The Eighth Wonder of the World:
Clifden, Part I
June 27-29th
A phone call in late afternoon:
“Hi, I was wondering if you had any beds for tonight and tomorrow?”
“For how many?”
“One.”
“No problem. Your name?”
“Anthony St. Clair.”
“Okay, Antony” – I don’t think I’ve mentioned this before, but no one in Ireland or the UK pronounces my name correctly – “and when are you coming down?”
I checked my watch: 4:45; the bus would leave in 45 minutes, give (definitely not take) a few depending on the conversion to Irish time. “I’ll be there around seven.”
“Okay, Antony. We’ll see you then. Connemara is nice – we’ll take care of you.”
We hung up soon after, and I was smiling.
“Connemara is nice – we’ll take care of you.” Just what I needed to hear.
I brought down my pack, then left a note for flatmate Clare, telling her that I’d be staying at the Brookside Hostel in Clifden until Thursday morning. I got off work at 3 today, and had Wednesday off, so I decided to get out of Galway for a wee while. I’ve been wanting to go to Clifden, especially since the day trip I took to Connemara a few weeks ago.
On top of it all, Galway is nice, sure, but it’s still just a city. Besides, the tourists have landed, and I’m tired of walking down the street trying to dodge pot-bellied men panning video cameras over shopfronts. Combine that with weather changes that offer proof that we don’t live in a ordered universe after all and, well, life has been getting a little irksome as of late.
But a spell of nice weather had just come in, to tease us little humans – definitely time to get out of town, and enjoy it while I could.
Though not ubiquitous in the Emerald Isle, many Irish have some of the most unique eyes in the world: blue, and lit with a mix of kindness, sadness, mischief and at least a twinge of madness. They’re good eyes, that are usually an indicator of a good person. After ringing the bell on the front door of the Brookside, a man opened it and showed me in, and those were the eyes he had, wild and blue and good.
I smiled and said, “I’m Anthony.”
“Ah, Antony! I’m Richard!” He stuck out his hand, and we shook. Inside, he went over the usual hostel intro with me – where the loo and the kitchen were, important times such as check-out, blah-blah-and then said, “Now in the morning, Antony, just talk to me about what to do. When you go back home, you’ll be able to tell everyone that the highlight of your trip was the Eighth Wonder of the World – Clifden.”
Richard’s charisma was contagious; I already felt I was in a wonderful place, and I’d only been in town 15 minutes.
I went to my room, threw down my stuff, chatted briefly with the other people staying there, and soon went to check out the town. If anything, Clifden is tiny. There aren’t many streets, so it’s easy to get around and pretty much impossible to get lost. So I wandered about, looking at shopfronts and restaurants and such, but mainly I just took in the air. People were about, but it was still quiet. There were cars, but the air felt clean, vibrant in the lungs; I walked around (rather, up and down, as Clifden is definitely diagonal), and was happier and happier with every step.
After dinner – at Cullen’s Coffee Shop & Bistro, very nice wee place – I wandered up to the Town Hall, near the outskirts of town (i.e., off the high street). Richard had told me that on Tuesday nights local musicians and dancers get together “for the tourists, but it’s good fun.” So I went up, paid my three quid and took a seat. Yeah, there were lots of tourists, but more than a few locals were holding down the bleachers, and all told it was great fun, listening to music and watching people dance. I stayed in my seat, though. I’ve tried my feet at dancing, at Scottish ceilidhs – pronounced ‘kay-lees’ – but to no avail save embarrassment and lack of coordination. I decided to spare the Irish; they don’t need any help in being driven to drink.
The emcee was one of the best parts of it all. Asking people to come up for one dance, there were few takers – so she started naming names. “Simon Jones, Mark Taylor, Matthew Taylor… on the floor, now!” And down came Simon, Mark and Matthew, smiling thinly, heads down; you would have thought they were wee boys whose mum had just found out about something bad that they’d been up to. Still, the floor was mostly empty, and the emcee wasn’t satisfied. “Luke, Martin, Sue, Nora…” In the end, she didn’t have to keep naming names, and the floor filled up with dancers – from old men to young women to, even, one American boy, about 8 or 9, wearing a Cubs jersey – and the dancing began.
It’s not easy to be a writer and a traveler, at the same time – it requires an ability to watch people as much as possible, while also looking down at your notes occasionally, to make sure you’re not writing on top of lines already there. But I managed to watch the skill of the dancers, well, evolve; I’d try to describe the steps themselves, but my two left feet might as well be the two halves of my brain, and the steps elude me. By the end of it all, though, the steps didn’t elude the dancers at all, and laughter and applause filled the Town Hall.
Many different local artists all came up, including a teenage girl who was a local accordion champion, and a teenage boy who sang some of the old songs:
Her lips are like some roses fair.
My love she has the gentlest hands.
I love the ground whereon she stands.
I wish I could write the melody to it, but if you know the song, you know how both beautiful and haunting it is. But such is much of Irish music.
Leaving that night, I was happier than I had been in weeks – Clifden, oh yes, was just what I’d been needing: an escape from the city, to the countryside, to a small town where there are mountains all around and music in the heart. When I went to bed that night, I was smiling as I closed my eyes. I was out of Galway. I was in Connemara. No more city, for a while – only a town that was little more than an oasis in the midst of Connemara’s desolate landscape.
The day had been beautiful, clear and bright and warm; there was no sign of things changing much for the morrow. I didn’t care, though. It could have rained buckets and the mercury could have frozen. I didn’t care – I was happy again.
The eighth wonder of the world, Clifden. Who would have thought? But it was.
