There comes a point when you have lived in enough places and travelled to so many more that every new place and every old place reminds you of somewhere else. That's not to say you can't ever be happy in one place. The 'grass is greener' syndrome doesn't always come along with memories (though it does often enough that it can get depressing). And so it happens that my mother often tells me late in the afternoon or early in the morning that this kind of light reminds her of Ireland. When it is cold and drizzly she says it is Irish weather.
And she is right. All day starting probably in November the quality of light was such as we get here in the depths of winter in the early morning and late afternoon; the sun is low to the horizon and casts long shadows and sheds a golden-amber light on the dull world. I could never tell what time of day it was except for the couple of hours around noon when the sun would climb to a more central point in the sky. It always felt like three o'clock in the afternoon or ten-thirty in the morning. This is my favourite kind of light. But, of course, the weather was cloudy or rainy often enough that the light would be somewhat lost. The cold rains of winter were of bone-chilling quality and nothing could rid you of that cold except for a thick hot Irish soup, a steaming cup of tea, and a blanket if at home and the heat was only just coming on.
The year of 2009 almost certainly went down on record as having the most abnormal weather in Ireland in a long time. The floods of November had finally receded when December rolled in with its bitter cold and a sudden flurry of snows and heavy frosts. Even though Ireland is pretty far north, most of the country is still considered to be in a temperate zone thanks to Atlantic currents and winds, about which I know very little other than the fact that it brings Ireland plenty of rain and keeps it green. So snow is not a regular wintertime occurrence. Cold rains, certainly, but it usually doesn't get quite cold enough for snow.
In Cork, as in most cities, the fall of the snow was not much cause for comment because it didn't come down heavily enough to stop traffic and it didn't stick very well to the sidewalks, so unless you saw it falling or went to a park, it was unlikely you'd even notice it had come down at all. But take the bus out of the city and it was immediately apparent the changes that the weather had wrought.
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| Here we are, still pretty excited about the snow. |
The wind would blow the mist into our faces, but rarely would it clear enough to see very far ahead. As we were still first entering the snowy altitudes, we had to cross a stream that flowed out of a small lake. As we mounted the ridge above the lake, we entered the regions shrouded in mist and even though the lake was only just below us, there was no sign of it except for about a minute when the wind blew the mists thin enough to catch a glimpse of the lake below. As we climbed higher, the mists grew thicker so that we had to walk closely in line so as not to become lost or detached from the group. The snow covering on the ground got thicker, though never more than four or five inches or so. The ice on rocks was frozen in such a manner as to show which way the wind was blowing. We crawled uphill so as to minimize the wind's chance at successfully toppling us over as we ascended a steep, rocky slope. We moved at an angle because of the wind and often paused to catch our breath and our footing. Sometimes we would huddle together for warmth. At one point, I spotted a sheep and I worried, but he seemed perfectly fine with ice hanging from his wooly sides. At last we reached what we thought was the top, marked by a deliberate pile of rocks. I almost wrote 'a deliberate pile of snow' there. Which it pretty much was. Except that it wasn't the top. I think it was the marker for a boundary between Co.s Tipperary and Limerick. So on we marched. Our resting point for lunch was marked by a frozen cross and a lot of large rocks coated in wind-patterned ice. We tried to take shelter from the wind amongst the rocks, but my leftover taco salad that I had brought ended up with bits of ice deposited in it from the wind. It wasn't much farther to our destination from there, so we set out again quickly as even huddling together in a large bunch didn't seem to help us warm up.
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| Our lunch break was here. |
The wind was literally whistling and tearing at our clothes, trying to push us off the mountain. It was hard to walk and the line got more spread out as we struggled along the barren ridge. It was a surreal experience with nothing to see but white all around and the shadowy figures of each other trudging on, heads bent. No one spoke because the wind snatched our voices and carried them off. We just listened for our own heartbeats and the screeching of the wind. Occasionally rocks would loom up in the mist, and it was by one of these that we re-grouped after a torturous twenty minutes struggling in the wind. It was decided that conditions were just too treacherous to make our way to the peak we had originally intended to reach, and an alternate route was devised for our descent.
We plunged back into the wind and slowly made our way downwards. I feared that my fingers, toes, and nose might actually be suffering from frostbite as I was having trouble feeling them, but my pockets were damp, my gloves were damp, and there pretty much nothing I could do until we returned to the bus. For a while we walked along an ice-encrusted wall built during the famine. It has no purpose other than it provided paid work for the unemployed starving men of the time. It also helped block some of the wind for us. Eventually we climbed over it and began to come out of the mist and bitter, icy cold.
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| Ah, green! |
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When my mother came to visit for a week and help me pack up to come home, I took her out to Blarney, Killarney, Dublin, and Newgrange/Tara. There had been a few flurries in the previous weeks and when we went out in search of supper in Dublin, snow started falling again. The streets were decorated with lights for Christmas and the snow falling lightly amongst the city lights and the dark sky was magical. Walking up and down O'Connell Street and along the wide side street to our hotel, saying hello to James Joyce, it all seemed as though the turn of the century would simply tumble back into Dublin again. Later, long after my return and resumption of school in Chestertown, I read Joyce's 'The Dead' again and I suddenly realized why I had thought of the late 1800s. The mention of the O'Connell Bridge dropped me right into my memories of Dublin with the snow falling and I realized that my subconscious had held onto this story from reading it the spring before Ireland and brought it up again when the snow was falling.
It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westwards. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hill, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, further westwards, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, on every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Fury lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.
~ James Joyce, 'The Dead'
The snow was brief in Dublin and the next morning we caught a bus tour to County Meath, the highlights of which were the tomb at Newgrange and the Hill of Tara. The grass crackled with frost beneath our feet at Newgrange, but at the Hill of Tara there was actual snow on the ground. It was windy there, but the snow was damp and heavy, and it did not blow. It soaked into our shoes.
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Our next excursion was to the Lakes of Killarney and Ross Castle. I shall dedicate a post to it eventually, as I have much to say on their beauty. (Actually all these adventures with my mother will get deeper treatment at another time.) For now, the bus ride to and from shall suffice. As we left Cork and passed through a few towns, there was some evidence of the snows and frosts. The farther we got into the countryside, the most dramatic it became. Passing through hills and fields for a long time between towns, the frost that had coated the ground turned heavy and was combined with layer of snow. Field grasses were each standing curved with the weight of ice and snow. Tree branches were outlined in white against the sky. The countryside was the perfect winter wonderland. By the time we got to Killarney, the weather must have been different there because the covering of white was thin. It was still enough, though, to make our walk through town a slippery one and make the ferns at a memorial look as though they were made by Jack Frost. On the way home, the light was fading fast, but the countryside had not melted in the day and the last orange and pink light lit the frosted fields with a rosy glow that beautifully contrasted the deathly white covering of the snow.
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If only I had a sweetheart, something to hold on to, she thought, as she cracked some ice with her high heel and watched the crazy splintered pattern it made. The poor birds could get no food as the ground was frozen hard. Frost was general all over Ireland; frost like a weird blossom on the branches, on the river-bank from which Long John Silver leaped in his great, hairy nakedness, on the ploughs left out all winter; frost on the stony fields, and on all the slime and ugliness of the world.
Walking again she wondered if and what she would tell her mother and her brothers about it, and if all parties were as bad. She was at the top of the hill now, and could see her own house, like a little white box at the end of the world, waiting to receive her.
~ Edna O'Brien, "Irish Revel"
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The last place I took my mother outside of Cork was Blarney. It was too beautiful not to go again. The ride to Blarney is short and there isn't much countryside to see on such a short trip, but on the grounds of Blarney, we could walk through all the frosty beauty that Ireland had to offer. It was a sort of combination of heavy frost and light snow so that all the plants were edges in white and the ice patterns on the grass sparkled in the sun.
We explored all the places I had been before and a few new ones and it all looked different with the frost. Still indescribably beautiful, but now with a note of hibernation, a feeling of life withdrawn. There were still red berries on the rowan, though, and two hardy roses bloomed on a fence. But they were frosted as well and the pond was iced around the edges and the ducks huddled. The cows and horses were nowhere to be seen. The men at the top of the castle must have been freezing, but they helped Mom kiss the stone. I passed, satisfied with my kiss from the fall. From the top, the view was the same, but now the land was white instead of green. The sun cast its long shadows through the trees and across the land. Everything was wrapped in stillness, waiting for a thaw.
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