The Road Not Taken

In Robert Frost's well-known poem, "The Road Not Taken" the author describes a walker faced with the decision when two paths fork into the unknown. Knowing that he only has the inclination to take one path and not two, the walker decides to take "the road less traveled by" and leave the other for an unlikely second walk.

Unlike Frost, I try not to accept that I can only go down one path (and I mean this literally, not figuratively). The paths in Ireland fork quite frequently, especially on the Aran Islands, and I have been making a valiant attempt over these past few weeks to travel down each road.

I hate choosing one thing over another. This could be why my last semester of college was so busy, instead of picking dance or photography, kickboxing or boxing, philosophy or sociology, I took them all. I think I get this trait from my dad.

He's what most people would conservatively call a worrier (and I say this with love). Take either my dad or I into a shop to buy one specific item, and given the complexity of the object, the purchase could reasonably be made hours later after visiting another store for comparison and interrogating a customer service representative. Take both me and my dad to a store, like a couple of days before I left for London when I decided I needed a new netbook because the old one was too slow, and you only really get a purchase after internet research, three separate stores, conversations with 4 sales reps, 5 hours,  and a whole lot of: "You decide, Dad," "No, Elaine, you decide, this is your computer," "But, Dad, I don't want to make the decision."

The thing is, to make a satisfying choice, you really have to be fully informed about what you are giving up.

I tell you this because this approach has defined my walks around Inishmaan. While one would assume that the pathways covering a 9 mile water locked island would be significantly limited, it seems to me that each path around the island forks at least 5 times before you reach your intended destination. Which means, to me, that every walk that is supposed to take an hour or two, ends up being 3 or 4.

There is one main road in Inishmaan that beings in the middle at Kilronan Village and winds its way in two directions, towards the tip of the island and towards the base (though really the island lies almost east to west so which is the tip and which is the base, I can never be sure). The road to the west goes upward to the main chunk of the island were the Mesolithic attractions stand on the cliffs overlooking the Atlantic Ocean. The road to the east heads towards what I consider a tower, but what is now simply a circle of stones built up from the ground from which you can view the end of the island and the next island over.

If you set out in the early afternoon towards the east, you might be lucky to come back towards Kilronan as the sun sets. Because we are so far north, the sun seems to rise and set in the same southern portion of the sky, never really hitting a point right above our heads. And as you head west during the sunset, you are not facing directly into the sun, so instead of observing the sunset, you watch as the village of Kilronan turns orange as the fading light from the sun hits the buildings just so. Then the angles of the roofs soften as the sky goes to a greyish-blue. If you time it right, then right as you enter Kilronan you have just enough time to find a suitable perch on the rocks along the beach, turn to the south, and watch the sun tuck itself in the hills for the night.

Every afternoon I decide which way to head into the island. But even if there is only one main road, there are many paths forking off. While the main road is paved, its out-shoots are grassy and they tend to wind themselves through stone walls held together by nothing more than gravity. You come upon ducks on their ponds, horses in their yards, cattle in adjoining yards, goats climbing over the walls, and pigs in their muddy little kingdoms.

While I do hope to travel each path at least once, some deserve extra attention as a walk down one in the morning air could be very different from one in the evening.

No matter where I go, however, the land is green. It is fall in Ireland, but still the land is green. I suppose this is because there are little to no trees on the island, so there is nothing to change color. If it weren't for the weather I would guess that it was summer in this little cove.

I don't want to make the wrong choice of path to follow. And if I don't see everything then I really won't know what I'm giving up. I want to see it all, so I'll continue to traverse every new path on the island until it is time to go back to the mainland.