The Ireland Dispatches

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There is a strictly photographic modality called "chasing the light." When I engage in this quest, it doesn’t matter that I badly need to pee, that I’m starving, that I don’t know where I’m staying yet, that it’s cold as all get out. All this is secondary. The light is building, and there’s a photograph out there somewhere. It is, however, preferable to be alone. One evening in Alberta (incredible light, clouds , mountains, the works) Robin brought the enterprise to a halt, thusly: "We’re eating NOW."

I’m on the edge of the Iveragh Peninsula, on that tourist strip known as the Ring of Kerry. It’s the kind of place where the menus are in five languages. Hype or not, the area is achingly beautiful. I’m navigating with an ordinance survey map, which marks every ogham stone and wedge tomb in the neighborhood. The map looks like it was shotgun blast with neolithic sites.

It’s been a blustery day. Rain and sun intermingle. There have been fugitive rainbows. I’ve stood through lots of showers, waiting for light and land to coalesce. The light now is building to that end of day crescendo, and this one’s going to be a doozy. I just need to find where I want to be. Thus the chase.

I think I have it. I’m on a roadside halfway up a mountain. The landscape empties beneath me. White houses dot green fields at the base of mountains made of rock. A serrated edge coastline, and the islands against the distant Atlantic horizon. It feels like the edge of the world. The sun is setting, but this is no ordinary sunset. It’s raining too, and the Skelligs are enveloped in a glowing cloud of falling rain. The light is spreading upwards, the undersides of the clouds are glowing. The wind bites fiercely into my face. It is raining upwards onto me and my equipment. My fingers ache. I struggle to keep lenses clean. And the scene just keeps getting better and better. The sun sets behind the next squall in the lineup, but then the entire atmosphere, full of rain, lights up orange. And a switch is flipped, and in moments, just gray and blue and gone.

31 October 2000

Waterville, Co. Kerry