The Lift in Take-Off Again, Donegal and Mum Week

Take-Off Again, Old Friends and Timeless Lessons, Dad Time in Mum Week, 'Stroke' City

Take-off Again

Travel brings observation and the reflection that comes with observation, and the learning that comes with those observations, all juiced under in the variety of place and movement, and novelty and conversations.

And so travel is an amphitheater of things to write about, in this drip, drip, drip of the mind as vapors cool into colorful liquid drops of flowing ideas.

The last few weeks of career pause blended more Donegal time with Dad with a first visit to Hawaii, touching down in Lihue on the island of Kauai.

Paired with reading some 19th century military history - on the infamous massacre that was the Charge of The Light Brigade - and the shock of waking up on 7 October to learn of a massacre in Israel - these last weeks yanked me into plenty of thought about history’s endless arc of tribes, possession and dispossession, and the primal brutality that can bubble up.

The extraordinary gift of flight

But, let’s start with take-off, and the magical experience of my outbound EI60 Aer Lingus SFO-DUB, on a rare balmy early fall evening.

Just stepping into that green tube of aluminium alloy now brings a warm feeling of familiarity, welcomed through the galley by the verdant charm of the Irish cabin crew, with their mostly Dublin accents.

Ten minutes later, the voice of the Captain comes over the announcement system: "You're in for one hell of a treat if you're on the right hand side", he shared as our rumbling taxiing down the runway U-turned into take-off position.

Over the next seven to eight minutes it was snap, snap, snap as day turned to dusk and dusk turned to darkness. It was like you could feel a rhythm in the moments of lift, in each turn, one of the wings tipping down and touching a thermal, bouncing the vast flying tube of aluminium alloy into an arcing bend as we looked down on South San Francisco, straightened out over my other spiritual home of Ocean Beach, with a wonderful view too of Golden Gate Park (larger than New York's Central Park, did you know..?). And then that next wing dip as we cut a saluting turn over 'Her Majesty' the Golden Gate Bridge (as I call 'her'...!) with a view spanning east out to the city and the Salesforce Tower winking in the setting sun.

It's amazing that we have flight at all. It's amazing how cheap it is, really. It's amazing that you get a hot meal, and there are toilets up there. And it's amazing that in the passage of churning through the first hundred pages of a new book, falling on the floor once as I jerked myself out of sleep, that we then land in a whole new quilt of colours and light…in tomorrow.

Old Friends and Life’s Timeless Lessons

The older a friend, and the richer the shared memory, the more colorful it is to stay in touch. 

And so Dad and I had a first afternoon stop planned, stopping by in Bettystown north of Dublin, before our long drive to Donegal. Roger Pickett is the father of a high school friend who fell to the floor one evening in September 1993. Young Warren Pickett at 17 had had a massive brain hemorrhage, and never got up again. 

And too, those days taught me much in seeing the stoic and generous response of Roger Pickett, who immediately launched the Warren Picket Adventure Travel Award, an endowment providing pupil and parent opportunities on two annual summer trips, places on a transatlantic Tall Ships Race and seats on a geological Grand Canyon River Expedition. My brother Pete won the first Grand Canyon trip award, and what he experienced in those 200 miles of rafting opened Pete’s eyes to a life of discovery and the wonder and beauty of our world that taught him more about who he was than his years of classroom time before that (in my interpretation). And we see the evidence in Pete’s life and spirit today (that has ricocheted across Keara and I too, I would bet any shrink would testify…!).

We sat with Roger and his wonderful wife, Liz, on a beautiful Indian summer style afternoon on the coast enjoying an Irish mezze of lunch. Roger touchingly pulled out a Sauvignon Blanc in Mum's name on her birthday, marveling at his thick photo deck of printed pictures telling the story of Roger re-living the dream of a fourth expedition down the Grand Canyon this summer - all the more remarkable after a couple of years in skirmishes with health, including a knee replacement. 

Sitting there brought thoughts back to my own trip down the river in the summer of 2021, courtesy of the Warren Pickett Adventure Travel award (as I wrote about here). Journeys like these are a reminder of what journeying is all about: experiencing the world from a new perspective, and being down in a giant crack in the earth for a week on a pair of rugged inflatable rafts with thirty other people is quite a way to do that. 

Dad and I waved our goodbyes, time with Roger always feels so rich in some ways, sitting there with a man that I first sat with in a housemaster's living room, he heartbroken and shattered in tragedy and me in a confused disbelief at how life can pan out when you have a millimeter or less of bad luck in your physiology. I'll never forget it…

‘Stroke City’

Spending ‘Mum Week’ with Dad reconnects with Ireland, our family history and the cultural history of the Island. A highlight was our afternoon in Derry, where in a walk around the town you’re in a panfire of history from four decades ago and four centuries ago. The afternoon paired nicely with my hours of pushing through reading Cecil Woodham’s 1953 ‘The Reason Why’ on the fatal ‘charge of the light brigade’ in the Crimean War in 1854, made all the more infamous by the Alfred Lord Tennyson poem written a few months later in December 1854. All the reading taught me about the rhymes in history of people being sidelined in hatred and dispossession. And the endless battle to hold on to your land that results. 

Now, when someone says Derry to me, I have this flashback to standing at ticket kiosk when I was 19 or 20 at Edinburgh University, and making a trip over to Donegal to see Nana and Grandpa and Granny and Grandad. 

"A single to Derry, please" I asked, following Mum and Dad's instructions as I got off one bus in the North (the United Kingdom part) to make a switch to another, correspondence as the french say. 

"To where?", was the response, from the gruff grey man behind counter. 

"Derry, please", I said, knowing it was about an hour away, a major city in Northern Ireland, and so hardly a secret. He stared at me again. 

“Mum and Dad told me I could get a bus to Derry from here”, I detailed, staring back. It must have been the London accent of mine that softened this gruff old man into letting me in on his riddle.

“I think you mean Londonderry”, he said…“Go look it up, ‘Stroke City’ we’ve been called, but this city is called Londonderry on the map.”

There’s no stroke symbol on Google Maps but you can see the political point in this town being digitally pinned today under its two names still.

Derry is mostly peaceful today but tensions remain between the catholic (Irish nationalist) and protestant (UK ‘unionist’ loyal) communities. 

And that afternoon I found myself thinking to growing up in London in the 1980s, the brutal Middle East conflict part of my early awareness of global news and human barbarity every night on the 7pm Channel 4 news after dinner. 

Back then, Pete and I settling into English life from Canada and getting used to our nicely fitted school uniforms, Dad was often delayed home from work due to bomb scares I remember. And we’d get the odd glance or comments or questions from people hearing Mum’s soft Irish accent. Pete and I would called names at school, “stupid paddy” I remember once (and that was the last time I threw a punch, around 1991…).

We visited the Free Derry Museum that memorializes the ‘Troubles’ of the 1970s, the bloodshed in Bloody Sunday when catholic protesters were mown down (the British Government closed a long enquiry with a formal Parliamentary apology, following the Saville Report initiated by Tony Blair in 1998 and released in June 2010). 

And then we headed up to walk along the stunning medieval wall built by the English in the 1600s to separate from the ever rebelling catholic Gaels. And on into the main square within the walled segment of Derry to visit the Guildhall.

I read a lot more about the latter, only deepening my understanding of the values and culture that I see and so admire in my Jewish friends and their family life. 

These two pieces stood out, an FT essay ‘Let us be, to grieve, rage, weep’ (Simon Schama)  and this powerful essay (Isaac Saul)  that went viral on Twitter (I saw it via Paul Graham, who founded Y Combinator, the most well-known start-up incubator, the business model of my last employer Antler).

In all, ‘Mum Week’ 2023 was blessed with beautiful autumn days, walks on the beaches Mum and Dad would frequent, time with Uncles and Aunts, watching the Rugby World Cup….and the accompanying pints 'of the black stuff'. 

Ireland was enjoying a humble, earnest anticipation in the country with the rugby team's progress in the Rugby World Cup, based in Paris, and just moving into knock-out stages. For a few years now, Ireland have been the world #1 seed in rugby, which few outside the country appreciate. For the small playing base, it's a remarkable story of management and structure through the 30 years since the game went professional while I was at Edinburgh University.

A First Visit to Kauai

It was back in 1988 or so that the picture of Kauai formed an image in my head.

It all began on a stage in Surrey in England, perhaps ten or eleven years old and a dreamy and earnest chorus member in that year’s musical the Rodgers & Oscar Hammerstein score about a mystical, exotic island in the South Pacific. Mrs. Robbins’ conducting was so intense, so full of deliberately placed energy, as she led us through rehearsals like track athletes in training doing laps and laps of precise pacing. I can still pitch that ‘descending octave’ note interval that signals the opening,

Whizz forward four decades almost and the postcard image was still not filled in with a dose of reality. And it’s been twelve long years living in the US as a surfer, repeatedly saying…”no, still haven’t been!”….when people assume that you’re a regular to surfing’s birth place and its cultural Mecca.

So we touched down in Kauai, and disembarked into the small and charismatic airport. Charismatic in the simple 1950s functional architecture of a small airport. C and I had picked Kauai, the ‘Garden Island’, for its inspiring beauty and lesser development than the other islands.

As we drove ever deeper north, we got to understand why, the feeling of being in an America away from America. And too that you’re in another land, another people, another tempo. We passed small towns that felt like a snapshot into heartland America in the 1950s, with quaint and humbly sized art deco cinemas and banks, a boutique or two, second-hand stores and carefully curated vintage shops. Churches in that basic white style of early last century, the biggest we saw in a verdant green in Hanalei and the smallest and cutest in Kilauea being a neat and unique architecture entirely of Kauai’s distinctive black lava rocks in its walls (see Postcards).

Gazing out the window and starting to see the lush rainforests and rich birdlife, I could see too why Kauai is famed for being the set for multiple scenes in the 1993 box office hit Jurassic Park and too for featuring in Raiders of the Lost Ark. Grassy areas mid-island turned into richer, greener meadows and then more manicured lawns, and then a golf course as we pulled into towards Hanalei Bay.

The horizon to the left gave us a first sense for the hills, small mountains and rainforest ridges. At dawn and dusk the merging of land and ocean was blaze into a canvas of color to soothe the day’s energy in tropical vibes.

I loved how, as the week unfolded, I had a long overdue cultural education in the word and the culture ‘Aloha’.

We hear and see this word all the time in surf culture, and I’d known it expressed a spirit of mellow warmth, a welcome and a sense of love. But it’s only in visiting Hawaii that you understand that it’s a short word that describes the long arc of a society’s emphasis on living in harmony with others and with nature.

The first known settlers to Hawaii were estimated to land between the fifth to twelfth centuries, seafaring Polynesians arriving from other islands in kayaks. And radiocarbon dating research showing a more precise development period between the eleventh to thirteenth centuries. But it was in the early 18th century that the first American traders arrived and started to shift and rebrand ‘Aloha’, discovering and harvesting sandalwood for export to China.

The British influence then stepped ashore in 1778 with Captain Cook’s arrival, accidentally bringing disease and practices that first disrupted native culture. In fact, the Union Jack is incorporated into the Hawaiian flag today still, a legacy of an alliance between Great Britain and King Kamehameha the First, when the King unified the Hawaiian Islands in 1810.

As Go Hawaii writes:

….warfare between chiefs throughout the islands was widespread. In 1778, Captain James Cook arrived in Hawaiʻi, dovetailing with Kamehameha’s ambitions. With the help of western weapons and advisors, Kamehameha won fierce battles at lao Valley in Maui and the Nuʻuanu Pali on Oʻahu. The fortress-like Puʻukoholā Heiau on the island of Hawaiʻi was built in 1790 prophesizing Kamehameha’s conquest of the islands. In 1810, when King Kaumualiʻi of Kauaʻi agreed to become a tributary kingdom under Kamehameha, that prophecy was finally fulfilled. Kamehameha’s unification of Hawaiʻi was significant not only because it was an incredible feat, but also because under separate rule, the Islands may have been torn apart by competing western interests.

Spending time in Kauai you awake inspired by the rainforest and mountain beauty you are surrounded by, the rumble of the ocean just around the corner. A standout highlight was our eight hour hike along a Napali Coast trail, so richly rewarded with the Hanakapi’ai Falls at the top, with its glistening 300 feet of rainforest water plunging into the pool below and the accomplishment of eight stream crossings in the middle of nowhere with nothing more serious than one foot being soaked through its sole and upper and sock (we each ‘lost one’ to a soaking!).

Other highlights were the array of fish pecking at healthy (reasonably) looking coral reef in such shallow waters snorkeling at Poipu Beach, a quiet afternoon with a long swim at Anini Beach (our favorite, perhaps) and our mellow mornings with coffee or lunch in small old towns like Kilauea in the north and Waimea in the south…and, and, and…on the second last day, finally seeing the curious walk and gander of the endangered Hawaiian goose, the Nene (enjoy this Wikipedia entry).

Aloha, at last…:)