When all else fails, an island will restore your spirits, and where better than Inis Oírr, writes MICHAEL HARDING
I WAS at Galway Arts Festival on Friday, watching Political Mother, a stunning dance work by Hofesh Shechter. The dancers moved through moments of pain and compassion, like people being sucked down a drain, as their bodies struggled to reveal something human against a backdrop of mesmerising drums and electronic guitars. Its intense beauty overwhelmed me and, like all great art, it filled me with an urge to abandon the world – as the fisherman does, when he turns his back on the stressful street and finds wisdom at the quiet corner of a river.
In the morning I decided to abandon the festival and flee to Inis Oírr. Islands are full of islanders, rocks, seaweed, lobster pots and rusty cars, but I have always sought refuge on islands, ever since I was a teenager and spent a summer on Aranmore, and got my first kiss, in Irish, which made the language a safe haven for my heart forever.
The morning was full of drizzle. I squeezed on to Lally’s double-decker bus with a flock of European teenagers and headed for Rossaveal. I got a seat upstairs behind two American ladies with white hair. They were disappointed with the foggy windows, the steamy heat, and the yapping children of the Mediterranean. The women chatted about an ex-husband: “I was going to go to Phoenix one time, to look him up, but hey, what? To reminisce? It’s too late now.” She gazed at the fogged window, and recalled some intense moment with him in a bathroom long ago. “I guess I said this, and he said that, and then I said something else. After that he just left. I could never understand why.”
She was gazing wistfully at a Spanish couple, who seemed unshakeable in their devotion. The woman was thin, and her face did not seem lived in; her expression was blank, as if she had woven its stillness by a lifetime of dreaming, and her two arms were wrapped around her beloved’s body, as he lay sleeping with his head in her lap. She gazed down at him as if he was a child and she was his mother, protecting him; such are the unconscious loyalties that surface on a difficult bus ride.
The American ladies fidgeted, and the stuffy bus was unbearable, and the stillness of the Europeans seemed almost like a display of quiet superiority. They had the equanimity of people who have always lived in the house of their own ancestors, without ever hearing a threatening knock at the door. But the Americans were edgy, like people who have known the fear of eating standing up, or the fear that comes when strangers take your ancestors’ photographs off the walls and tell you to get out.
When we got on the ferry, the Spaniards went indoors, cherishing the moon within each other, while the Americans sat atop the boat, battered by the wind, screaming protestations at the gusty air like children, when the wind tried to take their hats. Ferries are always the same. The grey sky hangs low as a ceiling, and bungalows on the mainland shrink into tiny white dots; the sea gets churned into surf by the roaring engine at the rear of the boat, and the ocean is flat and silvery grey.
It felt good to escape the midlands and all that solid ground of horse hoof and chestnut tree, and be sucked again into the sweet language of Connemara and the scope of the mighty ocean.
On the pier I met a friend and we spoke in Irish. A red tractor carried supplies from the pier, and outside Tigh Ruairí’s bar two girls in sunglasses smoked loose tobacco and a solitary German man with walking boots and two rucksacks contemplated his maps.
I went in search of the rusting hulk of a ship that went aground on the shore 50 years ago, and later I found a church sinking into the sandy clay of a graveyard, and I walked up the sloping limestone hills to Áras Éanna, the local arts centre, for a music session.
I saw the two American ladies again, sitting outside on the wall. They still looked like they had spent too many centuries in buses, or on trains that sometimes take human beings to hell; but they were more relaxed now, smoking furtively, and focusing their spectacles to take in the view of that unbearably beautiful island, with tears in their eyes.
