Not many of the good stories start with: “Well, I stayed home …”

Some of them end up there. There’s Ulysses, say.

But those stories that ring the bell, that stay with you, that do you the favour of telling your life back to you, most of them have some dislocation, some disturbance of the usual thing, some stagger. That’s usually where the Gods of the Road catch up to you and start murmuring the intricacies of fate into your ear.

Earlier this fall, having spoken in Oxford, I made for Ireland and granted myself two weeks of cavort. I was aided and abetted by Christie who, bless him altogether, set his considerable life aside and showed me around the place. Each morning he’d say, “Alright then, what would you like to get up to today?” Each morning I’d say to Christie, “Just take me to Ireland, man.” And he would. He was a man truly at home, and the assurance wafted from him.

There’s joy and travail driven into the countryside of that place. If you have ears for it you can hear the ground remembering the hard and tender moments that make up a real country. There was many an abandoned farm house, and grand old manor houses in dilapidation looming, casualties of the civil war a hundred years ago. The beauty in the west of the country can be severe. Most of the people that made farms and lives and graveyards out of the Algonquin bush where I am now fled the Great Hunger from here in the 1840’s. The place names around my farm attest to it.

*

Your last day on the road is almost always the second last day. That titular last day is usually taken up in scrambling, packing, cleaning up the accommodations, tracking down the passport, practicing dislocation again. In the Grief and Mystery days I had many a second last day.

And so it was that on the last day preceding the last evening in Ireland we were rolling down the highway towards Dublin and an early flight. I should say here that Christie is a bit of a trickster. Or, he draws it to him, or something. Your old grandmother might have called him a mischief man, but in Ireland it’s called the craic, part national past time, part veritable patrimony, part revenge for centuries of occupation. The airbnb for the evening had a check-in deadline, and we were hoofing it, and it was already late afternoon. Maybe ninety-five minutes out of suburban Dublin we came up on a road sign that advertised several exits coming up, the last of which was, in two languages, Clonmacnoise.

Now, as it happened, I had recited a bit of Seamus Heaney’s poetry featuring that very Clonmacnoise earlier on the trip, to wit:

The annals say: when the monks of Clonmacnoise
Were all at prayers inside the oratory
A ship appeared above them in the air.

The anchor dragged along behind so deep
It hooked itself into the altar rails
And then, as the big hull rocked to a standstill

A crewman shinned and grappled down the rope
And struggled to release it. But in vain.
‘This man can’t bear our life here and will drown,’

The abbot said, ‘unless we help him.’ So
They did, the freed ship sailed, and the man climbed back

Out of the marvelous as he had known it.

We were almost certainly jammed for time and doomed by a deadline. And so Christie looked at me, and I at him, and we nodded, and at the last minute veered off onto that exit and were away. It was a painfully narrow road we took, barreling along, and very likely the place itself was to close soon. So Christie pressed his van inadvisably, illegally fast. Finally a bit of ruin loomed to our left, and the sign came up on our right, and we veered into the all but empty parking lot, gravel flying, at ten to six.

We walked towards the entry to the grounds, only to be waived off by an official lady who said, “Oh no. Too late now, lads. Sorry, but we’re closed in ten minutes.” With no hesitation at all Christie launched into a semi-fictitious tale of his old grandfather having come from America and this being his last night in Ireland, hopefully devoted to seeing the famous ruins and could we not just have a look and wouldn’t she be blessed if she could see her way clear …”

Vaguely put out, she said: “Alright. Take him to that railing there, and have a look for five minutes, no more, and then we’ll close the gate behind you.” But Christie was already off at ‘Alright’, dragging me along to the railing in question, and there it lay before us, a fifth century holy place of maybe fifteen buildings, heaving gravestones, Celtic crosses, a complete marvel, a telluric place if there was one. But clearly this was a moment for craic for my companion, and he took my arm and said “C’mon”, and we slipped past the railing and into the grounds proper, just as our woman mysteriously drove past us on her way home.

Now I am for the most part a rule follower, and Christie just as characterologically not so much. I could feel the tension of trespass in me, but he defiantly declared that he was Irish, and this was Ireland, and so it was his as much as anyone’s. Just then the last two guards of the place came over, asked where we were parked, said they were about to close the gates and sure it was closing time. “Yeah sure”, said Christie, and made as if to obey.

But they kept on going towards the gate, and we towards the ruins, and in a moment they just drove off, leaving the gate unlocked. I looked at Christie, and he at me, as if to say, “Well, here we are, and it’s entirely meant for us to be here now, with officialdom gone off home, looking the other way, and no harm. Let’s go.”

And after all of that there we were, the only two people in the place, with the sun going down over the River Shannon, bracketed as it was by ancient towers used to seek refuge from marauding Vikings sailing up that very Shannon. And the air was soft and the place seeming to be as old as the oldest of God’s helpers might be. And we drifted illegally and solemnly through the buildings, until there we were in front of the roofless oratory.

And into the marvelous as we had known it, in Ireland.

Stephen Jenkinson
Founder of Orphan Wisdom