Rooms were not to be found. She had arrived without a reservation, and after she had wasted some time making the rounds of the hotels and rooming houses, a student from Edinburgh suggested she try the Festival Accommodations Committee. She went to their office, and a kindly woman arranged accommodations for her in a private home not far from the center of town. She was to pay five pounds for her room for the whole of the festival and would take breakfast with the family.
The price was reasonable enough, but later she thought that she might almost have done without a room altogether, for all the time she spent in it. The city bustled endlessly. The streets were thronged with tens of thousands of visitors, and the town park had the air of a three-ring circus, with several events going on at a time from morning until late at night. Students from all parts of the British Isles had turned out in full force, many of them with knapsacks on their backs. They had reached Tralee by hitchhiking, and now they slept in the park or in fields on the edge of town, cutting their expenses to the bone and hurling themselves into the festival activity with a vengeance.
Ellen was on the go for three days. Each night she crept back to her room in the small hours of the morning, careful not to wake the family with whom she was staying, and each day she left the house just after breakfast for another furious round of festival activity. The guitar, always close at hand, kept making new acquaintances for her. It stamped her as a singer, and other singers sought her out, and she spent hours in feverish conversation, swapping songs, exchanging gossip of the world of professional folk music, and making the sort of easy friendships that emerge from such hectic meetings.
She filled all the rolls of tape she had bought in Cork, and mailed them all back to herself in New York. She sang songs around campfires on the edge of town, at a party in a house that three boys from London had leased for the season, and at the base of the 1798 monument in Denny Street near the Mall. She sang and listened and ate and drank and smoked and talked and kept going as long as the festival itself kept going, waiting with throngs in the park while the Rose of Tralee was chosen and crowned, running through the streets with the mob, caught up in a frenzy of unmotivated enthusiasm, and returning, at last, the festival over for another year, to her little room in Edward Street.
She missed breakfast the next morning. She was exhausted and could barely drag herself out of bed. It was time to go to Dingle, she thought, and she wasn’t sure that she wanted to go. Maybe she had had enough of folk music and festivals for the time being. Maybe she could go directly to Shannon and spend a few days in one of the lush American-style hotels near the international airport. She could well afford it, she knew; the trip so far had cost her far less than she had anticipated, and she could easily afford the luxury of a few days of lolling in an air-conditioned room and taking long baths and sleeping the day away.
“There won’t be many of us going on to Dingle,” a Dublin singer named Rory had told her the day before. “They don’t get a tenth the crowd that Tralee does. It’s a tiny town, you know, and couldn’t take a crowd if it got one. They’ll have some singing and dancing, but I’ve had my fill of that for the time being.”
She, too, had had her fill of it. Most of the singing in Dingle, she had heard, would be in Gaelic, which made it unlikely that she would be able to learn any new material. She would have been delighted to tape some Gaelic songs, but that seemed impossible now, since her tape was all gone and there did not seem to be any for sale in Tralee.
No, she decided, she wouldn’t go. She was already exhausted, and the festival in Berlin would certainly be taxing. Between now and then she could use all the rest she could get. Dingle had sounded like fun when she had first planned it, but after all, it was only another little Irish town, and she had already been to a great many Irish towns, small and large, and...
“Will you be going on to Dingle?”
“I don’t know, Mrs. Sheehy,” she told her landlady. “I was thinking I might go straight to Shannon and—”
“Ah, and I wish I had the time to go myself this year! We went last year, Dan and I.” The woman smiled at the memory. “The first night’s the most beautiful. All of us gathered at the harbor, the whole town and all of us who’d come down for the celebration. And the Rose of Tralee, she sailed up Dingle Harbor on a barge, and they touched off fireworks to greet her. Big pretty things that lighted up the whole sky. Ah, it was a beautiful thing, I tell you, and something you’ll never see elsewhere. I wish it was me that was going again.”
Ellen walked to the bus station, carrying guitar and suitcase and the now useless tape recorder. Fireworks and a brass band, she thought; nothing that you couldn’t find in Keokuk, Iowa, on the Fourth of July. But she couldn’t brush aside the enthusiasm in Mrs. Sheehy’s voice. It gave a special glow to the description of the little town.
Don’t be ridiculous, she told herself. You don’t have to go. There’s no point to it.
But she knew it was a lost cause. And at the little Tralee bus station she gave up the fight in good grace and bought a ticket to Dingle. If nothing else, she thought, a little seaside village might be restful. She could take her ease there as well as she could in Shannon, and no doubt at much less expense.
And there was no getting around it — she was too responsive a traveler to force herself to take it easy. She grinned gamely as the tall, red-haired bus driver helped her up the steps of the bus and placed her luggage in the rack overhead. Already, she admitted, she was looking forward to Dingle. Already the thought of doing nothing for a few days had lost its charm. The luxury hotels of Shannon would be wasted on her, so she prepared to enjoy whatever was in store for her.
The thirty-mile trip from Tralee to Dingle led through some of the most beautiful scenery in Ireland. The bus moved at a deliberate pace, stopping three times along the way at the little towns of Blennerville, Camp, and Aunascaul. On the first leg of the journey she had her choice between two equally splendid views. To her left were the Slieve Mish Mountains, their rough peaks shimmering in the sunlight. On the right Tralee Bay lay before her, soft and gloriously blue, with the “lonely Banna Strand,” celebrated in so many songs, stretching out beyond the scope of her vision. Sir Roger Casement had been captured there in April 1916, taken prisoner after an attempt to persuade the Germans to provide guns and troops for an Irish rising, then spirited off to England, tried, and hanged as a traitor to the Crown.
The bus swung to the south at Camp, and before long she could see the waters of Dingle Bay on the left. The roads were circuitous now, steep and winding, with other cars appearing magically as they came around turns, and with an astonishing quantity of all sorts of animals turning up in the middle of the road. Sheep, pigs, even a pair of tethered goats, their presence giving the lie to the theory that goats would not cooperate long enough to clear a fence together. The bus moved onward, slowly but surely, somehow avoiding an accident with any of the odd creatures that cropped up in its path.