Free Midlife Irish by Frank Gannon Page A

that fond of fish. I met an Irish surfer, two words that don’t seem to belong together.
     I asked him how he did that, and he said, “Drunk.”
    There is not a spot in Ireland more than a hundred miles to the sea, and you would have to look very hard to find a place
     in Ireland ten miles from a river or a lake or a pond or a stream. Unless you stay inside all the time, it’s hard to stay
     completely dry in Ireland. I took a lot of pictures when I was in Ireland, a lot of pictures of wet people.
    It almost never snows there. If it does, it’s gone in an hour or two. No skiing. But lots and lots of mist. Wake up early
     inIreland; look out the window at the green mist. It does seem like another planet.
    Because of all that water, Ireland looks really, really, well, green. But there are many shades of green in Ireland. How many
     shades? The standard answer is “forty.” I was told “seventy-one” by a man in glasses in a pub in Longford. I believe him.
     The preciseness of “seventy-one” convinced me.
    Whatever the number, the sheer
greenness
is overwhelming, and if you stare at green for a long time it begins to affect your vision.
    In Ireland, there are always gray skies and gray rocks that seem to set off the green, so the landscape almost glows when
     you look at a long horizon. I have lived for a long time in the rural South of America, and I have seen lots of pastures and
     farms. But Ireland doesn’t look like the American South. I told a man in Ireland that Ireland looks a lot like Scotland and
     he looked at me as if I was insane or just really, really stupid. Ireland or Scotland? Apples and oranges. If you can’t tell
     them apart you are a sad case.
    The Old Sod has a very distinctive look. The green is broken up on the ground by—always—some rocks, some gray rocks. There
     are gray stones everywhere. And where there aren’t gray stones, there are gray ruins, of ancient buildings. And on the sides
     of the ancient crumbling gray walls there are green ivy vines. And where there aren’t rock or ruins there are little winding
     gray roads. And there always seems to be the ocean, or a stream, or a lake, or a pond, somewhere in the background to add
     some hazy, vaguely mysterious blue.
    I am not a poet, but when I looked at Ireland I started to have what I called “poetic thoughts.” (I kept these, largely, to
     myself.)
    Anyway, trust me. Ireland doesn’t look like anyplace else.
    Ireland has what geography people call a temperate climate. Parts of the southwest actually have some tropical flora stuff
     that wouldn’t look out of place in Florida.
    The average temperature, for the whole year, in Ireland isfifty degrees Fahrenheit, but, as I was told, “Every day in Ireland is all four seasons.” It will be freezing in the morning,
     but you will sweat before the day is through. After a few days in Ireland I went with the “layers” strategy: a T-shirt, a
     regular shirt, a thin sweater, a thick sweater, a coat. You get the idea. It worked pretty well. You are always putting things
     on and taking them off in Ireland. You sweat and shiver three hours apart.
    “Ireland is a natural simulacrum of a detox center.” I was told this by a man in a bar near Athlone. He had a huge, bulbous
     nose, and it looked as if he knew what he was talking about.
    Ireland was an island before Britain became an island. Because of this, there are certain plants in Ireland that do not appear
     in Britain. This also accounts for certain differences in the animals found on the two islands. And, Yes! There are no snakes
     in Ireland! I wasn’t able to establish whether there had ever been any there. I was told, of course, that the island was crawling
     with snakes until Saint Patrick got rid of them. Scientists believe that there never were any there to start with, but I wouldn’t
     necessarily buy that.
    Irish people have an odd relationship with the weather. Most Americans think that a rainy day is bad, but the