A DAD'S LIFE:A nostalgic drive up to Co Mayo and down memory lane, writes ADAM BROPHY
SOME PARTS of north Mayo seem like the moon. The long stretches of bog flanked by dark cliffs, clouds lurking beneath their summits giving a walled-in isolated feel. I read Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World when I was a kid and back then hitting the bog in Co Mayo reminded me of the explorers ascending the untouched plateau that gave the book its name.
As a kid, heading to Co Mayo to visit the rellies felt like going to another world. My mother, one of eight, was brought up on a farm just east of Belmullet. She would bring us “down home” a couple of times a year and we would be treated like visiting dignitaries, passed from house to house to be poked and prodded and slipped pound notes with a wink and a finger to lips.
There I got to save hay, milk cows and wreckle turf. There I learned that you couldn’t stop saving the hay, milking cows and wreckling turf when you got tired and wanted to play. I saw my cousins, the same age as my sisters and me, work without complaint while we pouted if our favourite cereal wasn’t available. It was a different world.
Then we got older, got city haircuts and, as soon as we could, ducked family trips where possible because we couldn’t bring cable TV with us. Not visiting became the habit. Lives became busier, we grew up, developed careers and kids came on the scene. The road to Co Mayo became more and more distant.
Last weekend, I introduced my younger daughter to her great-grandmother for the first time. One is incredibly shy and reluctant to speak, the other can barely hear or see. Yet they held hands and had a couple of moments together. And when the child moved away she had a €10 note grasped in her paw.
Granny still has the tricks.
On that visit my cousin’s husband asked as to the length of the journey back to west Cork. I told him at least six hours and he was taken aback, although he stated he’d never been to Cork. I asked how he’d avoided the pleasure and he shrugged and said he hadn’t had any reason to go. He lives in Co Meath and travels internationally for his job. Sometimes the world is small, and sometimes it’s big.
In a way, that made me feel a little better for my slackness. We may be drawn around the world, sometimes out of necessity and sometimes for pleasure and exploration, but for the most part we stay where we are based. So, I felt a little better, a little but not much.
Most of all, I felt for my own kids who don’t have a broad swell of cousins to run with as I did. The ones they have, they are close to, but their extended family is a blur thanks mainly to the ties fraying in my generation. Family size has reduced, people scatter and links are lost.
Last weekend they had an opportunity to rekindle some of that and they relished it. They fell in with second cousins like hands to gloves.
And it happened with an ease that was remarkable. We stayed with my uncle and his family, where we had never stayed before and where we worried would we be an imposition. Whether we were or not they never let on, but they made us welcome and included us as if we were, well family I suppose.
While the kids did what kids do, that is find entertainment in a hole in the ground providing other kids are there to do it with them, I ran and cycled the countryside. I stuck myself to the alien landscape and moved around on it. Out there the rain
pelted down and the wind off the Atlantic gave me a right rattle, but it was okay. There was no rush to see things, do things, take in the touristic delights, there was no rush at all. All we were interested in was slowing time down a little, eating, drinking and talking. Catching up with the familiar.
Without getting overly mystical, there are different worlds within worlds. It takes seven hours for me to drive to north Mayo; in the same time I could be sitting down to a steak dinner in Manhattan. But the drive takes me further, it takes me back in time. The drive serves as a reminder that the world, for all its convenience and connectivity, has places it is important to make an effort to get to, and they are usually the places that you came from in the first place.