By Cormac MacConnell

A MAYTIME to die for in the west. A Maytime, golden and blooming, to make you happy and lonesome at the same time. 

On days like this when the west is laved and bathed in light and color and the aromatics of a million blooms, and when the faces of the people bloom too, and the sky is blue, I think I get a little lonesome that someday, sometime, in some year with a Maytime, I will have to leave. I hope I don’t die in a May. 

Myself, I’d pick the last week in January. Or the Ides of March when everything is blanched and wet and often whimpering in wild winds.

I awoke this morning about five o’clock because of the musicality and volume of the Dawn Chorus from the garden. A wise man from Newmarket was telling me last week that it is extra loud this summer. 

And ye know why? The last two winters have been so mild and frostless that the mortality rate of the wild birds was down to maybe its lowest level ever. Global warming?

Anyway he says, and I think he’s right too, that the fabled waking Dawn Chorus of the wild birds is essentially a territorial thing, each sparrow, blackbird, robin, thrush, tit and finch loudly staking out his own territory. With more of them around the battlefield is much more congested. 

Out of that congestion and tumult comes a Dawn Chorus to thrill the soul. An Adagio for wings!

I had to get up early anyway. My son and colleague Dara was going out on the Fergus with the traditional drift net fishermen of Clarecastle to do a recording for our mutual radio show. These are the first 10 days of the salmon fishing season on the tidal river with its gray clay banks and lushly reeded banks, and it’s great silver fish from the mighty ocean. 

We coffee together, Dara and I, and smoke a cigarette (MacConnells don’t eat in the morning), and then he gets his gear and I drive him into the little village of Clarecastle about eight miles down the road. 

The morning is bright and breathtaking. We have not seen rain for a fortnight. Another week of it and the farmers will be complaining about a drought. Even the oldest stone castles on our horizons have warm faces.

Dara is my third son. He’s 26 now and the makings of a great journalist, probably best on the news and technical side of radio. That’s why he’s doing the recording for Clare FM. I’m bad at that, ‘tis not my trade, my machines malfunction, I get hassled. 

A jotter and pencil is simpler. I brought a jotter and pencil with me on this exact same run almost exactly on this day 30 years ago when Dara’s eldest brother, our first child, Cuan, was three days old. Cuan will be 30 in a few days! 

I tell Dara he was not even a glint in my eye that time. He laughs at that. “Thank God,” he says, after a while, “that my glint came along later.”

I was going on the river that time with the Scanlans, one of the oldest and most respected of the fishing clans in Clarecastle. They gave me a warm welcome in their home a half-mile from the Quay, and tea, and then we went off away down the river and the men told me of their love of fishing and the salmon — ‘twas more than about money — and every action showed their affinity with their river. 

The lead-tipped wooden pole of the drift net bobbed along one bank of the river as the boat with the other end of the net attached slid down the graygreen drifts of the other bank.

The hen fish coming up to spawn, they said, she’s sacred, you would not keep her. And you try to help the spent fish coming back downriver to get to the ocean because they revive there and they’ll come back again. 

And we’ll catch fish, they said, at the turning of the tide. And we did too.

Just one beautiful salmon. Doubly beautified and silvered by coming out of the silty tidal murky waters. 

And the Scanlans gave the fish to me to bring home. I still remember the taste. One of those in the boat with me that morning was drowned in the river years later. I remember that too.

Dara, too, is meeting up with the Scanlans. We pull up at the Quay and Peter is already waiting with the boat the way the boatman was waiting for me. 

They are sturdy dark-avised men, the Scanlans, nimble on their feet and with strong arms. Peter is typical of the clan. 

Dara climbs aboard the timber boat, Peter starts the engine and they are off. I’m standing there on the Quay watching them head towards the first bend in the river. 

People say that Dara looks very like his father. He’s nearly the age now I was, when, with a Scanlan that looked exactly like Peter. I went around the same bend in the same river all those silver salmon and silvering years ago. It’s like watching another life dimension somehow. 

The sun glints on my son’s black hair before he disappears from sight around the bend with a careless wave of the hand. You know something? I shivered. 

I’m not sure why, but I’m thinking about it. There’s profound stuff in there about the times and tides of the lives of men and salmon. I won’t go there.

I come home. I sit down behind the laptop. I switch it on. 

I boil the kettle, have a coffee and a cigarette. And I go down another morning tide of the drift nets of words I live by . . .