Faery Tale (25 page)

Happy Birthday! From Mike, Ali, the kids . . . and the faeries.
I melted. I had gone into the day expecting nothing and had ended up with one of my most memorable birthdays ever. The kindness of others was simply astonishing—I was the luckiest girl in the world.

That night was my last with Wol, Paul, and Big John, and we were going to the pub for one final evening out. But I needed to say goodbye to Mike and Ali before leaving for the night. I found them outside with the kids.

“You guys are incredible,” I said. “Thank you so much for the gifts. You didn't have to do that!”

“Of course!” Mike smiled.

“You can mix the elderflower liquor with Pimm's, seltzer water, or vodka . . . it's made from the flowers on the hawthorn trees, you know, the faery trees.” Ali grinned.

“It's amazing, thank you. I love it.”

“Thank
you
,” she said, “for giving us the chance to discover something that we didn't even know existed in our own backyard.”

That made me feel pretty special indeed.

Little George was standing in front of a brown dish tub, blowing bubbles into the courtyard. “Hey, George, I want to say goodbye now, because I probably won't see you before I leave.”

He froze, dropping the plastic bubble maker, and turned to me, a shocked, heartbroken look on his face.

“Why?”
he asked, his voice tiny.

“Well, I'm leaving very, very late tonight. And you'll be fast asleep in bed! I just didn't want to miss you.”

He processed this for a moment. “But when are you coming
back
?”

My heart swelled. “I'm going to come back as soon as I can again, to visit. Maybe next summer, or the summer after that. America is pretty far away, you know, but I really do want to visit soon, okay?”

He looked down at his toes, stricken, and his upper lip began to quiver.
Don't cry
, I willed silently,
please don't let him cry!
How this little boy loved so openly, and saw so many people come and go, I just don't know.

“Listen, George,” I said, placing my hand on top of his blond head, looking at him quite seriously. “I wanted to ask you for a favor.” I paused, to allow the gravity in my tone to sink in. “Do you think you could do something for me?”

Ever the brave boy, he straightened and, looking up at me, nodded his head slightly.

“You were the very best faery helper today . . . so I wanted to ask you. Do you think you could keep an eye out, for me, you know, until I come back? And let me know if you see any more faeries?”

He beamed. “Yup, I can do that.”

“That would be wonderful. I hope I'll get to hear about your adventures someday.” Giving his hair a tussle, I turned to head back to my room, lest I suffer from my own case of the quivering upper lip.

I was only blowing gently on the flame of imagination he already had kindling within. Someday he was going to grow up, like the rest of us. But maybe, when he was walking in the woods, he'd see something that reminded him. And just for a moment, he'd remember the day the red-haired lady came, and he and his cousins and his mom went off into the woods, looking for faeries. Maybe that was all that the faeries were trying to connect us with—a flash of magic, if only in a memory.

 

I met up with Wol, Big John, and Paul in the kitchen.

“So,” Big John said, as I detected the slightest smirk on his face. “Did you have any luck? Did you see any faeries?”

“No,” I replied, “I couldn't say I
saw
them . . .”

“Well, we did,” he said. “We saw a faery.”

“Ha-ha. Very funny,” I said, crossing my arms.

“No, really, we did!” exclaimed Wol.

“And we brought it back for you.” Paul was smiling broadly now. They stepped aside to reveal a small white box.

“Happy birthday,” they said.

“You guys!” I exclaimed, flipping it open. Inside was a beautiful little pewter faery with pink wings and an Isle of Man symbol on her chest. “Oh my God!” I swallowed the lump that was forming in my throat. No crying allowed in front of bikers. Wol passed me a greeting card.
For your birthday, we thought you'd like something that makes you feel loved, admired, and appreciated!
I flipped the card open.
So here we are!
They had all signed it, and at the bottom was written simply,
We are waiting.—The Faeries.
Then Big John handed over a jar of Manx Knobs (very funny) and I burst out laughing and crying all at once. It was the perfect end to a magical day.

“Okay,” I said, recovering myself. “I'm ready to celebrate!” The TT was over, and most everyone had left, so we had the pub pretty much to ourselves. We didn't stay out too late—I had been planning on just staying awake until two thirty a.m., when my taxi was scheduled, but my adventures of the day had caught up with me, and I felt my eyelids closing of their own volition. We took a cab back to the Centre and I said my farewells.

Before the tears came, I managed to give them one last hug and disappeared into my cabin. I was on my own again. But little did I know, I
had
seen a faery. Rather, my camera did.

At the end of my journey, looking back at my photos from the old Fairy Bridge, something caught my eye. A tiny glowing dot on the bottom left of the photo. Zooming in, it gets blurry, but I swear, within the glowing bubble is a little form with wings.

—WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS

 

 

 

 

I
T was three thirty in the morning, but I couldn't sleep on the ferry ride from the Isle of Man to Dublin. I'd been thinking a lot about the old saying that there is nothing new under the sun. More often than not I've found this to be true. Even as we discover new species of plants and wildlife, we tend to forget that these things are not new at all—they're simply new to us. The problem is that as humans we have an annoying habit of making a big deal of ourselves. It's been estimated by an organization called the UN Global Diversity Assessment that Earth supports close to 13.6 million species. Of which human beings comprise . . . one.

What does this have to do with faeries, you might ask? Lots. We aren't certain about the existence of faeries, so we conclude they don't exist. But just like some undiscovered exotic species of plant or animal, they could exist whether we see them or not. It made me wonder once more how so many people believe in the existence of God and angels but laugh at the notion of faeries, ghosts, and other spirit-world characters. You'd think they were part and parcel, would you not?

Now as I roamed from place to place, I couldn't utter a word about my search without people entering into a full-fledged debate over the existence or nonexistence of a world outside our range of human perception. It was fascinating and, after a while, exhausting. I grew tired of hearing people argue that God was real but faeries weren't. That angels were real, faeries weren't. I would ask them why they felt that way, and the funniest thing was, no one knew. “Because God is real and faeries are fictitious,” came the common response.

So perhaps by the same logic,
God
could be fictitious and
faeries
could be real. But if you ask me, the existence of one only serves to support the existence of the other.

 

Apparently, insomnia on a ferry in the middle of the Irish Sea wasn't a bad thing. I had nothing but time to think. Now that I was headed to Ireland, I had been reading a lot of William Butler Yeats, and I was surprised to discover that he and I had more in common than I thought. First of all, we had the same birthday—June 13. Of course, he was born in 1865, making him 115 years older than me. But hey, I'll take it.

Also, when my parents split, my mother moved to West Yates Street, which is probably why I grew up spelling his name wrong. If those commonalities weren't enough to bind us together as kindred spirits forever in my mind, there was the subtle fact that we both were interested in the world of faeries. Yes, that's right.

You may have read his poem “The Stolen Child,” which was one of several Yeats wrote about the faery kingdom. Not only did he write poetry about it, Yeats truly believed faeries existed. He made a lifelong study of mysticism, occultism, spirituality, and astrology. “The mystical life is the centre of all that I do and all that I think and all that I write,” he wrote in 1892. And like W. Y. Evans-Wentz, Yeats's interest in faeries spurred him to travel the Irish countryside collecting local folklore and supposed firsthand accounts of faery encounters, which he presented in his book
The Celtic Twilight
(1893)
.

At the turn of the twentieth century, much of Ireland had been devastated by the potato famine of 1845-1851, which claimed the lives of more than one million people and caused another million or so to leave Ireland for better hopes of survival abroad. Ireland was struggling to retain its autonomy against British rule, and nearly everyone who lived outside the major cities still believed in faeries. So actually, the fact that Mr. Yeats wandered the countryside chitchatting with locals about “the kindly neighbors” and “the good people” was quite unremarkable. Mysticism was on the rise at the turn of the twentieth century, as many people participated in séances and created the famously mysterious occult organization the Golden Dawn, in which Yeats was an active member. During this time, faeries had yet to undergo the Victorianization that was to come. Instead, faeries were considered, much in the way the Frouds consider them today, mutable spirits connected to the land that should always be respected (and were best left alone entirely).

Yeats's involvement and belief in this world of faeries was widely known, but it's interesting to see how public opinion of him was influenced by his beliefs as time went by. He was a Nobel Prize-winning poet, but after his death in the late 1930s, his popularity swelled to even greater heights. Later, his worldview was rashly criticized for being too “fascist,” and his occultist tendencies were frowned upon. And yet no one has ever called Yeats a madman. No one has questioned his sanity due to his belief in faeries. (Lucky for him. The adamant Christian Joan of Arc was burned as a heretic for her connection to the “Charmed Tree of the Fairy of Bourlement,” where she used to visit and leave garlands in the spring.)

Yeats would spend hours walking through the woods “pre-occupied with Ængus and Edain, and with Manannan, son of the sea.” Sure, he was perhaps susceptible to the power of suggestion, and as a result, some of his writing, especially in
The Celtic Twilight
, is pretty far out there. He describes being entranced, bearing witness to things that can't be seen by the naked eye.Yeats “saw” things upon waking. He writes of one late night encounter: “I awoke to see the loveliest people I have ever seen. A young man and a young girl dressed in olive-green raiment, cut like old Greek raiment, were standing at my bedside. I looked at the girl and noticed that her dress was gathered about her neck into a kind of chain, or perhaps into some kind of stiff embroidery which represented ivy-leaves. But what filled me with wonder was the miraculous mildness of her face. There are no such faces now. It was beautiful, as few faces are beautiful . . . it was peaceful like the faces of animals, or like mountain pools at evening, so peaceful that it was a little sad.”

It was this that reminded me of faery.

 

The ferry arrived in Dublin at dawn. I caught a cab to the train station and hopped on the first train to Galway.

I watched from the train window as my first glimpses of Ireland whizzed by—a blur of green grass, cows, sheep, and horses. Located three hours from Dublin by train, on the western coast of Ireland, Galway is well known for its “Irishness,” mainly due to the fact that it has on its doorstep the Galway Gaeltacht, a center devoted to keeping the Gaelic language alive.

I would be there five days researching and writing before my friends Liz and Stephanie arrived. Two of my best friends from New York, I hadn't seen them since I shipped off for Charleston. Liz came to Ireland often and wanted to introduce me to her Irish friend Peter Guy, who was, according to Liz, one of the most brilliant people she'd ever met. Peter knew more about Irish history and folklore than most, and he was going to be our host for a few days in our search for faeries.

Even though I hadn't slept in nearly two days, I felt oddly energized arriving in Galway with its quaint winding streets and gorgeous shop-windows, a vibrant, buzzing hub filled with locals and travelers alike. By the time Liz and Stephanie arrived to meet me, just seeing their faces was a welcome dose of home. Liz looked me over from head to toe and concluded, “You
look
like somebody who's been looking for faeries!”

After cleaning myself up and doing some much-needed catching up, we set off to meet Peter. And the first thing Peter Declan Thomas Guy did was present me with a large manila folder. He'd gone to the library and photocopied hundreds of pages of research that he thought I might find helpful on Irish folklore and faery tales. While Galway had not gotten off to the most productive start research-wise, I had a feeling that if Peter had anything to do with it, all that was about to change. A tall, striking man with piercing blue eyes and dark hair, Peter had a quick wit but a quiet manner of speaking that radiated intelligence. Rather eccentrically, he avoided eye contact altogether. Born and raised in Ireland, Peter earned his doctorate in literature and psychoanalysis. He was curious about my interest in Irish folklore and faeries, and even though he himself hadn't given much thought to the manner of their existence, he didn't think me mentally deficient for pursuing them. Instead he opened himself up to our will, saying, “All right, girls, tell me where you want to go and we'll go there.”