I TURNED MY COLLAR UP AGAINST THE WIND and shifted my weight slightly to ease my back. The cold cut all the way to the bone.

Peter, encased in a heavy green jacket, skulled the boat, his gnarled and callused hands moving the oars lightly in the dark water, keeping the lines true and allowing our back casts to roll out properly. He was in his late 50s, short and wiry, with a freckled, ruddy face creased and raw from a lifetime in the wind and cold.

His deep blue eyes saw everything, and measured a man in a glance. Later, they sparkled when he chuckled.

“Aye, Gran’,” he said, dropping the “t” from my name, “I do love the sheep.” Peter pronounced it “loov.” He spoke slowly and softly despite the wind, each word caressed by a brogue so rich that I had to strain to catch it.

A Connemara sheep farmer since childhood, Peter tended a flock of 240 ewes and four rams that roamed those barren, rock-encrusted mountains. Once in a while, like today, he would guide, or ghillie, for fly fishermen from the Delphi Lodge.

It was mid-morning but sunless, and the gray mist rolled down in billows from the Maumturks Mountains. The mist swirled around the brick, two-story Irish country manor that was the lodge, a quarter mile up the gravel road that ran along the Finlough Lac. Then it curled down the water’s edge, playing peek-a-boo with the flat water on the lake that was basically a wide, shallow spot on the Bundorragha River.

The river started at the bay and wound its way through Connemara County until it sliced and clawed up the canyon. We were at the very western edge of Ireland, and the mist came and went as the wind blew, draping the dark, coffee-colored water with a timeless Irish melancholy.

“Peter,” I said as I raised my fly rod forcefully. The line lifted out of the water and straightened behind me in a tight roll before I pulled it forward against the wind. The long rod took the weight easily and carried the line over the water. I braked it at the end, so the shooting head could extend the leader and the fly out straight and settle them gently on the water. The fly sank into the brown alkali water before I started a slow retrieve. “How do you know which sheep is yours, and which one is your neighbors’?” I wondered.

The rugged, treeless mountains surrounding the lodge were called “commonages,” and sheep from various herds mingled and grazed on the emerald grass that jutted between the big gray boulders.

“Aye, Gran’,” he answered, “by their faces.”

I gave him a quizzical look, and he affirmed.

“Yes, lad, each has a differen’ face. We canna’ recognize each of them.”

I paused and turned back to my fly line. It tugged to the right, I raised the rod tip smartly, and the tug became a heavy pull.

“Fish on,” I said.

The rod bent and the line sizzled off the reel as the fish made its runs. Eventually, it tired and I worked it toward the boat. When its head came up on the surface, I slid it toward Peter, who netted it. He deftly unhooked the silvery Atlantic salmon as I took a couple of pictures. Then he gently returned the fish to the lake.

“Lovely,” he said. “The first of the season. Jus’ lovely, my boy.”

We grinned at each other, shook hands warmly, and felt the overall joy of those who have fished successfully. It was, and is, a very primal connection.

We settled back and I suggested to Peter that he use the second rod we had brought along.

“You donna’ mind?”

“Not at all,” I assured him. “Besides I’m already one up.”

“Aye. Though, I dinna expect to compete this morning,” he said, his eyes sparkling as he chuckled. “But I’m pleased to be given the chance.”

By now the mist had become a lacy whisper over the water, and with the first fish netted, the wind wasn’t as cold. Peter and I each made a long cast into the lake.

I think it was two casts later that Peter leaned over and nudged my shoulder.

“We also put a tag in their ear,” he said without a trace of brogue. Then he clapped me good-naturedly on the back.

I looked up speechless, realizing that I had been the victim of my first sheep joke. Peter was laughing and we chuckled for another five minutes.

Despite the mist, the cold and the wind, we both caught fish. And eventually we talked about rural Irish life. Peter was remarkably intelligent, and not just about raising sheep — he had deep insights into modernity and its threats to Irish traditions that went back to the Druids. He knew the Irish well, knew their strengths and weaknesses, but was mostly worried about a decline in the rural way of life.

“Wool prices are down,” he noted. “We donna’ compete on the world market. I sell my wool direct to our village weavers, who make our Irish sweaters for export.

“But it’s the youth that have no interest in our way of life. The schools are down to one classroom, and we donna’ have a regular priest for the church. What are we to do without the sacrament? If it came to that?” Peter shuddered at the thought of rural life without communion, and I was amazed at how deep his feelings were.

Across Ireland, the modern Catholic Church is in shambles, torn apart by a series of scandals, most recently revelations of the abusive Magdalene laundries that were run by four orders of Catholic nuns and that virtually imprisoned thousands of young women. Yet none of this mattered to Peter, whose rural way of lived was intertwined with what grace and succor his religion could still offer.

Peter was an astute observer of modern Ireland. While he had spent his life raising sheep in the mountains, he knew that his way of life was slowly giving way to modernity and globalization. His daughter had left the village for Galway University. Proudly, he told me that at 28 she had just completed her doctorate in psychology.

Yet he was more grateful that his son had decided not to go. “He loves the sheep, too,” Peter said. “Aye, he’s as good as I am with ’em.”

Peter’s son had just become engaged to a village girl, who also had decided to stay. The couple was to marry in the summer, and Peter was helping them build a house and develop a flock.

* * *

IRELAND IS A CONFOUNDING PLACE. It is lyrical, mystical, and endlessly timeless. As the Pleistocene ice age withdrew some 11,000 years ago, the ice gouged two trenches in the peninsula that jutted west from continental Europe. The westernmost trench severed Ireland from Britain, creating the Irish Sea; thousands of years later a huge glacier created the second or eastern trench, called the English Channel; its formation created the Thames River estuary, which evolved into London, history’s most important trade and financial center.

The western island, or Ireland, was a wild, rugged world of deep oak forests, rocky outcroppings jutting from brown peat bogs, and lush grassy hills that were an emerald green, a unique color that comes from the alkali and limestone in the soil. The Irish poets were right — the green hillsides here are like no other.

Small groups of ancients inhabited the wild western island. Whether early humans, Neanderthals or a mix of the two is still argued at Dublin’s Trinity College.

These ancients were foragers, living in caves cut in the limestone. Their past is legend, but they left behind remarkable cravings in the rocky promontories and caves, most likely in dedication to gods or animal spirits, that took the form of complex, intertwining spirals.

When the ancients died out, the Celts adopted these spiral designs, and the motif is seen throughout Irish folk art and even in Irish Catholic artwork, like the medieval Celtic cross and the designs in the Book of Kells. According to a Galway street artist who uses the designs in her jewelry, the spirals represented the universal life form.

The early Celtic world was clan-based, with chieftains vying for collective power. Druids were a select group, a mix of shaman, priest, judge and political adviser. The Celts rose at the end of the animist era, and the Druids taught that gods and goddesses inhabited every natural being and element. Like many early classes of priest, the Druids were learned as well as soothsayers and seers. They conjured spirits, talked to ghosts and called upon the elements, beseeching the sun and rain as needed during the growing season.

The Druids would go into the wilderness and live like hermits for years, then return with visions and magic. They understood edible and medicinal plants, and often went days without food or water. They came and went in the dark, and appeared at will. According to legend, they were capable of transmogrification, borrowing the body of a raven for their time travel.

The Romans brought Christianity to Ireland around 300 A.D. Christianity mingled with Irish paganism and took on its own peculiar tribal forms. Around 460 A.D. St. Patrick brought his fiery brand of Catholicism to the island, converting many of the Irish princes and their clans with the sheer force of his belief. Among the legends, St. Patrick is revered for driving snakes from Ireland — though like Peter’s sheep joke, this tale too is encrusted with irony, for Ireland never had any snakes. The Irish land mass had separated from the English coastline long before vipers took residence there.

Not only did St. Patrick bring Catholicism to Ireland, he also touched off centuries of political and religious tumult, first with the Pope, then England, then both. To this day the traditions of Ireland’s pagan ancestors mix with Christian rituals to form a unique mysticism that resides in the Irish spirit and comes to life in the writings of her poets and novelists.

Over time, the Druids that did not become Catholic priests transformed into bards and singers. Perhaps it was this ancient power, but music and literature has always been as much a part of Ireland as potatoes and Guinness.

My first real love of Ireland was triggered by its poetry and literature. There are many gods in the Irish pantheon of writers, but the ones who stuck with me through the years are James Joyce and William Butler Yeats.

* * *

WE MET BRENDAN ON OUR FIRST NIGHT IN DUBLIN. Susan and I had arrived at our hotel that morning, visited Trinity College, and then went out in the evening to explore the capital. We had ventured into a pub, where in a room at the back, a large group was singing Irish ballads and traditional songs. They had sheet music and hearty voices, and they carried a tune like a precious feather.

They motioned us in and we sat down. The guy next to me, who we discovered later was a priest on a night out, had a lilting tenor and he helped us through many a sad but gorgeous Irish ballad. A couple of pints of Guinness and I found myself robustly singing along to songs I didn’t know. It was a glorious introduction to the pleasures of an Irish pub.

It is said that the Irish sing to rid their sorrows, and a pub full of friendly people and great songs — plus an accordion and maybe an Irish penny whistle — is a wonderful way to spend a few hours. Fortunately, we found it throughout the country at most of the pubs. Galway, whose residents come from a peculiar gene pool that produces dark raven hair with bright blue eyes, is particularly alive with music and song. A city with three universities, Galway’s curving Shop Street is vibrant. Musicians take over each bend in the street, and the music washes over you like hope. Mikey and the Scalawags were our favorites — young musicians who sang their hearts out while balancing on barrier poles.

But that first night in Dublin after our introduction to an Irish pub, we were happy as larks when we reached our hotel. The hotel bar was nearly empty, but we decided on a nightcap. A lone man sat at the bar reading a newspaper. We asked the bartender for a whiskey and he reached for a bottle of Scotch. Nope, I said, we want the best Irish you have.

“Jameson,” the man with the newspaper offered, looking up. “It’s the smoothest, though Bushmill is good.”

So we ordered Jameson, settled into our drinks and began a casual conversation with Brendan. Soon the conversation started spinning around politics and international economics, and whether the European Union would survive. Then it got into deeper issues like the death of the Celtic Tiger, and whether Ireland would ever recover. We quickly realized that our newfound friend was an astute observer of Irish politics and international affairs.

Our hotel was across the street from the Dail, the Irish parliament, and earlier that day I had seen lots of men in dark suits coming and going in the lobby. Brendan, it turned out, worked for a young minister who was a rising star in the Fine Gael party.

* * *

“THE TROUBLE WITH THE IRISH,” Brendan said, “is that they couldn’t abide success. We are great at suffering, but not at prospering. The one and only time that we had an economic boom, it was squandered. It was the Irish curse.”

We were talking about the collapse of the Celtic Tiger, roughly that period between 1995 and 2008 when Ireland was booming, riding the crest of an economic bubble fueled by foreign high-tech companies and spiraling real estate prices. At its height, country houses in places like Doolin were selling for $1.5 million.

Today, they may get $300,000 — if a buyer can be found.

Brendan had worked some sort of magic and gotten us into the Dail. We were sitting in the balcony waiting for the members to finish arguing about a redistricting proposal. Before we had sat down, Brendan had been pulled aside by anxious men in dark suits for a few words and a quick nod, but now he was concentrating on the members below us on the floor of parliament.

A man in his 50s wearing a dark suit came into the room, followed by an older man. The younger one was athletic looking with dark hair, wire glasses and a salt-and-pepper beard. The older man was bigger with a full head of white hair. He had an confident, authoritative bearing, like that of an international statesman.

“Those two are the leaders of Sinn Fein,” Brendan nodded at them as they stood together talking. “The older one was the IRA’s gun dealer — now he’s a politician.” There was irony in his voice.

Asked about unification and finally getting over the Troubles, Brendan shook his head. “Not in this generation,” he said, adding thoughtfully, “Too many still remember the bloodshed. Though you can bet the English wouldn’t mind giving up the North — they’re spending over a billion pounds of year in subsidies.”

* * *

DAYS LATER AT THE DELPHI LODGE, we were having an after-dinner conversation with Warner and Yvonne, the owners. They were German, and in his youth, Warner was rated the sixth-best professional tennis player in the world. “But I was never going to beat Connors or McEnroe, so I became a doctor,” he said. He had pioneered micro, non-invasive surgery and was now one of Germany’s most sought-after orthopedic surgeons. Many of his patients were professional athletes with knee and elbow injuries.

Warner was passionate about fly fishing and had come to Ireland 20 years ago for the salmon. Both he and Yvonne had fallen in love with Ireland, and eventually they bought the lodge. For a decade, they and the lodge’s staff had been engaged in preserving and restoring the salmon runs in the Bundorragha River.

Warner had battled the salmon farming operations off the Irish coast for years. The farms, with their huge amounts of nitrogen, were ruining Ireland’s fragile coastal waters. “They are owned by the Norwegians,” Warner said. “They moved the farms away from their own shores and brought them here despite the environmental damage.”

There was a deep pause as Warner considered what he would say next. “The Irish politicians are the most corrupt in Europe,” he frowned. “Such a beautiful country, and they don’t care about it.”

* * *

THERE’S A MELANCHOLY ABOUT IRELAND that seems to stretch across the ages. In modern times it can be felt in the fact that there are only 4 million Irish left on Irish soil, and 10 times that many spread across the world. As the Emerald Isle struggles through an economic recovery that will take decades, not years, you hear it in the voices in the pubs and in the speech of the bright Irish youth working in London because jobs are scarce in Dublin.

I suspect the melancholy is part of the Irish soul, as timeless as the mists rolling off the Maumturks. Yet it’s incapable of quenching their joyous spirit or fierce intelligence. Adaptation and transformation have always renewed them, and will again.

Grant Cooke is a long-time Benicia resident and CEO of Sustainable Energy Associates. He is co-author, with Nobel Peace Prize winner Woodrow Clark, of “Global Energy Innovation: Why America Must Lead,” published by Praeger Press. Cooke and Clark are currently writing a second book titled, “The Green Industrial Revolution.”