Journey to the Gate
My two years living in Ireland were spent following impulse like it was good sense, visiting parks and pubs, exploring one end of the River Liffey to the other, and working on my book. I lost whole days walking Raglan Road where Patrick Kavanagh once lived and set his famous poem, drinking in Ryan's where the American poet John Berryman composed an avalanche of Dream Songs, losing afternoons and evenings in the myriad pubs where Brendan Behan wrote, drank, sang and was barred. Or, reclining with a book on the shaded grounds of St. Stephen's Green, site of public executions in centuries past.
The Saturday I embarked on my pilgrimage was the sort of day for which Ireland doesn't get credit: bright and warm, the sky a great blue slab rubbed clear of clouds. Dublin City Centre thronged with pedestrians by ten a.m. With my backpack over my shoulder, I rode the southbound DART train beyond the city limits, through Dun Loaghaire, Dalkey, and Sandycove. Passing over Grand Canal Basin and Ringsend Road, I glimpsed Windmill Lane Studios, and recalled the day I spent searching for that unmarked, warehouse-like building, all sooty and sullied by the exhaust of passing traffic. It stood next to a garage where city buses were repaired, and was where artists like U2 and Sinead O'Connor recorded albums.
When I tried the windowless front door, it was locked.
I pressed the intercom button.
"Yes?" a female voice crackled over the speaker.
"Courier," I said, wondering from where that reply came. Then I heard the snap of the automatic lock-release.
Stepping through the door was like crossing a threshold: from the traffic-choked drear of Ringsend Road into the Sanctum. Where my heroes trod. The place was plush: rich carpeting flowed from the foyer into the reception area, like the map of an ancient river. The foyer walls were white plaster sloping round-edged into the ceiling, cozy and cave-like. Inside the paneled reception area, the place smelled of cedar and polish and perfume. The receptionist was a girl no more than twenty, blue-eyed, pert and pretty in her gray blazer and mint-green blouse. The wall behind her was adorned with gold and platinum records, most belonging to U2. Rock music played on hidden speakers.
I noticed a door in the far right-hand corner. Closed. There, I thought, sure of it. Behind that door is where it happens—where they record. Who was in there now? Would the door open any moment and Bono and the boys stride past me on their way to lunch? The receptionist seemed to smile and frown at the same time—I didn't resemble the couriers riding motorcycles, swaggering into buildings clad in black nylon, or leather rain-gear; helmets balanced atop their heads in tenuous compliance with the COURIERS PLEASE REMOVE HELMETS signs posted at most office entrances.
"Can I help you?" she said.
"I'm a Canadian," I said. Then the mischievous deity, who prompted the lie that got me through the door, swooped to my aid. I said, "I'm a Canadian, and a courier of sorts."
I was carrying my leather writing folder, which contained a city map, a notebook, postcards I had yet to write—and a CD recorded by friends from Windsor, Ontario, who played in a Celtic rock band. Took more than a year to record, mix and press, and was sold by drunken lackeys from shoeboxes at bars during their shows. I had brought it to banish the homesickness.
I presented the CD to the receptionist.
"Sawney Beane?" she said, reading the cover. "What's that?"
"The band," I said. "The name comes from a tenth century Scottish cannibal."
She stared at me.
I shrugged. "The guys are Scottish history buffs."
"We're not an agency, just a recording studio."
"Well, I promised the guys I'd deliver it somewhere," I said, and turned to go.
The receptionist seemed relieved.
Moving through the foyer, looking at the abstract art on the walls, I noticed the music over the hidden speakers had stopped. A moment later came the familiar strains of Sawney Beane's "The Grad House Song." I opened the door and stepped back out to the overcast day. The windowless door slammed behind me. The lock caught immediately.
Mass transportation always lulls me, the cradle-rock of the train on the uneven track, the blur of landscape passing before my eyes like a hypnotist's trick. Swaying with the train's motion, I thought about the Wall. It was located near the original Windmill Lane Studios, where U2 recorded their first three albums. The studio had moved to Ringsend Road in the mid-1980's, and the group continued to record at the new facility. Old-time fans went to the original studio, adding graffiti to the Wall, which had become an illegible mass of tributes written in more languages than I could name. Adoration gone unintelligible.
Twenty minutes into the journey the train rounded onto the coastal mountain. No matter how often I rode the DART, this always took me by surprise: rounding a bend, coming out of land-locked suburban monotony to find the train several hundred feet above the Irish Sea—confronted by a wide-open scene of water and mountains and beach and sky and sky and sky.
Killiney Bay.
I felt nervous thinking of what lay ahead, and gripped my backpack. The right-brained pragmatist in me swelled with embarrassment, uncertainty, thinking, This is stupid. It was the same doubt I often felt about my book while writing at the lopsided table of my bedsit, or sitting before a PC at the Irish Writers' Centre. Wondering if moving to Dublin was the only way I could get an objective view of my hometown, or if anyone would care about my book even if I ever finished writing it. And then second-guessing the pilgrimage.
Did I actually believe I would be arrested?
No.
Or, worried others would be present, and that I might be too self-conscious to go through with my spiritual errand? I nodded over that. But that wasn't it, entirely. It was the apprehension of setting out to fulfill a dream: fear that what had seemed miraculous and unattainable might be rendered all too earthly upon closer inspection. Like the sooty structure of Windmill Lane Studios.
I got off at the Killiney DART station, a forlorn little place, like a lost telegraph station in a corner of Eastern Europe. Passing through the turnstiles, heading outside, my breathing quickened, my heart rate was up. I struck out to the right, up Station Road. The Killiney Court Hotel was on my left, and the sea beyond the DART tracks was to the right. A few hundred yards up the way, Station Road turned ninety degrees to the left, then veered again to the right, inclining up a steep hill.
Toward Vico Road.
And I pondered how steep climbs were usually involved in pilgrimages. Thinking of St. Kevin amid the dense forest of sixth century Glendalough, scaling a forbidding rockface in order to meditate, and evade a woman in pursuit of him. The woman, legend has it, climbed up to his nook, and soon after plunged to her death when St. Kevin cast her out. Until recent years, pilgrimages were led up that rockface. That cast-out woman was now a footnote, an anecdote recounted by tour guides around the ancient chapel in Glendalough, known as St. Kevin's Kitchen. When I first heard it, years ago, I was less intrigued by St. Kevin and his venerators than his poor, doomed pursuer. The first of his pilgrims, it could be said. Rejected. Cast out.
The area was heavily wooded, branches interlacing over the road. A seven-foot-tall stone wall ran along either side of the sloping road. Although the day was bright, the air smelled of dank stone, moldering moss, and damp tree bark. Aside from birds singing back and forth, there was heavy silence; nothing indicating human presence—no lawn mower drone, no car engine, or voices, or even music from a portable radio. I was soon out of breath with the climb.
The first sign of habitation was the wrought-iron gates fronting a white stucco estate. Through the bars of the gate I saw lush green grounds, and the Irish Sea in the distance. A bronze plaque gleamed next to the gate: UNDERCLIFF. I continued up the incline, my shoulder and back perspiring beneath my bag. Rounding a bend in the road, I first glimpsed the Gate.