Sunday, March 16, 2008
ON the second day of last week’s storms and spring tides, I walked down the long, sandy beach that stretches away from the village of Courtmacsherry, in west Cork.
At low tide it was 200 yards wide, edging the woods along the channel, almost all the way to the open sea. The sun shone, the wind buffeted my ears, and sand devils raced past me, as if cavorting for joy in that world of zephyrs and white horses that leap out of the incoming sea, their manes blown back in the blast.
The storm walk was wild and wonderful, but I enjoyed it alone, seeing not another soul abroad on my two-mile circuit along the beach, the cliffs, and, homeward, through the woods.
In their traditional cleft in the cliff face, a raven sat on its nest, the sea boiling below. Out on the grey, churned water, three Great Northern Divers breasted the choppy waves and the big swells, as to the manor born. A wren sang in the woods; so loud a voice for so small a bird. Wood anemones dotted the ground under the trees and acres of forest floor were covered by the spear-like leaves of ransoms, one flower already open. Elsewhere, bluebells were in leaf, but not yet in bloom. It was impossible to walk off the path without standing on some living thing.
In the garden at home, two robins were feeding side by side in connubial bliss, after their solitary winter. Daffodils nodded their pretty heads, willows wore soft, silvery buds and every shrub I looked at was bursting into leaf.
The postman will soon deliver a DVD of an impromptu music session we enjoyed three weeks ago in the Canary Islands. In organising this shindig, in a kitchen in La Gomera, I was fulfilling the Enrights’ historical role. McLysaght, and other genealogical luminaries, say that my name, in Irish, Mac Innreachtaigh, means ‘party organiser’. Our clan, indigents (emphasis on the ‘gents’) on both banks of the Shannon Estuary, was a sub-sept of the O’Briens. We were the organisers of ‘knees-ups’ for the royal O’Brien line.
In 1014, Enrights may well have organised the wake and the whooley for Brian Boru at Clontarf, before heading back to Clare, having put manners on the Vikings.
Four Saturdays ago, the small La Gomera house, 3,000 feet above the Valle Gran Rey, was filled with music; the soaring strains of an Irish fiddle, played by a master, Johnny Fitzgerald, of Clonakilty. Then, our Gomero friends played and sang Canarian and Cuban songs, accompanied by the Irish fiddle. Led by a woman with a voice that would have filled the Albert Hall, the music bridged oceans and cultures. Wine, from vines grown on the terraces outside and chilled in the ‘cueva’ beneath the house, flowed. A fisherman arrived with his guitar and a big, red fish called a ‘pargo’, which he cooked himself. Spuds and greens came from the fields nearby.
Next day, a Sunday, we saw a family and friends clearing a banana plantation down by the sea; no doubt it will be developed into low-rise private houses or apartment blocks. Meanwhile, the dark, rich earth was ploughed into drills for temporary cultivation.
The morning after, we saw two women, well past pensionable age, in the new-made field planting spuds. One was moving along the drills, making holes with a dibber and holding a mobile phone to her ear with her other hand. Her friend dropped seed potatoes, from a sack, into the holes.
La Gomera was famous for its unique whistling language. Land-line phones couldn’t reach the lonely houses in hidden valleys, but mobile phones can. No more whistling; only ring tones from Silicon Valley. A pity. Another unique human facility, evolved over millennia, is endangered. March is roaring outside my window as I write, flower pots blown over, and magpies scudding over the trees like rockets in the wind. Who knows what the weather will be like as you read this.
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