Jaywalking with the Irish

by Lonely Planet

  I led Jamie out onto a flat square of roof, and waved at the panoramic visions under the floating clouds.

  “It’s fantastic,” she squeezed my hand, breathing in the enormity of our changed lives. “The town is so compact, and yet everything stretches out into the imagination. It all looks so interesting and new. Plus, this house is superb. I love it. That you found it the way you did is incredible. The kitchen is so big and bright, and the garden so perfect and private for the kids. Can you imagine the parties we could have here? This is exactly what we needed!” With that, Jamie, high on a roof at the absolute top perch over our new town, closed her arms around me.

  Well, now, ahem. A guy could get used to this kind of thing. And Jamie, with Cork’s bay gleaming behind her, looked as gorgeous as the day we met: her blue eyes radiant, her high cheekbones freckled and her blond hair glistening in the wonderfully beneficent light. I felt there was only rightness between us now, and that our marriage would be stronger for this journey.

  I stepped back and pointed toward things discovered on my reconnaissance trip a few months earlier, when I had found us a real-estate agent and told him exactly what kind of house we dreamed of. Past a leafy park to a glassy edifice to the west lay what is known as “the tallest building in Ireland,” and this was flanked just across the river by “the longest building in Ireland,” a granite former lunatic asylum that has been transformed into luxury apartments for the beneficiaries of the country’s new wealth. Between these points lay what is known as “the straightest road in Ireland,” and this in due course leads into Irish-speaking regions where locals congregate on a nearby mountaintop at what is known as “the highest pub in Ireland.” A mean little bar down the road, I’d heard, is sometimes disparaged as “the lowest pub in Ireland.” Taking all this in, with my wife appreciatively at my side, I was, for a moment, the happiest man in Ireland.

  Not for long. A horrible screeching erupted from somewhere in our perfect house, and we hurriedly climbed back through the top bedroom’s window.

  “It’s not yours, Harris!” That was redheaded Laura with a shrillness in her voice that flooded the labyrinths of our new abode’s stairs and inflicted agony on all eardrums within its reach.

  “I’m not sleeping in a pink room! I’ve never had my own room. You’ve always had your own room!” screamed Harris. Then Owen flaunted his impressive lung power. Friends sitting at a tranquil candlelit dinner party on the deck outside our house in the States once heard a similar outbreak of hideous screaming and alternating demented laughter from our miniature threesome inside, and remarked that it sounded like a mad chamber from the Marquis de Sade. Racing down the stairs, I could picture our little darlings’ nearly pure Irish blood flushing their freckled cheeks as scarlet as the hue sometimes glimpsed in those of their deceased grandfathers, Bill Donnelly and Jake Monagan – the latter surname being a bastardization of a flinty line of dirt-poor Monaghans who emigrated to Lowell, Massachusetts, to card wool at the beginnings of the Famine’s ravages in the mid-1840s. Deasy and McDermott, Butler and McKeon – even the grandmothers’ sides of the family were ridden with Irish blood.

  Poor Harris was our biggest worry. Only yesterday he had been living in the woods, prowling for his beloved snakes, salamanders, and frogs. He knew there were no snakes and few frogs in Ireland, and that his world had been turned upside down. Laura, the ready adventurer, had embraced the scheme more easily – until now.

  “I’m not sleeping in the same room as Laura!” Egging on the fray was moppy, blond Owen, who would follow Harris off the edge of a cliff, would do anything to be at his brother’s side. Owen is a boy who refers to the early summer months as Julune. A perfect name for an Irish summer, that.

  So it was the children who began searching for their new senses of identity – with all-out warfare, and shrieks to the neighbors announcing that the Yanks had arrived.

  In an effort to find peace we decided to walk into town. The vertiginous Military Hill, with its Ambassador Hotel formerly known as “the hospital for the incurables,” and its St. Patrick’s Hospital and Chapel of the Holy Ghost, led us to the shady descent of Wellington Road, and then the San Francisco-steep St. Patrick’s Hill spilling down to the balustraded St. Patrick’s Bridge over the Lee to greet St. Patrick’s Street and its many Pats, Patricks, Paddies, and Padraigs waiting on the other side.

  Wishful thinkers like to dub Cork “the Venice of the North” because the downtown is but an anvil-shaped island between two branches of the Lee. A few hundred years ago half the lanes in the place oozed water and several avenues hosted boats, before being drained and filled in to make streets. Were Cork hot enough to breed mosquitoes, great numbers of its 220,000 residents might contract malaria, which would help explain the behavior of certain of its more peculiar citizens. The original name, Corcaigh, means marshy place, and engineers say that the town’s tallest buildings have no right to stand upon their foundations in the enduring subterranean mud.

  Today, the main branch of the Lee runs so deep that oceangoing ships dock at the city’s southern end. A bustle of modern commerce is everywhere visible from that point, with shop-crowded quays sweeping toward stately Georgian and Italianate facades and the Romanesque colonnaded St. Mary’s of the Dominicans spliced between a boxy mishmash of modern theaters, department stores, and car “parks.”

  Above this tableau, on Shandon Street, the 150-year-old St. Anne’s Cathedral’s “liar’s tower” thrusts its four clock faces, each of which was once said to tell a different time, before tapering into a spire crowned by an incongruous salmon. Although two thousand or more of that wild species somehow make it through the alluvium below to cleaner waters upstream, the lower reaches of the Lee are more commonly inhabited by gangs of mullet, which lounge beside effluent pipes discharging the city’s wastes. These scavengers recently attracted a hungry pod of killer whales whose five-foot dorsal fins struck wonder into drinkers attempting to separate themselves from certain quayside Cork taverns at closing time.

  Elated and curious, we crossed St. Patrick’s Bridge toward the outstretched arm of a soot-black bronze monument – dubbed De Statue – of Father Theobald Mathew, a charismatic nineteenth-century advocate of temperance, now spending eternity urging ever more indifferent sojourners onward toward deliverance. Today, de poor fella’s right arm held some prankster’s recently emptied can of Guinness. “De smell off Patrick’s Bridge is wicked. How do Father Mathew stick it?” goes one local ballad.

  Great clots of people thronged the main thoroughfare, yakking with a blithe animation. An amazing percentage, some only ten or eleven years old, simultaneously chatted on mobile phones, a device the nonstop talking Irish have adopted with a unique mania, as evidenced by the presence of shops selling phones on nearly every block. The ambience was festive, sauntering and laughing with summer ease, and also chaotic with young and old cutting across traffic whenever and wherever they felt like crossing the street. The way everyone ambled before onrushing vehicles, like matadors fighting the modern age, was impressive. Young mothers shoved prams before buses, school girls giggled between accelerating cars – yet drivers never blasted a horn. The anarchy seemed to be governed by secret rules.

  At the next corner a hunched-over Jimmy Durante look-alike was tap dancing on brass-studded shoes to jigs and reels creaking out of his tinny boom box. A teddy bear sat inexplicably beside him, pensively eyeing hordes of skimpily dressed teenage girls in platform shoes and push-up bras with earrings stuck into their exposed belly buttons: Britney Spears appeared to be a shoo-in for Irish sainthood. All her young devotees seemed to be smoking, puffing heedlessly without so much as a disapproving glance tossed their way. For years, I had told my wife what a moral and protective place Catholic Ireland would be for raising our children. Doubts were already creeping in.

  Farther along, a wan individual sat on a stool, working a bent saw with a violin bow. The thing released ethereal, mesmerizing versions of “Moon River” and “When You Wish Upon a
Star;” one wondered what the man could do with a hammer and nails. On the next block, four gaudily shirted Romanian Gypsies played trumpet harmonies from Herb Alpert’s 1960s’ Tijuana Brass.

  “The place feels like an audition studio for dreamers,” said Jamie, and I suddenly felt Owen squeezing my hand with excitement. Harris, his eyes roving in wonderment, was holding my wife’s, and suddenly even Laura, just turned twelve and growing standoffish, was leaning tenderly against my shoulder.

  A friend had predicted that the best thing about our adventure wouldn’t be the sights savored but how permanently the experience would pull our family together. This was wisdom, I thought, as a redheaded midget in a plaid jacket and blue tie tottered forward, steadying himself from one parked car to the next. He turned out to be called Small Denis, and was famous all over town for the way he scaled certain bar stools and, after a mere pint, disintegrated into bouts of uncontrollable laughter over jokes only he heard. But then raucous laughter is never rare in Cork.

  We found our way to a side street that housed the irresistibly named Cronin’s Gentlemen’s Outfitters, Jamie being overcome with a desire to ask about school uniforms that might be needed in, oh, another four weeks. The proprietor poured on his loquaciousness the instant he understood her quest. “Your sons are attending Christian Brothers? Why that’s a fine choice for a school. Very strong.”

  “My husband was impressed,” replied Jamie, referring to the whirlwind trip I had undertaken earlier to arrange our affairs. “And we’re both thrilled with the idea of the boys wearing blazers and ties after the baggy pants and ripped T-shirts you see in American schools. Every day you get a new clothing fight back there.”

  “I can imagine. But you should understand that Christian’s uniform has some particularities that give it a special class. Look carefully here,” the proprietor said, pulling a black blazer off a rack. “You see the piping on the sleeve, the gold braid? The stuff is not come by like snuff at a wedding, that I can tell you. Why, there are only two manufacturers who still make it, and they might as well own Fort Knox. A shoebox of that material costs £900. Madness! Why, you couldn’t even be leaving it overnight with a tailor if you wanted to see it again!”

  Fearing the conversation was only beginning, and sensing that the boom was about to lower on the price of this guy’s golden jackets, I slipped outside. A shadowy half-open door across the road boasted a gnomic sign, saying Hi-B.

  “Hi-C and -D, too,” I thought.

  The dark stairs, with the first landing resembling a Giant’s Causeway of beer kegs, looked dirty enough to harbor specimens of interest to bacteriologists. Painted in a sickly maroon, it was straight out of the dour old Ireland of decades past. But some un-usual aura beckoned and I vowed to investigate another time.

  For now I turned my back on the place, returned to collect the family, and we continued to wander the streets of our new home. The high, scrubbed northern light shimmered a soft magic on every edifice. From a recent sea-brilliant month in West Cork, from a honeymoon foray into Kerry’s mountain fastnesses, and from other visits, the cool tranquillity of this light had lodged indelibly in my memory, as transfixing as a scent suddenly recalled from decades past. I asked myself whether it was right to have moved us all to Ireland, and replied “Yes.” Definitely, yes.

  How could one not love the place’s unceasing oddness? On Oliver Plunkett Street – named after the saint whose pickled head now stares out of a glass case in a church in Drogheda north of Dublin, while one of his arms reposes in Cork’s North Cathedral – shopfronts shouted of glassy and chromium modernity. Mannequins preened in skimpy tight skirts and shocking lingerie – one shop was even called Undies – that not long ago would have set passersby to making disapproving signs of the cross. In fact, an earlier Cork bishop decreed that, to prevent lustful thoughts, curtains must be drawn over shop windows when mannequins were undergoing a change of clothes.

  Clearly, the world had changed. There were bookshops and boutiques and flash cafés exuding aromatic coffee smells. Coffee? That was a rare luxury in Ireland a couple of decades ago, when pots of loose-leaf tea were protected against the chill by wool caps known as “cosies,” and the road crews employed a specialist in a tin hut who kept the brew fresh for work breaks that recurred all day long.

  The tea brigades had long vanished, departed forever along with the thatched cottages, donkey carts, and quiet roads where old geezers on bicycles pedaled timelessly, with blue curls of smoke wandering out of their ancient pipes.

  What kind of place, I wondered then, was this modern Cork City – or for that matter, this jumped-up new Ireland? Was the country the one I imagined that I understood?

  Or was ours a journey into nostalgia, an indulgence a hundred times worse than purchasing a yellow convertible? The question worried me. No priests or nuns negotiated the sidewalks. The Cork grannies with black shawls had given way to fifty-somethings in bright American tracksuits, and stylish young women with carefully tended manes, gaudy jewelry and glittering Irish eyes flashing seduction in a glance. Here and there one saw old men with timeworn Irish faces and tweed caps tapping canes on the sidewalk, still seeming to have all the time in the world. They looked like people who held the ancestral memory of their race in their eyes. What would happen when they were gone?

  I kept eyeing the stampede of Cork’s jaywalking whimsy. People of all ages were cavorting in the traffic, dipping and diving into its flow like surfers probing waves. A sign said “Live Traffic Ahead” and I wondered if this place had dead traffic, too. A laborer strode between a truck and a bright red sedan, called a “saloon car,” as opposed to a station wagon, which is called an “estate” and never mind that a modest housing development is known as an estate also. The Gypsy trumpets echoed and people ambled with a remarkable nonchalance. The weight of years began to slip off my shoulders. There was laughter in the air and loud shouts of “How ar’ ya dere boy.” No, it was not America yet, hardly. Not like any city I’d ever known.

  We entered a quiet pub and ordered a round of toasted “specials,” which turned out to be ham, cheese, and tomato, the same as every other toasted “special” in Ireland. Customers may ask for any kind of sandwich they wish to be toasted, but these other mutant varieties will never be billed as “special.” The pubs always serve a soup of the day, questions about which are pointless. “It’s veg.” But the stuff is invariably fresh and delicious, so we ordered that too and savored our every drop, while listening to the conversation close by.

  “Did you know that the sun is a nuclear weapon?”

  “I never heard that, no.”

  “Well, it is, and if you are against nuclear power, you are then against the sun, and therefore you want to be dead.”

  “The only time I want to be dead is when I am listening to you.”

  “In fact, if you think about it, there are all kinds of people with nuclear energy radiating around their heads now, because they use the microwave so much and the mobile phones are dripping with it too.”

  “Radioactive Irishmen?”

  “Yes, just like yourself.”

  As spellbound as the children were by this mad talk, it was time to put their jet-lagged bones to bed. A long row of cabs awaited fresh fares from a halting lane in the middle of the broad Patrick Street, but we noticed that, for some reason, no one ever approached the first taxi in the queue. Some hopped in the sixth or the seventh or even the eleventh, but not a soul ever progressed the few feet toward the first. Wanting to join in with the local spirit, we jaywalked across the street, dodged a bus marked “No. 1 Orbital,” and climbed into a taxi at the end of the line.

  “Is there a system here?” Jamie asked naively.

  The elderly driver cackled in disbelief. “Would this be your first visit to Cork?”

  Return to beginning of chapter

  Chapter 2

  His travel-exhausted mother and siblings had collapsed into their new beds, but Owen refused to sleep and instead followed me
into the lane outside our house. Everything was quiet, even the birdsong had grown melancholy as the clouds thickened. I wondered about the scores of people who lived in the terrace houses across the way, and the transformations awaiting us after leaving a neighborless life deep in the Connecticut woods.

  A boy on a bicycle appeared, then slowly pedaled away and returned, three times. There seemed to be an Alice in Wonderland aspect to whatever was happening – illusions and dreams that could take us down any wishing well into which we happened to peer. The boys locked into their mutual sizing up.

  “Time to start making new friends,” I whispered to Owen.

  “I don’t need more friends. I already have Myles,” he said of the soul mate with whom he had shared complete comfort and happiness, and the severance from whom broke his heart.

  “Well, you can never have too many,” I replied and asked the scrutinizing kid his name.

  Thirty or forty seconds passed and the two boys slipped into our garden. There they kicked a ball. Then other children – two, three, and now a fourth – began to materialize like young deer out of the shadows.

  The father of one of these introduced himself. He was in his early thirties, dark-haired and slender, more Corsican than Celtic-looking, just as are a great number of Corkonians, thanks to the genetic contributions of so many invading Normans, shipwrecked Spanish sailors, and Moorish pirates washing up on the southwestern Irish coasts. His head had been nearly shaved to the scalp, in a ubiquitous style inspired by the county’s revered soccer star Roy Keane of Manchester United fame (who would later walk out on Ireland’s World Cup team in a classic Irish tantrum). But he smiled in that slightly canny way Cork people have, as if forever dwelling over the unspoken next thought.