What I learned from a sheep farmer in the dark, cozy pub in Kinvarra is that tomorrow is the first day of spring around here. Which makes May 1st the first day of summer, August 1 the beginning of autumn and so forth. It may seem more hope than fact, but the birdsong is ramping up nicely to a considerable dawn chorus and the narcissus has broken through the earth and the lambing is well on. These three old men and a massively overweight pubtender traded stories of things that have scared them in the middle of the night in the middle of various nowheres. I can't give much detail because this was all in a dense Galway brogue that I found nearly impenetrable, rhymthically much like the Gaelic one hears frequently around here. I've developed my ear to where I can often identify where is a speaker is from, and if I can't it's often because they're from someplace I don't know, like County Kildare. The accents derive from the wide range of Irish dialects, the Gaelic in Kerry is hardly the same as in Connemara (though the standardized Irish taught from kindergarten on is homogenizing the language considerably).

All this language minutia I acquired from an earnest erudite woman at a Gaelic literary conference in Westport that I inadvertedly crashed while seeking out the set dance ceili that was supposed to be happening at the hotel. The dance was for the conference participants. The good news is that the dances were all called. The bad news (for me) is that they were called in Irish, though the words for "House" and "Chain" began to be familiar by the end of the evening.

The next two days I reacquired my dance bliss with the Michael Sexton Ceili Band playing at yet another ceili, drawing 200 dancers whose collective body heat quickly converted the room to a torrid tropical greenhouse. My cameras fogged up immediately when I took them out of the case. I half expected condensate to begin dripping on us from the ceiling. I recognized several people from Tralee, and I seem to be getting on some kind of A-list, as women ask to partner with me now. I'm just beginning to understand the syncopated battering step, and with the right partner with the right music I can manage at least an auditory approximation.

I found lying about a schedule for the year of all the major set dance ceili events in the country. There's one every single weekend of the year someplace in Ireland. Plus there's the irish set dance cruise through the Greek Isles, another one to the Carribean, the irish set dance week in Spain, and, irony of ironies, the craze is sweeping England. You heard it here first, within five years cowboy line dancing will revert to the obscure subcult status it deserves, to be replaced by the battering pounding of a Connemara Reel in every tavern in the West.

Doug Plummer

Back in Galway