Chapter 2
…By the time we pick up our luggage and step outside Dublin Airport it’s 9 in the
morning and it is pouring. We’ve been up for 24 hours at this point and our collective
mood is just south of sour. As luck would have it and despite the deluge, Dehlia falls
asleep the second we duck into a purple cab. “I wanna go to Ireland.” are her last words
as she dips off.
Sitting on the left side of a car, with no wheel or pedals, and a weird perspective, I make
small talk with Eamon, our driver. He tells me he lives on 315 Dawson Street in Dublin,
and I nod like I understand. We’re staying north of Dublin in an ocean-town called
Malahide. I can’t help but think of the freak-boy from Stephen King’s ‘Children of the
Corn’, Malaki, or something like that, but out of fear of unsettling the first actual Irish-
person I’ve come across, I decide to keep this to myself. We pass neat rows of shops and
as the rain slows to a patter, Eamon spins us into our Hotel driveway. He is moving like
a middle infielder, grabbing bags from our hands, carrying Dehlia (who’s locked and
loaded into her car seat), and scurrying like a man on the trail of 20 Euro’s worth of tip.
Given my light understanding of the newish European currency, it’s probably exactly
what he got, maybe more—I know it was a lot of heavy coins.
The Island View Hotel is peppered with nautically themed bric-a-brac and noveltia. On
the entryway wall a script tells the story of St. Brendan the Navigator. He was born in
Co. Kerry around 486 AD. He became a monk and later the Abbot of Ardfert and
founded a monastery in Galway in 561. The epic voyage of St. Brendan amazed the
medieval world, and is chronicled in the 10 th century account, The Navigation of St.
Brendan, in which he set sail with 12 disciples in search of an earthly paradise in the
Atlantic Ocean. The journey lasted over seven years and it has been suggested that his
account of ‘crystal columns’ (icebergs?), and ‘curdled seas’ (the Sargasso?), may
pinpoint him as the first to cross the Atlantic. In 1976, and in a putative repetition of the
supposed Voyage, Tim Severin sailed across the Atlantic in a leather-covered boat called
the Brendan. In 1980, apparently tired of the rigors of leather-sailing, Tim built The
Island View.
We’re too early for lunch and too late for breakfast so we finish off the sleeping Dehlia’s
peanut-butter crackers and collapse in our room for 90 minutes, almost exactly. Our bed
is fitted with one of those vile plastic under sheets, originally designed to make life easier
for carers of the terminally incontinent. These things draw sweat from your pores like
suction pumps. My dreams of drowning in lukewarm brine are interrupted by an older
woman setting down a tray of tea, some biscuits and a few plastic shot glasses of what
appears to be cream. “There isn’t any food ready yet, is there?” I say. Apparently blind
to the fact that this lady has magically appeared in the middle of our room “There is.”
Says our tea-bringer—“Head downstairs after you’ve gotten yerself together, and git
yerself a bite. Oh look at herself there in the crib, isn’t she a wee-love.” Dehlia is just
getting herself together, sitting upright in her Pac N Play and resembles nothing
particularly wee or lovey. She offers a popular scowl that says, ‘I appreciate the biscuits
lady, but you’re going to have to give me a minute.”
Downstairs in Oscar Taylor’s Pub they’re just setting up the Carvery—a sectioned off
area dedicated to preparing heaping portions of mashed potatoes, sliced meat, and gravy-
soft vegetables. The tea-bringer has deftly turned into the meat-slicer and offers my wife
a plate. The Pub is late-night dark here at 11:30am, and there’s some sort of music being
pumped through invisible speakers. I drink my first pint of stout and am just starting to
percolate when the rest of our traveling brood arrives. Brooke’s parents, her aunt, her
sister and the Hausman’s—long-time family friends of my in-laws who, in a previous
life, led forced-march military expeditions through Macedonia and trained briefly with
the Huns. Linda, the matriarch, has assembled enough in the way of Irish maps and
guidebooks to actually lead tours, which it is clear she’s going to at least try. Russell,
by long-measure the more reserved of the two, possesses a comic’s timing and air of
quiet command.
After hugs and backslaps, attack plans begin to form. The Hausman’s are hungry, my
father-in-law Brendan is about to set out on a vision quest to secure his parents marriage
certificate and ultimately his own citizenship, and Aunt Carol has begun to needle my
mother-in-law Loretta with questions like, ‘Rhetta-is there a batroom in here-Rhetta?”
and “Rhetta-don’t you think I should go to the batroom now-Rhetta?”
Ti-Ti Carol, a 50-ish woman with thick curly hair and the survival instinct of an Army
Air Borne Ranger, is my wife’s Aunt. At birth, she spent a few precarious moments with
her umbilical cord around her neck that caused some irreversible damage. She has the
tendency to begin and end sentences with the name of the person she’s speaking to; an
attempt, I think, at hammering her point home with unfailing precision. ‘Rhetta, you
better listen to me now, I haveta go to the batroom Rhetta.” It’s worth noting that my
mother-in-law has spent the better part of 20 years caring for her sister and is the senior-
receiver of Ti-Ti’s commands, edicts and epistles.
Absent anything inspiring on the flesh-heavy Carvery menu, I finish a second and third
stout as Brendan, not unlike his saintly namesake, begins his Voyage. The rest of us,
armed with a plan as loosely knit as the scrap of cloth Dehlia will drag across the lower
half of the country, stroll to the train station about a mile and a half away.
If you had decided to take a stroll across a sunlit meadow in central Ireland about 14,000
years ago, you would have needed more than a sweater to keep you snug. The place was
covered with ice, When the glacial sheet withdrew about a thousand years later, it left
behind a land that was, for the most part, a lot of soggy bogs and barren tundra. But, over
the course of the next 3,000 years, the climate took a turn for the better. Although not
quite balmy, it was warm enough for a few bushes to spring up here and there. By
10,000 BC you could have taken that stroll through an actual green meadow, though the
sweater would still have been strongly recommended.
The channel between Scotland and Ireland was, at one time, only a few miles across and
a land bridge encouraged adventurous horses and Megaceros (giant deer standing nearly
7 feet high with antlers topping out at over 11 feet) to make the trek across the divide.
They were rewarded with vast green meadows stretching into the horizon.
With water now everywhere (lakes and rivers were left by the ice) fertile soil, and a
climate tempered by the oceans and seas surrounding the island, the vegetation thrived.
Meadowlands gave way to trees, which multiplied into dense woods until the island was
covered with mighty forests. The enormous herds of horses and giant deer dwindled as
their grazing plains matured into woodland. The first wave of Ireland’s many invasions,
far and away the gentlest, had come and gone.
We’re now standing at the ticket counter at the DART station in Malahide. The DART
(Dublin Area Rapid Transit) is the primary system of public transportation in and around
Dublin. The ticket signs are written in Gaelic and I ask who appears to be a quiet,
gruntish man what the price would be for a 3 yr old, straight into the city. “Sure’n it’s
free for yer tree-yr old, man.” Says the gent, “Now if she was tree-and-a-half, that’d be a
different story.”
The Malahide DART station is impossibly tidy. Enormous hanging baskets of
Geraniums, Petunias, Licorice and creeping vine hang from long poles, and a dozen
sturdy wrought-iron benches support those waiting for the train. I immediately make
quiet mental comparisons to Boston’s MBTA system—specifically the Blue line, a
stretch from Boston’s North Shore into the city, with which I’m most familiar. Absent
from this scene are the spoon- and-dribble musicians, the panhandlers and the general
sense of filth that pervades the Wonderland stop in Revere, Ma. The acrid scent-mix of
urine and burning electricity is replaced, here, with something decidedly better, though
for the life of me, I can’t figure out what it is.
Kids in varying shades of green school uniform are milling around to the left of me, and
Ti-Ti Carol is working, cloak-and-dagger-like, on her Kit-Kat to the right of me, as the
train begins pulling into the station. The Hausman’s are covertly pouring through relief
and topographical maps of Dublin. Loretta is sitting with her eyes closed, enjoying the
oddly tranquil setting and trying to beg her headache away. My wife and her sister are
talking and I’m writing it all down on a notepad pilfered from the Hotel lobby. Dehlia
is sitting on my lap, shrieking. She’s directing her volume at a lady on the bench across
from us who’s knitting something that looks remarkably like her blankie that,
incidentally, we decided to leave back at the Hotel. The lady gives a good-natured glare
back at us while thinking, I have to believe, that Americans are loud, noisy
creatures—especially the short ones.
Lack of sleep, 3 stouts and Dehlia’s increasing pitch are bringing on a headache, and my
thoughts turn to Brendan and his voyage. I’m starting to lose faith in his original story.
I’m picturing him slinging stouts and singing songs in one of Dublin’s damp corners
when the train slides to a stop, the doors open and an Irish voice whispers, “14 miles to
the City, next stop Kilbarrack.” On the sign it’s listed as ‘Cill Bharrog.’ I duck into the
train and the doors slide shut behind me.