Erin Hart: Lake of Sorrows

Seventy miles straight west of Dublin, at the northern perimeter of Loughnabrone Bog in the far western reaches of County Offaly, Nora Gavin had already formed a distinct image of the man she was supposed to rescue today. It was not a complete figure she imagined, for the man she was going to see had been cut in half—jaggedly severed by the sharp blade of an earth-moving machine. The image lodged in the back of her mind was of frayed and slightly shrunken sinews, ragged patches of skin tanned brown from centuries spent steeping in the bog’s cold, anaerobic tea. She knew she should feel grateful that even a portion of the body was intact; a few more seasons of turf cutting and he might have been completely scattered to the winds. It made her suddenly angry to think that an entire human being had been preserved for so long by the peat, only to be destroyed in the blink of an eye by the thoughtless actions of men and their machines. But the bleak reality was that she might never get the chance to examine an intact bog body, so she had to make the most of each fragmentary opportunity.

It was Monday, the seventeenth of June. The excavation season had begun only a week earlier, and the bog man had turned up the previous Friday. The business Nora would be engaged in today was just a recovery operation, to salvage the torso dug up by a Bord na Mona excavator. It remained to be seen whether the body’s lower half was still embedded in the bank beside the drain. That mystery would probably have to wait for the full excavation—something that would take several weeks to coordinate, since it involved a whole crew of wetlands archaeologists, forensic entomologists, environmental scientists who analyzed pollen and coleoptera and ash content, and experts on metal detection and film documentation. But since the bog man’s upper half had been removed from his peaty grave, the recovery was urgent. Without the proper conservation procedures, ordinary bacteria and mold would start their destructive march in a matter of hours.

Nora glanced down at the large-scale map she’d laid out on the passenger seat of the car. Driving into the West from Dublin, you couldn’t be blamed for missing County Offaly. The two major motorways managed to skirt it almost entirely. The county had a reputation as a backwater, perhaps befitting a place that was one-third bogland. The Loughnabrone workshop, her destination, showed as a cluster of industrial buildings on a dryland peninsula, a scrap of solid earth jutting out into the bog. Bord na Mona, also known as the Turf Board, was Ireland’s official peat-production industry, and had dozens of operations like this all over the midlands. The bog itself appeared on the map as a set of irregular blank areas between the River Brosna and the few hectares of arable land.

She was surrounded on all sides by bogland, and had evidently missed the turn for the workshop. It seemed too arduous to backtrack; the easiest way to navigate now might be to steer toward the looming pair of bell-shaped cooling towers at the nearby power station. That should put her within a quarter-mile of the workshop. The power station looked like the old nuclear plants at home, but chances were the electricity produced here had always been generated by burning peat. No smoke poured from the stacks now, but the towers remained still and silent landmarks in this strange landscape.

Scale was definitely the overpowering element here, where each furrow was fourteen meters across, and human beings were reduced to miniature among the gargantuan machines and the mile-long mountains of milled peat. Deep drains cut through the bog at right angles to the road. Ahead, Nora saw an enormous tractor with fat tires that kept it from sinking in the spongy peat. The extensions suspended from its cab on long cables looked like vast wings. Bearing down on her, with two front windows glinting in the sunlight, it took on the aspect of a monstrous mechanical dragonfly. Far in the distance, several similar strange contraptions in a staggered formation churned up huge clouds of brown peat dust. She drove on, toward the very center of the vast brown-black desert.

The sun was still low, but strong. Racing before her on the road she could see the car silhouetted in the golden morning light, a shape that contained her own weirdly elongated shadow. There was no one else on the road for miles. She opened the window and thrust her hand out into the wind, the way she sometimes had as a child, and felt her whole arm swimming, salmonlike, against the strong current of the cool morning air. She glanced over at the passenger seat and imagined her sister Triona as a child, red hair trailing down her back, her arm out the window as well. She grasped Triona’s hand, as she had done years before, and they flew along together for a few moments, reveling in their sisterly conspiracy of wickedness and giddy with the sensation of being at least partially airborne. Suddenly her mother’s voice echoed in her head: Ah, Nora, please don’t. You know she insists on copying everything you do. Triona’s bright face vanished, and Nora pulled her arm back into the car. There was little comfort in such memories. Triona was gone, and these fleeting images had become a precious, finite commodity.

Eventually, the road’s surface became so uneven that Nora had to slow to a crawl to keep her head from banging against the roof of the car. Bog roads provided only the illusion of solidity; they were merely thin ribbons of asphalt, light and flexible enough to float above the shifting, soggy earth beneath. At this level, right down on the surface of the bog, you could see an unnatural barrenness where the earth had been stripped, year after year, to prevent the spread of living vegetation. It was only in comparing this landscape to what she knew of ordinary boglands that she could understand what was missing here—the teeming proliferation that existed in a natural bog—and could grasp the fact that the dark drains stretching to the horizon and beyond were actually bleeding away the life-giving water.

She imagined what the bog must have seemed to ancient people—a strange liminal region, half water and half earth. To them it had been the center of the world, a holy place, a burial ground, a safe for stowing treasure, a region of the spirits. She tried to conjure up an image of what this spot might have been like thousands of years before, when giant oaks still towered overhead. She had seen their sodden, twisted stumps resurrected from peaty lakes, the trunks used up for ritual structures, or plank roads to traverse the most dangerous marshy places.

It was astonishing to her that bogs, despite their role as collective memory, were still being relinquished to feed the ever-growing hunger for electric power. Up until a hundred years ago, the bogs had been considered useless, mere wasteland. Then the men of science had gone to work on them, devising ever more efficient ways to harvest peat—only to find out, too late, that this was a misguided effort, and perhaps the wrong choice all along. Twenty years from now, the outdated power plants would be gone. This bog would be stripped right down to the marl subsoil, and would have to begin anew the slow reversion to its natural state, layer by layer, over the next five, or eight, or ten thousand years. Without even realizing it, the men of science and progress had given up a book of the past, whose pages contained an incredible record—of weather patterns, and human and animal and plant life over several millennia—all for jobs in a backwater wasteland, for a few paltry years’ worth of electricity.

Since prehistoric times bogs had served as sacrificial sites; it was strange to think that the bogs themselves had become the sacrifice. She thought back to the archaeology books she’d been reading steadily all winter. She had found a kind of fascination in the description of hoards recovered from watery places, including many of the artifacts she’d seen on display in the National Museum. Most had been discovered completely by accident. She had been stunned by the beauty and complexity of the ancient designs. Some of the objects were distinctly military: ornately patterned bronze swords and daggers, spearheads, serpentine trumpets like something from a fairy story. Others suggested domestic or ritual purposes: gold bracelets and collars, fantastic brooches and fibulae that mimicked bird or animal forms, mirrors with a multiplicity of abstract faces hidden in their graved decoration. The reason these objects had been deposited in lakes and bogs remained shrouded in mystery, the enduring secret of a people without written language.