Dingle, whose narrow streets, sidewalks and colorful, close-in buildings follow the contour of the undulating landscape, was indeed a quiet town. A car or two went by the four as they walked down the sidewalk along the canal the river ran. Few street lights were on the whole way and those that were weren’t harsh but instead lent a soft glow about the street that made even the shadows and the alleys seemingly non-threatening. It seemed that Dingle was merely a quiet sea port town along the Irish coast, where everyone was at home, in bed, by 7:00 pm.
But not everybody, for in what was just another colorful building along a street across from a church with no lights over the door, and but a few shining through the small windows; nothing indicated what lay inside. A shadow was about the doorwell of the narrow red double-doors; a single old-style frosted glass-paned door whose opposite was locked in place at the top and bottom and allowed but one person entry at a time that Ula tentatively opened into the incandescent light of the high-ceiling room. Inga, Monique, and Sven followed, waiting as each squeezed into the standing room only crowd of people.
A small room, only about 24’x30’ was divided by a shoe shop wholly intact on one side of the narrow room; and a fully stocked bar on the other with a half dozen stools on either side. This was Dick Mack’s Shoe Shop and Pub (in 2003) There was nothing commercial about the place; it seemed just a hole-in-the-wall that once sold shoes and now sold Guinness, Jameson, and atmosphere.
Shoes and rubber boots in their original boxes yellowed in age and dusty, were on shelves all the way to the ceiling. Counters were along the bottom of the shelves and out onto the floor the length of the room. Dusty red metal buckets stenciled “water,” in case of fire, hung from the ceiling.
Sven estimated 40 people including the musicians in the room; the musicians numbering nine. The crowd was older, no amateurs. Blue collar and blue jeans, leather and canvas jackets, heavy wool sweaters, berets and Irish caps. Cigarette smoke was thick, so Monique, sensitive to it after over 40 years as a singer/entertainer herself, took her glass of wine and sought the cleaner air near doors at the opposite of the room that she saw lead to the toilets and outer areas.
The musicians were everyday people, just off work and were doing an impromptu jam session that night; it wasn’t a planned event. There weren’t any amplifiers or electric instruments. There were two guitarists, a flute and Irish Tin-Whistle blower, a Bodhran (Irish Drum) drummer, two Uilleann-pipe players, a concertina squeezer and two fiddle players.
They sang and kept time to the rhythms of each in their own way as did the crowd. One musician was Con Durham, a pipe-player of some renown international notoriety; other musicians fully adept on other instruments proved their mettle over the course of the evening. Monique and Sven visited with the concertina player who reminded Sven of his friend Syd Skogstad back in Reed River, U.S. Of A.
“Where in the States are you from?” the squeezebox player asked Sven.
“So, what was the give-away? Howdya know?” Sven said, genuinely interested.
“Your baseball cap…” the man said awaiting the next song.
“Yah but that guy is wearing a cap too—is he American?” Sven asked, spying a taller man in the crowd nearer the front door.
“It's an old habit he’s trying to break… He lived in the states for 15 years before moving back here, ” the concertina guy said with a big smile on his face.
“Well then, what do you call a hat like that?” Sven inquired seizing the opportunity to finally know what to call those wedge-shaped caps the Irish men wear.
“You just go into one of the shops and you tell ‘em you wanna buy a cap. There’s nothing to it…,” the man concluded and lifted his concertina to his chest to play.
Ula procured a Guinness for he and Sven, and a glass of wine for Inga who found an open stool near a musician named Lucinda, a Uilleann pipe player. Lucinda was friendly and open to conversation; she explained her instrument and its operation, indicating she had learned to play it ‘with cooperation of Mr. Durham' and was still learning.
The Bodhran was about 24-inches in diameter and 5-inches deep across the back with a duct tape-wrapped strut/support from top to bottom that the player held in one hand vertically. moving this hand into different positions. He struck the drum with a short two-headed drum stick held in the fist of his other hand; the blows being soft, and the sound of the drum low and not so resonant.
The fiddlers, the resin from their bows caked on the face of the fiddle, played with their eyes closed their whole bodies in time with the music, their feet tapping, the bow alive across the strings. About the room were smiles and laughter amid the smoke’s blue screen. Conversations in clusters of people nearer the door, a guitarist singing a solo gets a round of applause.
A man Ula was visiting, talked of Dingle. Sven tells him Ula’s ancestors came from County Kerry and the man replied,
“All Americans say they came from Ireland…”
Sven figured he had heard it before a few times, but that in Ula’s case it was true, although Ula had no idea of where exactly, only his father Joseph Williamson, he figured, knew that.
A few people sat talking in the semi-darkness off the aisle to the toilets, talking. On the walls there were photographs of the Irish Civil War for Independence of the 1920s; and drawings, and poems, Monique had explored the back rooms where the air was cool and had sought Sven out to tell him about them.
In one of the poems, Sven read this stanza that reminded him of the conversation he had with Ula and the man from Dingle. “From Benner’s Hotel, the American Irish, cameras ready, search the pub stools to find where grandfathers once sat. Tour busses filled, fly by, blurred pictures of Ireland not…” -- by Jet Halligan (1994).
So it was true, Americans came to Ireland too in search of their ancient past and the locals smile about it, even laugh. If the reverse was true, the Irish traveling to American to find their roots, we’d probably just wish them good luck and go on about our business because our history, except for wartime events, mean nothing to us. We callously build subdivisions over sacred grounds of U.S. history like Antietam and Sharpsburg in the name of progress and bulldoze on old buildings to make way for new. We waste landscape wontingly with landfills and dumps and then write our congressmen for more land use needs. Recorded history in America is rare and defines only the most ancient of sights along the coasts of this land; the most ancient all but destroyed by a people so desperate for the future they have lost all interest in the past here until they go to different countries with ancestors on their minds.
Perhaps if Ireland had been given the opportunity to better itself as quickly as America had tried to do, its ancient history and ruins would’ve been destroyed in the name of progress too. Perhaps the thousands of miles of stone fences would have been cleared away by corporate farms; the roads improved and widened to move product and produce across the country more expediently; rail systems improved, communications made priority; the population would’ve been larger and the demands on land use greater.
Although history has been hard on Ireland, Ireland may reap an economic benefit from those Irish Americans searching for their ancestral bar stools their history is right in front of them there. It’s not in bronze statutes of Civil War generals on horseback nor in solemn stone faces carved on a mountainside. Not many Irish Americans identify with the adobe cliff dwellers in New Mexico, the towering totems of the Northwest, the Russian-influenced architecture along the west coast, the forested regions of Idaho and Oregon, but could trace their ancestors mile after mile across the railroad beds from coast to coast, border to border, and wonder from afar about the racism and hardships they endured as laborers, who held their own hopes and aspirations for the future so to improve their lot — in Ireland where there was hopelessness and despair. Where then, but in Ireland, would an individual go to begin to appreciate what being of Irish descent is really all about?
When an American goes to Ireland or to any foreign country, he or she has a chance to learn what it is to be an American.
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