OUTDOORS Foreign hitchhikers’ blues

Lost in translation


Country Sights and Sounds
John Shelley

It was one of those uniquely Connachtian mornings, with the remnants of last night’s frost clinging to sheltered corners while a thin and drizzling wind cut through our clothes with an inhospitable, icy dampness.
We had stopped the car to stretch our legs at Kylemore Lough, where crooked, half-starved whitethorn trees formed a skeletal framework of winter sticks around our view of mountain, moor and lake. There ought to have been music: the lonely lament of a distant piper, the cheerful peal of wild children at play, even birdsong, but there was nothing to relieve the dreadful, tomblike silence held between a blackening sky that promised rain and 30 miles of boggy hill that didn’t want or need it.
We couldn’t stay here. We drove on, taking note of a road sign inviting or daring us to travel at 80 kilometres an hour. Imagine, that in one hour we could be 80 kilometres from this place. More likely, in less than a minute we could be at the bottom of one of these roadside ravines, or even in the sea. If there was ever a waste of resources this is it: why tell people they may travel at no more than 80 or 100 in places where it is patently obvious that any speed in excess of 30 is perilous? Besides, a rough mental calculation told me than 80 kilometres would take me to Galway City or to Claremorris. Kylemore would be fine. I slowed down.
It is just as well that I did so, or I should have missed the slight figure hunched between the ramshackle stone wall and the crooked thorn that shared its footing. As it was, I saw the frail arm waving too late so that I had to turn back on myself to offer assistance.
‘Wesh lerrfack,’ he mumbled through frozen, lips.
‘What?’
‘Lerrfack.’ He stubbed a thin and trembling finger at the map that shivered in his right hand.
‘Ah,’ I was beginning to understand. ‘You want to go to Letterfrack. Well, if you keep walking that way,’ I pointed, ‘it shouldn’t take too long. An hour or so.’ The poor fellow gave a despairing look. ‘On the other hand, if you jump in it should take only a few minutes.’
In the warmth of the car our guest soon began to thaw out. He had been walking since dawn and was hoping to reach Dublin by mid-afternoon. Dawn last week might have been a better time to start, I suggested. He was Italian, with a limited grasp of the English language. It didn’t look very far on the map, he observed. I had to agree. ‘Just an inch or two.’
He would go to Letterfrack and catch a bus that would take him to Dublin. I tried to explain. ‘Buses in Letterfrack are as scarce as hen’s teeth.’
‘What,’ he wanted to know, ‘are hen’s teeth? Are they many or few?’
We came to a stop in the middle of the village. ‘This is it,’ I told him. He looked around wildly, back at his map and out into the weather as if there must have been some mistake.
‘Where is the bus?’
‘There is no bus.’
‘This is Letterfrack?’ He eyed me suspiciously and pointed back at the map, which clearly showed a place, with signs of habitation. Here there was just a house and a pub that was closed.
‘Then there must be a bus.’
‘There might,’ I conceded.
He cheered visibly and disembarked. I left him tightening the collar of his thin, continental jacket while wondering where to stand and wait for the number 53 to Dublin.
Later, on thinking over the young Italian man’s predicament, I had to ask that same perennial question: What is being done to attract foreign visitors to these remote parts of rural Ireland? The place-names on tourist maps are in English, and bear little resemblance to the road signs as Gaeilge. Local people, who are able to understand there own road signs, don’t need them; they know where they are and where they are going. Yet there must be a point to it. Is feeling lost supposed to be part of the Irish experience?
I might be wrong, but I imagine there is at least one tourist who will not be back.