morningside:: the west

The Connemara is a lonely place. Stretching west and north from Galway City between the western shore of Lough Corrib and the west coast of County Galway, this rough and dramatically beautiful area is the most Irish place in Ireland, encouraged by its continued economic deprivation and geographical isolation to maintain its ancient rural ways of life. The Connemara features a zone called the Gaeltacht, a purely Gaelic-speaking area and the largest of such zones in Ireland. The tourist buses are plentiful on the roads lacing the Twelve Pins and the Maam Turk mountain ranges – a pub owner in Oughterard, "the gateway to the Connemara," said the roads in July and August are "gridlocked worse than Istanbul" – but the men and women hauling peat out of the bogs for their winter fuel are following traditions and habits that have guided life in this harsh region for centuries.

Most of this land was scoured clean by glaciers in the last ice age. Ireland was once heavily forested, but the glaciers plowed most of the trees under. The decaying layer evolves into peat – the last step of organic rot before it becomes petroleum – which the farmers carve out in long strips for their winter fuel. Can't chop trees for the fire, might as well dig 'em up. Still, though, there's just enough foliage about to keep a handful of traditional houses with thatched roofs. You see them here and there, always white and low like a Spanish bungalow, with red doors and tiny windows. Property taxes used to be assessed based on the amount of light that entered the home; thus, the portholes. (Also, apparently Lloyd's of London is the only company that still insures these cute little fire traps.) Incidentally, the Connemara is slowly reforesting. Long swaths of evergreens stripe the hillsides sometimes – patches of woods too neatly arranged to be natural. Some fellows in an upcoming pub explained this method of this madness.

Much of the Connemara, despite the Oregon-like weather, resembles west Texas – mountains in the distance, vacant, scrubby ground flattened out before them. Once we passed a fairly new church, all painted bright salmon pink with beige trim; it could have been a mission near Tucumcari! The fields, though, are populated by countless sheep, Connemara Black Heads with their namesake black heads and spindly little black legs, the better for climbing and navigating the rocky terrain. They're good at it, too; the hills are spotted with white woolen lumps, like sweater pills, no matter how perilous the slope. (Sometimes the sheep add color to the landscape, since they are usually marked with red or blue ink. This is apparently how the farmers brand their herds. In fact, some old men in Leenane joked that "the red sheep are the girls, the blue ones are the boys, and the ones with both red and blue are the gay sheep." Perhaps the Connemara isn't so isolated, after all ....).

We stopped in Leenane, a speck on the point of an Atlantic fjord, a puny little town that hasn't quite gotten over being the location for the 1989 Richard Harris film, The Field. There's even The Field Restaurant near the pier. The fjord comes in from Killary Harbour, where WWII submarines surfaced to recharge their batteries. A trio of local old farts at Gaynor's Bar were muttering their concerns about foot-and-mouth, in between an exchange of bawdy jokes. ("Why did the chicken cross the road?" "To fuck the duck." Enormous laughter all around. Whatever.) Riley explained the area's reforestation. Only 10 percent of the island is forested, and the government wants to double that in the next 30 years. It's economic incentive: Ireland is a new member of the European Union, which imports too much oil and timber. In order to creep toward more self-sufficiency, farmers are offered huge subsidies to plant trees. Thing is, they're not planting natives; they're planting Norwegian spruce, which thrives in Ireland's temperate climate. "The only threat of that is the importation of some kind of crop disease," Riley said. "We're trying to fend off this bloody cattle virus now, and Ireland, I'm sure you know, hasn't had much luck with crop diseases before."

Nestled amid the Twelve Pins (or the Twelve Bens, depending on your map) is the postcard view of Kylemore Abbey, a towered castle on lush, dedicious slopes and on the shore of its own lake. The house was built as a wedding gift from Mitchell Henry to his wife Margaret. She died in Cairo in 1874, and he added a stunning Gothic church to memorialize her. The place is now a Catholic girls' school run by Ireland's only order of Benedictine nuns. The Gothic architecture is pretty grand, esp. since the whole place is constructed of native Connemara marble, pulled from a quarry just over one of the Pins. Connemara marble is usually (and appropriately) a verdant green color, though it comes in a rainbow assortment, which is what makes the pillars of the church so breathtaking and bright.

Lunch in Clifden on the coast, a crap little tourist trap with – yawn – another magnificently beautiful church. Clifden's claim to fame? Marconi sent his first radio signal from the town's defining hill, a signal that reached Canada and established the invention of radio. Other than that, it's full of shops hawking cheap tourist baubles, and it looks like Pensacola.

The closer we got to the coast, the more rocky the terrain – and thus the more walls snaking across it. The stone walls in the fields of this island are a trademark symbol of Ireland, and they are pretty bizarre in their reality. They exist for three purposes: to divide and map the land, to pen each farmer's livestock, and to clear the land of the rocks. The Irish didn't build miles upon miles of tangled stone walls just for the lark of it, they were trying to clear the fields of the stones. Why not stack them up between good neighbors? And a tradition was born. The traditional walls are dry – no concrete, no sand, no mortar – porous to the wind, moveable if need be, and configured just right for the respective animals. A graphic designer in Clifden ran down the wall-building terminology, illustrating the flexibility of these neat dividers: "Terms used in walling vary around the country: a lunky, hogg hole, lonky, thril or thawl hole, sheep-smoose or cripple hole are all the same thing: a passage through a wall to allow sheep through whilst holding out cattle." At one point along the coast, west of Spiddal, the walls became out of control – the land netted in a tangled pattern of bleached stone walls snaking every which way, penning in not only the animals but the houses, too, houses built of the same stone and rising out of the walls as if to peer out of their confinement.

Invigorated by the spirit of a road trip, Cynthia and I tore out of Galway City Friday morning in a rented Fiat Punto, blaring the latest Amy Rigby album and slingshotting around the east end of the bay and rolling into the Burren, the barren moonscape of County Clare. When I say barren, I'm not just coming up with a cute rhyme for Burren. The Burren is so rocky and wasted that the government has to pay people to live here, much less attempt to farm anything from the gravel. Littered with pre-Christian Celtic monuments and the occasional goatherd, the Burren stretches along the county's northwest breast as a surreal, intergalactic landscape of rock – mounds of rock, ridges of rock, beaches of rock. Photographs are fairly useless, I discovered upon viewing mine; they're just frames of grey fragments, sea, sky and land. The day we rolled through it especially – you couldn't imagine a greyer day, a colder day, a more damp and miserable and blustery day.

We stuck to the coast road, figuring that by following the water we'd at least have a rough idea which direction we were heading. Ray and Alicia had rolled into Galway City a few nights earlier after getting lost in the Burren for much of an afternoon. No landmarks, no sun, no chance. Yet still, amid all this emptiness, the stone walls. They seem so futile here. Walls and walls and walls, yet the countryside doesn't seem to have been cleared of any stones. An existential existence, surely.

By the time we rounded the inlet at Bell Harbour, we were getting a tad stir crazy. We detoured onto a road – or a driveway? – and made our way to a beach, flinging ourselves out of the car and sprinting along the beach on a shared, manic impulse. We'd been on the road for just an hour.

Stopped for lunch on a whim at Monk's Pub, a seafood bar near Ballyvaughan, and stuffed ourselves with chowder and monkfish. I think we were there for a couple of hours – it was so bright and inviting and warm with a blazing fire, a harsh contrast to the frigid gales and empty roads outside.

From my travel journal, Friday, March 16:

Moved back into the grey desert – not really a desert, though feels like it – strange ruins in shapes that confess their stories pasts, sometimes even their era, if not always their purpose – odd monuments, dead farm houses, well covers – all spotting the landscape, suggesting ghosts have just hurried over the horizon. How do the cows and sheep survive on these hills? Are they ghosts, too? Have I finally gone mad, poor city boy? It's all so severe and scary – too much room for your soul to stretch out – can there be too much? Severe –

John M. Feehan, from The Secret Places of the Burren: "It is as if the dream of God wantonly pitchforked a gem of severe classical beauty into our midst, and scattered some kind of fallen star dust over the earth. ... It is a land of terraced mountains, sunken valleys, hidden caves, exotic flowers and scattered everywhere are the relic of our stormy past.

Cynthia: "The word godforsaken keeps coming to mind."

When we rounded Black Head, complete with Black Head sheep standing resignedly on the point, the wind came up stronger. A glow of sunlight grew in the south, in our direction, but faded away before we reached Doolin. I'd read a lot about Doolin which made it sound like a music hotbed, but Doolin is a dinky little town without much going on. We'd kind of made this our destination; dismayed, we trundled on south toward the Cliffs of Moher.

Now here's the Ireland you've dreampt about – the cliffs sheer as the side of a skyscraper, green on top, battered by the Gulf Stream below. Every photo is a post card, whether you're got thousand-dollar lenses or a plastic instamatic. Standing on the edge of the headland, I could even feel the destructive power of the waves bashing the rocks below – shockwaves whispering through my feet. Apparently, during a storm a few years ago, a sizeable chunk of the cliffs fell into the raging Atlantic, taking a picnic table with it. The cliffs run along the coast for about five miles, and the view is astonishing in either direction from the visitors center (just be sure to check that the field to the north is free of any territorial bulls!). How beautiful they must look on a summer night, with the full force of the setting sun hitting their bleached faces as hard as the battering waves.

Just outside of Liscannor, we were snared by the warm lights and playful, running border collie of the Sea Haven B&B. With night slipping down, we turned in and booked for the night with the proprietor, Shiela Lees, who looked exactly like my mother but was extraordinarily cold and aloof (why run a B&B if you don't want to talk to the customers?). Her home was a doll house, for sure – gas lamps and porcelain figurines and lace doilies everywhere. Pink sheets under rose-pattenered comforters. Skeleton keys. But $20 for the night ...

That afternoon, Cynthia and I struggled through a walk up the road, through the nor'wester along the sea wall. A small graveyard sat opposite the road and wall, slumped in a dip in the scrabbly grass and ringed by a dark, sooty stone wall. The graves were old, mostly 19th century, and there were lots of O'Connors. For all I know, I could have been walking over ancestors. We both grew silent and melancholy and, inspired, I sang from Joni Mitchell's "Hejira":

Well I looked at the granite markers

Those tributes to finality – to eternity

And then I looked at myself here

Chicken scratching for my immortality

In the church they light the candles

and the wax rolls down like tears

There is the hope and the hopelessness

I've witnessed 30 years

We drove into Lahinch for the night, in search of the living. Pints at a small, cozy pub; dinner and more pints at the Shamrock Inn, complete with a singer named Enda who played dusty, dry American hits ("Heart of Gold," "City of New Orleans," that one that goes, "Oh it never rains in southern California" – is that Jimmy Webb? – which only made us more homesick); pints and more craic at The Ninettenth Bar (which alluded to a golf theme, God knows why), where James and Caitlin and their entire wedding party for the following day's festivities were gathered, whooping it up from young rascal to old lady alike. Of course, the music this time was provided by just a guitar player and a reedy old fiddler in his wool vest and tie. The guitarist knew the pop stuff (does Roger Miller count as craic?), the fiddler the traditional jigs, and they followed each other's expertise.

From the travel journal, that night:

It's just a lonely island – a lonely island, steeped in tragedy, see-sawed luck and a hardiness the rest of the world has never known. Listen to the music – even the jaunty stuff has a tinge of sadness to it, a resignation to the venting of strapped spirits through cultural means – the jigs are desperate measures to stir up the serotonin. Forlorn, romantic – indeed, romantic, but that does not necessarily imply happiness. No wonder they all come to the pubs. They crave the human contact. Esp. out here on the edge of the Old World.

The rest of that night, the wind howled outside like the banshees in the rural legends. No wonder the old peasants – fending for themselves in a world dominated by a corrupt church and no local government – thought ghosts were screaming out there, turning to their imagination to create an entire roster of fairy folk. Even on American plains, I've not encountered a wind like this – tireless, iron-lunged heaves of icy air across the rock. How long has it beaten this poor little island? The wind, the waves, a deafening static. I coudl smell the sea, too, pitching and roiling a few hundred meters away, struggling to crawl back over the dry rock and reclaim it. Cynthia woke at 5 a.m. convinced ghosts were roaming the house's precious hallways. Thank God for the tea pots in the rooms, for tea banishes all banshees. It was then, sitting on the floor, having the shakes from the tea and media withdrawal, that we looked each other in the eyes just as dawn broke and said, simultaneously, "Let's go home." The laughter at least stopped our snoring neighbor.



		`The West` We live by the side of the road on the side of a hill as the valleys explode dislocated, suffocated the land grows weary of its own — U2, "A Sort of Homecoming," The Unforgettable Fire Part One: The Connemara The Connemara is a lonely place. Stretching west and north from Galway City between the western shore of Lough Corrib and the west coast of County Galway, this rough and dramatically beautiful area is the most Irish place in Ireland, encouraged by its continued economic deprivation and geographical isolation to maintain its ancient rural ways of life. The Connemara features a zone called the Gaeltacht, a purely Gaelic-speaking area and the largest of such zones in Ireland. The tourist buses are plentiful on the roads lacing the Twelve Pins and the Maam Turk mountain ranges – a pub owner in Oughterard, "the gateway to the Connemara," said the roads in July and August are "gridlocked worse than Istanbul" – but the men and women hauling peat out of the bogs for their winter fuel are following traditions and habits that have guided life in this harsh region for centuries. A peat bog in the valley of the Maam Turks. Most of this land was scoured clean by glaciers in the last ice age. Ireland was once heavily forested, but the glaciers plowed most of the trees under. The decaying layer evolves into peat – the last step of organic rot before it becomes petroleum – which the farmers carve out in long strips for their winter fuel. Can't chop trees for the fire, might as well dig 'em up. Still, though, there's just enough foliage about to keep a handful of traditional houses with thatched roofs. You see them here and there, always white and low like a Spanish bungalow, with red doors and tiny windows. Property taxes used to be assessed based on the amount of light that entered the home; thus, the portholes. (Also, apparently Lloyd's of London is the only company that still insures these cute little fire traps.) Incidentally, the Connemara is slowly reforesting. Long swaths of evergreens stripe the hillsides sometimes – patches of woods too neatly arranged to be natural. Some fellows in an upcoming pub explained this method of this madness. Much of the Connemara, despite the Oregon-like weather, resembles west Texas – mountains in the distance, vacant, scrubby ground flattened out before them. Once we passed a fairly new church, all painted bright salmon pink with beige trim; it could have been a mission near Tucumcari! The fields, though, are populated by countless sheep, Connemara Black Heads with their namesake black heads and spindly little black legs, the better for climbing and navigating the rocky terrain. They're good at it, too; the hills are spotted with white woolen lumps, like sweater pills, no matter how perilous the slope. (Sometimes the sheep add color to the landscape, since they are usually marked with red or blue ink. This is apparently how the farmers brand their herds. In fact, some old men in Leenane joked that "the red sheep are the girls, the blue ones are the boys, and the ones with both red and blue are the gay sheep." Perhaps the Connemara isn't so isolated, after all ....). Gaynor's Bar in Leenane. The men in back: Riley, John and, if I understood him correctly, Wiggle. We stopped in Leenane, a speck on the point of an Atlantic fjord, a puny little town that hasn't quite gotten over being the location for the 1989 Richard Harris film, The Field. There's even The Field Restaurant near the pier. The fjord comes in from Killary Harbour, where WWII submarines surfaced to recharge their batteries. A trio of local old farts at Gaynor's Bar were muttering their concerns about foot-and-mouth, in between an exchange of bawdy jokes. ("Why did the chicken cross the road?" "To fuck the duck." Enormous laughter all around. Whatever.) Riley explained the area's reforestation. Only 10 percent of the island is forested, and the government wants to double that in the next 30 years. It's economic incentive: Ireland is a new member of the European Union, which imports too much oil and timber. In order to creep toward more self-sufficiency, farmers are offered huge subsidies to plant trees. Thing is, they're not planting natives; they're planting Norwegian spruce, which thrives in Ireland's temperate climate. "The only threat of that is the importation of some kind of crop disease," Riley said. "We're trying to fend off this bloody cattle virus now, and Ireland, I'm sure you know, hasn't had much luck with crop diseases before." Nestled amid the Twelve Pins (or the Twelve Bens, depending on your map) is the postcard view of Kylemore Abbey, a towered castle on lush, dedicious slopes and on the shore of its own lake. The house was built as a wedding gift from Mitchell Henry to his wife Margaret. She died in Cairo in 1874, and he added a stunning Gothic church to memorialize her. The place is now a Catholic girls' school run by Ireland's only order of Benedictine nuns. The Gothic architecture is pretty grand, esp. since the whole place is constructed of native Connemara marble, pulled from a quarry just over one of the Pins. Connemara marble is usually (and appropriately) a verdant green color, though it comes in a rainbow assortment, which is what makes the pillars of the church so breathtaking and bright. Kylemore Abbey, a trifle little wedding gift. Below, the inside of the Kylemore Gothic church, with three-different colors of local marble. Lunch in Clifden on the coast, a crap little tourist trap with – yawn – another magnificently beautiful church. Clifden's claim to fame? Marconi sent his first radio signal from the town's defining hill, a signal that reached Canada and established the invention of radio. Other than that, it's full of shops hawking cheap tourist baubles, and it looks like Pensacola. The closer we got to the coast, the more rocky the terrain – and thus the more walls snaking across it. The stone walls in the fields of this island are a trademark symbol of Ireland, and they are pretty bizarre in their reality. They exist for three purposes: to divide and map the land, to pen each farmer's livestock, and to clear the land of the rocks. The Irish didn't build miles upon miles of tangled stone walls just for the lark of it, they were trying to clear the fields of the stones. Why not stack them up between good neighbors? And a tradition was born. The traditional walls are dry – no concrete, no sand, no mortar – porous to the wind, moveable if need be, and configured just right for the respective animals. A graphic designer in Clifden ran down the wall-building terminology, illustrating the flexibility of these neat dividers: "Terms used in walling vary around the country: a lunky, hogg hole, lonky, thril or thawl hole, sheep-smoose or cripple hole are all the same thing: a passage through a wall to allow sheep through whilst holding out cattle." At one point along the coast, west of Spiddal, the walls became out of control – the land netted in a tangled pattern of bleached stone walls snaking every which way, penning in not only the animals but the houses, too, houses built of the same stone and rising out of the walls as if to peer out of their confinement. Walls and ruins near the Galway Bay coast. Part Two: The Burren Invigorated by the spirit of a road trip, Cynthia and I tore out of Galway City Friday morning in a rented Fiat Punto, blaring the latest Amy Rigby album and slingshotting around the east end of the bay and rolling into the Burren, the barren moonscape of County Clare. When I say barren, I'm not just coming up with a cute rhyme for Burren. The Burren is so rocky and wasted that the government has to pay people to live here, much less attempt to farm anything from the gravel. Littered with pre-Christian Celtic monuments and the occasional goatherd, the Burren stretches along the county's northwest breast as a surreal, intergalactic landscape of rock – mounds of rock, ridges of rock, beaches of rock. Photographs are fairly useless, I discovered upon viewing mine; they're just frames of grey fragments, sea, sky and land. The day we rolled through it especially – you couldn't imagine a greyer day, a colder day, a more damp and miserable and blustery day. Various moonscapes in the Burren: barren hill, brave house, unfortunate cow. We stuck to the coast road, figuring that by following the water we'd at least have a rough idea which direction we were heading. Ray and Alicia had rolled into Galway City a few nights earlier after getting lost in the Burren for much of an afternoon. No landmarks, no sun, no chance. Yet still, amid all this emptiness, the stone walls. They seem so futile here. Walls and walls and walls, yet the countryside doesn't seem to have been cleared of any stones. An existential existence, surely. By the time we rounded the inlet at Bell Harbour, we were getting a tad stir crazy. We detoured onto a road – or a driveway? – and made our way to a beach, flinging ourselves out of the car and sprinting along the beach on a shared, manic impulse. We'd been on the road for just an hour. The beach at Bell Harbour, south side of Galway Bay, with Cynthia. Stopped for lunch on a whim at Monk's Pub, a seafood bar near Ballyvaughan, and stuffed ourselves with chowder and monkfish. I think we were there for a couple of hours – it was so bright and inviting and warm with a blazing fire, a harsh contrast to the frigid gales and empty roads outside. From my travel journal, Friday, March 16: Moved back into the grey desert – not really a desert, though feels like it – strange ruins in shapes that confess their stories pasts, sometimes even their era, if not always their purpose – odd monuments, dead farm houses, well covers – all spotting the landscape, suggesting ghosts have just hurried over the horizon. How do the cows and sheep survive on these hills? Are they ghosts, too? Have I finally gone mad, poor city boy? It's all so severe and scary – too much room for your soul to stretch out – can there be too much? Severe – John M. Feehan, from The Secret Places of the Burren: "It is as if the dream of God wantonly pitchforked a gem of severe classical beauty into our midst, and scattered some kind of fallen star dust over the earth. ... It is a land of terraced mountains, sunken valleys, hidden caves, exotic flowers and scattered everywhere are the relic of our stormy past. Cynthia: "The word godforsaken keeps coming to mind." A distant rook on the headlands north of the Cliffs of Moher. When we rounded Black Head, complete with Black Head sheep standing resignedly on the point, the wind came up stronger. A glow of sunlight grew in the south, in our direction, but faded away before we reached Doolin. I'd read a lot about Doolin which made it sound like a music hotbed, but Doolin is a dinky little town without much going on. We'd kind of made this our destination; dismayed, we trundled on south toward the Cliffs of Moher. Now here's the Ireland you've dreampt about – the cliffs sheer as the side of a skyscraper, green on top, battered by the Gulf Stream below. Every photo is a post card, whether you're got thousand-dollar lenses or a plastic instamatic. Standing on the edge of the headland, I could even feel the destructive power of the waves bashing the rocks below – shockwaves whispering through my feet. Apparently, during a storm a few years ago, a sizeable chunk of the cliffs fell into the raging Atlantic, taking a picnic table with it. The cliffs run along the coast for about five miles, and the view is astonishing in either direction from the visitors center (just be sure to check that the field to the north is free of any territorial bulls!). How beautiful they must look on a summer night, with the full force of the setting sun hitting their bleached faces as hard as the battering waves. The Cliffs of Moher in a somehow appropriately misty setting. Just outside of Liscannor, we were snared by the warm lights and playful, running border collie of the Sea Haven B&B. With night slipping down, we turned in and booked for the night with the proprietor, Shiela Lees, who looked exactly like my mother but was extraordinarily cold and aloof (why run a B&B if you don't want to talk to the customers?). Her home was a doll house, for sure – gas lamps and porcelain figurines and lace doilies everywhere. Pink sheets under rose-pattenered comforters. Skeleton keys. But $20 for the night ... That afternoon, Cynthia and I struggled through a walk up the road, through the nor'wester along the sea wall. A small graveyard sat opposite the road and wall, slumped in a dip in the scrabbly grass and ringed by a dark, sooty stone wall. The graves were old, mostly 19th century, and there were lots of O'Connors. For all I know, I could have been walking over ancestors. We both grew silent and melancholy and, inspired, I sang from Joni Mitchell's "Hejira": Well I looked at the granite markers Those tributes to finality – to eternity And then I looked at myself here Chicken scratching for my immortality In the church they light the candles and the wax rolls down like tears There is the hope and the hopelessness I've witnessed 30 years We drove into Lahinch for the night, in search of the living. Pints at a small, cozy pub; dinner and more pints at the Shamrock Inn, complete with a singer named Enda who played dusty, dry American hits ("Heart of Gold," "City of New Orleans," that one that goes, "Oh it never rains in southern California" – is that Jimmy Webb? – which only made us more homesick); pints and more craic at The Ninettenth Bar (which alluded to a golf theme, God knows why), where James and Caitlin and their entire wedding party for the following day's festivities were gathered, whooping it up from young rascal to old lady alike. Of course, the music this time was provided by just a guitar player and a reedy old fiddler in his wool vest and tie. The guitarist knew the pop stuff (does Roger Miller count as craic?), the fiddler the traditional jigs, and they followed each other's expertise. From the travel journal, that night: It's just a lonely island – a lonely island, steeped in tragedy, see-sawed luck and a hardiness the rest of the world has never known. Listen to the music – even the jaunty stuff has a tinge of sadness to it, a resignation to the venting of strapped spirits through cultural means – the jigs are desperate measures to stir up the serotonin. Forlorn, romantic – indeed, romantic, but that does not necessarily imply happiness. No wonder they all come to the pubs. They crave the human contact. Esp. out here on the edge of the Old World. The rest of that night, the wind howled outside like the banshees in the rural legends. No wonder the old peasants – fending for themselves in a world dominated by a corrupt church and no local government – thought ghosts were screaming out there, turning to their imagination to create an entire roster of fairy folk. Even on American plains, I've not encountered a wind like this – tireless, iron-lunged heaves of icy air across the rock. How long has it beaten this poor little island? The wind, the waves, a deafening static. I coudl smell the sea, too, pitching and roiling a few hundred meters away, struggling to crawl back over the dry rock and reclaim it. Cynthia woke at 5 a.m. convinced ghosts were roaming the house's precious hallways. Thank God for the tea pots in the rooms, for tea banishes all banshees. It was then, sitting on the floor, having the shakes from the tea and media withdrawal, that we looked each other in the eyes just as dawn broke and said, simultaneously, "Let's go home." The laughter at least stopped our snoring neighbor.

	The journey:



	Recurrent themes:








A home with traditional thatched roof.

Clifden, by the sea.
		home \| remarks dublin \| galway \| the west foot & mouth \| u2 \| gay ireland \| words back in nyc

The West

`The West`