cliffs of moher

Date traveled: October 31, 2017

I don’t remember ever hearing of this place before trip-planning. For me the allure was simply in the horizontal drive across Ireland, the country roads and painted sheep and seeing their version of the Atlantic coast.

We got there as the sun was setting, and only because I gunned it the last 90 minutes to try to get there in time for Justin to take a picture. It was probably dangerous – I was speeding around bends on the narrowest roads I’ve ever been on, unable to see anything outside the road, driving on the wrong side of everything. There weren’t any medians, and instead of a partition on the side, there is either stone or thickets that may be covering stone.

Shops were built into the side of the mountain but they were all closed by the time we got there. It got pitch black in a hurry, and by the time we made it to the parking lot you couldn’t see anything. I didn’t want to drive in the dark but it wasn’t a long way to Galway, the next stop, and I underestimated how decimated I would feel after the day of driving, capped off in the darkness, with only the sound of the ocean, who knows how far away, as I turn around cliffs.

These drives allowed me to feel rural Ireland first-hand. Instead of convenience stores, most highway towns have bars with old Guinness signs on them, and instead of fencing, they use short stone walls to demarcate property, even on farms to keep animals in. The trees were changing colours and were really pretty but I don’t know what kind they were. All I can really say about them is that they were more human-like in shape and with thin branches, and I heard them scratching against the side of the car when I was too close to the left.

One of the pictures Justin took is now framed in my loft. Since going there I’ve seen a lot of pictures of the Cliffs of Moher on things like Jeopardy, or heard them mentioned, and the photo of Justin’s I ended up printing is probably the most typical angle of it that I see. I didn’t know that when I selected that one – there were probably dozens of angles I could choose from – so I guess there’s something to be said about the reasons why this angle is most popular. Something about it makes us long after it and want to see it again, like the chorus fade-out on a pop song.

There’s something exhilarating but also terrifying being so far from anything you know and the darkness in every direction. To be honest it’s not that different than I felt many nights on Vancouver island, hardly knowing, really knowing, anyone there, so far from even a ferry ride to get back to the main continent, so many hours and planned time and saving up from home.

I don’t know why I am so obsessed with falling and with running away from things. Most of my dreams involve one or the other or both. At these cliffs both of those themes are unavoidably present: the step away from a crash hundreds of feet to rock; dark blue as far as I can see, like my eyes are running off the coast, but also with nowhere left for me to go.

Of course I wasn’t completely alone. Few times in my life have I been. I’m scared of traveling alone, though I’d like to low-key try a cabin for a couple nights by myself to see how I could handle it. Aside from having a friend at something that so much symbolizes the end, how else would you want to face the abyss? Pretend it doesn’t exist? Or gawk in its immensity?

Overall the cliffs seemed peaceful and dark. I’m sure I’d feel lonely staying there too long. I’m lonely just thinking about being there. It was quite amazing to drive around those roads half-lost and absorbing all the things that have some nods to familiarity but are mostly quite different from all the places I’d been before.