I’m running out of the bathroom on the wrong platform when the train pulls into the station. I have to book it through the tunnel underneath the tracks and double-step the stairs back up, weaving through nonchalant comers and goers whose heads become fixed and turn when I rush past them. Part of this makes me feel just a little bit like a jackass, but hey, everyone’s boarding, and I already dropped six euros for my ticket.

I spot them as they’re all stepping into the end car. Four of them: two thick-accented lads in their twenties from Belgium and France, the Belgian a little easier to understand; a good ol’ country boy you’d think was a linebacker from Iowa; and a fellow upstater from Rochester.

All of them good guys that I consider friends at this point in my time in Ireland. Little lost fish who found each other swimming alone and buddied up in the big empty ocean.

First to establish some familiarity and support in this new place, but now our gung-ho company is a given, and it goes without saying that we would share these experiences with each other.

I sort of speed walk to the end car and find them sitting at the back wall. A woman in here early twenties, studying at Trinity College, enters the car, looks around, and sits by us without saying anything. In fact, none of us are really talking. The woman is sitting across from me, so when the train starts moving she’s travelling backward, and I’m taken aback by how bitingly good looking she is. It takes me a minute to find the right word for it: refined. Alright.

It doesn’t seem like the right time for conversation. Nobody’s moving and there seems to be this acute self-awareness everyone’s feeling that keeps us in our seats, mouths shut and eyes pointed out the windows. All the guys seem alert for something. I’m pretty sure my expression looks jaded and dull. I’m very tired. I take a sip of coffee from a thermos in my backpack.

The doors close and the train lurches forward just like the subways in New York do. We’re sailing over the City Centre, where everything’s set in brick and cobblestone, over the River Lifey and onward North. Every other store down below is a phone repair shop, and the rest of the buildings are casinos, traditional sounding pubs with names ending in “Beer Garden,” used book stores and poison remedial clinics. But eventually the urban core of Dublin fizzles out into the industrial peripheral, where shipping containers are stacked fifty feet high and crumbled buildings are commemorated in graffiti, with thick mucus green vines weaving around the outer walls. The world is flat and dying here.

We cross over a river with a Honda half submerged in it, nose down, the trunk door wide open and pointing up into the sky. The woman sitting across from me says vaguely that this reminds her of the Meadowlands in New Jersey, her head tilted lazily toward the window. The guys and I make conversation with her, Carry, verging on 23, and we learn that she’s from a military family, that she’s lived in Rome, Japan, Germany, Hawaii, and about nine other states that were too nondescript and fleeting for even her to remember, though her current home is Colorado Springs.

She doesn’t take me for someone who’s very patriotic; she seems displaced and driftless and has a wholesome kind of young energy to her speech that gets destroyed when you’re pinned down with a narrow history that patriots are plagued with.

Still, her movements and readjustments are economic and don’t call too much attention to herself. I like that. We all chat it up as the train moves closer to the rim of the ocean, and out one window there is the beautiful Irish Sea, and out the other window are graffiti tagged walls that keep stringing along the track and go on for miles.

We pull into Howth in under an hour. It’s not a place you would think is still within Dublin city limits; leaving the train station leads you right onto the boardwalk, where rainbow colored sailboats—one with sails with Snoopy poised heroically with a red scarf around his neck, flapping loosely in the wind—sit docked in the bay, and farther out a rogue island that rises steeply into mountains, right out of the sea. Up and down the main drag beside the boardwalk are seafood eateries and tourist centers, housed in immaculate Georgian capes. It feels like a quaint, isolated village you’d find “Up North,” more in the symbolic sense of it than strictly its literal location, like a breezy, English named town on the coast of Maine that you’d wind up in if you started in New York with a full tank of gas and stopped when you ran out.

The wind’s starting to pick up, so one of the guys says, “We should get going,” but we take a minute to figure what it is we should get going to. None of us are that hungry yet, so we decide to head toward the mountains that loom away from the village. We start heading toward them with our rain jacket hoods up to stave off the now pelting wind, and soon we reach the point where the boardwalk breaks out into the sea, hook shaped, leading perhaps a full kilometer way out, forming something of a storm barrier for the harbor.

We take some pictures here and continue on, heading up the main road that thins and winds up a steep incline away from the ocean. I think it’s now become a one way road, but two cars heading in opposite directions come toward one another and barely miss snapping each other’s side mirrors off when they pass on. What look like farm houses sit just beside the road, their doors way too small and comical.

It feels like I’ve stumbled into an Italian back street, the homes here and bends of the street feel entirely unIrish.

We keep stopping intermittently to take pictures, of the Island way out to sea at different angles, the huge walled-in yards of millionaire philanthropists, of the jagged rocks taking on waves so many feet below and the crags that break up the cliffs. All of this is very Mediterranean, evocative of Sicilian islands or the California coast.

We lose Carry as she stays back to photograph her eyes out, and I have a feeling we’ll come upon her again under unexpecting circumstances. The road opens into a scantly filled parking lot, and then ends where the dirt trails begin, leading up into the massive hills. The trails branch off into the ferns and tall grass in all directions, some skirting the edges of the cliffs, and others leading deeper into the hills where the farmland resides.

The wind’s really howling now with the elevation. We opt to take one of the path’s skirting the cliffs. It hasn’t rained that day, but there is a stream of water running down the center of the path, which we have to waddle up with our legs split, one foot shuffling on either side of the stream. This path breaks into three more, and we take the one running closest to the cliff. Much of the tall grass looks wadded up in dead brown clumps, but somehow this adds to the serenity, the authenticity of the place. We stop and take pictures on wide ledges that slant toward the sea but aren’t too steep to stand on.

They turn out to be great vantage points to get a fuller, God-like view of the town below, and the distant islands that we couldn’t see before.

I take a candid picture of Yaro, the one from Rochester, as he stands at the very edge of one of these ledges, looking out, hands in the pockets of his peacoat, and his blonde hair taking with the wind; an image that seems too right to be true. We move on, reach an extension of rocks that goes out some ways to a tip. I have a little edge in me now, so I crawl out there crab style and reach the point, peering over the edge to the crashing water 100 feet below. I make my way back to the path, and we all move on.

Dam and Victor, the Belgian and French, respectively, mutter to each other in French as we reach the end of the path, where there is another rock ledge for us to look out on. We take our obligatory pictures, then head back the way we came, our final option being to go farther inward to the highest mountain. I run ahead up that mountain, so I can privately urinate at the top, and my shoes get completely sullied by the muddy stream that comes down from there and weaves onto the main path near the parking lot.

I get up there, the wind just beating the hell out of me, and pee in the only shielded place there; a thorn bush. I come out unscathed and look out at the highest rock at that highest point. It’s a view that many people die for. The colors of the landscape, the islands, the sea, and the hard wind make me think of this place being bombed in a WWII raid.

It seems like that kind of place where that’d happen, where the German’s might have dropped firebombs at one point. Violent winds breed violent thoughts, I guess.

The rest of the guys reach the top behind me. A few “wows” are cast into the wind from middle distance. Yaro stands in that stoic way, looking out. Chris, the Iowan, sits upon a rock, holding himself. Dam and Victor continue speaking in French. A painting of this sight seems implied, a natural part of it. Eventually, the two of them quiet down, and we all gaze out in silent comradery. Some knot’s been tide or some rock’s been overturned in life. This what I’m thinking, looking out at the sea. I can’t explain what I mean by rocks or knots, but it’s what I’m thinking. Then we head back down the mountain.

About halfway down, we see Carry stomping through the brush, completely limitless and on her own trajectory. She’s not even following one of the paths. I watch her arms and body disappear over slants and bushes as we continue down, and then she steps onto the path and waves at us from a distance.

She waits, and when we reach her, she asks, “Is it worth it?”

“Yeah,” Yaro says. “Yeah it is.”

We head back to town as she goes up the mountain. We scour the harbor for a good place to drink and head toward a place at the far end of the street that looks like it says “FREE BEER” on the window. But when we get closer, we see that it says “FREE wi-fi, cold BEER”, but we all go in anyway. It’s a touristy place with 80s New Wave music playing unfittingly, and we all order pints of Guinness and fish and chips because it seems like the thing to do. I didn’t know the chips would be French fries or that the fried cod would sit in my stomach so heavily after consumption. We pay and leave a marginal tip split between the five of us. The waiter says “cheers” as we leave.

My tolerance is pretty low, so I’m a little buzzed walking out onto the harbor again. We head over to the market and talk to a man selling sunglasses, who tells us an abbreviated story about when he went to America and got arrested in Pittsburgh for some mild misdemeanor. But he tells us “cheers” like everyone else when we leave. All this repetition makes me feel like I’m getting a hang of this place.

The wind has died down now that we’re at sea level, but it’s still going, it’s still kicking us in the pants. But we don’t go inside. We just go back to where the boardwalk juts out into the sea and we sit there, looking out, feeling this is correct somehow, just sitting there and scanning the water, knowing this moment will be lost in time, never to be replicated, but always to be remembered.