Everyone knows that 'getting there' is the super-boring-if-not-downright-awful part. My flight was no exception (well, I did get a free [mini] bottle of wine for trading seats with someone) just really long.
It wasn't raining in Dublin, not at the moment I arrived, anyway, so skipping from the tarmac to the macadam was drier than it had been before (the first time I'd come from Dublin I'd taken a ferry from Wales. I was considerably less wet this time). Dublin wasn't that different to me -- I didn't see anything that I couldn't remember -- but I am very different. On the 20 minute ride from the airport to City Centre I stared down the road signs, trying to pronounce the Irish in my head. The signs look like the ones you'd find in Canada, with the same information written in English and in Irish. I don't know what version they use for the national road signs (Connaught? Munster?) and I'm beginning to learn that, like all languages, even beyond the three main dialects there are hundreds of other little subdialects that distinguish one parish's tongue from another. Here in Lacken, we're in North Mayo dialect territory. I regret not having finished Irish class last year.
The 748 bus goes straight from the airport to Heuston Station, following the Liffey through Dublin City. As you're driving along you get to see different bridges (including the famous Ha'penny Bridge), the little sandwich shops and markets and, of course, the pubs. I got a sudden and unexpected urge to take the same walk that Bloom took on June 16th of 1904 -- I wonder if this doesn't happen to everyone who reads Ulysses? I'll bet you it does; I'll get around to it when I get to Dublin.
Insert chilly three-hour train ride here.
Needless to say, pulling in to Ballina, County Mayo to find my entire family (plus my brother's Rugby Buddy Tim) standing on the platform waiting for me was a thing of beauty and a joy forever. Pat took my picture -- twice -- through the foggy window of the train car. The day was indeed somewhat cold and grey but spirits and voices were high as we trooped back to the car, stopping for a family photo in front of the 'Ballina' station sign. I'd forgotten what an exhilerating and terrifying experience it is to be driven on the wrong side of the road. All my father's precious cargo (i.e., his family) in the car and him at the wheel surely didnt help, either. Not least because we continued to jabber as he drove. The roads in North-Western Mayo are fairly narrow. Road markings and signage are optional and courtesy in granting right-of-way is heavily relied upon.
The towns hadn't changed much since I'd been here for the first time in 2003 -- the same small cottages made with thick plaster whitewashed walls, square-ish, symmetrical windows and little walls around gardens and carparks. The roads have become a little smoother, more paved and more cleaned up, but this seemed pretty new. Polish work crews (Poles represent a sort of migrant worker community here and across Europe) were still putting the pipelines in down by Lacken Strand where we're staying for the city water.
The gardens are sparse but the actual flora is intriguing -- palm trees and giant elephant-ears plants, side by side with furze bushes and pines. I had no idea rhododendron and fuschia (fuschia shrubs or trees, no less) were native to Ireland. The fuschias are just gorgeous, though their blooming season is passing. The blossoms are narrower and less plump than our potted fuschias, but their color is even richer and deeper and their stamen hang down quite a ways, making them look like tiny, brilliantly colored Art Deco chandeliers. The rhododendron had already bloomed, but I'm promising myself that one day I'll be back to see them flowering on the road to Belderrig [insert proper traditional Irish homecoming tune here].
My whole family is staying in two little cottages by Lacken Pier -- right up the hill from the somewhat deserted boat-launch itslef. From our kitchen window you can see wee Lacken Bay with its huge golden strand. The beach disappears almost entirely with every high tide. The locals hunt for sand eels as bait; some fishemen still launch their boats from the pier here. Limpets (??) and periwinkles cover the mostly sandstone rock-beach by the pier. The other side of the pier shows those shelf-like layers of basalt that the coast of Ireland is so famous for; the hardest stone, black and perfect, stacked in blocks under the bog land. By the waterline it's covered in purply-red delisk seaweed and bright green seamoss. Slick brown algae is invisible against the stone and you only know its there when you begin to skid toward the edge of the rock shelf. On our second evening walk, Pat and I found out what I firmly believe to be a prehistoric, petrified tree stupm. Growing right in the middle of layers of baslat, approximately 5 1/2 feet high, the whole thing in diameter might be seven or eight feet. It's a light brown, almost pinkish color, and the veiny, cell-like form looks like nothing so much as live wod when the living matter has rotted out f its tiny capillaries leaving only the shells behind. Its 'roots' grow and gnarl down through the basalt, and it juts out of the face of the minicliff as though thousands of years of surf-beating had finally revealed it.
Pat and I got stuck on this stroll; I made him walk through four or five sodden cowfields rather than taking the easy (albeit less-accessible, due to the incoming tide) way back. We got soaked. But it's good for his character.
I don't know the history of our little cottage and oddly enough no one seems to care. We pretend to play Gaelic football-catch in the front yard and my siblings drink and play cards in the evenings. I've spent most of my time around them speechless with laughter. Being the oldest means that everyone else has to entertain you...you're never the funny one. I haven't been able to join in the revelry because of projects I've got to finish for school, which necessitates my staying up late and pining for the internet. As might be obvious, the closest internet is in Ballina, 18 km away from the cottage. That is why I hadn't blogged earlier; sorry.
Lacken Pier cottage is amazing. Its tiny couches are hardly big enough for mine and my father's sprawling largeness and are small enough to be doll couches, but big enough to fit our family in her tiny old-agedness. This woman makes amazing, absolutely kick-ass hand-knit Irish sweaters. I have one and I'm getting another. You will never need anything else for a cold winter than one of Molly's sweaters. If you want one, we can probably hook you up. If you live in Massachusetts, it will really come in handy.
The cottage is so quiet, and the roads are so infrequently used that the only thing you can hear are the wind and the waves. The farmer down the lane drives (literally: in his old Volkswagen) his dairy cattle from the fields below our house up to his milking barn twice a day, and the sheep get noisy on occasion., We have a tiny, 6 inch TV that no one's tunred on, and today was the first time I'd used the radio. We have to pay for the electricity here -- we don't use much and boy is it cold. I've allowed myself to be delightfully creeped out by the foreignness of the house in the dark, thinking of previous owners and their spirits and just the personalities of a sea and a land that I don't know well at all. I can imagine myself here, clearing my head in the quiet, breathing the cold ocean air.
I can also imagine myself going insane without sushi after a whole week, and moving to Dublin immediately. Or at least to Galway.
Later: Revisiting the homestead. This time with more detail.
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