Stones of Aran (23 page)

The Araners distinguish about thirty types of seaweed, each with its own advantages and disadvantages as fertilizer for various crops or as the raw material of kelp. The main division is between
fea
mainn
dhubh
,
blackweed and
feamainn
dhearg
,
redweed. The
former
comprises the dark-toned
Fucus
species that grow on the upper and middle shore, and of which acres are exposed by the ebb on such shallow stony bays as An Gleannachán. The redweeds are the huge tangleweeds, mainly
Laminaria
,
growing around low water mark and only accessible to cutting when the tide is far out, on such rocky promontories as An Chora Dhubh on the east of the bay.

There are various types of blackweed, as I learned on that day I spent cutting it. The most favoured is
feamainn
bhoilgíneach
,
or “belly-weed” as it is called in English here, the familiar
bladderwrack
; all these names refer to the air-sacs like big blisters that float its leathery thongs. Blackweed should always be cut rather than pulled, so that its holdfasts remain on the rock and soon sprout new growth (and one should not lose the penknife and at the end of a tiring day have to spend an extra half-hour groping for it in the swilling tide, as I did). After stooping to cut for an hour or so it is a relief to stop and pile the weed into the big square basket of woven osiers—and after stumbling under that dripping load through the rock-pools and up the shinglebank it is a relief to return to cutting. The first attempt at straightening up under a full basket convinced me of the superiority of another method of bringing cut weed to land, no longer used in Aran, which is to
assemble
it into a
cleimín
,
a flat bundle about ten feet across, tie a rope around it, and tow it ashore when the rising tide floats it. Vast amounts of
feamainn
bhuí
,
yellow-weed (the knotted wrack,
Ascophyllum
), a seaweed of sheltered waters uncommon in Aran, are still harvested in the landlocked bays of Connemara by this method for sale to the factory at Cill Chiaráin; there are usually several
cleimíní
moored by each little jetty of that coast, and one
may see men making amazing leaps from raft to raft of seaweed as they pole them out of the shallows around the off-shore islands where it is cut and assemble them into little flotillas that a small boat will tug to the mainland. This is still a very slow business even with an outboard motor, and the progress of a rowing-boat towing a
cleimín
is almost imperceptible however the men strain at the oars; and so, short of further mechanization, it seems there is no way of bringing weed ashore without back-breaking effort.

My friend’s shore-marks were irrelevant that day as there was no one else cutting blackweed then or indeed on any other day of that spring. Has anyone cut weed anywhere around the island since, I wonder, or was my mentor the last to do so? A hundred years ago vast tonnages of it were cut each spring, mainly to
fertilize
the fields before potato-setting in March and April; it was not the best weed for kelp-making. The island’s hooker-owners used to make a bit of money at that time of year running blackweed to Galway and Kinvara, whence it would be distributed by cart around the countryside and sold to farmers as fertilizer, but this trade died when guano from South America began to be shipped to Galway early in this century.

If nobody troubles with blackweed nowadays, a certain amount of the redweed is still used, though even this more easily obtained natural fertilizer is being replaced by the usual industrial products. These weeds are exposed as prostrate forests whenever the tide withdraws sufficiently, which it does in the spring tides, that is, those tides on two or three days just after each full or new moon. This twice-monthly showing of the island’s blood-red margin
imposes
itself on the attention of anyone who stays here long enough, although it no longer dictates the cycle of shore-work, for enough redweed is brought ashore by the gales of winter and spring to save its few users the trouble of wading out to cut it. Every now and then in the beginning of the year I and my philosopher of the shoreline go down to the bay nearest our
village
and consider the state of the
bainc
,
the heavy deposit of
macerated
redweed that accumulates on the outer slopes of the
shinglebanks throughout the winter. When it is judged to be
sufficiently
preasáilte
,
that is, pressed, compacted and rotted into a black maggoty dung, we “straddle” the grey mare and take her down to the shore for one of her rather infrequent days’ work. The straddle or
srathair
is a wooden bridge that sits across the horse’s back like a large saddle, with pegs from which a sally-rod basket hangs on either side. A thick layer of straw under the straddle
protects
the hide from the brine of the seaweed. With pitchforks we fill the baskets, piling yet more
bainc
onto the straddle until the
bord
or
load is a tall cone. When we lead the mare up the
shinglebank
she watches carefully where she places her forehooves among the turning stones, but the hindlegs it seems have to look out for themselves and tend to trip and slip. At the roadside we push the nodding superstructure of weed off the straddle and then, one on either side, we unhitch the ropes that hold up the hinged bottoms of the baskets, so that they fall open simultaneously and deposit the rest of the load on the ground. Then we rest for a moment, praising the mare for her steadiness and rubbing her nose—her master always cups her eyeballs in the palms of his horny hands in a way that looks uncomforting but which she seems to like—and take her down to the weedbank again. After a dozen or more such turns, having exchanged the whole short winter afternoon for a hillock of weed, we go home to tea, bringing an acrid whiff of horse-sweat and sea-rot into the house. The next morning we put the mare into the shafts of the “common cart.” How long all these adjustments of the ropes and chains and hooks of the harness seem to take! How anxious I become in trying to follow
instructions
about them in Irish, while the mare, to me a compendium of unknown forces, stirs and twitches and rolls her eyeballs, making me think of a saying her master has given me to the effect that while a horse only thinks of killing you once in its life, a mare does so seven times! At length we are ready and go rattling down the hill to the shore, the pitchforks bouncing beside us on the cart. Yesterday’s mound seems to have shrunk a bit, but it still makes three cartloads since the way is steep and the mare young as
yet. If squalls break across the island one after another as they
often
do at that time of year, forcing us to spend time crouched
under
a wall by the roadside looking at the mare hanging her dripping head, the three journeys take all day, and I learn not only the Irish terms for countless details of horsecraft and seaweed lore, but also a slower mental pulse, which dreams away the distinction between minutes and hours and threatens to stretch my city-cut days into the baggy lunar months and earth-heavy seasons of Aran’s old fields and shores.

If the structure of the year is a very loosely fitting harness around the Aran farm nowadays, and chafes for that reason, in the past it cut, blinkered and bitted a life ruthlessly driven by want. Each household planted as many ridges of potatoes as a whole village does now, and as soon as the weed this demanded was gathered in spring, stacking of more weed for the summer's kelp-burning
began
. Less weed ended up as
bainc
,
ready heaped for easy loading, because so much was snatched from the waves before it reached shore, such was the islanders' need. Redweed used to be cut too, and as this could only be done at the ebb of the especially big spring tides around the equinoxes, the calendar whipped everyone to the shore on such occasions. A story by Máirtín Ó Cadhain,
An
Taoille
Tuile
,
“The Flood Tide,” gives us the urgency of the work, its consequent erosion of gentle feelings, and perhaps a moment of fierce joy in the elemental struggle. In this case it is co-operation that adds to the stress, as two households sharing the weed of a particular
cora
each feel bound by a competitive sense of honour to make the larger contribution. One household is represented by Pádraig and Máiréad, a newly-married couple, and the other by an older man, An Loideanach, and his two daughters. They meet by arrangement on the shore at dawn—the setting is Ó Cadhain's
native Cois Fharraige west of Galway, but I picture it as An Chora Dhubh Thoir by An Gleannachán. Pádraig and Máiréad find the others waiting for them, the two girls sitting on their upturned baskets and An Loideanach striding up and down the shinglebank gnawing on his pipe:

Pádraig starts the day full of consideration for his tender bride and carries her basket down the shore for her. But once he bends to the task of proving himself the equal of all three of the
Loideanaigh
together, Máiréad is left to her own tentative and feeble
efforts
among the blackweed of the upper shore, and is told off by the older man first for wasting time gathering limpets and then for cutting the wrong sort of weed, the juiceless serrated wrack that, he tells her, would still be lying unrotted in the stony earth by
autumn
. The men have waded out waist-deep onto the farther reaches of the Cora to cut the large redweed called
coirleach
(strapwrack),
and the women are ordered to follow as soon as the water-level has fallen a bit further. Once the tide turns the women start to carry the weed up the shore to the place where it will be spread to dry. Máiréad feels the sweat warming the brine running down her back and the salt burning her fingers, raw from the ropes of the basket. As the sea gains on the Cora the men also have to turn from cutting to carrying for fear that the weed already cut might be lost to the tide again, and the conflict sharpens. On each journey up the shore Pádraig is already emptying his basket at the
drying-place
while the Loideanaigh are just passing high water mark and Máireád is still at the foot of the beach. In the culmination of the race against the rising tide Máiréad goes after a bit of yellow-weed, and Pádraig's tolerance is exhausted:

Contemporary Aran attitudes to the part women played in the old shore-life are complicated. I have been told with a certain pitying pride by their offspring, now themselves elderly, that Aran women sometimes had to work at the seaweed until late in their pregnancies. (Whether any Araners were actually born on the shore I do not know, but from County Clare I have heard of a woman giving birth on a shore below cliffs, and the baby being hauled up the cliff face with one of the seaweed baskets while the mother continued cutting weed below so as not to loose the ebb.) In a
discussion
of the scene in the film
Man
of Aran
in which that
supporting
role, the Woman of Aran, is allowed her moment in heroic
silhouette
, bearing a monumental basket of weed, against a backdrop of raging elements, I have heard an Aran man flatly deny that women ever did such work. This retrospective chivalry is not the rule, however. Whereas Flaherty's film caused offence to islanders in the past, when the way of life it recreated was still too salt in the memory for nostalgia and the simplicities it heroized were seen as brands of poverty, today its stilted naturalism can be smiled at and its colossal energies relished. And in celebrating strength and
endurance
Flaherty was true to a persistent Aran value. Many feats of the
seandream,
the old people of the shore, are still remembered. For instance I have several times been told of a woman who could carry her backload of seaweed from the shore near Port Chonnla up a mile of rough boreen to her field on the skyline, without pausing for rest. In looking for a wife the Aran farmer of those days, whatever his other ideals of beauty, modesty and gentleness, had it in mind that she who could not carry a burden would be one. As a bitter old Aran saying puts it, “
Is
é
moladh
na
mná
óige,
a
droim
bheith
fliuch
,” “Praise of the young woman, that her back be wet”—wet, that is, with the brine from a basket of weed.