The growing addiction

Here, Matt Gross of the New York Times gives us a snapshot of his first ever day in Ireland … 

“… I had to go. After all, this really was why I’d come to Ireland in the first place … to lose myself over the course of a week in a country I knew nothing about.

Or rather, to lose myself in a country so familiar to me (and, I’d argue, to anyone who grew up in the United States) that its reputation had eclipsed its reality. From St. Patrick’s Day parades to the peace process, from Guinness fetishism to the potato famine, from ‘The Dubliners’ to ‘The Commitments’ to ‘Riverdance’, Irish history and culture have been such a steady backdrop that I never felt the need to think about Ireland as an actual place. Instead, Ireland seemed like a wholly imaginary source of fantastic good times, tinged with poignant historical misery and populated by characters so vibrant and strange that within minutes of meeting them (and I was 100 percent sure I’d meet them) I’d get sucked into their Wildean dramas.

As I pulled out of the Enterprise parking lot in Dublin, and onto what felt to me like the wrong side of the road, my heart raced with every careful shifting of gears, and I fretted about where I was in my lane. Was I drifting? Or overcompensating? Often, my right hand would flutter in mid-air before I remembered the gearshift was on the other side. And when, just half an hour outside Dublin, I found myself hurtling down one-and-a-half-lane roads, tension gripped my upper body as I negotiated my way around oncoming cars.

The rewards for such anxiety (and the subsequent neck aches) were immediate and unending. The Irish countryside was remarkable, a constant flow of the expected green hills and greener valleys, and once I got comfortable with the Fiat’s flip-flopped controls, I began to enjoy the way the roads snaked tight around corners, through virtual tunnels of trees and bushes. When I’d reach the top of a hill to find a truck barreling my way, I could take a certain pride in the swiftness with which I’d stomp the brakes and find a smidgen of shoulder to pull onto. Then I’d fumble around for the gearshift with the wrong hand.

From glen to glen I drove, and down (and up) the mountainsides, using the sun to keep myself on a rough south-southwest course toward County Kerry and finding new spectacles that diverged from the usual verdant-Ireland clichés. After unexpectedly visiting the Powerscourt Waterfall … about as classic an Irish image as you could imagine, all rocks and woods and fern-furred fields and white rushing streams … I wound up speeding along a high plateau runneled with rows of dense bushes in shades of yellow and purple … as alien a landscape as I could’ve imagined, especially under a steely sky backlit by a feeble sun. Eventually, I had to pull over and gawk.

Then I drove on, the road a growing addiction.

(M)