#313

http://sweatshirtpoesy.com/2010/02/22/john-berryman-313-of-the-dream-songs/

Ireland. Full of spirits and ancient influences, druid rituals amid the stone circles and lost ghosts wandering the splintering stone walls of ruined castles. My week-long stay in Ireland was all about stories. But first, last summer. I was in Idaho, at a conference. A member of the Nez Perce tribe hosted a group of us on a bus tour of his tribe’s lands, telling stories the whole way. One was about a beautiful princess maiden frog who rejected all the handsome green boy frogs who visited her tipi, croaking their love. Her father reminded her that these all seemed like pretty nice guys, and it was time to take on a husband and start raising some tadpoles. (I’m embellishing just a touch, but these stories need to be continuously reinterpreted if they’re to survive without turning to stone.) But the pressure was too much, and she didn’t want to get married, so she ran away. At one point she started climbing a hill, but started to slow down because she was turning to stone, and she ended up turning solidly to stone. (There’s something there about what will happen to a maiden who doesn’t get married and raise children like she’s supposed to. But we’ll let that go for now.) This story is thousands of years old. The bus went around a bend in the road and our storyteller guide pointed up the hillside, saying, “And there she is!” He pointed at a big rock that looked just like a big frog. Actually, it looked like a beautiful maiden princess frog. The point is that the story, thousands of years old, wasn’t just floating up in some person-to-person cultural ether of stories. It was that, but just as importantly, this was a story embedded in the landscape. The Nez Perce people have been telling that story for a thousand generations, and I bet most of the times it was told, it included that same delightful moment, the finger pointing up the hillside: “And there she is!” All the listeners had that wonderful moment of recognition that we did on our bus tour. Thus do stories inhabit a place. As I walk around my woods and rivers, one of the things that sometimes saddens me is that the ancient indigenous stories about that rock, this hill, this creek, this dark stretch of forest, this island—they’ve been lost. The Shawnees of southern Ohio were mostly driven out and their stories went with them. You can bet they had them. Other people and other stories have mostly replaced them. I know a few and have generated my own, but in general Americans are not a people who live close enough to our land to feel the stories embedded in it. But new ones will build up, given time. For example, a friend of mine once was in a crisis, and in a panic I took him camping in December on an island in the Little Miami River, near Fort Ancient. I made him wade through the painfully frigid river, which he wanted no part of but that I knew had to be of the process. It isolated us from the rest of the world. We talked all night, and I don’t remember exactly what I said, but his life turned that night. Really, it wasn’t what I actually said. All he needed was a friend to listen. In the morning, dawning crisp and wintery, we saw a great buck deer step to the river and drink, and it was so perfect that it seemed an implausible gift, and then we saw a hawk kill a squirrel overhead, then look down at us and give that iconic call that red tail hawks make before flying off with the squirrel, and again, it didn’t feel random. That night on that island is now part of my personal story landscape. I’ve since learned that there is a burial ground on the island, and I know this because rangers in the state park it’s part of occasionally find the Indian peoples’ bones exposed in the bank after the spring floods. They respectfully rebury the bones on a less vulnerable corner of the island where they can rest in peace without the meandering river digging them up. There was a village nearby, too, and about a mile away the great Fort Ancient complex sits on the hillside, long abandoned, but protected for now by the park. This is a land once deep with stories. Most of them are lost. Some few small new ones keep coming, but the Hopewell and Adena people had thousands of years of a head start on me and my friend. But we’re doing our part. We love that spot, and it’s important to both of us now. I go fishing there a lot, almost always alone, and I walk over the island remembering what happened there, looking for bones. If the stories attached to the place and the people buried there thousands of years ago are lost, I’m still slowly becoming part of it as I add new stories, and my camping there with my friend has enriched the place just a little bit more. I still tell our story now and then, and so does he.

When I was in Ireland, a friend of my host took me on a tour of the country outside of Dublin, mainly through County Clare. From what I understand, he has a skill that’s in some demand. He knows how to fix the plumbing embedded in the rock walls of Irish country cottages. It’s a special skill because usually the plumbing is old, old, old and the walls are usually about three feet thick. I drove with him on a circuit that stopped by five or six houses and cottages. These were all about estimates and planning; he didn’t do any stone-work or plumbing on this day, but he used the information he gathered to plan the upcoming week’s work. He never stopped talking, telling story after story. It was great fun. The stories were about, say…well, I seem to remember one about this Medieval princess who was supposed to marry this particular prince fellow, who had a misshapen claw for a hand and gray, watery eyes, so that she fell disastrously in love with someone else with normal hands and deep, handsome brown eyes, but eventually her father’s will won the day and they built that castle—right there! Though ‘tis said by many her daughter had lovely brown eyes herself. My host was a normal-looking Irish dude, with plaid pants driving a French Citroen auto on these narrow little stone-walled roads through the wintery Irish countryside and all its warm-woolen sheep, but he was telling me stories a thousand years old, that were embedded in this particular landscape. This happened right there! The tree’s tops shiver with them. We stopped in a pub for a bite and pint, and while he was in the men’s room, a girl sat at the table and started talking to me. I believe I stood out in my foreign Americanness from the regular local folk. But we had to go. Pale translucent skin, freckles across her nose, and long curly red hair, I’m telling you, but I touched her hand and got up and left. Had to. Not much of a story generated there in the end, and there wouldn’t have been anyway, but people are people, whether in Malibu or Country Clare, and they like to talk and attract. But as B. is feeling so clearly, the language, and the stories generated through the language, they’re a special part of that place. You can’t help but feel it when you’re in Ireland, if you’re paying attention.