Traveling to Lose

Dublin, Ireland. The city I called home for five months. Scratch that. The city I called home for two months and then was quickly ushered out of and thoroughly disoriented by due to the COVID-19 worldwide pandemic. Junior year abroad had been my dream ever since hearing my mother’s stories of her own time studying abroad in 1980s London. She had purple hair, a scribbled cardboard sign that said “LONDON PLEASE...MOM’S WAITING” and a perfectly good hitch hikers’ thumb. Grandmum wasn’t waiting, that’s just an old trick for solo safety. Nowadays hitch-hiking is a little less common, and a good bit riskier for young women, but nonetheless I had romantic ideas of my own time traveling through Europe. Sometimes, it was every bit as exciting as I’d imagined, and other times it was every bit as exhausting and frightening as I hadn’t.

For the first two weeks after arriving in the bustling city of Dublin, I spent most of my time alone recovering from food poisoning in an 8-by-12-foot room, which quickly became home, one resembling more of a cave than a castle. I was pushed every day to get outside and meet new people, fueled by my desire for outlandish experiences. Thinking I had roughly five months to enjoy my new surroundings, I took my time acclimating. In hindsight, I spent one out of my two months there suffering from growing pains. New country, new city, new campus, no familiar faces. Eventually I made friends with other exchange students at Trinity, and some from nearby colleges staying in our building. We’d go out to pubs in the evenings, drink dark liqueurs, foamy beers and Irish Coffees while listening to live Irish bands until it was time to stumble home, tripping on cobblestones, clapping to the beat of a jig. The following mornings, we’d plan to rise early and head for the DART station, a commuter railway that takes Dubliners out to the suburbs on the coast. From the station, taking into account distance and fare, we’d decide which nearby town to venture to that day. Exploring the quaint villages of Bray, Howth and Dun Laoghaire are some of my fondest memories, though one slightly more adventurous weekend, we made it across the country to Galway, North to Sligo and then Donegal.

After being told it was impossible to rent a car under the age of twenty-five, myself, my best friend studying at Oxford and her roommate on the mainland decided there had to be a loophole. Ireland is best explored by driving, and we wanted to be in control of the trip, rather than follow a guide and ride on a bus full of tourists. Nowadays, riding on a bus full of strangers without masks and without the fear of contact would be a welcome idea.

Nonetheless, after some late night snacking whilst internet prowling, we found a rental agency that would rent to twenty-one year-olds, with a pricey deposit that we would supposedly get back upon returning the car in one piece. We ignored the shoddy reviews, pooled our money and packed for a long weekend through the Irish countryside. It just so happened that there was a storm moving through when we made it to our bed and breakfast just under the cliffs of Slieve League. Around 10pm the first night, we pulled up to a tiny farmhouse nestled in the hills, with a view of the lush countryside we wouldn’t see until we awoke in the morning. Never having stayed in a B&B before, nonetheless one we had booked online hours before, we were unsure what to expect. Thankfully, there was a kind couple to welcome us into a sliver of their lives that evening. When we rapped on the door, a middle-aged man swung it open with help from the wind outside and walked us into a dimly lit foyer. Other than his partner watching television on the couch, there was no one to be seen. Apparently, they had driven everyone into town to hit the local pub, and he would go out to pick them back up in the early hours of the morning. Knowing we wouldn’t be going into town that evening and we wanted to get an early start, our host led us up the stairs to a quaint room with two Queen beds, and a small washroom. After he left us, we sat gingerly on one of the beds and looked around at one another. Too stimulated to succumb to sleep, but too skittish to explore, we resolved to cracking open the bottle we’d brought and making a meal of the biscuits that were so kindly left on our bedside table. There we were in a dark inn on the West Coast of Northern Ireland, three girls sitting in a circle with our legs crossed under us, eating Belgium Treasure Biscrips, drinking gin out of paper cups and listening to the rain rattling against the window panes. The TV wouldn’t turn on so we settled for sleep soon after. The plan was to spend the following morning driving up the mountain and then hiking around, but as all travelers know, plans change.

The Slieve League Cliffs, sometimes written Sliabh Liag in Gaelic, are among the highest sea cliffs in Europe, and are a load less frequented than the Cliffs of Moher, even though they are three times bigger. If you want an epic view with few other folks around, this is the place to go. Be cautious though, the road up is a narrow one that rides closely along the mountain edge. On any other day, we wouldn’t have been entirely concerned... But of course, there were sixty mile per hour gusts shaking our little rental car the whole drive up, inching the vehicle closer to the edge of the mountain with every winding turn. When the first of us attempted to get out, the door slammed open, vicious wind dragging her out by the hair. We had come all this way and we weren’t about to let some frisky weather keep us from experiencing the cliffs, so we bundled up and trudged against the winds to the lookout point. As my legs pushed forward, I felt as if I were trudging through knee-deep wet sand, or walking along the ocean floor with weights strapped to my feet. But the air smelled so sweet, that I couldn’t possibly have been anywhere but in the clouds. Rays of sun shining through the dark sky caught bright green blades of grass whipping around themselves, rooted in the soil of the cliffs. Gusts of wind caught the white sea spray and carried it up to us, misty drops of salt kissed our skin. When one looks over the Slieve League Cliffs, they will be met with jagged rock walls, broken up by bits of green and white. The drop to the mass of deep blue water below feels somehow welcoming, as if death wouldn’t await at the bottom.

I yelled to Kate, but she couldn’t hear me over the storm. The sound of ocean waves occupied all of the space in our ears, leaving no room for communication other than the tears in our gleaming eyes, and the smiles we drove here for. I watched as my oldest friend splayed her arms out like a seagull, and opened her mouth wide, letting out the sharpest, wildest scream she ever had before. Muffled by the ocean waves, faint sounds of her release made their way to my ears, and called for me to do the same. I lifted my arms against the pressure of the wind, pitched my chest forward and let out a cry into the Atlantic. It was then that she turned to me, her back to the waters with her arms spread wide to a T, her eyes wild, hair whipped across her face, and I ran to her, mirroring her stance, both of us bellowing yells of happiness. This is what my favorite picture from Ireland looks like. It’s hanging on my wall as I write this, and every time I look up at it, I’m taken back to this moment, this gushing ecstasy of freedom.

This was by far the single most impactful moment of my time abroad. Witnessing the ocean waves lapping high against the rocks, feeling the wind sting our skin, burn our eyes and tangle our hair; I’ve never felt the power of the Earth as intensely as those few minutes.

When I think of Ireland, it isn’t the Blarney Stone, Temple Bar or even the famous Cliffs of Moher that come to mind. Of course, all of the main attractions are famous for a reason, but they aren’t why we travel. For me, I think of rolling hills and lush green grass pouring out over the ocean, sheep roaming along the winding roads, cows running free, and that one random pub we walked into in Doolin, meeting boisterous Irishmen whom drunkenly explained one of Ireland’s most popular sports, hurling. I think of the hours spent rummaging through Dublin’s best hidden secrets: the kilo vintage shops. It’s the rush of jumping into freezing cold waters in February among the wild locals in Dun Laoghaire. It’s the evenings we spent melting away under the influence of Jameson-gingers and live traditional Irish music, and the pizza parlor that was open until 3am serving up massive €4 slices. It’s the curly-headed fellow who sat next to me in Irish Writing at Trinity College, who called me love and explained Irish slang to me. ‘Craic’ (pronounced “crack”) for example, means fun. So when someone walks up to you and asks, “Where’s the craic?”, they don’t think you sell drugs, they just want to know what you’re up to. Man, if that one didn’t come in handy.

Ireland itself has many names, my favorites being The Dark Rosaléen, and Éire, the Gaelic translation. The hours spent in class learning about Ireland’s rich culture will never be enough to understand how deeply personal the culture is for each individual native. I often found myself buried in Irish Literature, contemplating our existence, my presence in Ireland, and why I was called there above all else. My mind of its own usually circles back to one particular lecture I sat in at Trinity College, which focused on William Wordsworth’s, The Prelude, specifically his musings during a trek through the Alps in search of ‘the sublime’. Essentially, Wordsworth passes the peak unknowingly and initially thinks that the trip is ruined because he missed the climax. But he soon realizes that the disappointment he felt gained him insight to the power of perception. It wasn’t the adventure he had planned, but the emptiness that gave him the enlightenment he was seeking. In many ways, my time abroad wasn’t the adventure I had planned. I had to give up my naïve perceptions of Europe, the romantic ideals that had been formulated in my mind from novels and films. What I got to experience was so much more authentic, and it’s mine. When I travel back to Europe, it will be with the fondness and knowledge of my first stint living there. It looks different now, and I welcome the change.

The professor ended the lecture with a quote by Henri Michaux, “Do not travel to gain, travel to lose...” This can be interpreted in many different ways, but I choose to say: travel to lose the fantasy of your expectations, travel to lose mind-numbing routine, travel to lose your self- limiting beliefs, travel to lose cultural bias and naiveté. I urge you to consider, what do you travel to lose?