Blasket Spirit Read online

  That afternoon, while returning along the south road, I heard the distinctive blow of a whale east of An Gob. I sat back against a dagger-like rock that pierced the side of the cliff and scanned the undulating waters that sparkled over 150 metres below. It was the time of year for whales to migrate along the 100-metre contour west of Inis Tuaisceart, travelling to and from warmer breeding waters. I had seen one close to Inis Mhic Uibhleain the previous week but never this close. I knew that they could stay submerged for over an hour but if it was a large school of whales, the chances of seeing something as these colossal creatures cruised majestically by was much greater, so I waited.

  Suddenly I heard a great explosion as a waterspout sprayed high into the air. The huge rounded black back arched through the surface as the whale submerged. The tail flukes flicked and slapped the water as it disappeared. I jumped up in excitement. Close by, another spout exploded, followed closely by two more. A school of whales was cruising by! At the height I stood above them, it was impossible to gauge their size. They frolicked and displayed, as if they knew they were in protected Irish waters.

  Suddenly, a whale rose vertically into the blue sky. For a second, it seemed to be suspended in the air, before it slapped onto its back with a spectacular, explosive crash. Then another broke out into the sunshine and returned in a white blossom of spray. In turn, each great water creature threw itself against the sun, fusing sky and sea in a flash of sparks. The electricity pulsated through my body. As each broke the surface and blew, a shout leaped from my chest. Each launch melted the heavens and the ocean into one. Thousands of birds wheeled around the dancing sea creatures. The sea opened and closed to the sky, as the surface bubbled with life. Breathless, I watched and watched, hardly daring to blink, until their trail faded from view in the sea to the south.

  When they had disappeared, I flopped back down against the rock, light-headed and laughing, my body vibrating with the energy of sun and sea. I watched the veil of sea birds that had shadowed the whales turn in unison and return to the island. Their noise rose to a deafening pitch, as the keening of thousands of birds suddenly echoed against the cliffs. The island tolled with the sound, and I became aware in their cries of the requiem song for 118 young Russian men.

  The whales had now disappeared without trace. The defining lines of sea and sky returned as if nothing had happened, but I knew that it had. I stood for a long time, the sole witness of their passing, with a cold emptiness in my stomach. It was after sunset before I turned away from the silent sea and returned home to the village.

  Do or Die

  The climb down to the Gravel Strand was unnerving. I made cautious progress, weighing the pros and cons of each step and handhold as I descended. Sigrid swam in the cove frequently and so clambered down surefooted as a goat. Since this German woman kept to herself as much as I did, it had been quite some time before we had made one another’s acquaintance on the Great Blasket Island. When she met me for the first time, I was in the middle of one of my daily conversations with the seal pup. That seemed to break the ice between us easily. Neither she nor I was the focus of the attention, as we doted over the cuddly ball of fur and mischief, and so a relaxed friendship developed.

  Each summer, when the German kindergarten where Sigrid worked closed for the holidays, she escaped from the city and flew to Ireland. She camped on the Great Blasket Island for her six-week break, returning to Germany only two days before the school reopened.

  In the stormy weather of that summer, her tent had ripped in two, and so she had moved into the hostel. Most days, she lay on the beach, becoming a darker shade of mahogany. Each time we met, we stopped and exchanged reports of the seal pup, the falcons, the very pregnant donkey or the sunset. Then, one day, Sigrid said she would take me swimming on the Gravel Strand, through the sea arch and into the seal caves. I was both excited and terrified at the prospect.

  The low morning sun just brushed the clifftop, where my shoes and towel lay abandoned. Below, the cove was dark and steep-walled, with black water breathing in the shadows. The rise and fall was violent, making hollow, thudding sounds in under the cliffs. Sigrid was already a tiny blonde head bobbing on the black swell. With each breaststroke, she swam farther out from the gravel beach. I dropped onto the cold pebbles and crunched down to the water’s edge. I followed her, gasping in the icy water and struggling to keep a central path between the cliffs, for fear of being scraped up and down the rock faces. As the water heaved, I was launched skyward like a helpless rag doll. Then, just as suddenly, the sea sank beneath me and I dropped as fast as a stone. Exhausted, I turned at the mouth of the bay and looked back into the gloom. As we trod water, Sigrid indicated the narrow sea arch on the left. For a few seconds, I saw it open, a silver window of light, until the swell rose and slapped it closed with a thunderous roar. I watched the rhythm of light and dark, all the while my heart racing faster.

  The old battle for survival began in my head once more. You can stay as you are, tread water until you drown, or stand up to the terror and overcome it. At once, the arch became the focus of my life. Passing through it became the only way to escape. With my heart pounding in my throat, I swam slowly towards the arch. How many strokes? When to start? If I mistimed, I would crack my head open like an egg. Behind me, Sigrid was saying something that I could not understand. Then she was beside me. ‘I swam through it yesterday, on low tide,’ she said. ‘It was great. Pity we can’t do it today.’ I pulled myself within reach, then reverse-kicked, to keep out of the suction.

  I had to do it; I could see no other way. I imagined myself lunging forward on a count of ten, only to realise that I had not moved. Several times I counted and failed to move. I believed that if I did not succeed, I would not survive anything. The reasoning was dubious, but the outcome was realistic. If I didn’t get through, I wouldn’t be alive to attempt anything else. ‘Don’t get too close,’ Sigrid shouted. Suddenly, on the count of ten, I shot forward. My arms glided through the dappled reflections. Almost at once, I felt the surge launch me up into the roof of the arch. I don’t remember jack-knifing. I remember kicking desperately and dragging myself along the rock walls. My fingertips bled, and I felt a burning pain, as the roof of the sea arch skinned the backs of my legs. The water turned, surging back, blinding my face with my hair. I kicked against it with all my strength.

  When I broke through the surface of the water, choking and gasping, I was still kicking for all I was worth. ‘You’re through, you’re through, Anita. Stop!’ Sigrid roared. I glanced around frantically, still fleeing for my life. She was right: I had got through. I stopped and struggled for air, until my breath came back. As we trod water closer to the shore, I became aware of the stinging of my hands and legs.

  ‘That was close,’ Sigrid said, shocked.

  Farther along the cliff, the high tide still gave a good metre’s clearance under the wide mouth of the seal cave. I swam slowly after Sigrid into the darkness, taking care to keep to the side this time. She had warned me never to block a seal’s line of escape. At first, we could see nothing in the darkness. We rose with the swell and heard the heavy thud as the water slopped into the caverns and cracks in the cave, echoing, deep and resonant. Gradually I began to make out spear-like stalactites hanging from the dark roof and a pebbled shore against the back wall of the cave. The swell surged into it, crunching and flooding the gravel before draining and sucking noisily as it retreated once more. I held my arm outstretched against the wall, holding my position. The light bounced off the water surface under the cave mouth, before shattering into shards of dancing reflections on the cave roof. To the right of the gravel shore I could make out a few dark, rounded shapes. As we watched, one seal turned and was obviously looking in our direction. Before they took fright, we turned slowly and glided out on the next wave.

  Back up at the hostel, Laura provided some dressing for my cuts. Then she listened eagerly to the next instalment of the adventures of the seal pup, as she served the last tourists
of the day.

  ‘Sigrid brought turf briquettes from the mainland yesterday, and I have a pile of driftwood, so it’s dinner and a fire tonight,’ she announced. ‘Come up after sunset, and bring any extra candles you have. You know how thrifty Seán is with candles; he thinks we’re all owls.’ I had heard that Seán was worried about fire in the hostel and naturally he did not want candles burning, yet the few hostel lanterns had a habit of walking. As a result, Laura ended up operating in darkness. I promised candles and departed, relishing the thought of a proper dinner later at Peig’s fireside.

  As the sun disappeared to the west of Inis Tuaisceart, I set off across the rabbit path to Peig’s house. The air was still and expectant. Seán had said that there would be thunder. I arrived at the half-door as the first heavy raindrops began to fall. I lifted the latch to Laura’s greeting, ‘And the Lord said “Let there be light”, and about time too.’ Inside, Sigrid and Laura’s faces glowed in the firelight. The shadow of a giant chair quivered on the far wall, while above it Laura tossed the metre-high shadow of her head. ‘Now, at last, we can see our dinner,’ she said as she helped me light my two candles and four small tea lights. Sigrid balanced a tray covered in aluminium foil behind the candles, and the reflection was thrown across the room.

  I pulled up a chair to the fire. ‘No wonder Seán is worried about fire,’ I laughed, looking at the great branch of driftwood that rested on the flagstones, at the far end consumed in the flames. As it turned from orange to black and burned to ashes, Laura nudged it farther into the hearth with her foot. ‘Well, I suppose Peig did the same and she had no trouble,’ I said.

  ‘No trouble! The woman had a miserable life. No, correction: she was a misery,’ Laura admonished. ‘Have you read that godawful book of hers?’

  ‘I have, at secondary school. Every student in Ireland had to read it. Peig was on the Irish language syllabus for years.’

  ‘How did students handle it?’

  Suddenly I had flashbacks of pages of vocabulary, translated painstakingly from Peig into my copybook, and the dire panic before exams.

  ‘We hated it’ was my understatement.

  ‘But surely The Islandman or Twenty Years a-Growing would have been more suitable for teenagers?’

  I had to agree with Sigrid. An t-Oileánach by Tomás Ó Criomhthain and Fiche Bliain ag Fás by Muiris Ó Súilleabháin brought island people to life again. As a teenager, after a visit to the Great Blasket Island, I had devoured the two books. Of all the visitors that I had encountered since my arrival, there were always more hunting for Tomás Ó Criomhthain’s and Muiris Ó Súilleabháin’s houses than for Peig’s.

  ‘Well, before we start bad-mouthing Peig in her own house, remember that her stories were modified dramatically before publication,’ I hastened to point out.

  ‘That’s terrible. Why didn’t they publish what she said?’ Laura was irate.

  ‘Well, apparently, she was fairly feisty and outspoken. She wrote about a lot of things, and spoke in a way that may have given offence to the Irish Catholic masses of the early 1930s. Church and state were one and the same, so I suppose anything on the state exam syllabus was bound to be sterilised and sanitised before it was read by the pure, impressionable youth of Ireland.’

  ‘Well, Peig, there will be no censorship in your house tonight. To Peig!’ With that, Laura raised her glass to the woman of the house.

  Sigrid and I echoed the toast. Laura spooned out the curry in front of the fire and we started dinner. Occasionally, a puff of smoke was blown back down the chimney. Outside, the rain splashed noisily from the gutter, turning the path into mud in the darkness. Inside, the conversation and laughter got louder while Peig’s kitchen got warmer.

  ‘If you think meeting a seal cow is dangerous, you should try meeting a bear.’

  ‘A bear?’ Sigrid was eyeing Laura sceptically. ‘And who has met a Mammy Bear? Do tell us.’

  ‘Who do you think?’ I asked, still laughing after Laura’s last story.

  ‘For absent company,’ Laura said, as she poured a glass of wine for Peig, which was placed ceremoniously on the mantle. I wondered if any of the few island emigrants who returned from the New World told stories to match Laura’s. Having poured Peig’s drink, she launched into yet another.

  ‘Before I started travelling in Europe, I spent two years working in grizzly bear country. The job was advertised in college. Plant trees in a beautiful, mountainous wilderness and get paid for it. It seemed idyllic. I was going to save the planet. I had signed up and was on my induction course before I knew what I was letting myself in for. I was going to plant trees in the Canadian wilderness. We would be flown to some outback town, like Fort St John, from where we would be dropped by helicopter to our planting zone. They drop you off with a couple of hundred boxes of saplings, a backpack and a foreman who is armed with a rifle and a radio. That’s it for two whole weeks. Well, they always said two weeks, but we never saw the chopper before the month was out. I arrived for the induction course, armed to the teeth with mosquito repellent, refreshing hand-wipes and every kind of deodorant spray imaginable. Our tutor’s bear course was short and sweet: “Bears will smell you ten miles off, as you are now. You have to smell like the forest and the animals around you. No deodorants, shampoos, hand cream, body lotion, toothpaste or insect repellents. No cosmetics of any kind. (The last working group in zone B12 didn’t take it seriously and so they had a fatality.) Don’t hide in a tree. Black bears climb them and grizzly bears knock them. Be on your guard at all times. Women, if you’ve got your menstrual cycle, remember, you’re a red rag to a bull!”

  ‘As he spoke, I was counting the days of my cycle, anxiously. I was due to have my period during the first week of planting. I was going to die! I asked him what one should do in the event of one’s menstrual cycle.

  ‘…“Stay upwind of bears. Never plant alone. Always plant in twos or threes. Bears will attack a lone, weaker animal.” (He kept looking at me.) “When you’re being chased…” (I would have preferred “If”. I began to have severe reservations about my chosen career path.) “…always run downhill, never uphill. Bears are slower and more awkward when going downhill. And don’t forget: never climb a tree.”

  ‘Then he gave each one of us a whistle, making us hang them around our necks. “Blow this, if you’re lost or being attacked. The noise might scare off the bear. If not, you make yourself look as big as you possibly can. Stretch up. Jump. Roar. Make noise. Let the bear think that you’re as big as him, and therefore not worth the trouble.”

  ‘I began to pray that if I met a bear I would meet a blind one, or else I would need to grow pretty fast. So we were told to pack. I proceeded to unpack most of the things that I had packed at home. It was hardly worth the bother of taking the bag at all when I was finished. I had my last shower for at least a month. Like the others, I used no shampoos, lotions or deodorant. By the time we were choppered out to our planting zone, I can tell you, we were rancid.

  ‘My worst fears came true. We were dumped in zone B12. When the noise of the chopper fades, it’s the weirdest feeling. You’re standing there, dwarfed by giant trees and mountain peaks as far as the eye can see – not another human being for a thousand miles. It’s awesome. Then they strike.’

  ‘The bears?’ Sigrid was anticipating an attack.

  ‘No, the bugs. Millions of bugs. They are everywhere: on your skin, under your skin, in your hair, your clothes, your food. You can’t escape them. After two weeks, they stopped biting me, I probably smelt too bad but one of the guys nearly lost his mind. There wasn’t a millimetre of his flesh that wasn’t infected and swollen. He tore at his face until most of it bled. The noise of the bugs never stops, night or day. When one lot finish their shift, the new guys take over. We were so busy dealing with the bugs, we sort of forgot about the bears.

  ‘When we arrived, the foreman divided out the boxes, and we set off into the forest. I dug a hole for each little sapling, broke up and softened the
soil and then gently tucked in the roots. I talked encouragingly to every single one that I planted and sang to them. Stop smirking! It’s scientifically proven that plants respond accordingly to a positive or negative sound. It’s amazing how involved you become. I suppose I was feeling quite evangelical about it at the start. Each little sapling would grow and replace the great trees being massacred in the rainforests. Then, after a while, you become absorbed in the rhythm of planting. You lose yourself. It’s a bit like meditation. Then a blister or a pain in your back brings you back into yourself. You look up and realise that you’ve been in another world for two hours. It’s like being on this island: you shed all the distractions that you carry round on the mainland.

  ‘There was one guy who didn’t speak to anyone for a whole month; I don’t know what was going on for him. Maybe it was the only way he could deal with it. Some people are not suited to it, but it’s just tough luck if you discover that on Day One. You ain’t going anywhere for two weeks.

  ‘In the evening, you return to camp with your planting buddy and cook dinner. Then the foreman does the count of the boxes. The exact number that you planted during the day is meticulously recorded. Typically, in our group, the guys had a competition going. Who was going to earn the most money? I couldn’t believe it – on the first night, one guy had eight boxes planted, another seven and another five. I hadn’t stopped planting once and I was still under one box. I was so embarrassed, but not for long, when I discovered how they managed to get such figures. They just shoved the trees into the ground. Sometimes, they broke the roots, at other times the tree fell over as soon as it was planted. Most trees just dried out in the sun. In any case, most of them were dead by the end of the week and there was I, watering mine into the ground and checking them after a few days. I was so angry that I brought it up at the evening meeting. The guys laughed at me. So did the foreman. He was paid to count the numbers of trees missing from the boxes at night. It wasn’t his job to see how we planted the trees, he said; that was up to us. I couldn’t deal with this attitude. You could just tip the trees out and read a book for the day for all he cared. Anyway, after a few weeks, I came to accept that I couldn’t be responsible for others or I would go off my trolley trying. So I continued gardening my saplings into the earth: at eighty cents a tree, I wouldn’t become a millionaire, but at least I could live with myself.