Hedges & Highways: Memories of the Emerald Isle III

I saw the BMW too late. I was on an Irish country lane, hemmed in on both sides by towering hedges, driving my little white van too fast for the narrow road, and I had to make a quick decision. I yanked the van’s steering wheel to the left and plunged into the hedge.

After I came to a stop, van partly in the hedge, the BMW driver, a kindly older gentleman, got out of his car to check on me. “Are you okay?” he asked.

I told him I was okay, even if the van wasn’t. “I should have been going slower.” I admitted.

Mr. BMW nodded and got back in his car and drove away. I looked miserably at the white van. There were a few new scratches on the paint, but the worst damage was to the side mirror, which now dangled by its wires.

There was nothing to do but drive the van to the camp office and confess. “I had a choice between hitting the BMW or the hedge,” I explained. “I knew the hedge would be cheaper.”

The staff of Comeragh Wilderness Camp were kind to each other about driving incidents. None of us had been born in Ireland and a driving calamity of one kind or another was as common as cabbage and sausage. (Out of respect for my former colleagues, I’ve changed their names in this blog post.)

Like most of Europe, Irish roads are much narrower than American roads. Meeting a milk truck on a country road could mean backing up until you reached a spot where there was enough room for the truck to squeeze past.

The narrow roads were even narrower because of the hedges, which Irish landowners are required by law to have. In towns and cities, Irish hedges are tame, neatly trimmed shrubs, sometimes with a cute little fence.

But the back roads of Ireland, called country lanes, have wild hedges, overgrown, scraggly, wildlife-harboring conglomerations of green foliage that are trimmed by huge hedge-trimming equipment that lubbers along the country lanes, hacking and sawing.

Roads often aren’t wide enough to fit two cars, and brushing close to hedges is a way of life. Usually, sideswiping the hedges wasn’t a big deal, unless you got in too deep and hit the stone walls buried deep inside the hedge.

One of my colleagues, Miss Emma , was in Ireland only about a week when she hit a hedge and popped a tire.

Of course, some of this hedge-hitting was probably due to driving on the opposite side of the road than what we had been used to all our lives. It messed with our perception.

One staff member, Mr. Moses, an American who had lived in Ireland for a long time, had to appear in court for being at fault in a traffic accident where he had been on the wrong side of the road. When the judge asked Mr. Moses how long he’d been in Ireland, Mr. Moses sheepishly admitted, “Sixteen years.”

Occasionally, livestock roaming the country lanes would cause issues. One staff member, Alex, totaled his car, named Goldilocks, when he hit a cow one summer evening. Alex was European, so American driving habits weren’t to blame that time.

Just driving around the camp, with all the tight spaces could be an adventure. I scraped the white van one time trying to squeeze through the narrow gate that led to the camp kitchen. That gate was so small it gave new meaning to the Bible verse “straight is the gate and narrow the way”.

Sometimes mechanical failures, rather than bad driving was the cause of our car problems.

Almost all Irish cars have manual transmissions— automatics just aren’t an accepted part of the culture. Manual transmissions plus steep hills plus narrow spaces equal failed clutches.

Our maintenance man, Peter, was good at fixing at cars. He got called in whenever, say, a wheel would come off a car, which actually happened once to the white van on a round-about.

Sometime after the wheel incident, I called Peter to report another white van problem, the nature of which I can’t remember (except it wasn’t my fault).

“Bring that white van to the garage on top of Crotty’s Rock!” was Peter’s response. Crotty’s Rock was a cliff, named after a robber who had once hidden in the Comeragh Mountains. It was a favorite spot for camp staff and campers to go hiking and apparently, at least in Peter’s mind, the perfect spot for troublesome cars to meet their end.

As much as Peter might have wished to get rid of the rubbish vans and cars, they were actually the perfect beater vehicles to drive around camp and through the stream. One of the supervisors, Mr. Kulp, had a nice car that he refused to drive through the stream, just making life unhandy for himself.

I’ve written about the stream in an earlier blog post, found here. Just to explain, in order to reach part of the camp, we had to ford a mountain stream with our cars.

We were given warnings about driving through the stream too fast, especially when it had rained in the mountains, and the water rose higher than normal.

Water could get into the engine and stall the car. It even happened to Peter once, soon after he moved to Ireland.

Despite my many stream crossings, I’m proud to say I never stranded a vehicle in the stream the whole two years I lived in Ireland.

But I won’t forget the night Miss Emma did, and I don’t think she will either.

It was winter time in Ireland, which means short days and lots of rain. Camp had been temporarily shut down as some legal issues were worked through. A large work group of young guys overlapped the same time as a days-long power outage.

One evening, we were all at the dining hall and heavy rain was lashing. Miss Emma left the dining hall a little before the rest of us. I finished the dishes and was ready to head home at the same time the work group and some of the other camp staff was also really to leave.

But when we got to the stream at the bottom of the hill, we saw Miss Emma’s car sitting in the rushing waters.

Miss Emma later told the story. She started crossing the stream and when her car stalled, she decided to take off her boots and get out (the stream wasn’t high enough to sweep away a person). “When I opened my door, water rushed in the car! I had bread in the back and it got soaked.”

Miss Emma managed to climb out, wade through the stream, and go pound on the door of Mr. Martin’s house, the camp director who lived on-site with his family.

Those of us stranded in the dark on the other side of the stream watched as Mr. Martin drove out with his tractor and pulled the stalled car from the water. The work group guys were delighted and snapped pictures.

Miss Emma, along with Mrs. Martin and the Martin children, were watching from the other side of stream from the privacy of some bushes. “All the guys were taking pictures!” Miss Emma later moaned. “Like they thought this was funny!”

The tractor pulled the car from the stream, and Mr. Martin waded over to give the rest of us instructions how to get across.

“I don’t want you to drive your van through the stream,” Mr. Martin told me. “Let Peter drive you through.” I could have pointed out to Mr. Martin that I had never stranded my van in the stream, and Peter had, but it was not a time to argue.

We all got home that night, safe if not dry. A few days later, Peter had Miss Emma’s car dried out and running again. Miss Emma recovered from her embarrassment (I hope she has, anyway).

The biggest driving challenge was getting our Irish driver’s licenses… But that’s a story for another blog post!