Swimming with ghosts to find home
IT’S nice to visit with the ghosts now and then. I had been determined for a while to swim with them. If you walk down past Poul Gorm in Glengarriff and head left along a beautiful woodland path you will come to what my mother calls the Point. And I like to think that the uncles, the mother’s brothers who loom over us all, used to hang out there and swim on long, lazy summer days in different times. I guess I felt that by bathing in these same waters there would be some benediction or baptism, or maybe even absolution. Or maybe it would just be good to wade into the waters of the past. Then again, the brother tells me they never swam there. He says none of them could swim in these places, not even the boatmen. The mother, more indulgent of her soft son’s magical thinking, says they did and she has pictures. She promises to show them to me. She probably never will.
I was shaky enough. We had been back exploring our roots in Kenmare and we had so many cousins that it had been a late night. But the view when you get past Bonane and the tunnels and then Bantry Bay spreads out in front of you would cure anything. I will never get to the bottom of all the names and the people and places.
We made a few calls first; into Casey’s Hotel to look at old pictures, for my mother to catch up on who’s dead or alive, and to hear who really killed Collins. Over to my aunt Joan in the old house. We look at old pictures with her too. Those pictures are all we have left of what we had, she says, but sure we had enough.
I can tell they all think I’m cracked, like some mad returning Yank, to want to get in the water in the middle of December. But getting in the water has become an important part of my pilgrimages these days. Immersion, taking a proper bite out of a place, christening it. I don’t regard a place as done anymore until I climb into it, until I’m up to my neck in it.
A stranger I meet on the street says “Welcome home”, and in my delicate state I nearly hug him or cry. The truth is this was never home, only a place we visited occasionally to dip into the past. But sometimes maybe home is where you least expect it. I meet another man who tells me to look after my mother, “Because she’s one of us”. He says his grandfather was my mother’s godfather. My mother tells me when I check that he was indeed, even though he had a dozen or so girls of his own.
I make the nephew climb into the water with me. It’s so flat and reflective it’s like climbing into the sky, into eternity. And for a few minutes, in the still water, in this, one of the most beautiful places in the world, I do feel home, maybe a deeper home my conscious mind doesn’t understand.
While we changed our clothes a robin came and stood right next to me, brazen, watching. And of course it would be foolish to think he was a ghost, or that he was sent by ghosts. I vow to come back in summer, when I can hear the ghosts laughing and splashing here.