August 2011

Seagulls flapping in the breeze, crying. Good stiff wind. Cold enough to make me wish I’d dug out my jacket from the boot. Still, it’s bracing. Better than the stale moist air inside those gloomy Titanic rooms. Could hardly breathe in there. Just imagining the air in steerage on a ship like that. As it was going down. Worst way to drown, I should think. Trapped below deck, icy water rushing in. Must have been a lot of screaming. Last thing you’d hear. Cries of drowning men.

And here, looking out over the water is young Annie Moore and her two brothers. First immigrant to pass through newly-opened Ellis Island on January 1, 1892. Imagine a 14-year-old girl crossing the ocean with brothers only 11 and 7. Parents in New York already for several years. Annie and the boys left behind in Cork, waiting. Until a letter comes with money for passage. Just enough to crowd into steerage and spend 12 days making the crossing, seasick almost every day, scared out of her wits.

Sail pass the Statue of Liberty on New Year’s Day, 1892. Which just happens to be Annie’s 15^th birthday. What was she thinking? Probably tough as nails by then. Had to be. Can’t spend almost two weeks in the hold of a ship with two boys to look after and not age quickly. A barge unloads them and shuttles them to the new landing place, Ellis Island. A ramp is lowered. And the first one down, tripping as she goes, is Miss Annie Moore. And there to meet her is an official with a bushy walrus mustache who hands her a $10 gold piece. What’s this for? she asks. For being first, says he. First what? The first immigrant to pass through Ellis Island.

What must she have thought? More money than she’d ever seen in her life, she tells a newsman. I’ll keep it forever as a memento, she says. But surely it was spent. No doubt she held out her palm to show her father, who was waiting for her and the boys, and she never saw it again. Can’t hold on to a gold piece like it was a ticket stub. Not in a poor Irish family with four children trying to make a go of it in New York. That gold coin was spent. No doubt.

And what of Annie? Married a German immigrant, of all things. A fish monger. And had eleven children with him, some of whom died before they could walk. And Annie died young herself of heart failure. Only fifty. Buried in Queens. Never did see Ireland again. Maybe that’s why they designed her sculpture here the way they did; with her gazing back towards Ireland. Forever gazing back.

Photo by David Lansing.

On the map (purchased in desperation at a gas station in some small country village miles away from where we thought we were) it looks like the anemic road from Midleton to Cobh should take no more than ten or fifteen minutes. But it’s three and then three-thirty and eventually four before Mr. Lynch make an illegal U-turn in front of the Mauretania bar and wedges our once unblemished rental (Mr. Lynch thinks the side-mirror that clipped another vehicle’s side-mirror can be easily repaired) into a just-vacated parking spot on the street.

By the time we find the Cobh Heritage Centre, where we were to meet Bernard and his group at three, it is quarter past four. They’re not here, I tell Mr. Lynch after having a look around. They’ve come and gone. We should make quick work of it, then.

Mr. Lynch is not so sure. Enquiries are made. We’ve been expecting you, says the stout woman reading a romance novel inside the ticket booth. You’re late. We are, we are. And what of the other group? Have they already gone through? Not at all. They’re late as well. Are they not with you? They’re not. We came separately.

Separate it is, then. Tickets are issued, brochures distributed, and then down a dark gangway to relive the Famine and Emigration (you know it’s serious when it’s capitalized) of the late 18^th century. Dark inside, like the holds of the coffin ships, recreated here with dummy families sleeping on the floor and hunched over mannequins hurling their oats in tin buckets.

Then a cut-out lad in an Irish cap holding the Evening News: TITANIC DISASTER GREAT LOSS OF LIFE. For it was here (at what was then known as Queenstown) that the newly built luxury liner embarked upon her maiden voyage on April 11, 1912. “At 1:30pm an exchange of whistles indicated that the tenders’ business was complete and the Titanic weighed anchor to the strains of ‘Erin’s Lament’ and ‘A Nation Once Again’ played on the bagpipes by steerage passenger Eugene Daly. A total of 1,308 passengers were on board as they left Queenstown together with 898 crew members making a total of 2,206 souls on board as she embarked on her final journey.”

Mr. Lynch seems quite entranced by the photos and displays. I’ll just wait for you outside, by that little café, says I. Are you feeling all right? asks Mr. Lynch. No, I’m fine. Just need a little fresh air, I think. It’s close in here, isn’t it?

It is, says Mr. Lynch. Like the tight quarters of a ship.

I hurry out of the darkness, into the daylight where the salty breeze coming in from the bay smells sweetly of life.

Castle ruins along the road to Cobh. Photo by David Lansing.

Should take no more than two, two-and-a-half hours to reach Cobh, says Bernard, handing me the keys to some late-model number with the steering wheel on the wrong side of the car. Not me, I tell him. I’m not driving. Give the keys to Mr. Lynch. This is his idea. I’m just along as navigator.

Have you a map? I ask the concierge. Where you off to? Cobh, I say. Disappears into a back office and comes back holding a wooden board with a coated map of Ireland on it. Have you no map you can give us? No, sorry, he says. Then he points out the thin red lines heading for Cork.

This will never do. What point in taking highways to Cork? What will we see on that route? Just gas stations and Supermacs selling cod burgers (that said, need to try one of those). No hurry, now. Only half past ten and no one expecting us in Cobh until three. Sure it’s worth a drive along the coast. Take the green roads, then. The wee roads through towns like Baltinglass and Bunclody.

Car even has a GPS device. No idea how to use it. Nor Mr. Lynch. Bernard fiddles with the thing, programs it to get us out of Dublin and as far as Waterford. Off we go.

Turn left here, says the wench stuck to the shield as we leave the Conrad, and so Mr. Lynch does as instructed, which upsets the woman. Recalculating route, says she a bit snippily. While we tango through four lanes of traffic. Turn right now, says she. Shiite, says Mr. Lynch, making a left. She said right, I tell him. I’m left-handed, says Mr. Lynch. As if that has anything to do with it.

Recalculating route, says the wench in a pinched voice. She’s a bit bitchy this morning, isn’t she, says Mr. Lynch. Turn right now, says she, as Mr. Lynch continues straight ahead. Grabs the little black box and yanks it off the windshield, throws it in the back seat. Now we’re done for. All I’ve got for directions is the little tourist map of Dublin which doesn’t even take us past the Grand Canal. Just look for signs, says Mr. Lynch. What signs? Any signs. There’s one, I say. Belfast, Sligo, Rosslare. Wrong direction, says Mr. Lynch. Well, I say, at least we know not to go that way. That’s a start.

Round abouts, honking cars, near collisions, spinning around once, twice, searching for something that says Cork or even Limerick. I’m getting seasick. Take this first exit, I say. Now. Mr. Lynch yanks the silver bug across two inside lanes and like a roulette ball we are released down a chute taking us where? Don’t know. But not towards Belfast, Sligo, or Rosslare.

We’ll die well before Cobh, I say. Mr. Lynch, without taking his eyes off the road, snorts. If you don’t like my drivin’, you can go ask me arse, he says.

I laugh. He laughs. We’re almost out of Dublin. Only god knows where we’re headed and sure he doesn’t care. And we don’t either.