Island

Anyway, Ann and he, together with the two younger lads, David and John, decided to take a holiday home in Dingle, Co. Kerry. There was nothing like a break, and Ann certainly needed it. Gary had always loved Kerry, ever since he had first gone to Baile an Fheirtéaraigh as a teenager to learn Irish all those years ago. The beauty of the Dingle peninsula was always stunning to say the least - a little bit of heaven on earth, especially in the good weather. It was there that the seeds of his love for all things Irish were sown, from the beautiful pronunciations of the dialect of Corca Dhuibhne to the splendid rugged beauty of the Blaskets just off the coast. He had soaked himself in all the books from the Blascaod Mór over the intervening years. The one he had really loved and the first one he had read was Muiris O Súilleabháin's Fiche Bliain ag Fás. He had read it in translation first as Twenty Years A-Growing, a copy of which he had procured at the local library. It was a great read, a real boy's book, a real man's book. Gary couldn't wait to read it in Gaeluinn na Mumhan, and that he did shortly afterwards. He had always been lucky with his Irish teachers, both at primary and secondary, and going to an all-Irish second level school was the icing on the cake. His Irish teachers had been inspiring Kerry men with a real love for the language. So consequently he longed to set foot on the Great Basket for the first time, to tread the soil where the writers, poets and storytellers like Peig Sayers, Tomás Ó Criomhthain, Muiris Ó Súilleabháin and Micheál O Guithín and the scholars Karl Marstrander, Robin Flower, Kenneth Jackson and George Thomson had once trod.
"It is time you two lads really brushed up on your Irish. Next year you'll both have to go to the Gaeltacht. Not alone will you learn Irish, but it will give you greater independence - not to mention the craic and the camaraderie, and meeting the cailíní áille. The Gaeltacht is always a good place for that, lads!"

"Now, Gar, don't be teasing them. They've plenty of time for that yet."

"I'm thirteen ma. Joe O'Kane has a girlfriend and he's in my class at school," retorted David.

"Christ, Dave you've plenty of time ahead of you for courting the girls. Enjoy yourself at soccer and live a little before planning your love life!"

"Yeh, all you need is a pack of condoms and Bob's your uncle."

"Jesus, Gar, what have you been telling these kids?
They're too young to be goin' on with this stuff!"

"It's got absolutely nothing to do with me, I can assure you. I've never spoken of such matters with the lads, have I boys?"

"Of course, you have. Sure you threw me a pack of condoms last week!" joked David.

"Jesus, Gar!"

"Ah, for God's sake, Ann, can't you see he's only pulling your leg, just winding you up, and you fell for it hook, line and sinker."

Limerick, the city of King John's great castle, Sarsfield Bridge and the Treaty Stone sat serenely astride the Shannon. Having stopped there for lunch and having visited the castle with its five great drum towers and ten foot thick walls, they headed south-west for Tralee, gateway to the Dingle peninsula.

"Seo linn isteach i dTrá Lí, literally the beach of the river Lee, famous for its being the ancient seat of the Munster Desmonds whom, no doubt, you've all read of in your history classes!" informed Garry.

"Huh, more famous for its Roses, its beautiful Roses, more like!" rejoined David.

"The very place, Dave, the very place!"

"Are you speaking of chocolates or women?" laughed John.

"Both I think, knowing Dave," replied Ann.

There were many associations vying for attention in Gary's mind, not the least of which was the fact that the anthem of the eponymous festival was his mother's party piece. He could long recall all the parties and sing-songs they had had over the years! The saints had always said that to sing was to pray twice. Singing certainly reached those places the spoken or written word failed to reach.

Having spent the night in a B&B, they headed further west for Dingle, the most westerly town in Europe, the town where Peig spent her first years in service, in aimsir, in the house of the Currans who owned a pub and shop. Today it is a bustling and prosperous tourist haven with steep streets and had an old world air. Gary felt that he could almost write a tourist brochure on this area. From Brandon Mountain to Slieve Mish, the place was steeped in folklore and ancient tradition. Gary had read somewhere that there had once stood a house on the corner of Green Street and Main Street where its owner, Count Rice, had sought to entice Marie Antoinette to stay in a bid to rescue her from the horrors of prison and certain death. But the fair Queen refused and perished at home instead.

"What is it about the Great Blasket that attracts you, Gary?" asked Ann the following morning.

"I suppose all islands, especially small remote ones, attract. There's definitely something in that."

"What specifically about this island?"

"Well, I suppose the ancient culture that lived there; their unbroken connection with the ancient tradition of our people; their stories which tapped into the very wells of our literary and oral heritage - the great Fenian Cycle that lived on in the memories of its storytellers like Peig."

"The island looks like just one huge big rock from here in Dunquinn, doesn't it, Gar?" cut in John

"That's it really. One huge old Rock on whose bosom a community survived for some two hundred years or so. It was a miracle of survival that the islanders managed to live on it for so long. I think the Aran island poet, Máirtín O Díreáin, sums it up best for me. He said that islanders - and of course he was talking about his own island, but it applies to all - were strugglers with the rock and the soil 'ag baint ceart de neart na ndúl', literally harvesting their rights from the strengths of the elements."

"That sounds good, at any rate, whatever that may mean?" retorted David.

"Come on now, Dave. You're not that thick. You know what I mean. All you have to do is dig a stony garden and you might possible get a taste, just a brief bare taste at that, of what it meant to live on an island. Then add to that the struggle to build stone walls, rid your field as best as you can of the accursed and blessed stones, plant your potatoes, cut your turf and plough the sea for fish. Then you'll understand. Add to that total subsistence living the fact that there were - no shops, no modern appliances, no nothing. "

"Haw! Haw! very funny. I know what gardening is all about. Ask ma. I worked for a landscape gardener last year. Isn't that right ma?"

"That's right, and you never stopped complaining about how hard it was, how tired you were, how the money was only brutal... And yous had all the latest gardening equipment... Think of those poor old islanders doing everything by hand... Back-breaking work, I should imagine."

"Here's the man in the motor boat in from the ferry, Gar," informed John.

The day was brilliantly sunny. It seemed somehow that the sun was shining on everything Gar was doing this summer. As the man in the B&B said that morning at breakfast: "Make the best of it. Get a good squeeze out of it, because you could come to Kerry and nine times out of ten it would be raining." He was right, that was the way to procede, carpe diem, 'seize the day,' 'make hay while the sun shines.'

The tide was out somewhat so the crew ferried the passengers in groups of about ten over to the ferry which stood some hundred yards out. The sea was a brilliant blue and there wasn't a cloud in the sky. Dún Chaoin receded somewhat into the distance and the island came into view. Gary thought of the great poet Seán O Ríordáin's famous injunction: 'Gabh faobhar na faille siar go Dún Chaoin agus tiocfaidh tú ar ár ndúchas': 'Take the coast road to Dunquin and discover our heritage.

"Tóg an bád farrantóireachta siar lán na farraige go dtí an t-Oileán agus ólfaidh tú as fíor-thobar an dúchais," said Gar to himself, attempting to build on the poet's famous injunction. He hoped O Ríordáin would forgive him his impudence: "Take the ferry across the fullness of the sea to The Island and you will drink from the pure well of our heritage."

After a quick preliminary walk-about, all the boys wanted to do was go down onto the beach and swim. Still, they were right. It was a day for lying in the sun, and no better place to get a good colour than on the strand. The waves were strong and exhilarating. There was nothing like as swimming in the sea or the ocean for that matter to reinvigorate you.

"Come on in, Gar, it's wonderful," called John.

"It's bloody freezing. As Joyce said: 'Oh snot-green scrotum-shrivelling sea.'

"It's not green, it's blue. Caught you out there, Gar.'

The waves were coming in more strongly now and Gary and the two boys dived into and under them. There was some elemental power in the ocean. It searched out every cell of the body. You felt how little and puny you were in her motherly embrace. The sea was a great mother who had to be treated with respect and fear, because when you least expected it she could smother you to her bosom and throw you up as food for the seagulls and fishes. The old islanders well knew the vagaries of the ocean. Peig had always feared the sea, was always afraid when any of her children were playing down on the strand, had sat lonely hours waiting for her husband to return from a fishing trip in his naomhóg.

It was nice to run along the beach to dry off and then sit soaking up the sun for an hour or so. Gary slept for a while. He remembered dreaming once that he should walk in the sun, follow the silver light of life.

"Christ, Gar's snoring like an ox, ma. He's as bad as da any day!"

"Now, Dave, when you get to my age, it's important to rest as much as you can."

"Jesus, listen to the old man speak. With that attitude you'll be eighty next birthday."

"This island is just one big huge hill. The islanders must have been fierce healthy and strong people," observed Ann.

"Very true. Remember your man on the video presentation in Ionad an Bhlascaoid saying just that, that the oldtimers, na seanfhundúirí, could run up against the hill even into their eighties. And he was a young man, the last born man on the island, before they evacuated to the mainland in 1953," replied Gar.

"And Muiris O Súilleabháin called this the last parish before the New World, before America."

"And wasn't he right? At that time, and before it, all the schools on the mainland and the one here taught the pupils English, because it was their passport to survival, their entrance ticket to An Domhan Nua."

"Christ, the people must have suffered much here?

"Indeed. It was that struggle to survive that gave them great strength of character and a rich spirituality, a deep philosophy and wisdom about life. No wonder the foreign and native scholars came here to live amongst these extraordinary people. They loved Karl Marstrander, the Norwegian scholar, whom they called 'An Lochlainneach' - The Viking. He became one of them almost. He went fishing with them and wasn't afraid to do any physical work which the islanders were doing."

"I remember studying Peig's story at school many year's ago," continued Ann, "and I recall that her youngest son, or one of her sons at least, Tomás, I think was his name, fell over the cliff one day when out collecting wood for the fire. What strength of character that woman had, to be able to wash and lay out the corpse of her own son! That's some strength, I'm telling you!"

"There's a brilliantly moving one act play by John Millington Synge, called Riders To The Sea, about this long suffering island woman, Maurya, who has lost all her sons to the sea and she says something like 'They're all gone now, and there isn't anything more the sea can do to me.' He could have been talking about Peig, except for the fact that he wasn't much liked here on the island. He came here in 1905 and was the first outside visitor, two years before The Viking set foot on the rock. They didn't have much time for Synge because they took offence at his account of his stay amongst them. He obviously got on better on the Arans!"

"That was a beautiful quotation you read for me last night, Gar, from Muiris O Súilleabháin. How does it go again?"

Well I think he was quoting an old proverb which runs: 'Bitter the tears that fall, but more bitter still the tears that fall not.' I think he was returning to the island as a very young boy, his father having died, to the home of his grandfather. I think that was the occasion, but I could be wrong. Anyway the Irish is beautiful and the sentiments are very true. It always remains in my head: '... mar a deir an seanráiteas, is goirt iad na deora a shileann, ach is goirte ná san na deora ná sileann.'

It was time to return to the mainland or míntír as they called it in Kerry. As The Island gradually receded into the distance, the sun was still shining. There seemed to be hundreds of cormorants around these islands flying around to bid them God speed. Gary saw a huge colony of them on one rock, he had never seen so many of them before. Maybe they were shags, first-cousins of the cormorants? He could not tell as he was not an expert ornithologist, but he had a deep affection for this mysterious black lithe bird, expert diver of the deep. He loved the way they flew just inches above the surface of the water in pairs, in threes or fours or on their own and then suddenly disappear, dive down and not surface for more than half a minute. He especially loved the way they stood like a brood of barristers in black gowns drying their wings. There much surely be some mythology about this bird. That was something Gary had to check up. One way or another he felt that he had been healed in a special way by this trip to the island. One of the stories Peig told Kenneth Jackson was one about the healing power of love and the restoration of sanity. It was a wonderful story, though with a peculiar and mysterious twist.

"You know, Ann, I'm reminded of a beautiful story told by Peig Sayers about Gleann na nGealt or the Valley of Lunatics."

"Christ, Gar, you never stop talking about madness, do you?"

"I suppose not. Sure what is madness, anyway? Who is really the judge of that? Anyway, when anyone suffers from any disease it becomes of necessity part of their very identity. It is something they simple have to incorporate into their self-concept. Here I am, and whether I like it or not, depression is part of my identity. That way I can cope with it, tame it, domesticate it, disarm it, take away its sting if you like, whatever about its affects."

"You're right, of course, Gar. There's no use living a lie. That way you're always a prisoner as I have found out to my cost... Anyway, get on with the story."

"Well, there was a wooded valley somewhere between Tralee and Dingle called Gleann na nGealt. It had got its name apparently because it was a wild place full of rocks and trees where lunatics went to roam wild and unperturbed by the sane. Anyway, according to Peig, that's where all the insane went before there was such a thing as a madhouse or an asylum. The story concerns a young beautiful woman called Eibhlín and her lover, Mícheál Bán. However, Mícheál's parents wouldn't allow him to marry Eibhlín because her parents were very poor and they had no dowry. So, you've guessed it, they arranged a marriage with another more prosperous family. The poor girl went demented: 'Tháinig brón agus briseadh croí uirthi agus do chuaigh sí as a meabhair.' She took herself off to Gleann na nGealt where she roamed wild and mad. Her family came one after another, but no one could catch her. - The fleetness of foot associated with mad people was a motif in many of the old stories. - Anyway, to make a long story short, the parish priest approached Mícheál Bán telling him that he was responsible for Eibhlín's plight and that the only way to cure her and bring her back to her family was that he should go to Gleann na nGealt and tell her that his wife was dead and that he would marry her if only she would come back. Mícheál did so, and here's the twist, when he arrived home, you'll never guess, his wife had died the previous midnight. The ending, needless to say, is a happy ever after one. They got married and had long and fruitful lives."

"What a story? The poor old wife was the unlucky one in that! Still true love will out, I suppose?"

"For me it represents the healing power of love; how when true love is denied things go awry; the centre cannot hold; the mind cracks. It's rather like the story of Mis and Dubhrois which I told you before. They're both about the healing power of true love. You see, Ann, I'm being healed bit by bit... And true love needn't be with another person either, it can be that true love you find in your own heart, deep in your own soul... That's not to deny, of course, my deep love for you, Ann. If I may re-write O Ríordáin again, and dedicate it to you, Ann: 'Tóg an bád farrantóireachta siar lán na mara agus tiocfaidh tú ar fhíor-thobar an ghrá: 'Take the ferry west across the deep sea and you will come to the true well of love.' "

"Well spoken. The true Romantic," laughed Ann.

When they arrived in Dunquin the tide was in and the ferry drew up right beside the pier. This time there was no need for a smaller craft.

^

Biography

I am a teacher in St Joseph's secondary, Fairview. I write poetry in both English and Irish. I edit the school yearbook each year and attempt to encourage young writers to compose stories, articles and poems. Some of my more recent Irish poems are published on the Arranmore website www.arainnmhor.com. My first book entitled "Still Point Meditations" is being published in September 2002 by Veritas Publishers