In all their desperate wanderings in the world, human beings came latest to the Americas. The first people came across the frozen ocean from Asia 12,000 or more years ago. They are called Native Americans, even though their nativity can be traced, through their DNA, all the way back to what is now Siberia. And like all people, they, too, kept on wandering until they had settled the whole of North and South America. Only when they reached Patagonia, in southernmost Argentina and Chile, did they stop, because they had run out of new land.
The first people from Europe to reach North America were Vikings, then fishermen from Ireland, who stopped in what is now northeastern Canada. Christopher Columbus was the first official delegation from Europe, who mistook the natives he met in the islands of the Caribbean for the natives of the East Indies, and called them "indios." The second wave of Irish immigrants didn't arrive in America until the 19th century, which is why I now call myself an Irish-American. Generations since, the descendants of those Irish people still speak fondly, if rather dimly, of The Old Country - a place only a small fraction of which is by now a real place, and the far greater part of which is a mishmash of memories and sheer fantasies. Americans who arrived from Europe have an insatiable homesickness because they have been Americans for only a few generations, not nearly enough time to develop a sense of belonging there.
Last April, a relation sent me a package in which was enclosed a great gift - The Collected Stories of Benedict Kiely, Irish novelist and storyteller, historian, travel-writer, broadcaster, and lecturer. I had read every Kiely story I could get my hands on some time in the 1980s, and one particular story had stuck in my memory more vividly than all the others. It is the story "The Dogs of the Great Glen" which was published in 1963 in Kiely's first collection of stories called A Journey to the Seven Streams. I remember it because it tells of an Irish-American who, after listening to the stories passed down to him from his grandfather, has decided to go and see if the stories are real. It is the same fantasy shared by everyone in the world who has listened to the stories of his parents and grandparents - stories many hundreds or even thousands of years old - about the place from which they came: going back, retracing the outward journey to the place of origin, their original home. In his introduction the book I got in the package last spring, Kiely quotes Antoninus Pius: "Whatever happens is as common and well known as a rose in the spring or an apple in autumn. Everywhere up and down, through ages and histories, towns and families are full of the same stories."
Strangely enough, the story is exactly as I remembered it from reading it once thirtysome years ago:
"The professor had come over from America to search out his origins and I met him in Dublin on the way to Kerry where his grandfather had come from and where he had relations, including a grand-uncle, still living.... 'All I remember is a name out of my dead father's memories: the great Glen of Kenareen.'"
All he knows for sure is that it's in County Kerry. No such place as Kenareen could be found on the most detailed maps of Kerry, but the narrator of the story - who may as well be Benedict Kiely - tells the professor, "At the back of my head I feel that once in the town of Kenmare in Kerry I heard a man mention the name of Kenareen."
So the two of them set off by car and are given the most vague directions pointing them up and up some mountains, which they eventually have to climb on foot. And as they ascend, the world around them seems to etherealize into a mist. It may be the altitude affecting the oxygen flow to their brains, but the higher the go, the more indistinct the landscape around them becomes, exactly as if they are entering not any real place but a dream they are dreaming together. "'Now that I am so far,'" the professor says, "'I'm half-afraid to finish the journey. What will they be like? What will they think of me? Will I go over that ridge there to find my grandfather's brother living in a cave?'"
Along the way the professor recounts the stories that his grandfather told to his father. "'He would tell stories for ever, my father said, about ghosts and the good people. There was one case of an old woman whose people buried her - where she died, of course - against her will, across the water, which meant on the far side of the lake of the glen. Her dying wish was to be buried in another graveyard, nearer home. And there she was, sitting in her own chair in the chimney corner, waiting for them, when they came home from the funeral. To ease her spirit they replanted her.
"'My father told me,' he said, 'that one night coming home from the card-playing my grandfather slipped and fell down fifteen feet of rock and the only damage done was the ruin of one of two bottles of whisky he had in the tail-pockets of his greatcoat. The second bottle was unharmed.'"
When they reach the watershed, noticing how the trickling stream was flowing with them: "So we raised our heads slowly and saw the great Glen of Kenareen. It was what Cortez saw, and all the rest of it. It was a discovery. It was a new world. It gathered the sunshine into a gigantic coloured bowl."
"'It was there all the time,'" the professor says. "'It was no dream. It was no lie.'"
But was it hallucination? As the two of them walked toward some thatched houses, large dogs came to them and followed. As if he knew the way, the professor opened a gate and found an old man as tall as he was sitting there with some children. The old man got up and "He put out his two hands and rested them on the professor's shoulders. It wasn't an embrace. It was an appraisal, a salute, a sign of recognition.
"He said, 'Kevin, well and truly we knew you'd come if you were in the neighbourhood at all. I watched you walking down. I knew you from the top of the Glen. You have the same gait my brother had, the heavens be his bed. My brother that was your grandfather.'
"It was moonlight, I thought, not sunlight. over the great Glen. From house to house, the dogs were barking, not baying at the moon, but to welcome home the young man from the card playing over the mountain."
It is a beguiling fantasy for everyone who ever wished to return to the Old Country.
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