by Sean Mallen
For a full twenty minutes, we were left to stand in a grim, post-industrial stairwell, balancing luggage, cranky children, and sanity with no explanation from Ryanair staff. It could not possibly have any perceptible cost saving for a budget airline. Perhaps it was the result of a monthly employee contest to find the most Kafkaesque method for pissing off your customers as their punishment for being such cheapskates and not flying with British Airways or Aer Lingus.
Shortly before a riot broke out, the door to the tarmac finally opened and we made our way to the jet. The best thing about the flight, aside from the price, was that it was short.
Ryanair’s bag of customer satisfaction tricks had one more dandy for us upon arrival at Shannon Airport. The jet did not pull up at a gate — you always seem to disembark on the tarmac, which is fine on a fine day. But it was raining sideways in western Ireland and as a result our budget flight experience was capped by getting drenched as we scurried inside.
“Daddy, are you sure you can drive on the left side?” asked my ever-supportive daughter.
I reassured her that I had already done so in Ireland while covering a story back in January and had only been cursed by a total of one driver for my questionable road generalship. She seemed unconvinced, particularly as I kept looking up and to the right to check my rear-view mirror, which was actually on the left.
The rental car came with an installed GPS — a very handy innovation, except that it immediately failed to work — refusing to allow me to input any directions. I went back inside to the rental desk and asked the grizzled, earringed Irishman who had handed me the keys if he could help.
“I have no idea. I’m proudly computer illiterate!” he declared. “You’re going to Doolin? Well, there’s only one road out of the airport. Follow the signs to Ennis, from Ennis to Ennistymon, Ennistymon to Doolin.”
Sounded simple enough, but I still managed to make a left when I should have turned right, which only dawned on me with the realization that we needed to be headed north along the coast but the sea was on our right. After ten minutes in the wrong direction, I turned us around. As it was still pelting rain, it did not matter much — just gave us more of a tour of the area.
Our destination was just outside Doolin: Ballinalacken Castle, a place arranged by the Irish tourism board. It is on a rise that would normally have a panoramic view of the sea, if we were not in the middle of a Celtic monsoon. You do not actually stay in the castle itself, which is a ruined, fifteenth-century tower that stands beside the main manor house.
Ballinalacken was run by the O’Callaghans, now in their third generation of operating the place after buying it from the O’Briens in 1938 — the same O’Briens whose ancestors built the tower. It was a tidy, homey place with a few tasteful antiques and it seemed very few guests.
After checking in, we decided to drive into Doolin to look around a bit. The village was spread out along a coastal road, with clusters of buildings leading to the dock where you catch the ferry to the Aran Islands. Too misty on this day to see the islands, but still a nice seaside Irish village.
As we searched for a place to pull over and explore, Julia asked from the back seat: “Daddy, aren’t you supposed to be on the left side?”
As I calmly steered to the correct lane on what was luckily a deserted stretch of road, I thanked my clever and observant daughter.
After a bit of desultory shopping in stores that had an impressive array of Irish sweaters, and one “Made in Ireland” sweatshirt that my wife vetoed, I dropped Isabella at the hotel for a nap and resolved to take Julia to one of the local attractions: Doolin Cave, home of the world-famous Great Stalactite. At an impressive 7.3 metres long, it was billed as the “largest free-hanging stalactite in the Northern Hemisphere.” If there is a longer one in the Southern Hemisphere, it must be a dandy.
Julia’s interest in it was restrained, but she went along without much complaint. Sadly, the heavy rains had flooded Doolin Cave and it was closed. The young woman at the front desk cheerfully told us to check later because it only takes a half day of dryness to drain the water. We never did make it back.
We met Sheila and Tom for supper at a lovely little seafood restaurant called Cullinan’s in Doolin. It was their recommendation that brought us to this part of Ireland — partly to see them, partly to experience the many charms of County Clare, home of the Burren, the Cliffs of Moher, and surfing.
The next day the clouds cleared and the sun came out, although it remained blustery. The first task was to meet a celebrated conqueror of Aileen’s Wave. On the main street of the village of Lahinch, next to the Shamrock Inn, was John McCarthy’s Lahinch Surf School where we met Ireland’s most famous surfer, John McCarthy.
He had the lean build of a surfer dude, a mop of blondish hair, and the ready smile of a guy who draws joy from the simple pleasures of riding mountainous waves that could squash an elephant.
McCarthy was the first to surf Aileen’s Wave beneath the Cliffs of Moher, and gave it its name, drawn from the Gaelic Aill na Searrach moniker for the cliffs.
Try to visualize it: McCarthy rode a twelve-metre wave at high speed directly toward cliffs that rise 214 metres above the sea. Aileen only appears ten to twelve times a year, only when wind, weather, and sea combine in catastrophic serendipity to produce monstrous swells with the kind of lovely curling breaks that give erections to surfers and nightmares to normal human beings.
“It’s like a Jurassic Park,” McCarthy said. “You feel really tiny.”
McCarthy and his followers would rush out to catch it, either climbing down a goat path through the cliffs, or towed to the scene by Jet Skis.
“It’s not good to wipe out,” he said with admirable understatement. “You have to climb up on the rocks and wait for help. Or hike back up the goat path.”
Mounted on the wall behind him was a shard of a surfboard, split jaggedly in half — a souvenir of one of his dances with Aileen.
McCarthy was a devout Christian, who said a prayer every time he paddled out to sea to ride the waves. Now thirty-seven and the father of a three-month-old girl, he said he was starting to think about how much longer he would tackle the more extreme challenges of his sport.
“So … would you like a surfing lesson then?” he asked with a big smile.
Irish Tourism had offered to pay for one. I declined, not wishing to taint my visit to the old country with a calamitous injury. McCarthy explained that I would not be testing Aileen, but rather getting a beginner’s introduction on the small waves and forgiving sand beach right in the town of Lahinch.
I looked at Isabella. She looked at me. I said yes. For good measure, we signed up Julia, too, thinking we could turn it into a travelogue video. We were set for two days later, lots of time to change my mind.
We checked out of the Ballinalacken and shifted to Sheila and Tom’s house. After spending several years in London, they moved to Lahinch to retire, buying a tiny cottage beside a tidal river on the edge of town. They tastefully expanded it, doubling it in size to a lovely, airy place that they shared with their dachshund, Bailey. In sight were the ruins of Dough Castle, built in the fourteenth century by the O’Connors and now a picturesque part of the scenery on the golf course.
In the nineteenth century, Lahinch was a popular seaside resort town, thanks to a railway delivering vacationers to enjoy golf and the sandy beaches. The rail link closed in the sixties, but visitors kept coming.
It is only more recently that it became surf central for Ireland. Locals say that it has transformed the town into a year-round operation with a nice selection of restaurants and shops benefitting from the ongoing traffic in dudes. The west coast of Ireland is not exactly Maui. But the Gulf Stream keeps the water from ever getting too cold. It never gets particularly warm either — wetsuits are needed even in the summer.
Surfing lesson day began with to Mass at St. Brigid’s Church in nearby Liscannor — a modest place “built by the people, for the people” in Sheila’s wor
ds, dating from the mideighteenth century when Catholicism was still under the boot of the Brits in Ireland.
We sat behind a very large, very fragrant older gentleman. Isabella turned to me, eyes wide, and signalled that she might not get through the service without either barfing or passing out. She did neither, but we all breathed shallowly.
It was a warm, fine day at Lahinch beach, with thankfully only modest waves gently rolling ashore. The Irish passion for surfing was evident as I saw dozens of pale Celts pulling on their wetsuits and carrying their boards out to the beach.
At the McCarthy Surf School’s hut, we met our instructor, a tanned, toned dude with sunglasses pushed atop his flowing blond locks. He looked every inch a California beach bum, until he opened his mouth and out came a full County Clare Irish brogue. Ollie O’Flaherty was a local boy who had made good in the surfing subculture.
Ollie was a professional surfer. He made his living partly through teaching, partly through sponsors who paid his way to ride some of the biggest waves in the world, including his local monster, Aileen. He had just finished third in an international competition after having conquered a fifteen-metre behemoth near Sligo, farther north on the Irish coast.
He brought us to the back of the hut to pick out our wetsuits. This is a garment that has no sympathy for middle age. I like to consider myself relatively trim, but after pulling it on and thinking that it would nicely show off all the weight-training work I had done in the gym I unfortunately caught a glance of myself reflected in a car window. Wetsuit Dad Bod.
Ollie, of course, looked like Superman.
Isabella was busily recording video of everything, but happily was focused more on Julia’s struggles with getting into her kid wetsuit, thus sparing me the wifely raised eyebrow.
Ollie had a practised shtick to introduce us to surfing, pulling out a chalkboard to go over some of the basic terms: “stoked,” “bro,” “gnarly.” Death was not among them.
He took the safety advice seriously, telling us that we needed to stay close to him at all times and to stay with the board when we inevitably fell off. The dangers seemed slight, given that he assured us that we would be staying in water that was no more than waist deep.
We practised our techniques on the beach first — beginning by laying on our bellies on the board, pretending to paddle like mad, getting up on one knee and finally to our feet. All very straightforward on dry land.
With that, we picked up our boards and waded into the Atlantic for the moment of truth. I evinced a relaxed attitude, trying to show I was not taking it too seriously when within my heart I was determined to not be an utter incompetent.
Isabella took off her shoes, rolled up her pant legs, and tottered into the twelve-degree water with our $2,700 camera in hand to record the spectacle, hoping more to capture the charm of a seven-year-old girl’s adventure than the humiliating flailings of her middle-aged dad.
The paddling part was fine, particularly given an assist from Ollie, who would give the board a push at exactly the right moment. I could feel the board gathering momentum and tentatively got up to one knee and then to my feet — before immediately tumbling over.
I tried again, and again — same result. Because I was officially writing a commissioned travel story, I asked Isabella to break off from the video for a moment to capture a couple of still pictures of my fumbling attempts.
For just about a millisecond, I thought I had it. The board was beneath my feet, I was hurtling (actually gently gliding) toward the shore. The moment was fleeting as I tipped off once again.
As my head popped out of the water, I could hear Isabella: “ARRRGH …!”
She was pointing off to my right where our seven-year-old was expertly riding a wave all the way ashore, a glorious moment for the video — except Isabella was not rolling on it, having focused on a still shot of my failure.
Isabella shook her head, her teeth chattering, lower legs growing numb in the chill surf. I walked over and took the camera so that she could go ashore to warm up and I could make further attempts to recapture the magical scene of Julia successfully surfing. Nothing matched the shot we missed, but she did manage to stay atop for a few seconds — just barely enough for the purposes of the video.
Ollie and Julia gave each other a high-five for the camera to provide us with a visual punctuation point for her success.
In spite of my inability to stay on the board, I had to admit it was all strangely invigorating. Had I not been distracted by the demands of the video, had Ollie not had to concentrate more on Julia, I was confident I could have done it.
“If only I had just a bit more time, I’m sure I could have surfed ashore, too,” I told my wife and daughter.
“Yeah. Right,” they chimed in near unison. The old guy thinks he can be a dude.
Ashore, we found a quiet place to sit down with Ollie so that Julia could interview him for the video. I had given her a few questions in advance, which she carefully studied as we set up the shot.
She took it all very seriously until the moment she had to start, when the strangeness of it all took over her bright, seven-year-old brain and she blurted out the first question with a manic delivery that suggested someone had jabbed her with an electric cattle prod.
“What’s so great about surfing in Ireland?” she shouted, hands waving aimlessly.
Ollie was a good sport, and it was, after all, his favourite topic, so he spoke lovingly (if slightly incomprehensibly, due to his accent) about the beauty and perfection of the Celtic version of the sport.
“We’ve got amazing waves, amazing scenery, amazing people, amazing lifestyle. Altogether, people have to come to experience what we have,” he said as Julia fidgeted and looked off into the distance, with all the concentration skills of your average seven-year-old.
He spoke with particular affection about Aileen’s Wave: “There’s a perfect flat rock at the bottom of the Cliffs of Moher. When we get big swells, this wave comes in and breaks pretty much perfectly in that one spot every time. So it’s probably one of the best big wave spots in the world.”
Once she was done, I threw in a couple more questions for my travel story, all focused on the hazards of big wave surfing beneath massive cliffs.
“So many things can go wrong,” he told me with a big grin. “The thrills definitely outweigh the scary parts.”
Ollie had already broken all his boards that year and boasted of an impressive list of career injuries, from a broken ankle to a gashed forehead. He was a man happy in his work. This was going to be a great story.
Back at my cousin’s place, Tom was utterly preoccupied with football. A true fan, he was headed out the following day to Poland to catch some games at the Euro 2012 tournament. But first, Ireland was playing Croatia that night in Poznań so he scrambled to barbecue supper before we all settled in front of the TV.
Tom handed over a copy of the Irish Times, which had a front-page picture of some slightly refreshed Irishmen headed to the game with the headline: “Angela Merkel thinks we’re working!”
Alas, the Irish were overmatched and lost 3–1. But there was something about sharing a pint in an Irish home, surrounded by sublime Irish landscapes, warmed by real Irish hospitality, that generated a deep satisfaction inside me.
My eyes grew heavy as the game drew to a close. Isabella typically growled when she saw me falling asleep in front of the TV. Not this time.
“Look at you — you’re really happy,” she observed, accurately.
The moment was fleeting.
My phone buzzed with an email from Vancouver. It was decided that I was to head for Greece in a few days to cover elections that threatened, again, to upend the European Union. A great story for a foreign correspondent, but not such a great scenario for a father — it meant that I would be missing Julia’s First Communion.
I told Isabella just before bedtime, after Julia was asleep.
“She’s not going to be happy,” she warned; clearly she was not e
ither.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
It was only a three-day layover in London before getting on a flight to Greece.
It was thirty-three degrees when we landed in Athens — a hot, angry, and uncertain city.
The Greeks were having their second election in two months, after the first one was unable to produce a viable government. This time the opposition Syriza seemed to have a real chance of winning and carrying through with a promise to junk the bailout agreement that had imposed so much hardship. Once again the EU seemed to be in big trouble because of the sufferings of one of its smallest members.
On the advice of our fixer, Maria, we hired a taxi to take us to the port town of Perama, just to the west of Athens. Once it has been a prosperous place, thanks to shipbuilding. But the industry collapsed, taking most of the best jobs with it. Unemployment was upward of 60 percent, triple the already high national rate. In keeping with a dreary pattern, people started blaming immigrants. It was fertile ground for the neo-fascist Chrysi Avgi (Golden Dawn) party. There were stories of guys in black shirts tearing through residential areas on motorcycles at night, screaming anti-immigrant slogans.
Among Golden Dawn’s enlightened ideas was a promise to plant land mines at the border to discourage illegal immigration. Their hammerhead image was vividly reinforced by their party spokesman, a guy named Ilias Kasidiaris, who demonstrated his manhood on live TV by throwing water in the face of a woman representing a competing party, and then slapping around a middle-aged woman who dared to upbraid him. Gallant fellow that he was, Kasidiaris then scurried out of the studio before the cops arrived to arrest him. The incident made for a powerful element in one of my stories.
On this day in Perama there was to be an anti-racism march, a reaction against an outrage committed against a family of Egyptian-born fishermen. One night earlier in the week a dozen or more goons brandishing bats and iron bars broke into their house at 3:00 a.m., trashed the place, and beat the shit out of one brother, sending him to hospital with a broken jaw. One of the assailants was wearing a Golden Dawn T-shirt. There had been no arrests.
