My Life On The Littlest Aran Island, Part 1

The Irish poet Derek Mahon once wrote a poem about a place in Ireland called Inis Oirr, the smallest of the Aran Islands off the country’s west coast.

A dream of limestone in sea light

Where gulls have placed their perfect prints.

Reflection in that final sky

Shames vision into simple sight:

Into pure sense, experience.

Atlantic leagues away tonight,

Conceived beyond such innocence,

I clutch the memory still, and I

Have measured everything with it since.

That’s a fancy way of saying that Inis Oirr is the kind of place that haunts you once you’ve been there. The name of the poem--“Thinking of Inis Oírr in Cambridge, Massachusetts”--reveals that Mahon was writing about Inis Oirr while living very distant from it. He had the same challenge as I do now, writing about a place that while very dear to me, is very far away. I have no hopes of writing anything nearly as impressive as Mahon’s poem. But my words are from the heart just the same.


Sunrise on Inis Oirr, currach on beach. Taken morning after St. John's Eve Bonfire.

Wildflowers on Inis Oirr.

View of Inis Oirr from Inis Meain (the middle island).

I was 22 the first time I went to Inis Oirr. It was the summer of 1995, a year that turned out to be one of Ireland’s sunniest and warmest ever. I was lucky to be in Ireland at all for such an unusually golden summer, and especially fortunate to be somewhere as beautiful as Inis Oirr. I think it was the happiest time of my life.

Me and the Plassey shipwreck, 1997.

My friend Celine and me, outside the hotel, 2009.

I landed there a little by accident, after being less than 2 weeks in Ireland and looking for a job. I was a cooking school student back in America at the time and had a permit through a student work-abroad organization to live and work in Ireland for up to 6 months. I went over with the assumption that I’d end up working in Dublin. It never occurred to me that I might live anywhere else in Ireland. I’d been to Ireland the summer before, for about 3 weeks on a tour around the country. But that was it. I didn’t know anyone there--not a soul. I didn’t have a job or a place to stay pre-arranged. I didn’t even have a credit card. All I had was the work permit and a few hundred dollars in cash and travelers checks that I hid stuffed down in my pockets and in my socks and so on. I was counting on finding some work and a place to stay within a week of arriving. If there was ever an award for the most naïve 22-year-old in the world, it should’ve gone to me.

I made a beeline to Dublin once I arrived in Ireland, then a couple days later made a beeline out of it. Dublin felt too big, too lonely and anonymous for a newly arrived foreigner with no connections in the country. I went west then, to Galway on the opposite side of the country, and spent a week staying in what was probably the most wretched hostel in town, a brightly colored on the outside, completely disheveled on the inside little place on Lower Dominick Street, overlooking a filthy-looking canal spotted with pristine-looking swans. Yet I still liked it better than Dublin.

Galway City, Quay Street, back in the day.

Galway City, keg changing time.

I spent a couple days in Galway walking around looking for work in all kinds of places, and finally resorted to tearing the Hotels page out of the phonebook, locking myself in a phone booth in Eyre Square for awhile, and calling hotels while going down the list of names. This being the west, some of the hotels had their names listed in Irish (rather than English), including one place called Ostan Inis Oirr. When I called this place and the manager answered in Irish, I panicked and said, “Speak English please?” Which made the woman laugh. “I’m only saying the name of our hotel, dear,” I remember her saying through her laughter. Ostan Inis Oirr (Hotel Inisheer) said they weren’t hiring but took my name and the number of my hostel, just in case. I kept on.

A few days later I got a message from the hotel with the funny name. The chef was coming to Galway and would interview me for a job in the hotel kitchen. It was only then I realized that this hotel was not in Galway or even just outside the city, but on the Aran Islands. And then it took another while for me to figure out that it wasn’t on Inis Mor (the largest and most modern of the 3 islands) but on Inis Oirr, the smallest island. I’d truly had no idea people still lived on the smaller two islands, Inis Meain and Inis Oirr. Trying to imagine what life would be like there, I kept picturing a cold and dreary place of perpetual gale-force winds and ancient, black-shawled, rosary-clutching islanders huddled around open fireplaces. I assumed there’d be no one my age out there. I nearly decided not to go. Besides I was making friends in Galway and finding it a great town for young people.

Blind accordionist busking in Galway City.

Taken on bridge over River Corrib, Galway.

On bridge over River Corrib, Galway, 1995.

Then Kieran, the chef of the hotel with the funny name, showed up a couple days later in Galway and took me to a pub to interview me. Not an islander, Kieran was from Cork, was only a year or 2 older than me (so that cleared up that notion), and was a natural mumble-mouth. I couldn’t understand a word he said to me about the job or the island, but just smiled and nodded along like I did. He had me phone the manager for instructions to get to the island. Looking back, it was all so complicated. (Like a Celtic knot. Sheesh.) The problem was the boats didn’t go every day to Inis Oirr in those days. Since there was no direct boat for the next few days, I was told to go down to the docks in Galway early in the morning and get on a cargo boat there headed for Inis Mor, the big island. The cargo boat was a massive slow-moving ferry called the Oileain Arainn that was used to transport large objects, including cattle and horses, to and from the islands. I remember having to stand at the docks that morning and wait for the crew to finish loading the cargo. After being let on, I found I was the only passenger other than an Italian couple.

The boat I rode in on. The Oileain Arann.

The cargo boat reached Inis Mor around noon. Once we docked there, a man standing on a much smaller boat, a little navy-blue ferry called the Happy Hooker, called out for folks going to Inis Oirr. This time I was the one and only passenger. The crew was one man and two teenage boys--Paddy Crowe, the skipper, and two black-haired brothers, Eanna and Cormac. I remember that the two boys barely acknowledged me, and I thought they must not like the looks of me, maybe didn’t like Americans. This would be my first experience with the natural shyness of many of the islanders--something about the islanders I’d learn I’d have to get used to and not take personally. And something I felt I should have recognized, being a shy person myself.

Funny how I remember all these little things so well after all these years. It was a sunny day, and as we came closer to Inis Oirr, it looked a more colorful place than I had pictured it. The houses were mostly white, yellow, or pale blue in color and were rather neatly arranged on natural terraces rising up from near the island beach. The beach looked clean, and the water at one end of the beach, near a slip for small boats, was a beautiful and clear turquoise. Rocks tumbled down all along the shore and gleamed in the sun like a string of thick, dirty pearls wound around the neck of the island. I’m not sure the island’s fields and walls would’ve been very visible to me at this point, while still on the boat. Not the extent of them. These walls and fields are among the most famous features of the Aran Islands. The islands are very stony--and that’s understating it. A bit like describing the Atlantic as “very wet.” Plenty of stones (limestone in particular) but not much in the way of natural soil. So the islanders long ago devised a way of building up the soil by hauling up seaweed and sand and spreading them out on small plots of land that were parceled out between families and separated by walls made from all the stone. Backbreaking work, to say the least. From above it ends up looking like a sturdy gray net cast over the island’s scarce plots of green, stone wrangling crop and soil into order and obedience. On Inis Oirr, the only place to get a really fair view of this big puzzle of fieldwork is up by O’Brien’s Castle, a 14^th-century ruin occupying the highest point on the island and the first feature anyone arriving by boat is able to spot from a distance.

View of Inis Oirr from the ferry.

O'Brien's Castle on Inis Oirr.

My friend Lisa climbing castle ruin on Inis Oirr.

View of Inis Oirr fields from the castle.

View of Inis Oirr fields and walls, from the castle.

Inis Oirr is a tiny island, covering only 4 square miles. In 1995 the population was only about 300, and I think these days it’s even less. It would probably sound funny for anyone to say they could find such a small place intimidating, but the truth is I felt terribly nervous as the boat approached the island, even a little frightened, so afraid of messing up the new job and not fitting in. I remember there was only one person at the pier as the boat docked. A woman wearing a red jumper and light blue jeans and standing with her arms folded low on her chest, like she was a little cold. This was Rita Flaherty, the proprietor of the hotel with the funny name, Ostan Inis Oirr.

Rita with Irene (fellow staff) in the hotel pub.

The hotel with the funny name.

Rita owns the hotel along with her husband, Mairtin, a born islander. (Rita comes from the mainland originally, and married onto the island.) She and Mairtin have more kids than even my parents, who have 6. Back in America, I’d always put up with jokes and comments that families of such size as mine are preposterous, even irresponsible. But in the days and weeks to come, nearly everyone I’d meet on Inis Oirr, even non-islanders, came from a family of 5, 6, 7 or more. This was among the first challenges I encountered to the belief that the American way is the only way--and I was grateful for it.

Islanders: Tomas, Tomas, and Micheal. (Plus Misty the horse & Sooty the dog)

Ostan Inis Oirr was (and still is) a family-run place. Back in ‘95 about half of Rita and Mairtin’s children were old enough to help out at the hotel. Since 1995 the hotel has expanded a bit and the rooms have been gussied up, all outfitted now with TVs and ensuite bathrooms. The number of rooms has stayed the same--15. But this is Ireland, a country loaded with superstitions. So there’s no Room 13 at the hotel. Instead it’s Room 11, Room 12A, Room 12B, Room 14... No fooling.

Most of us hotel staff who weren’t family stayed with the family. That first summer in ‘95 I shared a room with Mary Ellen, the eldest daughter, just a year younger than me. Rita and Mairtin and their children were all great to me, and over time I’ve come to view them as like my own family. Mairtin had lived and worked in Chicago for a time back before he got married and liked talking about the city with me. He had worked for the CTA there (the city’s transit system) and over 20 years later he still knew all the el lines like the lines in the palm of his own hand. I would wonder sometimes what it must have been like for someone from a place like Inis Oirr to adjust to life in a place like Chicago. Because for me, trying to do the reverse, it wasn’t always easy.

I try to row a currach with my friends Amanda and Tomas.

I made lots of mistakes my first few weeks and was often frustrated by my mistakes. I’d only been in Ireland about 2 weeks before going to Inis Oirr and hadn’t been familiarized much at all with Irish ways, much less island ways. Even Irish people from the mainland who were living and working on Inis Oirr--like Kieran the chef, or Sinead and Irene, two of my co-workers, from Galway City and Ballinasloe--found island life very different from what they were used to. But still, they could tell the difference between an islander speaking to them in English and an islander speaking to them in Irish. I couldn’t near the beginning, I’m embarrassed to say. (Go ahead, laugh at me. Laugh and point. Won’t be the last time.)

A dumb American Midwesterner mistook this folk art for a seahorse. ;)

Being right by the sea may have been the biggest--and happiest--change to adjust to. I come from the American Midwest--thousands of miles from any ocean shore. Rita and Mairtin’s house is almost right on the beach. The room I was in faced the sea. Every night I could hear the waves rolling up on the beach as I fell asleep. Every day the first thing I saw when I got up was a view of the sea and the hills of the Burren and Connemara beyond. It never got old for me. It never made me feel anything less than so fortunate to be here on this beautiful island. Never.

Cara and Max on the beach one morning.

Back of the island.

Before coming to Inis Oirr, I don’t think I’d been on a boat more than half a dozen times in my life. Since then I’ve crossed water more times than I can count. Before coming to Inis Oirr, I’d been to the Pacific and Atlantic, looked at them and maybe waded in them. But I never swam in the ocean until swimming off the beach on the island. Inis Oirr was where I saw for the first time seals, puffins, jellyfish, and dolphins in their natural habitat. It was where I ate lobster for the first time and learned to cook and shell a crab. After a few years working on Inis Oirr, I was able to identify the different kinds of seaweed growing offshore, learned about the benefits of a seaweed bath, and even tried seaweed pudding.

Catching a crab.

Fishing is of course important to an island community and as tough a job as farming is on this rocky place. The sea is unpredictable, even in the summer. Daily sailings at the height of the tourist season are not necessarily guaranteed, and when the water is especially rough the ferries that usually spend the night tied up at Inis Oirr’s pier are brought over to Inis Mor or Doolin (on the mainland) for safer keeping. In the winter, the pier can be completely overswept by high waves, and it’s been said winter waves have even come up as far to flood Tigh Ned, one of the island’s pubs, located just beyond the pier. As for boats, you’ll see all kinds crowding around the pier (well, not all kinds--I never saw a sub there), but the kind of boat native to the Aran Islands is the currach, a long, black, canoe-like boat with a wooden frame covered over in tarred pieces of canvas (in the old days, cowhide was used). Some of the islandmen still fish out of currachs, and in the summer there are currach races with teams competing from all three islands. Fishing currachs are often outfitted with motors these days, but for racing the boats are powered by oars, tough islander palms, and strong islander biceps.

Rough crossing to Inis Meain. Paraic Poil with Bebhinn and Reamonn.

Currach racing team.

The Inis Oirr team getting set for races on Inis Meain.

My mom on the beach. When the currachs aren't on the water, they're turned upside down and set on barrels.

Plassey shipwreck in background with freshly tarred currach in foreground.

The Plassey, which was wrecked on the island in 1960.

It took me 2 years to convince any of the islandmen to take me out in a fishing boat or currach with them. For one thing, fishing is strictly a man’s job on the islands. And second, there’s a superstition among the island fishermen that ginger-haired women are bad luck, and my hair was lightened to a strawberry blonde in those days. Even passing a red-headed woman on the road on the way down to the boat was reason enough to give at least one of the islandmen reason to turn right around and leave the fishing for another day. But there was one brave islander who finally let myself and a friend come out fishing with him a few times, using a long, weighted line stuck with hooks that we caught rockfish and pollack with. As we began, he’d look out over the water for places where the birds circled and dived, telling us that’s where the fish were. If that failed, he fell back on more of the old superstitions, asking if either of us had been to mass lately. “Yes? Oh, I’d say we’ll have some luck today.” Don’t believe it? Well, here’s the proof!

Catching a pollock. He's holding it, but don't be fooled--I caught it.

On to Part 2...