It was nearly a year ago when my father first told me about Ireland’s Eye. We were at our cottage on a hot and lazy summer day, motorboats buzzing by and Sea-Doos thump-thump-thumping over any wakes they could find, and Dad was sitting in a lawn chair on our deck, absorbed in another book. That’s what he’s like: he’s either reading everything in sight, or he’s off on some adventure, climbing a mountain or crossing a lake somewhere in the Yukon or Alaska or Timbuktu. And when he’s not doing that, he’s planning something. The book he was reading that day was about Newfoundland and I could tell he was getting an idea because he was tapping his foot, and then, and this is always the biggest giveaway, he started vibrating his whole leg. Suddenly he jumped up, ran into the cottage, and came out again, the screen door slamming behind him. My dad is old-fashioned about a lot of things. He was carrying a map in his hand and soon had it spread out on the deck, holding it in place by leaning over it on all fours like a kid. I saw his finger trace something and then stop decisively. He lowered his head closer to the map and smiled.
“That’s it,” he said excitedly.
I had been walking the other way on the deck, trying to decide whether I wanted to go for another swim or listen to some tunes on Mom or Dad’s phone, but I couldn’t miss this.
“What are you doing, Dad?” I asked.
“Nothing.”
That’s my pop, forty-five years old and going on ten.
“What are you doing?”
You have to get his attention.
“I’m looking at a map of Newfoundland.”
I came up to him and peered over his shoulder. His finger was pressed so firmly onto the map that it was turning white at the tip. I squatted down to see what he was pointing at. He hardly noticed.
Newfoundland looked to me like the head of a moose, with a single thick antler going up at a cool angle, while down at his neck there were things hanging down, like whatever those things are on a rooster’s neck. My father had his finger just above them and almost out in the Atlantic Ocean, at the eastern end of the land. At the tip of his finger I saw a little island and then a smaller one. I leaned even closer, my cheek resting against Dad’s wrist. “Ireland’s Eye,” it read.
“What’s that? What’s Ireland’s Eye?”
When my father is interested in something a jet airplane could fly a foot over the cottage and he wouldn’t even notice, unless of course the vibrations disturbed whatever he was looking at. So I resorted to desperate measures. I moved the map.
“Hey!” he said. “What are you doing?”
“What’s Ireland’s Eye?” I asked again.
He stared at me blankly for a moment. “Did you just ask me that?”
I smiled at him.
“Sorry. Uh…it’s an island in Trinity Bay in Newfoundland, almost out in the Atlantic.”
“And you think it’s cool, don’t you, Dad?”
“It’s very cool.”
“Why?”
“Well, first of all because it’s an island, and you know I like islands. And secondly because no one lives there. And thirdly….”
My father is a lawyer, but he wishes he wasn’t. He loves dramatic things and he likes to be dramatic himself, at least at home. At work he is John A. Maples, respected barrister and solicitor, always very serious, and bored. As he told me about Ireland’s Eye, he paused with all the drama he could muster, and then said:
“…because…right at its centre…way out there, on the edge of the Atlantic Ocean…there’s a ghost town!”
And that was when I knew I had to go there.
I didn’t know why. It didn’t make any sense for a twelve-year-old to go out into the ocean in a kayak, not with the waves and swells I would have to face. And it seemed pretty well impossible that my parents would let me go, especially Mom: she would freak out if I even brought up the idea. She’d go herself, of course. If Dad was going, she’d be there.
But something was telling me I had to see Ireland’s Eye too, not a voice or anything like that, just a feeling, something that made goosebumps come out on my skin and made me feel funny in my stomach when Dad said, “…way out there, on the edge of the Atlantic Ocean…there’s a ghost town!” I knew there was something on that island I just had to see.
“You’re going, aren’t you, Dad?”
“You bet, Dylan. By this time next year, we’ll be turning that corner out of the windswept waves of the Atlantic and looking up at the serene beauty of Ireland’s Eye, a vision of what has been in the distance.”
My father can get poetic when he’s in the mood. “Next year, eh?”
But he was lost in the map again, seeing himself battling the ocean, feeling the first sighting of the ghost town on the hill.
Next August I would be thirteen years old. I had a whole year of growing, of maturing, of learning to be a good kayaker and an excellent swimmer. But most importantly I had a year to convince them that I should go too. As for Ireland’s Eye, whatever it was that drew me grew stronger with every day.
Both Dad and I needed something to distract us that year. My grandfather had died in the spring and we both missed him terribly. Grandpa had been just about my best friend. Saturday nights in the winter we often got together at his house to watch hockey. We rarely missed a game. Grandma had never been a hockey fan, Mom thought it was too violent (I don’t know what she based that on, since I don’t think she ever saw a single game), and Dad felt that watching anything was a waste of time. “Why watch what you can do?” he used to say, though he never played the game.
So Grandpa and I were a little island of excitement on hockey nights at his house, with a calm, rational, slightly disapproving sea of sensible relatives all around us. We loved the colour, the speed, the courage, and the inventiveness of what we watched, and for those few hours we were like one person, and I think that person was very young.
The only thing we disagreed about was the history of the game. I wasn’t very impressed by stories about old players who would never play again. I loved what was happening now, what was speeding around in front of me on the TV. That was it. Grandpa knew this and tolerated it, and he tried to find ways to make me listen to his stories. A Gordie Howe story, for example, would start with, “You know, Sidney Crosby is pretty good, only Howe was better. I recall the time…” and off he would go, while I shut my ears and watched Crosby rocket-power down the ice, leave a defenceman in his vapour trail, fire a laser into the top corner, and pump his fist in the air as a funky bass line throbbed through the arena.
Grandpa was born in the 1930s, but it was the ’40s and early ’50s he loved to talk about. That was when the Leafs were the undisputed kings. Six Stanley Cups in ten years, led by a gentleman without peer named Syl Apps, the heroic young “Billy the Kid” Barilko, frozen in time and immortal at the tender age of twenty-four, and of course, Grandpa’s favourite, Teeder Kennedy. Hard-driving, never-say-die number nine, the glorious captain. The spirit of Teeder Kennedy, in Grandpa’s eyes, was still alive and well.
I heard all of this and much more, time after time. I nodded my head as we watched TV, and his stories went in one ear and quickly out the other.
“The history of the game,” Grandpa would say, “has to be valued. History should be valued throughout life. The people who came before us made important contributions.”
“Sure, sure,” I said to myself, stifling a yawn, “but they’re dead.”
And now…so was he.
I missed him at my own games. We were both centres and we used to talk about why it was the best position. You had so much more freedom. And you had to be a good skater, none of this up and down the wing, or stay at home and mind your own zone. Wingers and defencemen had to put up with that, but we were free to use our imaginations on the ice. A centreman can almost feel the wind in his face, even in a stuffy arena. We can skate anywhere: up and down, behind the net, in front of it, crisscrossing back and forth, moving the play in one direction or turning it around and sending it the other way. The game always has a flow to it, whether it be fast, slow, or jerky, and centres can join it, work in it or against it, even slip in and out of it. Grandpa used to say that a centreman was the artist on the team, but a tough artist, of course.
I had a pretty good season, despite missing him. And I know what it was that made me play well. It was Ireland’s Eye. I’d look for Grandpa at the spot in the rink over the penalty box where he used to stand, a cup of coffee in his hand, never shouting, just watching me closely. For an instant I’d be shocked not to see him. Then I’d remember he was gone, so I’d think of Ireland’s Eye.
To get there I would have to have the strength, skills, and maturity of an adult, and it would have to show. So even on the ice I worked at being more grown up: I took fewer penalties, I was more of a team player, I took power skating lessons, and spent hours practicing my wrist shot. Gone were the temper tantrums, the big celebrations after a goal, and all the board-banging slapshots. Dad didn’t know much about hockey, but I convinced him to come to a few games, and on the way to the rink I’d talk about how the more mature players performed. Then I tried to show him that I was that sort of player. I doubted at first that he noticed. I’d look over at him and he’d have his usual dreamy look on his face, his mind off in the clouds thinking up another adventure. But one day on the way home he surprised me.
“Dylan, I see what you mean.”
He is given to that sort of comment: just blurting out something that doesn’t seem to be related to anything that anyone has said for the last year or so. I gave him my blank look, the one I use when he says that kind of thing.
“Oh, explanation, right? I mean that I see what you’re saying about playing hockey in a mature way. You’re doing it. Keep up the good work.”
And that was all he said. But I soared. I doubt he knows how I soared. I could have lifted right out through the closed sunroof of the spotless Jeep he drives.
That’s the first step, I thought to myself. I’m on my way to Ireland’s Eye.
The following week I made my next move. This time I worked on Mom. It seemed to me that that was a good strategy. Once I’d sprung the question on them, I didn’t want one of them trying to convince the other that I should go. No, I wanted both parental units on side at the same time and well aware that I was prepared for the trip.
A lot of Dad’s adventures are on water, but Mom’s the best swimmer. She was excellent in high school and university and just missed going to the Olympics by a hundredth of a second or something like that. She was the one who taught me to swim, and she used all sorts of ways to get me to have proper technique and even tried some motivational things on me. I can remember her talking for hours about an “approach” called “visualization.” But I just wanted to swim and have fun, so right from the beginning I only messed around in the water. I had her genes, I guess, and it came to me easily, but I never took it too seriously and I suppose I could have been much better.
“Mom,” I said to her one day when she had a moment, “I’d like to take swimming lessons.”
Well, the look on her face should have been captured by a camera. She had this stunned expression and seemed to stare right through me as if someone on the other side of my head had spoken to her using my face.
“I thought I just heard you say you’d like to take swimming lessons,” she said and laughed. “I’m sorry, what did you really say?” My mom is like that. She’s a bit of a card, though a lot of the things she says that are funny are usually a little critical too: sarcastic, as they call it. I think it’s because she’s trying to keep Dad and me in line. We’re both dreamers, I guess, and she has to put our feet on the ground from time to time. I think it’s also her way of getting close to me. She’s not a touchy-feely sort of mom, thank god, at least not constantly. Every now and then she gets into a bit of cuddling, but for the most part she just tries to kid me and pokes me in the ribs and that sort of thing. It’s like she’s telling me I’m not a little boy anymore, as if I’m on my way to becoming a man. But there are still some days, when she’s particularly busy with her work, that I catch her looking over at me a lot with sappy looks, like she’d like to spend the whole day hugging me. She doesn’t seem like a kidder then. On those days I try to keep my eye on her, in case of a surprise attack.
But I didn’t need to worry today. She was in full joker mode.
“That’s what I said,” I told her in the most serious voice I could muster. “I’d like to take swimming lessons.”
“Excuse me, but have you seen my son Dylan around?”
Good old Mom.
“Mom, I’m serious.” Another very mature voice, matched with my most adult look.
My mother is always in a rush. She runs a private school downtown for parents who want their children to get what she calls an “alternative education.” Don’t ask me what that is. But it keeps her pretty busy. It isn’t often that she or Dad actually sit and talk with me, except at dinner, of course. But this time I had Mom down for the count. I had Laura S. Maples exactly where I wanted her.
“Have a seat, Mr. Serious,” she said. She looked at me for about a minute straight. I tried another grave expression.
“What do you want?” she finally said.
“Mo-om!”
“Okay, okay.” Another pause. “Swimming lessons, Dylan? Are you sure?”
“I want to better myself, Mom.”
She almost laughed. That wasn’t a good sign. And yet I had the feeling we were moving in the right direction.
By the end of January my hockey team was in first place, I’d been named team captain and I was, much to my mother’s shock, the best swimmer in my swimming class. It was time for my next move.
In a way this move had started in September, but I knew Mom and Dad hadn’t really noticed. They aren’t bad parents as parental units go and if I have any problems they’re always there to help. They often tell me how much they love me (I could do with a little less of that in public places), they hardly ever raise their voices at me, and they talk a lot about “giving me space” and “respecting me,” and they do. But sometimes I wish they’d just haul off and yell at me. All their nice comments, which they make even when they’re gritting their teeth because I’m really bugging them, can start to sound like they’re taken from a book or something. I’d prefer it if they’d really notice what I’m doing, and then look me straight in the eye and tell me if it sucked. Anyway, this is a roundabout way of saying that they hadn’t clued in to how much better I’d been doing at school lately and how much more time I’d been spending on homework. As usual, I had to spring it on them. For my target, I picked Mom again. She gave me the perfect opportunity.
Her car was running in the driveway when I got home that day and as I came through the front door she was banging around in the upper hallway, trying to get on the latest shoes her chiropractor had given her. I waited at the bottom of the stairs, smiling, my plan in place. Down the stairs she came, ready to fly out the door.
“Hi, sweetheart,” she said, breathless. “Love you.” That meant she was about to kiss me, hug me, and disappear. But I knew better.
“You need to see this,” I said, using another very serious, mature expression. (I was getting better at those.)
She really did have to go. A board meeting or something like that. But when she saw the report card and heard my tone of voice, she knew she had to spend a moment with me. I could feel her frustration, but she smiled at me and did a wonderful job of hiding it. My mom would hang out with me all the time if her schedule let her, but she can’t and that really upsets her. She plucked the card away from me, glanced at it and handed it back. Then she snatched it away again.
“This,” she snapped, “is a forgery!”
I didn’t take the bait. Instead I just waited, silent. That was the first time I’d ever seen my mother a bit flustered in my presence. She looked at me in a strange way.
“Let me know when you see Dylan around. I’d like to talk to him.”
But it was an old joke and she knew it. So she gave up. Putting her hands on my shoulders she spoke in a voice she had never used with me before. It was the adult-to-adult tone I often heard when she was talking business on the telephone.
“You are growing up, Dylan,” she said. “You are maturing right in front of my eyes.”
Bingo.
Later, lying in bed in the darkness, strengthening my wrists by squeezing two parts of a rubber ball I had cut in half, I heard my parents talking in the kitchen. I slipped out of bed, pulled the door open a crack, and listened. They were discussing the improvement in my marks and how I seemed to be so different lately. My plan was working perfectly.
But I still had more to do. For the next phase I went after Dad again.
Every spring Dad rented a small indoor public pool in a little town just north of the city and practiced kayaking. He always went late at night just after public swimming had ended. Mom didn’t go with him very often. She wasn’t a kayaking fanatic and felt that the practice she had every summer at the cottage was enough. But occasionally Dad would ask me to come along, on the days when he knew the lifeguard had to be in the office and didn’t have a direct view of the pool. I was to be the alarm bell should any emergency happen during one of his fancy manoeuvres, such as the rolls he loved to work on. So I trudged along with him, sullen and resentful about losing a night to such dreary duty, content to lie on the floor at one end of the pool listening to music on my earbuds or reading a comic book. He’d splash around like a kid, throwing water up over the edge, taking everything so seriously you’d swear he was doing this for some sort of world championship.
I didn’t wait for him to ask me that spring.
“Dad,” I said to him one day in late February, a good six weeks before he usually rented the pool, “when are we going kayaking?”
Well, that got his attention, let me tell you. Though his head was buried in some mountain-climbing magazine that would normally arrest his attention the way a loaded gun pointed between the eyeballs would focus anyone else’s, he turned to me immediately. His head snapped around as though I’d just mentioned that I was a Tyrannosaurus rex. It wasn’t just that I’d asked about kayaking practice and asked so cheerfully, it was the fact that I’d said “we.”
“Huh?” he said, looking very stunned.
I smiled as pleasant a smile as I had in my repertoire. “When are we going kayaking, Dad?”
“Kayaking? You and me? Kayaking?”
“I can hardly wait.”
“You can hardly wait?” he repeated in a monotone, that stunned look not entirely gone from his face.
“Let’s start earlier this year, Dad.”
And so we went together just a few weeks later, my dad so amazed that I don’t think he really believed I would show up for our first practice. But when the day arrived so did I, right on time, waiting in the Jeep as he climbed in shaking his head. Every week for the rest of that spring the two of us splashed around in that pool like a pair of children, threatening to flood the whole building.
By the time we were ready to go to the cottage that summer my stroke was stronger, I felt at home in the kayak and I could roll it nearly as well as Dad. Occasionally, while he was working on something, I’d swim a few laps in the pool, going as hard as I could, making as much noise as I could, churning up the water like a speedboat. I could feel him watching me, his mouth wide open.
My friends thought I was nuts too. I didn’t really have time to do the things I used to do anymore. Things like killing time playing video games. That really ticked off Rhett and the Bomb. That’s Rhett Norton and Bomb Connors, my two best buds, a slightly thick defenceman and a right winger with a big boomer of a slapshot. They used to love the nights when Dad was off kayaking at the pool on his own and Mom was at a meeting. We had the TV, the fridge, and anything else we wanted in the house all to ourselves. We were in heaven.
But I guess it almost seemed to them like I had changed overnight. Before long they were bugging me about all the homework I was doing and why I was doing it, and when they got really peeved they even called me a suck about my marks. But I knew they were impressed that I was team captain now, and I’m sure that once or twice when I called I actually caught them working late at night on their own school work, though they denied it every time.
“What’s with you and this Ireland’s Eye thing anyway?” asked Rhett one day as he and the Bomb stood at my door with their boards, unable to coax me out for a little skate down to the mall. I’d told them and only them (you can never be too careful) about my Ireland’s Eye project almost the day after Dad showed me the map, and every day since then. I guess they were getting pretty sick of it. (To be honest, I also told my other best bud, Jason Li, left winger, good moves…and Terry Singh too, but goalies are good at keeping secrets.)
“Yeah,” said Bomb. “All it is is a little island somewhere in Newfie land. We can’t waste this whole summer. We’re going to be grade eights next year, man, we’ve got to have some serious fun before school. You can’t go back in September and say you spent all your time in Nowheresville. Look at all the things we could do if you didn’t go.”
“Remember last year, when John A. and Laura S. were out west climbing that friggin’ mountain?” said Rhett. “Your grandparents were pretty cool about letting you do things. And we’re a year older now.”
“Grandpa’s dead, okay?” I snapped, never pleased when that subject came up.
“Then stay with your grandmother, Maples, she’s a pushover!”
“I’m going to Ireland’s Eye,” I said firmly.
They just didn’t understand. I suppose in a way I didn’t either, so it was hard to blame them. But somehow I knew that exploring that strange island was going to be so much better than playing video games all summer, or skateboarding until we dropped, or even going to a few Blue Jays games. It was just something I had to do. Rhett and the Bomb and Jason and Terry would still be at home when I got back. They’d forgive me and we could do the same things we’d done before. But Ireland’s Eye…way out there, on the edge of the Atlantic Ocean, there’s a ghost town…it was like something from a dream.
So, I kept working on getting there.
About a month into the cottage season, during which time I swam and kayaked every day, Mom and Dad gathered on the deck to plot the trip to Newfoundland.
I was in the water when I heard them say those two magical words. Ireland’s Eye. I knew my moment had come. It was time to put it all together.
As I paddled quickly towards the shore their voices grew louder. They were talking about how difficult it would be to get from Random Island across the Thoroughfare to their little gem-like destination in the ocean. They sounded excited. Then they spoke of the Eye itself, and of the ghost town on the hill in the old harbour. I docked the kayak and got out.
My heart beat faster as I walked up the little incline towards them, carrying the kayak. They were seated at a table, their backs towards me, talking now about legends and rumours and history. I stepped up onto the deck and dropped the kayak loudly, almost knocking it into the table. They both looked up.
“I’m going with you,” I said clearly, looking both of them in the eye.
Mom and Dad opened their mouths at the same instant, a “no” forming on their lips. But something stopped them. They looked at each other. It seemed to me that it was only then that they realized what I had been doing these last twelve months. And they knew my plan had worked.
I was going to Ireland’s Eye.