|
From The Leaves Are Something This Year...
Bóithrín Na Marbh
for William Crobett
IThere’s a narrow grassy path that rises from the Dunquin harbor to the foot of the surrounding hills. It’s called Bóithrín na Marbh in Irish, which is translated as “Road of the Dead.” Bóithrín is Irish for “road,” but any adult standing in the middle of this grassy path could reach their arms out and touch the montbressia flowers and fuchsia hedges that line it on both sides. So this bóithrín is more a “lane” than a “road,” the same width as the Mass. Ave. bike lane in Cambridge between Harvard Square and MIT. If you swim in a pool, it’s as wide as a lane for doing laps. Blasket Islanders, who lived on An Blascaod Mór, “the Great Blasket,” an island three miles off the coast of Dunquin, used this lane when they rowed a currach carrying a coffin cradling the dead from the island to the Dunquin pier for burial in the graveyard on the mainland. When I look out to the Blasket Island from my kitchen window in Dunquin, the island’s silhouette resembles a cow resting on its side in a field. Islanders would walk the road of the dead in a single line behind the coffin. They also walked the Blasket Island’s narrow path along its steep cliffs in a line because the cliffs are sheer, wet and slippery. It was not uncommon that an islander would fall to a prevailing death, so walking one behind the other along the road of the dead was nothing new. I wonder if any of the islanders, when they accompanied their dead through this lane and brushed against the montbressia with its fiery orange blossom tongues, and the fuchsia with its hanging red petal bells, if they saw this abundance of nature within reach as a celebration of life. Or did it feel like a rebuke of their own once-in-a-lifetime life, we who are part of nature, but different? The road of the dead cuts through privately owned fields. Land in Ireland has always been sacramental, “an outward sign of an inner grace”—the fanatic heart, Yeats called it—its image and its cause. But Dunquin locals whose fields are divided by this lane don’t object to this weirdly straight ditch through their land. The lane isn’t used for pulling the dead off the sea anymore: it’s a shortcut from the top of the village, where I live, to the lower, harboring pub. I don’t walk through Bóithrín na Marbh because its grass is always wet, and I don’t like standing in a pub in wet shoes and jeans. If you do laps in a pool, standing in a pub with wet shoes and jeans is the feeling you have when you pull yourself up the ladder as the pool’s buoyant embrace slides down your mostly naked body and gravity grabs you around your comically stoic Speedo cresting the surface of the pool. Last summer there was a drought in Ireland. I wanted to tell you how road tar was melting in the sun, how driving through it made a sound like driving through early winter slush on Mass. Ave. I wanted to tell you that our neighbor, when she was a girl, used to stand barefoot on this melting tar because she liked to feel it squishing up between her toes, how her mother got angry when she came home because she had to use butter to clean the tar off. On chilly days, she said she’d go into the field where her cows were resting, push one away, and lie down in the warm circle of grass its body left. |
