Our Search for the Sublime in Donegal

I was over 30 years old when I spent my first night under my father’s roof. My wife and I had traveled to Ireland to visit him there, and tour around the country the way my mother did with me when I was a child. I’ve already told that story — what preceded it, and followed on. But, in the middle of that trip, my wife and I took a break away from the business of my epic father-son reconciliation, to pursue something else. Namely a few pictures of ourselves in the places where the The Quiet Man was filmed by John Ford 60 years earlier. We wanted to send those home to my wife’s father, who loves every line of it.

She and I went driving in a rented car north of Galway, around Lough Corrib. I remember the moment we turned a corner, and the hills rolled down underneath us, toward this body of water, revealing a panorama of Irish scenery beyond it that would make John Ford scream for a working film camera. Giant expanses of sun-dabbled sky and those hilly rural landscapes of Ireland showed themselves to us. I realized why they were so transporting. It was the combination of natural beauty and human ordering. Ireland’s patchwork quilt of green was made by human effort pushing against an uncooperative nature. Those dry-stone walls were made from what was dug up there originally. Nature’s bounty, yes — but a homey human settlement as well, not the wilds of a forest. But this does not, by itself, account for my peculiar attachment to these sights.

A few days later, we were driving around the ring of Kerry — the southwestern coast, in a more typical Irish fog mist. We stopped by Dunquin Harbour (Dun Chaoin locally), and I peeked over to see if the sheep were coming up, and tried to get a photo. A little while later, we turned another corner, and far below us was the Atlantic, and the sun pierced through the clouds and poured its honeyed evening light over those windswept cliffs. Somewhere in between, we went to the Cliffs of Moher, which would have had a similar effect had it not been for the abundance of other tourists like ourselves and the signs urging you to call for a psychological pick-me-up rather than throw yourself off the cliffs.

Food, company, culture, the sights, some show-offy selfies. I think each traveler wants some of them all, but in their hearts there is a primary aim.

On that trip through Ireland, my wife and I discovered in ourselves and in each other this great hunger not just for natural beauty but for these experiences of the sublime in nature, these golden moments. I’m still trying to work out what exactly these experiences are.

The literary and philosophical pursuit of “the sublime” — the attempt to give it a definition beyond or opposed to beauty — never quite made sense to my intellect. But the desire was in us somehow. In many cases the Irish had to be whipped and driven to these places — “To hell or to Connaught” — and for two centuries they’ve been abandoning them via emigration to the United States, Australia, or just to the cities of Dublin and London. And yet, I find myself rushing toward these places — dreaming of them for years on end, trying to master the language spoken by the dwindling population there.

This August we went to Ireland primarily to reunite my children with their granddad — who hadn’t seen them in the flesh for over 18 months of this long, awful period of our lives. And my labors — recounted in that book — yielded some of the intended fruit. My two-and-a-half-year-old impressed that side of the family by demonstrating his knowledge of the lyrics and melody to “The Wild Rover.”

But my wife and I carved out a slice of time and made off with kids in tow for one county we had never seen before — Donegal. It didn’t matter if we had to pacify the children in the car with iPads during the day and pools in the hotels at night — we were in chase mode again.

At first the weather was not in our favor. We stopped at An Gianán Aileach — a ring fort that may date back to the early Middle Ages, though it had fallen to Norman invaders eventually, and was rebuilt in the Romantic 19th century. Fog covered everything, and from the top of it, we could only see the surrounding heather and long grass lashing in the wind. Soon we were off to Malin Head, the northernmost point of the mainland. From there we could look back toward Portmór beach, or see the stone sign “80 EIRE” meant to tell the German bombers that they were over neutral territory. Beautiful, vast, but not quite the experience.

No, what I was looking for was just a little south of there, Five Finger Strand. To enter, you pass through these undulating hills, covered in that long grass. This little sliver of beach is nestled in front of sand dunes that are 100 feet tall. Across a thin slice of water and to your left hand are the landscapes of Lagacurry, with all the joys normally offered by hilly rural landscapes of Ireland — the quilt, and feeling of settlement. But crowning it was a small mountain where the heather and long grass is no longer shaped by human hands, but seems almost alien. To your right-hand side, a cliffside rolls out and pours into the northern Atlantic. I failed to even begin to capture it with my rudimentary landscape photography skills. Opening the lens to 14mm barely began to capture the vastness of the panorama, and yet this aspect from my camera lens tended to crush the awesome height of the scene around me. I started to cry in joy watching my children laughing as they futilely tried to scale up these cliff-like sand dunes, only to roll down again. This was it — that feeling I was searching out.

We would have it a few times, again, as we zagged westward and down — through the endlessly charming streets of Glenties — plastered in the local GAA club’s blue and white banners through to Glencolumbkille. The sun finally broke through as we arrived at Malin Beg — a secluded beach that is hidden in the Western cliffs. There are 174 steps built into the cliffside to get down there. A little sign alerted me that at one point, my beloved drunken Welsh poet Dylan Thomas stayed nearby while composing his work. Again I could not quite capture it photographically without sacrificing height or width. To communicate its vastness would be to exclude the weird details — particularly the sheep that traverse the cliffside without fear, as if it were a comfortable den. There is an arm of rock, jutting outward into the sea, with upward-facing palm grass that the sunlight lands on. The sight of it staggered me.

There it was — that feeling we were chasing. What was it, though? It wasn’t quite the temptation to worship nature itself. Our faith teaches us that this world is not our home, but that creation itself was deemed good. Somehow these epic, vast landscapes emphasize both of these truths to us.

I realized in these places that the last year and a half has been hard on us as a family — and as individuals, and that’s true even as we considered ourselves quite lucky. Sickness and death — the twin fruits of the Fall — held up their heads in the past two years, and the world was filled with suspicion and alienation. Our neighborhoods felt un-neighborly. The schools turned themselves into surgical wards. We all fought — constantly — over what was to be done, and what wasn’t to be done.

These scenes of natural beauty, and the way of life that was nurtured around them for centuries — the sheep with the painted rear-ends to identify them, the tidy cottages, and stone walls — somehow peering into these landscapes, and toward the vast powerful ocean just beyond them, was like peering over the edge of Creation itself. The vast ambitions of man, meeting his natural limits. This great beauty was made for us. It thrills us and rejuvenates us; it salves our wounds. I cried watching my children on those dunes because my gratefulness for this gift of life, the way it is shot through with love and consolation, was revealed there as still inadequate. And I cried because this gorgeous place, these happy hills, are not where my rest will be found. We’re tourists, just passing through.