My family left Ireland during the famine. That is the whole story as I have carried it, and it took me a while to notice how little it says. I have spent the last few months researching records, names and dates and towns, and I could see the people in it presented as facts, a birth here, a town there, a year they showed up somewhere new. What I could not do was picture anyone experiencing anything, how they lived. That is what I brought to Ballinesker Beach on my last hike in Ireland, a late-morning walk in sand and forest on the County Wexford coast, with the tide out and nothing to climb. Three hikes on this trip, three different corners of the country, and this was the one where the ground under me had something to do with me.
Ballinesker Beach
The day started at Curracloe, with coffee outside a beach shack flying flags from half the world and locals debating the weather for the day. North was Ballinesker, where they filmed the Omaha Beach landing for the movie Saving Private Ryan. A small sign marks it, and it felt unmistakably familiar. Inland was Raven Wood, a forest on an old sand spit, every pine covered in ivy and busy with birds I rarely saw. Between the two routes, 9.7 miles and 387 feet of gain, which is about as flat as a day gets. Most of my hikes are built around getting to the top. This one didn’t have one, and I was curious what the day would do with that.
What it gave me was time to think about two people I could name but never really saw for who they were. John and Bridget, a couple from Rosslea, who boarded a ship in 1846 with a four-year-old, a two-year-old, and no way back. Leaving is the part I had recorded as one of the things that happened to them. It took a long walk on a wide beach, and a slow morning to start asking what they actually faced. I thought about what the ninety-eight years between their crossing and my grandfather’s would have looked like to those who lived through them.
The Journey…
There was nothing to climb today, and that took some getting used to. I arrived at Curracloe around eleven and started the day with a latte outside the Coffee Break, a beach shack flying flags from half the world, listening to locals debate the day’s weather the way people do when they have known a sky their whole lives. By half past, I was walking the soft sand between the dunes, with beach grass high enough on both sides to close off everything but the light ahead. Then it opened and there was the Irish Sea. I turned north toward Ballinesker, where they filmed the Omaha Beach landing in the movie Saving Private Ryan. A small sign marks it, and it’s easy to walk past, which I did. I thought about what the filming must have been like on the quiet stretch of sand, and then about my own grandfather, who was killed on a beach on the other side of the world just nine days after the Normandy landings. People remember Omaha.
I turned around north of Ballinesker and walked back the way I had come, past Curracloe again, until the access to Raven Wood took me inland through tall grass and into the trees. The sea went quiet almost as soon as I was inside. What I found in there was a forest covered in ivy, climbing the pines as far up as I could see, green the whole length of the trunks. The trail was wider than a path, more of a road really, and running straight ahead of me were ferns shoulder high along one side, sometimes both. Then the birds. I rarely saw one, and there must have been hundreds, with sound coming from every direction.
The loop turned to where the marsh opened, a channel of still water with a sandbar sitting in the middle of it, the dunes low on the far side, and clusters of small pale purple flowers along the bank. I came back through a gap in the dune on a set of black plank steps with sand pouring over every one of them. The tide was as low as it gets by then and the beach was much wider than when I left it. Firm sand the whole way back north to Curracloe, which after eight miles was a gift. I finished at the same table where I started. Over a year of hiking toward summits, and it turned out that a day with nothing to climb suited me just fine.
Gratitude…
The drive to the coast took just over thirty minutes, tirty if you asked a local. I went late in the morning to line up with a low tide that would not arrive until much later, which was not a typical time for me to begin a hike. This was my last one before I fly home, a beach walk on Ballinesker with Raven Wood at the end of it. I kept my eyes on the left side of the road from the right side of the car, but there was room for gratitude, and it had everything to do with this trip. My family left Ireland during the famine. That is usually how the story gets told, as though those few words explain something. They don’t. It sounds like travel plans. Not real people making a real decision, one that was forever. Somewhere on the road out to the coast I realized I had never once pictured the two of them at a table, trying to decide what came next.
His name was John Peter Bagan and hers was Bridget Tierney. Rosslea, up on the Fermanagh border, a long way north of this beach. He was forty-one and she was thirty-four, married seven years, with two boys. Joseph was four. Patrick was two. In the autumn of 1845 the potatoes came out of the ground black, and nobody yet knew it would go on for years and take a million people with it. They did not wait to find out. By March of 1846 they were on the far side of the Atlantic, which means the whole thing was settled within a few months of the first bad harvest. I have taken longer than that to make up my mind about things that mattered far less. Two people looked at one ruined autumn and chose to live the rest of their lives somewhere else.
Getting out meant Liverpool first, across the Irish Sea before the real crossing started, with a four-year-old and a two-year-old and whatever they had left. I keep trying to picture the moment before they walked on. Not the voyage. Just the standing there. What could be sold was sold, the boys holding on to whatever they could, likely warm clothing, and in front of them a ship bound for a country neither had seen, described by people who had not seen it either. I fly home in a few days with a seat number and a return ticket. They went with no way back, and no way to know whether they had saved their family or ended it. They never got to see how the story turned out, but it did. And me, five generations later, standing on their coast in good boots with a plane to catch. They could not see any of it from where they stood. I am grateful they did not need to.
Reflections…
My trail-thought on today’s hike was a bit different than normal, in that it really started months ago, not on the trail. I have been researching my family’s records, a list of names, dates, and towns running back to John and Bridget in Rosslea, Ireland. Six generations, and I could read the whole thing in about ten minutes. Most of the entries were three words long. It reminded me of the stats I put at the bottom of every post for my hikes. Distance, elevation, coordinates. Everything I need to understand the trail, but nothing about the day. I have done enough of these to know the numbers don’t really reflect the hike. Somewhere along my beach walk, it occurred to me that maybe I had been treating my family history the same way.
So I started thinking about the story behind the numbers. John and Bridget had landed in New Orleans in March of 1846 with Joseph, four, and Patrick, two. They had left an Irish winter, forty-some degrees and wet. What met them at the dock was a Gulf spring likely in the low seventies, damp and humid. Ireland would not have given them that until summer. From there, the family went up the Mississippi by steamboat, weeks on the river with two small children. I do not know how they traveled, but I would guess they had deck passage, which was probably what their money allowed. That meant riding on the main deck with the freight and the engine, with no bed and no food provided, all while cholera moved through the river traffic. At the end of it was a lead-mining county in northwest Illinois, where they stopped.
Their son John Peter was born there in 1851, one of seven. His son Peter John was born in Minnesota in 1880, one of twelve. Not a typo, and yes, still confusing. He married Mabel in Chinook, Montana, in 1914, and their first children came at Corral Coulee, then Zurich, then Eureka. The record gave those names in a row, like stops on a map. But something else was happening. Drought hit northern Montana in the spring of 1917 and did not let go. Heat over a hundred degrees. Wheat prices collapsed when the First World War ended. Half the farmers in the state lost their land. In 1921, the family crossed into British Columbia. The record called that a move. I had started to think it might have been a family getting out, once again.
Daddy Jack was born at Corral Coulee in 1916, one of eleven. By 1940, they had reached Marysville, and he was working at the pulp and paper mill in Everett. He enlisted in 1942 and trained as a Navy corpsman. He was five foot four and a half, a hundred and thirty-eight pounds, with a wife and three small children, the youngest just over a year old, my father. There had already been two ships in this family’s story, the one out of Liverpool and the steamboat up the river. His was the third. In May of 1944, there was no room for him aboard, so he slept in the landing craft carried on deck. At four in the morning, in rough weather, the cable broke and it went over the side with the men still in it. He was pulled from the ocean at half past seven.
One month later, he went ashore at Saipan and was killed at about eleven that first morning. He was twenty-seven. The letter reached his parents in Marysville in 1949, five years later, and said he had died as a direct result of wounds received in action with an enemy of the United States. Then it asked them to acknowledge receipt of the Purple Heart on the enclosed form. Every word of that was true, and none of it was his story. His story was that he was a corpsman, the man who ran toward whoever was hit. He wrote poems, one of them printed in the paper back home, and he wrote one for his own father the month before he died. I have started reading numbers about people more slowly. This journey has taught me that. On that beach, I realized every town name was somebody’s whole year, and every date was a morning somebody had to get through. The path continues.
-Ken
Ballinesker and Curracloe Beach + Raven Wood Nature Reserve, County Wexford, Ireland
Trailhead: 52.383370, -6.3659600
9.73 mi | ~387 ft elevation gain | ~4.5 hours
Late-morning walk: 11:30 AM, 67 to 68 degrees, overcast, with sun breaks
His name was John Peter Bagan. The family called him Daddy Jack.
He was born in Corral Coulee, Montana in 1916, at the far end of the road his family had been walking since they left Ireland. He enlisted in the Navy in 1942 and trained as a hospital corpsman, which meant that in a landing his job was to run toward whoever had been hit. He was killed on Saipan on June 15, 1944, the first morning of the invasion. He was twenty-seven. He left his wife and three small children, the youngest of them my father.
The medals reached his parents in Marysville in 1949, five years after. The Purple Heart is engraved “John P. Bagan, PhM2c, USNR.”
He was also a poet. Two of his poems survive. He wrote this one for his own father in May 1944, the month before he died:
My Dad · May 1944
My dad its proud I am To have a dad like you Your smile so grand your heart so big Your hand so firm and true.
You’ll always be the pal to me Who helped me as a boy You’ll always be the dad to me Who made my trials a joy
May God always look down on you And smile on you and say Hes the man who’s always true And for me hes O.K. The best of luck old pal of mine And when the sun breaks thru You’ll find your son right by your side In everything you do
Your loving son Jack
And this one for his mother, reprinted in a local paper on Mother’s Day, eleven months after his death:
My Mother · May 13, 1945
Dear Mother mine I love you And miss your dear, sweet smile; I love the way you say things too, Your patience all the while, God bless you Mom and keep you For this, today I pray, That God will always smile on you For your son while he’s away Keep smiling Mom, and happy, It keeps you young and gay, I’ll be back to help you out Some day not far away.
Love, Your son Jack.
For most of my life his name went unspoken. This is a small way of speaking it. He was a writer and a healer who went to war to take care of people and gave his life doing it. He was ours, and he is remembered.
John Peter Bagan
Born September 23, 1916. He was 5 feet 4-1/2 inches, 138 pounds, blue eyes and brown hair. He enlisted in the US Navy Reserve on September 9, 1942 and transferred to the Naval Training Station at Great Lakes, Illinois the next day. He served as a Pharmacist’s Mate Second Class, a Navy hospital corpsman, assigned to the 2nd Battalion, 8th Marines, 2nd Marine Division. He was killed in action on Saipan, in the Mariana Islands, on June 15, 1944, dying of wounds received in action. He was 27.
His Final Months
April 6, 1943: reported to the 2nd Battalion, 8th Marines, 2nd Marine Division, in the field, from the 11th Replacement Battalion, Camp Elliott, California.
May 13, 1944: embarked aboard USS LST-485 at Hilo, Hawaii, and sailed.
May 14, 1944: for lack of room he slept in the landing craft carried aboard. Around 0400, in rough weather, the cable holding it broke and it went over the side with its men still in it. He was pulled from the sea at 0730 by the USS Arthur Middleton.
May 30, 1944: sailed from Pearl Harbor.
June 15, 1944: went ashore in the landing at Saipan and was killed in action at about 1100, the first morning of the invasion.
He survived being thrown into the ocean in the dark on May 14. One month later, almost to the day, he fell on the beach he had crossed an ocean to reach.
His Medals
Purple Heart: for dying of wounds received in action. The backside is engraved “John P. Bagan,PhM2c, USNR.”
Presidential Unit Citation: for his unit’s extraordinary heroism in combat.
Asiatic-Pacific Campaign Medal: for service in the Pacific theater, the campaign in which he fell.
American Campaign Medal: for service in the American theater.
World War II Victory Medal: for service in the war.
Rifle Marksman badge, with Rifle and Carbine clasps.
The Road from Rosslea, Ireland to the Pacific Northwest, United States
Daddy Jack was born partway through a journey his family had already been making for seventy years. The line that produced him began in a parish in Ireland emptied by the potato famine and did not stop until it reached the far corner of the United States. Here is that road:
1804 to 1846, Rosslea, Ireland. John Peter Bagan (born 1804) and Bridget Tierney (born 1811) married in 1839 in the parish of Rosslea, on the Monaghan and Fermanagh border. The family name reached back through Beggan to O’Beaghan, and to Irish saints before that.
1846, New Orleans. With the potato blight turning Ireland to hunger, John and Bridget boarded the ship Lapland at Liverpool and crossed the Atlantic, landing in New Orleans in March with little more than each other, two young children, and their name.
1850, Jo Daviess County, Illinois. They worked their way up the Mississippi and settled in the green hills of northwest Illinois. Their son John Peter Bagan was born nearby in 1851 and baptized at St. Michael’s in Galena. He later married Ellen “Nell” Carey and lived to 1939, dying in Everett, Washington, by which time the line had reached the coast.
1880, Le Roy, Minnesota. His son Peter John Bagan was born here, and with him the family began to migrate west in earnest.
1882 to 1912, Iowa and Minnesota. The towns read like a list of departures and arrivals, each marked by children born along the way: Estherville and Swan Lake in Iowa, then RedLake Falls, Avoca, Alexandria, and Herman in Minnesota.
1914, Chinook, Montana. Peter married Mabel Adeline Meiwald on the high plains. Through her mother, a Ross, the family carried Scottish and Welsh associations as well.
1916, Corral Coulee, Montana. A son was born here and named John Peter Bagan. The family would come to call him Daddy Jack.
1917 to 1919, Montana. More children followed at Zurich and Eureka.
1921, Vancouver, B.C. A turn north across the border.
1923 to 1930, Washington. Down into the wet green at last, to Bellingham, Ferndale, then Everett.
1940, Marysville, Washington. The road came to rest. Daddy Jack’s father, Peter John Bagan (b.1851), who had carried the family across half a continent, lived out his days here and died in Marysville in 1966.
John & Bridget: Saint Patricks Cemetery, Le Roy, Mower County, Minnesota.
