As the car slung-shot around and out of a half a dozen traffic circles (quite possibly on two wheels at times), running on both cylinders, a beautiful day was dawning over the whole of the island.
Judging time to distance in Ireland is not something one should do without significant conditioning. It is only about a hundred miles from one coast to the other as the crow flies at my current latitude and less than 120 miles to watch the sun rise over the Irish Sea. If you stay to the main roads, I’d say it would only take one (keeping farm machinery and the odd shepherd’s flock in mind, of course) about six days to get there. That is IF you stay to the main roads, mind—and I’m sure the skate-ball bag could make the trip and halfway back again on one tank of fuel. I only had eighty-nine days, though, so I decided not to attempt the endeavor.
A few more traffic circles and I was finally past Limerick Town. Another turn or two in the road and I was driving along the N— (oh, never-you-mind which) National Highway and slipping into the picturesque Irish countryside.
To assist me in staying in line with the local driving custom, I have chosen a simple mantra. At every turn, bend, traffic circle, busy intersection, or long country straight away, I find it helpful to state aloud:
“Drive on the left, Idiot! Drive on the left.”
It’s only failed me a couple of times in the past, and forty-five minutes into this drive, I’d gone the entire way without a single slip-up.
I avoided the new dual carriageways in favor of the older, often more direct, routes that connect villages and towns together along ancient footpaths and lanes. They’re the kind of roads farmers used to get from farm to town, barn to field, field to field. Judging by the tractor to auto ratio count, they are still using them for the same purpose.
The sun now in its full, late autumn glory caused me to smile, and I couldn’t help myself from laughing … giggling really, like a schoolboy twenty minutes before the final bell of the term. Many back in America’s Pacific Northwest asked me, “Why would you move to Ireland in the winter?!” My response was a steady, “Why would you stay in Seattle in the winter?!” A photo of any slice of my current visual arc would have provided a far better answer.
The fields aren’t as green in November as I’ve seen in the tourist brochures or coffee table books, and those are the only places I’ve seen them in their glossy, glorious, greenness. Three trips I’d made to the island since my first and each one was between October and February. While that might seem odd to some, it makes perfect sense to me.
I learned, while living in Vermont and attending culinary school, that Robert Frost, perhaps the state’s most famous resident, never wrote a single poem about the magnificent foliage that people travel from around the globe to experience. Rather, in his poem “Reluctance,” I found one of his rare mentions of leaves. He described the beauty and introspection that can be found when the leaves have changed their beautiful colors and fallen atop crusted snow, leaving us amid the raw remains of nature to find our own joy in the world.
Winter in Kerry may not offer itself up as a playground for the casual tourist, but I was not approaching the season as a tourist. I was not yet forty years old and had come to the early understanding of the importance of living in the stark light of the present rather than in the fading images of our past or the misty, blue fog of the future. Living with MS has a way of scraping away the glossy bits of our plans and dreams, leaving us to examine what remains—the real joys in life, not the fluff.
Ask any “real” chef about their dream meal, for example. It’s a game that my mentor chef Michele LeBorgne used to play with his students at New England Culinary Institute—“My Perfect Meal.” Students were asked what they would eat, where they would eat it, with whom they would dine, what they would drink, and to what they would be listening.
Lobsters, foie gras, caviar, and exotic fare topped the students’ lists, while to a person, the instructors of the school (and I later learned in conversations with some of the greatest chefs in the world, most every “old school” culinarian) wistfully request “the perfect roasted chicken.”
The fuchsia hedgerows may be without leaves or flowers, the fields may show as much brown and gray as green, the matted sheep on the wind-blown hills (and in the roads!) are as far from their slick-sheared, springtime selves as they can be, but it seems to be the right time to be here.
This isn’t a season of tourists and luxury motor coaches crowding the Ring of Kerry, frolicking on the beaches, or dining on lobsters stuffed with goose liver and salted fish eggs. It is the rugged season, a time for stout men and hearty women driving shit-spattered farm equipment, a time for stacking the turf and topping off the oil tank. It is the time of the year for coarse brown soda bread, buttermilk scones, shepherd’s pie—and of perfectly roasted chickens.
I hoped it was also the time for a poser like me who was trying to live the experience but couldn’t afford a rental in the high season, bouncing around in a skate-ball bag.
“Drive on the left, Idiot! Drive on the left!”