Simon, my beloved Inca Trail companion, writes:

Well, it worked. The link is to a great interview with one of my heroes, Declan Patrick Aloysius McManus, also known as Elvis Costello. As for the article title, I would like it as my epitaph, please.

The Day of the Condour, or How to be a Propour Canadian Spellour
By Ronald de Sousa, via the wonderful wood s lot.

I think of Ireland as a country slowly recovering from a long misogyny infection it picked up from foreign visitors.

Irish Catholicism reveres Mary, but held contempt for women who couldn’t achieve acquiescent virgin motherhood at sixteen. Women were the labourers of the Church; organising the fund raising, cleaning the churches, ironing the vestments, making the tea, giving sons to the priesthood. They were not expected to have a voice, unless it was raised in support of loud church campaigns against the legalisation of contraception, divorce and information on abortion.

Our constitution enshrined the “special position” of that church. De Valera, its architect, wittered on about building an Ireland that returned to days of “comely maidens dancing at the crossroads”. Ireland’s history is pockmarked with the names of punished women—like Anne Lovett—and unnamed ones, like the X Case victim, the women of the Magdalene Laundry, and the thousands who emigrated because they were pregnant or separated or abused.

Until the 1970s, female government workers had to resign as soon as they got married to free a job for a man. More recently, I found Irishmen visiting the US, even young ones, to be the worst offenders when it comes to patronising female technology workers (especially those of us who don’t have engineering degrees—and they are quick to ask). “Make us a cup of tea, love.” The men who move to the US, on the other hand, adapt fast.

And yet, and yet. There has always been a tradition of the strong woman in Ireland, of stout-hearted women running the farm and raising a brood. If a TD(member of parliament) left his parliamentary seat due to death or illness, it was considered natural for a wife or daughter to be elected in his place; many long-running female politicians got such a start. Irish women in politics never had to compromise their femininity, and I believe they were listened to respectfully by their male colleagues and by the press. Women were also among senior political journalists when I was growing up: no one messed with Olivia O’Leary or Emily O’Reilly. And men and women managed to socialise together (often down the pub) in a jolly, friendly way, with none of the alternate holding-the-door-open-and-then-leering special treatment that I associate with say, parts of England.

We had a folk memory of strong women, buried under the layer of later constitutional and church law. It’s not surprising. The ancient Irish Brehon Laws are progressive and enlightened for women even today. Women had full property rights, and were expected and encouraged to enter any profession, whether law, poetry, or soldiery (our folk hero, Cú Chulainn, fought Queen Maeve leading her Connaught armies. Grace O’Malley, a 15th century pirate from Co. Clare, was as feared as Boadicea.) In marriage women were equal partners with their husbands. They were entitled to divorce, retaining their property as well as any settlement deemed fair. The law protected them from rape and harrassment. Long before Gloria Steinem fought for equal pay for equal work, an Irish wife tending the sheep was entitled under law to annual payment for the work of two lambs a year from the flock. That all adds up to wider recognition of women’s rights than any western system of law until very recently.

Brehon Law was in place from the first century AD until the English finally conquered Ireland over two centuries, beginning in the 1500s, and wiped out the use of this ancient legal code. The Midnight Court could not have been written later than the 1700s—the joyous, lusty freedom of Merriman’s women, even as they complain about the shortcomings of their men, was lost soon afterwards (and in fact it is that loss they are mourning). The people soon forgot that women had ever had a right to demand equality and satisfaction in marriage and elsewhere.

Ironically, it was under a female pirate queen that Irish women lost equal rights for centuries: Queen Elizabeth ordered that English law be imposed on a territory that was to be settled for once and for all. The harshness of these conquests led to great support for the Church, which comforted a people being destroyed. But the old Celtic Church of St. Brigid was by this time drawing ever closer to Rome’s imperious doctrine, and by the time Ireland was self-governing again, she had forgotten what she once knew about equality and justice. We are remembering now.

Summer is late at Lake Superior, but Autumn comes early. It’s about 11°C/50°F today, and the wind is whipping rollers and whitecaps on the lake. Great thunderstorms roll in in the evenings, knocking out the phone lines. The skies are grey. The campers and the college-student rangers have gone home. The animals are gobbling the rest of the harvest before winter.

It feels like the west of Ireland, like mornings walking the windy cliffs in Kilshannig, Co. Kerry. Last night I cooked up a dinner that would shock my mother, who thinks my tastes are dainty: what we call “a big feed of bacon and cabbage and spuds” (boiled ham hock). I saved the ham stock for soups all week.

At night I read the Brehon Laws and Brian Merriman’s poetry (and because I have the best sister in the world, I’m about to get an Amazon package with the Seamus Heaney translation I wanted). The stereo is stacked, five CDs deep, with Irish music, though I hardly realised until I listened to them all through. On No Prima Donna, a Van Morrison tribute album, I listen to Liam Neeson’s spoken-word cover of “Coney Island” (the real Coney Island, in Van’s northern Ireland). It is rapturous. If Lou Reed were Irish, this is how “Perfect Day” would have sounded. Suddenly I want to be drinking Guinness with soft-spoken people again. (You can get the MP3 here.)

On the same album, Sinéad O’Connor sings “You Make Me Feel So Free”, whispery Colin Farrell vocals backed by an over-the-top orchestra. I have a love-hate relationship with Sinéad, the poster child for neurotic Irish women, and this cover is dreadful. No amount of Nelson Riddle strings will convince me that she has ever felt free in her religion-addled life.

A Tired & Emotional Mary Coughlan takes modern Ireland to a Midnight Court of her own on her smoky Galway blues albums: “I want tah be se-jooced,” she purrs in an accent straight out of Ringaskiddy. She was faintly scandalous when I was growing up in the 1980s: a thirtysomething single mother, a blousy redhead who sang about drinkin’ and smokin’ and men. Gay Byrne clucked like an old hen whenever she was on The Late Late Show. Ireland has changed so much.

It is fourteen months since I was in Ireland, the longest I’ve ever gone without a visit. Time to go back soon. In the meantime, I’m halfway there.

I am still having trouble with Canadian English. Producing it, that is. I understand it fine. It’s not even that I feel the need to pass; rather that I’m afflicted with an obsession with how people speak. Ranger Tim is patient with the elderly three-year-old who follows him around the staff kitchen.
“What do you call this? Tin-foil or aluminium foil?”
“Aluminium foil.”
“Do you ever say al-you-MIN-ee-um? Or is it always a-LOOM-in-um? “
“Always a-LOOM-in-um here.”
“Hey look! The French side of the packaging writes “aluminium”, like us!”
“That’s really exciting, Dervala. But I don’t think that’s how it is in the periodic table.”

To get me off his back, Ranger Tim has defined a useful rule:
“All terms relating to technologies newer than, say, fire, are American.” I have limited access to post-Stone-Age technology in Lake Superior Provincial Park, but it’s good preparation for a return to urban life to deduce all by myself that Canadian phones are busy, not engaged. Canadian kids get diaper rash, not nappy rash. Canadian cars have trunks and hoods, not boots and bonnets. (This last is a sad loss. Bonnets are so much cooler than hoods. Think of Emma versus Eminem.) Everything else is English-English, except that Canadians have asses not arses. Do asses count as technology? Maybe Britney’s does.

Not that it matters what words I use. No one in northern Ontario realises I’m a Paddy Without Papers. They assume I’m a displaced Newfie with a poor work ethic. Even my sister suffers this confusion, though she is less twangy than me. She has just arrived in Ottawa to start an MBA, and now sits through management lectures on ‘Sow-hwest Airloins’ by a professor from Co. Leitrim.
“So where did you do your undergrad?” she asked him during the designated suck-up period after a seminar.
“Ireland. That’s in Europe.” he said. Pause.
“Yes, but where?”
“Cork. That’s down the south.”
“I know where Cork is. I’m from Limerick.” He gaped.
“Are you sure? “

We’re learning. The Canadian “eh?” is addictive. I don’t know how I managed without this little nudge, at once wheedling for approval and inclusive. It is free of the slack-jawed tone of “huh?” and the hectoring note of “right?”. But I try not to overuse it just yet. Now that my haircut is growing in to a full mullet, no sense getting taken for an Ottawa Valley hockey player, eh?

I bought a copy of The Economist on my monthly grocery run to Sault Sainte Marie, a special treat even though it was a week out of date and hidden behind Yoga Journal at Cole’s bookshop. It was that or People, and I was so horrified by the before-and-after pictures of Melanie Griffith’s big-mouth-bass lip surgery that I couldn’t bring it into the house.

The 20-something behind the counter snatched up The Economist.
   “Ohmigod! That’s my favourite magazine! And nobody buys it; no one ever reads it except me. I don’t even know why they stock it.” He swiped it reverently. “What’s your favourite section?”
I was unprepared for this level of detail. “I’m sort of a lightweight. The one at the back, “Moreover“, I think it’s called. And the Science and Technology section.” He looked disappointed.
   “I like the International Politics.”
   “Me too.”
   “Are you from the Soo?”
   “No, just visiting. I’m from Ireland.”
   “Oh.” Disappointed again. “See, I told you no one around here buys this.”

Reader, I think I could have had a Cougar Moment. But he’s right. The Economist is terrific. I never know what my opinions are until I read them in The Economist. I wish the old gray hag had the sense to poach its editors.

From this issue’s Lexington column, a sly description of the Democratic candidates’s wooing of Joe Sixpack.

I liked Adam’s recent entry on MBTI testing.

My sister has just started an MBA program, like Adam, and she and I had spent the previous evening on IM(instant messenger) babbling about the results of her class’s Myers-Briggs seminar. It turns out she’s the same type as me—INFP—and we love this stuff. We are the people who crowd the seminar speakers at the end of the session asking how we can get their job. We are amateur sleuths forever guessing new friends’ types. And we tend to annoy more sceptical people by repeating over and over “Well, of course you think it’s all bollocks. That’s characteristic of The Scientist/INTJ personality.”
(But no, I don’t have loyalty points from the Psychic Hotline.)

The Myers-Briggs test seems to be the Trust Fall of this decade’s MBA program. I learned my type during a mini-MBA training program at JP Morgan six years ago. That seminar is the only one I remember clearly. It made a great deal more sense than the Black-Scholes pricing equation, and I liked it all the better for the sneering it earned from the thrusting Wall Streeters who sat next to me. But the results revealed the horror of being a lone Feeling, Perceiving type exiled in a wasteland of investment banking ENTJs and ESTJs. We’d all be living in caves if it weren’t for the extroverted Thinking and Judging types. I’d hire them without reservation. But they’re great big Bossy Boots, and besides, camping in caves is fun.

UPDATE: Here’s a link to a free online Myers-Briggs test. The Typelogic site analyzes the results fairly well. The Personality Page is slightly more cartoonish in its descriptions (and more entertaining).

Limerick, Ireland is my home town, but I am most at home in the Limerick of distant literary history. In the 18th century it was the capital of a country whose national sport was competitive poetry. I’m not making it up; that’s what Van Morrison refers to the title of his album, The Poetic Champions Compose.

The file or bard was a hero for hire who could spin verse on the spot. He recited yards of poetry, and was as famous for memory as for invention. Young bloods waited for slip to snatch their chance at greatness. (One translation of my name from the Gaelic is dearbh fhile, daughter of the poet. It’s the one I like best.) Poetry wasn’t the unread, starveling business it is today. I’m about to sound like a hapless English teacher in baggy, chalk-smudged tweeds, but those poets were the Eminem of their day.

Limerick was famous for champion poets, and gave its name to five-line doggerel. The greatest of all was Brian Merriman, who wrote Cúirt an Mhean Oíche, or The Midnight Court. No sunsets and daffodils for Brian. His poem describes a dream in which he is dragged to a trial where women of Ireland accuse the men of general foot-dragging and lame bedroom performance. Irish men aren’t worthy of their spirited womenfolk, they say. The population is falling. Tight-buttocked, cutie priests are unavailable, and maidens wither while single men dither. A young woman addresses the court, blasting men for waiting to marry until they are past being able to satisfy women in bed. She proposes, among other things, that priests should marry, and destroys the shrivelled old man who defends men by abusing her. Aoibheall, judge and fairy queen, delivers a verdict against the men just as Merriman, in terror, wakes up.

It is splendid stuff, rich and earthy and full of detail. Diarmuid Breathnach writes:

The Midnight Court was written in 1780, but aside from the post-party texting negotiations, the complaints seem fresh to some Irish women today. Seamus Heaney translated part of the poem in The Midnight Verdict, which I’d love to own.

UPDATE: Noel Fahy has a terrific set of Midnight Court related material here. It includes detailed translation notes, autobiographical details, and a side-by-side translation. Thanks, Noel!

Need a fix of a lovely Irish accent? Here’s the bodacious Caitríona’s first radio report from Tehran. (Incidentally, the RTÉ introduction is by another college contemporary of ours, Philip Bouchier-Hayes. It is strange to hear these familiar voices from Tehran and Dublin in a cabin in northern Ontario.)

The piece is fascinating. Fifty years ago British and American governments toppled the last democratically-elected government in Iran for the crime of nationalising the oil industry and effectively taking control of Iranian oil from the British. It was nominally done to prevent a Soviet invasion, and led to the re-instatement of the Shah’s poisonous regime. I had no idea. Listen well.

Ranger Tim dropped me off at Gargantua, 35km north of my cabin and a further 14 jouncing klicks down a dirt road that might have been in Ecuador. He has walked the Coastal Trail four or five times and I kept asking him if he was sure—sure—I would be okay alone. Eventually, reassured, I swung my pack on and he yanked on the compression straps, tsk-tsking at my overloading.

Tent, sleeping bag and pad. Spare pants, underwear, shirt and socks. Gore-tex jacket, fleece, hat, flip-flops. Cookpot, cup, bowl, spoon. Four packs of noodles, loaf of bread, cheese, Marmite, peanut butter, yoghurt, teabags, oatmeal, home-mixed muesli and GORP. Swiss Army Knife. Torch. Waterproof matches and lighter. Bugspray, toothbrush, Tampax, moisturiser, camp soap. Desert Solitaire and Going After Cacciato. Moleskine notebook. Uniball pens. Excedrin, for coffee sweats. Band-aids. Map. Rope. Water bladder.

Enough to make me stagger slightly until I got used to the burden. Far too much food, it turned out. I eat extremely on a long hike, but can never predict beforehand whether I’ll be ravenous or ascetic.

Superior’s summer is too lovely to last long, but by the middle of August it was finally in full bloom. I left Tim at the car park and set off down a Hansel-and-Gretel path, a deceptively easy 45-minute stroll to an abandoned cottage. A stone hearth and chimney is all that is left in a clearing behind a sandy cove.

At this early stage the Very Difficult trail rating seemed pitched to what Edward Abbey called Industrial Tourists. So far I wasn’t hiking as much as grazing. Wild raspberries and blueberries flanked the path. Mushrooms popped up under every tree. There were snowberries—wintergreen-flavoured Tic-tacs—and wintergreen leaves. I thought of the excuses I would make rushing into a New York conference room: “So sorry I’m late. Unavoidably detained in a raspberry patch.”

This shore is bountiful. It’s a magic trick to drink sweet, cool water straight from the waves on a fine-sand beach, and to see pond frogs jumping in rockpools. There is driftwood and brushwood wherever you look, and smooth cobbles to ring the fire with. Birch paper makes perfect kindling. If you could throw a stone straight you’d brain enough game—hares, squirrels—for a fine stew.

The natural harvest is explosive this season; the best in 25 years, say the old hands. In the backcountry there are whole stands of raspberries unpicked on the beaches, and so many blueberries you soon learn to pass all but the choicest and fattest. There will always be more. ‘Booberries!’ my young friend Aidan calls them, and I wished he were here to set down in a patch to pick until he turned as purple as Veruca Salt.

The woodland stroll didn’t last. The trail spat me out onto a cobbled beach, the first of many. The Coastal Trail, not surprisingly, hugs the shore wherever possible. You cross coves of fine sand, pebbles, small stones, cobbles, jagged rocks and huge boulders. There are smooth sheets of granite, grey streaked with pink like salt-water taffy, jagged rhyolite, quartz and diabase, evil, predatory granite cobbles. I learned to pick my way over rocks and cobbles, pack throwing me off balance from time to time as I searched ahead for trail-marker cairns, cunningly camouflaged in a landscape of rocks. After hours each day my field of vision reduced to next flat rock. Hop. Hop. Brace and hop. It was blessedly dry: Vibram hiking soles are no better than rollerskates on slippery, mossy granite.

I met five other hikers on the trail. The first day I was passed by a Torontonian with a heavy knee-brace and a heavier pack who told me he was fitting in this hike before knee surgery. Might as well get value for the medical fees. We walked for a while, then I stayed behind to pick raspberries and lost him for good. He was nice, but we were glad to see the back of one another; this trail isn’t meant to be shared with strangers. The second day I sat on the beach at Beatty Cove and watched Tom and Jake gallop towards me; a pair of twenty-year-old naturalists who work for Tim, who were trying to fit the Coastal Trail into their two days off. Then I met Ralph and Mike, high school friends who had been doing a camping trip like this every year for twenty years. We shared the camaraderie of the blistered, and I wished I’d packed in Guinness like them. They told me about the innkeeper who had shuttled them to the trailhead: “I sit in a deckchair looking at these guys limping over the sand, and I ask myself, what part of backpacking is supposed to be fun?”

Outdoors, the in-head jukebox plays all day, songs I’d long forgotten that emerge with complete lyrics. Studenty stuff, mostly. I have no control over the dial.

Some days are sleepy
Some days are lazy
Some days you feel like a bit of a baby
Some days take less but most days take more
Some slip through your fingers and onto the floor
Some days you wake up in the army
Some days are better than others

———————-

Like a bird
On a wire
Like a drunk
In a midnight choir
I have tried
In my way
To be free

The first night set the pattern: I walked until six and camped in a deserted cove. I stripped and swam off the day’s sweat, then spent twenty minutes throwing a stick tied to my pink bear rope at the branch of white pine. Glad no one was watching me throw like a girl. Eventually I looped it over a branch I wasn’t aiming for and left it dangling, ready to string my food up out of reach of animals once I’d finished my ramen extravaganza.

I sat on a log in front of a small driftwood fire, eating noodles. Ten mergansers crossed the cove, so busy ducking for food I could hardly keep a count straight. The molten sun looked ready for a glassblower. When it got dark I brushed my teeth with lake water, tied up my food bag and crawled into the nylon coffin of my bivvy-sac. The mosquitos puzzled at the net inches above my face: insolently, I blew the carbon dioxide they crave. The full moon rose above the trees. A loon called. I wanted to tell someone, but no one was there. I imagined telling someone later, how I would describe it. I wondered if my friends were watching this same moon. But no one was there. At last I understood it as a secret gift; my private moon.

Next morning I packed up without breakfast, holding out for a good blueberry patch to sweeten the muesli. By eight the sun was warming my back on a huge red rock high above the lake. The water was clear to the bottom, a giant lens for studying grains of sand. I sat with my purple breakfast, a queen surveying her territory, glad to have been deeded this landscape.