CHAPTER THREE

THE RED-HAIRED GIRL ON THE BOG

 “So, you were out the Old Bog Road, were you?”  Frank Kelly asked.  “And did you meet the red-haired girl?”

                His own hair was more silver than sand, his eyes more water than sky, but my friend seemed otherwise no older than when I first wandered into steep and steepled Clifden two decades past.  Back then, Frank had owned a pub on the square and a house around the corner.  Now he hosted a B&B above the ruined castle overlooking Mannin Bay.  Sky Cottage’s white-curtained breakfast room faced America, but the sun flooded nevertheless in each morning as I drank my strong sweet tea. 

            “The red-haired girl?” 

                “Ah, no, of course, but you wouldn’t have met her.  You’d have to be a lad, and probably in a pub—but then you had better watch out.”

                Is there no such thing as a direct conversation in Ireland?  Never mind your desire to move on to a new place or a new subject, your need to shoot like an arrow to some important engagement.  An old joke claims the Irish never answer a question except with another question.  “Never answer a question with another question?  Now whoever would have told you that?”  It would not be funny were it not so true, just as it is true that Irish has no words for our simple “yes” or “no.”  Indirection is an Irish way of life.

                It was early fall.  Everyone told me how dreadful the summer had been: sheets of rain, the sky blanketed in gloom, the hay barely saved.  But it had been bright for a week.  The previous day, I had driven down the coast, car-dancing to Niamh Parsons and the Loose Connection, windows open so to the sea air.  Orange montbretias and butter-yellow gorse waved as I sped along the yellow strand at Ballyconneely.  Past Roundstone I turned left, onto a road marked only as a faint line on the map. 

                On one of my first return trips to Ireland in the 1970’s, when I felt smugly and confidently post-tourist, I had turned down that road, imagining it the perfect shortcut from Carna to Clifden.  Within moments I regretted my decision, for I was on an oddly endless road across an eerily desolate bog.  It reminded me uncomfortably of the time I had turned off, one moonless night near Gort, onto a bog-cutters’ road that led into an axle-high swamp from which I had to drive out three miles—in reverse, as there was no way to turn on the narrow track.  I had learned to be wary of bog roads.

                But this road was paved, though roughly so.  It took only half an hour to get to Clifden, but I was on edge the whole time.  It was not just fear of sinking into a bog miles distant from help that kept my hands fisted around the steering wheel.  There is an unshakeable feeling of airy remoteness—one I have since grown to love—about the Old Bog Road.  You pass nothing, not boreen nor fence nor cottage, along its length.  Well, that’s not quite true, there are those ruined stone foundations near the bog’s edge, the remains of Marconi’s telegraph station.  And a pile of rocks that was once, perhaps, a midway cottage.  Other than that, all you see is quaking bog and shallow lakes and jutting granite, and hoodie crows soaring above wandering sheep.  And wind, the unceasing wind, bending the bog grass, ruffling the gray water. 

                When I reached it, tiny Clifden seemed a cramped crowded place. Everything jangled and clattered around me, while Roundstone Bog seemed serene and distant.  Since then, I have made it a point to travel the Old Bog Road whenever I visit Connemara.  Hoping to bring home some of its magic, I search for paintings and photographs of the bog in Connemara shops.  But I have never found a picture that captures it, perhaps because the bog’s most salient feature is invisible.  What draws me there is silence: “Nothing breaks the silence in a Roundstone bog,” says poet Joan McBreen, “but a curlew's cry caught in the wind.”  Silence draws me there, and the solitude that blows through one on even the stillest days.  I have known that silence, that intense solitude, in only one other setting.  On the Alaskan tundra, no tree nor shrub interrupts the eye as it sweeps across the land.  There on the tundra, as on the bog, I sense beneath my feet a separate and discrete world, both museum and mausoleum of the vegetative kingdom.  Growth and death, death and growth, interlaced and intertwined.  On the tundra, I have felt the same unmeasured antiquity as in Connemara.

                Connemara: the wildest place in Connacht, the most westerly of Ireland’s five traditional provinces.  The province of wisdom.  The syllable that begins both names is etymologically related to ken, the Anglo-Saxon word meaning “to know.”  To know is to remember deeply; to remember deeply is to be wise.  When the English drove the Gaelic-speaking Irish “to hell or Connacht,” they banished those they did not kill into the province of memory.  Even today, the old ways—the Irish language, ancient customs, mythic characters and narratives—are still alive in Connacht, and most especially in Connemara.  Evans-Wertz, the early folklorist who stalked Coole’s Seven Woods with Yeats in hot pursuit of fairies, found Connemara the most Irish of places.  “If anyone would know Ireland, let him wander amid the fairy dells of gentle Connemara.  When there are dark days and stormy nights, let him sit beside a blazing fire of fragrant peat in a peasant’s straw-thatched cottage listening to tales of Ireland’s golden age—tales of gods, of heroes, of ghosts, and of fairy-folk.  If he will do these things, he will know Ireland, and why its people believe in fairies.”

                  I love Connemara in a way I love few places.  I have never lived there, only visited, more times than I can count.  Almost every time I go to Ireland, I fly like an arrow to Connemara, whose changeful terrain moves me in a way I have rarely felt, and never so intensely.  There is a curve on the road from Galway City, a few miles out of Oughterard, where the Maamturk Mountains suddenly heave into sight.  At that moment, predictably, my throat tightens as I sense the boundary of Connemara.  Coming from Mayo, on the northern road, I have not detected a similarly precise point of entry.  But somewhere before Leanane on Killary Harbour, when the sun begins to play shadow tricks upon the Partry Mountains, I realize that I have passed into another state of consciousness, that an unseen veil between myself and living nature has disappeared.  I do not penetrate the veil, nor tear it as I pass through; it simply drifts away like smoke.

                I have had the same sensation where France yields to Celtic Brittany, near the mythic forest where Merlin is trapped, still alive, inside a tree by the spell of his fairy mistress Vivienne.  In both places, music suddenly fills me: thin piercing notes that make me shiver with inexpressible longing.  Yeats describes this sound-that-is-no-sound in “The Host of the Air”:

                He heard, far up and away

                A piper, piping away,

                And never was piping so sad,

                And never was piping so gay.

The silvery strains call to mind the etymology of our word “enchantment,” for such music is said to signal the presence of fairy folk.  The 14th century author of the Voyage of Tadgh described it as “plaintive and matchless,” while Saint Patrick found its match only in heaven, though he objected to the “fairy twang,” an elusive unsettling discord.  “Planxty” is the word coined by the great harper Turlough O’Carolan to describe such music’s unforgettable beauty unfettered by conventional cadences or scales.  O’Carolan owed his genius to the fairies, for he was but an ordinary minstrel until, falling asleep on a rath, he dreamed his way to the heart of music.  O’Carolan’s “Farewell to Music,” blown by fairy breath through Irish pipes—that is how Connemara sounds to me.

                Some of my Irish friends would shrug, hearing this, and offer that it is well known the Gentry make themselves felt in this fashion.  Some would explain a bit impatiently that, as my ancestors were Mayo people, of course I respond to the West with such extreme emotion.  Others would pour me another cup of tea, laugh gently, change the subject.  They may have these mystic encounters with the land, but they certainly don’t talk about them.  No matter.  I know I have heard elusive inaudible music singing forth from land that is wild but nevertheless deeply known by humanity.  For rituals have been performed in Connemara, continuously, for thousands of years.  The same ritual, in the same place, year upon year upon year, creating what Christopher Bamford calls “a holy intimacy of human, natural and divine.”  In Connemara human consciousness has met the land’s consciousness—what my ancestors called the goddess—so consistently that she reveals herself even to the outsider, even to the occasional visitor.

                Old rites and folkways that rivet people to place have been preserved in Connemara with an almost unbelievable determination, for as the proverb says, Na dein nos angus na bris nos, “Neither make nor break a custom.”  This conservatism extended to the use of land.  There are few bogs so unspoiled in all Ireland, indeed in all of Europe, as that bisected by the Old Bog Road.  For years it had no name; it was just “the bog” to residents of the area, but recently it has worn the name of Roundstone Bog for its proximity to that village.  Except for Marconi’s telegraph site, and perhaps that ruined midway cottage, the bog has been empty of human occupation since it began to form some 10,000 years ago.  It begins at the Roundstone turnoff and extends for twenty-five square miles.  Rush and sedge and cottongrass purl into tussocks in a marsh dotted with hundreds of small surface ponds.   Granite outcroppings rise from deep rich peat that Seamus Heaney calls “black butter melting and opening underfoot.”  Here and there, a dark slice shows where someone has cut turf for winter fires.  Squads of thin-legged long-haired sheep, branded with fluorescent paint, graze lazily.  Above the bog rise steep quartzite mountains called the Twelve Bens—from the Irish word for a pointed peak, sometimes anglicized as the Twelve Pins—on whose gray-blue slopes the sun plays hopscotch with the clouds.

                Without a local guide to point out the hidden pathways used by generations of shepherds and turf-cutters, or feet tiny enough to tread the otter trails between the shallow lakes, hiking offroad is difficult.  Wellingtons would be imperative for walking on the watery bogland, but footprints might leave permanent damage.  There is a better way, the one I used that bright fall day.  Tracing, like the clattering sheep, the maze of pink granite outcroppings brought me deep into the bog.  Light kaleidoscoped the heathery mountains from southern Benlettery, the wet-sided peak, north to Muckanaght, “naked Macha,” named for the goddess whose hoodie crows flew around me like gray ghosts.  It was peaceful beyond expression.  I drank in the bog’s rich loamy scent and the sudden sharp hits of salt from the nearby sea.  Crows and merlins calling in the wind, and the soft moan of the wind itself, mixed with an occasional burst of bleating and, every quarter hour or so, the dull growl of a car on the distant road. 

                I had seen no red-haired girls at all.

                “So,” I asked Frank, “pubs and young men—where do I go to take lessons?”

                “Oh,” he grinned.  “Oh, you!”  And then he told me the story.

                Once a year or so, a woman arrives in town, walking down the gentle slope from the Old Bog Road.  A green scarf covers her head, a green shawl crosses tightly over her chest.  She carries no satchel, so it seems she has not travelled far.  It is a night when a ceili is planned, or a wedding or funeral, so she can mingle in a throng of strangers.  She wants strangers around her, but she also wants to be noticed.  It suits her purpose to be noticed. 

                It is evening, and the celebrants (or are they mourners?) have gathered indoors, probably in a pub.  The fiddlers have finished a set, and someone begins to intone a lively sean nos melody, the ornate unaccompanied song of the west.  The red-haired girl presses towards the center of the crowd, where she throws back her head, opens her full lips in an ecstatic breath, and begins to dance.  She dances the old way, Connemara-style, the way the Irish danced before anxious priests forbade the movement of anything but the feet.  Her feet flash, right enough.  But her shoulders also sway, her breasts heave, her arms rise lightly from her sides.  Her hips swing to the quick tempo.  As her green scarf slips to her neck, red hair blazes out around her milk-pale face.

                Soon everyone is dancing.  She has no lack of partners, the red-haired girl.  She dances into the night with one and then another of the young men, finally pairing up with the most attractive.  He might be a strapping black-haired fisherman, or a short tough farmer, or a gray-eyed poet.  They disappear into the night.  Bystanders hear her murmur a promise that she will take him to her house, up on the Old Bog Road.

                 She takes him to her house, indeed, that halfway place other travelers see as a ruin but which her young man perceives as a cozy firelit cottage.  She has her way with him, and he with her, until both are sated.  After that night the young man is never seen again for, like some perverse Brigadoon, the cottage of the red-haired girl disappears in morning mist, leaving only that shattered pile of rocks at the halfway curve of the Old Bog Road.  Like smoke, the red-haired girl too disappears, until the next time she awakens to the call of her desire.

                She has no name, the red-haired girl on the bog, but she is easy enough to identify, for old legends declare that anything red-and-white is fairy-born.  White dogs with russet ears, white cats with brindle stripes, liver-and-white cows, roan pinto horses, all such creatures bring the magic and threat of fairy to our world.  Her dancing partners should have recognized their danger, for red-haired girls with milky skin—and anyone resembling them, even non-redheads wearing red petticoats—are omens of ill fortune, Lady Wilde informs us.  Westropp records the belief that the mere glance of a red-haired girl can kill a horse, much less a man.  But, in thrall to her otherworldly beauty and without thought of safety, lovers follow the red-haired girl, the Leanan Sidhe, the beautiful fairy mistress.

                She leads her fated lovers to Tir na n’Og, a paradise island in the western ocean where no one ever ages, sickens or dies.  Dreamy days are passed in eating and drinking, dancing and making love and, when those pleasures dim, fighting fairy wars where no one is ever injured.  The landscape is as beautiful as its people: castles of silver and gold rise from rounded hills covered, not with spiky gorse, but with trees that both flower and bear fruit at once.  “Though the plain of Ireland is fair to see, it is like a desert once you know the Great Plain,” the fairy king Midir once told a mortal woman he was intent upon seducing.  Yeats called it “an Eden out of time and out of space,” while his contemporary, the Galway piper Steven Ruan, described it as “a place of delights where music, singing, and dancing, and feasting are continually enjoyed; and its inhabitants are all about us, as numerous as the blades of grass.” 

                Those who travel to Tir na n’Og are referred to, not as dead, but as “taken”; they are said to have gone, not to the grave, but “away.”  Small, common words for a vast, uncommon experience.  Save for certain places and times, fairyland is invisible to and inaccessible from our world.  The red-haired girl lives there with others of her kind, the sidhe  or Tuatha de Danaan, the “people of the goddess Danu.” This race is said to have ruled Ireland until defeat at the hands of the Formorians, a myth that may encode displacement of the de Danaans’ worshipers—early Celts or pre-Celtic people—several thousand years ago by an invading culture.  Just as their people did not go away but were absorbed into the conquering race, the de Danaan divinities remained in Ireland, omnipresent but invisible.                  Within Ireland’s hills and beneath its lakes, these diminished gods still lead their charmed and charming lives.  Shamanic peoples like the Australians, whose Dreamtime bears a striking resemblance to fairyland, readily recognize such parallel universes.  As Joseph Campbell said, “The idea of a sacred space where the walls and laws of the temporal world dissolve to reveal wonder is apparently as old as the human race.”  But the idea does not require any spiritual belief.  A staple of science fiction and television space operas, alternative worlds can be derived from contemporary physics: the many-worlds hypothesis, in which probability curves collapse, each reality continuing on its separate course; or superstring theory, in which unimaginable worlds are hidden in the folds of a ten-dimensional universe.  Fairyland is like that: intangible but quite real; out of sight, under the hill, on the wind; nearby, just not right here.

                In 1869, Thomas Huxley coined the word “agnostic,” to describe his belief that divinity is utterly beyond our understanding.  People nowadays tend to mix up “agnostic” with “atheistic,” but Huxley did not necessarily disbelieve in god; he just did not think us capable of knowing much about the subject.  In the way Huxley was agnostic about god, I am agnostic about fairies.  I cannot agree with the old Sligo man who told Yeats firmly, “No matter what one doubts, one never doubts the fairies, for they stand to reason.”  Neither can I dismiss them as mere fiction, projected archetypes, or mislabeled history.  For although I have never met anyone, red-haired or not, whom I suspected of being one of Them, I have had many peculiar experiences at sidhe-haunted places in Ireland for which the Fairy Hypothesis is as good an explanation as any I have heard.

                When I was younger and more reckless, I deliberately sought the sidhe.  Inspired by Yeats, I yearned for places “where enchanted eyes/Have seen immortal, mild, proud shadows walk,” where “beings happier than men/Moved round me in the shadows.”  That first time over, after unpacking my volumes of Yeats and Lady Gregory at Geoghan’s, I began inquiring in the pub after the local fairies—calling them, as I remember, by that very name.  One of the patrons snorted knowingly.  “Ah,” he said, pausing to take a long drink of porter, “you’d be interested in the Good People then?” I leaned forward eagerly, failing to notice his correction of my nomenclature.  The man waved his arm at bright-faced Grainne.  “Bring her another Smithwick’s, she’ll be seeing Them soon enough, so.”   

                The unsubtle codding stung.  I had not, after all, asked for directions to the wee shoemaker’s shop, the one with with the little red cap and the pot o’ gold.  I had asked a serious question about local tradition, and I did not expect such resistance and evasion.  Dermot MacManus, compiling Connacht fairy lore in the 1950’s, elicited the same response:  “They are desperately shy of strangers or of any who might scoff and so they keep these things among themselves as closely as if they were not.”  There are limits to what one talks about with strangers, even those who live above the speaker’s favorite pub.  Outsiders have often derided the Irish as soft-headed mystics; how could anyone be sure I would not do the same? 

                But something was at work besides suspicion of strangers.  With the wisdom of years, I now understand how inappropriate was my question.  Ireland, like many traditional cultures, had fierce taboos against speaking too boldly of powerful beings, something I should have realized from my Alaskan upbringing.  During the summer, Athabascan people never mentioned—much less told stories about—the fur people; such discussion was saved for wintertime, when bears were safely asleep and would not overhear humans gossiping about them.  Similarly, the Irish did not chatter recklessly about their fairy neighbors.  When it was necessary (or irresistible) to mention the sidhe, flattering euphemisms were employed: the Good Folk, the Gentry, or simply Them.  Common words hiding uncommon reality.

                Chastened by my non-informant at Geoghan’s, I went back to my books and my rambles.  The west of Ireland is dotted with fairy sites, odd bits of bog and forest not visibly different from the next bit of bog or forest but with a certain ineffable quality that both attracts and repels.  Even with a precise map, much less the fragments of oral history and folklore that were my guides, such places are hard to locate, for normal senses fail to perceive them.  Joseph Campbell described fairyland as a warp in the space-time continuum:  “One seems to be walking a straight line, but actually is curving past an invisible fairy hill of glass, which is right there, but hidden.”  But fairy leaves its traces.  A road shimmers slightly, a tree pulses, a rock grows too sharply focussed.  Often there is glassy wall upon which the scenery seems painted, beyond which everything becomes much more vivid, as though this world is a projected image of that other.  Or a spikiness, like nettles surrounding an old ruin, a warning written in the aspect of land. 

                Celtic shaman Tom Cowan calls taboo the twin of speech.  As I continued my explorations, even hints and implications began to seem the boldest chatter.  Hearing the mystery nested between words,  I became unwilling to speak of what I had experienced.  Even now, writing here, I find myself hesitant.  What, I ask myself, makes me so?  Fear of seeming a soft-headed Irishwoman?  Not at all.  I have often been urged by accepting, even credulous, friends to speak of these matters, but even then I feel a crushing sense of unease.  The taboos that surround fairy have come to seem appropriate.  Each word here is mined from cavernous silence, every sentence forged from the fragments of dozens of discarded others.  As Yeats said,

                More I may not write of, for they that cleave

                The waters of sleep can make a chattering tongue

                Heavy like stone, their wisdom being half silence.

                In half-silence lives the ineffable.  Anyone who has tried to write a love poem knows how far short words can fall.  Fairyland is like love; tangled in words, fairy encounters seem either flat and dry, or exaggerated, unreal, hallucinatory.  I keep extensive journals and have a steel-trap memory, but I sometimes doubt my own experience.  Did I really aim a camera at a fairy spot that broke my light meter, which repaired itself afterwards?  Did I really step on a Stray Sod and wander for hours in a tiny clearing, unable to find my way past a sudden wall of nettles?  Are there places that have whispered their names to me?  Did I visit a world long past?  Is there a crack in time through which I have edged?  Well, yes.  Yes, but...

                I came to Ireland imagining fairyland a metaphor or a mythic well of sweet poetic imagery.  What I found is that fairy—or whatever it is, that something truly Other into which I have stepped in forest and on bog, at holy wells and within stone circles—is real, and poetry the clearest way to describe its wild beauty and dangerous power.  But I am not writing a poem here.  To tell otherwise of fairyland is to enter a thicket more prickly than gorse.  Is truth what is impaled, or what escapes?  The latter, I suspect.

                Despite these hesitations, I will tell you how something precious went “away.”  The cause of such disappearances is said to be the “fairy blast,” an invisible inaudible tornado that tears things from their moorings in time and place and sets them down far away in either dimension.  Here one moment, gone the next.  Sometimes these kidnapped items reappear, hours or days or even years after their disappearance.  Sometimes they never reappear, or come back so far away that no one recognizes their return.  According to old lore, butter is a favorite target, so much so that Lady Gregory devoted an entire chapter to its protection; to keep the sidhe from this prize, rural Irish women placed mullein leaves or holy water in their churns.  Butter itself is not the fairies’ goal; they want its foyson, its wholesome goodness, which they drain away, leaving the physical ghost of the butter behind.  The Gentry steal milk too, making us spill it and then growing angry if we cry—hence the still-common proverb—as they lap its foyson away.  Fairy food may tempt the tastebuds, but it never satisfies as does our own grosser food.

                Some thefts are unmotivated, flat-out fairy mischief.  MacManus recorded a particularly entertaining—to reader, not to victim—incident that occurred in 1947.  One summer day, the young artist Miss E.M. traveled by bicycle to Roundstone Bog, intending to paint the famously picturesque Bens.  Locating a hillock that promised a good vista, she dismounted and carried her canvas up its slope, where she placed it on the ground before descending for her paints.  In her brief absence, the canvas disappeared.  It was a still day with no wind.  Even had it been breezy, a sailing white square would have been clearly visible against the dull gray-green bog.  But the canvas was nowhere to be seen.  Gone, vanished, poof!   

                “Miss E.M. is an intelligent, sensible girl with a well-balanced mind,” MacManus assures us, “and it was the outrage to all logic and common sense which irritated her as much as the waste of her time and energies.”  Outrage or not, the canvas was gone.  After a fruitless search, Miss E.M. gave up and ate her lunch, then casually glanced up at the hillock.  There lay the canvas, exactly where she had left it, gleaming whitely in the sun.  Miss E.M. later learned her chosen worksite was—are you at all surprised?—a fairy hill.

                My story is something like Miss E.M.’s, with one important exception.  I had not the excuse of ignorance, for I knew what I was doing:  I went to a famous sidhe-haunted spot wearing a magnificent silver-and-turquoise necklace, one that would tempt a New York mugger, much less a fairy.  The necklace itself had a peculiar history.  Years earlier, a Navaho shaman had asked an Irish visitor to deliver it to Ireland, then walked away without revealing the intended recipient.  The woman passed on the necklace to a stranger in a Connacht pub, offering no reason for the sudden gift.  That man in turn gave it to me, another virtual stranger.  Fascinated with its story and taken with its beautiful workmanship, I wore the necklace constantly, often reaching up to touch the long silver arrow that pressed into my throat.

                The day in question, I decided to visit a haunted area in Connacht, one long familiar to me and mentioned in many folklore texts.  On earlier expeditions, I had felt a somber watchfulness about the place.  When I call it to mind, I remember an encounter with a bowhead in Prince William Sound.  Twice as long as our boat, powerful enough to capsize us with a flip of its flukes, the whale surfaced nearby and lay for a quarter-hour, like a huge barnacled waterbed, staring at us.  Gazing steadily into its one visible eye, I wondered how this vast creature assessed us tiny humans.  Like the calm alien intelligence of the bowhead, that is how the fairy place felt to me.  Lawrence Durrell seems to speak of such assessing invisible eyes when he says that all landscapes ask the same question:  “I am watching you—are you watching yourself in me?”  In Ireland’s fairy places, I have been watched and have watched myself being watched.

                That day I put on the shaman’s necklace and hiked over to the fairy place.  In retrospect, I shake my head at my behavior.  Whatever was I doing, wearing an object of power from another land into a place that opens onto fairy?  Worse, I was not alone; for no other reason than to show off my knowledge of the countryside, I brought along a curious companion who made me uneasy by chattering about fairy apparitions as we walked.  Light and shadow dappled the ground as we neared the boundary.  Nervously, I touched the silver arrow at my throat.  The fairy spot, when we reached it, seemed oddly ordinary, beautiful in a conventional and earthly way, not at all conscious and alive.  We chatted a bit, walked about a bit, then turned to go. 

                Everything seemed suddenly awry.  I put my hand to my neck.  “My necklace.”  I said.  “It’s gone.” 

                The necklace was heavy; its absence was striking; it could not have fallen to the ground without catching on my clothing.  Yet it was gone.  Vanished, poof!  I reasoned that, as we had not moved since I last touched it, the necklace must have fallen near my feet.  Its silver should be shining up from the dull earth.  But a methodical search turned up nothing.  I choked out a feeble joke about 21st century dissertations on ancient trade routes between the Navaho and the Irish.  We retraced our steps slowly, scouring the ground with hands and eyes.  Nothing.

                Days passed.  Unable to resign myself to the loss, I returned to the scene of the snatching.  I am, like Miss E.M., a intelligent, sensible girl with a well-balanced mind; it was the outrage to all logic and common sense that irritated me as much as the loss of my necklace.  Surely we had not searched with sufficient care.  Surely a bit of leaf had covered it, or a shadow, or a slanting slate.  Surely there was another explanation for the disappearance of my necklace than the lust of Irish fairies for Navaho silver.

                Approaching the fairy spot, I walked slowly, studying the ground.  Walking that way, space becomes distorted.  Everything seems more complex, larger somehow, than when you walk swiftly, arms swinging, eyes forward.  I saw tiny golden flowers not earlier in bloom.  The strange bulbous spikes of seeding ivy.  Oddly geometrical arrangements of stones like undecipherable ogham.  My senses began to shift, as they had not on the earlier visit.  Plants, rocks, water, leaves, a feather—all seemed deeper, more complex.  Things wavered, quivered, came alive.  Outside the perimeter, the world as we know it.  Within its boundaries, light both more slanted and more direct, glowing from the undersides of objects, coming from all directions at once.

                I searched carefully, with no happier results than before.  The necklace remained “away.”  Resigning myself to the loss, I sat on the ground and fell into what I can only describe as a silent conversation with the place, which answered in a tender breeze.  What did we talk about?  The past, the present, the future.  Other things as well, things I cannot now recall.  I do remember how the conversation ended: I asked whether there were really fairies there.

A great burst of wind beat against me, so sharply that I shut my eyes. Something hit my cheek.  The wind stopped.  I opened my eyes.  A nut lay in my lap—a hazel nut.  I looked around: there were no hazel trees in sight.

                Do even Irish fairies answer questions with other questions?  My pocket was full of Irish coins, for I rarely walk in fairy places without silver for an offering.  I dug a hole and slipped in a few punts.  I had virtually forgotten about the necklace, so bewildered was I by the incomprehensible reply—had it been one?—to my silent question.  Baffled and inexplicably grateful, enchanted by the consciousness the place once again emanated, I hiked away, in a different direction than previously.

                Far from the path we took on necklace-snatching-day, something glinted on the ground.  And there it was:  my necklace, laid out in an exact circle as though on display on a jeweler’s counter.  I looked down uncertainly.  If it had been “away,” perhaps it did not want to come back.  Finally I took some coins from my pocket, thanked the Good People for returning my jewelry, offered the punts in trade, and reclaimed the Navaho necklace.  It lies here on my desk as I write.  No scratches or other marks betray the truth of its sojourn; if its foyson has been taken, I cannot detect the loss.  But if it remains the same, I have changed:  I feel a curious lack of attachment to the necklace, which seems to have a will and a life of its own.  I wonder if it plans to travel southwest again, bringing home a message from the Irish fairies, or if it will remain yet awhile in the midwest. For now, it rests with me as a reminder of the mysteries.  If only I could appreciate everything and everyone in my life with the same clarity of affection.

                I hear the rustle of doubt from invisible readers.  Surely there is some simple scientific explanation of how a shaman’s necklace disappeared in a haunted spot, only to turn up somewhere else!  Perhaps the clasp loosened.  Okay, then.  And maybe I leaned forward, so that the necklace neatly avoided catching in my clothing.  Possible, although I do not remember leaning, nor the release of the weight from my neck.  Then, perhaps, the force of its fall drove the necklace into groundcover, hiding it from sight.  Hmnn: not very probable, as the groundcover was not deep, but again, possible.  Then an animal or a bird carried it in mouth or paw to the place I found it and dropped the necklace, which fell into a perfect circle.  Yes, well, I suppose...

                Or perhaps it was just “away.”

                I have, to my knowledge, never been “away,” despite frequent visits to fairy-haunted places.  Sometimes I come back later than planned, but never with a confused sense of lost time.  Most importantly, I have never seen those tall gracious beings who move with a dancing grace that people profess to encounter when “away.”  For that matter, I have never met any of Ireland’s other supernatural races, either—not wee folk like the drunken cluricaun or the shoe-making leprechaun, nor hybrid beings like the devilish pooka-horse or the silkies who live like seals on coastal rocks.  Belief in such creatures runs parallel to belief in fairies; Yeats wrote of a woman who assured him that hell was a fiction, “but there are fairies and little leprechauns and water-horses and fallen angels.”  Non-fairy races live on the borders of fairy, where we can bump into them without being “taken.”  But little leprechauns, water-horses and fallen angels do not reside in Tir na n’Og, and they do not stage raids on our world for loot.

                 Butter and unpainted canvasses are not the fairies’ only targets; people of certain categories are at serious risk of kidnapping.  Wetnurses and midwives are frequently “taken,” because the sidhe do not practice those professions.  Those with exceptional hand-eye coordination (dart champions, beware!) are drafted for wars against the next mound over.  Poets are held captive awhile, then freed to spread the fame of fairy.  Musicians of genius are “taken” to play for the endless fairy dances; the Irish equivalent of a Grammy is that one day you up and disappear.  When the sidhe have no further use for you, back you come—to find find everything changed utterly, for centuries pass while you fiddle those fairy tunes.  Although the released (nay, discarded) servant misses the comfort of a familiar world, the sidhe do provide recompense for work well done.  Musicians are given memorable tunes like the famous air “Danny Boy,” which originated in fairy, and midwives endowed with prophecy or healing.  Poets receive an equivocal gift, a fabulous eloquence that burns through them until it snuffs their lives; the price of fairy inspiration is expiration.  

                Fairies also steal humans simply because they find us desirable.  Babies are especially at risk, for fairies are born as wizened little raisinettes, not plump pretty infants like our own.  One story of how Biddy Early got her magic blue bottle involves her providing cover for a fairy kidnapping, wherein a changeling was substituted for a human babe.  But any beloved person, of any age, is in danger of being “taken.”  Utterly amoral, fairies feel no compunction about stealing whomever—married or single, young or old, male or female—they find appealing.  For this reason, it is good to be chary of tender gestures; I never heard my grandfather speak my grandmother’s first name aloud, an omission meant to thwart the eavesdropping sidhe.

                Although infatuated fairies kidnap humans of both sexes, men are disproportionately at risk.  While a few randy fairy kings—like Finvarra of Clare who “loves the mortal women best,” according to Lady Wilde—prefer plain-faced humans to the beauteous sidhe, the fairy mistress is by far the greater danger.  Finding little charm in her bloodless brethren and preferring the smoky testosterone musk of the human male, she treats men from our world like butter, stealing them at will.  The kidnapped rarely suffer, for they fall—hard, fast, completely—in love with their captors.  It is not Patty Hearst syndrome that keeps the “taken” submissively in thrall, but rather the inventive wantonness and irresistible beauty of the fairy sweetheart. 

                Tall and stately, soft-skinned and soft-haired, high-colored and sweet of feature, fairies are “so beautiful that a man’s eyes grow dazzled who looks on them,” says Lady Wilde.  “I left her at the garden gateway, my jewel, my fairy lover,” one song says, describing the fairy mistress’s “eyes like stars, lips like berries, voice like a gentle harp.”  She haunts the singer:

                I left her in the cattle-meadow,

                my brown-haired fairy lover,

                eyes like stars, cheeks like roses.

                When I kissed her, I tasted pears.

A 12th-century text describes her this way: “Her upper arms were as white as the snow of a single night, and her clear and lovely cheeks red as the foxglove of the moor.  Her eyebrows black as a beetle’s wing; her teeth a shower of pearls; her eyes blue as comfrey; her slender long yielding smooth side, soft as wood, white as the foam of the wave.  Her thighs warm and glossy, sleek and white.  The bright blush of the moon in her noble face; the lifting of pride in her smooth brows; the ray of love-making in her royal eyes.”   Ah, who would not follow a woman like that?

                The beauty of the Leanan Sidhe assails every one of our senses: silken skin, rosy cheeks, musical voice, sweetly fragrant hair, the taste of pears.  But it’s all done with fairy mirrors.  The fairy mistress garbs herself in what is called in Irish a pishogue, a fairy spell—in anglicized Scots Gaelic, a glamour.   It is fairydom’s favorite trick, to use our own senses to confuse and confound us.  Just as the Stray Sod causes us to circle, elf-led, round and round the smallest space, so the Leanane Sidhe confuses us with beauty.  But what is she, really?  Some who penetrate her veil of illusion claim that she is no glorious queen ruling from a silver castle but a dowdy hag in a nettle-ringed shack.  But such reports are few.  Usually, the glamour holds. 

                Mortal men cannot resist the Leanan Sidhe.  Neither can Ireland’s immortals, as we learn from the tale of the great warrior Cuchulain and his fairy lover Fand.  In a dream she came to him, cloaked all in red, only to beat him until he lay near death.  Cuchulain awoke to find that neither medicine nor magic could cure the injuries inflicted in the dream.  For a year he lay in dire straits.  Then, on Samhain eve, Fand “took” Cuchulain to her magical island in the west.  Instantly forgetting both her bloody attack and his brilliant wife Emer, Cuchulain fell under Fand’s glamourous spell.  It took not only Emer but an entire college of Druids to draw Cuchulain back to earthly life.

                Man willingly depart fairyland only on rare occasions, and not because they weary of fairy love but because they crave, as fairies do butter, earth’s simple joys.  A common motif in the imramm, the ancient voyage tales, is the wretched homesickness of fairy captives.  A particularly sorrowful imramm centers on the hero Bran who, lulled to sleep by mysterious music, awakened to find a wand of silver extravagantly and unexpectedly blooming with fragrant white flowers.  When he touched it, a beautiful woman appeared, singing poignantly of a “distant isle/Around which sea-horses glisten: /A fair course against the white-swelling surge.”  She disappeared, leaving Bran rent with desire for the unseen land and its lovely singer. 

                He set off towards the setting sun—for, as everyone knows, the sidhe live off the west coast of Ireland—and was reunited with his fairy love on the Isle of Women.  There they danced to the soulful fairy piper and made love endlessly in sweet grassy bowers.  But despite the beauty of his Leanan Sidhe, Bran grew so homesick that he stole a boat and escaped.  With a party of other captives, he reached Ireland’s welcome shores, where one eager sailor leapt ashore rather than wait for docking.  The instant his feet struck earth, the man grew old, died, disintegrated into ash.  For time passes differently in fairy; this side of the gate, life dashes by; over there, it crawls along.  (Applying Einstein’s special theory, the sidhe live faster than we do, so time in their world passes more slowly.)  Faced with a hopeless choice—to die in Ireland, or to live forever banished from it—Bran set back out to sea, never to be seen again.  Does he still voyage there, stuck between the worlds?

                Stories in which people chose an ordinary workaday life over fairy’s luxury seem baffling at first glance.  Fairy kidnapping should be a popular fate, offering as it does a shortcut to immortal leisure.  Ireland’s bogs should be crowded with men striking macho poses in hopes of attracting the red-haired girl’s eye.  But there is a reason to direct the Leanan Sidhe’s lustful glance elsewhere, for she is notoriously fickle.  When her passion wanes, she ditches kidnapped lovers back over here: the fairy equivalent to capital punishment, for most die as Bran’s companion did, the moment feet touch earth.  Those who survive re-entry succumb to wasting illnesses.  Nothing here compares to anything there, so the spurned suitor refuses food, drink, love, until he goes, quite permanently and with no quotation marks, away.

                Once a man has made love with the Leanan Sidhe, no other love suffices; returned to our world, he wastes away, finally dying in order to return to her embrace.  That was what happened to Oisin, poet of the heroic Fianna.  “Taken” by the lovely Niamh of the Golden Hair, he lived happily with her until his homesickness for Ireland grew too strong to ignore.  Niamh loaned him a magical horse that brought him instantly from the island paradise of Tir na n'Og to the mainland.  But there, stunned to discover an Ireland filled with churches but empty of heroes, Oisin fell to the ground, whereupon the fairy horse vanished.  Saint Patrick himself attempted to covert Oisin, but the poet so mourned the loss of his fairy love that he died soon afterwards.

                The Leanan Sidhe, la belle dame sans merci,  shortens life rather than extending it.  In Ireland she rarely acts directly as executioner, though we find that motif in other Celtic lands.  In Brittany, a virtual twin of the red-haired girl is Dahut, last pagan princess of the land.  Assisted by sea elementals called the Korrigans, Dahut built the golden city of Ys on an island off the Breton peninsula.  Dahut was said to have taken scores of young men to her bed, each for a single night of bliss—then killed them, and had their bodies tossed over a cliff into the roaring sea or buried in what they call in Ireland a “purpose-built” pit in a bog.  Her hair is said to have been the color of fire.

                I used to think that these ancient tales were reflections of men’s fear of women’s sexual desire.  Mythology offers innumerable variations on the bogeyman theme, imaginary figures used to scare people into good behavior.  I heard these tales as fire-red warnings to women: act on your desires, and you will destroy those you love.  I saw these stories as mythic versions of the priestly rules that stiffened Irish dancing until it became only flashing feet.  Women—I believed these stories warned—harness those dangerous desires.  Fear them.  Resist them.  Do not act upon them. 

                Such messages would indeed be useful to those who feared that,  unbridled, women’s sexuality would contaminate lines of patrilineal inheritance—or merely require more exertion than men were willing to expend.  Such rejecting messages about women’s sexuality are sometimes articulated quite clearly, as when the seventeenth century English clergyman Robert Burton, in The Anatomy of Melancholy, shuddered,  “Of woman’s unnatural, insatiable lust, what county, what village doth not complain?”  But images are more powerful than words; narratives last longer in the memory than statements.  Thus we find what feminist scholar Susan Bordo defines as stories that encode “fear of woman as ‘too much’—that almost always revolves around her sexuality.”  Such a “too-much” woman is our red-haired girl, our Leanan Sidhe.

                There is no question that such stories have been used to warn women against our sexuality.  But that does not necessarily exhaust their meaning. Irish mythology, being polytheistic, is both/and, not either/or.  Multivalent meanings are more common than not.  The red-haired girl on the bog may serve as a cautionary tale for overly aroused Irishwomen, but that need not be its only—nor even its primary—meaning.  Myths do not long survive when they are limited to controlling the behavior of some members of a society in order to benefit others.  Without a deeper meaning, the red-haired girl’s legend would have faded long ago, even in conservative Connemara.

                To plumb this deeper meaning, let us return to the entrance to fairy, to Roundstone Bog and the site of the necklace-snatching.  This side of the veil, such entryways seem nondescript, “unrecognizable, invisible to the unaware,” in the words of French scholar Jean Markale.  Hidden-in-plain-sight locations for fairy gateways include crossroads, little hillocks, high patches of rough ground, boulder-strewn glens, wild clumps of trees.  Size doesn’t matter; one can enter fairy through a tiny door at the base of a gorse-bush as readily as through the open side of a mountain.  Trees are popular; a grove of ash, oak and thorn is a sure sign of fairy presence, as is a lone thorn growing in a rocky field.  Ruins—raths and lisses and duns, dolmens and menhirs and brughs—are favored as links to the ancient past when fairies ruled.  Markale points out that the sidhe  especially delight in “intermediate zones, neither earth nor water, where all life is both made and destroyed...the alarming region of exchange between the living and the dead.”  Bogs—lonely and remote and swept with sadness—satisfy these requirements perfectly.  For similar reasons, fairies colonize islands that look like blue clouds on the horizon, sometimes visible, sometimes cloud-hidden.

                Like place, time can be fairy-haunted.  Normally, temporal differential separates earth from fairy.  The Wild Hunt gallops past and we hear nothing, fairies frolic in morning sun and we see nothing, although in the first instance we may feel a sudden breeze, in the second an inexplicable lifting of the heart.  Occasionally, however, the door swings open.  The fairies and their world become as visible and audible and tangible as anything this side of the veil.  Like fairy places, such times are liminal, invisible to the unaware.  The hinges and crossroads of day—dawn and dusk, when the outlines of reality are blurred—are common fairy moments.  Other moments occur at unpredictable intervals, when the worlds bump into each other.

                But quite predictably, on two days each year, the door jams open, the veil is shredded, the walls fall down. Old Celtic feasts mark these points where fairy and earth coincide and synchronize.  On Beltane, the first of May, fairies wander about earth looking for humans to seduce, creating a time of risk and opportunity, of power and possibility.  Quite the opposite is true of Samhain on November 1, when fairy hills snap open, islands drift close to shore, cities rise from shallow bog lakes, and the night belongs to the fairies.  Even those without second-sight behold the hosting of the sidhe.  In great armies, they troop across earth, killing plants with their breath, stealing infants and midwives and lovers, waging war on neighboring fairies.   

                It is a night of danger, not opportunity.  In olden times, people stayed indoors on Samhain, hoping to avoid the Wild Hunt; anyone walking outdoors carried a black-handled knife or a steel needle, as fairies were believed to fear metal.  Should you meet the trooping sidhe, throw the dust from under your feet at them, or turn your coat quickly inside-out in the hopes the disguise will fool them.  A few have lived to tell tales of near-capture, but most who encounter the trooping sidhe vanish forever.  We maintain a hint of the dread with which our ancestors greeted Samhain, when we dress children up as monsters, spread in hushed voices tales of razored fruit, denying and thus sustaining Samhain’s fearful image.

                But why should we fear to meet the sidhe?  Because they will steal us from earth, and beautiful as fairyland is, there is a shadow upon it.  However much one eats of fairy food, one is never full; however much one drinks of fairy mead, one is never drunk.  Something is missing, some foyson, some essential vitality missing int hat perfect shadowless world.  Our world of growth and death, death and growth, interlaced and intertwined, holds something that fairies need, something so compelling they resort to theft and kidnapping to taste it.   

                If fairy is essentially unsatisfying, what of the fairy mistress?  Can one ever be fully satisfied with her?  Although it is never spelled out in myths and folktales, the answer must be no.  Sex with the fairy lover must leave us unfulfilled, for in her lovely loving arms we can never plummet the mystery of mortality.  The sidhe , the Colloquy of the Ancients puts it, “are unfading and their duration is perennial.”  But without an ending, we do not really understand a story; without shadow, we cannot see the true shape of things.  Thus the Land of Youth is ultimately terrible in its unnatural beauty.  When the queen of fairyland promises that you will never die, she does not mention that you will never truly live.

                Death today seems an insult, a wrong done us, something to be outwitted as long as possible.  Although now we hide and deny death’s presence, things were different in the not-too-distant past.  By the time they reached my age, my Irish ancestors would have attended on many deaths.  They would have seen death come in the night, taking someone quietly from the side of the turf-fire; they would have seen death come in the middle of the day, stealing children with fever and young people in bloody accidents.  But death does not become less mysterious when one has witnessed it.  Indeed, holding a cooling body from which a loving, living person has vanished reinforces rather than diminishes that mystery.  

                Death is the foyson of life, its imperfect but vital essence.  Immortals never feel how much like orgasm death is in its overwhelming inevitability, in the way the body becomes both most fully physical and most utterly soul-filled at the same instant.  Death is as precious and intimate as sex—perhaps even more precious, more intimate, for it can never be repeated.  “Sex and death both require an entire giving-up of self,” my friend Corinne once said.  “With sex it’s temporary.  With death, there is no longer any boundary.”   And it is just that boundarylessness for which the Leanan Sidhe hungers, which draws her back again and again to our world, to steal one after another young man and then to send him back to his death.

                But the very chaotic imperfection for which fairies lust may be their undoing, for this changeful earth offers potential for disaster as well as creation.  Our power over the sidhe  extends beyond leaving silver necklaces at home when we go to fairy places, carrying iron on Samhain, and trying not to be outstandingly talented in music or midwifery.  Actions in our world directly impact fairy, which is vulnerable wherever it intersects with our world.  Those hidden entrances may be too clever by half.  What stops us from cutting down the fairy tree and paving the bog?  We can close the doorway from this side, trapping the red-haired girl and her kind to starve for foyson in their perfect, beautiful, sterile world.

                In the past, belief in fairy punishment contrained such closure of the passages from fairy.  When the sidhe’s invisible roadways were blocked with buildings and walls, they were said to toss stones, cause objects to fly about, even bring death and disease until the offending structure was removed and the path could once again be used.  Even worse was the destruction of fairy trees, for which retaliation was quick and furious.  In the 1920’s, a Father O’Hara decided that his parish of Kiltimaugh—right down the road from my grandparents’ village—needed a new hospital.  The only available land was vacant, and with good reason, for between the two fairy trees upon it there was insufficient space for even the smallest building.  Not a soul in the village dared cut either tree, but Father O’Hara found a foolhardy farmer who, loudly mocking the fairies, did the dire deed.  That very night, the man suffered a stroke—the term means “stricken by fairies” and is said to mark the wound of a fairy arrow—and died soon after.   

                Old pishroguery, long gone from modern Ireland?  No.  Just ask in Ulster about the American company that selected a field with a fairy thorn for their factory site.  Locals strongly urged reconsideration, but the company shrugged off the warnings.  Bulldozers arrived, the fairy tree was torn limb from limb, the foundation was poured, the walls went up.  As the production line groaned into action, forward-thinking capitalism seemed to sing a paean of victory over backward superstition.  But—and here I see Ulster folklorist Bob Curran, who first told me this tale, lean back, adopt a deep Antrim accent, and wink just slightly—nothing ever really went well after that for the DeLorean Automobile Company, now did it?

                Belief that disasters follow desecration of fairy places remains, if not common, at least conceivable in Ireland.  In 1999 in Carrick-upon-Fergus, Eddie Lenihan campaigned to save a fairy tree—not just a tree but the Croake Park of fairy thorns, the gathering place for Munster fairies when they rode against the hosts of Connacht—slated for execution in a road improvement scheme.  Teacher and folklorist Lenihan vociferously reminded everyone concerned of the traditional punishment for anti-fairy behavior, thereby winning an indefinite stay of execution for the tree.  The road was re-routed around the tree, and officials declaimed about avoidance of adverse publicity and the folkloric value of the “monument.”  One could almost hear the great sigh of relief from the other side of the veil.

                Such controversies have raged for centuries, ever since Saint Patrick battled the sidhe  on a northern Connemara mountain, a bit beyond Leanane.  On the peak, a fairy woman wrestled with Patrick for domination of Ireland.  He won their magical battle, then banished the sidhe forever from Ireland. Nothing against our sainted Patrick, but some seem not to have heard the news, if sixteen hundred years later, people still battle to preserve fairy trees.  Perhaps, as Eddie Lenihan says, there is something powerful in the land itself, tangible even to strangers—something essentially vitally Irish that is best described in the vocabulary of fairy encounters.  So long as necklaces are still stripped off visitors at fairy sites, will not the sidhe endure?

                They will, so long as they continue to have access to our world and its nourishing chaos.  And that is far from certain.  For it is not just lonely fairy thorns hindering road expansion that are threatened.  The most sacred mountain in Ireland, the very place where the fairy woman battled with Saint Patrick, has come under siege.  The events are surprising, for Croagh Patrick is Ireland’s most famous and beloved mountain, one that tens of thousands climb annually on pilgrimage.  Their goal is a little chapel atop the peak, near a stone circle that shows that the mountain was sacred long before Christianity arrived in Ireland.   The date of the annual climb, on the Celtic feast of Lughnasa, has led Maire MacNeill and others to argue that the “Reek Sunday” ascent replaces a Celtic feast, which in turn may have replaced an earlier one.  Sixteen hundred Christian years and untold centuries before, the same ritual, year after year after year, has riveted people to the land.

                I remember the first time I saw Croagh Patrick, blue against a limpid sky, a pyramid so perfect I thought it some mysterious ancient structure at first.  I was at Carrowcastle, the farm where my grandfather was born, and my cousin Vincent was telling me how I came to be American.  In 1903, he said, when my grandfather was a strapping lad of 16, he spent a summer burying a stone.  In Mayo’s raw and stony land, fields were made by digging out small stones, which are useful for buildings and fences.  Larger boulders were burned:  encircled by blazing fire until the stone grew so red-hot that water, thrown against it, cracked it into manageable pieces.  But stones too big to move or to burn had to be buried.  Wheelbarrow after wheelbarrow of soil—on poorer farms, basketful after basketful­—was dumped on the ground until the rock was covered sufficiently deeply that grass could be sown.  

                I was standing on a fine flat field, soft with bright grass.  If underneath was a massive rock, the surface showed no sign of it.  When my grandfather’s task was done, Vincent said, he laid down his spade, announced that he would not be broken by the stony land, and simply walked away.  John Gordon walked to Dublin, took passage to London, emigrated to America—and there married a girl from Bohola, just two miles down the road from Carrowcastle.

                I had been brought up singing Irish songs and writing “Irish-American” under “nationality” on school forms, but until that moment I had no real image of my grandfather’s life in Ireland.  He had rarely spoken of it.  Mayo was a poor county at the turn of the century; the joke was that the most productive crop was raising children for export.  The west of Ireland is gloriously scenic, but scenery grows no potatoes.  Cold hungry hopeless people lack the leisure to appreciate nature’s aesthetic values.  As playwright Martin McDonaugh says of Connemara, “All you have to do is look out from your window to see Ireland.  And it’s soon bored you'd be. ‘There goes a calf.’” 

                It is easy to idealize the old ways, to imagine that ancient life was easy as well as simple.  It was far from perfect.  Howard Rock used to grow angry at strangers who came to him hoping to learn the secrets of Eskimo shamanism.  He would lean forward in the dull darkness of Tommy’s and speak just loud enough to force the petitioner to bend forward.  “Make you a deal,” Howard would say, “I’ll tell our secrets.  You just have to lose all your teeth and die of tuberculosis at 40.”  We shared many a laugh at the startled disbelief that spread across the listener’s face just before he excused himself and darted from the bar.

                To my grandfather, America was Tir na n'Og, a fairyland in the west.  He did not expect to go “digging for gold in the streets,” as the Percy Ffrench song goes.  He was reasonable in his expectations.   He only wanted to find—and did find—a livelihood that let him raise himself and his children out of poverty.  His grandchildren have done even better.  Grandpa never traveled, except for that one trip home when he was 80, yet I come and go from Ireland at will.  He never went even to high school, yet I have had the benefits of higher education as both student and teacher. 

                Who would I be, had he not emigrated?  Some of my Mayo cousins still work the land, strong farmers on rocky soil that over many years has been brought to fruitfulness.  Had some not left, life would have been harder for all.  There was not enough to go around—not enough land, not enough jobs, not enough money.  Even in the 1970’s and 80's, my younger cousins followed in Grandpa’s footsteps, because they could find no work at home.  Now, although the Gross National Product in Ireland is only three-quarters the average of the European Community, the Celtic Tiger is roaring.  Thousands of exiles are returning home.  They want to raise their children in Ireland, as my grandfather could not.  And they don’t want to live in poverty while they do it.

                And so monied interests threaten traditional sacred land.  In 1993, Andaman Resources and Glencar Explorations purchased mineral rights to the slopes of Croagh Patrick and nearby Clew Bay.  Their intention: to mine gold.  Connemara not the Klondike, but since prehistory, gold has been extracted from its hills and valleys.  The Irish National Museum is filled with splendid Celtic gold objects, treasures of the nation.  But ancient ways of mineral extraction—the antler-bone pick and woven basket—did little damage to the land.  Industrial-strength gold extraction, by contrast, tears the land’s skin, plundering right down to bedrock, then uses poisonous mercury or cyanide to leach the rubble.  Three million tons of rock are churned up and processed for every ton of gold extracted. 

                I grew up surrounded by the residue of gold mining: great blond tailing piles a half-century old, rocky hills that still support little vegetation.   Gold holds no romance for me, for I have clambered around old dredges and seen the iron buckets still lined up, ready to be filled when the vein gave out and the effort was abandoned, museum and masoleum of dreams of wealth and leisure.  A gold mine on Croagh Patrick?  It steals my breath away.  Many others feel the same; opposition from pilgrims and farmers, pagans and tourists has brought the project to a standstill.  But not to a halt, for the companies are still fighting to reopen the mining scheme.

                Neither the Formorians nor Saint Patrick have been able to evict the fairies from Ireland.  But we may yet manage what millennia have not.   In spite of his victory in saving the Carrick-upon-Fergus fairy tree, my friend Eddie Lenihan is despondent about the future of the fairies.  “The old culture is almost gone,” he told me in a letter not long after the victory, his backwards-slanting writing growing twisted as a thorn tree as he grew more heated about Ireland’s losses, “and soon will be, no matter how we may wish it otherwise—and there are very few people who wish it otherwise.  All that matters now in this wonderful new Ireland is money, status, show and—nothing, really.  because there’s nothing behind the veneer.”  

                We have come to believe in our own glamours, and so we are making a world in which fairies are unwelcome.  Even if we leave open the doors between our worlds, what good is butter from which the foyson has already been extracted?  Tom Hannon mourns, “Patricia, I hate to say it, Patricia, but we were better when we were poor.  Truly, Patricia, truly.  Much as I hate to say it.”  And I, who have flown in a fossil-fuel-powered aircraft to sit in a dim pub and drink tea with him, am silent.  Would my grandfather, who left Ireland so as not to be broken on the wheel of poverty, object from the grave?  Why do I keep thinking the fairies hold the clue, that there is some third way in this apparently inevitable war between a decent life and magical land?

                Up on the Old Bog Road, I walk upon the granite bones of the earth.  “The wet center is bottomless,” said Heaney, but it is not so.  The old derogatory term for the Irish was “bogtrotter,” which I proudly embrace.  Ireland used to be one-fifth bog, but in the last half-century, ninety percent has been destroyed.  Roundstone is a blanket bog, one of the last undeveloped examples in Europe.  It could be gone within my lifetime.  Mined out, all its peat removed.  Eroded away by those picturesque grazing sheep, whose numbers have tripled in a decade with the help of EU subsidies.  Destroyed by encroaching conifer forests, planted by commercial pulp manufacturers.  Paved to create an airport to service yet-unbuilt resorts.  Or turned into a dump.  Boglands across Ireland are being used—legally and illegally—to bury fast-food refuse, tires, broken blenders, the refuse of an increasingly commercialized society. 

                Perhaps, from the perspective of geological time, the loss of an Irish bog would not be especially significant.  Nor would be the elimination of human life, for that matter.  Other ecological niches, other species, have been destroyed by geological processes, climactic change, meteors, glaciation.  Roundstone Bog shows the scars of such ancient change.  In the very heart of the bog is the only patch of volcanic rock in Ireland:  Boolagare, named from the tradition of women spending the summer together there, milking and making butter.  In that tiny area, Roundstone writer Tim Robinson says, the most ancient Ireland shows through “like floorboards under a worn carpet.”  For the now-green island was, geologic ages ago, a chain of seabed volcanoes into that a tectonic plate smashed during some unremembered catastrophe.  The earth moves and changes, gradually or cataclysmically.  Does it really matter what we do?

                How can it not matter?

                In one of his early poems, Yeats describes the way fairies steal us: by promising us a beautiful deathless world.  Is it not all we desire?

                Where the wandering water gushes

                From the hills above Glen-Car,

                In pools among the rushes

                That scarce could bathe a star,

                We seek for slumbering trout...

But to join the fairies to leave this “world more full of weeping than you can understand,” the child must abandon all homely earthy pleasures, “the calves on the warm hillside...the kettle on the hob..”  In the end he goes away, “solemn-eyed...to the waters and the wild,” never having known life but forever preserved from death.  And we, Yeats’ readers, know that he has lost more than he has gained, that the brown mice bobbing around the oatmeal chest are far, far more important than the mingled hands and mingled glances of a fairy dance.

                To remember deeply is to be wise.  The world of the sidhe is called “the land of youth” not only because fairies do not age physically, but because they need never bear responsibility for their deeds nor for their consequences.  But ours is not the world of the sidhe.  When we pretend that it is—when we push away awareness of death and decay, when we bury the refuse of our overly complicated lives like strange sacrifices in bogs—we lose more than we gain; we are doomed to get exactly what we do not want.  Only by embracing our mortality, by honoring the cycle of life and death, can we live our individual lives fully.  Only by honoring the earth’s rhythms can we survive as a species.  There is no bog huge enough bury a discarded earth.  Those who seek to avoid death, to live forever in a fairy shadowland, are doomed to get exactly what they fear most.  Even the fairies know that, just as they know that there is no real ecstasy without pain.

                I call myself an agnostic about fairies because what happens in Ireland’s fairy places defies my understanding.  Something plays with me, steals from me, gives back to me, answers questions I have not yet even learned to ask.  Whether we call this power the sidhe or elemental powers or god or the universe, it is there to remind us that there is more to this world than our mechanistic philosophy allows.  The red-haired girl on the bog is a story of the passion that other world has for us, and of our own desperate passion for it.

                Dusk came on over Roundstone Bog, that day.  Hours passed, but I could not make myself leave the silent land.  Feelings rushed through me like the sighing wind: remembered losses, stinging anger at feeling those losses again, confused guilt, panic at not knowing how to balance contradictions, piercing sorrow at the fragility of beauty.  But even as those feelings surged through me, I felt something else as well, a kind of joy that is not separate from pain and that cannot exist in isolation from it, a great tearing hunger to live in this world as fully as I could, until I heard the wailing of the fairy woman at my death.