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The Plain Set. I danced it every night last spring in Clare. I knew this dance. The familiar reel step. But something felt different. The moves were the same. The pass across with your lady, twirl her one way once, the other way twice. The way you step out the swing, rotating just twice in the 16 bars. Then it hit me. It sounds different. I’m in County Cork. People aren’t stepping it the same way as in County Clare. There isn’t the common batter rhythm, almost a syncopation, that dancers in Clare do. That was absent, replaced by a hard, jerky kind of sound. I was delighted that I sensed this.

The first dance of the evening I was a little nervous. I hadn’t dance a set in 6 months. The Clare Lancers Set was announced, a set I was confident in. But for the life of me I couldn’t have told you what the first move was. Thinking of it now it completely escapes me. Is it a lead around? Fortunately my dance memory is a kinisthetic one. The moment the music started and I had to do something, my body remembered what it was I had to do. And performed it flawlessly. I’m at the level of dance skill that merely making it through a figure without having to ponder my next move too hard give me profound pleasure.

Oh I have needed this night of dance. For six days I have been roaring through the south of Ireland, ticking shots off my list for the guidebook, racing to make it to the next attraction before the sun vanishes and the next frontal system dumps an inch of rain on me (they’ve been moving through in a regular 48 hour cycle). I’ve not been able to slow down and properly explore an area. I’ve caught a cold. And I’d just come from a night and a day in Cork, a crowded city with too many cars in too narrow a space for them all at once. Cork was not a city I liked.

But I drove past Cork and into the West, where the landscape changed. Those bare mountains, the base of those fingers of land that reach into the Atlantic, I saw those and I felt, "I’m home." And this part of West Cork isn’t even a place I’d been before. Something spoke to me, some deep connection that holds me to this partcular part of this small country.

A psychic once told me that I had several past lives in Ireland . I’m a skeptical agnostic on these matters. If all of us had past lives, and there’s so many more people alive now than have ever lived, there must have been a dozen of us sharing the same past life for the math to work out. If I’m so rational about this wuu-wuu stuff, why was I consulting a psychic in the first place, you might reasonably ask. Another story. But whether I’m visiting a place that a piece of me remembers, or just that something in it deeply soothes and touches me, I have an attachment to The West that is ultimately beyond explanation.

26 October 2000

Ballyvourney, Co. Cork