The Seaside
I am, at my heart, a Prairie girl - moutains are all very well in post cards, but in reality I find any sort of incline the cause of a spoiled landscape. So disorganised, so irregular. Driving in the mountains is hazardous, and walking uphill is uncomfortable. I know it’s an insupportable opinion to hold, but I cleave to it still - the earth may not be flat, but I sure do like a flat horizon and a BIG sky, one that comes in startling colours (minty green before a storm, painfully deep blue in the height of summer, jewel-toned and glowing at sunset, pale gold in the morning, velvety black and dotted with diamonds at midnight, periwinkle when it rains - increasingly, hazy orange when fires rage in the north).
But I will admit that this certainty was challenged when I first saw the Atlantic in person. I was standing on the pier at Dún Laoghaire, having gone past the pebble beach and the ornate pergola, right to the very farthest outreach of the pier’s stretched arm, to get as close to the ocean as I could. How strange to stand on the shore and know that home was on the other side of that briny sea, but only able to see wave upon wave, dark and foreboding, but strangely seductive, too. Even stranger was the place where the ocean met the land: Dún Laoghaire was tidy, charming, quaint, with pretty treed streets and inviting little lanes and quite a nice church and the most aggressively friendly people I’d ever encountered, anywhere. There were swanky hotels and cozy little inns standing shoulder to shoulder along the cobbled streets, with bright facades, like heavily made-up faces, or stately Victorian shops in ruddy brick. All very civilised. And then right next to all this civilisation was the wild water of the Atlantic - churning and hurling itself against that pebbled beach and the walls of the pier. I wondered if the people of Dún Laoghaire had purposefully leaned into the rigid charm of the town, in an effort to put from their minds the wildness of the ocean that beat against their shore daily. Either way, it was a remarkable sight, and for the first time I began to have an inkling about sailors of old who longed to go to sea, despite its dangers.
The more staid aspects of this little seaside town were very pleasant, too, to give them their dues. It was very soothing to stroll up and down the pier, eating a 99 (soft serve with a chocolate stuck in it) to the dulcet tones of seagulls and the crash of waves. I stayed in a funny little bed and breakfast, full of twisted stairwells and mismatched furniture, where the proprietress made me an Irish breakfast and insisted that I eat it with so much vigour that I could hardly refuse, despite my day of travel ahead. I wondered, then, too, if that aggressive friendliness which seemed to greet me wherever I went in Ireland, was typical of island nations for whom the sea’s aggression was never distant - although, on second thought, the English are similarly insular, in both senses of that word, - and they were, in my experience, much less likely to offer to help with my luggage or holler ‘what’s the story?’ at me as I got on a bus. I hope to go back to Ireland soon - perhaps to find out more about those fiercely friendly folks, but also to reacquaint myself with the Atlantic again.
Jennifer