“Well, if yer not gonna take the Luas,” said the man in the Guinness van, upon hearing that we were ‘walkers,’ “You could follow the Liffey.”
Dublin sky
“Of course! The Liffey! Thanks for your help,” we said, and Luke and I set off in the direction the Guinness man (Who better to ask directions to the Guinness Storehouse?) pointed. We congratulated ourselves for our ability to ask for directions (a rarity among American men). “Now all we have to do is follow the Liffey!” I said.
“Wait,” said Luke, “what is a Liffey?”
I did not know. Neither of us, in fact, had any idea what a Liffey was, or how we would go about following it once we had found it. Were they dangerous, these Liffeys? How fast did they go? Would they be okay with us following them? There were a great many questions we hadn’t thought to ask.
You mustn’t fault our lack of foresight – we’d just stepped off a six hour flight, throughout which our stewardess, hearing that Luke had a cold, insisted that both of us drink a hot toddy. Four or five medicinal beverages later, we touched down in Dublin, where you, dear reader, find us in hot pursuit of the Liffey.
“Maybe these trolley tracks are the Liffey,” Luke suggested, “I think he said we could take the Liffey.”
“The Liffey could be a street.”
“Why don’t we take those Liffeys to the Liffey?”
“Look at those Liffeys over there!”
“Watch out for that Liffey!”
Ah, the elusive Liffey, everywhere and nowhere at once.
We’d been walking along a slow, grand river for some time now. “I think we’ll know the Liffey when we see it,” I concluded, snapping a photo of the water under a bridge.
Dublin water
“Yes,” said Luke, “the Liffey was in us all along.”
We continued down the river, daydreaming of the glorious stouts that would flow at the end of our journey, when the Liffey had finally led us to our goal. An old Irishwoman came toward us, and Luke, without a doubt the more sociable of the pair, stopped to ask her, “Excuse me, ma’am, could you tell us what a Liffey is?”
“Wot a Liffey is?” she cried, “why yer walking on it!”
The Liffey was the river. We’d been following it the whole time.
When we reached the Storehouse, we raised a pint in celebration. “To the Liffey,” I said.
“To the Liffey.”
To the Liffey!
*Addendum: Less than an hour after Luke and I left Dublin, the Liffey flooded.
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