KIN OF ARAN

Timaru Herald, Volume CXXXIX, Issue 20065, 23 March 1935, Page 18

KIN OF ARAN

ATLANTIC ISLAND CHARM OF MONHEGAN Twenty miles distant fro mthe mainland, Monhegan rises out of the Atlantic. Ribbed walls of rock, bald moors and patches of dark pines, a small snug harbour—these fill a space between sea and sky. Clustered about the landing stage are the fishing shacks, with their piles of lobster pots and their stringy nets hung to dry; behind them a narrow lane curls up the hill, holding a handful of houses, an inn, a store or two in its looping. The shingled houses have weathered to the colour of dust; the midsummer grass is dull and sere; gray gulls in endless number wheel and scream overhead. Yet a few small gardens are vivid with flowers, there are pied patches on the island’s grave hue; Monhegan is replete with shifting colour. So much the eye takes in, almost at a glance, while the heart reaches out for a share of that enchantment which has drawn so many to this fragment of the Maine coast. Knowing nothing of Monhegan, but challenged by the thought that its mile and a half of length and half-mile of width were ours to explore, we went first to the Fish House for a lunch of lobster stew, writes “E.Y.” in the “Christian Science Monitor.” There a young girl served us. She had sunbronzed skin, dark hair, and Spanish eyes. Feeling our curiosity and retreating from it, she served us quickly; then, like a shy wild thing, disappeared. Later we saw her sitting on the rocks, tossing scraps to seagulls. We crossed the road and climbed steps to a loft, the general store, where we made a small purchase. A lively white-haired woman greeted us and, appreciating our interest, she told us of her son and the hundred lobster pots which he put out in the season. Hers was the proud air of those who draw their living from the sea. Her people had been fisher-folk for generations, as had the other twenty or thirty families on Monhegan. The sea was their province and. too. they had their gardens. The soil was rich—especially good for flowers. Her manner was gracious and good-humoured, but behind it lay a bravery that shamed us as we thought of our easy city lives.

The trails, skirting and crossing the island, take Monhegan’s varied beauty into a loosely flung embrace. Cathedral woods; a thousand thousand slim fir trees through which the light sifts in a lovely diffusion of beams; wide rolling moors with grasses blowing in the winds; healdands facing the Atlantic north, east, and south; grand piles of rock, some rising nearly two hundred feet high, against which the sea swirls and spumes, drawing away in a receding silver tide only to come dashing half-way up their dark sides with the next great wave; small trees, disciplined by the winds, clinging to rocky holds; trailing yew; pine-scented shrub carpeting the ground with gray-hued berries that turn blue when plucked. “Do you know the Aran Islands one of the summer visitors asked us. “No—” “After Monhegan, they won’t seem strange to you.” “But we thought—” “That doesn’t make any difference.*' she smiled; the feeling is the same.*' We sat in a sheltered cove, with the sea heaving at our feet and the wind moving the grasses above us. A short distance from shore a whale rose out of the waves, sent up his spout of water and slithered into the sea again. We knew something of Monhegan, but what is enchantment was w r e were not sure—a compact of a few natives facing a rugged life with simple confidence, and a summer influx of visitors drawn by the island alone; a savage beauty of cliffs defying the sea and a harbour recipient of the seas’s bounty; suns that bathe all the island all day and set, throwing down a crimson carpet to the mainland; rains with a salty sweetness to them, swept off the sea in the gathering; and mists, like the trailing yew. peculiar to Monhegan. Yet the enchantment -went deeper, part of the people themselves. Here, as in Aran, w r as a people’s kinship with the sea, significant of some need of stalwart grandeur, of independence desperately achieved; of kinship with the sky at that fine line where the two meet. Those who live on Monhegan—or one of the Aran Isles—can never escape the “free sweep” of the eye to the rim of the world.” 19.