Stones of Aran (28 page)

Fishing (at least for gigantic fish, or if for the humble rock-fish then from gigantic heights) is clearly proper to the Man of Aran, but one cannot imagine him as concerned with
selling
fish, any more than as being priest-ridden or throwing stones at tourists or
keeping paying guests. Aran fishermen on the other hand had to make a living not only in fickle seas but in treacherous market conditions. The old wharf-house by Cill Mhuirbhigh pier, the centre of a thriving business fifteen years before Flaherty installed his darkroom in it, resists his mythifications with its own prosaic story of boom and crash.

The pier itself was built in 1893, when the Aran fisheries, which had dwindled almost to extinction in the post-Famine period, were being refounded by the Congested Districts Board. It has never given much satisfaction, as there is insufficient depth off it at low water for any but very small boats. As one shore-critic put it, “You don’t build a pier on dry land: that’s
my
policy
anyhow
!”—and indeed the structure does seem to hang back like a timid bather and go sidling along the shore unnecessarily before turning and marching into the chilly water, firmly, but not far.

Twenty years later, the Aran fishery was still based on currachs and small wooden sailing boats such as hookers and nobbies, and the big foreign steam drifters operating in local waters were able to snatch most of the catch from it. Also the Aran crews felt that they were not getting fair treatment from the buyers for what fish they could bring ashore. It was the Cill Mhuirbhigh men who first decided to form themselves into a co-operative society to market the catch. The parish priest of the day, the Reverend Murtagh Farragher, a keen modernizer, drew up the proposals for the
co-operative
, and the C.D. Board approved. Although the Board warily refrained from giving direct financial aid, it helped in other ways, and so far as I can discover provided the pier building which Flaherty later found so useful.

An Stór Dearg, the red store, as it is
called for some reason not now apparent, has a concrete floor with a central drainage channel, and behind it is a small concrete area, now broken up and obscured by plant life, with scupper-holes in its low concrete surround; both were for the wet and messy job of filleting and pickling fish in salt. Here the Aran Fisheries Co-operative Society began
business
in 1915, curing and dispatching the autumn catch of
mackerel
,
mainly to the American market. The crews still owned their boats and gear as before, while the Society under the management of the parish priest took care of the processing and marketing, and distributed the profits among the crews in proportion to the catches they had contributed. Canon Farragher was a vigorous and enthusiastic organizer but (at least in the hindsight of the C.D. Board’s first secretary, writing after the event), not a businessman:

During the First World War the foreign fishing boats were
absent
from Irish waters, catches were better, the American demand for pickled mackerel insatiable, and the fresh fish was fetching
abnormally
high prices in England. The Society spread to Cill Rónáin and nearly all the Aran crews joined it, though some took advantage of the high prices to make private deals with outside buyers. A cooper was permanently employed making barrels, and it is remembered that at the height of the boom the lines of barrels awaiting shipment from Cill Mhuirbhigh stretched all along the roadside around the west of the bay from the quay. The Board was gratified, but added a cautionary note to its report of 1917:

Instead, the Society was overreaching itself. To publicize the high prices it could obtain, it had got into the way of paying or
promising to pay the crews for their catches as they were brought in, upon estimates of the future proceeds. Then a large
consignment
to England had been delayed in transit and was condemned as unfit, so that the Society’s finances were already strained when, with the Armistice of November 1918, prices fell sharply.
Thousands
of barrels already consigned to America had to be sold for less than had already been promised to the crews, and it was found that the compensation claimable for this loss was quite
inadequate
. The fishermen would have settled for less, but barrels, salt, labour and freight had already been paid for. The Board was full of sympathy for what it termed the Society’s “gallant struggle” against the flood of debts, but could not avert the collapse which ensued after a few more loss-making seasons, among
recriminations
that are not quite stilled to this day—I have seen old men go pale with anger over the seventy-year-old question. Hundreds of barrels of fish were dumped in the bay (which I am told brought bad luck on it, so that mackerel never came there again), and the Society was finally liquidated in 1922.

After the war the British and Scottish drifters returned to these coasts, catches declined and the disturbed state of the country made marketing and transport precarious. Nearly all the
motorized
boats gave up entirely and the Aran fishery was once again left to the oar and the sail. Among the gloomy reports of
successive
years from the C.D. Board, the only positive note is in its last, before Independence brought its dissolution in 1923, and it once again concerns Cill Mhuirbhigh. Some boat-owners there had been issued with large-mesh nets and were being paid at a fixed price higher than the normal for the larger mackerel of their catch, which were carefully graded and packed “in accordance with the taste of the American buyers” and exported under the Board’s own “Shamrock” brandmark. The net profit on sales of £458 was £78—and that probably represents the last profitable activity in the old shed (apart from that of Flaherty’s dream factory ten years later), for the fisheries continued to decline after Independence and by
the time of the recovery in the Thirties the industry was largely confined to Cill Rónáin and Cill Éinne.

Ever more decrepit, An Stór Dearg has since served out a postscript to its history as depository for a clutter of buoys, ropes, nets and lobster-pots from a few currachs and small half-deckers. In
recent
years the last of these lobster-boats, the
Lively
Lady,
was part of the furniture of the bay, bobbing at her moorings just off the pier—and now (1982) she is gone, foundered in a heavy sea off Ros a’ Mhíl, and with her two of the “lads,” Mikey from Cill
Mhuirbhigh
and Brian from Gort na gCapall, their bodies never found. Coming across odd references to this little boat, identified or unidentified, as I leaf through parts of this book written over the last few years, is to feel time like the rush of salt water in the throat. Time, postscript to postscript to postscript. Time, salt postscript.

Because the bay of Port Mhuirbhigh curves so deeply into the flank of the island its waters are undisturbed by the currents that sweep along the coast, and so have deposited a beach of fine sand. Onshore winds have carried the sand inland to build dunes, now grassed over. The whole area around the bay is a
muirbheach,
a sea-plain of sandy pasturage; hence the name Port Mhuirbhigh, the bay of the
muirbheach.
There was once a little burial ground or
cill,
perhaps an ancient church site, close to the head of the bay, which in turn has been buried by the dunes so that its only
memorial
is the name of the nearby village and the surrounding townland, Cill Mhuirbhigh, anglicized as Kilmurvey. The
Kilmurvey
House farm, which almost monopolizes this
muirbheach,
is the best holding in the three islands.

Sand, then, sets the tone here. A beach the colour of the moon waxes from a poor crescent to a good half and wanes again twice
a day. Behind it is another crescent, a pale and ragged area of marramgrass hillocks between a foreshore path and the road going by to the village. Sometimes young visitors set up their tents in the snug hollows of this field, which for some reason is called The Vinegar, and the currachs of the Cill Mhuirbhigh men are kept on their stone stocks in the shelter of its walls. All around are the vivid green and unbroken acres grazed by the cattle of the “Big House”; in contrast, the background of hill-slopes to the
south-east
and south-west is grey and lined with walls.

All the roads and tracks of this area run to or loiter by the beach. The stony coastline itself seems to holiday here and unwind from its severities. Sunbathers and sandcastle-builders dispel the old
equation
of the shore with labour and its new one with loneliness, at least for those short and radiant times in which the angle of a gull’s white wing against the unstable Atlantic blue defines high
summer
in Aran. At such hours even the pulse of the breaking waves, the universal constant of all shores, never quite stilled, becomes a whisper, a merely subliminal reminiscence of storm, of winter.

Winter is defined by a bird here too, a solitary great northern diver that comes with falling temperatures from the far north to haunt the bay, and lives for months out there on the heaving
waters
, rising and falling in time to the crash of waves on the beach, a dark, secretive thing that keeps its distances and refuses one a view, slipping silently under the surface if one approaches the
water
’s
edge and reappearing after a long interval farther off, half lost in the poor light. One gives up peering, identifying, and wanders along the heavy ever-repeated landfall of the sea. At this season the resistant depths of colour on land, sea and sky slow down the pace of perception to that of contemplation. If a gleam from the low sun comes across to catch the countless overlapping marks on the sand, then idleness and the absence of humankind can tempt one into the error of thinking: “Signatures of all things I am here to read.” Each fallen wave, for instance, rushes up the strand with a million urgently typing fingers, and then at the moment between writing and erasing subscribes itself in a negligent cursive across
the whole breadth of the page. Signatures and counter-signatures accumulate, confuse, obliterate. Seabirds put down their names in cuneiform, lugworms excrete their humble marks. And then come my boots to add the stamp of authenticity, not of the endless process of the beach which needs no authentification from
anybody
, but of my witnessing of it.

Is this an image of the work I have dreamed of, that book—with which the present book has a certain flirtatious but respectful relationship—preliminary to the taking of an all-encompassing stride? A muddled draft of it perhaps, or more usefully a
demonstration
of its impossibility; for the multitudinous, encyclopaedic inscription of all passing reality upon a yard of ground is
ultimately
self-effacing. But no; for if the book like the beach lies open to all that befalls it, welcomes whatever heterogeneous
material
is washed up or blown in, then must begin the magic
transubstantiation
of all this intractable stuff into the person fit to make the step. A work of many generations, I wonder? Let a few almost frivolous examples of the countless marks that have been
impressed
temporarily on this particular beach and more lastingly upon myself demonstrate how nearly overwhelming is even my limited and ill-defined project.

In the spring of 1975 almost the entire area of sand between high water mark and the foot of the dunes rather suddenly filled up with low clumps of a silvery-leaved plant never recorded in Árainn before, the frosted orache. This is in general rare on
Ireland
’s western coasts, though commoner on the east, but I heard later that it had turned up at Roundstone in Connemara the
previous
year, and perhaps a drift of its seeds had come across the channel from there. This insemination has probably not added permanently to the Aran flora, for year by year since then its
summer
growth has been thinner and thinner, and now it is difficult to find a single specimen. In my capacity as self-appointed
resident
scientific busybody I kept the botanical authorities informed, and now I read in D.A. Webb’s almost-but-of-course-not-quite definitive “Flora of the Aran Islands,” published in 1980:

The Latinism was new to me; I am tempted to adopt it as a motto.

Similarly, on the 27th August 1977, I witnessed the presence of a small bird running to and fro and pecking at the margins of
retreating
waves, a slim, stilt-legged, long-beaked wader very like a common sandpiper but with a reddish underside. Unlike the other shorebirds that feed in mixed flocks here from the autumn onwards, and which take flight as one approaches, circle round over the sea and re-alight behind one, this elegant little oddity stayed there, busy and preoccupied, until it was almost under my feet. Later the reference books told me it was a buff-breasted
sandpiper
, a vagrant from America recorded less than a dozen times in Ireland, and well known as an unusually tame bird—though “tame” is hardly the word for a creature to whom human beings are of no more concern than any other solid obstacle in its way. I referred this observation to higher authorities too, and was
informed
that a body called the Rare Birds Committee was “sitting on it” and might well accept it as an authentic record, but I never heard the outcome of their incubations. In fact I would say to them “
Diffide
Robinson!,” for my certainty about the
identification
is of the sort oddly called a “moral certainty,” which seems to be inferior to a factual one. (For instance, Professor Webb once found on Inis Oírr a certain plant, a little stonecrop called
Sedum
dasyphyllum
;
at least, that is what the specimen he brought away with him turned out to be. The discovery was unusual enough to demand confirmation, but although he, his acolytes and rivals have like myself diligently searched the place, that particular stonecrop has not been refound. And although he is still “morally certain” about it, he has excluded it from his Aran
Flora.
)

What else? The dolphins, forty or fifty of them, did indeed dance in the bay one year, just as I described to the lightkeeper who saw them praying on the beach. I am told that their splashy
leapings are more practical than expressive, and that they were probably rounding up a shoal of fish; also that they were of the species known prosaically as the bottle-nosed dolphin, from their elongated snouts. Aran does not distinguish between the various dolphins and the smaller porpoises, lumping them all together as
muca
mara,
sea-pigs, a libellous name for such lithe hydrobats. The expanding ring-waves made by that circus troupe can hardly have shifted a grain of sand on the shore, and I can include
dolphins
in this catalogue of beach-marks only on the strength of those fanciful, prayerful, kneeprints.

A last impression: a stumpy-legged dog, white with brown blotches, mainly gundog but “with a bit of a seal in him”
according
to his owner; our adopted pet, Oscar, dearly loved and sadly missed as the death-notices put it. I used to throw a ball for him on the strand, a game that almost killed the neglected creature with delight. If I stood forgetful with the ball in my hand, lost in my musings over the riddles propounded by the sea to the sand, he would wait patiently at my feet, looking up, and very delicately place a paw on my toe to recall me. Then I would glance down and catch him saying, “There are just two ways, or perhaps three, in which you can hope to give supreme pleasure to another living being. You can go home and make love to her who loves you, or you can throw that ball for your dog. This is the time for the
second
alternative, for the third is to go on trying to perfect your book, which I do not believe you have it in you to do.”

No, dogs do not speak. The sea does not riddle, dolphins do not pray, the vagrant bird neither trusts nor distrusts Robinson, waves never sign anything; what I myself witness is my own
forgery
. One should forego these overluxuriant metaphors that covertly impute a desire of communication to non-human reality. We ourselves are the only source of meaning, at least on this little beach of the Universe. These inscriptions that we insist on finding on every stone, every sand-grain, are in our own hand. People who write letters to themselves are generally regarded as pathetic, but such is the human condition. We are writing a work so vast, so
multivocal, so driven asunder by its project of becoming
coextensive
with reality, that when we come across scattered phrases of it we fail to recognize them as our own.