Erin go bragh
My sister and I were raised in the Dovre Club, but we’d never set foot in Ireland before
St. Patrick’s Day special edition of Words & Water! 🍀🇮🇪 This was once a whole chapter in my memoir The Muckraker’s Daughter (still on submission!) but got excised for space and flow. It’s a long read about a 1996 father-daughters trip with me, my sister and our dad Warren Hinckle; our San Francisco Irishness; the British occupation of Northern Ireland; sister-bonding; a very literal rock of emotional baggage; and seeing dad’s physical vulnerability up close for the first time. He’d appreciate that I am behind deadline to post this, but I’ve got 16 people coming for corned beef and cabbage tonight and I got distracted. I hope you enjoy it. Erin Go Bragh (Ireland forever!)
Dad had his towel wrapped around his waist and was just starting to write his San Francisco newspaper column, due that morning, when I got to his upper east side apartment at 7:10 am to catch our flight to Ireland. He had been up all night, easier to just stay awake, he said, then try to wake up after only a few hours sleep. This was not a surprise, as his toilette, like everything he did, took an extraordinary amount of time. I packed his bag as he dressed.
“The cab is here,” I urged him futilely. “We don’t want to miss our flight!”
“Jesus, relax will ‘ya?” he said through the steam as he shaved.
Forty-five minutes later, we were speeding downtown to pick up Hilary, my little sister who we all call H.
“I’ll dictate my column from the airport,” he said as he dropped into the backseat of the taxi, finishing off a can of PBR and dropping it to his feet.
Dad had suggested this father-daughters trip, our first ever, for H’s 30th birthday. Given his hefty record of broken promises, we sisters were braced for non-performance but it was special enough to him that he followed through and got his Irish travel agent friend Mary C to book us a car and places to stay in Limerick, Galway, Belfast, and Dublin. For this trip there were no girlfriends, none of his usual entourage, just us three.
Turning 30 was a milestone that dad took seriously. In 1968, when he hit it, dad made his first trip to Ireland, with my mother Denise and their friends Sidney and Elsa Zion. During that trip he found the name for Scanlan’s Monthly, the magazine he and Sidney started the next year (after Ramparts, dad’s best known magazine, declared bankruptcy). At a pub one night, the locals were celebrating the death of one John Scanlan, a pig farmer so hated that he was remembered every death day decades later. Dad had also begun writing his autobiography, “If You Have a Lemon Make Lemonade,” about turning Ramparts magazine from a sleepy Catholic intellectual quarterly into a best-selling new left radical anti-Vietnam war machine.
For my 30th, he’d thrown me a huge surprise party at the Tosca cafe in San Francisco and had the Green Street Mortuary Band play for me. Now it was H’s turn.
“You need to get the fuck out of New York,” he had told her lovingly, worried she was depressed after a breakup. “I’ll take you and Boxcar to Ireland.” We had never been, but dad had raised us Irish in his favorite bars (the Dovre Club was a second home, with the motto “Let’s drink to the end of the British occupation of Northern Ireland” hanging above Paddy Nolan’s bar). In 1981, he took us to protests at the British Consulate as we followed the hunger strikes of Bobby Sands and all the martyrs on Maze Prison’s H Block. Dad had covered Sands’ funeral in Belfast for the Chronicle and Rolling Stone.
On a morning gray and black, Bobby Sands’ mother came to church. The funeral got there before her. Thousands of people gathered silently on a slight hill. She didn’t look up. She had watched her son die by inches and her face was a map of grief. Don’t feel sorry for the hero, feel sorry for his mother.
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The Germanic-sounding Hinckle name had always felt to dad like a teutonic wart on an Irish maiden. Both his parents, Angela Catherine DeVere and Warren James Hinckle Jr., had been Irish. Grandpa Hinckle’s mother was a Boyle, and his grandmother had been an O’Brien. Grandma Hinckle’s mother had been a Noonan and her grandmother a Doherty. He deeply resented his alcoholic father and the unfortunate name he saddled him with. All of dad’s greatest gifts—compassion, dark humor, imagination, storytelling, and drinking—came from the creative underdog that is the Irish psyche. (When I finally did a DNA test years later I discovered that he was right—there is no German blood on his side, only Irish, some Northern Irish, and a smattering of Scottish and English. Where the Hinckle name comes from is still a mystery.)
“Ohhh, ah’m dyin’, ah’m dyin,’” Grandma Hinckle would say in her fabricated brogue in imitation of her grandmother Bridget Doherty as she told us the story of her voyage from Ireland to America in the 1860s. “She was so seasick she was sure she was dying. She lay in her bunk moaning and saying ‘ah’m dying.’ When someone told her she was just seasick, she sat bolt upright, looked them in the eye and said, “Aye am TOO DYIN’!” and that settled that.” She said none of her grandparents ever spoke of the old country and who or why they had left it behind. By the time she was old enough to want to know, there was no one alive left to ask.
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With H aboard, the cab hurled its way towards JFK. I constantly checked my watch and felt sick to my stomach, sure we would miss our flight. It reminded me of being a kid and taking dad, always late, to the airport. Mom would white knuckle drive the white ‘69 Impala convertible with me and H in the backseat, mumbling the whole time that he was going to miss his New York flight (and often he did).
It’s tight, but we make ours. We are the last people to board the Virgin Air flight to London, which is packed. H and I sit across the aisle from dad, giggling like little girls and making fun of his outfit. He is wearing a leather car coat that gives him a 1970s pimp vibe, a gift from his recently-deceased friend Sam Jordan, the legendary African-American bar owner known as “the Mayor of Butchertown.” Dad’s rose-colored sunglasses cover his black eyepatch while his reading glasses hang down over a gray button down shirt tucked into dark green corduroy pants cinched with a silver iguana belt buckle. We christen him “Babar,” after the elephant hero of the 1930s French children’s book series by Jean de Brunoff that he would read to us as kids.
Babar orders many cocktails on the flight while looking through two weeks of unopened mail and making notes for his column, which he now says he will dictate from London.
Babar takes forever to deplane. He HATES to be rushed.
“Do we need assistance?” The British hostess asks.
“No, no,” Babar says, moving glacially as he gathers his many piles, and carefully bends over to pick up his swollen foot and encase it in a ripped canvas tennis shoe.
On the Aer Lingus flight to Shannon, the flight attendant spills Bailey’s Irish cream all over Babar’s leather jacket. He is not pleased, but demands, and gets, a couple travel-sized bottles for his trouble.
At Shannan airport, H and I wait for an hour in the bar while dad dictates his column. We pick up the car, a left-handed stick shift Toyota Camry, and I am the designated driver, being both the only one with a valid driver’s license (for years now dad fortunately only travels by cab) and the only one who knows how to drive stick.
Mary C. meets us at the airport and I follow her to her house in Askeaton, a nearby village. Babar has a drink and then she takes him to a local TV current affairs show. He is to discuss the American perspective on the latest Irish peace talks and “Angela’s Ashes,” the hit memoir by Limerick native Frank McCourt, brother of dad’s old friend Micheal McCourt, one of San Francisco’s most beloved bartenders. Sitting in the guest bed, H and I watch Babar nod off on camera in between questions. Later, we are awakened by the sound of Babar and Mary coming home, loud, drunk and fired up. We all sleep in until 1pm.
Boher, a tiny village east of Limerick is where folk musicians from all over Ireland come to play. The place was rocking with about seven guys playing accordion, fiddle, guitar, flute, wooden spoons, and the bodhrán, a hand-held flat drum played with a wooden mallet when Mary bring us there the next night. Three couples did traditional Irish dancing. We nursed delicious pints of Guinness and stayed until the place closed.
We pack up and drive to Galway the next day to visit Liadain O’Donovan Cook. Liadian has been a close family friend ever since she had the impossible task of being dad’s administrative assistant during Scanlan’s brief run in 1970. Her father was Irish short story writer Frank O’Connor and her husband was Gordon Cook, a well known Bay Area painter. After living in San Francisco for more than 30 years, she had returned to Ireland and retired in Kinvara, a seaside village just south of Galway, where she was restoring a couple of classic Irish thatched-roof cottages.
The roads that aren’t freeways are narrow and flanked everywhere by low stone walls. Liadain explains they are known as “dry walls,” built entirely without mortar, mostly by ancient farmers who needed to clear the rocky soil of, well, rocks, and divide and subdivide tiny bits of land. I think about the geology of western Ireland and what made it thus. That night, we head to her friend’s house for dinner. I park at the end of a line of cars on a narrow dead end road flanked by low walls.
The hosts offer us a feast of local vegetables and grilled lamb. They are local writers, poets, and artists and we drink bottles and bottles of French and Italian wines sitting around a huge wooden farmhouse table. Babar and Liadain entertain us with their magazine war stories. We debate the prospects for a true Irish peace accord and take turns posing for photos in Babar’s leather car coat and sunglasses.
H and I excuse ourselves to get some air. Her 30th birthday is in a few days. She says she feels like maybe it’s time for a change and she should leave New York. She and her boyfriend just broke up. But she loves her theater work. She doesn’t know what to do. She notices a particular rock at the base of the wall near our car, gray-black and oblong. She picks it up to examine it more closely then sets it back down.
I’m inspired.
“Pick up your rock,” I tell my sister. “This rock is a symbol of all the baggage you’re carrying. You need to carry this rock around you until you’re ready to let it all go.”
“What?”
“Pick up your rock,” I insist. She picks it up. It’s heavy and awkward. She is half laughing and half annoyed. Growing up, we both found it useful to drape our vulnerable feelings in laughter, bravado, sardonic irony, and outsized gestures. This is our common language with dad to process feelings that are too raw, or to cover up feeling hurt or vulnerable.
She wants to put the rock in the car as we walk back inside to the party.
“No, no, no,” I say. “The rock stays with you. All the time.”
For the next three days, I made her carry this rock with her everywhere. I tucked it into bed with her at the Galway B&B. I brought it to her in the shower in the morning.
“Where’s your rock?” I demanded when she came downstairs for breakfast. “No coffee until you go get it.” Her eyes shoot daggers. She is over this fucking rock.
“H! Go get your fucking rock!” Babar yells, totally into the extreme nature of this rock burden.
The three of us love bookstores. Besides bars, restaurants, and editorial offices, bookstores are probably the places we’ve spent the most time together. We spent hours browsing at Kenny’s Bookshop in Galway. I buy an Irish history trilogy by playwright and novelist Walter Macken that covers the atrocities of the Cromwellian conquest of the 17th century, the potato famine of the 19th century, and the Easter Rebellion of the early 20th. I find a book on the history of the Irish Palatine— German Protestant families from the Palatine valley encouraged by the Crown to settle in Ireland in the early 1700s. Babar summarized it thus: “They hoped the Germans would breed some Protestant work ethics into the lazy Catholics, but instead they all became drunks within a generation or two.” He liked this potential origin story for a German-Irish Hinckle surname produced from a failed British attempt to override Irish Catholic culture.
We dine at an Indian restaurant near the hotel that night and Babar interviews the rock.
Babar: So, Mr. Rock, what brings you to Ireland?
Rock: I’m exploring my roots.
Babar: What do you think about the latest peace accord prospects?
Rock: Don’t hold your breath.
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That night Babar is taken ill. We are all sharing a room with two queen beds and a large bathroom with two sinks. Through the closed bathroom door we can hear vomiting, moans, gurgles, and assorted gags and dry heaves.
“Dad, are you OK?” I ask through the door.
“Fuckin’ Indians are trying to kill me!”
H and I nervous-laugh at his excruciating noises. We are both worried, knowing how much he has abused his body with the booze and his lifestyle and how much pain he endures from his scoliosis, spinal stenosis, the cracked and swelling feet, and the swollen joints. I know that much of his suffering comes from his advancing alcoholism, but we don’t speak of it. As Grandma Hinckle once said of her son, “A leopard doesn’t change his spots.” There is not a world in which either of us can imagine our father without alcohol.
The next morning, he has an insane sinus attack, complete with phlegm waterfall, and we can barely get in the bathroom to brush our teeth. The gagging and heaving are extraordinary. I feel helpless and scared. His physical fragility is shocking to me. He’s always been a lion of a man, indestructible, unsinkable, untamable. Now? All I can do is laugh because for everything my father has put me through, I can’t imagine a world without him.
Dad tells us he is staying in to rest and sends us out. We bring him bottles of water and gatorade and something from the pharmacy for food poisoning and diarrhea. H and I buy matching Celtic cross necklaces (which we will wear to his funeral twenty years later), silver claddagh rings, and locally-made wool sweaters and hats. We come back to check on him and there is a note taped to the bathroom mirror:
GONE TO THE PUB. FUCKING INDIANS!!
The next day is H’s 30th birthday and he is feeling better. We drive north, along the coast between Sligo and Donegal. Some of our ancestors are from this area, we believe. It’s wild, rocky and beautiful. H says she feels like the time and place are right to let go of her rock.
“Pull over here,” she says, pointing to a turnout at the edge of a low cliff overlooking the North Atlantic Ocean. Dad and I stand by the car as she walks alone to the edge with her rock.
“Arghhhh!!!” She yells as she throws it out and away.
We all walk up to the edge and look over. It is low tide. We can see her rock sitting below in the mud.
“Hmmm,” H says and we all nod. Our baggage always finds our forwarding address and waits for us there.
Leaving the rock behind, we drive east to Belfast. I’m driving in the fast lane of the two-lane freeway when I see flashing lights. The car is unmarked, so I assume it wants to pass Italian-style, and I move into the slow lane. The car rides my tail, flashing its headlights again, then speeds up alongside me and two men flash their badges and point for me to pull over.
This is the Royal Ulster Constabulary, Northern Ireland’s militarized police.
“Shit,” I say to dad, who is sitting in the backseat with a prominent BOYCOTT BUSHMILLS pin on his jacket and a pile of Irish nationalist books and magazines on the seat next to him. The two twenty-something commandos suspiciously eye my U.S. driver’s license and inspect all of our passports. They ask where we’ve been, who we’ve seen, and where we are headed. They tell me, I violated a driving rule that only allows people to pass in the fast lane, not travel.
“Oh my God, I am SO sorry, I totally didn’t realize that,” I say in my best California Girl voice, trying to be non-threatening and coy (not an easy task for me) as H smiles brightly at the lads with her red hair shining in the sudden sunlight. Dad stays stone faced and silent behind his sunglasses.
No smiles.
“You know, we have the right to take you into detention and hold you for 48 hours,” the tall one says.
“That would mean we would miss our flight tomorrow back to San Francisco,” I say.
“Show me your plane ticket,” he says. We give him our plane tickets, which he takes along with our passports and returns to their car.
After making us sweat for another ten minutes, he comes back and hands us our documents and tells me to drive better. They take off, peeling rubber that leaves a bitter taste in our mouths. We agree we were targeted because of the Irish license plates on our rental car.
In Belfast, H and I do a quick tour of the Botanical Gardens, while dad reads in the nearest pub. We head to Falls Road in the Catholic quarter. There are no trees anywhere and dark vibes everywhere. We park in front of one of the “Peace Walls” that separated the Catholic Irish Republicans from the Protestant Unionists. It looks like a prison wall, concrete and topped with razor wire. Dad knocks on the door of one of many identical row houses. Inside, all the windows have blackout curtains. We sit around the kitchen table with dad’s IRA buddies and have tea and biscuits. Most of these men, and some of the women, have lived in San Francisco off and on for years. They are back to care for aging parents, or because of green card troubles. Dad passed a small but hefty envelope across the table.
We are happy to shake off the heaviness of Belfast and drive two hours to Dublin, where we return the rental car and stay in an airport hotel. Dad goes to the bar while H and I engineer all the Irish wool sweaters, blankets, and books into our suitcases.
We are at the airport impossibly early the next day, which makes dad crabby until he buys the papers and settles in at the bar. H and I hit the Duty Free shopping for last-minute souvenirs and lose track of time. Suddenly dad appears, flushed from running around, and looking genuinely harried.
“There you guys are! What the fuck! Hurry up! We’re going to miss our flight!”
We almost fall down laughing that HE is worried about missing a plane.
I can’t believe the size of your sister’s rock! 🪨
So much love here, Pia. Conflicted, which makes it all the more real.