Peat
“Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone,
It’s with O’Leary in the grave.”
--W.B. Yeats, “September 1913”
One of the things I was looking forward to about our trip to Ireland was a peat fire. Twenty years ago, some friends of mine went to Ireland and brought back a peat log: a large, brown, rough, mossy hunk of turf. We threw it on the fire and a strange aroma spread through our house; it smelled like the essence of the earth.
The cottage we were renting in Ireland had a fireplace, and the details on the website said that peat was available locally. Several of my husband’s family members—we were there for a reunion—went into town and came back with something called peat that bore no resemblance to the chunk of earth I recalled. It was hard and black, like coal, and when I built a fire with it, it gave off a faintly coal-like odor that was nothing like the intoxicating scent I remembered.
As an English teacher, I am fond of metaphor, and this seems like a perfect one, not only for Ireland, the leprechaun-hawking, shamrock-toting Emerald Isle of brochures, but for tourism itself.
Everyone had told us to drive through the Ring of Kerry, though our guidebooks warned that its tiny roads were clogged with tour buses. We braved it anyway, weaving through a dense fog through which the only thing visible was a sign that said, “Best View in Ireland.” In Waterville, we met a British couple, Mike and Linda, while trying to figure out what to do for dinner, and decided to eat with them at our B&B, which was also a restaurant. The trouble was, it turned out, that the restaurant was not fully open yet, but the chef rustled up two small bowls of truly awful Thai soup and some raw oysters that he had ruined with something he said was chili sauce, for which he later (he didn’t quote us a price at the time) charged us 42 Euros (about 56 bucks). I paid without complaint.
It turned out that Mike and Linda had recently visited Chicago, which I still consider to be my home town though I have only lived there briefly since I left for college an eternity ago, and they had adored it. “I loved the blues clubs,” Mike said. As he listed a few, I cast my mind back on some of the old South Side blues dens. They were a far cry from the shining new clubs that now dot downtown and the near North Side. At the old Checkerboard (now relocated near the University of Chicago for the benefit of its students), my sister once took an amazing photo of Chuck Berry jamming on guitar with Keith Richards, and one night at Theresa’s many years ago, the late Junior Wells had devoted an entire improvised song to making fun of the goofy expression on my ex-husband’s face. For all I know, the new generation of blues musicians who play for businessmen visiting Chicago are every bit as good as the old, long-gone ones, but it’s hard to imagine anyone producing that sound that Junior Wells and Buddy Guy had together, which always reminded me of the grinding sound of the old Illinois Central trains, the music of metal and rust.
I thought of those old blues clubs again a few days later as I sat in a crowded pub in Doolin, County Clare, listening to bodhrán, Uilleann pipes, flute, and guitar while surrounded by a hostel-load of cheering young people. The music was beautiful, and I was seated so close to the bodhrán that I could feel it pulsating in my chest. At the same time, it was quite different from what my peat-bearing friends had told me about their idyllic journey twenty years before, when they had sat in tiny, nearly empty pubs amid spontaneous eruptions of traditional music.
I had been told that the roads in Ireland were awful, but I was not prepared for how truly awful they were. Someone told me that they’re built on peat, which causes them to collapse and form countless ripples and dips, so if you actually drive the speed limit—at least 80 kilometers per hour, even on winding, narrow country roads—you feel like you’re in a blender. Consequently, it takes a million years to drive anywhere. We took two different routes between Dublin and Shannon, a distance of 138 miles, and it took five hours each way.
After about a week of paying too much for everything and being buffeted on the tiny, peat-hole-ridden roads, I confess that I began to take something of a dislike to Brand Ireland. However, I loved Yeats’s tower, Thoor Ballylee, and the nearby estate, Coole Park, home to the eponymous wild swans of his poem. The house at Coole, which had belonged to Lady Gregory, co-founder, with Yeats, of Dublin’s Abbey Theatre, was torn down in 1941 for reasons that don’t seem clear to anyone. We wandered through the gardens in light rain (as my husband likes to tell people, it rained twice during our two weeks in Ireland: once for the first week and once for the second), stopping to try to make out Yeats’s signature on the famous “Autograph Tree.”
It seemed like a crime to have allowed a house of such historic significance to be torn down (for scrap, evidently), but was it merely a crime against tourism? I pondered this as the nineteen members of my husband’s family attempted to have lunch in the “tea room” at Coole, which was actually a cafeteria. The menu featured a Mexican chicken wrap that cost 11 Euro; I could feel Lady Gregory shuddering in her tomb. As a tourist, I would have preferred to have the house at Coole still standing, preferably with the original furnishings, but as a Chicagoan, I recognized that this would simply be packaging, the compression of the rich layers of Irish literary history into a hard, coal-like chunk, a consumable product that would burn quickly and leave no trace of redolent smoke behind.
We had been told that Irish people were incredibly friendly, but we did not experience this. It’s not that people were unfriendly—they were perfectly cordial, but they did not seem to have that extra something that I would describe as truly warm. I didn’t blame them; we and our fellow tourists had descended on their country like a swarm of moths and were buzzing through the west, denuding it of wool. On the last night of our two weeks, which had at times seemed like an eternity, we stayed near the airport in the incredibly touristy village of Bunratty at a B&B that promises on its website, “A warm welcome awaits you.” In fact, we were met at the door by a man with a cell phone who grunted at us, then disappeared. His wife later came to offer us tea, and because we never saw the two of them at the same time, my daughter was convinced that they were in fact the same person.
As our last act of tourism, we drove to the enormous shoppe next to the Bunratty Castle and Folk Park and cruised its aisles, searching for our last souvenirs. I rifled through my last pile of leprechaun pens (I bought three), while ambient Irish music hovered ethereally, and as I realized that I was about to leave Ireland, possibly forever, I found that my eyes were full of tears.
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