Part I: Adoration

According to legend, St. Patrick climbed the mountain now known as Croagh Patrick barefoot, a journey reenacted by unshod pilgrims to this day, and fasted there for forty days and nights. The mountain rises above Clew Bay and looks over Westport, a village hardly more than a tide away from the Atlantic Ocean that has been voted the Tidiest Town in Ireland three times. The Quay Road, lined with a low stone wall and tall, lush trees, is anchored by a life-sized statue of the Virgin Mary across from a Centra convenience store. May Mary transform all our worries into joy, reads the inscription at her feet. The sun throws rays obligingly upon her back well into the evening in the summer, keeping her in the light even as the day comes to an end.

Somewhere in the shadow of the holy mountain, my ancestors Ellan Moran and Ulick Walsh were born and later lit out for America. Like so many millions of others who have left their homes and crossed seas and oceans in search of different lives, they never returned to the shallow, rocky shores of the west of Ireland. So at first, standing on the shore of the bay with that same mountain rising behind me, it felt like closing a historical and genealogical loop. They left, and I, their descendant - college-educated and then some, with enough time and disposable income to be overseas - stood where they might have stood, and wondered, even knowing what I know of history, of the Great Hunger and the tyranny and the siren call of America, why they left.

Nearly two hundred years after the Famine, petunias blossom from planters on the side of a small stone bridge over the River Carrowbeg. The market across the road is painted teal and lime green; other storefronts pop in lavender and cerulean and fuchsia. Rarely does a local walk more than a block before being met and greeted by a neighbor. Older women gather under the portico of St. Mary’s beside the river, chattering quietly before going inside for the evening Eucharistic Adoration. And while Ellan and Ulick might have been shocked by the flowers imported from South America, by the paint colors in hues they could have only imagined, they would probably recognize the ritual about to take place in the church.

We know, at least in theory, what it is to grow up hungry. To never have enough, to know that others do—and more. And because the western part of Ireland was especially hard-hit by the Famine, it’s certainly reasonable to assume that Ellan and Ulick, like so many others, simply looked for a better life on the other side of the ocean.

But if there had been no Hunger, would they have left anyway?

Part II: Hunger

What is it to know it’s you they’re chattering about under the portico at St. Mary’s, when the neighbors’ news is all anxiety and grief, when the petunias aren’t in bloom? What is it to grow up in the Tidiest Town in Ireland, in the shadow of the holy mountain?

When the whole of your world is closed within eight town blocks and a half-mile stretch by the water, what feels charming to some is claustrophobic to others. To look on the mountain every day might be a source of inspiration for some— perhaps for the ladies gathered outside St. Mary’s— or might be a constant reminder of the ways in which one’s own devotion falls short. Scraped and pierced by the sharp edges of small places, the loneliness of towns where everyone knows one another, you might leave even if you aren’t hungry.

I should know. I left the church-with-a-capital-C, left the small town where I grew up, moved to the biggest and most godless place I could find without leaving my own shores, and there’s no amount of money I would accept to come back. And while my birthplace, unlike Westport, could never be accused of holding a surfeit of charm, still it exercises a certain hold, a gravity from which one must break away like a rocket, with thrust and fire. Leaving the only place you’ve ever called home, never to return, is a choice— no matter how obvious, how necessary, how life-or-death it might have been.

Ellan and Ulick chose to live. Whether they thought of their homeland with regret or relief, I’ll never know. But I’d like to know what they thought about living in the shadow of a holy mountain, in eight town blocks and a half-mile by the bay, if remembering it comforted or chafed in the years after migration.

I looked up at the mountain and chose not to climb it, in favour that night of seafood pie and Guinness and music at Matt Molloy’s. And then I left for the next destination on the itinerary— the north, the open water that begins at the edge of the Giants’ Causeway— the next opportunity, the unfamiliar, the new.