After years of watching people leave Nantucket during the winter, I decided I wanted to be one of them. Not for the whole winter, just for a week. And not somewhere warm—though I can see the appeal now, especially that I have this cold. A strange season led me on a trip to Ireland and the United Kingdom. Prior to this, I had only been out of the country once, to Iceland. I guess I have a thing about islands, I love the people on them.
I’m recording this in Wales, where I landed after taking a ferry from Dublin across the Irish Sea. While still in Ireland, I took the train up to Howth, a fishing village some 23 km away from Dublin by rail. The tidal swings in this part of the world are extreme. In the six hours I spent in Howth, the tide dropped by more than twelve feet. Metal fishing vessels chained together three abreast huddled for warmth, waiting for the next tide to raise them out of the muck. I thought, of course, of Provincetown, more than 3,000 miles away on the other side of the Atlantic, with her eight-foot swings and much larger sea scallop draggers.
It is hard not to think of Nantucket and Cape Cod everywhere I go here. Shop girls in half-shuttered gift shops apologize for the weather, but I keep telling them I know of nothing else but wind, rain, and grey back home, too. The biggest difference between here and there is that most everything here is made of stone. It sure is a lot harder for the gales to blow down a stone structure, and even the ruins of old abbeys and churches have been left alone to stand in situ, abandoned in place.
I spent three hours in a coffee shop in Howth, mending the thumb in my mittens after picking up a sewing kit at the Marine Suppliers. I have no cellular service so it is a bit like going back in time, tethering off the wifi of cafes and shops. I have to ask people how to get where I’m going. My scalloping friend Pennel Ames, back on Nantucket, used to drop messages in bottles, and his wife Sharon says many have washed up in Irish fishing villages. From the cafe, I send them pictures of the thinning shelves of the marine supplier, the fleet, the herring gulls that look more well fed than our scrawny friends back home.
I see glimpses of people I know back home here, in the ladies chatting about their quilting projects at the cafe, in the scallop dredges, in the banners of the carpenters and stone masons guilds that hang in the dusty historical societies, in the old Martello tower in Howth where wireless transmissions were sent out over the Irish Sea. No matter how insular a place, the desire to connect is always there.
All over Dublin, there are stickers on street signs, on trash cans, on old brick walls that say OPTIMIST ATLANTIC ISLANDER. Nobody can tell me exactly what they mean. I think it means you have to be a bit of an optimist to live your life this close to the ocean, in a world where the gloom hangs like a fog and rarely burns off. But today I saw the sun rise over the Menai trait, and I guess I am an optimist at heart.
