Away from home on a brief work trip, a new parent wrestles with the promise and futility of travel for its own sake.
It’s always raining in Letterkenny, but I don’t mind. Rain is good for hangovers. Sunny days seem to mock you, to tease you for burning through the night so as to squander the brightness and health of the morning. Rain is on your side. Nothing worth seeing out here anyway. You feel bad? Great. So does the world. You belong.
At six o’clock that morning, an alarm wrenched me from my bed, veins still running black with last night’s Guinness. I bumbled through consecutive Zoom calls and batted away emails, remembering that the dark side of being able to work from anywhere is that, so often, you end up working from everywhere. This was my one day off before speaking at a travel creator conference. It would therefore be incongruous not to do some kind of travel while here. Around midday, I unglued myself from the laptop and tottered out into the rain.
The bus to Derry departed at 12:24 from a stop just down the road. In theory. When the bus with the correct number on the front did pull up, I was informed by the gruff driver that it’s ‘not going to Derry.’ I waited 20 minutes until another bus pulled up. The bus driver told me that the bus to Derry was the one that came 20 minutes ago. I waited another 10 minutes, hair now soaked, and then decided to walk along the highway to the main bus station.
Letterkenny is in Donegal, an odd pocket of Ireland that is almost an enclave; it’s virtually impossible to get from Dublin this far north without driving through Northern Ireland and entering the United Kingdom. On the bus the day before, I’d watched road signs change from kilometers to miles and back again as my phone received ‘welcome to the UK’ and ‘welcome to Ireland’ texts in short succession. Donegal is rugged and wild, with sheep grazing on windswept hills. Letterkenny itself, however, is concrete and intersections, with a smattering of decent pubs tucked away between the vape shops and fried chicken joints.
I could have ventured further, into cute windswept coastal towns with names like Bunbeg or Falcarragh, where they speak Irish first and English a distant second, but I only had a few hours before an evening engagement, and my travel gears were rusty. My daughter came along eight months before this trip, and aside from an even briefer work trip to London, this was my first time away. Four nights. Five days. That’s 2% of my baby’s life. The equivalent for me would be over 200 days. This math is somewhat spurious, but any parent will understand the power small children have to distort the passage of time.
My wife was confident and encouraging. And she’d be having her turn next month, a trip to Montenegro with her friends, where I would be alone with the little one. Yet still, guilt was abundant. Christopher Hitchens said that to be a parent was to experience your heart running around inside another body. I was in Ireland, but I wasn’t really there. Every vibration of the phone could bring news of the baby.
Travel happens when you become so immersed in your surroundings that you lose the anchors that normally define and confine you. Your language, your name, your job, your story, all fade away, drowned out by the deafening roar of the now. Can this happen as a parent? When traveling with your child, you’re constantly attuned to their mood, their needs. When traveling without them, you are torn in two, never able to be present when they are absent.
At the bus station, the departure board didn’t show the bus I had been waiting for. The next bus to Derry was not for another three hours – not enough time to make it back for the evening’s event. The bus I’d been waiting for “did show,” the woman behind the counter assured me, “but it was quite late.” The accents here are so florid and beguiling that it would be hard to get mad at someone even if they were confessing they’ve just swiped your credit card, rear-ended your car, and abducted your dog, and so I quickly forgave her.
It was after one PM, with no viable bus. I’d worked all morning and spent over an hour faffing around at bus stops, and now faced the serious prospect of my only day in at least a year where travel, true, for-its-own-sake Travel with a capital T, was a real possibility just evaporating before me.
I called an Uber.
For an international ride (Derry is back across the border in Northern Ireland, where it is technically called Londonderry), it was quite reasonable; just over 40 euros for the 45 or so minute trip. The driver was an affable, bald 30-something with a scraggy black beard who knew the route well; his girlfriend lived over the invisible border, while he was a local of Letterkenny. He pointed out the house where he grew up as we exited the city and drove over green hills where sheep grazed and stared portentously into the cloudy horizon. Like New Zealand, yet older, more grizzled, less dazzling but no less seductive.
New country. Same rain. Yesterday’s hangover still clinging to me like a piece of chewing gum under your shoe. I’d somewhat guiltily booked a walking tour on the way over. Normally, I prefer to wander and enjoy the thrill of discovery. Slouching along in the company of other rain-sodden tourists is about as close to my idea of travel as a green salad is to a hangover cure, but time was short.
Derry feels like any British town; the pubs, the chain drug stores, the mall dominating the hill with streets sloping down to the port. Grime on the streets, construction, and umbrellas. The historic Austin’s department store in the centre is boarded up. Directions for the walking tour led me to a side street down by a mall, where I found a yellow sign advertising the tour next to a convenience store. I waited until 10 minutes had passed the appointed time. No one showed up. I was a little relieved, but then the lady in the store scurried out and set me right. Sure enough, up the hill outside the mall, the exact group I had foreseen appeared; mostly Americans, drenched yet enthusiastic, around a 60-something-year-old Irish man in a yellow raincoat.
And so he talked, and we walked. He told us of Bloody Sunday and the Troubles. The church where a British soldier was shot; the spire where the Union Jack once flew. The history of the town, the riots of 1969, and the British Army rolling in with armoured cars. There, the apartment block where the city’s Protestants lived, a defiant and pugnacious minority in this overwhelmingly Catholic city. Here, the Protestant church the community painstakingly built; when Reverend David Latimer attended the funeral of former IRA leader Martin McGuinness, some finally believed peace might be possible. And Derry Girls. Did I mention Derry Girls? The guide did, ten, twenty times, pointing out the mural of the surly teens of Netflix sitcom fame on a tenement wall.
The crowd shuffled in step and listened in appreciative silence. Except for one man. The same age as the guide. Wearing a beret with a Palestinian flag badge, a man who liked to broadcast his opinions and make sure we heard them. The smooth patter of the guide was interrupted by this loudmouth, by construction workers, by another tour group heading the other direction. He would pause. Make a joke about Derry Girls. And then continue. The speech, like the stones beneath our feet on the old city walls, worn smooth by time, the pathos rehearsed, practiced, calibrated. The anecdotes are honed, selected, and designed to shock just enough to entertain without causing awkwardness and upsetting someone’s vacation.
This was interesting. Important. But not it. Not travel. I could have learned all of this from five minutes on Wikipedia, without leaving the hearth fire or the home acre. From the rehearsed safety of a productized walking tour, you glance at history, but you do not encounter it. You are served stories, processed and packaged, but you do not uncover them; you don’t earn them. When there is no possibility of getting lost, there is no possibility of finding anything.
Why was I here? The travel experience was a failure. That feeling, often misunderstood as freedom, but really a sense of infinite engagement with the possibility of the moment, was absent. But by failing to find it, I had at least realized what I’d been searching for.
I thanked the guide and slipped away. The bus to Letterkenny was in half an hour. Newly skeptical of Irish buses, I went to the Derry station early. There was no departure board. At the information desk, a group of three elderly women attempted to gossip with an exhausted-looking attendant. When they wouldn’t get the hint, she simply closed the booth and walked away. The bus did eventually arrive. Back in Letterkenny, it was still raining.
