Roads and hearts

Roads are some of the most permanent human-created things there are. Life travels along them, people and animals, seeking water, food, and shelter from seasonal weather. Paths created by animals may eventually turn into paths, lanes, and streets, but it's mostly people that create roads. There's a place where we live, another place we have to be, yet another place that has what we need to eat, clothe, or feed ourselves. Roads most often reflect how we got from place to place before anything carried us, other than our feet.

Marian talked about the roads of Ireland, their designations by size or use. I was struck by the connections they made to places mostly or long-abandoned. Loughall, Tobercurry, Ferrymount, Frenchpark, Swinford, Foxford, Monasterevin. All connected (eventually) by roads my ancestors walked. Until of course they took the final walk, to a ship that took them to America.

You can't really get a picture of Ireland without thinking about the roads. As I described earlier, there are the organic roads left behind by animals and people moving according to their needs. Then there are the purposefully constructed roads, canals, and bridges that were used to take the goods that Ireland produced and transport them to others for consumption. This is the scar tissue of colonialism—where all roads lead to the capital, and all the wealth of the country pours into the colonizer's coffers.

Two weeks gives you no platform to say what Ireland is, nor what it should be. As people of Irish descent "come home," there is invariably some level of discombobulation. The presuppositions you might have had from the media, from family stories, from your own DNA, all conflict with what you see in a modern country with traffic jams, cellular phones, and charming accents. The only thing you know after two weeks is how you feel, and what little you've found out. You may feel like you did when you came home from college the first time, and found that your bedroom now has a pool table in it and your stuff is in the garage. You may also find that you're pretty good at pool.

Of the places we visited, I know for sure that in Monasterevin and Swinford, I was standing where my people had worked and lived. I lit a candle in Swinford and thought about the connections I had to these places and these people, which is both very little and everything. Very little connects me to shoemaking and being a publican (other than being a customer), and yet everything does. These are the people who created the body I live in, the set of brain chemicals propelling this typing. While it would at first be difficult to describe the life Marian and I lead to the Gallaghers, Husseys, Colemans, Corcorans, Stensons, O'Malias (and O'Malleys?), and McNeeces, by the end of the evening they would all be roaring at the jokes we tell, and be pushing back with (probably much funnier) jokes of their own.

What I found in our travels around this island is that the roads are also engraved in my heart. This made the trip not necessarily a homecoming, but much more than a stamp in the passport.