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| My Ireland | ||
| BY LEE HURLEY, TODD KEITH, & HILARY NANGLE | ||
I was just beginning to relax, just beginning to loosen my white-knuckled grip on the steering wheel and allow myself a quick sideways glance at the stone wall-stitched, green patchwork of Ireland’s countryside when—KK-THUMP. “OhmyGod,” I gasped, releasing my foot from the accelerator and peering gape-mouthed into the rear-view, then driver’s- side mirrors. I expected to see a body lying in the road behind me. There wasn’t one. Still holding my breath, I glanced to the passenger-side mirror. It took a minute for my jetlag-addled brain to realize that it was the spring-loaded mirror that had kk-thumped shut, perhaps nudged by an errant branch from the fuchsia hedge lining the road. I resumed breathing. My missionary-like zeal for finding every mapped castle and ancient ruin has sent me down many of Ireland’s shoulderless, one-car’s-width lanes, but previously with my husband, Tom, at the wheel. Once, while zigzagging through the purple-rocked hills of The Burren, we met another car head-on, stopping just feet from a bumper-to-bumper collision. The other driver reached out his window and pulled his mirror shut. Tom mimicked his gesture, and both inched cautiously forward. When they were window to window, the other driver turned to my husband, noted his death grip on the wheel, and smiled: “Re-lax,” he said with a nod, and continued on. I tried to internalize his advice when I found myself behind the wheel of a subcompact rental—an automatic, thank God—looping from Shannon to Dingle and over to Galway. Missing or cracked mirrors and scratched paint are all but expected when visitors take the right-mounted wheel, attempt to keep left, and fumble with mirror-image controls, all while navigating Ireland’s notoriously confusing roads.
As I approached Dingle, the roads not only narrowed, but also became peppered with suicidal sheep and the occasional cow. The kk-thumping that resulted when I grazed the greenery camouflaging an unforgiving stone wall was far preferable to hitting one of James Herriot’s creatures, great or small. All these challenges were minor however when compared with translating Irish directions. The Irish are extremely warm, welcoming, and helpful, but they’re not keen on direction details. Despite repeatedly asking for an escape route, I felt like a hamster in a wheel in Tralee. The advice, always delivered with a smile, helpful gestures, and a rolling brogue, invariably was “Auchk, just go straight on, you can’t miss it. It’s just a wee bit down the road.” Did “straight on” mean veering left or right at the fork? Was “wee bit” a couple hundred yards or a couple of miles? One evening, while trying to follow a friend’s directions to his rural home in the dimming light, I got lost. I panicked, and rote memory wrongly steered me right. On a narrow dirt lane. On a blind hill. On a curve. Ack! I yanked the wheel left. One minute later, and I would have kk-thumped into a farm truck and ended up like Woody Allen in Scoop, doing my shtick on the River Styx. I poured my tale of driving woe out over dinner. My friend seemed surprised that I managed to get lost amidst the narrow strip of rolling farmland between the main road and the sea. As I prepared to leave, he leaned into the car. “I’ve got a shortcut you can take on the way back,” he offered in all sincerity. “Just follow along and bear right at the crossroads. You can’t miss it. It’s just a wee bit up the road.” Vienna, Austria, 1991. My brother and I had just hitchhiked from Bratislava, Czechoslovakia, where I’d been living and teaching English. “Well, where to now?” my brother asked looking at the train schedules on the board of the Südbahnhof, Vienna’s largest rail station. Europe was our oyster: we were young, with no schedule or obligations all summer, a trusty Let’s Go Europe in our hands. It goes without saying we had no money. After months in “Bratty,” as the British expatriates like to call it, I was a bit intimidated by the prospect of the full-on vitality, consumerism, and economic activity of Western Europe. In Bratty, things were simple. Your RDA food group consisted of pork, knedla or dumplings, beer, and tureck? káva, coffee with the grounds still in it. No one, including teachers, had any money to spend—which was fortunate since there was hardly anything to buy—so you went on walks in the countryside, met friends at cafés, or went away for the weekend with your students for home-cooked meals, delicious pastries, and the occasional pig killing (another story). Consequently, Alex and I had one overarching requirement for our summer travel: that it cost next to nothing. At the time, that left us a choice between the two most affordable countries in Europe: Greece and Ireland. A trip to Greece, while intriguing, would take us to the farthest reaches of the continent. Ireland had plenty going for it—there was our Scots-Irish ancestry and a vague curiosity about where our family came from; the musical draw of Dublin, a city that helped launched U2, The Waterboys, and The Pogues; and then there is Guinness beer. I kept picturing the serene green grass of Ireland, the rolling hills and rugged coastline, and the gentle rain. At the time, I didn’t know if it was an accurate portrait of a country I’d never visited (it was), but it worked for me.
But for its citizens in 1991, the Ireland of my young imagination might not have been reality. On a train to Dublin, an elderly woman invited us to join her for tea. “The thing that we Irish have to be thankful to the English for is that they gave us their language,” she said. “Before that, we were on the edge of the Western world, nearly outcasts. And today, look at us.” Indeed, nearly 20 years after joining the European Economic Community, Ireland was in the game but struggling with an unemployment rate of 20 percent and inflation nearly as high. There was massive emigration, the loss of skilled workers, and low wages compared to the rest of Europe. “Watch out in Dublin, now. They’ll steal the dye out of yer hair and come back for yer eyebrows,” she warned us about the hardknock capital. She wasn’t far off, given some of the neighborhoods we walked, yet all told, Ireland was the most beautiful convalescence I could imagine. After two weeks, taking the ferry back to the continent felt like leaving home. I didn’t need an excuse to return, but found one recently for a travel writers’ conference held in Galway. Now married with children and thankfully no longer earning Czechoslovak koruna, I brought my wife along to combine work with pleasure. I couldn’t wait to show her Dublin, but the mean streets were not quite the same. The town had gone continental on me. Posh coffee bars, snazzy lunch places, and tony hotels like the Dylan now dotted the urban landscape, the rule rather than the exception. Guinness was not the obvious first choice drink in all the pubs. And unlike before, immigrant workers from central and eastern European Union states were almost as likely to pull your beer at the bar as a native. Commenting on the changes since I’d last visited the country, a cabbie remarked, “It’s night and day the differences—people now have pocket change to go out for lunch.” A small detail maybe, but the remark stuck with me. While the Irish countryside is still dotted with small hamlets and villages that conform to an American’s expectation of what Ireland is all about, Galway turned out to be much the same as Dublin, if on a smaller scale. Restaurants, shops, pubs, and hotels had almost all taken a step up. Ireland had joined Europe. I found myself wondering, is this something lost or something gained—an indulgent, romantic exercise when you have little at stake save for wanting to recapture a youthful memory. It is hard to begrudge such an overwhelmingly hospitable country their well-deserved economic success. On the other hand, we did meet an amicable young lad from Bratislava, Tomas, who worked at Glenloe Abbey Hotel in Galway. He clearly missed the old country—his old country—and I did the best my broken Slovak allowed, reminiscing with him about his home. We found ourselves in a new Ireland that had welcomed us both. And for that, I know we will return again.
In the merry month of June from me home I started, Kenmare One day I went to see the owner of a local pharmacy in Kenmare who knew my father from his earlier travels. He said, “Jack Hurley got famous around these parts. He took to singing protest songs in the pub. We almost got kicked out.” I felt tame by comparison. The morning I left Kenmare my head hurt from a self-inflicted wound the night before. It was scotch. In my fog, I climbed in on the wrong side of my miniature rental car and sat there for a minute pretending I was looking for something in the glove compartment. Slowly I climbed over to the driver’s side, which is the passenger side in my country, and drove off in the left lane searching for something I could not describe. I found myself in Cork.
Blarney Dublin So I got to the airport five hours early and loaded up on music and trinkets for the family.
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Ireland means many things to many people. For some, it’s a chance to reconnect with a distant heritage; for others, a place to commune with one of the most warm and hospitable populations on earth. Whatever their reasons for going, people rarely travel to Ireland only once—most return again and again, discovering something new to cherish on each trip. Ireland has shown some of her many faces to the writers whose essays follow, from a healing sanctuary to a place to get happily lost on her tangle of roads. 
Roundabouts left me sweating and swearing: look right, flow left, keep right, exit left. I circled each one at least twice. Making it all the more difficult was signage in Irish, not English; it took me a few go-arounds to puzzle out that An Daingean was Dingle. Then, whenever I signaled, I activated the windshield wipers and spray. Oh well, better to douse and drive than to leave a body in my wake. 
Maybe it was the wracking cough I hadn’t been able to shake for months, a product of Bratty’s dreadful winter air quality still weighing on my fatigued lungs. But that’s where Ireland comes in. Coughing up a lung in Doolin near the Cliffs of Moher, nursing a head cold in beautiful Galway, and eventually biking around the Ring of Kerry, I went to Ireland to mend. It was a moveable sanitarium, a green, lush land of health, and I will forever associate it with healing, rest, and repose.
Cork
