Soppy on the Emerald Isle

With a splat, squelch and gurgle, my left shoe fell away and disappeared into the Guinness-like murk of Irish blanket bog.

Unfazed, one of my fellow hikers plunged an arm into the mire, frowned, reached further, groped around, frowned, and reached yet deeper. When my trainer (and his arm) reemerged, naught but a mud-clump coating could be seen. It oozed muck and scum. Probably toted small swamp creatures. Reeked, needless to say.

Me, too.

Just then, the skies opened up. Again. On this summer day in the east of Ireland, rain came in fitful spurts, cheekily alternating between mist and showers, drizzle and downpours. Sopping gorse, heather, and sedges; river crossings; and the occasional boggy misstep helped to ensure an even drenching, from top to bottom, as my companions and I wound our way up into the Wicklow peaks.

Perhaps I ought to have been unfazed by Irish wetness. I've (more or less) survived Bostonian weather for the past two years, after all. And I'm intimately familiar with decidedly aquatic environs, one might say, given the many hours I've spent in Blodgett Pool for water polo practice.

But this summer, I've come to know a new definition of wetness altogether.

No one comes to Ireland for the weather, I'd been told over and over. Not for nothing has precipitation preoccupied Irish literary luminaries from Joyce (“It would rain for ever, noiselessly. The water would rise inch by inch…covering the monuments and mountain tops...”) to Frank McCourt (“Great sheets of rain gathered to drift slowly up the River Shannon and settle forever...”). But in July and August, I'd also been told, one could realistically hope for tolerable weather—even occasionally beautiful days.

This is, unfortunately, one of the wettest Irish summers in decades.

Cloudbursts are the least of the aqueous troubles in Ireland, however: Since March, a cryptosporidium parasite has rendered the tap water in Galway County (my home base for the summer) unusable. Bottled-water profit margins have surged, the Archbishop of Tuam has sought an alternative source of holy water, and I've become accustomed to treating water with a stanch mixture of fear and vexation.

It didn't make total sense, then, to willingly venture into surroundings that would leave my feet sopping with swamp matter and the rest of me saturated with other strains of sogginess. As I slogged forward once more, after squashing my foot back in my sneaker, a part of me scoffed at the allure of Ireland's natural beauty. Of the many odes to the Irish landscape, most must have been composed by those with dry feet, in a heated room, far removed from the terrain and the elements.

But as we began scaling the craggy flanks of Tonelagee Mountain, the haze lifted momentarily to expose a breathtaking spectrum of color and texture: tracts of lavender heather, russet and burnt-gold rushes, somber rock, downy moss, a thousand shades, of green rushing streams, fern-limned pools, and glistening earth and slag. The slate-grey sky rendered every other hue all the more dramatic. This close to the earth and the sky, this deep and this far within the terrain, there was nothing between me and the poetry of the place.

Squishing earth between my toes was merely a part of it.

The transformative effect that inevitably accompanies life abroad is not unlike the elements in Ireland. Insight can come in droplets, dashes, steady cascades, and bursts and deluges. Some lessons and memories can be shaken off, but the total effect of the experience stays with you forever, clinging like the smell of stale must.


Julia Y. Lam ’09, a Crimson editorial editor, is an anthropology concentrator in Dunster House. Despite her newfound appreciation for rain, she is not looking forward to the chilly drizzle of Cambridge, Massachusetts.