Getting there !

"Okay. Relax. You can do it...steady...(deep breath) why do they allow those big trucks here...one-lane, narrow roads.....of all places...Okay, look's clear....Go....NOW! "
The same thoughts rush through me everytime I approach the roundabouts on the outskirts of Galway.
Roundabouts. Sounds like a fun thing to do on a weekend, go play in some roundabouts.
Quite the contrary !
"Put your signal on for a left exit here."
I am alert as a fox ready to leap onto an unexpected dinner.

And the Irish drive so sensibly!
Or so it seems, compared to drivers in Lansford or Summit Hill, Tamaqua or even White Bear. There, in 1960, as the vehicle tailing the '58 Ford Fairlane, you found yourself saying " Come on, get off the road you snail...pull over. My brother has got to get to Uncle Frankie's house by 6:30."

Although I shouldn't, I often let Co. Galway drivers get to me. A good majority of the drivers are probably tourists, or German businessmen, or maybe even American ex-patriots who have moved to this, the fastest growing city in the European Union.

No one gets beeped at for coming to a complete stop or just slowing down at stop signs, not running yellow lights, yielding the right of way at intersections and following other rules of the road the local Gardai don't enforce. In fact, no one gets beeped at or blasts a beep at other drivers at all. After driving in Pennsylvania, Ireland has a lack of predatory fierceness I wasn't ready for.

I realized cars and highways were absolutely necessary to give us the freedom we so desperately desire.
*
One warm afternoon in the summer of 1961, I abandoned the old black Chevy I had just started to drive in my senior year of high school, and walk the highway from Tamaqua to Hometown.
Observing scenery makes me imagine going out in it, and I wanted to see the road other than through glass, at less than fast speed.
From the grassy shoulder, I walked past the thinning outskirts of our small town and entered the open byway to neighboring Hometown only three miles away. Traffic was heavier than ever. Cars zoomed by like leaves in an autumn windstorm.
I chose to walk on the right hand northbound lane because that side seemed to have had more room. Of course there was no sidewalk, but neither were there signs forbidding pedestrians. I passed a Holy Shrine where Bobby Williams was killed in a car accident the year before. I tromped thru weeds, and I observed a torn mass card, a broken old 45 rpm record, lost Chrysler Imperial hubcaps, pieces of aluminum siding, empty Stegmairer beer bottles, several condom wrappers, an old T-shirt reading "Texas Lunch Hot Dogs", Evening Courier newspapers from Moser's news agency, and a battered green shamrock banner from the last year's St Patty Day Parade in Tamaqua.
The traffic blew by, screaming their beeps at me, bumping by with the dull rubber thumps of tires hitting pavement seams.
I arrived in Hometown more aware of the world outside the automobile. I stood there on top of the hill and looked at my town a little differently now.
"What was our land like without these steel-made transporters ?" I thought.
That night I was shook up and couldn't sleep... as if walking beside so much noise and speed had rearranged my molecules.
*
"Okay...relax, I got through that one without incident. A few more miles and then the notorious FFRench Roundabout on Galway's Headford Road !"

The Beginning

2007. Galway, Ireland.
The beginning of the journey.
Where to begin !

In the summer of 1954, just after my tenth birthday, I was serving as navigator in my father's bittersweet orange and white automobile , a sparkling and obvious attention-getting chromed delight - as big as hearse - a fit simile given that a year later he would nearly die in it when a drunken coal miner drove into him on the Lansford-Coaldale highway.
In July before the crash, we were passing through the eastern edge of the woods of Hauto.
The cabin on the lake was his "look at me-Ive made it in life" summer home only ten miles from our family home on Ruddle Street, Coaldale.
The road seemed to fall away as it rolled through the mountains, ahead was a distant horizon, not only of dark trees, but of a thin pencil -line linking two radiant shades of blue. It was impossible to discern which reflected the other. There I had my first glimpse ever of the beauty of water and sky. I was a Pisces after all, and the water beckoned me. I dreamed of far away waters and skies.

Of the highest order among travelers are those moments when a place, and an indelible link to write themselves into one's memory, occurs. By the end of that summer I was standing on the New Jersey shore. Staring at the distance and imagining another country, somewhere, across the oceaned sky. I day-dreamed of Ireland.
That day, Lake Hauto, Pa. and Galway, Ireland met in my mind.
I would have to wait for my Kate to bring me here.
It is 53 years later.