stood, waving. Molly had whistled for the dog— on her fingers again, Robert had waved back one more time, and then they had all slipped from his view as he rounded the bend in the road.
Sixteen nights Robert had stayed in Tarbert, and a good measure of strength had come back to him there. In shards and fragments, he recalled things he had forgotten. Small mosaics of memory formed in his mind, jigsaws of personal lore. They amounted to a significant advance, even if they still dissolved before a composed picture was set.
Now one of these fragments snagged him. Next day was Julia Shannon's birthday, since childhood a red-letter day in Robert's year. That morning, as he left Tarbert, he almost remembered it. Something nagged at him, and he said aloud to himself, “Tomorrow: a
special
day.” He wondered whether it indeed had to do with his mother, but that was as far as it went. He struggled for a while to rake up the extra memory. It lingered at the edge of his mind, like a half-wild animal that won't come into the house; then he gave up and strode on. Dr. Greenberg would have called that
progress.
The Shannon River flows quietly past these roads. Widened out and diluted now by the spread of her own estuary, she is twice daily pushed back upon herself by a larger grandeur, the incoming tide from the sea. Farther up, she has always been in command, a stream of mixed pace, dominating the land through which she flows. She has an exotic spirit: There are rapids, lakes, stylish falls, and oxbows.
Not a safe river, she has a temperament all her own. She can throw waves up to thirty feet high; she owns lakes as long as twenty-five miles; she has sweet and plump tributaries. Her riparian living has an ancient feel and her lands can be enviably fertile— if she chooses to bestow an untroubled year.
But her pools and eddies are as wild as the human spirit and rise from as deep a source. The way she caresses her riverbanks, the way she inundatesfields with her savaging floods— these extremes of behavior all spring from a soul that dwells far beneath the plates of the country's bedrock.
Her catchment covers 5,800 square miles—almost one-fifth the area of all Ireland—and she flows for 215 miles, from an infinite hole in the lean stony ground of Leitrim and Cavan in the north to the hardy Atlantic headlands of Kerry and Clare in the southwest.
Her people know their river like they know their weather. The farmers alongside the Shannon live at her whim. How often has she flooded their fields without warning? On how many mornings have they seen their trees standing like elephants’ feet in the water when the floodplain broadens out for several miles on either side of the river's normal course, causing silent havoc? No wonder that she was, to medieval poets, “the spacious Shannon spreading like a sea.”
And she has a tribe of her own, committed to tussling with her: the Shannon boatmakers. They have a skill some call an art; they make a craft dedicated to conquering the river. Some of them live in houses that can only be reached by water. They've always been people of instinct, alert to the river's moods.
In truth, the Shannon has never offered an easy life to anybody. Crossings are scattered; bridges occur infrequently—on average, no more than every twelve miles or so. But in Robert Shannon's time she could still be forded here and there, as she often was in the past, and to great historical effect.
She is one of the great and ancient rivers of the world— Ireland's Nile, a baby Mississippi— and she has long been recognized as such. She was powerful enough to attract the geographer Ptolemy; three hundred years before Christ, his maps bent whole countries out of shape, but he accurately grasped the line of the Shannon. A thousand years later, her water meadows lured monks to her banks, able to see God in the sweetness of the stream. And after them, up the river, came the longboat Vikings to ransack the sacred
Sixteen nights Robert had stayed in Tarbert, and a good measure of strength had come back to him there. In shards and fragments, he recalled things he had forgotten. Small mosaics of memory formed in his mind, jigsaws of personal lore. They amounted to a significant advance, even if they still dissolved before a composed picture was set.
Now one of these fragments snagged him. Next day was Julia Shannon's birthday, since childhood a red-letter day in Robert's year. That morning, as he left Tarbert, he almost remembered it. Something nagged at him, and he said aloud to himself, “Tomorrow: a
special
day.” He wondered whether it indeed had to do with his mother, but that was as far as it went. He struggled for a while to rake up the extra memory. It lingered at the edge of his mind, like a half-wild animal that won't come into the house; then he gave up and strode on. Dr. Greenberg would have called that
progress.
The Shannon River flows quietly past these roads. Widened out and diluted now by the spread of her own estuary, she is twice daily pushed back upon herself by a larger grandeur, the incoming tide from the sea. Farther up, she has always been in command, a stream of mixed pace, dominating the land through which she flows. She has an exotic spirit: There are rapids, lakes, stylish falls, and oxbows.
Not a safe river, she has a temperament all her own. She can throw waves up to thirty feet high; she owns lakes as long as twenty-five miles; she has sweet and plump tributaries. Her riparian living has an ancient feel and her lands can be enviably fertile— if she chooses to bestow an untroubled year.
But her pools and eddies are as wild as the human spirit and rise from as deep a source. The way she caresses her riverbanks, the way she inundatesfields with her savaging floods— these extremes of behavior all spring from a soul that dwells far beneath the plates of the country's bedrock.
Her catchment covers 5,800 square miles—almost one-fifth the area of all Ireland—and she flows for 215 miles, from an infinite hole in the lean stony ground of Leitrim and Cavan in the north to the hardy Atlantic headlands of Kerry and Clare in the southwest.
Her people know their river like they know their weather. The farmers alongside the Shannon live at her whim. How often has she flooded their fields without warning? On how many mornings have they seen their trees standing like elephants’ feet in the water when the floodplain broadens out for several miles on either side of the river's normal course, causing silent havoc? No wonder that she was, to medieval poets, “the spacious Shannon spreading like a sea.”
And she has a tribe of her own, committed to tussling with her: the Shannon boatmakers. They have a skill some call an art; they make a craft dedicated to conquering the river. Some of them live in houses that can only be reached by water. They've always been people of instinct, alert to the river's moods.
In truth, the Shannon has never offered an easy life to anybody. Crossings are scattered; bridges occur infrequently—on average, no more than every twelve miles or so. But in Robert Shannon's time she could still be forded here and there, as she often was in the past, and to great historical effect.
She is one of the great and ancient rivers of the world— Ireland's Nile, a baby Mississippi— and she has long been recognized as such. She was powerful enough to attract the geographer Ptolemy; three hundred years before Christ, his maps bent whole countries out of shape, but he accurately grasped the line of the Shannon. A thousand years later, her water meadows lured monks to her banks, able to see God in the sweetness of the stream. And after them, up the river, came the longboat Vikings to ransack the sacred
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