John Butlerfinds there's no escaping the chat with an Irishman
Once, on holiday, I took a four-hour hike to the top of the highest mountain in a remote range at the edge of a national park. It was as much of a climb as a walk, and it was undertaken in the searing heat of a foreign summer. Still, climb it I did, and for my own reasons. Not only would the view from the summit be spectacular, but the silence would envelop me, and silence is a rare flower - the black orchid of our times.
When I stood up at the top of the highest rock, I was breathless. Below me were the mountain forests, a dark lake and a clear, cloudless sky. Around me, a cool breeze. I stood there, listening to the rustle of branches. An eagle circled above, and I could hear its wings beating. I drank it all in. A fly buzzed past. Nature was working. Sometimes it takes climbing a mountain to hear your heart pulsing, to be reunited with the abyss.
"Is that a familiar face! How the hell are you? Some walk, all the same! You might have to carry me down! Somebody call me a chopper! Mountain rescue!"
He was climbing towards me, red-faced, thrusting out his hand and saying with this very gesture that we were now to be buddies. I knew him vaguely, chiefly through an incident which had reflected badly upon him. But we weren't going to let that prevent us from bonding, were we?
Apparently not. We stood there discussing whether it was the heat or the humidity that did it. Then we guessed the type of tree, then what kind of bird, then how many miles back to camp. How my estimate of the distance back to camp could be of interest to another living soul was beyond me, but there we were. Above us, I could sense the eagle listening to the two Irish guys batting inanities back and forth into the wind beneath him, and lamenting his own solitary commute from mountain top to eyrie.
Whenever I hear someone describing national characteristics, I think of that day, because that, to me, is what it means to be Irish. We can fling ourselves into the farthest reaches of the wild and never guarantee solitude, in fact we can nearly guarantee company. Maybe that's why we fling ourselves so far, so often - it's not a real gamble.
The prospect of a familiar voice is no bad thing, of itself. Some kind of idle conversation can be a real comfort when you're lonely, and we're good at it - talking to the bus driver about the shocking traffic. But interference is a problem if you're not lonely - it's the opposite of a comfort.
By now, the mountains and the sky and the trees had all disappeared. We may as well have been sitting on a bus. All I could see was a pink questioning face which framed these blinking, searching eyes. I didn't want to go down the mountain yet - I had only been there for five minutes - still, I found myself sticking out a hand and saying goodbye. "You going down? I'll probably head down myself." He appeared at my shoulder, and so began our descent.
I've never understood people who jog and talk at the same time - it seems to me an insanity. Exercising while talking should be an Olympic sport. The winner ran 10,000m in 25 minutes, 17 seconds, and spoke an astonishing 100,000 words! Yet as we clambered over rocks, this guy never drew breath, firing questions at me, quick and fast. What was I was doing? Where I was living? Who I was living with? Did I like it? What was my family doing? Where were they living? Did they like it? I searched in vain for a rock I could dash my head off, or a venomous snake I could French-kiss.
It's hard to keep your own business private, being Irish. We are a product of our environment, and anyone who grows up in a small country has an obsessive interest in finding out about other people, who they are and to whom they are related, and makes judgments about them based on what they know of their relatives. This was apparent as we hiked down the mountain, yet I am a product of the same environment as my inquisitor, and a corollary of the first characteristic of nosiness is the desire to let no one know anything about your business, however trivial your business might be.
As we brooked the stream, our conversation bore the uniquely ambiguous form of an Irish chat. He asked me "How did you enjoy living there?" (in a house in Dublin that I knew for a fact that his sister's ex-boyfriend had lived in before me, with his sister, who later broke up with him quite messily).
I answered "Ah it was fine, you know, it wasn't the worst, but it wasn't the best, you know what I mean? It was kind of like this thing that I did and then I left afterwards, and then I was living somewhere else, you know that kind of way?" Struggling with all this ambiguity, a grizzly bear let a salmon fall from its jaws, and a squirrel fell out of a tree.
It's a blessing and a curse, being Irish. As we rounded a corner in the trail and joined a larger path, I heard a shout from behind. It was the younger sister of a girl I knew in childhood, but it seemed that she knew my inquisitor much better. "Jesus H Christ, how the hell are you?" she squawked. He shot a glance at me as she air-kissed him. "Funny meeting you here. You must be stalking me! God, that's gas. What about the mountain? Three Rock how are ya?"
He may have turned to introduced me. We will never know. I was gone - soaring like an eagle.
John Butler blogs at http://wordpress.lozenge.com