Jeremy Hart has heard tell of a place in Ireland w
Wading at the Edge of the World: Cold, Wet, and Mostly Alone on the Irish Coast (3 of 3)
Ireland
I kept going, up and up, south and west, and the world got weirder as I went. The fog slowly closed in on me, narrowing those things I could see from the waters of Barleycove Bay to the hillside over Barleycove to part of the hillside and finally to just the road. There was really no noise, except for the wind and the rumble of the sea somewhere down in the mist. It was as if the world had been swallowed up entirely, beyond the edge of the asphalt.
Plodding along silently and regretting that I hadn’t gotten at least some bottled water in Goleen when I could, I happened to look up and see, out of nowhere, a brilliantly white horse just ten feet to my right, in a grassy meadow edged by fog. It had its head near to the ground at first, its ears cocked forward, so that when I first saw it, my heart skipped a beat – was that a horn? For one surreal second, I thought the lack of food and water had gotten to me, that I’d fallen into a delerium and started to hallucinate unicorns in the eerie white air. “Dear God,” I thought dazedly, “I must be farther gone than I’d realized.” Hearing me approach, though, the horse raised its head to watch me pass, and the spell was broken.
Hard as it is to believe, the rocky, barren coast of Mizen Head is actually home to some, and I passed a good dozen small farms, each one barely clinging to the steep hillside. I couldn’t imagine living somewhere so constantly, completely wet and cold, but judging from the lights I passed in the growing dark, people do, raising cattle and keeping warm down at the Goleen pubs at night.
The road felt so desolate and empty, completely devoid of people, that I was starting to really worry about making it back down to the town – I’d hoped to be able to catch a ride down, but by then it seemed to be too late at night, and everyone who was coming down for the night probably already had. I began to panic a bit as I tromped along, shivering and wet, imagining that some fisherman would find me in the morning, a frozen lump by the side of the road. I briefly tried heading up the hill to one farmhouse I spotted off a side road, hoping to beg at least a quick spell by the fire, but ended up running for my life from the farm’s pack of silent, free-roaming guard dogs.
In the end, I feel kind of silly claiming that I visited Mizen Head, because I never actually saw the sea once the fog rolled in and obscured the Bay. I wandered along at the edge of nothing, hearing the sea nearby but only able to see blank whiteness all around. I eventually came to an area where the one-lane road widened to a big, empty parking lot and then seemed to end, but I didn’t get any further than that. Was it Mizen Head? I have no idea.
I saw what looked like an old transplanted lighthouse at the far end of the spit, but just then headlights swept across the road. I turned to watch as a van pulled into the parking lot and turned around for the ride back down, just staring dumbly for a moment before my brain kicked in: I hadn’t seen a single vehicle for at least an hour. As the van started down the hill, I ran after, yelling frantically and waving my arms like a maniac until the driver stopped and motioned me alongside.
I must have been quite a sight by that point, soaked to the bone and close to incoherent, but the owners of the van agreed to let me jump in. They’d intended to simply stop at a wide spot in the road and camp there for the night, but I talked them into giving me a ride back down to Goleen, pointing out that the road where we were was barely wide enough to fit one car and was obscured by fog; not exactly the safest place to park for the night. It was a self-serving argument, admittedly, but I the only things that concerned me at that point were food and warm clothes, respectively – even ethics took a back seat to making it back to my nice warm room at the Downeys.
The couple who gave me a ride down were from the west of England, and had driven over on the ferry in their battered old van with most of their earthly possessions. They were on an extended vacation of sorts, cruising the coast of Ireland, and were aiming next for the Dingle peninsula, if their driveshaft didn’t give out (which it sounded like it might do at any second). We traded stories about traveling in Ireland, and I made friends with their dog as we sped through the fog for about a half-hour.
Noting the outdoor gear lashed to the van’s roof, I told them about my original plan to surf the the coast, and they nodded sympathetically, although they admitted they hadn’t ever heard of anybody surfing in Ireland, either. Finally, we came down out of the clouds, and the man pointed down to the cove below.
“Looks like somebody else had the same idea as you did, eh?” he said, chuckling.
Unsure what he meant, I peered out the window and down to Barleycove, where, in the middle of what looked like it was becoming a serious storm, I could just barely make out three tiny figures cutting back and forth on the rough, choppy waves. There they were, doing just what I’d wanted to do, surfing off the rocky Irish shores, and I couldn’t help but smile to see it.
It had to be numbingly cold down there in the water, but damn, it sure looked like fun.