It’s July in West Cork and that means one thing: talking about the weather. There has been relatively little rain since March this year and the fields and verges are looking rather golden. The natural springs that seep up through the roads, out of the sides of rock faces, and from unseen gaps in the hillsides are slowing to a trickle where once there was a rush. Farmers are talking about the grass, hay, silage and tillage. The fields must be harvested before the nutrition is baked out by sun.
This last week it was balmy by Irish standards so Tom and I, enjoying the rarity of having no guests to manage and no child at home (more on this later) have been striking out on little exploratory trips in search of places we haven’t seen in the sun. First up was Lough Hyne, a geologic/hydrologic wonder where a narrow inlet captures the incoming tides and creates a tiny inland sea. It’s all rapids coming in and waterfalls going out as the saline lake settles between tidal surges. Each visit in the past we experienced frigid winds, sideways rain, and mists so thick we couldn’t see the margins of the waterway. This time, though, the sun shone and the sky didn’t have a wisp of cloud. Cars were jammed along the lane, with families launching kayaks and stand-up paddleboards. It was very tempting to swim here, as the water was warmer than the glacial waves of the Warren, but I knew we had a day of adventuring ahead of us and didn’t want to spend sticky minutes peeling out of a wet bathing suit in front of a crowd. I settled for balancing on the rocks and running my hands through the sea spaghetti swirling along the shore. Then we were off in search of Tragumna beach, which I had only heard about but never seen. As we trekked back to the car I overhead a woman exclaim, “Oh, isn’t it so pretty! But I’m absolutely MELTING!” Tom and I glanced at each other and giggled. A quick check of the thermometer showed it was about 68F (20C) and there was a gentle breeze. Melting, apparently, is relative. Chocolate doesn’t even melt until about 30C, but let’s not split hairs. Shortly after we set off to find Tragumna, we saw a sign that advertised Rare Books and a Poetry/Vinyl Garden. I made a swift turn up the narrow gravel driveway and we found Inanna Rare Books, a beautiful home/shop run by Holger and Nicola. The doors and windows were thrown open, music was wafting from a central room, and the walls were absolutely filled with tidy rows of unique and rare books, black and white prints, maps, and other unusual items. Tom and I immediately started thumbing through the stacks as Holger appeared and bid us welcome. He and Tom connected immediately over a shared love of art and beautiful objects. While they chatted I slipped out to the Poetry House in the garden and stood in silence reading first editions manuscripts and slim volumes of poetry as the wind blew through the towering bamboo outside in the lush garden. Had there been records playing on one of the three turntables set up in there, I might have slipped right out of my soul and stayed forever. After picking up a few books, touring the grass tennis court that Holger wants to turn into an art garden, and bidding our goodbyes, we set off again. By now the sun was streaked with thin clouds and the breeze was picking up. But we were determined to find Tragumna beach, and set out on the impossibly narrow roads toward the sea. I kept telling Tom, “This can’t be right!?” as we wound down the lane, passing no cars at all, but he assured me that Google Maps said yes, and just as I thought I was going to have to back up my little tin can of a car and reverse course, the beach appeared in front of us, thronged with folks and their children. Caravans and cars, tents and lounge chairs, picnic tables and beach towels. We shook our heads. How in the WORLD did all these people get down here?! Luckily we got the last parking spot and I performed the classic deck change into my suit. The wind lapped little waves at the shoreline and children in spring wetsuits screamed and dug huge holes in the sand. A few in front of us had mesh nets and were rushing back and forth into the sea. I headed straight out into the water as Tom watched from the rocks. Halfway into the waves, I heard what the children were yelling happily about as they held up their heavy nets: “Oh look! I caught five more jellies!” I looked down into the clear water and saw that I was surrounded by fist-sized moon jellyfish. I turned carefully and waded into the shore, watching as others splashed and played and swam without a care. Perhaps they are the non-stinging type? I didn’t want to find out. Tom and I lounged on the rocks until the wind said it was time to go home. The day held a deep sense of calm and peace. The sea, the breeze, the books, the garden, the people, the discoveries, the simple pleasures of a day spent being delighted by the little things. The only thing missing was Clare. This is the summer of transition, where she explores the world a bit before she heads to University in the fall. She is in the heart of the forests of British Columbia studying trees, waterways, and the indigenous peoples of the area as she hones her knowledge in her chosen field of Ecology and Evolution. Tom and I have to learn how to be us again, people who aren’t parenting 24/7, artists and dreamers, a couple and not a trio all the time. It’s odd, and wonderful, and scary, and heartbreaking. Clare would have loved all the adventure, and the experience at Lough Hyne, as Marine Biology was her first love. I love that she is shaping her new world and finding ways to interact with people outside her sphere. But we miss her here at Reavilleen. The morning rabbit count and the afternoon staring-at-the-sea-sessions are not the same without her. I still say hello to the recalcitrant horse in the front field as is our tradition, and I still make her a cup of tea before I remember that she’s not fast asleep upstairs but dreaming about what her future holds under a canopy of trees thousands of miles away. Appropriately, as we awoke this morning and looked outside, it had begun to rain. Now the talk in the shops will be, “Ah, it’s been wet all day. There goes my washing on the line.” As an Irish friend once told me: If there’s nothing to complain about, there will always be the weather. Well, 2020/21 was a long, strange year where the SARS-CoV2 virus rose up and washed over the world in a pandemic that is still burning like hotspot fires in places near and far. I took that time off to write a passel of poems and bake bread, read, garden, cocoon, and be with my little family in our Costa Mesa home. The world is beginning to open up as people get vaccinated, and we long to return to Reavilleen to settle back into the Irish hillside life, just as soon as their population is stabilized with immunizations and infrastructure. To read what I was working on during quarantine, pop on over to the poetry page. Be well!
There are many forms of madness the earth throws at us: hurricanes, tsunamis, epic lightning storms, floods, wildfires, landslides, sinkholes, freak windstorms, single digit humidity, triple digit humidity, tornados, droughts, hailstorms…. All these natural disasters are awful considered one at a time, but in concert or succession they are terrifying. With its epic coastline drawing a jagged arc down the Pacific ocean, its numerous geologic faults tracing tectonic plates down its length, its reach through multiple latitudes, and its unique fertile-valley-meets-the-desert climactic reach, California is like the world writ small. We also have all 13 of the aforementioned calamities (with the tornados usually forming in small waterspouts over the ocean front and sand devils in the deserts) but among that list is the one that tends to frighten people the most – earthquakes. Most of those other forces are above ground: things you can prepare for, see or hear coming, and take shelter from. But when the very ground beneath you begins to buck and writhe, there is no escaping the shake. You must ride it out.
My first real quake memory was when I was living in south Los Angeles. The Whittier Narrows quake hit in the morning of 1987 and the image that sticks with me is watching the school ground roll in waves, the cement of the sidewalk in front of me like liquid and the metal awning above me rippling in huge sheets. The door to my classroom all of the sudden didn’t fit right in its jamb, and the ceiling tiles were dropping like dinner plates from the classroom roof. I grabbed my friend in a wheelchair and pulled her into the doorway as I dove under a desk, watching my school books bounce and slide away across the tiled floor. I was shell shocked after that. I couldn’t hear a glass rattle on a shelf without going into palpitations, couldn’t sleep without making sure I had my shoes near the bed, couldn’t stand in front of a mirror too long without worrying it would explode and cut me when the next shake came. And came they did. My first temblor was a 5.9 magnitude but all everyone kept talking about was how the quakes “swarm” and whether or not it was just a foreshock for “the Big One”. There was talk of the earth liquefying, or massive building damage, fires, death, and destruction. The news lit up with words I had never heard before: strike-slip fault, diffuse fault, reverse and thrust faults, subduction zones, intraplate deformation. At just 12 years old, I felt like the very ground I stood on was suspect and not to be trusted. As they talked and talked on the news, the aftershocks kept rolling through our days (and nights) and the panic in me mounted as I realized there was nowhere to hide. Whittier Narrows may have been the first, but along with the hundreds of unnamed quakes that jolted through our landscape in Southern California, I experienced the larger ones: the 1990 Upland quake (5.7), the 1991 Sierra Madre quake (5.6), the 1994 Northridge Quake (6.7), 2008 Chino Hills (5.5), and the 2014 La Habra (5.1) quake. With this current COVID pandemic lockdown underway we had a tremor a few nights ago and as I felt that trademark sense of inner ear vertigo as a quake rolls, I literally yelled out loud: “REALLY!!!???” How much more can we take? And the answer is, and has always been, more. You see, California, is MORE. With the fifth largest economy in the world; the oldest known tree in the world (Methuselah clocks in at about 5000 years old); the tallest trees in the world (Hyperion the California redwood stands 380 feet tall); the most fertile valley in the United States (using fewer than 1% of U.S. farmland, the California Central Valley supplies 8% of U.S. agricultural output and produces 1/4 of the Nation's food, including 40% of the Nation's fruits & nuts); with a Napa Valley wine region that frequently out medals the French powerhouses; the most National Parks of any state (9); its top universities in business, technology, and the arts; its dubious title of state with largest number of homeless people (125K at today’s count); its 284 days of sunshine per year; its crime rank of 14 among the 50 states – this is California’s complex and layered face. We live life on the knife edge; we live in lush abundance. That delicate daily dance is what makes it interesting. I’ll never forget the first time we took Clare’s friend Sophia to Ireland. As we were touring Glasnevin cemetery we walked into one of the rooms at the base of the O’Connell tower. There were coffins stacked up three or four high leaning up against the wall, and as the guide finished his speech about the famous folks in the room, he asked if there were any questions. Twelve year old Sophia raised her hand and said: “These coffins, stacked up here… what happens if there’s an earthquake?” The guide, the British and Irish guests all looked at her agog as many seconds drew out into silence. I quietly leaned over and said: “Sophia, they don’t have earthquakes in Ireland.” The guide gave a little laugh at being spared the need to answer the inscrutable question, but it made me realize how much the rest of the world takes for granted that their world literally doesn’t move. We would never stack coffins in California because you’d have a mess of bones on the ground as everything toppled over. We don’t hang heavy paintings or glass mirrors over our headboards because they’d shatter and fall during a quake. We use sticky putty on our kitchen cupboards to keep the glasses and plates from sliding out. We build our houses from balloon framing, great bendy sticks of wood sheathed in light plasterboard and bolted to the foundations to keep them from sliding right off (they still sometimes slide right off). We have seismic codes that make sure things are light and supple to roll with the energy of the earth and not snap. We have skins, not stones. When we bought Reavilleen in Ireland there was a huge learning curve as we navigated the structure. Hanging a painting takes a heavy powered drill to drive through the concrete block walls and a spreader to hold the screw. When we had to hang our own bathroom cabinets after the third woodworker failed to show up, we had to devise a whole cleat hanging system to install the 40 lb cabinets on block walls. One Irish friend, while touring the house, bounced up and down on the upstairs floor and said: Oh grand! You’ve got concrete floors. Nice and sturdy.” We looked at each other in horror, and then realization set in. In California a concrete ceiling above you would mean being crushed to death when it fell in a quake. In Ireland, the concrete block walls hold up a concrete pieced floor, and the wind doesn’t blow your house down when it howls up the hillside and shakes your slate roof. Different states, different stakes. Many people in the US often exclaim: “Earthquakes are the worst. I could never live with them. I’ll take the hurricanes and tornados; at least you know they’re coming and can hide.” Even though our highest death toll in modern times is only 60 souls (after seismic building codes were put in place) the last highest count was in 1906 with 700 souls lost (before major retrofitting of buildings was undertaken). Consider that compared to tornados which kill on average 80 people PER YEAR, the earthquake is much less fatal than the “acceptable” natural disasters people claim they can handle. While I will never say I am comfortable with them, earthquakes have become part of my world whether I l like it or not. I tend to not get palpitations anymore after a jolt. I just check all the glassware, look for cracks in the walls, and sniff around for gas leaks and then go on with my business. We Californians learn to take things as they come: humid rain/no rain, Santa Ana winds/eerie stillness, smog/crystal clear, snow/surf, poverty/excess, Democrat/Republican, rules/hedonism. The one thing that doesn’t have a yin to its yang are earthquakes. They jolt the very foundations of who we are. One night my friend Kim and I were having glasses of red wine and sharing Italian plates at a local restaurant when a pretty moderate earthquake struck. It was a swirly one, in which your head felt tippy and the table top seemed to float. We both quickly picked up our glasses and held them aloft as we reached behind us to steady some large magnums of wine perched on a low room divider. When the earth just kept swirling and seemed it wouldn’t stop, we stood up with our wine hanging in the air, looked at each other, lifted our eyebrows and clinked glasses to make them ring. “Cheers!” we both said, as we held safe all the breakable things around us. When the shaking finally ended all the patrons in the restaurant held their breath for a collective moment, watching the chandeliers swing slowly to a stop. Finally, the bartender yelled: “All right?” and the quiet crowd all held their drinks aloft and cheered. Then they tucked happily back into their plates and conversations. Ah, California. Finally ... the Palm Trees. The series on California starts now!
Morningsong There are rituals that sustain us. We wake, we wash, we take in a warming liquid or bit of bread or both, and we prepare to meet the day. Some begin with prayer, some a simple word of thanks that the body has made it through the night to greet the day, some wake with regret clanging like a bell clapper inside their skull. I have always been a slow riser. A lifetime of poor sleep, nightmares, and minor physical ailments made the night a labyrinth to get through rather than a blessed space of rest. Raising a child naturally meant that my body’s rhythms were wrenched into the early morning hours, as the young like to rise with the sun, recalling some internal clock that we grow out of in our middle years, and return to in our old age. I am now in that phase where my child is mostly self-sufficient -- actually she is more than that, she is a master of her morning schedule. She sets multiple alarms on her phone to wake, eat, and even schedules in a “chill mode” where she reads, surfs the web, and catches up on news before she has to face the day. I prefer to lay in my bed unmoving, sheets to tip of nose, willing my eyes to stay closed and brain to stay on neutral before the first shocks of information seep in. Eventually I rise and plunge into it, with the first order of operations being coffee or tea making. I knew plenty of people who can pop up and start their day with a smoothie or fruit or a protein shake to wake the metabolism, but I’m a hot, savory, slow kind of girl. A bit of avocado and toast, and a cup of something steaming begin to melt away the cobwebs of a California morning. Most days I make my cuppa and find a spot on the couch, facing the direction the sun rises, and stare into the middle distance of the back garden over the swirls of steam. This is my time to drift, to piece together fragments of ideas into poems or essays, to dream about an upcoming trip and how I might make it interesting. Woe to the human who interrupts this quietude with banter, as my husband has found. He pops up from sleep, fully functional, brain firing in all regions, ready to chat, already planning the paintings he will tackle that day, wanting to discuss the finer details of the calendar, full of reminders and questions and topics and queries. I want to smack him. I refrain. Because I love him. Truthfully, it’s a different kind of noise I crave in the morning. Not until we bought Reavilleen in Ireland did I realize how much my life in California is based on the familiarity of noise and pattern. We live very close to a local airport, and I can be lying in bed on any given morning, eyes like little slits behind the covers, and my ears catch the sound of a distant jet engine struggling to make the swift ascent over the Newport Back Bay. Immediately I know what time it is, especially if I pause to listen for the next take-off. If they occur one after the other in swift succession, it is 7am. Local sound laws require that the planes begin their service at 7am and end at 10pm, so my internal clock is oriented by the frequency of the jets. We are far from any jet trails in Ireland, and the sound of a plane overhead is cause for an excursion outside to marvel at the anomaly. The busy suburban traffic noises start up next, as we live on a main street close to ocean. People use our street instead of the congested highway, and the peak of traffic noise ramps up as people make their way to work, and peaks again at 5pm when folks start to head home. In Ireland, the sound of a car on our road is unusual, though we are getting used to Cathy’s rhythms of early to work and late afternoon home. John has his schedule of work and farm and then a 9:30pm departure for the local pub, The Beehive, where he plays cards on certain days. Lord knows when he returns, because I am an early-to-bed woman and wouldn’t know when he rounds home. When I’m in Ireland I sleep like the dead. The house is silent, made of cinder block and insulation and stone. The hum of the refrigerator is the only mechanical intrusion, and the stone walls absorb that nicely. When we first moved in we had to silence the ice maker at night after a few loud, cracking drops of ice at 1am gave us frights. There’s no nighttime traffic, no hum of air conditioners, no power plants, or water processing facilities, no night workers toiling at graveyard shifts, no planes, no constants except the wind and rain. In California, everything has sound. Our houses are made of wood and concrete and metal, and everything talks in its sleep. The heat of the day expands the wood, and the cool of the evening makes the dwelling crack its bones. The power lines hum, the ceaseless traffic swooshes, the sodium streetlights buzz, all the gadgets of the house grumble as they work, the distant helicopters and police sirens and general movements of human bodies all create a sort of subsonic whirr that becomes the fabric of the night. It’s easy to dissolve it into a dichotomy: it’s this here and that there, but not until I was faced with the contrast did I begin to love the noises in California. They remind me that I am not alone. Those planes full of people are all going somewhere, reaching for something. The cars with their tired drivers are going to jobs to work in places where I can find nearly anything I want if am willing to drive to it. The drone of garden tools early in the morning means my neighbors are making my city pretty, and the sound of distant sirens hopefully means there are people out there keeping order, keeping us safe. The thing I miss most about California when I am sitting on my silent hilltop in Ireland are the morning noises. In particular the birds. Over the past centuries, Ireland has been stripped of its tree cover, with agricultural land patchworking the hillsides in flat variations of green and gold. Small trees line the roadways and sometimes stretch into the odd patch of woods, but for the most part, the habitat for birds in our area has been replaced by low bushes and scrub. We have a wild patch of land just below us on the east at Reavilleen where a few hardy hawks make their home. They rise up in the warm currents and flutter over the flatlands, waiting for a hare or rat to move. But this means that the area around us is nearly devoid of small birds, too. The occasional pied wagtail will venture forth, or the ringnecked doves might crash into the limbs of our four large sycamore trees for a rest, but the surrounding hillside is largely silent. Magpies are rare, and in any case do not sing, and crows don’t really talk about it all that much in Ireland. Our most common thread of conversation revolves around planting trees and bushes with berries to entice the birds up onto our hilltop. In California, my mornings drinking coffee outdoors are an assault of birdsong. Sure, the jets compete in whining overhead, but hummingbirds yell it out over territory disputes. Goldfinches (not the brightest bird by far) chatter about it in my curly willow tree and bathe in the beehive-shaped fountain. Crows and ravens croak out greetings and warnings, and the colony of green parrots (escapees from a pet store a decade or more ago) hold forth in the tops of the palm trees lining the main street. Occasionally a hawk will fly into the large Torrey pine and all will fall silent, with the birds tipping their heads up to watch until the hawk grows bored or catches sign of something and glides off with a rustle of wings. Families of robins stopover in the branches sometimes, making the whole canopy move and sing at once. Phoebes have made their nests under the next door neighbor’s eaves and they pop around the fence tops, exclaiming about nothing in particular. The house finches chitter all the time, sort of like sending out echolocating pings to let the others know where they are. We even have some very rare Japanese White Eyes that are trying to establish themselves in our privet bushes, though the rats usually find their nests and ravage them before they can fledge. These are just the birds I see, the birds I know. This is just one layer of life. That old chestnut that says you don’t appreciate what you have until it’s gone is true. Until I was faced with the silence of the hilltop, I didn’t really love the relentless assault of city noises. I noticed them, but loved them? No. Now I see the city noises as a sort of circulatory system for industry and progress, much like hearing blood rush through veins and arteries when the stethoscope is held to the heart. I see now how I thrive in the silence and disconnection in Ireland, where my brain is free to float and create and dream in the stillness and simplicity of the landscape. But I can thrive in motion and madness, too. Right now I can hear the traffic of the freeway, a trash truck crashing through the alleys one bin at a time, honking from impatient motorists, hummingbirds swooping in mating flights, a pair of finches singing in the bushes, two white crowned sparrows dueling it out in a round of trills. There are dogs barking and butterflies floating over the tops of fences as the sun warms their wings. In this contrast of gritty and city with nature and melody, I find beauty. In my native lands, I find I can sing. |