The Keys to the Cottage

In 1954, documentarian Dorothea Lange traveled to the West of Ireland to photograph that region’s stark, rural life. While the 20th century succeeded in modernizing much of the world, the people of western Ireland held fiercely to the past and their traditions. But beyond a world frozen in black and white photographs are the stories of those people. And in 1972, an Irish-American set out to find those stories in a county known as Clare.Reyes—who grew up in a family of seasonal farm workers in western Oregon—was intent on discovering his ancestral roots. What he found in the West of Ireland was more than lineage. For a pittance Reyes purchased a 300-year-old stone cottage in Letterkelly and lived among the very farmers in Lange’s photographs. And over the course of more than forty years Reyes came to be welcomed by those people as one of their own.In his book, The Keys to the Cottage, Reyes brings to life this cast of unforgettable characters. Pa’ Lafferty, the near-giant of a man and patriarch of Reyes’ adopted clan. Mickey Vaughan, horse trader, old bachelor, and unrepentant bicycle thief. Not to mention the likes of Jack Dan Haran, the irascible IRA veteran who sold Reyes a cottage that he never even owned. Through Reyes’ eyes we see the procession of people walking to Sunday Mass on the county road, and the Laffertys’ red tractor with diesel smoke trailing behind. Ten-year-old Paddy is confidently at the wheel, while his parents and sister, dressed in their Sunday best, stand in the cargo box, holding on. Clustered behind the hedgerows of Letterkelly are the ruins of cottages abandoned during the Potato Famine of the 1800s, a daily reminder of the devastation that swept through the West of Ireland.The people in Reyes’ stories are the descendants of those either too poor to escape or tough enough to have survived The Great Hunger. With humour and the toughest of skin, they scrape out their existence: a cabbage patch and a bed of potatoes, a pig for meat, a few chickens, and a cow so they have milk for their tea. The people Dorothea Lange captured in photographs are now gone. Reyes is the oldest surviving member of his adopted Irish family. Now 80, Reyes heeds the urgency to record the stories of County Clare and its remarkable people so that they come alive, to be treasured and remembered.