Sweaters
Casting off
I arrived in Ireland with two sweaters, both borrowed, and one pair of pants. My 15-liter daypack, clean but worn, was a relic from the last time I’d seen Seán, when we were both trailing around Latin America and met in a hostel dorm in Cali, Colombia. I didn’t need sweaters then.
I haven’t needed sweaters since, really, or at least not in a way I’m willing to acknowledge by permanently acquiring some. The black cotton pullover I bought while wintering in New Zealand the months after I was in Colombia is still with me, but the fuzzy maroon crew neck I picked up in Ann Arbor last winter and the Michigan sweatshirt that got me through chilly January days in Austin are both packed up in my sister’s storage closet.
The sweaters I brought to Ireland were borrowed because visiting the Emerald Isle in November requires sweaters, and my life requires that I not own any.
For the last four years, I’ve lived in the in-between. I’ve moved between sublets and short-term leases with first my backpack, then a carry-on, chasing sunshine and warmth and water and healing and learning and growing and friends. The only thing that tethers me to the world with any permanency (beyond my relationships) is the only pillar of my life that I’ve built small and nimble enough to collapse and take with me: my work.
But my laptop isn’t on this trip.
I jettisoned it to make room for the extra sweater. The creamy cropped turtleneck with extra-long sleeves and heavy ribbing. But also to make room for a sense of newness and play that I hadn’t felt in a long time.
Traveling is the purest kind of play I have found as an adult. It’s the open-ended unknown, the making up of the story as you’re living it. What calls our attention? How do we fill our time? What kind of world do we most want to dream up and crawl inside?
Who are we when no one’s watching? When no one’s waiting?
That kind of play has been hard to access lately. The work that lets me live a life of slow travel means that actual travel is rare. Me, in a new place, with nothing to do but explore? My first six months of backpacking were that, yes, but in the last three and a half years, I’ve had to balance exploring with client calls and assignments.
So uncoupling my brain from my body and leaning into the pleasures of play meant leaving the laptop and bringing the sweaters.
Who I would I be, wearing them?
Seeing for seeing’s sake
We zip down the N84 for no reason other than the fact that I want to see the Cliffs of Moher and Seán is kind enough to oblige me. It doesn’t matter what time we got there, or whether there is a cell signal, or if we take the shortest way there or the longest one. As he drives, choosing to skip the coast road because maneuvering along it feels too close to death, I watch the pastoral landscapes begging to be painted.
I clock the sheep dotted with blue spots grazing on grass carved up by walls made from stones stacked one on top of each other like stories. Small dwellings roofed in mold-dipped shingles. The row houses of Kilmaine—and a dozen villages just like it—with painted pebble ash sides, squat and ugly. And green everything: rich and hearty green that reminds me of the Pacific Northwest. But here, it’s not a fecund, overripe green of wet ferns and heavy canopies. On the west side of Ireland, the green is in the ground itself, in the hills rolling towards the sea, towards its crenulated coastline.
I notice, but I don’t paint, so I write down what I see in my Notes app, then go back to looking. It feels like a worthy occupation: seeing for seeing’s sake.
The red-and-white caution signs, overextended Peruvian flags, that herald a curve in the road; the small, round speed limit signs—100 kilometers per hour—and the oversized rectangular ones that spell out, in Irish and in English, what they mean. Yellow dashes line the sides of the road, and a white solid line, dotted with metal grommets, reaches down the middle. An inside-out version of what I’m used to.
I pull the sleeves of Camilla’s teak-colored sweater over my fingers and pump my fist to Maggie Rogers’ “Leave The Light On.” Seán, dressed in a thick grey pullover, joins in, and we keep driving, insulated in our car cocoon from the 6° day. For the first time in months, I don’t know how to get to where I’m going.
We pass Ballinrobe, and Seán points out the SuperValu that went viral years ago when a bull broke in and ran through the aisles, buttheading shoppers with their carts full of eggs. It was big news, the bull in the grocery store. I think about what it would be like to live in a place where that was the leading story three days in a row.
A dip in the road reveals the sun racing over Clare Island, with its craggy spikes like uncovered brown sugar.
Seán’s friend, the one whose house we stayed in two nights ago in Dublin, is from there. Only 156 people live on the island. Her sister, a teacher, is one of them. I tried to imagine her classroom. The twenty or so students there, staggered throughout grades, hunched over independent-study workbooks and coming back from outdoor ecology lessons with ruddy cheeks. I picture them wearing uniforms not dissimilar to those Maria makes from curtains for the Von Trapp family in The Sound of Music: pinafores trimmed in ruffles, high-waisted shorts cuffed just before the knee.
That can’t be what they actually wear, not in 2021. They must have regular school uniforms and sports jerseys and wifi and all manner of normal and modern things.
But I like imagining it differently. I like sitting here in this car, feeling my brain unspool like kite string, following one idea, one image, one imagined life before finding the next one and following that, too.
A sheep with a black face and black hooves bends down to find new grass as we go whooshing by. Horses swish their tails as they graze near the fences, metal gate arms akimbo. I could climb through the opening and walk along them if I wanted.
A brown cow licks itself near a stream, turning over its shoulder to reach its flanks. I’d like all the beef I eat to come from here.
Wood smoke curls from a house to our left, the acrid scent reaching us through the car’s closed windows. Big bales of cut grass covered in black plastic loll next to barns and behind walls, and Seán tells a story of having to do work on his grandfather’s farm right before a middle school dance, of being nervous that the girl he liked could smell the silage on him.
We pass Kilmaine and dozens of signs wishing Mayo’s gaelic football team well—Good luck, lads!, from the Kilmaine National School!; Good luck, Mayo, from Murphy’s Bar—and accompanying green-and-red flags. I think of Seán’s roommate’s boyfriend, with his bruised face, a slice of plum where the undereye should be, the injury from head-butting an opponent, and imagine Saturdays spent cheering the boys on.
I can imagine the rest of the week, too. A Sunday morning like today, buying good coffee and mediocre carrot cake—its flavor too concentrated in the lemony frosting—and a sausage roll stuffed with sage from a woman with drawn-on eyebrows at a cafe whose windows are full of fancy picnic hampers packed with pate and seeded crackers and gin-flavored chocolate. Eating the food at the tables behind the pub, dotted with dew at 9:30. Saying “Good morning!” and “How are ye?” to the walking couple with windburned cheeks and the dad pushing his daughter in a stroller and the woman with too many totebags and a pom-pom hat slouched like a half-blown dandelion. A Wednesday evening spent at Culture Night at the Quay Gallery, strolling around the kaleidoscope quilts hung on the walls. A Friday running errands, driving my car on the other side of the road and following the roundabouts that are simply circles painted on the ground, just a gesture towards the ask, slowing down to heed the “beware of bollards” sign before slamming into third gear when the road opens up past downtown and sinking into fourth around the bend. Paying €350 a month for a room in a sunny, warm house a short walk from the water where my fridge looks like a cabinet and metal butterfly art crowds my walls.
I want to take that life and pull it on like my borrowed sweater. To feel its warmth, to lean into it, to expand to fill its shape, to nuzzle my chin into its neck until I become a part of it, until it becomes a part of me. This is the part of travel that makes me feel thoroughly alive and thoroughly heartbroken at the same time. Seeing all of the lives that I could have, laid out before me and gleaming, knowing what they’d look and feel and taste and like: that’s the alive part.
My sweaters are borrowed because owning them would take up too much space in my suitcase. Lives can’t be borrowed the way clothing can: that’s the heartbroken part.
Playing along
The last time I was without my laptop, Seán was there, too. We were staying at a jungle hostel in Magdalena, Colombia with the other friends we’d linked up with in Cali. The hostel had no wifi, thatched-roof dorms, volleyball courts, impromptu dance parties, and 20,000 pesos-per-person (~$5) family dinners signaled by a giant bell. The laptop, which I only used to write and trip plan at that point, died for good one humid morning, and I wrote my observations on what a life in a British-Colombian summer camp would be like longhand in a small, pastel notebook.
I didn’t expect to still be living like this three and a half years later. To still be noticing, to still be observing, to still be trying on new lives for size and seeing how they fit me.
To still be playing.
I watch Seán pass someone on the right, going 102 in a 50. Look how much we notice when we’re somewhere new. And look how little heed we need to pay other people’s rules. I write down a list of my own: regularly go for long drives with friends; seek out green; sing along to Hozier often; never stop looking and being grateful you get to see.
We were in Hozier’s hometown yesterday. “Every version of me dead and buried in the yard outside,” he sang to us, and I see the versions of myself I carry with me. The versions I carry in my heart like e.e. cummings, but as a love poem written by me for me. The versions I am never without. I think about layering those versions like stamps, fancy embossed ones you can run your fingers over, whose stories you can feel by their edges.
I am not the same person I was three and a half years ago. Neither is Seán. But traveling around his home country together without much of a plan, with no work to distract us, has made me realize that seeing and being seen—and doing so with a dear friend—does not get old. Play doesn’t have to be outgrown. Dreaming and designing lives keeps you grateful. Doing it often just makes you better at it.
That is what this trip is teaching me: I am meant to live a life just like this one.
It is not the fact that I have done long-term slow travel that makes me curious and playful and attentive. That is who I am, even if no one’s watching. Even if responsibilities are waiting. It doesn’t matter where I am or who I’m with or what I’m wearing.
It never has.
Casting on
We pass a bare tree that looks like a waitress serving with a tray of telephone line spaghetti. We pass another village with blue- and red-painted doors and pumpkins gathered like watchmen on the stone steps outside. If I lived there, I’d always have a crust of bread and some cheese and a book tucked into the pocket of my skirt. I’d wander along walls of close-packed stones and cheer for the yellow and primrose blue of Country Clare and names like Abhainn an Chláir would tumble from my mouth with ease.
Would I really? Does it matter? If imagining that life informs my own, reminds me to add “read books outside” and “eat cheese for dinner” to my list of rules?
Before we get to the Cliffs of Moher, where I will make Seán sit next to me on the steps of an old castle while I finish the library book that’s overdue on my Kindle app and he reads over my shoulder, and where we will hike past the tourist lookout to spend the entire afternoon sitting on a cold, muddy cliff as we watch the sun melt into the water, we stop at the Burren.
It’s a wide strip of glaciokarst landscape made up of rocks that are 300 million years old, and if that hadn’t already made me feel small, walking along it does.
The rock is a millefleur cake, layers packed and flaky where they’ve cracked and blackberry vines snake through. The ocean crashing in the background sounds like static, and walking above it on the Burren is walking across the moon, each step exaggerated. I look behind me to see if I’m leaving footprints. I’m not.
It feels like an earthen crucible. Like the place life began. If you told me the first creatures to evolve were the plankton stuck in these tide pools, I’d believe you.
I stand there in just my sweater—hot from singing, we’d stripped off our jackets in the car and left them there—and look out in the direction of the cliffs. My phone is still on airplane mode, to avoid losing the library book. I’m unreachable and unremarkable, blending into the millennia around me.
To start a new knitting project, you have to cast on. That’s what it’s called to create something sturdy and new from what was previously a tangled tail of yarn.
I imagine gathering up the threads around me, the ocean and the rocks and the green and the road signs and Seán and me and the music, and casting on with them. Making myself a sweater from the moments, from the memories, constructing it line by line like a song. Wrapping myself up in it and taking it with me, from this place to the next one.
Just like I have before.
Just like I will again.