The Sheep

Shannon Airport was empty at 8:30 in the morning, just twenty of us stumbling off the red-eye from Toronto. A few dark-jacketed employees leaned on brooms to watch the fatigued arrivals. One pointed me to the bus for Limerick, where a small, gray-haired man waited.

“I’m going to Shannon View Farm,” I said, “Will you pass by there?”

“Hurry, now, you’ve got ’aff an ’our to worry abou’ thet!” he said and grabbed my backpack, hurrying me up the steps. The bus pulled out of the parking lot, barely faster than I could walk, with a wild clatter. I was gratified to see that the land was emerald after all—emerald and empty. Shannon View, I kept saying to myself, Mrs. Flynn, Bunratty, County Clare—Mrs. Flynn, who had written to me twice in perfect penmanship on lined stationery, and who was the only person whose name I knew in all of Ireland.

Suddenly, the bus stopped and the little gray-haired man called to me–“Hurry, now!” and jumped off to get my pack from the baggage compartment. I was shivering with the fragments of long travel.

“Where am I?” I cried, looking around at empty fields on either side of the road.

“Down there!” he said, pointing at a narrow dirt lane. “Ye’ll find it!” He was back on the bus before I could stop him. It was nothing like Mrs. Flynn had described.

As I stood there wondering what to do, a small car drove up and stopped.

“Are ye needin’ help, then?” the driver called.

“I’m going to Mrs. Flynn’s,” I told him. “Shannon View.”

“Ah, this is the wrong road!” he said. “Get in. I’ll take ye there.”

We drove a few miles farther along, and there it was—a farmhouse, a white fence, the sign for Shannon View. When we stopped at the lane, he smiled again and put his hand on my knee, just to see, and I jumped out of the car and grabbed my pack and ran up Mrs. Flynn’s driveway.

“Ah, isn’t it grand that you’re here!” said Mrs. Flynn, and then she put me to bed between cold, white sheets.

I woke up from jet lag to the shock of cold, damp air, and the smell of stew. Arthur and Libby, a retired couple from Florida, were staying in one room, and a pair of silent German women in another. In the evening, we made small talk by the paltry fire. Then I went to my room and bundled up under the covers, my coat around my shoulders. It was wonderful here, I wrote in my journal, overwhelmed by loneliness, “just what I need to really rest.”

I was seventeen years old.

The next day, I drove into Limerick with Arthur and Libby. Women who looked a little like my mother did their shopping with scarves tied under their chins, holding down stiff curls. Skinny men in sporting caps and dark suits pored over the football scores in the cramped cafés on the banks of the Shannon. We had tea and biscuits and I bought a copy of Harbison’s Guide to the National Monuments of Ireland, secretly disdainful of Libby’s touristy exclamations. Sharp young men, their hair slicked down and eyes bright with plans, prowled the streets past young women wearing Peter Pan blouses and full skirts and sensible heels. I had only jeans and hiking boots, and my long honey-brown hair hung loose. I looked incandescently foreign, and I was dismayed. I was finally a true outsider after working at it for years.

I had left my parents’ home the year before, a teenaged autodidact with a broad vocabulary and a minor police record. Ten years of public school left me raw as a blister, bored, and full of fight. I didn’t exactly drop out of high school; I just didn’t go back. Instead, with the help of the court-mandated family counselor, I slipped into an experimental program at a nearby state university. It was called Living/Learning, and was based on the Summerhill model of self-directed education. I moved into an old dormitory with about a hundred other dewy freshmen and sophomores. We governed ourselves through long meetings and endless debates about the grand and minuscule concerns of the day. A lot of the students were like me—bright, uncomfortable oddballs who began to thrive in a miniature bubble of our own design. I was a born iconoclast, though I didn’t then know the word, and here was a nest of them.

We took classes more or less at will. The small faculty offered various subjects, and students could do independent study, find an internship, or hire an outside expert to teach. We signed contracts for each class, promising to show up and do the work—and mostly, we did. Over the course of a year, a small group of students created a vegetarian cafeteria line for the school, learning the tricks of the restaurant business from scratch. Several long-haired ski bums did an environmental impact analysis of a new ski run on the nearby mountain, and incidentally got to go skiing every day. I bounced from astronomy to semantics, chemistry to sailing. I helped edit a literary magazine and wrote a lot of bad poetry. The college itself wasn’t sure how to sort it out; we all got a lot of Humanities credits.

We could take a term abroad. As with everything else, there was no program for this. No curator. If you wanted to travel, you picked a country, designed a project, and then tried to talk a professor into signing your contract. My friend Lorrie set up a language immersion experience with a family in Paris; another friend planned a term on a kibbutz in Israel. My brother, who’d fled the Air Force for L/L, went on a cultural tour of Japan.

I longed for community and justice. I called myself a hippie, a neopagan feminist, a poetry radical. Patty Hearst robbed a bank on my seventeenth birthday, and it seemed fitting; I had kept a catalog of the world’s ills for years, and knew all about gasoline shortages, famine in Bangladesh, apartheid, and nuclear testing. My journal began to fill with fantasies of rural refuge; I felt worn out by the world before I could vote.

From the almost infinite distance of a small American college town, Ireland seemed isolated, simple, and clean. I told friends with confidence, if no actual knowledge, that it was a place apart from the world’s struggle. I would live on a farm and I would study history—an amalgam of commune and library, scholarly days filled with butter churns. I wrote grand plans for research into the roots of Irish folklore and cultural belief. Then, in what still seems like a miracle, I talked two patient English professors into sponsoring me.

My plan seems close to delusional now, but it went unquestioned by my elders in that pre-litigious time. I had only been on an airplane a few times, had never left the United States, never lived alone—had rarely even been alone for more than a day. This didn’t seem like a barrier. I wanted to be a solitary pilgrim. I packed a few changes of rough clothes in a used canvas backpack, and strapped on a sleeping bag with bungee cords. I added a list of postage costs and banking hours, a few hundred dollars of traveler’s checks, and Mrs. Flynn’s address. That was my preparation—as far as hubris and the optimistic theories of educational reform could take me. I was on my own.

At Mrs. Flynn’s farmhouse, I read The Three Musketeers under the thin blankets. I felt damp all the time—my sweater, my socks, my hair—and I shivered through the night. During the day, I walked for miles, exploring the confusion of waterways off the River Shannon, its banks lined with old castles and forts. I talked to anyone who would talk to me and in the evenings wrote that the stranger I’d met that day was likely to become a dear friend.

After several days of pretense, not all of it to Mrs. Flynn, I took the bus to Galway: the place for emigrants and sailors. For lonely pilgrims. I had made promises, and so I would work. The bus followed rocky shelves far above a blue-gray sea, shards of white granite breaking through tufts of dark-green grass. Golden streamers of sunlight shifted like smoke from wave to wave. All the streets in Galway led to the sea, like fate: at every turn, I looked straight across the Atlantic.

I had learned by then of the tourist board. A half-dozen travelers crowded the small room, reading pamphlets and checking the bulletin board for ticket exchanges and shared rides. I waited for the busy clerk to notice me and then asked about rooms.

“I’m here to study,” I said, hoping that would impress her and get me a good rate.

“God love ya,” she said. “Here’s the list, and you can check the board.” The prices for approved rooming houses were higher than my meager budget could bear. I waited for a space at the bulletin board, watching the milling travelers, mostly young, mostly carrying backpacks, talking in groups of two and three in German and French and languages I didn’t recognize. Behind me, I heard an American voice, and turned to see a substantial young woman with thick dark hair and dark eyes.

“Hey,” I said, “I’m American too.” It was all I could do not to grab her. She introduced herself as Gloria, a schoolteacher from Long Island on a year’s sabbatical. She was twenty-five and had a sardonic smile and a bag full of books slung off her arm.

“You dropped out to go traveling,” I said with admiration.

“Yes, and I’m running short on funds.”

“Do you want to share?” I asked. So we rented a double room together near the university, much better than either of us could afford on our own.

Gloria saved me from study for a time. We went to the Spanish Arch and the Claddagh. She gave me a book of poems by Yeats. I gave her Dumas. We began going to pubs in the evening, something neither of us had wanted to do alone. These were dark, close rooms, with amber lamplight leaving the ornate scrollwork near the ceiling in shadow. Men in sporting caps and dull dark suits filled the bar stools in each place; they were known as the sentries and nursed broad glasses of black Guinness with a tawny foam top through the evening hours. The wall behind each bar was lined with shelves of dark bottles and trays of tall clean glasses, with a big clock above, so no one could complain when the barman called out, “Time, gentlemen, please.” We sipped sweet treacly port, “the ladies’ drink.” In many pubs, we were refused anything else.

We took the bus to Connemara for a night, through miles of crazy-quilt fields with falling rock walls, bog fields, and shaggy mares, and the occasional line of houses like beads in a string. The town of Clifden was a modest place high above the famous bay, and the air blowing through the wet streets was so fresh it seemed to have been newly made. That night, we walked from the farmhouse where we’d found a room down a dark lane to a tiny country pub. Our entrance into a room usually reserved for local men was greeted with a moment of silence and then applause.

“Two ports, please,” I asked.

“Ah, but you haven’t sung,” said one of the sentries, a thin old man leaning back on the bar with his glass of plain in his hand. “Ye ’ave to sing.”

I consulted with Gloria, both of us feeling a bit wild with the West. We sang “When the Saints Go Marching In,” and then we sang it again, and got our port. And then the entire pub took turns singing to us for an hour, and in between songs I raised my glass and called out, “Slainte ra!” I felt that I had arrived at last.

But the day came when I could put it off no longer, and I walked to the university and presented myself to the research librarian like a gift. I wanted to study original material, I said, with panache. I was doing research into folklore. She explained that early manuscripts were rare and fragile, and that most were locked away in Dublin. I could read all I wanted from their collection, if I liked, and she pointed me down a long book-filled room—shelf after shelf disappearing into shadow.

I was no kind of student. The public schools in my small hometown had offered no particular challenge. I had read widely, but without guidance, and never had to work hard. Consequently, I had little skill in studying, great gaps in my knowledge, and no way to understand those gaps. I had a lot to prove, and no way to prove it. At home my idea had seemed almost a trifle—Irish folklore and cultural beliefs. I would need to read a few books, of course. With a jolt I realized what my professors had known all along and were willing to let me discover for myself: that I was no more ready to study such a thing than I was to teach it, that research like this was the work of a lifetime, that original meant an ancient language. Standing in the silent reference stacks of the University of Galway, I knew for the first time that there were subjects out of my reach, realms out of sight. In one sinking, timeless moment, I realized that to really study this subject required the kind of attention I had never paid to any single thing before.

That day and for many days after, I picked books off the shelves at random. Many were in Irish, and my private embarrassment at not having thought of this was sharp and hot. But I sat down and I started reading where I could about the scattered and vague disasters of the Irish past, both real and felt—stories of the Fir Bolg, the earliest people; the arrival of the Celts and the raids by Vikings; the endless incursions by the English and Scots. I took copious, careful notes. I copied ancient poems and legends and made timelines of important battles and outlined the relationship between versions of a legend. All this in a kind of daze, in a pool of incandescent light in a cubicle beside other silent, solemn readers, hours sliding quietly away in the hushed, high-ceilinged rooms.

Gloria and I decided to go to Dublin, with a stop along the way. She wanted to surprise her never-met second cousin Mrs. Neary, who lived on a farm near Athlone with seven children. And surprise her we did, knocking on the farmhouse door in the middle of the afternoon. Mrs. Neary was flabbergasted at our arrival, insisting we stay for a few days. “Aren’t you bold!” she said, and I preened at the compliment. Bold was exactly how I felt.

We milked cows and played with the children, meeting more distant cousins and drinking quarts of dark hot tea. My father was a lapsed Catholic, and as a little girl I longed to go to Mass with his mother and my four devout aunts decked out in gloves and hats. This was always refused, without explanation. So one Sunday, Gloria taught me how to genuflect, pursing her lips and making me practice over and over in our tiny room in the back of the Nearys’ farmhouse, and then we went to Mass with the family. I crossed myself, sang hymns, and bowed my head, searching for roots. Here was my farm; here was my butter churn, my refuge; I couldn’t wait to leave.

As we hoisted our packs, bound again for Dublin, Mrs. Neary said, “You should go see the balloons, then.”

We made another detour. As the bus swung into the village square in Ballymahon, I looked out the window and saw two perfect orange-and-blue striped teardrops floating on the horizon in the moist glow of twilight. We found a guesthouse, threw our bags in our room, and walked and hitched a few miles farther along to a large estate. The green grass, lit by the falling sun, was littered with silver Bentleys and Mercedes and Range Rovers hitched to small trailers filled with big wicker baskets and coiled ropes. We could hear music from the house, so we simply walked into the drawing room. A small crowd was gathered, drinks in many people’s hands. A half-dozen young men sang around a grand piano.

We introduced ourselves to the first people who turned our way, a booming well-fed man named Chris Mullin and his wife, Gay, an impeccably dressed pale woman. They were from Tucson and they took our sudden and rather rumpled appearance as normal; perhaps it was to balloonists. Gay disappeared a moment, and then returned.

“I’ve got you seats at the table,” she said. The fourth Irish Balloon Meet was almost over, she added. They’d run races, competing to see who could get to a pub fastest after ten miles of flight and which basket could hover at a designated altitude for a specific length of time. Of eighteen teams, four balloons had scratched out due to accidents and one had been destroyed, and so it had been altogether a good week of flying. Gay took us around the room to meet the pilots, who named their balloons like children: Denny Crawford, who flew Tulip and had damaged his balloon by crashing into a bog, and Ian Jacobs of the balloon Godolphin, who clutched a trophy, and young Mike Adams, excitable and glad—“I’m with Clarklift! Glad to meet you!” Finally, she introduced us to a handsome silver-haired man named Cyril Murray, a member of the young Dublin Ballooning Club.

At dinner, I only wanted to talk about flying. How could I learn to do this?

“You’re not far from the big man, you know,” Chris told me. “Don Piccard. He was here earlier but left a few days ago. He has a factory in Roscommon. A balloon factory.” Even I had heard the name Piccard, in some vague weather-related way.

“Do call us when you get to Dublin,” said Murray’s English wife, Rita, writing down the number. “Perhaps we can go up.” She meant up in the sky, and I could barely breathe.

“Come back in the morning,” said Chris, expansive, swinging his glass in a wave. “And call Piccard, if you’re interested. He’s always looking for help.”

We were up early the next morning, walking to the chilly meadow through the last strands of mist. What seemed to be an acre of glowing white and blue nylon was already spread across the grass, surrounded by busy people who nodded and bent back to work. Stand here, someone said; hold this, and I leaned against a thick rope, feet slipping on the wet dawn grass in the shocking roar of propane burners, the loud flap and snap of nylon as the gigantic envelope began to fill and shimmy like a waking beast. Suddenly, the balloon was off the ground and the thick wicker basket stood up and bounced, fell and bounced again as two people clambered aboard. “Now!” I heard someone shout and felt the harsh rope shoot out of my hand as the basket fled into the pale sky.

The rhythm of the Dublin train made the afternoon sun flicker as if reflected by a signal mirror. My head was full of balloons. I’d woken at dawn and looked out upon a bank of black cloud on the horizon, lined with light. As I watched, an upside-down black teardrop rose silently and crossed the face of the copper sun.

We reached Heuston Station and walked into the city heart: stacked rooftops and rows of pale chimneys, bright stucco walls and shiny storefronts, bulbous cars and green double-decker buses, crossing back and forth over the River Liffey on its countless bridges. The river smelled of sewage. I found a pay phone and called Piccard; he wasn’t home, but I left a bright message, offering my services. We went to the Irish premiere of Blazing Saddles and laughed so hard we almost fell out of our seats, and laughed even harder when we realized that we were the only people in the theater laughing at all.

The next day, we called the Murrays, and if they were surprised to hear from us, they didn’t let it show. We took the bus to the suburb of Castleknock where they lived in one of the Guinness mansions. The great white house with its wide white gravel drive was called Oatlands. I was a reflexive if wholly untutored socialist, my ideas about politics the peculiar mix of self-righteousness and hope that is the province of certain bright young people. I didn’t want to care about the Bentley and MG parked outside. I didn’t want to care about the chandeliers and Persian carpets—or my dirty boots. I laid blame for the world’s suffering squarely where it belonged, on the faceless straw men of government and finance. People who lived in houses like this. So, I shook his hand firmly and called Cyril by his first name. He introduced us to Jimmy, his handsome son who worked as a real estate agent, and waved toward a daughter and a nameless younger boy who ran away.

The Guinness family kept a gardener at Oatlands to work the land, a half-acre of figs, vegetables, and flowers. Brendan Crowley was thirty-seven and a native Irish speaker; he was bearded, a bit weathered, often a little drunk. He lived in the mews—seven rooms, five of them empty, with dusty floors and marble fireplaces—and it was to this that the Murrays gently steered our untidy selves. Brendan welcomed us with only a little bewilderment, and we settled in.

Each morning, we rode into Dublin with Cyril or Jimmy. During the day, we toured O’Connell Street and St. Stephen’s Green, took tea at Bewley’s Café on Grafton Street, went to see the magnificent Geneva Window and the Museum of Modern Art. I found the National Reference Library, with more rooms filled with tall shelves of books I couldn’t understand. But I spent a few hours each day reading the work of real scholars who could—about Finn MacCool and his warriors, the tall and fair Tuatha Dé Danaan from the North, the poet Columcille. I read the story of MacDatho’s Pig from the Book of Leinster, the Lebor Laignech, and began to explore the intricate history of the ancient kingdoms that had become Ireland.

Eventually, I found my way to Trinity College. The Long Room of the Old Library was something to behold: a great tunnel of books, thousands of books shelved in a tall, narrow hall under a curving roof with vertebral spines of dark wood. The spiral stairs led to bays where silent students worked and made me feel vaguely ashamed. The public was not allowed to read there. I could only look at exhibits—the Book of Kells behind glass, a page turned every day.

Each evening, we found our way back to Brendan’s involuntary hospitality. Often Jimmy joined us, and we played cards, cooked a few of the vegetables no one else would eat, and walked up the road to the Wren’s Nest. Over port and whiskey, I flirted with Jimmy and told Brendan what I had been reading. In turn he told me legends, old wives’ tales, and superstitions, and taught me to say Marbh le tae, agus marbh gan é—my one true Irish sentiment. Killed by tea and dead without it.

“You have to learn Irish or you won’t learn anything,” he said.

I was studying. But mainly I was reading paperbacks from the penny bins. In between my careful genealogies of mythical queens and diagrams of linguistic relationship, I scribbled movie plots and titles for novels and jokes that made sense only in the moment. I made lists of my ambitions: 1) clown school 2) learn French 3) write for Rolling Stone 4) fly balloons.

Somewhere I’d come across a poem called “The Sheep” by Seumas O’Sullivan, who died the year after I was born. It began:

Slowly they pass 

In the grey of the evening 

Over the wet road, 

A flock of sheep. 

...

Slowly they pass, 

And gleaming whitely 

Vanish away 

In the grey of the evening.  

In the simplest of language, the poet evokes the image of forms appearing and disappearing in the grey, and of the white days / When we two together / Went in the evening / Where the sheep lay.

He concludes:

All white, and go fading 

Away in the greyness 

Of sundering years.

I copied it out carefully and drew a picture with crayons of a flock blocking a country road. I thought it was about sheep.

We left for a time: Carlow to Clonmel, Clonmel to Waterford, Waterford back to Dublin. We were restless circuit riders: Dublin to Mullingar to Ballinasloe across the rounded shoulder of the Republic back to Galway. From Galway up to Roscommon to Ballymurray House, hoping to catch Piccard at home. He was never there. Autumn came in, day by day. The oaks and elderberries blurred into the mist; the empty peat bogs turned golden and then gray. I learned to wash my long hair in cold water in a bathroom sink and pack my canvas sack in a few minutes. I read The French Lieutenant’s Woman. Gloria gave me Jorge Luis Borges. I gave her All the President’s Men. Galway to Limerick to Mallow to Killarney and back to Dublin, where we bought Groucho Marx masks and sat on a street corner making a nuisance of ourselves, thinking it a grand joke.

I wrote by the hour, obsessed with the people I’d left at home, with the past and future in equal measure, with all that was wrong and how to make it right, with news of “The Troubles” and the poor and my own lonesome self. The world seemed woven with invisible, radiating lines of force and connection, a matrix in which a single self was both vast and small. “I have the feeling of being a passive floating point in space conveyed to places unknown by everything around me,” I wrote. “In relativity there is something about how you yourself are the only absolute; everyone and everything lives and moves relative to you. I pay my ₤1.70 and sit down and say, ‘Here, Roscommon,’ and Roscommon conveniently comes, two hours later.”

One day, we returned to Castleknock and Cyril Murray greeted us with news: Mike Adams and his partner had been killed in the balloon Clarklift, caught in a freak whirlwind that tore the rip cord open; they fell two thousand feet.

I called Piccard; he wasn’t in.

I was avoiding work; Gloria was looking for it, making the rounds of dismal employment agencies that seemed to offer only hopeless secretarial jobs. Then Jimmy’s big sister, Tina, who lived in a village to the south, said she knew a wealthy family who wanted a “nanny type” to run errands, chauffeur for the children and so on. An American Catholic schoolteacher? Perfect. In a day it was settled, sight unseen, and Gloria left to work at Borris House just before Halloween.

I was all at once more alone than I had been when I arrived.

I resumed the rhythm, staying for a day or two in one town or another and then moving on. The train compartments had seats for four, facing each other across a table. My fellow passengers read, talked, played cards, or bought tea and biscuits when the girl came through pushing the cart. Many smoked beneath the NO SMOKING signs. When anyone asked, I lied and said I was nineteen. I ate the same cheap food every day: a handful of sultanas, a Toblerone bar, a can of sardines, and a hunk of fresh cheese. I read Steppenwolf and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Lady Wilde’s Ancient Legends of Ireland. I played a lot of Solitaire, sitting on cold benches outside closed stations, waiting for an early train. Sometimes I crossed the country twice in three days, skipping from Youghal to Killarney to a dim flat in Cork where a crowd of university students made room for me to sleep on the floor and sit at the all-night poker games. Sometimes the challenge of solitude was too much to bear, and I would go back to Oatlands and sit at the table with Brendan, talking until very late, and then fall asleep in my weary sleeping bag on a bare mattress on the floor, in front of a dying fire making faint shadows flicker on the wall.

Now and then I called the Piccards up in Roscommon, and left a polite message. They were never home.

Mostly, I wrote—on buses, in the hushed study bays of libraries, on park benches. I wrote through the whole of chilly evenings in rooming houses. I wrote countless letters, thin blue aerogrammes covered in cramped handwriting, never enough room to say all that needed to be said—euphoric descriptions of the landscape, monologues about social ills and worldly depositions on love. I devoted a great many pages to infatuation and fantasy and the characters of other people. Once, I wrote a letter of apology to my professors; I was sure they were each waiting impatiently for the projects I had no hope of finishing. I made lists of what really mattered and what I would do with my life and where I would go next. I became completely unhinged for pages at a time—with all that might happen, could happen, that I would make happen. Astronomy, I wrote. Go to Andorra. Balloons.

I walked for miles with a full pack, catching buses in the rain or hitchhiking down isolated country roads for hours to find a bed and breakfast. Then, juddering and tense, I would leave again the next day. I read D. H. Lawrence’s The Trespasser and Mary Stewart’s The Hollow Hills. I fell in with another young American woman for a few days. Then I took off to Dingle, heading as far to the west as I could. The colors of the peninsula were a fine tweed of greens and rusts, the water rolling like sky under red and blue and white fishing boats, their masts trim and crowding in the bay. The whole town was jumbled up against the sea, so remote that it had once minted its own coins; Dingle had been a great smuggling town. I went to the movies with a young man from the Tourist Office and left the next day, heading for Borris House and Gloria and not being alone.

Borris House was in the valley of the River Barrow, near a village called Muine Bheag—once called Bagenalstown for its founder, William Bagenal, who had been seized by a vision of Versailles and set out to make a town of the same name and architectural worth. He did not achieve this. Gloria picked me up at the tiny Muine Bheag train station in her employer’s big car, gave me a quick hug and pulled back. “Man, this town is filled with gossips,” she said, by way of hello. “No privacy. Everything I do gets up to the house.”

On a nearby hill, I could see the big stone castle higher than everything in the valley, a giant gray box trimmed with parapets and chimneys against the stormy sky. Jimmy’s sister Tina, it turned out, was married to Andrew MacMorrough Kavanagh Leinster, descendant of the ancestral kings of Leinster, one of Ireland’s four ancient kingdoms. Andrew and Tina and their baby daughter, Aiofe, lived in the converted mews in back of the house. Over generations, death duties and taxes almost took the house out of the family hands. An unfinished painting by Rubens had once hung in the bathroom to be used as a target for wet sponges by the children; it was sold to save the house. Now the king’s descendant worked the land and rented the mansion out. Gloria worked for their tenant.

We drove slowly up the winding gravel drive, and the head housekeeper stepped out to meet us, her crisp white apron covering a gray dress. She took my hand and said, “You are welcome to Borris,” in a murmuring, respectful voice. The cold entry hall echoed with the noise of children racing through, and I could see into the sunny kitchen where several young women in uniform worked.

Gloria’s employer was the American film producer Michael Todd, Jr., a big bluff man with a degree in philosophy from Amherst and his daddy’s Oscar. Todd shook my hand and disappeared, and his wife, Susan, a short curly-haired woman who preferred to stay in the kitchen and supervise the preparation of grand meals, said a shy hello. I followed Gloria up a wide winding staircase; she was laughing as she watched me take it in through the huge windows as we climbed: the collection of Ming vases and Renaissance art, the massive stables, the separate chapel, the 680 acres of moist green lawn and woods. She showed me the library, with its shelves so high that a rolling ladder was required and pointed out the illuminated manuscripts inside a glass case.

Gloria had her own suite of rooms on the second floor. A room had been made up for me on the third floor in what used to be the servant’s quarters, up the back scullery stairs, with a fireplace and heavy, dusty curtains and a big creaky bed. We went out for a tour of the grounds, and ran into Andrew, a lanky man in his mid-twenties with a high forehead, long nose, red cheeks and big squirrel teeth: to me, the unmistakable marks of aristocracy. He wore a filthy torn sweater and wellingtons. A pair of huge russet-colored Irish setters bounded beside him. We said hello, and he marched on toward the stables.

“He’s a laird,” Gloria whispered to me as we walked away, with a tiny smile behind her hand. From then on, I always called Andrew “the Earl,” an ironic confusion of history that I did not understand for years.

Gloria ran the family errands and Sue ran the kitchen. Michael spent hours talking to New York or Los Angeles and loudly cursing the P and T, the government utility that combined post and telephone into one labor of Sisyphus. When Gloria wasn’t busy, we rode around the front fields with proper English saddles and black helmets or carried little wicker baskets into town to shop at stores bordered by hedges and windrows. On nice days, we went for long hikes over the soft irregular fields where the pheasants fed in the morning, down into the vale and woods past old mill wheels. But she was often busy, and then I wandered the great house alone, exploring the closed wings falling into disrepair. Sometimes I ended up in the library, a warm room with overstuffed chairs where I could play classical records on the turntable. Once, when I was sure no one was watching, I snuck into Michael’s study and picked up the heavy gold Oscar he kept on the mantel there.

I was driven into self-reflection like a cow down a chute—driven by isolation and discomfort, by having no clue. I began to experience something new. Very distantly, and long before I could have explained it, I saw what it was like to be disappointed in one’s self and keep on going. I recognized obstacles even as I placed them, found answers even as I asked a question, then promptly found a way to forget. I understood and then forgot that I’d understood; this seesaw between knowing and forgetting would become one of the rhythms of my life. Briefly I saw that it might be easier to live without the ceaseless examination that I couldn’t seem to stop. I saw that I could forget—or I could remember. My choice. “There is so much in me, abstract and instinctive and unformed,” I wrote. “I want to take my life into my hands. I want to do everything. I want to make realities out of my dreams.” I wanted most of all to hold on “to my fleeting feeling of being a floating point moving effortlessly in and out of turmoil, where things will happen of their own accord.”

Every time I returned to Borris House, the third-floor room was waiting. They simply let me in. We ate Thanksgiving dinner in the long, cold dining hall framed by tall windows with the Leinster crest in stained glass, lit by chandeliers and candlelight. Michael and Andrew talked about the European economy. I drank a glass of wine, and another, and announced to the table that money wasn’t real. I knew there was wrongness in the world—how could it matter if London was supporting the dollar or not? Everyone turned to look at me. Money is just pretend, I said. What we should do is feed hungry children, I said. Eat the rich is what I meant. Does the currency of Spain really mean anything? I asked the table, expansively. Does it really mean anything at all?

I think of this now and I am stunned by the kindness and the patience and by how much I missed. I’d bent over the slowly turning pages of the Book of Kells, but I barely glanced at the shelves of Borris House, where the illuminated history of the Kingdom of Leinster sat in one case and another held a great drinking vessel made of ivory, the twelfth-century Kavanagh Charter Horn. I sat beside the king’s descendant at meals and never asked him a thing worth asking. Whitely they gleam for a moment, and vanish away.

I left the next day for Dublin, where Oatlands always let me in.

One day, Cyril offered me a job. He knew I was running out of money, that I wanted to stay in Ireland, that I was still trying to catch up to the Piccards.

“You’d have to clean up a bit,” he said.

I had paid just enough attention to know that he worked in the city, that he wore a tailored suit and tie every day. I was not sure what he did for a living. Doing what? I asked. A job! A job would mean I could stay.

Kruggerands, he explained. He dealt in currency, mostly from South Africa. I could do phone orders and reception at the office. I was almost broke, and I couldn’t say no. But I had boycotted everything from grapes to Nestle candy bars, and I knew about apartheid. Kruggerand was an epithet, and I couldn’t say yes. I told Cyril I needed to finish my projects first.

I returned to Galway where the tourist season was long over, and at last found a good room in the little beach suburb of Salthill, in a big warm house with a stereo and shower and piano. I could walk to the university along wide streets lined with white stucco walls, the pavement always glistening with the night’s rain and the restless bay below lapping along the shingle.

Perhaps it was the shrinking days, foggy and gray and growing dark without ever having grown light. Perhaps I’d worn out the agitation, or just gotten warm for the first time in months. But finally I settled down to study in a way I’d never studied before. I didn’t just read—I learned. I read parts of the Book of Invasions, an ancient imaginary history in which Ireland is the bastard child of fantastic races. I found a translation of The Book of the Dun Cow, Ireland’s oldest existing manuscript, a hodgepodge of fragmented legend and religion and dream. I read parts of the later Fionn Ballads and part of the Red Branch Cycle. I read about Guaire the Hospitable and Charles the Bald and Cuchulain, the great fighter who tied himself to a pillar so he could die standing up. I read from old books, from precious books, wearing white gloves, under supervision; I learned in a mix, upside-down, without order, without plan, but I learned.

A few weeks later, we were back in Dublin together for a long weekend, Gloria briefly freed. We walked down to the Christmas Fair and thought about the future. I had told Cyril I needed to think about it, knowing somehow that the offer had been a strange one for him, an offer he made in spite of the obvious drawbacks. I couldn’t say yes and I couldn’t say no.

That night, he took us to the balloon club meeting, and there was Don Piccard, a lean man with sharp eyes. Without any preamble, I told him that I would work for free if he would teach me the trade.

Sounds good, he said, turning toward the half-dozen others waiting for his attention. How about April?

I returned to Borris House for an early Christmas in a strange mix of exhilaration and panic. I had only a few dollars left. I would need to go home—my return ticket was still in the bottom of my filthy pack—and say my goodbyes and find my way back by spring. I would learn to fly. We watched Les Miserables on television, and then ate a long feast of three-inch steaks and cranberry ices, with everyone together around the table. I gave Gloria a book of paintings from the Munich Gallery and she gave me two books by Borges and a wooden spoon.

The next day, we walked for an entire afternoon. Roses were still blooming here and there in the valley. We talked about fate and cosmic intervention and karma. I talked, mostly—about love and justice and my long lists, Cyril and Kruggerands and balloons. The earliest possible moment, I told her. I would be back at the earliest possible moment.

One should fling oneself with complete trust into the arms of the universe, I said.

“We have to throw ourselves into everything,” I said, standing on a broken railroad trestle. “That’s when the universe will take care of us.”

“We’ll fling ourselves,” said Gloria.

“Close our eyes. Trust. Fling!”

“It’s a deal,” she said. We walked on.

“We must grasp what we can,” I wrote that night, “what by hazard can be ours.”

A writer is, in large measure, a witness, and one becomes a writer in part by seeing, and seeing the fact that one sees. You record and know yourself to be recording, and, thus, are doubled: a witness to the world and a witness to one’s own self equally, witness and recorder at once. In time you learn to slide back and forth from the world’s perception of the self to the self’s perception of the self without preferring one to the other. A writer is that peculiar kind of introvert who needs to be alone and has a lot to say at the same time. The questions I carried like open wounds, the conundrums of science and politics and the meaning of our oldest stories, are existential questions at heart—spiritual questions, in fact, that we are bound by nature to ask. Without knowing the words, I knew it wasn’t exactly happiness that I sought. I was often lonely and confused and I wore the skin of other like a coat, but I felt a kind of spaciousness I’d never known before. In Ireland I began to sense that loneliness might be, in some way, necessary to me. I began to see that the world I longed for would demand something from me in return. That sacrifices would be made. In fragile, glancing moments, I saw my own self as incomplete, saw that I was a partial creature, and that this was both natural and good. The themes of my life were being written in my journals of Ireland, though I had no way to know that then. I was discovering the buried treasure of what would matter in my life.

As long as we live, we come upon unmarked forks in the road. One never knows until much later—if at all—which way is best. There is so much ahead to be missed, so few things to be caught, much to gain and much to lose. It is quite impossible to know ahead of time, and if we did, however could we choose? To go here is to not go there, to do this is to not do that. We suffer not so much from the what of our losses as from the mere fact of loss itself. A faint sorrow colors the snapshots of memory like a fading sun colors the sea.

Just before I left, I called Don Piccard again, to make arrangements for my return. His wife told me they had decided it would be at least a year before they could take on another person. I thought of calling Cyril and asking if the job still stood, if there was any way I could stay, if I could stay after all. But I did not.

I was crushed. I was glad. That was the last bit of rope in my hands.