A walk in the woods

Walks in Ireland are not like walks in the States, where we drive to parks, stay on trails, don't trespass, follow signs. For one thing, hike is not a word that is used here; there is no verbal differentiation between the quick daily circuit around the neighborhood and the 20k hill walks that walkers here might make on any given weekend. Walking, the hiking sort, is serious business here, not in the commercial sense (there is very little attention to gear other than boots and walking sticks) but in the way the walkers build their leisure time around their walks.

         Yesterday--a glorious day at last!-- I headed out to the Slievebloom mountains again, this time for a 10k walk in the Delour River Valley. When I got to the meeting point there were at least 30 people there, nearly all of them members of the same walking club. After driving to the embarkation point, a lovely little pocket of a park whose three picnic tables were scattered in the grass on the river bank, we set out by immediately plunging into the woods. Within five minutes we had forded our first stream. Our movement seemed completely arbitrary as we wove through the forest. We ducked fallen branches, straddled several barbed wire fences, climbed over two gates, jumped thin rivulets of streambed. Our progress through a cattle pasture caused a mini stampede after one animal got too curious and one of our group chased it off with a stick. Overall we forded the river and its tributaries at least 8 times. The river was higher than our two guides had anticipated; at various points throughout the walk one or the other of us would give up trying to stay dry. By the end of the walk, as we passed by the sheep field, barns and then the house of an environmental farm, we were all soaked but happy.

         In the woods, the trees were nearly in full leaf. For the first mile or so nearly the entire ground was covered with bluebells in a breathtaking show. The swollen river ran fast along its bed over stones; occasionally we would encounter a small falls or a few small rapids. Even the chattering of the walkers didn't overwhelm the bird song. How could it ever be better than this?

         My chief companions were two boys, aged 1o (Tom) and 12 (David), who realized they had a captive audience, one American willing to listen, and bent my ear for the better part of two hours. They asked a million questions about America--did a lot of people skateboard? were there farms? did people drive Ferraris? had I ever seen a snake? What about a moose? were there bats? were they fruit bats? what did people call fizzy drinks? They knew that what they called trousers were pants to us, and that their pants were what we called underwear. They had two dozen stories about crocodile sightings in Florida, but they hardly knew what I meant when I told them I had seen rattlesnakes in the wild. David is fascinated by reptiles, a problem in a country which famously has no snakes and very few lizards and others of their ilk. He imagines studying biology in the States--this kid is 12!--and becoming an animal biologist. As for me, by the end of the walk I would have cashed in my retirement to buy stock in his (future) lab, he was that smart.

         At our lunch break I perched on a tree trunk next to a man whose name was Vincent. Unlike the others on the walk, he seemed to be, like me, alone. I found out later that he was the brother of one of our two guides. I could never have guessed this. Vincent's brother was a large, gregarious man whose natural tendency was to chat and joke. Vincent was compact and quiet. At the break he made himself a bread and banana sandwich and poured tea from a flask. He clearly knew his Irish history, specifically asking me questions about my research that no one else had gotten to. When he got to Cromwell, a man and a period very often glossed over in the concise Irish histories I had been reading, I felt his kindness to me masked a general benign contempt for my overall ignorance of the subject matter about which I was so willing to expound, but I think he was also truly interested.

         At the end of the walk, when everyone was stripping off their soaking wet boots and socks and getting ready to head back to whatever real life awaited them, Vincent offered to lead me to Kinnitty, a town on the far side of the mountain we were on, so that I could take a different route home from the way I came. As a sort of aside, he asked if I would like to stop in for tea at his house on the way. Since my overriding need was to find a loo, I jumped at the chance. But as I followed him deeper and deeper into the mountains along what was the most rural road I had yet been on in Ireland, I began to panic. I thought of my children, as I drove blithely along behind Vincent's VW, wondering how I would ever explain to them, assuming I had the chance, that their gullible mother thought nothing of being led into one of the more isolated of places in Ireland by a man she had struck up a casual conversation with at a lunch break on a walk in the Slievebloom mountains.

         Vincent lives in a remote cabin on the mountain. Early in its 150-year-old life it had been a house; sometime later it became a cow shed. Vincent is slowly converting it back again. He bought it recently, along with 10 acres of forestry land, after he returned from years of living in Australia. He has travelled all over the world, but is back home now close to where he grew up. Vincent described the cabin as living rough, but in fact it seemed quite domestic. He made a pot of tea, the first loose tea I have had here, where everyone uses tea bags, and we ate toasted pita bread and cheese while we talked about Ireland. Vincent knows a good deal about early Celtic Ireland, a period I haven't studied at all since my days, long ago, of reading Robert Graves. On the way back down the mountain we stopped to look at a standing stone in the middle of a field where two horses were grazing. Vincent told me that it was made of quartzite and that it was left there from a Celtic tribal ritual. It would have had Ogham characters inscribed on its surface, but the weather has obliterated them now.

         Vincent waved me off at Kinnitty, and I headed back home in the gathering dusk. When I arrived, just before dark, the girls in my apartment complex came running to greet me. They were all relaxed and happily sunburned, evidence of a happy day in the sunshine for them and a sign for all of us that summer really will come.