Ireland’s
where I seriously started on the only indoor sport I’ve ever been any good at,
drinking, and the only outdoors one I’ve ever really enjoyed, walking. I walked many miles in Ireland, at first because
it was the best cure for a hangover and/or bachelor’s itch, then because it was
the best way to see the country, and it made me feel good at the end of the
day. Usually I walked on my own, occasionally with one of my roommates, but
alone or accompanied I walked far and wide, from Coleraine to Portrush, and
along the wind-harried coast, sometimes bent double in the face of a keening
gale, at other times listing slightly, with a blister the size of a shilling on
port or starboard heel, and occasionally so madly content that I sang, a ma façon, off-key, with sporadic words
but molto gusto. Books, and classes,
and my dreamed-of writing could all wait. Walter Allen and Sinead and the
mystical Gaels were no rivals to the allure of the open road, not to the 20-year-old
I was, with spirit and energy and the dreams of romance still alive in mind and
heart. And becoming a walker required little effort; all I had to do was to
step outside my front door in the bright or misty morning and set off down the
road. Portstewart and Portrush are smallish places, and Coleraine’s scarcely
more than a big market town, so the hawthorn-heavy boreens and bearded
hedgerows of the countryside were easy of access, and the rolling land beyond came
equipped not only with Calendarland’s wattled cottages and, in the lustrous early light, the non-partisan green of the fields and
orange of the rowan berries and sleek herds of
Holsteins; it came well-equipped, too, with attack dogs, and rusted barbed
wire, and steaming cairns of cowshite, and sullen rural yeomanry who’d as soon
shoot you as give you the time of day, especially if you’re of the opposing
religion, which of course I always was, except in the select company of the
Official IRA and their like…but I spent many a truant day away from politics or
lectures on Celtic Mythology, trudging in the morning mist across the
green-and-yellow crazyquilt of the fields above silvery Magilligan Strand and
that wind-rippled sea that is the threshold of the Viking North of my childhood
legends.
