I attended the Catskills Irish Arts Week this summer, a six hour drive southeast of Ottawa. It was the week that Donald Trump was shot in the ear during an attempt to assassinate him, and a week before Kamala Harris became the presidential candidate as Joe Biden stepped down.
We drove almost due south, passing by the Fort Drum army base, which covers more than 430 square kilometres in northern New York. I glimpsed it from the car window through tall chain link fences topped with barbed wire.
We passed through little towns on our way, and most were festooned in American flags, with many windows and porches decorated in red, white and blue pleated bunting. The occasional Make America Great Again sign appeared on the side of the highway.
A lot of the buildings in these American towns have wood siding and are painted white, but the paint was peeling on most of them, giving many of the towns a dilapidated air. Some of the houses were boarded up and empty.
It was a beautiful day when we headed south, but I felt a bit on edge. At that moment, it felt like the Democratic Party was on its way to losing the upcoming election, which could mean that the world’s only super-power would turn its back on fighting climate change and on women’s rights and welcome a dictator with open arms.
The town of East Durham is up in the Catskill mountains, which is dotted with resorts that prospered from the 1920s to the 1970s, when New Yorkers, especially those from Irish and Jewish communities, would escape the city heat into the mountains. Those resorts are now less opulent, but still fill up during the Irish arts week. The place where we stayed is also a popular vacation spot for biker gangs and even metal detectorists, who attend the resort’s annual Lost Treasure Weekend.
The weather was sunny but sweltering for most of the week, overwhelming the air conditioning in East Durham’s Irish pubs and taxing the window air conditioner in our small motel room.
I had learned to play the bodhrán during the pandemic over Zoom. The classes in East Durham were the first time I had a chance to learn in person in a group setting. I was so excited about it, I attended both the advanced and all-level classes.
Learning the drum has allowed me to feel what it’s like to be in the music, surrounded by other players and connected through a shared tune. It takes many years to play well enough to really connect with others during a session, but there are times when the music extends around everyone in the circle, as if weaving a golden rope and tying us into its knot.
Most nights there were sessions in the pubs, and we attend one led by teachers, which in this case means some of the best players from Ireland and New York. There were about 100 students in the pub, I think. The air was very humid and warm—the teachers at the front set the tunes and the pace, spinning out reel after reel as everyone tapped their feet to the rhythm and played their instruments, including fiddles, banjos, bodhráns, whistles, accordions and uilleann pipes.
Our collective effort made the wooden floor reverberate and the walls hum. The people around me were glowing with perspiration but also with a hint of inner light. The beer and whiskey glasses shimmered, and the tables swung back and forth slightly. The whole building seemed to shift and shimmy a little on its foundations.
When we left the pub, we looked up at the stars in the dark country sky and the world felt a bit sweeter, more peaceful. The feeling of powerlessness faded a bit—these days I see fires in my mind’s eye, burning through forests and towns, as temperatures go higher and higher. I find myself wishing for the winter months to come and damp down the searing heat. But that night, colder air flowed down from the sky and drifted after us as we drove along the road back to our room, where we dropped into the cool darkness of sleep.