At the Edge of Ireland (42 page)

Old Tractor near Dursey Island

“Ah—the inevitable ‘until,'” Anne said.

“D'y want me to finish this? We're just getting to the best bit…One night the young trainee engineer came down from his hidden nook where he'd been pulling the lines. There were a few people about but most had gone home. And as he came out of the front door of the church he didn't notice that one of those almost invisible fishing lines had somehow come loose and he caught his foot on it and it jerked the statue completely off its plinth and it started to fall…”

“A messy end!” said Anne.

“Ah—not so fast,” said Tom. “It was coming straight for his head and would have smashed it like a fat juicy watermelon but—six inches from impact—the statue suddenly stopped apparently in midair, and everyone round about gasped and shouted and photographed and videoed and the young man still didn't know what all the fuss was about.

When the crowd pointed to the statue slowly revolving about his head he lost his nerve and ran and was not seen around the village for quite a long while after that. But the photos were, and everyone agreed that, despite all the fakery with the lines, the fact the statue had stopped in midflight and spared the engineer's life was a miracle easily equal in notoriety to all the other moving statues around the country. And so the little village continued to prosper!”

“Fascinating,” I said. “And the moral is?”

“Moral? I'm not too sure about that. Maybe—make the most of whatever you've got—I suppose.”

“Just like Noel with his beautiful little farm, all those velvety meadows, all those cute sheep, and a stack of money in the bank from all those bottles of whiskey he never drank.”

“I'll drink to all that!” Noel said, laughing, his warm eyes glowing in the brilliant sunset that was bathing the room in a golden-scarlet light.

“Oh no, you can't do that!” Anne said, chuckling. And the evening rolled on…

A
NOTHER CONVERSATION A FEW DAYS LATER
reinforced a lot of what we'd learned from the “protean life” seemingly lived by many of the more creative individuals on Beara. I was chatting with Pete O'Neill, a burly red-haired fisherman in his early fifties who lived down in Kinsale but seemed to enjoy occasional sojourns up to Castletownbere. We'd met originally by chance at Breen's in the square and agreed to keep in touch. On this particular occasion we were sitting down by the ferry slip on a warm afternoon, and he was describing the appeal of our little town and his memories of one notable event back in the late 1990s.

“Y'see, this place always seems to lure in the mavericks and the magic individuals—with the occasional madman thrown in to keep the pot bubbling. In fact there was this one guy—back in '98, I think, maybe '99. He seemed to be a bit of all of that—maverick, magic, and definitely a touch mad too. I think his real name was Pearl-man—David, Dennis—I forget. But he'd decided to call himself Neutrino—Poppa, Poppa Neutrino, that was it—after the name of a small particle so elusive and mysterious that he assumed it was unreal—a theoretical entity.”

“And how did you meet this Neutrino fellow?” I asked.

“Oh, I didn't. I've been told about him. I wish I had met him, though. He became a bit of instant Beara folklore when he arrived here out of the blue—actually, out of the black, just after a tremendous storm had hit the town here. Floated in on a clapped-out piece of junk he'd somehow hobbled together with a few of his mates out of scrap lumber and Styrofoam and suchlike and sailed with this crazy crew—three guys and three dogs, I think—across the Atlantic from Canada to Ireland.”

“Did the locals take him seriously?”

“Not at first. I mean, you wouldn't believe what a piece of crap that boat of his was—if you'd even call it a boat. More like a mini-masterpiece of discarded dreck! Some didn't believe he'd made the crossing at all, but after a while, as people talked with him, he became a bit of a zany saint-guru. He seemed to be all kinds of different people bundled up in one little individual. They said he was a singer, songwriter, violinist, poet, builder, craftsman, a lettering artist—I heard he painted quite a few signs for people around here.

“The guy was in his seventies, but he acted like he was in his early forties. Energy just radiated out of him, so they said. He seemed to be one of those people who refused to outgrow their vicarious vicissitudes. People'd come just to listen to tales of his adventures around the earth, especially his zany sailing odysseys on other crafts he'd patched together from scraps of this and that. I think he even tried to replicate Thor Heyerdahl's journey on his amazing trans-Pacific
Kon-Tiki
raft built out of balsa logs. They couldn't get enough of this chap around here. They even started quoting him—things like: ‘The forbidden and the impossible are always the greatest aphrodisiacs.' And another—‘Life is fire—you're meant to get burned. You can't escape it. The faster you learn to enjoy the smell of burning, the faster you learn what life is all about—an endless adventure!' I always remember that last bit—‘an endless adventure.' Kinda makes you wonder about your own life—the way you've chosen to use your time.

“And that's another thing he kept saying too—about the choice always being yours. No matter what the circumstances—no matter how many justifications you have for living a straight-line kind of life—stifling the options—it's still you doing the choosing. ‘Course he said there were penalties to be paid: ‘He who dares not grasp the thorn should ne'er crave the rose'—bit of Emily Brontë so he said. You can blame God, fate, bad luck, obligations, responsibilities—all the usual stuff—but the choices are always there and only you can choose them, release them, sailing on the whims of the winds—and release yourself, I suppose.”

“Or your
selves
,” I suggested.

“Yeah,” Pete said and thought for a while. “Yeah—well, I think that's what this Neutrino chap was trying to get across. Some people got mad at him, usually behind his back, though, and called him irresponsible, a wandering bum, an escapist unwilling to live in the real world with real responsibilities. Others went the other way—they seemed absolutely fascinated by his ideas—and more important, the fact he'd lived out his ideas. Lived out his fantasies and dreams. Made them really real. He gave people a kind of release—at least that's what some of my friends who were around at the time tell me. He seemed to be living proof that zany things are possible—that life could be lived as a great adventure. He said something like, “The true adventurer goes out aimless and uncalculating to meet and greet unknown fates!”

“Well, sounds like this Neutrino chap gave Castletownbere quite a bit of a buzz.”

Poppa's Boots

“Yep. They said the quay was crammed with people as this piece of floating junk bobbed into harbor. It was all in the papers. Neu-
Poppa's Boots
trino shouted out, so they say—‘Sixty-two days from Newfoundland to wherever it is we've landed in Ireland—we've definitely broken the scrap barrier!'

“And scrap just about describes his floating creation. The major components were ‘distressed' lumber nailed and then woven together with miles of frayed rope from local boatyards back in Canada, huge Styrofoam floats, an old parachute pulled over a web of ancient fishnets for a sail, broad outriggers of bamboo to stop the contraption from flipping over, and a huge piece of construction plywood as a daggerboard. And additional luxuries apparently included a full-size upright piano, an old radar that nobody knew how to work, an ancient oak bar for nightly ‘sundowner' drinks, and—oh those three pet dogs…said it was all inspired by Buckminster Fuller's crazy concepts and constructions.

“He must have had God on his side—they were hit by two hurricanes, tipped over, blown three hundred miles off course, kept running out of food and having to beg from rare passing boats. They'd planned to piggyback on the Gulf Stream current all the way to Europe but never seemed able to find it! But they somehow finally arrived in Castletownbere, were celebrated mightily by the locals, and eventually had a video of their exploits shown on the National Geographic channel later on the same year. And when they interviewed him on the local TV and radio, he kept coming out with more pretty neat ideas—things that kinda stuck in your mind…'”

“Like?”

“Well, like…like what I was saying earlier on, really, and well, it's been a while…so I can't remember it all…but I know he kept saying you've got to ‘break the alignment'…meaning, don't be too predictable. He said, ‘When you die, the alignment's broken anyway, so have more fun and do it yourself from time to time. Step out of one life existence and slip into another. Let your possessions go—all those material distractions—give 'em away…Be a gypsy…Let go and trust and let the current carry you…Go a little crazy…You don't have as long as you think…'”

“So you do remember!”

“Well—maybe not his exact words, but that was the gist of it. He spoke what many of us secretly think or fantasize about—but most times we never do anything about it. Never get beyond the ‘what if' stage.”

“So what happened to him?”

“I'm not sure, really. I heard he'd gone back to the States to build another raft to cross the Pacific to Japan or…or maybe it was Thailand. He'd always have some wacky scheme going. For him, I reckon, it would just be following his life-code. Doing what he felt he should be doing. But I tell you, he left a lot of people around here wondering about their own lives and the way they were living them…He created ripples of restlessness, you might call it…which isn't necessarily a bad thing, is it?”

“Y'know,” I said, “we've had quite a few friends visit us down here from England and the USA and they told us that Beara itself—this beautiful peninsula—has had a similar impact. Creating those ‘ripples of restlessness' as you see other ways of living—other ways of celebrating life and being alive.”

“Yeah. And it doesn't just happen to the blow-ins. I think many of us who've lived here for years—sometimes all of our lives and the lives of our forefathers—feel we can tap into these…ripples. Kinda keeps us on the right course…gives you a kind of whack on the side of your head once in a while. And that can be a very useful reminder of the important things…right?”

“Dead right,” I said.

(or Not…)

W
ARNING: THIS IS NOT A PROJECT
to be undertaken lightly. Oh sure, it looks easy enough on a small map—a simple dotted line wriggling up and around the Beara's mountainous spine and encompassing its two islands, Dursey and Bere, and ending up among a very pleasant cluster of restaurants in elegant Kenmare.

Even the official guidebook is disarmingly encouraging in its summary description: “Using tracks, old roads and mountain paths, it takes in some of the most breathtaking scenery in Ireland…One could walk sections by following the easily recognized marking posts or a map. It provides a delightful and easy way to discover and explore the peninsula.”

The actual length is a little disheartening, though—125 miles is a lot longer than it looks on the map—but having once in my more ambitiously exploratory days conquered England's Coast to Coast Walk (75 miles) and the mighty Pennine Way (at 270 miles, the longest of all the nation's “long-distance” footpaths), I convinced myself that the Beara Way must be something of a dilettantish dawdle. Particularly as almost half of it is along narrow paved boreens and not across (so I was assured) thigh-deep bogs and snap-your-ankle rock deserts, as it was on the wild and soggy moors of England.