Carraig Dulra

Teagan and I have been here at Carraig Dulra for about two weeks and unfortunately are leaving in a mere couple of days. We arrived on sunday the sixth dead tired from our last night in Galway - rewind two weeks and to the other side of the island, in which we went with our Merchants Freaks' housemates and a bunch of their friends to Castle Menloch, just on the outskirts of Galway. It's a small castle right on the River Corrib, which runs torrentially through the city, but is pretty calm where the castle is. We had a bonfire, drank and played games in the beautiful nightime moonlit scenery right between the water and the ancient broken down castle. A great late night of shotgunning beers, and overall crosscultural drunkenness with a couple of Aussies, a Kiwi, a brit, and even a couple of Irish, for once. It was all fun except for when Teagan and I decided to go to bed and some of the housemates decided to stay up all night on drugs making it hard for Teagan to sleep - I just powerslept through it.

At any rate, we were in somewhat decent shape to meet Mike and Suzie, the owners of Carraig Dulra. They were leaving for France the next day for a week for a wedding and just showed us the site and gave us a few things to do quickly before leaving. Timothee, french, and Martin, German, were already there. We were all four in charge with definitely less than a weeks' worth of work.

The week went by and we got to know the two others and did the work, made up other jobs and quickly ran out of work. Martin's girlfriend had just broken up with him and feeling he had to do something somewhat rash, decided to go straightedge for a hear and branded a small X onto his wrist. Martin exuded kind of an annoying youthful arrogance/naivete, whatever. Timothee, on the other hand, was quiet at first but Teagan and I won him over and brought out our favorite person on our travels together so far, and probably both our favorite frenchman ever. An extremely hard worker, we would have to fight him to let us do the dishes. He had a constant sense of humor that spanned the relams of the sick and demented, the intellectual, the punny and mostly the just plain potty humor (he farted a lot and loved it). He rode an old cruiser bike here on a ferry from France and went to volunteer at Electric Picnic, pretty much the biggest summer festival in Ireland. He just left a few days ago to go to his sister's wedding and then to harvest the grape in France (which we may join him in hopefully) and we miss him already. Martin also left because his ex, Hannah, was arriving. She was only here a few days and was kind of a princess and we didn't like her. Vito, an Italian, also arrived a few days ago and is still here.

Carraig Dulra is wonderfully rustic, there is no electricity or running water. Where is a yurt with a woodstove for warmth, a covered kitchen with gas burners and a vegetable and herb garden where a lot of our food comes from, there is a spring we draw water from down the hill also. We have worked on a few community and school gardens in the area, saving them from the outrageous overgrowth resulting from the rampant rain of the summer. We've also helped Gary, the neighbor, to move his sheep.

Let's see, what else is there. The rats are a nuisance, but sometimes fun in an annoying way. Teagan stubbed her toe while frolicking in the grass naked.

Now here is a Carraig Dulra exquisite corpse exercise Teagan and I did:

Stone ridden land we watch this farm, stove stocking, feet in sheep's fleece we rest. Raain torrents hinder imaginative huckleberry finesque escapades. Conversations in an array of foreign accents punctuate the brisk evening air. The candlelist face of an abandoned heartbroken youth gazes through a telescope attached to a stick. It's pointing out the window of the yurt into a cloud filled sky, the pleiedes just barely peeking through as the wind sweeps them across the canvas as if the turbines off the shores of our consciousness were propelling them. Suddenly he turns to us, "I will be straightedge!" he says and just as suddenly he leans out the window and vomits up all his heartbreaks, his lovers past present and future and, of course, his lunch. As the rats came to feast upon his expunged emotions we laughed at his partial suicide and turned the telescope to the neighboring field. The moon illuminates the night activities of sheep showering in naive ignorance of the iminent death, consumption and role as butt warmers. All those who reside at Carraig dulra are shown the joys of repetition by Cal the 14 year old collie, who is fortunate enouch to be deaf to the wild Frenchman's daily abuses and advances. The frenchman, who once considered smoking his own eyelids bbefore realizing he had swallowed the ghost of a captured IRA soldier who was tortured to death in his sleep. For days he would pick different varieties of leaves and roll them into cigarettes or smoke thime in his hazel root pipe until his voice was grizzled like that of an old drunken Irishman. We decided that an exorcism was in order, for our sanity and overall quality of life was at risk otherwise. Everyone enthusiastically offered up traditions known to them by their own culture or folklore. The German wanted to strong-arm the situation whilst the Franchman and Italian had more romantic ideas involving cloks, smoke and ceremony. Being a product of American cult classics, we decided that locale was the most important detail and ushered the group to the highest rock on the site. Even Cal mosied along and joined the mob. But once on top of the lookout point the group quickly forgot their purpose as the winds picked up again, this time far more fierce and torrential than any of us had ever before experienced and picked up the yurt and sailed it away towards the fiery horizon, its canvasses resemblinng the wings of a phoenix in flight. The wind was so fierce, in fact, that it flung the clothes off our bodies and we were overcome with the desire to frolic in the tall grasses as if babies newborn into this world. Though amid our frolicking the wind threw us against the rocks again and again so that before too long were bloody and bruised and broken, rolling in the grass in apocalyptic ecstase. That's when Mike and Suzie returned.