To the Cliffs and Back (Saturday, 11/29/08)

Lahinch is known as a surfing town and a golfer's town, but it was on the beach and not the links that the SRU group gathered on Saturday morning. Climbing out to the big rocks that look out over the rolling waves, Jo and her colleague sat among all the students and held the SRU banner for the group photo. We camp followers joined them for photos next. John and his girlfriend Lydia, along for this weekend adventure, had everyone's cameras dangling from their wrists and did their best to get a group photo onto each camera.

Lydia is someone with a quick smile and a soft voice that blends Irish English with native Slavic accents. She has lived in Ireland for six years but was born in Communist-controlled Latvia and lived in the Soviet Union into her adolescence. She says that she never knew anything other than the Communist culture until then, and when she began to realize that had options, she focused on getting out and making a better life for herself. One gets the sense that she has worked very hard to reach that goal, that she is like the thousands of immigrants to Ireland we see in Dublin, working hard at the lower-paying jobs and getting themselves established in a new country. Their immigrant story is similar to that of anyone leaving one country with the hope of finding something better in another. It's part of my own family history. I am in awe of such courage.

From Lahinch we were aimed out to the Cliffs of Moher by way of Liscannor. The focus of the early morning touring was rocks.

Out on the Dingle Peninsula, as in most regions of Ireland, rocks rule. If a farmer wanted to work the land at all, he'd first have to clear his field of all the rocks. This could take a lifetime, and then his legacy to his children would be a cleared field for them to farm. Sheila explained that it was long believed that the women carried the big rocks to the men, who then built the walls that divided one farm from the next. This view fits with the traditional Irish view of women as inferior to men and so best suited to a life of servitude. I'm guessing that the establishment of Christianity stripped women of the power they enjoyed in ancient Celtic life and relegated them to lesser roles that the male-dominated Catholic Church was only too happy to help them maintain. Old habits die hard, but Ireland does have a woman as president today. But I digress. Sheila said that it may have been more likely that the men, who were physically stronger, lugged the rocks off the fields and that the women directed the construction of walls and dwellings. Makes sense to me.

Toward the Liscannor region, in County Clare, the rock walls change. Where in other parts of Ireland they are made of craggy round rocks, in Liscannor it is flat, relatively smooth rocks that are used for construction. We learned that the stone rose in mountains from the sea a kajillion years ago and contained the fossils of wormlike creatures that give Liscannor stone its distinctive appearance. It was mined in the 19th and early 20th centuries by expert stonecutters who would lift off each shale-like layer and split it laterally to make transportable slates. The stones were loaded on boats called "hookers" and exported out of the region and around the world. Liscannor slate is of varying shades of grey, and with rounded ridges where the worms used to live. It's very nice indeed.

We learned some of this from watching a video about Liscannor in a place called the Rock Shop, where an opportunity to spend euros followed. I picked up a cool-looking fossil and thought I might get it for my 10 yr old niece Emma, but then I imagined her telling me that the fossil was not, in fact from the west of Ireland but from someplace in the South Pacific, because Emma would know such things.

Next it was to the Cliffs of Moher, those 600' high rocky cliffs that face the Atlantic Ocean and turn up in most travelogues about Ireland. Used to be, tourists could climb up, bucking the strong winds and lie on their bellies to look over the the edge. I myself fully intended to do so. But in the past couple of years, somebody made the decision to build in some safety features to protect tourists from their own foolishness. Seems that particularly lightweight tourists, including an unfortunate Japanese traveler, were more susceptible to the wind and went over the edge, literally. Yikes. I have considerably more ballast, but having felt the winds on what others said was a relatively calm day, I can appreciate the walls and walkways they have installed. We climbed all along the cliffs and saw them from different angles. Standing there, looking out at the cliffs and the sea beyond, I had that strangely comforting sense of being one very small piece of a very big mechanism, of being one nanosecond in a timeline stretching before and beyond into infinity. And then it was time for potato leek soup in the visitor center. It is important to maintain perspective, after all.

The road toward Galway had us pass through the Burren, a vast region covered with limestone and little else... or so Oliver Cromwell thought. The Big Bad Meanie Cromwell, collectively loathed by the Irish, would exile his enemies to the Burren to perish. He is quoted as referring to the Burren as a "savage" place with "neither water enough to drown a man, nor tree to hang him, nor soil enough to bury." But people have made a life there, as evidenced by 5,000 year old manmade structures and more recent real estate across the Burren plateau. I remember a documentary about all the flora and fauna that thrive amid the rocks, but it is cold November now and not much appeared to be growing. Still, there were signs of green. The landscape is lunar, quite dramatic.

We drove through Lisdoonverna, where they have an annual matchmaking festival for the region's farmers, who are widely believed to be inept at entering into marriage, arranged or otherwise. I'm thinking that you'd have to put together a pretty good relocation package to lure a prospective spouse out to the farm in this region. The views are striking, but between the sheep shearing and cow milking and rock arranging, and the rain and sleet, and the mud... yeah, this ain't Green Acres.

So by mid-afternoon we made it to Galway, city of the tribes, where folks speak Irish (Gaelic) and the old part of the city is laid out on the medieval street pattern. We checked into yet another nice hotel, the Forster something or other, and stowed our gear in the room. Jo and I went walking around Galway, making it about as far as Eyre Square before the rain started. (JFK spoke there in 1963.) We ducked into an indoor shopping mall, all decorated for Christmas and full of Irish mall rat kids, and came out the other side onto a cobblestone street that is part of the hub of the city. You can go up one street and down an alley, then back around another street, and another alley, and you're still in the central part of town. There are colorful signs coming off two and three story buildings, all with ground floor businesses.

We were in time for the Saturday street vendors, selling everything from scarves to fish to jewelry to wicca supplies. From a leather worker whose booth was full of Very Nice Stuff, Jo got a beautiful belt embossed with a Gaelic pattern. I found a sweet pair of handmade copper and silver earrings that will be someone's gifty in a few weeks.

The streets were very crowded. There was harp busker, a woman playing the traditional Irish harp, on one corner. Jo spotted Santa in the crowd near her. I could hear Irish being spoken all around, and by young people, which I thought was cool. We window shopped and went in and out of some of the stores. Down one lane, Jo looked into a graveyard outside a church tucked behind two perpendicular rows of other buildings, and her eagle eye spotted that the long-deceased man shared her birthday, January 11th.

We were hungry, so we found McDonough's, a seafood place John had recommended, and ordered chowder for each of us and a kabob of fish with chips to share. While Jo waited for the food, I grabbed us seats at an indoor picnic table where two young woman were tucking in to huge pieces of fried cod (I asked) and a mound of chips. They were chatting with two older women who took the benches across for them. One of the girls was talking about how broke she is and the dilemma she faces as Christmas approaches: "So I says to m'family, you's can have a crap prezzie now or mebbe sometin' better after." The older women assured her that her family could wait. We ate our very tasty chowder and wished we'd ordered the cod like the girls had. The woman next to me heard our American accented English and wished me a nice visit in Galway.

Galway is known for its pubs and "trad," or traditional music, at night, so I was all geared up to go back out after a little rest. But Jo has been hacking, and the bug I've been valiantly fighting for a month now decided to establish itself in my chest during the day, and I was feeling punky. So with much angst about missing Galway's night life, we decided to stay out of the cold and damp and get some rest. Sometimes it just sucks being mature.

So we stayed in and I started the Z-pack I'd gotten from my doc "just in case" (because bronchitis is, for me, one of the ultimate buzz kills). We watched bad Irish TV until we found the movie Some Mothers --the one with Hellen Mirren playing the mother of one of the men who was part of the hunger strike that killed Bobby Sands in Belfast in 1981. I'd seen the film before and was glad to watch it again. It's a good one.

So what did we learn on Saturday? That worms moving across the ocean floor today may end up on someone's foyer floor in a million years. That a hooker along the Irish west coast carries stone and not STDs. That the Burren gives new meaning to the idea of desolation. That farmers in the west of Ireland need wives. That they speak Irish in Galway. And that sun and rain mix in Ireland so that when you look up to the grey sky for a sign of what is to come, as we did along Eyre Square in the afternoon, you're likely to see a rainbow to remind you that something better is coming, and what's here in the moment is quite all right, as well.