Achill Island, Co. Mayo, Ireland. Photo by Jonas Stolle on Unsplash
The drive down to Achill is one I haven’t done in a while. As I make my way west through the awkwardly-placed brown hills of Mayo, memories are triggered by the roadside landmarks, and I scroll through images in my head in an attempt to recollect the last time I was there, like I’m going through someone else’s summer holiday pictures on social media. I’ve been going to Achill since I was a kid but it feels like years go by these days between return visits to anywhere.
I know I was there in the great hot summer of 2018, on an extended summer holiday home. I surfed at Keel and then watched the Newbridge or Nowhere match in the Annexe Bar. The full-time whistle was bittersweet, as in defeat and an uncommonly early end to the now-customary emotional summer journey, there was some relief that both players and supporters would have our first real holiday in nearly a decade. But last summer’s mental calendar takes longer to sift through.
The roads of Mayo always trigger memories no matter where I go. I know I’ve travelled on most of them at some point in my life, though it’s hard now to place when, where, or why. Trips to the distant north of the county mightn’t have been done since I was a child, and might require someone else’s word to confirm their having happened. It could have been a dream, fed by a book or a national schoolteacher. Blurry images of bog and stone and rock and heather, the famous green and red merging into a colour-blind brown.
Claremorris – Balla – Castlebar – Newport – Mulranney – Achill Sound – Keel. As I drive on I pass through villages I’d long forgotten or never registered were there at all. Tiernaur. Tonragee. Pollranney. I often drive through places as far-flung as Carlow and Waterford and Kilkenny and marvel at the exotic place names – even above in Sligo they seem to have formed from a different dialect and accent to the one in Mayo – though these places sound strangely familiar, despite their oddness. I’m sure I’ve seen them before only I can’t remember, passing visits with subliminal exposure to their signages perhaps, or glances over their names in the pages of the Western People: snippets announcing football results, development grants, water shortages, death notices.
As I pass by roadside pubs with closed doors foreboding a terrible tragedy I think and feel for split-seconds that I’ve been inside them before. But when? And why? As a child did we stop in to get a soup and a cold sandwich on the way home from the beach? Maybe, but more likely we didn’t. Where, then, does this image come from? And where does it go again just as soon as I’m about to get a full view of it, like it’s being snatched away from in front of my eyes, a child’s balloon floating away in a recurring dream?
Passing Achill GAA pitch at Pollranney and I can say with certainty I’ve been there, underage football matches being the best way to travel as a teenager. Either that or going to the Gaeltacht for three weeks in the summer. Where would my memory be without the football? People crave routine, and the order of the fixtures every Saturday and Sunday could well keep a lot of people alive in ways we don’t appreciate. I cross the Sound and conclude that no; I definitely haven’t been to Achill since the Newbridge match, though the question kept me busy for the drive down. As to the time before that? God knows.
Onwards into the island, further back in time and memories or what feel like them flicker into mind as I pass by side roads, pubs, trees. There’s a house there on the main road through Achill, standing alone in from the road through a clearing of trees with grey bricks and green trim and when I glance at it for a second too long a memory starts to diffuse into my mind just in front of my forehead – or is it behind it?
I can almost picture calling around the side and knocking on the back door, just a child, my mother calling in to say hello to a friend of a friend, and of course a cup of tea was offered and I’d to sit impatiently and listen to the grown-ups talk about things I didn’t understand, what felt like hours of my summer being whiled away. Almost. But why would I have been into that house at all? Are these memories at all, or something else?
I don’t have time to look more closely as I’ve to keep my eyes on the road, but the image of it stays in my mind as the road rises and falls and twists in front of me. A rush of new autumn air comes in the car window, the scent and texture of walking through leaves in Dublin last year, or every year.
I drive past people at the side of the road, and it’s the same: the longer they’re caught in that side of the road freeze-frame like cattle standing in a field seen from a moving train, the more I could swear I’ve seen them before, or I know them.
Matches, trips to the beach, family holidays, swimming club trips away, Irish college. Memories pile up on each other until new ones start to grow, maybe where there never were any before. Have I been into that pub before? If I look at it for too long it starts to feel like I have. I stare at the map on my phone and the whole thing comes alive until I can’t tell whether I’m thinking of places I’ve ticked off the list in the past or the possibilities of the future. It might be that the memories aren’t false, it could be that they’re just not mine.
Maybe my descendants live in that house, in the future. It’s worth remembering that the past and the future both look the same in our head. Neither are reliable, both tied to our state of mind and circumstances in the present. The past can be rosy and the future uncertain, or vice-versa. That innate and often inexplicable longing for the past that we all carry, even a past before your time, can intensify images til they have all the power and meaning of something you witnessed yourself. Even the worst of times can be seen through the rear-view mirror with rosy tints, and water can be thrown on the excitement of the best moments of your life by enjoying the satisfaction of the future before you’re there.
And often we just make it all up as we go along at a later date anyway.
Maybe I just love driving around Mayo.
An overheard conversation, caught off guard and you inattentive, can plant an inception in your head and cause a butterfly effect that’d make awful confusion down the line. Details are easily recalled with accuracy in a week or two or in a year’s time; in ten or twenty years the memories are only of conversations or memories of memories. Or maybe they’re just memories of wishful thinking and daydreams. It might be that the memories aren’t false, they could just be someone else’s.
If I don’t stop soon I’m going to remember the 1894 shipwreck.
In the water I think back on a month ago, when I sat in the same spot but the sun was on the other side of the bay, over the cliffs at Keem. The sea looks the same as the last time now, though it’s a month on, the seasons shifting a month in just the last 24 hours. Which day will I remember in five or ten years? The same scene, the same colours in both, but in one a white-hot sun sits up to the left above the cliffs at the height of morning; in the other the golden sun sitting to the west in the evening. Both vivid bright even in faded memories. Maybe I’ll just remember the photograph of it on my phone, or maybe I’ll just remember making and taking the photo, or maybe I’ll just remember a picture on a postcard I glimpsed in a shop. Maybe I’ll remember none of it, until the next time I’m here.