Hitching Around Eire: A bone-shaking experience
God help Ireland. On the face of it, or a least from the sanity of an airplane seat, it looks all green and organized, divided into neat patches by those sturdy stone walls. But once you land, you slide down a rabbit hole into a carnival hall of mirrors. Everyday reality is slightly skewed, if not upside down and cockeyed. Irish people never behave as you would expect.
Never ask for a “ride”
Hitchiking around Ireland in a Victorian-style hearse, lace curtains and all
One of the best ways to experience this is to go hitchhiking on an Irish road. But when embarking upon this adventurous form of transport, always use the word “lift.” Never, ever say “ride,” the North American term for it, unless you want to provoke lewd remarks. A "ride" in Ireland is something you do in bed, with a partner, whereas a lift is either the elevator cage you climb into to ride between hotel floors, or a voyage in an automobile that is not your own.
The first time I ever hitchhiked in Ireland was between Dublin and Galway. I happened to flag a travelling cigarette salesman (Players or Marlborough I don't remember) who talked my head off about “hearse-racing.”
Well now, that’s interesting, I thought. They race hearses in Ireland? I mean, why not? You think of Ireland as a crazy country anyway.
Hearses or horses?
So this cigarette salesman was going on and on about the tinkers and their hearse-racing, and in my head I was imagining all these big black hearses at the starting line. And then the penny dropped. Somewhere in the middle of his sentence that jogged off in the direction of Connemara ponies, I realized that it was his Dublin accent that had turned Irish horses into death carriages for lung-cancer victims.
Stunt driver? Oh my god!
Another time I was out in Dunleary, having a nip in a pub frequented by Radio Telefis Eireann radio and TV personalities. Before the foam had reached the bottom of the glass, I managed to arrange a lift all the way to Oughterard in County Galway with a man who assured me, with a charming Irish wink, that he would get me there in one piece.
When he started up his car with a beer-can opener, I had second thoughts. We started out the journey at a reasonable velocity, but quickly accelerated to warp speed. As we flew around curves that felt to my stomach like the knotwork in the Book of Kells, and while a very famous Irish actor’s son perfumed the back seat of the car with a certain illegal weed, the driver proudly spread open his Technicolor portfolio right in my lap.
He was a stunt driver and his running commentary, as we were whizzing and careening knife-edged along the twisty Irish roads, and as he flipped through photos of his car leaping through hoops of blazing fire, exploding into towering flames, rolling over and over and over, was that the problem with most people was they didn’t know how to survive a car crash.
He knew exactly what to do, and so if he were to drive the car recklessly, he would come out unscratched, while the "others" - passengers? - might come out slightly dead.
Feeling an odd mix of hilarity tinged with terror, and thinking it could be more dangerous to for me to leap out the car window than for the car to roll off a cliff, I took a long puff on the famous actor’s son’s joint. After that, it seemed perfectly normal to be viewing the Irish countryside from the cockpit of an airborne Morris Minor.
Drawing maps as you drive
The cartographer who drove me from Cleggan to Ballinasloe was slightly less dangerous. He ranted on about how Irish cartography was the most sophisticated in the world, while sketching cartographic triangles for me on paper -- with both hands completely off the wheel !
“I’m not looking at your drawing,” I shouted. “I’m looking at the road -- somebody’s got to look at it!”
He said that he could not talk without using both hands, and shortly after we got to Tuam he started drawing on the windshield - where I was looking - instead of on the car seat.
Free eats
Other memorable Irish lifts I have survived were with a Denehy’s Sausage salesman who gave me a pound of Irish sausage, an H.B. Ice Cream company driver who gave me an ice-cream cone, a health-club owner who offered me a massage (which I quickly declined) and a trucker I met in a cow market in Wexford, who jokingly offered to give me a few pounds of the stoney road fill he was transporting.
But the most bizarre lift I ever hitched happened ten miles outside of Galway town one late summer’s evening. I was with my mother, who had flown over from Poughkeepsie, New York to tour Ireland with me for a few weeks - her very first trip to the Emerald Isle. I wanted to show her the ‘Hidden Ireland’ the way a hippie backpacker would see it. But we had been standing by the side of the road for a full damp hour with no prospect of a lift.
I was fed up with waiting. I blathered a good Irish curse and said I’d thumb a ride with anything that came by - "even a hearse! "
Twilight Zone moment
Eerily enough, only ten minutes later a vehicle pulled up to us that made my teeth chatter and my hair stand on end. And I hadn’t even put out my thumb! There stopped before us was a big black shiny old-fashioned B horror-movie hearse. We stood there in a kind of Twilight-Zone daze as the older gentleman driver got out of the hearse. He politely opened the heavy black doors, the windows of which were all done up with white lace curtains, and he ushered us into red-velvet seats on either side of heavy metal bars designed to secure a coffin.
Where did we want to go - to the Galway graveyard? he joked. No, Eire Square in City Centre will be fine thanks.
Of all the preposterous, but predictably Irish things, this County Armagh gentleman explained to us that his son had bought this old hearse, which he called ‘’Bone Shaker,’ for 50 Irish pounds. His son drove it during the week, but on weekends the father enjoyed taking his son’s vehicle on jaunts around the Irish countryside--with the express purpose of flabberghasting foreign hitchhikers.
