It happened again just the other day. I was off on one of my local adventures, bound and determined to find the ruins of a castle I’d seen peeking through the trees, across a field, up just ahead if only I could find it. As I walked, I heard the loud rumble of an engine unbound by the muffle of a hood. Not long thereafter, the most unusual sight greeted me. A middle-aged man on a four-wheeler – half fire-engine red, half spray-paint gold – drove my way, a laughing three-month-old baby sitting on his lap. We waved and he stopped the engine, certainly to the gratitude of the birds around us, to engage in a friendly chat. He told me a bit about himself (the four-wheeler by the way was the calming charm, he said, for each of his four children at this youngest child’s age when they were a bit out of sorts. And did I like the gold look?). I shared some of my story – my retirement, my move to Ireland in general and Corofin in particular, my love of the land.

“You came here by yourself,” he said, not a question so much as a bewilderment, as if he wasn’t quite sure he’d heard right. Yes, I said. “And you say you didn’t know anyone when you moved,” once more a bewilderment. That’s right. And then I listened again to the same three words I’ve heard often this past year. “You’re very brave.” Or very crazy, I laughed, which has become my pat, somewhat flip response. As we went our separate ways – he down the one-lane road with the contented baby, me with his instructions in my mind headed for the ruins – I ruminated in a bit of bewilderment myself. What are the chances that an Irish father of four on a rural road in North Clare would say precisely the same words as some of my family, friends and acquaintances back in the states? And what did it mean, really, bravery? Did I have it? Was I a fraud? Did I have something else? Was it as alluring?

The fact is, I don’t feel as if I have been brave. It is true that I left the familiar contours of my known world behind – the hometown where I had lived nearly all my life, good and satisfying friendships, family who nourish me – to move to someplace new. Since coming to Corofin, I have felt acutely the juxtaposition between living in a town in the states where, Cheers style, “everybody knows your name” to living in one in Ireland where I am pretty much a stranger. I would be lying if I said that isn’t a bit unsettling. But really, people move all the time of their own volition, start afresh. In and of itself, that is not brave. There is a touch of additional adventure, I grant you, when that new town is in a different country. But I’ve not moved to Machu Picchu or Mongolia. English is spoken here, although I grant you, I do wonder about that sometimes when a townsperson talks rapid fire and I’m left in the dust, having to say, “excuse me?” However, I am reminded that more than one visitor “from away” has probably been just as bewildered when listening to a born-and-bred Mainer. You get the drift, though. I’ve not had to hone rusty Italian or Russian skills. Again, not particularly brave. It is true that I am generally not a fearful person, and maybe that’s closer to the nub. I am comfortable in my own skin, and find that most people are just going about their lives and intend me neither harm nor unwarranted great good cheer.

No, bravery is something altogether of a different sort. It is more profound, a test of character met and conquered, a fortitude. Several weeks before I met the father and baby, I spent the better part of the day climbing Mullaghmore, one of the hills in the Burren. The trailhead wanders off from a flat, rock-strewn surface barely recognizable as the road it once was. This is the image that accompanies my blog post. Here is a “famine road,” a road to nowhere built by starving Irish people during The Great Hunger, An Gort Mor. These roads are scattered throughout Ireland, the result of a government plan to pay Irish people to build roads as a means of putting money in their pockets to buy food. It is not my intention, at least in this blog, to delve into this policy from a political perspective. It is a fact that workers, already starving, built roads in order to make a pittance with which to buy nonexistent or highly overpriced food. Rural Clare was disproportionately hard hit by the famine, with record unemployment rates in the years prior to its onset. The first recorded death in Ireland was a widow from Corofin and the last, a man from Ennis who died of starvation in 1851, according to one account.  In the Burren in particular, the 1841 census recorded that 85 percent of the houses there were “fourth-class” structures, defined as “all mud cabins having only one room.” The road policy didn’t work, not surprisingly, and was abandoned altogether a year after it commenced. Hence, the many “famine roads” that were abandoned along with it.

When I think of bravery, I think about those who built this single road in the Burren. I can see them in my mind’s eye, bone-weary people with discouraged, defeated faces, wearing clothes caked with dirt and ingrained with odor. Their lives in the Burren would have been unforgiving to begin with, a hardscrabble existence fueled by potatoes gone black and animals long slaughtered or sold. Here was a chance to make a pence or two, this road work, to feed the children already weak with hunger. I see them painstakingly moving boulder after limestone boulder to clear a wide swath for a road they had to have known was situated in a wildly improbable and impractical location. Yet they persisted, day after day. This, I think, is bravery: not knowing what the morning might bring, but getting up anyway and getting to it because you must. It takes character, an inner fortitude, to find this place within. I think refugees torn from homes they love have this bravery of which I speak. So too, I think of the doctors and nurses who have known the risks to their health these last six months, known what they could bring home to their children, but go to the hospital nonetheless. When lives are disrupted by nature, or politics, or war, or disease, or any combination (dysentery and typhus were the primary causes of death during An Gort Mor, not starvation), and people find themselves facing the impossible but face it anyway, that is bravery.

Perhaps, you may say, I’m being a bit over dramatic. If that is my impossible exemplar of bravery, we most of us are found wanting. So be it. I found a road in the middle of nowhere leading nowhere, and this is where my thoughts traveled. The image I conjure in some strange way settles me. I chose to move to Ireland, and I can live here comfortably if not extravagantly. I knew enough about myself to understand that I would be fine. There will be travel in my future, if I remain healthy, to places not quite as accommodating as here, where I will undoubtedly have to dig a little deeper. But really, mine is a 21^st century first-world life. When I find myself in some unfamiliar country and don’t speak the language, when I’ve missed a train or can’t make myself understood and I’m tired and I feel overwhelmed, I will pause. I will think of those people on that road. And from their bravery, find my own pale resolve.