In Geoffrey Household’s 1939 thriller Rogue Male, the narrator, an English hunter who decides to take a shot at Hitler and misses, then gets caught, tortured, tossed from a cliff and left for dead, only to piece himself together and survive, finds himself in the last section of the book hiding from the Nazi who has hunted him across Europe by burrowing a man-sized den in a hedgerow. I loved that book in my 20s, but I never really understood that part of it until our trip to Ireland last week, when I almost burrowed a rented German sedan into several different hedgerows. And then got out of the car, and walked them on foot.

The hedgerow, as I experienced it along the wild Atlantic coast, is a curious model of interstitial nature as it manifests in a landscape that has been dominated by pastoral culture for millennia. Mounds of earth, turf, rock and wood that demarcate distinct land uses, the hedgerows are like unenclosed terrariums dense with diverse flora that also provide animal habitat. And no doubt a few magical beings, like the ones our 6-year-old daughter learned about at Dublin’s National Leprechaun Museum before we headed out into the country for a week of exploration that culminated in her big brother’s wedding.

Photography does not really suffice to capture the greenness of Ireland. It has some of the geological barrenness of Scotland, but it’s so much more temperate and close to the gulf stream that, at least at the beginning of summer, it has a vegetative intensity that feels like some cold country mirror of the tropics, much of it provided by lush ferns that seem to grow everywhere. Even in the manicured public parks of Dublin, and more intensely so in County Clare and County Kerry on the western coast. The bird and animal life seems abundant, despite the predominance of pastoralism, and one gets a sense that the people live closer to the land, and the deep memory it harbors. That closeness is manifested the physical details of the human imprint on the land, including in the way the plants are almost encouraged to reach out and grab the passing cars. Maybe it’s that connection to biodiversity, and a religiosity that seems tied to the land, that makes the country also seem intensely modern, multicultural, and welcoming of all.

In the Icelandic sagas, the Norwegian settlers who arrived at the that rocky isle in the 8th century often learned they had been preceded by Irish hermits, who would usually be found in coastal caves. The images those passages conjured always entranced me, as I tried to imagine living that way, that long ago. Walking stretches of the Irish coast, visiting a few sites of monasteries and forts of similar vintages, and even some ruins from the pre-Christian era, took me closer to that place.

So did my daughter’s insistence, the minute she saw a beach near the town of Ventry on the Dingle Peninsula, that we swim in the surf on a windy afternoon just barely bumping up against 60°F. The water was probably closer to 65°F. It was awesome, and a reminder of how much of our sense of coldness is learned.

As a three-generation family group traveling for a casual week culminating in a wedding, our experience of the place was no more than surface impressions—Ireland as the land of magical VRBOs. Filling out our week without any real clue where we were going, we lucked out on two nights in an insanely beautiful stone cottage on a bluff over the ocean, a short walk from the trail to the Cliffs of Moher and the village of Doolin, and a view of the Aran Islands. In Dingle, we walked out the front door to find an ancient pilgrimage trail across the street, which rewarded me with this good luck greeting an hour into my early morning amble:

And over the back fence, the ruins of a Norman castle built by the Knight of Kerry on the site of an ancient ring fort, access to which was through the backyard of a family that happened to have this heritage site on their land, and welcomed visitors with a solicitation for a small donation:

I picked up the Irish Times most of the days we were there, and one day there was a report about how the AirBnB-ification of the country has begun to change the social landscape of some areas so much that some are concerned that a failure to regulate vacation rentals will soon lead to protests and the possible demise or diminishment of the “Irish Welcome.” It helped me think about our presence with a little more perspective, and what lessons and memories we would take home to Texas with us.

Hugo and Neha’s wedding was at the end of that pilgrimage trail, at the Gallarus Oratory, a thousand-year-old stone chapel built by early Christians. Neha’s brother lives and works in one of the bigger cities of the eastern coast, and when Hugo and Neha visited together last year and traveled around, they immediately knew this magical little sacred structure was where they wanted to consecrate their bonds. So they invited family from Texas and Maharashtra to meet them there the last Saturday in May.

As celebrant, they found Julí Malone, a Druid from Dingle with permission to officiate weddings at the Oratory (who they learned the day after had also been the officiant of Sinead O’Connor’s memorial). Maybe that is why they got a gorgeous sunny day when the forecast called for overcast skies. The ceremony was really beautiful, with a call to the four winds, to the trees, to the mycelium, and to the gods of all those present, and deeply thoughtful and moving vows written by bride and groom that helped us know each of them and their life as a couple better. In that little space, Julí bathed them in the sonorous vibrations of a cymbal, literally tied the knot, and invited the couple to leap out over the threshold and into their new life.

As we celebrated outside in the sun after the exchange of vows, we saw a small bird flying back and forth from the shelter of one of the corner crevices in the Oratory, carrying nesting materials. Then, as we walked to the cars to reconvene at dinner, a sudden, intense, and hyperlocal burst of rain and wind drenched us, just as Julí had spoken of the cleansing of the past. And when we arrived in town, the clouds began to clear, and a full rainbow appeared over Dingle.

Back in Austin, we knew from our house sitter that our home had been pummeled by another microburst—this one the kind that our overheated Earth cooks up at the other end of the gulf stream, with 85 mph winds and baseball-sized hail that reportedly had people bleeding in our neighborhood grocery store after running from their cars. She sent pictures, but they weren’t good enough to tell what had really happened, so we wondered what awaited us as we boarded our flight back Monday.

We were lucky, even as we were saddened by what we found. Three mature trees downed on our lot. Luckily none fell on our house or guest house. But we lost one of our most beloved trees—a gnarled, 75-year-old mesquite that anchored our front yard, it was completely uprooted and tossed across the yard. It’s the tree that anchors the opening chapter of my book A Natural History of Empty Lots, in a recounting of the lessons I learned from it, and the sense of loss is intense, even as we are planning ways to preserve its memory through use of its wood.

Down in the woods of the urban floodplain behind our house, the arboreal carnage was intense. One of the majestic cottonwoods grown a hundred feet tall at the mouth of a municipal drainage pipe also was taken completely down, its fresh downy seed snow splattered across the forest floor, which was also littered with the limbs of hackberries. But the tall sycamore that hosts the great blue heron nests closest to us was undamaged. When I stood under it I could see the nest, and over the week I heard the fledglings running their reassuring motor mouths all morning and night.

Thursday morning as I stepped away from my desk in the guest house, I saw a magical being at the window: a painted bunting. I had glimpsed the bird earlier in the week, flitting around in the stubbier trees and freshly broken branches along our west fence, but it was wary and elusive. This time it couldn’t see me, and was protected by the glass, and I got to fully experience those extravagant colors.

Saturday morning, the parakeets came around to eat the sweet seed pods of that mesquite, just as I describe in the book, “Leprechaun colors” and all, tossing the used shells the way we toss empty beer cans to the bin. Invasive birds who prove how deserving they are of the life they have made here by being the only species I have seen that eats the mesquite pods—a vegetable protein that evolved to be eaten by the mastodons and other native megafauna of this region who went extinct around the same time as humans showed up on the continent.

That fallen tree won’t grow any more pods, but the younger one next to it already does, right in the path formerly occupied by the petroleum pipeline that bisected this lot when we found it. And maybe, when I finish my days-long date with the chainsaw and see what’s left under the fallen trunk, I’ll find a fresh little tendril coming up from what’s left of the root bed.

Saturday afternoon I noticed more magical beings congregating on that fallen tree. Golden-armored dragonflies, alighting en masse on its already-dead brown branches. When I identified them in the field guides, I learned they were widow skimmers, so named for the way the black patterns on their wings recall human adornments of mourning.

We don’t have any Druids in Texas, but we could use some. They’d have a lot to work with, even if they might not be able to appease the winds we have awakened.

The Roundup

Thanks to the Writers’ League of Texas and Becka Oliver for having me as one of the readers for Tuesday’s One Page Salon at Radio in South Austin, where I got to read something new about jaguarundis and robot Jaguars (part of an exploration of ways to combine nature writing and technology criticism), talk about Empty Lots, and meet and new work from a bunch of really cool local writers including Rachel Monroe, Carolyn Cohagan, Josh Alvarez and Renee’ Burleson. What a cool event.

Our latest local jaguarundi sightings have been in Seguin, a town in the Austin-San Antonio interzone.

My conversation with Australian author and environmentalist Anthony James for his RegenNarration podcast is now live and available for download. This was a fun one, as we recorded the conversation while walking around the East Austin edgelands.

Speaking of Australia, thanks to Jesse Sublett for this story about the cockatoos of Sydney who have figured how to operate public drinking fountains (video proof included).

And thanks to Bruce Sterling for this story about the bird nest found in the Ukraine battlefield made of a mix of natural materials and fiber optic cable, and this photo essay about how rapidly the Klamath River valley is rewilding after the most recent dam removal project.

The other magical conjuring to report from the week is that during our flight home, as I thought about watching a movie, I fed Google a query about the imaginary movie I wanted to see, one a friend and I concocted in a recent lunchtime conversation: Werner Herzog’s adaptation of the Relación of Cabeza de Vaca. To my immense amusement, the AI Assistant now embedded in the search engine hallucinated that the movie is a real one, and told me all about it.

If you ever need a Druid, click here.

Have a great week, and stay cool.