In September of 1976 i dropped out of college and spent the next 2 1/2 years traveling around the US, working a series of menial jobs on assembly lines, in tourist hotels, and tending other people’s yards. Like many people in their early 20s, i had the time of my life, formed the basic tenets that would see me through to my dotage, and acquired a good number of stories that, as the telling has gotten refined over the years, still generate laughs and head shakes, even from people who have heard them a few times. Did i brush up against my mortality on occasion? Well, come to think of it …
The first town i ended up having an extended stay was Phoenix Arizona. (How and why Phoenix is an amusing tale in its own right, but irrelevant here.) I think we arrived very early November. One of my first memories there is watching election returns on the cheap TV in the fleabag hotel we were staying in on East Van Buren across the street from the prison/mental hospital complex. Looking at Google Maps, i believe it is now called the Paradise Motel, and looks to be slightly more upscale than 46 years ago.
We (my college roommate and traveling companion) had used a Super 8 movie camera as collateral on the room for 2 weeks until we could find jobs and scrounge up some cash. After we’d been there about a month, the proprietor said he had a 1 bedroom “house” that he would rent to us for $85/month a few blocks away, on Fillmore St. I want to say it was between 10th and 11th streets, but i could be off a block in either direction. House is a generous description. The place was a shack, no larger than a medium sized toolshed you can buy nowadays at Home Depot for a couple of grand. We had to take the refrigerator outside for a bleach bath before we could use it, as the previous tenants had left a bunch of vegetables to rot while the electricity was turned off. The bathroom, surprisingly, contained a fabulous enameled claw-foot tub. The bathroom floor, however, wasn’t strong enough to support it, so, through several holes punched through the floor boards, the tub rested on stacked cinder blocks. We had a removable cassette deck in my van, and hooked it up to a spare car battery in the living room and played it through i don’t know what kind of speakers we could get for 3 bucks a pair.
Sometime around Christmas, possibly as late as the second week in January, i made the best purchase of my time in Arizona. A well used 9 inch cast iron skillet from the flea market, for 50 cents. After 45+ years, i think i’ve finally gotten it seasoned. It’s partner, a flat skillet that i inherited from a couple of roommates a few years later, also got packed up and sent to Ireland with the boxes that were intended to arrive here at the beginning of July, but which ended up sitting in a FedEx warehouse for over a month while various officials in both the company and Irish customs passed the buck back and forth for getting these things cleared and delivered.
Anyway, my cast iron, and a few other choice goods, arrived this week, and i couldn’t be happier. Might even make some corn bread soon.
If our time in Ireland taught me one thing, it is that after the rain comes the rainbow. It’s difficult to envision a rainbow right now, as the entire world shelters in place from this storm.
Friday morning was rainy, but we had a lot of packing and cleaning to do anyway. Once our packing was complete, the sun came out, and we went out for a last walk around Cork. We walked the length of Main Street and across the river to St. Fin Barre’s Cathedral, where we walked the labyrinth.
The labyrinth at St. Fin Barre’s Cathedral
We walked back east along the River Lee, then back west along Oliver Plunkett Street. Then just up and down the Grand Parade a couple of times. Being sure to keep appropriate distance from other people, of course.
We circled back towards the apartment but weren’t ready to go back yet. So we crossed the river to the north and walked out along the greenway, crossed back on the Mardyke Bridge and circled home.
The Mardyke Bridge over the River Lee. The building in the distance is the Music Department of University College Cork.
There were no direct flights from Cork to the U.S., and we didn’t think it was wise or desirable to spend hours in a UK or European airport on our way home. Our original flights were between Dublin and Philadelphia, so we changed our original, late April flight date to March 15. We rented a car and drove to Dublin and stayed at the Clayton Hotel near the airport. It appears to have several lovely restaurants, but we elected to eat peanut butter and marmite sandwiches in our room. They had hand sanitizer at the front desk, and allowed us to top off the rapidly diminishing pocket-size bottle I’d bought in January.
Soon after we booked our flight, Trump announced that anyone returning from the UK or Ireland would be subject to health screening and could only return through one of 11 airports — and Philadelphia was not one of them. The new restrictions would go into effect the day after our scheduled departure. We really needed to be on this flight.
On Sunday we got up before the crack of dawn and took the shuttle to the airport. We didn’t even stop for coffee, which turned out to be a good thing since I don’t think our bladders would have survived the wait. The airport was a madhouse. Thousands of Americans all trying to get the hell out of Dodge before the deadline. Most were young people — study abroad students ending their semester early, or returning from a limited study trip, or simply having headed to Ireland in the hopes of enjoying a festive Saint Patrick’s Day.
Besides the normal back-up of a crowded airport (the lines at San Diego airport after Comic-con were to date the longest I’d seen), Dublin Airport has U.S. pre-clearance, so you go through Customs there, not upon arrival. And you go through security twice, once for the airport, once for the U.S. area. In the confusion of arranging my toiletries for what I needed in Cork Saturday morning and in Dublin Saturday night and Sunday morning and what needed to be in checked luggage and what I needed to carry with me, I inadvertently left a small bag of liquids in my carry-on. So of course I got pulled over and had to empty the bag (once they saw what it was they wagged a finger but didn’t make me ditch any of it). I also discovered that my fitness tracker triggers the alarm, so I took that off for the second screening.
There were inexplicable delays. At one point, security screenings just stopped, for maybe 30 minutes. In Customs, they sorted us into two groups: people who had been in other European countries in the last 10 days and those who had not. Ours was the smaller group, I believe, so we moved a bit more quickly to the head of the queue to meet with a Customs officer. They have you stand on a numbered yellow square and await the officer at the desk with that number. We were on yellow square #12, next to be screened, when someone came through and said (loud enough for us to hear, but not the crowd behind us) “Stop processing people. Get representatives from the airlines out here.”
At that point Barry turned to me and said “We could be sleeping in this airport tonight.”
We were stuck on that square for about an hour. Most people behind us gave up and sat on the floor. They escorted small groups to the toilets (hooray, no coffee!). They passed out bottles of water.
I have no idea why they halted the Customs processing, or why it resumed, but what the airline representatives had to say was good news: they were delaying flights until everyone was on board. Since we’d had our boarding passes scanned at least twice already, they clearly knew who was at the airport but not yet at the gate.
Once Customs finally re-opened, we were of course next in line, and breezed through quickly. We even had time for Barry to buy a bottle of Teeling whiskey at the Duty Free shop!
Thankfully, we were not held too long on the ground once we boarded the plane. It was crowded but not completely full — we were the only people in a center row of five seats. The flight was uneventful, with little turbulence. We finally got a cup of coffee! We had lunch for breakfast, and I swear to you that airplane food never tasted so good. Even the salad was crisp and delicious. And when they served ice cream about six hours into the eight-hour flight I was as giddy as a 5-year-old.
We had another, even longer drive ahead of us, so we stayed the night at another airport hotel. The Microtel near the Philadelphia airport may well be the second saddest lodging I’ve ever seen (the first is a nightmare stay in a place in Las Vegas that I dubbed The Hotel That Time Forgot, but that’s a tale for a different blog). Whereas we were content to eat in our room at the Clayton, there was no way we wanted to spend any extra time awake in this depressing space. We decided to risk the outside world for dinner at Ruby Tuesday, the only restaurant within walking distance. It was fine, but believe it or not it was the most expensive meal of our trip! And that was with just entrees, one beer and two glasses of wine. No appetizers, desserts, or side dishes.
You would think that with all of this, we would have been in a hurry to get home the shortest way possible. But the shortest way possible is I-95 through Baltimore, DC, and Richmond. We took it to the outskirts of Baltimore, shot over to Frederick, MD, and headed south on U.S. 15. Significantly longer, but a must less stressful road. And central Virginia is almost as pretty as Ireland (but with dilapidated barns instead of crumbling castles).
We returned the rental car this morning, so our trip is now officially, completely over. Now starts the next adventure. A friend is doing a grocery run for us so that we can avoid bringing any airport germs to the Harris Teeter. The cherry trees are in bloom, and even some of the azaleas. It was warm enough to sit on the front porch yesterday evening. We’re home.
We’ve had a fantastic time here in Ireland, especially in Cork City, which we’ve both come to love. And we’ve done a lot of what we came here to do, and more: we’ve been all over the city centre and immediate outskirts, been to Blackrock Castle and Blarney Castle and Gardens and the Ring of Kerry, been to Midleton and Cobh and Kinsale and Youghal. We took advantage of living above a movie theater to see Parasite on a rainy day, and saw one film at the Cork French Film Festival. Barry found “a local” where everybody knew his name when he stopped in to watch a football match. We drank Murphy’s and Guinness and Beamish, tasted some Irish whiskies, ate fish and chips (and chips and chips…lots of chips), had a full Irish breakfast, beef and Guinness stew and seafood chowder.
We’ve also gone places and met people and done things that hadn’t been on our radar. We found a games cafe (not unlike Atomic Fern in Durham) where we enjoyed chatting with the proprietor, Chris, and playing games to while away rainy afternoons or days when we were tired from walking. We had wonderful conversations with the owner of a used bookstore. We discussed Nikola Tesla with some fellows from Serbia and Bosnia. We attended a Science Fiction meetup group, and joined their very lively and amusing discussions on WhatsApp. I discovered the details of my grandfather’s voyage from Ireland to the U.S. We watched the sunset over Cork from the Montenotte Hotel, went to two local theatre productions, visited the town of Crosshaven. We have seen more rainbows than we have ever seen before in such a short time — sometimes two or three a day!
But there’s a lot of things we set out to do that won’t be done, at least not on this trip, as we literally flee the country so that we can isolate ourselves in the comfort of our own home. Barry’s birthday trip to Paris will now be spent at home. All my hard work learning Spanish and Portuguese will go untested as we will not be traveling to those countries at all. If things had gone according to plan, we would at this moment be boarding a train to Dublin so that I could attend a meeting of the Pernicious Anaemia Society, and would have had the chance to meet our Chairman, Martyn Hooper MBE, a tireless leader for all of us who suffer from this condition. We won’t be having a cocktail at Ireland’s only tiki bar tonight, nor will we be having bagels in the Jewish Quarter tomorrow.
We won’t be doing that bus trip to West Cork. We won’t be taking short bus rides to the greenways through Blackrock/Mahon, Ballincollig, Bishopstown. We won’t be exploring the town of Macroom, which looked intriguing when we passed it on the bus to Kerry.
Maybe next time.
Tomorrow we drive in automotive isolation to Dublin, spend the night in a hotel, fly to Philadelphia and spend the night at a hotel there. We cancelled the PHL to RDU flight, figuring eight hours on an airplane is risk enough. On Monday we will drive home.
If I’m lucky, the trout lilies will still be in bloom, and the azaleas will be getting started. I’ll miss looking out at the River Lee multiple times a day, but will walk down and say hello to the Eno, being wary of the ticks that are undoubtedly starting to wake up for their spring feeding. I’ll watch some movies on Criterion and HBO, shoot some pool, sit outside if the weather is above 50 degrees. We’ll sleep in our own bed, cook in our own kitchen, drink in our own bar, and wave to the neighbors from the front porch.
Cork Spring 