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Through Sligo to Westport




The longer I was in Ireland the better I understood WB Yeats and recognized the depth and beauty within him. He is Ireland.







 




Westport was a veritable onslaught of color after Carrick. 


It’s a small town, but heavily laden with tourists. The few streets that radiate from its diamond center are packed with souvenir shops, women complaining that their husbands don’t like to shop, and pubs. It’s lively from 11 am to 2 am. Some of the pubs are well-known for hosting “trad” sessions, that is traditional Irish music. Probably the most well-known is Matt Molloy’s, the flautist for the Chieftains. They played in a small back room of the pub while I was there. To say they were a tight knit and talented group is an understatement.


Shortly after I arrived in Westport, so did winter. It came blasting in with an icy rain that chilled me to the bones. And everyone else. My hostel room, in fact the entire hostel, the Old Mill, was a funk of wet clothes and camping gear of cyclists draped over every conceivable space. It wasn’t a particularly happy coincidence that the showers were ill-designed, that is, your dry clothes necessarily got wet. Too, they have those showers that dispense waters in five second bursts, and unfortunately it was cold water. Very cold. I was staying there four days and my initial experience was enough to quell any inkling of a desire to get clean. I hand wash my underwear and sometimes even my socks and a quick-drying pair of pants, my hiking pants that are muddy more often than not, but nothing was going to dry in the dampness, so funky it was. I took a day trip from Westport out to Croagh Patrick on one of the last mostly-sunny days I would be seeing for a while. 

I took another day trip out to the remote and wild coast of Slievemore, aka Keel. The seas were too rough to venture out on just a ferry boat to Achill Island. As it was, the strong winds made it hard to even keep my footing on the crumbling sand shelf above the shore. The sand it picked up and cast my way stung like tiny glass shards. My poncho was behaving like a wind sail, wrapping wildly around me and knocking me off balance. I had to take it off for fear of being swept into the sea even though it was insulating me from the chill. I had made my peace about not visiting an island on the bus ride there. Even had the seas been calm, the local link buses were unreliable enough without throwing in the variable of a ferry. I couldn’t count on making it back to Westport. Still, it was worth going to Kill. So much of the Wild Atlantic Way feels like the edge of the world, a place of sublime beauty that is yours alone.





The weather changes you see above were all within a two-hour window.

I went out that night, because no matter how tired you might be, you have to check out the music in Westport. Most of the pubs, the happier ones, are overcrowded and loud beyond description, with everyone flush with alcohol annd shouting over everyone else, and there are decibel levels of boisterous laughter that rise above it all and seek to ripple on another level entirely across the shoulders of the crowd. Still, you push through. You can’t hear the music and don’t even know that it’s happening in a back room. Perhaps I haven’t described the pub phenomenon in Ireland. First you open the door to the pub, if it’s not already open because everyone simply doesn’t fit in and they are spilling out of the doorways and past the security guards (there are often two per bar) into the street. You squeeze and gently shove your way through heading toward the bar or the bathroom. There are seldom servers or anything as sane as an open table. You have to eye patrons for when they might be about to go and beat everyone else around you to a seat. So let’s say you’ve bypassed the bar because there are a lot of aggressive tourists who are taller than you surrounding it and you decide on the bathroom. You walk through the bars and lo and behold, there’s another bar. And then often yet another. Maybe one upstairs. Or downstairs. In Dublin I found a fabulous bar on the fourth floor of a building with I’m not even sure how many pubs. Each has its own character. The multiplicity of bars is not always the case of course. Sometimes there is just one bar and everyone is actually listening to the music. It seems I was having a tougher time reaching satisfaction this night. That happens me thinks without rhyme or reason you feel like placing a finger on at the time. At the end of this night I was still searching for good music. It definitely exists, but you don’t always find it everywhere. 

And there were nights I wanted to scream, Puh-lease don’t sing Piano Man. I’m going to slit my wrists if I hear it again. I want to hear Uilleann bagpipes and accordion, fiddle and banjo, flute and drums, the mouth harp and an acoustic guitar. Is that too much to ask? 

It was late. The streets were emptying. But I found it, in the bar behind the Clock Tower, not the entire troupe I’d yearned for, but enough instruments and good musicians to get the beautiful girls with the long black hair to take over the place with their brilliant traditional Irish dancing. Traditional Irish music sounds enough like bluegrass that when they pulled me to the floor, I was able to keep up, and though they were quite impressed, (and though drinking, still amazingly nimble on their feet), I knew that I was a bit slower than usual and that I was laboring more than I should have been. 

The next day I could feel that a slow day was in order. It was cold and raining hard anyway. There was no chance they’d turn the heat on in the hostel. It’s probably just as well as I said everybody was pretty wet and dirty as were all of the garments and tents and backpacks everywhere and heat would only magnify the pungency of it all. My plan was to simply bolt and find a warm humming laundromat where I could just relax and read while my clothes tumbled. Although it was Sunday, I found one! Or thought I did. When I at last arrived to the googled destination, my poncho soaked through as well as everything down to my silk camisole, well, it wasn’t there. I meandered around until I found it down an alley leading to a parking lot in the rear of the Sentra, a convenience store. And that’s where the washer and dryer were. Outside!


Clearly, standing barely out of an off-and-on driving slanting rain was not ideal.  I was dead tired and feeling “off.” This sort of set-up poses logistical challenges. There were people sitting in cars waiting for their laundry cycles to complete. And you had to scan the cars, knock on their windows and ask people sitting in them if they were also waiting so you could know if it was your turn. When a dryer was finally within minutes of being mine, a woman arrived with boatloads of wet clothes and a sweet child, one of a few by the looks of the laundry, who had she explained, been there earlier, gone home and come back to claim the dryer. My heart sank. I only had a small load that wouldn’t take long to dry and I gauged that hers would take closer to two hours. Rather than simply resort to fist-to-cuffs, both being mothers and washerwomen, we got to talking and who is one of her favorite bands but Old Crow Medicine Show, who I have a special affection for since two of them came up behind me in the beer garden at Floyd fest and hooked their arms in mine, delighted with how I danced to their show. Anyway, she let me go and I took them out a bit early, still a touch damp, but okay, after only fifteen minutes. The other bonus, that is on top of meeting this lovely woman and her warm-eyed tender son who cared so much about her, was that it reminded me of the days when my children were young and still loved me without question. And a third bonus was learning that if you poke around a Sentra you can often find a back room to chill and eat. This knowledge would serve me well the rest of my trip.

I tried going out that night, but just approaching the pub doors and hearing the tourists bawling “Country Road,” even though it’s a song I hold dear, was enough to send me back to my hostel room bed. I spent the night coughing and coughing, sometimes having trouble breathing and still not coughing up what it felt like I needed to. Then my chest started hurting like my heart was being squeezed. And that scared me. The next morning I stopped at the pharmacy next to the bus stop. On the bus to Galway, my apprehensions were confirmed. Positive for Covid.