Walking the Kerry Way (1 of 2
Ireland
I hadn’t spent much time with my brother Frank since he was about 12 years old, back in 1973. That was the year I’d gotten engaged to a non-Catholic, and my parents wouldn’t let me bring her home because “it would scandalize the children.” I was 19 and equally sure of myself, so I refused to come home without her.
I finally gave in seven years later, when my father’s health was failing, and went home for a visit alone. After that, my parents also relented, and met my wife and three-year old daughter for the first time. Our mutual stubbornness had cost us precious time together as a family, a loss made especially poignant by my father’s death six months later.
My relationship with my younger brother and sisters took years to recover. By the time I came home after my long exile, Frank was away at college, and thereafter we’d met mainly at family holidays and reunions. Still, we’d found many common interests and a mutual admiration. Both of us were entrepreneurs – I in publishing, he in construction – and both of us had struggled with how to build a business with a heart, a business that served its employees as well as its customers. In many ways, our lives were mirror images, seven years apart.
But there was one big crack in the mirror, one gulf between us that we skirted politely (most of the time): while I had long ago left the church, Frank remained a committed Catholic. He had also retained an abiding love for Ireland, to which he had returned again and again with my father, mother, and sisters in the years when I was persona non grata. He and my father had gone for many a tramp around Killarney, the town where my father was born, and where my aunt still lives. Mangerton, Torc, and the McGillicuddy Reeks were more than names to Frank; hikes on the slopes of these mountains were the source of the richest memories of his childhood and young adulthood.
I envied Frank the time he’d spent in Ireland with my father, and I’d always wanted to spend more time there myself. When my mother suggested that Frank and I might want to walk part of the Kerry Way together, we both jumped at the chance. I had a week between a talk I was due to give in Rome and another at the London Book Fair. It was March – not the best time to visit Ireland – but Frank could get free, and with his eighth child on the way, it was now or never.
We set out from Killarney on a blustery day. Though neither of us had done much recent hiking, we had an ambitious itinerary, about 18 miles a day for the next five days. We were planning on staying each night at bed & breakfasts along the way, but we still carried packs with plenty of extra clothes.
The first day took us through Killarney National Park, up around the back of Torc, then down across the road to Moll’s Gap and into the Black Valley. The hike took more out of us than we expected, and we tottered the last few miles, grateful that our guest house was at the near end of “town” (a sprinkling of houses spread over the better part of a mile).
After a hearty dinner of local lamb chops, though, things began to look up, so when Frank confessed that it was his wife’s birthday, and that he wanted to go a mile up the road to the valley’s only public phone, outside the youth hostel and the church, to call her, I agreed to go along.
It was pitch dark by then, and raining to boot. We managed to stick to the road, though, and eventually came to the phone. Unfortunately, Angelique was not at home. How about going in to say a rosary for her, he asked?
Now, I hadn’t said the rosary for over twenty years, and wasn’t sure I even remembered how the “Hail Mary” went, but I agreed.
The church was open, of course, its outer door swinging in the wind. In Ireland, at least in the back country, the church is never closed. There was no electricity, and only a single candle burning by the altar. The wind howled outside, the door banged open and shut. We began to pray.
Frank helped me recall the words; the memories I’d never lost. When we were small, the rosary, even more than dinner (where my mother never sat down till everyone else had eaten), was the time the family was all together. As we droned aloud through the decades, the joyful, the glorious, and the sorrowful mysteries, I remembered my father’s passing.