"Field Trip II"

The Fota House, Arboretum, and Gardens; Barry Castle; the Ruins of Bowen's Court

Friday was our first out-of-city field trip for my early-start class in Literature. A few of us met for breakfast beforehand, as I had been craving waffles and just recently figured out where I could actually buy some. Afterward we met the enormous bus on a street big enough for it to fit, and a long day got underway.

I'd known it would be a few collective hours' bus ride by the time we traveled to and from every stop, so I had put some entertainment on my iPod: the latest episode of This American Life ("I've Got You Pegged") from the Chicago Public Radio website, and Barack Obama's acceptance of the democratic nomination. This last made me feel very political and popular when I began mentioning it to others, even though I'd intended to keep it a secret, afraid that in a surprisingly political group, it might make me look bad to have not gotten up to watch it late the night before.

Luckily for me, no one had, but they were all eager to hear it. No one had a splicer, so we just listened to it in pairs, one ear bud each, beginning with Meg and I. Barack's address commanded my attention, even as my first real vision of Irish countryside appeared beyond the bus window, bursts of visible pastures and hills choked with green, intermittent between the deep trees and other foliage that for the most part tightly bordered the narrow roads. Each time I got emotional, I looked over to find Meg also brushing a couple tears from beneath reddened eyes. I passed the iPod along to the next eager listeners feeling oddly patriotic, experiencing for the first time a general homesickness for my entire country, rather than only the tiny part I knew well.

Our first stop was a sixteenth century Irish castle, looming mostly windowless beyond a colorful garden. We were sorted into the second group of fifteen to tour the actual building, free to wander around the orchard and gardens until the time came. Apple trees bowing over beneath the burden of their own fruit reminded me of the apple trees of my family; the bitter unripe taste of a yellow apple even more so. I took some photographs of flowers against the half-blurred background of the castle stone that I was happy with, and then we assembled to file into the castle itself.

I like to forget the barbarism of medieval living, but examples of it were rampant in the rooms of the castle. Designed for defense - after all, as our tour guide reminded us, at this point in history the Irish were fighting the Irish, the Irish were fighting the English, and the English were fighting the English - it had many eerie architectual features. The one visible from the outside were narrow windows just large enough for an archer to aim from, and then just beyond the door she indicated the murder hallway, which basically meant openings in the ceiling permitted defensors to pour boiling water and rocks on the heads of those who actually made it past the door.

The dungeon was nothing but a lightless space accessible only through an opening near its ceiling, the method of entry to be thrown down, the method of exit to be towed up on a rope. "Stumble steps," each of a different depth and height, made charging upstairs with a drawn sword complicated. Only the Lord and Lady's chamber upstairs had the sense of grandeur I'd imagined in even small Irish castles, with large windows, a deep windowseat, tapestries on the walls.

Outside the neighbors' horses were grazing close to the fence. I tried to get them to come up to be petted, but they were preoccupied by the wealth of vivid grass available, and completely ignored me. I took their picture anyway, got back on the bus, and tried not to get carsick as our reckless bus driver plummeted around blind corners in the center of the road, only slowing down and shifting into an individual lane when faced with oncoming traffic. On the roads most heavily wooded on each side, it seemed we were rocketing down an emerald tunnel, the air interrupted ahead of us by the bus's coming so that limbs and long blades of grass bent back from the road in a ripple, within centimeters of brushing the bus, before settling back into place behind us. There was everywhere a mood of restfulness, of avoiding hurry, even when the driver applied a leaden foot to the accelerator.

The Fota House, beautifully restored, was actually the family's summer hunting lodge. Their much grander permanennt home was destroyed, like most homes of the Anglo-Irish ascendency class, by repressed Irish landsmen in the nineteenth century. Since then, patriots like our busdriver have been reluctant to buy up and preserve the "big houses" of this era - as he put it, they are symbols of English occupation. However, he seemed interested in wandering through Fota and watching the videos of the restoration. I got separated from my little group somehow, but didn't mind browsing through the Arboretum alone. The Fotas were similar to many of their class, it seems, in that they traveled widely and brought back tree and flower specimens for their gardens. The Arboretum was a maze of exotic trees, each wearing a tag that identified its species and place of origin. An hour wasn't long enough for me to even walk past every tree, let alone stop and take a few pictures. I had an inedible vegetarian option lunch that made the next and longest leg of the bus ride especially unpleasant, and then we were at our stop to see the grave of Elizabeth Bowen and the remains of her home.

I wanted to be receptive to the power of place, but the empty farmland had been recently harvested, leaving some kind of gold stalks rather than the green that might still have impressed me, and the current owner of the land had erected some metal hay sheds within the remaining walled area that was once the house's garden. The house itself was completely gone, though if you pawed carefully through the weeds and tall grass around what was its exterior wall, you could see some of the foundation and the undeground space of the basement and cellar. It looked like any plain Kansas farmland, except it had taken us forty-five minutes to drive there to see it.

The bus driver, Liam, and I talked about the changing agricultural lifestyle in Ireland. Thirty years ago, he said, a dairy farmer only needed fifty cows. Now he needs one hundred. The average size of a farm thirty years ago was sixty acres. Now some people own thousands. I told him it was like that where I was from, too, and then he rattled off more statistics that sounded legitimate and proved to me politics weren't the only aspect of my country about which the average Irish person knew more than me. Liam asked me if I had any Irish background - he told me my freckles were precisely similar to Irish freckles. I told him I had great grandparents from Scotland, some German on my father's side, but wasn't sure about anything else. He recommended a family tree web site. Every one, he told me, in an only slightly lecturing tone, should know where they come from.