Travellers' Rest

There is a new page of the Controversy section, covering some elements of the general hostility between the sedentary and Travelling populations of Ireland (as previously promised). The principal segment was contributed by a remarkable Irish Country Person who, I promise you, will surprise even the knowledgeable reader with his very different description of the Travellers of Ireland.

Some old "news":
The incident took place shortly before WWII along the South Carolina/Georgia border area. It was wintertime and Uncle Eddie ("The Little Colonel") B. was traveling with his immediate family looking for paint-spraying work in the South. They stopped at a campground traditionally used by Travellers; I'm not exactly sure which one but the owner had built a tavern in the front along the road and was also noted for keeping an ape in a cage on the campground itself. I don't know the details but he must have bred the ape, a female, on occasion as well because she had recently lost a young one that lived in the cage with her.

The campground may have been the one known as "The Pines," which had been built on the site of a grove called "Travellers' Rest," where ITs had been tenting for fifty or sixty years even before that time. This period was just after the time that many Travellers on the East Coast had switched from tents to auto trailers. Murphy Village would eventually (after the war) be built not too far away.

Anyway, a couple of Southern Irish Travellers had dropped by the camp sites occupied by Uncle Eddie and some other Northern Irish Travellers to check them out and to advise them to stay out of trouble in the Southerners' home territory. Since this was a friendly warning, they brought along with them a sure-fire instrument of diplomacy: a jug of extremely smooth but potent moonshine, otherwise known as "White Lightning."

Eddie, who was not normally much of a drinker, slowly but steadily proceeded to get smashed in the worst possible way: as a walking, talking, fully-functional but painless and mindless drunk for whom all sorts of weirdness temporarily seemed both possible and logical, even inevitable.

He, along with a bunch of cousins (Mickey R., Mickey M., Jimmy D., Pat D.) decided that the night was still young after the moonshine was finished and the Southerners departed for their own sites. So they sought more liquid sustenance at the tavern across the road, which unfortunately housed a contingent of locals, country men, who hadn't yet imbibed enough to insulate them from the gentle murmuring of drunken laughter, interspersed with cryptic insults in Cant. A bit of a confrontation took place and the Travellers eventually found themselves back on the other side of the road a bit bloody but unbowed and in some danger of sobering up or, in Uncle Eddie's case, falling into a coma. Somehow, they all made it safely back to their respective trailers, even he.

There was a bit of a racket as my uncle prepared for bed by knocking over lots of bric-a-brac. Aunt Betty and their three kids also had to endure some vocalized second-hand indignation about his cousin Jimmy, I believe, having been injured by a country man that night. (Actually, Jimmy had taken a poke at the man, who ducked, leading him to break several knuckles on a brick wall behind the other man.)

He decided in his high-octane wisdom to find that country man again and inform him of the error of his ways, so he left. When he hadn't returned in an hour or two, (it was now about 3:00 am) his wife and three children first and then his awakened relatives started to look for him behind every tree in South Carolina and Georgia. Eventually his apparently lifeless body was discovered by the early dawn twilight, in a cage, with the ape sitting on his chest, cuffing his head, stroking his brow, smoothing his salt-and-pepper hair and otherwise trying to resuscitate him in the time-honored tradition of the great apes, even as she sat on his chest all the while.

Uncle Eddie seemed absolutely lifeless but the ape would go into a rage if anyone approached the cage at this point, much less enter it, so the owner was sent for. He managed to lure the ape toward the other side of the cage, with food I suppose, (those details are a bit unclear) while a couple of Eddie's more daring cousins opened the cage door briefly to snatch him out. The ape went berserk but the re-locked cage door held. The owner explained that the female ape had lost a baby a short time before and possibly was confusing the unresponsive human body with that of her dead offspring.

Much to everybody's surprise, Uncle Eddie was found to be alive, if still completely unconscious. It may seem odd in this day and age of 911 and "E.R." on television every week, but they carried the victim to his trailer, put him to bed and waited more than twenty-four hours for Eddie to wake up to ask if he wanted to go to the hospital. When he awoke, however, he reported himself to be bruised and battered but unbroken as far as he could determine; although it was another day or two before he was able to leave his bed and get back to work. Which, if you know anything about Travellers, speaks volumes about just how much pain he was in. Apparently the adage, "A little mothering never hurt anyone," is not universally true.

The mystery of how and why my uncle came to be found in that predicament was never solved. Was it revenge by country men, malice on part of the Southern Travellers (for whom the visitors, though distant kin, meant competition in business), a drunken prank gone sour by his own close kin, or perhaps it had just seemed like a good idea at the time to Uncle Eddie? No one ever confessed, he never remembered a thing, and the mother ape remained inconsolable. Afterwards, she would scream and cry for him each time he entered or left the camp, extending her arms out through the bars to reach for the "baby" that had been snatched from her. After a few days of that they packed up and left for other parts. Uncle Eddie, the kindest and most good-natured of men, never referred to that incident in later years and deeply resented being kidded about it, which in fact he occasionally was, unmercifully.