The Longest Silence

Back in Ireland

I’M FISHING THROUGH thirty years of unreliable memory, to a meandering trip through southern Ireland in a Morris Minor of ancient vintage. I have a few changes of clothes, a rubberized Irish raincoat; and the rest is my fishing gear. I have accepted driving on the other side of the road and shifting with my left hand, the delicate hum of the little motor, the alarming Third World driving habits of the locals.

I remember standing on the pilings at the mouth of the Galway river casting Blue Zulus for “white trout,” the extremely strong little sea trout which are part of Ireland’s fame. I also remember hanging over the old bridge in Galway City to watch the big, bright Atlantic salmon resting in the middle of town. I remember meeting and being taken in by a well-to-do American family who had purchased a beautiful Georgian home on the Blackwater river. An Irish girl built me a peat fire in the morning and told me that it was never necessary to eat anything but potatoes. I was comfortable and happy until I saw that my role would be to entertain the family’s teenage son, a whining nitwit. I drove him around the countryside in the Morris and gave him casting lessons. Almost old enough to join the army, he sniveled on about “Mummy” until the arrangement lost all value. The Blackwater River itself was hedged in by endless rules and the Americans imitating the Anglo-Irish gentry were avid to obey what they took to be an ancient order. These were the Kennedy years and when JFK passed over a garden party in the compound where I stayed, ruffling aristocratic hairs with his helicopter, no one looked up.

Walking to the Blackwater one day, I met a local man home on furlough from his duties with a NATO peacekeeping force in the Middle East. He had a young pointer bitch with him, a lithe, speckled ballerina of a bird dog. While we talked, she soothed her impatience by leaping back and forth across a little brook, glancing anxiously at her owner, who had ruined her jaunt by talking to this American. Something about the sight of that beautiful and energetic dog made me anxious to leave my comforts, my peat fire, and my unspoken duties to the nitwit. Discomfort set in and I was once again on my way in the little Morris, clothes and the tools of my passion in back. I remember spotting the young puke cuddling Mummy in the doorway. Neither of them waved and I was aware of having made a bad impression. It was opportunism gone sour.

I think I was headed for the River Maigue, probably because I liked the name when I passed through Kilmallock, a small market town in County Limerick on the road to Rathluirc, a town which after numerous sackings by fun-loving Oliver Cromwell became “an abode of wolves.” Four hundred years later, things had quieted down. There I spotted an establishment called Tom McGuane’s Dry Goods. I stopped the car and went in. The store was of the marginal type then common in southern Ireland, where no light was turned on until it was firmly established that a customer was present. A man walked past me, pulled the string. I introduced myself. Without any special reaction, he replied, “How do you do, Tom. I’m Tom McGuane.” I met Mrs. McGuane and her two beautiful daughters. All lived in the back of the store in immaculate austerity and that air of an impending joke that is many people’s favorite part of Irish life. I explained to my hosts that I was looking for a place to fish. We had already decided that we were unrelated.

“Get a room at Mrs. D’Arcy’s pub across the way. We’ll send someone round for you after supper.”

I got a white, breezy, comfortable room on the second story for about the price of an American hamburger. I spread out my books and tackle while watching the street below, anxious about the vagueness of my arrangements. There was a high overcast sky and the ancient street below me and the sight of the ruins of a medieval abbey in an empty pasture added to the sense, critical to fishing, that time no longer mattered. I was at that blissful stage in my life when my services were sought by no one. I didn’t know how good I had it.

A man appeared below, Ned Noonan was his name, already in his hip boots, carrying a long-handled net and a trout rod. He had been sent to see me by the other Tom McGuane. He wore an old tweed cap and a gray suitcoat with a shoulder that bore the permanent scar of his creel strap and with pockets slung open at the top from years of duty. I went downstairs and we met.

“Shall we start at the Morning Star?” he inquired politely, “or the Loobagh?”

“I am afraid I don’t know one from another.”

“Morning Star it is then. I understand you have an automobile?”

“I do.”

Ned gazed around the inside of my Morris with enormous approval. To an Irish dairyman who liked to fish, it was a very tangible luxury. Later, I could reconstruct the glee with which Ned imagined new territories. He’d had a fly rod in his hand all his life and a matchbox of homemade flies: sedges, rusty spinners, Bloody Butchers, grouse-and-orange, grouse and anything you could name. I remember first noticing his high straight backcast as he knelt before a wall of hawthorns to present his fly to a feeding fish. He fished to eat and for the love of it. He had made the rod, made the net, made the flies and his wife had woven the creel. He was a blood-and-bone trout fisherman with a Pioneer’s pin in his lapel, declaring that he abjured spiritous drink.

We fished that first evening, paralyzed by reciprocal politeness, on a small stream that wandered lazily through cow pastures. We would have better things to do once Ned absorbed the full power and implications of the 1951 Morris, parked like a black gumdrop beside the hedge.

It was very pleasant under the great clouds of swallows and mayflies, despite the thin population of fish. The scattering of ancient ruins, the long, mysterious Irish summer evening, the small trout whose ancestors swam this water when the ruins were full of people — all lent a gravity to our proceedings that I was to feel throughout my stay. Too, it was the company of anglers like Ned Noonan who could never recall when they began fishing, so undivided was it from the thread of their lives.

When I came in that evening, I returned the wave of an ardent and heavily made-up young woman with unnatural blond hair, rather a beauty but profoundly influenced by the latest Carnaby Street fashions. From time to time, she appeared in a burst of enthusiasm and ill-concealed carnality while her neighbors either stared at their shoes or moved off a short way to bless themselves. I saw her waving from the tops of buildings, from various windows and from the nave of the thirteenth-century church of Saints Peter and Paul, in ruins but the final resting place of Gaelic poets. Finally, I saw her cavorting with an entire hurley team in Blossom’s Gate, the last remaining of four medieval gates. These strong, raucous men from Cork City made me realize I was more in my own depth with my shelf of books and tin box of flies upstairs at Mrs. D’Arcy’s.

Blessing themselves was something the local people did many times a day. When we drove out past the parish church, Ned and my other companions would elevate the thumb and first two fingers in front of themselves and in a space smaller than a dime, make a sign of the cross, a rakish bit of muscle memory that I found myself imitating. It seemed to help before a difficult presentation to a large fish such as the listless slob of a brown trout, curd fattened at the outlet of a small creamery on the Loobagh River, where it took my grouse-and-orange.

In the water meadows whose edges I strolled awaiting the evening fishing, cranes stood alongside the half-submerged and ruined bits of fence or shot out of the hedge like arrows. Strangers wandered from other towns in black rubber boots, waterproofs, and tweed caps. Some were stockmen, driving a handful of cattle by the road, “farming the long mile.” When the sky cleared, the great traveling clouds seemed to belong to the ocean. I often thought of the wild girl who turned every cornice into a parapet from which to display her international plumage — learned from magazines — directed at me, at the drifting farm men and tinkers of the road, at the hurley team from Cork. I abashedly made mention of her to Ned, who shyly informed me that the “poor thing was mad.” This latter is less condemning than one might first suppose. When I wanted a sweater, we sent for the wool which arrived by train in a week, a lovely greenish-gray I had selected. Then we took it to a woman whose grown daughter was also “mad.” The mother took my measurements while the haunted, tall daughter stood in the shadows. In a week the mad daughter made me a beautiful sweater. At Sunday Mass, I sat and watched a priest genuflecting against the stone flags, cracking one knee over and over until my pew-mate turned to me and said, “The poor thing’s mad.” That only made my bottle blonde more interesting, though a sudden image of myself riding a madwoman through the moonlit streets of a tiny, poor, devoutly Catholic town where I had neither credit nor credibility (the townspeople had arbitrarily decided that I was from New Zealand) seemed frightening. Better to remain a quiet-spoken mock Kiwi with a fly rod and a Morris than risk it with someone who more and more often crooked a finger at me in demented invitation as I slipped back to my room above Mrs. D’Arcy’s.

One night I read a copy of the Dublin Times about a month old. The Beatles had seized the English-speaking world and would soon have the rest. There was an upstart band from London, the Rolling Stones, who would soon play Dublin. A large advertisement suggested this band was going places. I looked at their pictures in astonishment. Only the English cities, I thought, could come up with these drooling imbeciles whose stippled and wolfish jaws and pusspocket eyes indicated a genetic impasse. A decade later, I tried and failed to get tickets to their concert at Altamont, where with their retinue of Hell’s Angels, a rock ’n’ roll ceremony of murder was performed for our guitar-ridden new world. I didn’t even see it coming.

In my room, I had set out my books — my onionskin Keats, Borrow’s The Bible in Spain and Lavengro, my Thoreau and Walton, my battered Yeats — and my notebook with its hopeful scratchings and imitations, my pencils, and my knife. Downstairs in the pub I ate what I was given, and it was remarkably good with a bottle of black stout to see it on its way. A black-and-white photograph I took at the time has a notation that indicates that I was going native: “A brace of fine trout taken in the gloaming” (!). Another photograph shows me lugubriously standing beside Yeats’s grave, not revealing that my attitude is much the product of being stared at by local Protestants on their way to church, indignant at my tourism. I recall gazing at an eighth-century high cross in the town from which my mother’s family originated, staring at the stone monks, headless corpses, Daniel in the lion’s den, the peculiarly repeated faces and Celtic spirals.

Now, cheerfully ensconced in a medieval trout town, I was ready to do battle with my bamboo rod. I had discovered that I held no advantage over the locals’ cast of three wet flies with my single nymphs and dries. Indeed, on evidence, I was quick to turn to their ways. Years later, Americans would “discover” this soft-hackle revolution. At an ancient monastery outside Dublin accessed by a stone causeway over fast water, pierced by a circular opening for the angling convenience of the friars, I imagined they sought the trout and salmon with the down-winged, bright fly that was born in early times on the spate rivers of the Celtic world, in Wales, Scotland, Ireland, and perhaps Cornwall. A thousand years later, it pops up in American fly shops as a novelty. Constant discovery is the eternal joy of the ahistorical.

My new friend Ned informed me that we would advance upon the River Maigue by Morris Minor on the morrow. We had the usual array of grouse-and-anythings as well as his great proof against failure, the rusty spinner. I looked forward to the trip with enthusiasm tempered by the conviction that Ned knew where every drop of water in Ireland was headed. He was beyond being a presentationist, reading not only the thought of the trout but the next thought which the trout had not yet thought. As a result, my frequent cautious dragless drifts were set against the backdrop of Ned’s brief presentations and the hiss of his taut leader at an angle to the current. While I did the customary North American deep-sea wading, he knelt on the bank in his worn-out hip boots. If brush was behind him, he turned to look quickly for a hole in it and then, without looking again, sent the tight bow of his backcast into it without a hitch.

Because of Ned’s membership in a teetotaling society, I led a very quiet life in Kilmallock. When we headed out into the six-hour evening the roisterers were aligned in the pub, and they were there when we returned home in the dark with fish to clean and supper to get. I like both lives but they really don’t intersect.

Ned’s wife was a sharp-minded realist who made me the occasional meal. She had a tusklike tooth that kept her mouth slightly ajar: a drunken dentist, attempting to cure her toothache by extraction, had had the tooth halfway out when he fell into a stupor on the floor. The tooth recovered, as did Mrs. Noonan, but it compromised her dentition forever. And under no circumstances, she told me, would she ever go to a dentist again.

The blond sports girl left with the hurley team never to be further seen. Across from my room, I became aware of a gloomy figure smoking cigarettes in a second-floor window, an older man in a dark tweed coat, never without a cigarette, watching the street indifferently throughout the daylight hours. I learned that he was a “returned Yank,” that is, a Kilmallock local who had emigrated to America, spent his working life as a policeman, and returned to his hometown with a vast Detroit automobile to impress the locals. The car was undrivable in the local streets and was somehow disposed of. I gathered that on learning his return was not to be a triumph, the old cop sank into the gloom in which I discovered him: cigarettes, the passing scene, and the conviction he made a huge mistake leaving Boston.

One night as I dined downstairs, a modest country couple in middle age came by to present their son to Mrs. D’Arcy, who was tough and efficient, something of an authority figure if not in the town, at least on this street. The son had recently joined the Irish coast guard, and by some bureaucratic gyration he’d been sent, without ever seeing any settlement other than his native borough, straight to New York City. What an astonishment this must have provided, I thought. Butting in, I asked the young man what he thought of New York. His mother answered for him proudly, “Agh, he took no notice of it.”

This, I have since decided, is the war cry of the provincial. The proprietor of a bookshop in Montana, where I live, once said to me, “Piss on Europe. I’d rather be in Livingston.” And an old gentleman who worked for me on the ranch sometimes boasted that he had lived here all his life and had never been to Billings, eighty miles distant. Personally, I like the young African who made his way to the North Pole after having been enchanted by a photograph of the icebergs. Or the father of Beryl Markham, who at about the age we go on social security decided to leave Africa and homestead again in Argentina. There’s no substitute for courage.

When we fished the Morning Star and the Loobagh, I remarked to my companions on the handsome, ruined, once fine houses we saw from time to time, roofless, with fire-blackened windows. The lack of answers suggested hard days with the Fenians, of whom my great-grandfather was one, a violent rascal who was killed later in Cuba while covertly serving the United States. My grandmother told me it had never been explained why he was buried in an army cemetery in Lexington, Kentucky. He had been a specialist in violence, which even in the early part of our century made all places home. I was increasingly aware during our evening forays in my Morris across a sometimes vacant landscape that its history had been a melancholy one, and that if the small towns seemed weary, they were entitled to.

We were heading for the Maigue. In back were our rods, reels, creels, long bamboo-handled nets which hang crossways from left shoulder to right hip, various arcana like the top part of a Morris turn signal pace Oliver Kite, the perfect spoon for inspecting the stomach contents of a trout, waders and waterproofs, a Genoa salami, soda bread, and a knife. We planned to go nearly to Adare, situated at the top of the River Maigue’s tideway, a forest and pasture gallery of intimate trout stream.

Much of the water near Adare was preserved both by the Dunraven Hotel and local fisheries societies. I relied upon Ned to find us an opening. We went up past Croom, a market town once the resort of poets and now a place of ruined abbeys, ring forts, and crumbling round towers. You would have to be born not only among these lanes to find our aperture of unguarded water but also among its rumors, which seeped details of farmsteads and leases into the local collective consciousness.

We wandered down through a pasture and there flowed the Maigue like a woodland spring creek, where the rings of already feeding trout traveled thirty yards on the silken current before disappearing. Ned went upstream a way, only occasionally revealing himself through the steady motions of his rod.

I got myself in place to fish the spinner fall. Before I caught my first fish, a troupe of black-and-white cows gathered on the bank to watch me. After suspicion at the movements of my rod passed, they begin to cogitate on my activity, shifting their lower jaws and gazing from under long eyelashes, straight through me to some larger knowledge of human antics.

The fish I caught were all around two pounds apiece. I don’t remember ever catching stronger, wilder, more violent or wanton fighters than these fish. They were vividly leopard-marked with short, hard bodies. They wore me out with their valor.

I have thought of that evening for thirty years. Then, in Montana, I ran into a man married to an Irish woman, a fly fisher who knew the Maigue. Don’t go back, he said, they’ve drained the bogs and ruined it. Could this be? I knew how to find out. I wrote Ned Noonan in his tiny ancient town. I got the letter back: “Addressee unknown.”

And yet, and yet. A letter arrived this summer from the other Tom McGuane’s youngest daughter, Antonia. The blooming adolescent I remembered described herself as a divorced mother, a painter in Nova Scotia, and the director of a gallery for Inuit art. Ireland, she said, was prospering at last. And Kilmallock, where my old Morris had been a shining phaeton, was full of cars.