.  “Can’t get the bloody thing started,” he said.  He didn’t seem to be in any hurry to let me in.  “Well, we’re all booked up, you see.  There’s only one room open, and an American bloke is coming for that tomorrow.”

“That’s me.  I’m the American bloke.”

“Aren’t you coming tomorrow?”

I almost laughed.  “I could come back tomorrow.”

He thought about it a minute.  “Okay.  I suppose you might as well come in.  How’d you do that to your leg?”

“Croagh Patrick.”

“Seriously, then?  Well, well.”

I took advantage of having the car to take it into the Centre of Dublin.  It was rush hour, so the traffic was horrendous, but I could gawk at all the things I’d read so much about in the previous months.  The city was so small I could hardly believe it; Drumcondra, the start of Dublin’s outer suburbs, could not have been more than a half-hour’s walk from O’Connell Street.  All of Dublin would probably fit easily between Downtown Los Angeles and Santa Monica.  I followed O’Connell into the heart of the city, past the General Post Office, still bearing the shell-scars of the 1916 Easter Rising, past the Abbey Theatre and the Gate, past Beshoff’s Fish and Chips.  O’Connell is one of the widest streets in Ireland, and the pedestrian mall along the middle teemed with people.  How nice it would have been to stroll through that crowd, but the strolling part of my vacation was over.  I passed the statue of James Joyce’s Livia, which the Dubliners nicknamed the “Floozy in the Jacuzzi”, and utilizing a Los Angeleno’s driving skills, turned down a side-street near the River Liffey and parked the car.

I won’t go into too much detail about my perambulations, but let’s just say that Dublin is not a good city for crutches.  The streets are composed of cobblestones and puddles; there are lots of stairs and almost no elevators.  The Dubliners were accommodating, but the horde of tourists in town for Saint Patrick’s Day were not; on the contrary, they were irritated that an animal disease had ruined their holiday in Ireland, and showed no kindness to an Irish bloke on “sticks”.  I invoke the invisibility factor in my traveling clothes; the Irish knew I wasn’t Irish, but the tourists didn’t.  They thought I was just some dirty, sweaty busker, bumming through the Temple Bar on three legs.  How nice.

I ate out, I hopped around the Temple Bar, I looked inside hip art openings and rowdy pubs, I passed cinemas and sports bars, all under a cold drizzle.  I finally got fed up and hopped back over the beautiful little Ha’penny Bridge, where I stopped in the middle to stare into the water, cursing my fate and loving it at the same time.  No one had done Europe like this, really fucking lame.

 

16 March 2001

The next morning Mrs. Ryan moved me into her sitting room, the only room on the ground floor, a real kindness on her part.  After breakfast I took the car back to Dublin Airport, wondering if they would notice the tiny dent in the back bumper.  They didn’t; too busy staring at my leg, I guess.  I hopped into the terminal to change my flight.  With my leg broken and the Saint Patrick’s Day festival canceled, I had to admit defeat.  It was one thing to drive aimlessly around Ireland on crutches, but to hop uselessly around Dublin was quite another.  The public transportation in the city was poor and the taxis rare at festival time, with Parknasilla at least three long blocks from any bus line anyway.  Besides, if Dublin was anything, it was a World City like Los Angeles or London or New Delhi; it was a cold place.  It was not a place where, as the Irish say, a stranger is a friend you hadn’t met yet, even if I had fallen off the Croagh Patrick.

Aer Lingus didn’t have any sympathy for me, and charged me a hundred euros to change my flight home.  Hopping outside to catch a taxi back to Drumcondra, two men in pilot’s uniforms smoking took a long look at me.  “That looks nasty,” one of the men said.  “How’d you do that, then?”

“Croagh Patrick.”

He shook his head.  “Ay, I wish I was still young enough to do bullshit like falling off the bloody Croagh Patrick.”  They both laughed and went back inside the terminal, crushing their cigarettes out on the ground.

It was time to call home.  It was Friday morning there, and they might as well know I was coming home early, and why.  But for some reason, Mrs. Ryan’s phone wouldn’t work with my calling-card.  Neither did the phone at the Maples Hotel up the road, and they were so cavalier I immediately vowed to have neither stew nor pint at that joint.  I hopped out in frustration, and a woman just walking by escorted me around the corner to another B&B, and then another one.  She was a tiny thing, withdrawn and barely speaking, but she was kind to strangers, I’ll give her that.  Either their phone didn’t work or they couldn’t let me use it, sweating and hopping on my crutches.  I hopped angrily back to Parknasilla.

A man watering his lawn noticed my frustration and invited me in for a cup of tea and the use of his phone.  And my faith in the Irish, which should not be based on such trivialities, was reinforced nevertheless.  In such small courtesies did the Irish throw off the English yoke at last, not in the grand sacrifices of great generals.

 

17 March 2001

If I were going to see anything of Dublin, I’d have to take one of those cheesy bus tours I hate so much.  But there was nothing for it; I called a taxi and got a ride down to the headquarters of Dublin Bus, on O’Connell Street near the shell-scarred General Post Office.  They have a bus that circles the city, dropping you off and picking you up wherever you like.  It would have been grand if I could walk the city from each stop, but it would take something really special to get me out of that slippery bus on crutches.

That special thing was the Book of Kells.  Stored at the Old Library of Trinity College, the Book of Kells is often considered the most beautiful illustrated Bible in Ireland.  I was also keen on seeing the Book of the Dun Cow and the Book of Armagh, less illustrated but more historically important, and one of the few remaining copies of the “Poblacht Na H Eireann”, the proclamation of the Irish Republic at the Easter Rising of 1916.

I cautiously hopped over the wet cobbles of Trinity College to the library, where a jolly security guard escorted me upstairs in a freight elevator.  A large crowd of tourists milled about the Book of Kells, protected in a glass case.  He leaned close to me.  “Don’t worry yourself, I’ll clear this lot off.”  He waded into the crowd.  “All right, folks, it’s just a book, take a peek and then move along, please.”  With a wink he brought me up to the case.  And there it was, the ancient book found buried, the beautiful illuminations curling off from the letters like the arms of a galaxy.  I let out a low whistle and then hobbled off to see the other treasures of the Trinity Library.

A copy of the Book of Kells costs thousands of dollars, but a CD-ROM less than twenty, so I picked up two and slowly worked my way back to the bus-stop.  The bus went south to Merrion Square, across the street from Oscar Wilde’s childhood home, and a statue of Wilde reclines there:  the “Queer in the Square”, as the Dubliners put it.  We drove past busy Grafton Street and west along the Liffey, past Saint Patrick’s Cathedral and then the Guinness factory.  Now my leg really hindered me, as I watched the crowds waiting to go inside, the huge doors emblazoned GUINNESS beckoning me in, but I had lost my golden ticket into the Wonka factory up on the Croagh Patrick.  Arrgggh!  And on the other side of the river, its tall observation tower commanding a magnificent view of Dublin in the gentle rain, the Jameson’s factory was likewise denied me.  We drove by Dublin Castle and the National Museum, my crutches rattling as I shifted in the hard plastic seats.  What a way to see the city.

Back at the General Post Office, I eased my way through the large, directionless crowd of tourists and Irish holidaymakers.  I had fish and chips at the famous Beshoff’s, opened by a survivor of the mutiny on the Russian battleship Potemkin, savoring the crowds from the steamy glass windows, and then tried to find a seat around the corner at Sean O’Casey’s pub.  The Irish are a kind and hospitable people, but there’s one caveat:  they’ll never give up a seat in a pub, not for a man on crutches even.

As I carefully eased myself past the Hotel Gresham, where the IRA men holed up from the artillery of the Free State army in 1922, a pair of Irishmen stopped to admire my plaster.  “Oh, dear,” one said in the gayest Irish accent I’d ever heard.  “Don’t worry, eight weeks and you’ll be out of that.  I know, I’m a nurse.”  I noticed he was dressed completely in black, with a huge black cowboy hat.

“It’s been one hell of a Saint Patrick’s Day,” I replied with a smirk.  They chuckled and invited me into the hotel for a drink.  The bar, at the center of the lobby, was the best I could hope for in my condition, packed with middle-aged Irish and English couples, gay and straight, the volume of the voices cranked up with alcohol and choked by the thick cloud of cigarette smoke.  I had two drinks, shared my mountain-climbing story with a few interested parties, and feeling like I’d really squeezed every last drop of pleasure from the Emerald Isle, hobbled back into the wet streets.

I crossed O’Connell Street to the taxi-stand, and as I’d planned when I left the States, I peeled off my lovely tan duster and left it there in a bus shelter.  That duster which many of you know had served me very well indeed; it had crossed a lot of cold desert and seen a lot of wild Los Angeles nightlife.  I’d walked past Lake Merritt in it, carrying an unloaded .45 in the pocket, and I’d carried a fifth of good tequila into the Plaza del Toros in México City in it.  Yeah, a lot of people will remember that long, beautiful coat of mine, but the previous Thanksgiving in New York City I’d bought a black cashmere coat nearly as long, and the duster’s days were numbered.  But I gave it a good send-off, tattered and torn as it was, it kept me warm one last time, shivering up in the rain on the Croagh Patrick, and with a kind word I left it at the taxi-stand in the middle of O’Connell Street in Dublin, hoping against hope that the weirdest street freak in the city would stumble across it and give it a whole new life, my poor duster.

And so I caught a cab back to Parknasilla, and spent the rest of Saint Patrick’s Day packing my luggage and watching endless reruns of “Tops of the Pops”.  It was my last night in Ireland, and I enjoyed every minute of it.

 

18 March 2001

Naturally, the day I left Dublin was the first sunny day, lovely white clouds drifting across the Irish Sea and headed west, just like me.  The same weird pair of couples were having breakfast, but today I completely ignored their English drivel.  I said a heart-felt good-bye to Mrs. Ryan, loaded my bags into the taxi and said good-bye to Parknasilla, good-bye to Drumcondra, and good-bye to Dublin.  The plane for Los Angeles lifted off right on time, full of happy Irish on holiday and pissed-off Americans who’d blown their Saint Patrick’s, although no one had a story like mine.  The Celtic goddess in the seat beside me was Deirdre McCabe, and because of her fear of flying she talked non-stop for the entire ten hours of the flight.  I can sum it up in a few sentences.  She was in her late thirties, married, with a family, and over a decade spent in marketing, but she’d given it all up for her singing career.  Deirdre plans on being the next Shania Twain or Faith Hill, and after some useless singing lessons in Dublin, she found an excellent vocal coach who happened to live in Oakhurst, a small town near Fresno.  So every other month or so, in spite of her fear of flying, she boarded the non-stop Aer Lingus flight to Los Angeles and hired a car up to Fresno to spend a week with her vocal coach.

She invited me to stay with her family the next time I came to Dublin.  I waved good-bye to her and all the rockers on the jet, and then hopped off the jet.  It was a hot day in Los Angeles, the first real warmth I’d felt in three weeks.  A burly Filipina pushed me in a wheelchair out of the airport, through Immigration, through Customs, and to the baggage-claim, where she retrieved my bags with one arm.  “You’re strong,” I said at last.

“You’re right,” she said, without any trace of irony, and then pushed me and my luggage out onto the sidewalk.  Another guy from the Irish jet was wheeled out behind me, but he had no legs.  You know that old saying, I complained I had no shoes until...?  Whatever.  He turned out to be the sound engineer for U2, on his way to a music conference in Miami, and we smoked our first cigarette at home together, sitting by the curb of the Los Angeles International Airport.  The sky was really blue, that California blue, and warm, and tinged with smog, and beautiful.  I could see the look of surprise when Geri pulled up in the Volvo, Ava strapped into the baby-seat, both of them staring at my leg, but I just smiled, because my Holiday from Hell was at an end.  Now I had at eight weeks of torture to look forward to, but in LA, my pretty city, it would be a piece of cake.