Looking for Dermot Healy: A Trip to Sligo

The wind was too strong for an umbrella, so we wore our coats and hoped for luck as the sky threatened rain and the sun lowered into the Atlantic. Grey sand and white sky framed the water as the backwash shyly flowed away. The tide was going out. Out there was Inishmurray, and somewhere out there still was Hy Brasil, and for a moment we stood admiring the vista: the gradients of blue and the hinging of the sea and sky. This was the writer Dermot Healy’s garden, back when he lived in a cottage nestled into a headland the locals christened Inishhealy. For him, it was like living on a boat. ‘You learn to sleep to the beat of the engine,’ he wrote, ‘and wake when it stalls on the way to the shot. It’s the silence that gets you after the worst has passed the walls’. [1]

As we walked towards the cottage, the sand turned to gravel and then the gravel to large rocks still glistening from high tide. I looked out for fossils that Brian Leyden, a local and friend of Healy’s, had shown me on my previous trip to Maugherow. I can’t remember which way he went, I told Tiffani, my partner. I couldn’t keep up with him. He was dancing across the rocks. We walked with one eye looking out at the sea and the other looking down on the ground. I tried to imagine Healy waking each morning to this gaping drama. How can you write small in the face of an abyss?

We came upon gabions, wire cages filled with rocks. Healy had built them as buttresses against the pounding sea, lifting each stone into the wire cages until he had filled many cages and built a wall to dampen the water’s power. It didn’t seem to bother him when his walls were destroyed in raging storms, and ten years after his death, the wire on many of the cages had been torn ragged by the sea, with the stones spilling out of the trap. Regardless, the work is the thing, he told us. The act itself. The feeling of immanence before the mind takes over:

The everyday goes on.
I am who I am,

opening a can
to paint a toilet wall,

afraid of my folly first thing in the morning and glad to welcome the postman and put the sausages on (CP, 245).

Tiffani called me over to a rock inscribed with an ancient symbol. We got down on our haunches to examine it. It had wound into itself like a foetus. I spotted another fossil before we realised that they surrounded us. Look at this one, we said to each other, as they grew more defined and spectacular. We moved between them – ones that looked like snakes and others like fish – and when we couldn’t find words for their beauty, we took pictures on our phones.

How old do you think they are? I asked. They must be thousands of years old. More like millions, she said.

I looked down at one and wanted to pick at it, to try to lift it off its host, like a child unable to resist tugging at a flowering scab. With a bit of water and scrubbing, it could come back to life and tell us about millennia past.

Between the rocks were pools of water we were mindful of as we made our way, until we were beneath the shadow of the old cottage. I wanted to get to the other side of the headland – the strip of land holding the cottage aloft – to see what we couldn’t see from our side. But rain came in a great burst that had us scrambling up a slope to take cover under a small tree. Our clothes were soaked by the time it relented, and it seemed foolish to walk any further.

The newspaper I worked part-time for wanted someone to visit Sligo for the weekend – accommodation, meals, and attractions included – and write about their experiences. The first morning we went kayaking on Lough Gill, looked at Jack B. Yeats’s paintings at the Model, and tasted oysters before an evening meal. The second morning we went paddleboarding on Lough Gill, hiked up to Maeve’s Cairn, and took a seaweed bath before an evening meal. On Monday morning, having completed the itinerary, we drove to Gleniff Horseshoe, Glencar Waterfall, and then headed towards Maugherow.

Google Maps, which we set to Dermot’s old cottage, carved a green line through the land for us to follow. We took in fields, houses, and the odd person as our eyes sought out the blue of the ocean. I tried to overlay the immediate landscape onto Healy’s Maugherow, searching for a threshold into a more spectral and shadowy world. The map told us we were about five minutes away, and then a few minutes later, it told us we were still five minutes away.

I think my phone has frozen, I said.

We should pull over, Tiffani said.

No, I said, I’ll figure it out.

If you think so.

We kept driving straight, going past turns we didn’t know if we should have taken. I eventually pulled the car to the side of the road. Tiffani searched for directions on her phone, and we got back on course. We passed Maugherow Church, where Healy had married his wife Helen, and Ellen’s Pub, where he drank with friends. At a crossroads, we headed straight, and a plain opened before us with the odd human decoration: a scattering of houses, walls, sheds and machines. I knew Jimmy Foley, Healy’s old neighbour and friend, lived somewhere along that road, but I wasn’t sure which house was his. The land appeared wise and contemplative as if in the process of assessing time long past. Somewhere, Healy’s life, real and imagined, was waiting to be stored in the memory of the place. The road ended where a wooden gate protected the driveway to the cottage. I parked the car parallel to another car facing the sea. An old man and woman sat in the other car and looked suspicious of us as we got out to walk the beach.

Healy tells us that the story is not known until it’s told, and even then, it can be reinterpreted, revised and rewritten. Perhaps it is a symptom of spending too much time in a library, but I often enjoy the image of books being unsheathed from their containers, allowed to gather in the air and scrum for prominence. Some pages shout and yearn for attention, while others are meek and look to make friends. It all becomes a bit of a mess, of course, a babel of voices lacking harmony. But it tantalises a master narrative, a story amidst the swirling discourse of living that might be the keystone. As Healy imagines in ‘A Breeze’ (2001):

I step back from the crossword and turn to see
the leaves of the dictionary flap in the breeze
[...]

the pages speed by like frames in those early movies
till it all makes
some kind of story (CP, 190).

We drove from Healy’s old cottage back down the road to Ellen’s. There was a communion party in full flow. Shiny banners were stuck to the walls, and food was spread out on tables in the middle of the room. Young men in jeans and brown shoes were spooning chicken curry into their mouths between gulps of stout. People were tapping their feet to music. We sat at the bar, ordered two pints and looked around. A jumble of pictures, some coloured and some black-and-white, hung on the walls.

It was easy to spot Healy in a couple of them. Tiffani prodded me to ask the barman about Healy, but I felt it wasn’t the right time and, in some ways, the right place. In my imagination the pub had more nooks and shadows. It was darker and smokier, and people struggled more with expression. I looked around for an empty chair or some time-worn hollow in the room’s being to suggest Healy’s absent presence or where his energy might be stored. But life was going on. Parents were taking pictures with their children, whose sponsors, young men and women, were eyeing each other. The barman poured pints and lined them up on the counter to settle. Business was good.

I stopped at a wall of photos on the way to the bathroom. One captured a whitehaired man and a dog walking away from the camera. They were on their way down a road. From the man’s build, hair and clothes, I assumed it was Healy. Although it could have been someone else. I felt self-conscious about staring too long at the picture. When I sat back down, I got the urge to tell people about the Healy I had grown to know. I wondered if my Healy differed from theirs. I wondered if he was a neighbour to them before he was a writer. I wondered if they had read his books and found themselves in them. I wondered if he had coloured their perceptions of this place.

We could chance one more, I said. Tiffani looked at me.

No, you are right, I said. Better try to beat the dark.

The barman took our glasses and thanked us for our custom. Outside, a group of lads were smoking and staring at the ground. We got back in the car and pledged to return when we could have a few drinks and take in more of the place. I said we could take a room in a B&B and wake up to the ocean each morning. She said that sounded

like a good idea. We drove on thinking of our own oceans. ‘I’m back on the bank of a river I’ve not stood on in ages,

and there’s nearly too much to remember
and there’s not too far to go’ (CP, 114).

Works Cited

Healy, Dermot. Collected Poems. Oldcastle: The Gallery Press, 2018.