“The boat blew a long, mournful whistle into the mist. If she went, tomorrow she would be on the sea with Frank, steaming towards Buenos Ayres. Their passage had been booked.”
– Eveline by James Joyce
This name once caught my eye, chiseled into a soft-edged tomb stone, worn by years of Kansas storms that thundered over the plains of green or gold corn, the towering, tumid clouds visible from miles away, rolling in like a wave. My sister, Sara, and I walked softly through the lush, curled-over grass of the cemetery, trailing slightly behind my mother and her childhood friend. Gray and tall, the buildings of the convent rose handsome and gray around us, edged by tall pines and other trees. The summer wind blew through their branches.
We had crossed the plains to come here, driving from our small town of Athens, Ohio, heading for this middle land of my mother’s childhood. For her it was a journey into memories, reaching back through three decades retie the threads of old friendships with people and places. For us too, this journey felt somehow like moving backwards. Kansas felt older than Ohio, perhaps because life under those wide skies, among the fields, felt slower. Perhaps because this place felt more “American,” with its flags going down the brick and cobble Main Streets, with its great domed capitol building and spreading lawns, it’s love of fairs and the Forth of July.
Athens, on the other hand, was a college town set among the Appalachian hills. A town where the old hippies settled after Woodstock, a place where college students rebelled against their parents, their parents’ politics, their country’s politics. Among this young, who-the-heck-are-we demographic, most of us seemed ready to leave, ready to not be so American. We learned foreign languages, read foreign novels—Salman Rushdie, W. G. Sebald, Nadine Gordimer. We spoke of far away places we had never seen and often took ourselves too seriously. Yes, I am one of those.
I’ve crossed the Atlantic three times now, once to Israel, once to Spain, and now to Ireland. And the more I travel the more I realize what a child of the Midwest I truly am. How much awareness of the land, church on Sundays, guitar notes and home-made things inflect the world I see through my brown eyes.
Eveline from Joyce’s story didn’t need the travel to realize whose child she was—Home! She looked around the room, reviewing all its familiar objects, which she had dusted once a week for so many years, wondering where on earth all the dust came from. She belonged to Dublin’s outskirts, the place where the city houses turned into fields. The long green field where the children of the avenue used to play together . . . they seemed to have been rather happy then. But everything changes—A man from Belfast bought the field and built houses in it—not like their little brown houses but bright brick houses with shining roofs. Eveline’s city was growing, expanding from the river and the sea into the countryside. She seemed mournful as she looked out her window at these red brick houses, mournful for the changes and mournful for what was left, what she would leave behind, anticipating her journey to the Western Hemisphere with her sweetheart. She mourned the city, her brothers and sisters now gone, her dead mother, her father long descended into drinking, the field now filled. And yet for all this mourning, Eveline did not cross the ocean, did not escape. She went to the North Wall with her Frank, she saw the boat, watched him walk up the gangway calling to her. But she could not go—All the seas of the world tumbled about her heart . . . No! No! No! It was impossible. Her hands clutched the iron in frenzy. Amid the seas she sent a cry of anguish!
So impossible, to leave this place and all her mourning, so difficult to cross over to a new place, a new life.
When I stepped out of the Dublin airport, the smell of the sea hit me and I breathed deep—Home—I thought, and stopped myself. This was not home, and home had never been on the ocean, not land-locked Ohio where I have lived for twenty-one years. The sea was a place of my travels, when I crossed to Tel Aviv, San Sebastian, Barcelona, Haifa, Cadiz. Yet I thought it all the same. Home, the strange sense of return to this place I had never been. I do not which to imply something fated or cosmic, but something more complicated. The misty chill in the air certainly felt like Ohio, the way the morning fogs clung to the river and the depths of the valleys. But this Irish air was cut by the cries of gulls, the brogue of the cab driver walking beside me—“Y’ever be’n t’Dublin, love?”
No, I hadn’t. For the first time, I had crossed the sea on a shamrock-painted plane, flown over frozen Canadian lakes and the black Atlantic, over Irish towns studded yellow with street lights, flown over from America to here, flown—the name Eveline means beautiful bird. And as I stepped out the airport, I wondered if the sense of landing, of perching on this green island for two months, was the source of my home feeling. The ending—or the beginning?—of a journey was familiar to me, a recurring design stitched into my life.
Good morning, Dublin, you will be my place this summer.
Eveline Crosses Back 