When Irish Skies are Frowning
MARGOLIS, RICHARD J.
States of the Union WHEN IRISH SKIES ARE FROWNING BY RICHARD J. MARGOLIS Bantry Diane and I have spent much of the summer here sampling the beer and the blarney and admiring the many hues...
...it is certainly in camera—but our itinerary, it is true, has been shamefully relaxed...
...What we mainly felt was gratitude...
...The Irish, of course, thrive on adversity—who else would make a gourmet meal of nettle soup?—so their talk of outdoor conditions sometimes strikes Diane and me as inappropriately upbeat...
...Who's Wolfe Tone...
...In Bantry the main square is named in honor of another martyr to English tyranny and Irish weather—Theobald Wolfe Tone, founder of the Society of United Irishmen...
...No more stones," I shouted angrily, and they disappeared into the brush...
...A few days ago three medium-size boys took us there—or we took them: We were giving them a ride part of the way home, after our paths had crossed in Donemark Falls...
...It has been 65 years since 26 of the 32 counties freed themselves from the English...
...An elderly gent I sat next to at a pub one lunchtime told me he had arisen at sunrise that morning "just to breathe in the clean air...
...These are the innocent dead, the powerless, for whom Derek Mahon sometimes speaks: "Save us, save us, " they seem to say, "Let the god not abandon its who have come so far in darkness and in pain...
...At a certain distance the sheep appear as round, white rocks set amid the darker slates and granites—one of many hints in these parts that things are not necessarily what they seem...
...Probably he is vacationing in some alien tide of sunlight far from Ireland...
...A more weathered description might have alluded to a ripple of sunlight between shower and shower and shower and shower...
...Where they came from, and into what misty pasture they eventually vanished, remains a riddle...
...The weather and the bellwethers are familiarly Irish...
...His response was to slit his own throat with a pen knife...
...They listened politely— three tan-legged boys with blue eyes and silky brown hair—and then offered to show us around...
...In 1798 Wolfe Tone persuaded the French, ever eager to stick it to the English, to launch a small fleet of sailing ships toward Bantry Bay, the reasonable purpose being to liberate Ireland...
...In the mornings Diane stays in the bungalow, working on a manuscript she has lugged all the way from Connecticut, while my Opel and I coast down the long hill, known hereabouts as Vaughan's Pass...
...Still, below the cruel turrets there must have been mild herders of sheep and cows...
...Later, in the Opel, the older boy asked us to let them off at Wolfe Tone Park...
...Irish weather and Irish history are inextricably linked, often with the gravest of consequences...
...It rained in Dublin the day of the Easter Uprising in 1916, dampening what had seemed at first a promising revolution...
...Then the oldest boy told us the whole story, ending gracefully with, "And he succumbed with no one present but his Maker...
...We have climbed spiraling granite steps to the tops of crumbling towers and castle embattlements, mute reminders of Gaelic glories now smothered in ivy...
...The other thing I had hoped to discuss with Mahon was the proper role of tourists like Diane and myself, outsiders trying to make sense of this tight little insiders' island...
...On reading a poem that appears to come to the rescue of all the dead in Ireland, I got the impression Mahon was beaming an urgent message at the likes of us foreign dabblers: You with your light meter and relaxed itinerary, Let not our naïve labors have been in vain...
...Most of the plotters were duly executed...
...Another time, Sailing from San Francisco to Shanghai, He brought a crew of lascars out on strike In protest at the loss of a day's pay Crossing the International Dateline...
...no master was in sight...
...Diane and I discovered them by accident (we do a lot of walking in the afternoons) and have returned more than once...
...I looked up "lascars" in a dictionary at the Bantry public library...
...I was proud to be awake," he said...
...It is not hard to guess why people here prefer the silver lining, faint as it may be, to the scudding cloud...
...A dozen potatoes cost about 50 cents...
...A rake and a sailor, and a radical to boot, this man ••claimed to have been arrested in New York/Twice on the same day...
...In truth, everything here seems weighed down by history, much of which lies around us in ruins...
...The air is chilly here, the sky capricious and indifferent to the dictates of summer tourism...
...Yesterday evening we discovered a small flock of ewes, rams and lambs, plus a trio of bearded goats, grazing proprietarily in our own backyard...
...But we met them again in the marshland, whereupon Diane gave them a gentle lecture on safety, aggression and humanism...
...Hewasahero," the middle boy said...
...Not a creature was stirring, with the single exception of a small black and white sheep dog on the soccer field...
...A handful of onions, the one time I bought some, cost nothing...
...I saw several doubledecker baby buggies...
...but to our urban eyes they loomed as heaven-sent silhouettes against a perfect Irish sunset...
...The falls flow hard by the main road that leads from Bantry to Glengariff, but they are totally hidden from view...
...The sheep, in any case, do not always keep their distance...
...They were stalking us from atop a cliff as we loped from rock to rock in the gully below...
...In addition to Wolfe Tone Square there isaWolfe Tone Park, muchof ita soccer field that slopes lushly down to a blue inlet...
...We, with our relaxed itinerary, were their guests...
...The boys threw stones at us...
...The children are everywhere: in the shops, on the sidewalks, at the freezing beaches...
...They seem to thrive on underground vegetables, or else on the beam of liberty that lights up the entire island...
...Derek Manon, a witty poet who happens to live about 60 kilometers north of Bantry, in the town of Kinsale, has described Irish weather as "a tide of sunlight between shower and shower"— a fair summation if a touch incomplete, meteorology-wise...
...they assure us as we huddle sullenly beneath a broken umbrella...
...No collar circled its furry neck...
...They are a form of Irish weather...
...Diane and I know nothing about light meters—ours may be inside our camera...
...One reason I wish to talk to Mahon is to learn more about his uncle, whom he has memorialized in a fetching poem called "My Wicked Uncle...
...The fact that the rebels had forgotten to announce their plans to the general populace didn't help matters...
...In a place like this, with the sun benignly sinking behind Bantry Bay, a dog can seem more than a dog...
...They hover over the landscape like smoke from a turf fire, part sweetsmelling, part acrid...
...but unlike us Americans, they possess a racial memory...
...In the valley awaits downtown Bantry, a market town of some 3,000 souls, with its many pubs, victualers and vegetable stalls...
...I said, and got three answers...
...This dog was having a fine time scampering up and down the long greensward, pausing now and then to roll around in the cool grass...
...He was a Bantry fighter," the smallest boy said...
...We too had our lives to live...
...Diane and I lingered at the park while the boys went on their way...
...The Irish climate being what it is, the visitor tends to settle for beauty, which is everywhere, rather than for comfort, which is harder to come by...
...The vegetables are mainly the type that grow underground—onions, carrots, turnips and, naturally, the ubiquitous potato...
...The losses persist...
...Ah, it's another grand day...
...For a couple of frivolous reasons I have wanted to meet Mahon—he and Seamus Heaney, both still in their 40s, seem the best of the post-Yeats batch of poets—but he is never at home when I telephone...
...Too few to weigh, " the vegetable man explained...
...The uncle was buried "on a blustery day above the sea.' At the funeral, writes Mahon, "I saw sheep huddled in the long wet grass/Of the golf course, and the empty freighters/Sailing for ever down Belfast Lough/In a fine rain...
...Probably every schoolchild in Bantry knows the Wolfe Tone story, along with many similar tales of disorder and sorrow—the Great Famine, the Battle of the Boyne and, more recently, the massacres of Londonderry...
...People in Bantry are not rich, but they seem to have money for food and videotapes, and also for sweets—candy, gooey rolls, creamy eclairs—with which they ply their gorgeous, downy children...
...He died five days later in solitary confinement, at the age of 35...
...Diane and I have puzzled over the 4,000-year-old stone circles that rise unaccountably out of the heather on mountain slopes and in cow pastures...
...Wolfe Tone was arrested, summarily tried by a military tribunal and sentenced to be hanged as a traitor (rather than shot as a foreign enemy...
...In general Irish children are well-behaved and instantly huggable...
...Alas, an unexpected storm blew the ships hundreds of miles off course, whereupon an English fleet captured the French one...
...They turnout to be "East Indian native sailors...
...The parents, no less than the children, take it all for granted now...
...Theobald Wolfe Tone lives on...
...This was their place...
...There are steep cliffs and foamy cascades, dappled sunlight filtering through pine needles, black tidal pools where gray salmon can be seen gliding out to sea...
...States of the Union WHEN IRISH SKIES ARE FROWNING BY RICHARD J. MARGOLIS Bantry Diane and I have spent much of the summer here sampling the beer and the blarney and admiring the many hues of green and blue—bays, meadows, mountains— that are spread beneath our hilltop bungalow...
Vol. 70 • September 1987 • No. 12
