bloodline, pt. 3

(I wrote my second essay this semester on my trip to Ireland over the summer. There's no better way to fully review the meaning of that journey than to write blog posts about it. So buckle up. Click photos for better view!)

All the towns in Ireland have names that might sound funny to us: Killarney, Doolin, Dingle. Partway through the week we stop to hike more cliff paths near Kilkee, a tiny village on the western coast, where the sheer height of the cliffs is perhaps not as impressive as others we'd seen but in some ways far more picturesque.

The water is bluer than anything I've ever seen. The sunlight seems to bend as it approaches the base of the cliffs, turning the ocean green and reflective and deceptively shallow-looking.

The mothers hem and haw and hold us away from the edge, but we venture as close as we dare when their attention is elsewhere. When all I can see is rock and water and clouds stretching beyond the horizon, I feel oddly isolated, like I could float away in that moment.

Doubtless the subject of many tourist-y photos.

But even these cliffs, although more spectacular than those at Ardmore, can't compare to our adventure of the next day. Early in the morning we embark on an ambitious eight-kilometer hike along the Cliffs of Moher near our headquarters in Doolin. The day starts off windy and chilly, but as my brother and cousin and I pull ahead of the group, we strip off our jackets and shove them into our backpacks. The sun beats down, the paths are often steep, and before I know it I'm sweating despite my tank top and shorts.

We're mostly quiet on the hike, the three of us. Sometimes all that separates us from a heartstopping drop is a narrow wire fence. Sometimes we have to cross narrow creeks with suspicious-looking bridges made of wood or slabs of rock or even stepping stones and nothing exists to block us from falling at all. My brother swears at the top of his lungs, stops in the middle of a bridge, and pulls out his camera. He's incorrigible. We all take selfies and meander onwards.

The last stretch of the hike is a steep uphill climb, sometimes tilted so far against us that I fear a single misstep will send me tumbling all the way back down to the bottom. But we finally make it to the top, huffing and puffing, only to find that there's no point in trying to regain our breath.

The drop is three hundred meters. Doesn't sound like a lot, yeah? That's about a thousand feet. It would take mere seconds to fall from the top of the cliff face to the surface of the water below. But lying on your stomach, peering over the edge of a rock that juts out into empty space... I think all of our parents left those cliffs with some new gray hairs.

Yikes.

bloodline, pt. 2

(I wrote my second essay this semester on my trip to Ireland over the summer. There's no better way to fully review the meaning of that journey than to write blog posts about it. So buckle up.)

"This is my favorite place on Earth," says my mom.

We're spending the day on the cliff paths of Ardmore, a village on the southern coast of Ireland. "The hike will take us all the way out onto the peninsula and back again," my grandmother explains. "It's only a couple of miles, but it's mostly uphill."

Yesterday we walked for miles on beaches and roads after our bus broke down in the middle of the Irish countryside. I feel like in any other place I would be too exhausted to even think about a cliff hike, but the country has filled me with so much energy that I am one of the first to charge out onto the path. A few hundred meters away is the ruin of an ancient church, crumbling and bedecked with wildflowers. Once we reach it we pause to wander for a little while, admiring the chipped stone monuments and stooping to slip through archways so small that the child in me calls them "fairy gates."

Not far into our journey we spot a gap in the fence large enough for us to squeeze through, leading down onto a steep—but traversable—hill that breaks off into a flat, stony section before the sudden drop of a cliff. I hesitate only briefly before I scramble down the narrow path after my brother, who has already pulled away from the group in order to take daredevil photos without our mother breathing down his neck.

Our parents follow us down. Everyone's having too much fun to really be angry at us for taking the plunge. We take family photos sitting at the very edge of the cliff, a steep and rocky drop that makes my stomach jolt. But here in the heat of the moment I am surefooted and unafraid, all windswept hair and deep breaths of salt spray.

My brother didn't have the "windswept hair" problem. Photo by my mother, I think.

The tiny peninsula's tip is completely separated from what we stand on, a tantalizing few yards away. "We could make the jump if we didn't have any plans to get back," my dad says. It's a joke, but oddly tempting as well, the idea of standing where few other people have before. Luckily, before any of us do anything impulsive, the group calls us back to the well-trodden path. We have to move on.

Not that it's much of a problem for us.

The cliffs are an incredible sight no matter where we are.

We stop for a picnic lunch at the tip of the peninsula before heading back around to our final destination: an old cathedral with a single round tower that soars high into the air above our heads.

The church and tower are ringed by weatherbeaten gravestones covered with illegible script. The main building has lost its doors and most of its roof over the years, so we walk in freely. Inside the solid stone walls there is no sign that we are still in the modern world and not in the thirteenth century, which is the date my mother reads off a plaque at the entrance. "It says there are two Ogham stones here," she tells me.

I light up. "Let's find them!" I've been fascinated by Ogham stones since first reading about them, in books of Celtic myth and works of fiction like Madeleine L'Engle's An Acceptable Time. When the rest of our group is ready to move out, I am still kneeling on the ground in front of one of the small pillars of rock, restraining myself from tracing the centuries-old etchings on their surface, taking photos of them instead.

We drive past the cliffs again as we leave, heading back to our temporary headquarters in Killarney. I watch them until they disappear around the curve of the road.