SEPTEMBER 25, 2025 – Today my wife and her traveling companions (three of her cousins) arrived back from a 12-day sojourn in Ireland.
Early this morning I checked on the flight status to see if the seven-hour trip was delayed in getting under way. It had departed as scheduled. Three hours later I checked again and saw that by then it was flying over Quebec, with the anticipated arrival about 20 minutes ahead of (the padded) schedule.
I’ve not been to Ireland, but I have flown over Quebec and remember being transfixed by the appearance of the earth below—rocky, full of lakes and rivers, and devoid of civilization; earth largely untouched by humankind. Today when I looked at the map of Quebec, I saw not the features of the once glaciated half of what we now call North America, but routine: the routine route of a routine aircraft making a routine passage from the place whence came legions of the Irish poor, which meant, of course, the Irish Catholics, abused by the English, who happened to be English. I’d read about their hardships, the trials of their crossing to America, and their tribulations upon landing in the New World. Whenever I meet a Patrick O’Leary or a Megan Kelly, I think of the suffering in their genealogical trees, no matter how many generations of American branches preceded them. And I marvel at their resilience.
As I age I marvel at many things that in prior years struck me as unremarkable or to which I was oblivious. The flight from Dublin to the Twin Cities would’ve been one of them. Even back in the day, as it were, the plane ride from Ireland to Minnesota—or at least to Boston, New York or Chicago—was just one of thousands of international flights every day of the year. On the other hand, today’s ability of anyone with internet access to check on the status of any of those flights, would’ve been mind-boggling and mind-blowing—until, of course, there was an internet with a gazillion sites that we all take for granted and howl when service is interrupted, however briefly.
Today what I found so amazing once I’d thought about it was the ease with which my wife and her cousins got themselves from the Emerald Island to the Land of 10,000 Lakes. By contrast, the Irish immigrants of yore endured a range of hardships from grueling to the unspeakable. And once they got here, there was more pain and suffering, often with a mix of cruelty and hopelessness. (See the Irish section of the Tenement Museum in Manhattan’s Lower East Side.) At no time could any of those poor souls go online and check on the status of their prospects. They had little choice but to fight and suffer through.
As I pondered what we now view so nonchalantly, I took two steps back and considered the larger context of time, distance, and social/technological evolution. I thought about the ant I saw several days ago up at the Red Cabin. I was outside scrubbing some old lumber for my Pergola-on-a-Platform project. As I rested a clean piece against a patio chair, I noticed a solitary tiny ant hauling a grain of something across a patio stone. The grain was not even the size of a grain of sand, but for the ant it was big baggage. The insect’s movements suggested a level of thoughtful determination beyond mere instinct.
At first the ant’s almost anthropomorphic mission seemed wildly counter-intuitive. How could an ant—and a tiny one at that—with a brain a fraction of the size of a grain of sand function in any respect like me, a huge looming figure of the homo sapiens persuasion casting a long shadow over the patio in the late afternoon sun and with a brain a billion times bigger than that whole entire (tiny) ant—body, brain, and baggage all? To harbor such a thought, I suddenly realized was a sign of uniquely human insecurity.
This uncomfortable feeling soon yielded to a reminder, however, that the ratio of my physical size and brain power to that of the ant was for all practical purposes one-to-one when juxtaposed to the ratio of the size and power of the universe to the size and power of my thoughts and being. From a mere 500 feet above the earth, for crying out loud, I am not a man or an eggman and I’m certainly no walrus. I’m an ANT! And from 10,000 feet—well below the cruising altitude of a jetliner—I’m physically no more visible than my thoughts are detectable. From the surface of the moon . . . I’ll stop right there, before I’ve even left the gravitational pull of my (tiny) planet.
Today I recalled this little episode with the ant and how that experience had flipped my perspective vis-à-vis the ant. Likewise, I thought, time has so diminished the past that it’s all but cleared our memories of our forebears’ struggles and strivings. All that remain are our own. Yet if we look at history from the big end of the telescope—the present—back to the little end, we see that although our problems can keep us awake at night, in most cases they won’t be the blight that leads to famine—and emigration—and they won’t sink our immigrant ship buffeted by the wind and waves of the North Atlantic. Nor will the next day dawn on our crowded rat-infested tenement and starve us of our dreams of making a better life in the promised land.
On the ride home from the airport, my wife spoke fondly of Ireland and its kind and amiable people, its glorious scenery, and of course, its Guinness. “But I’m glad to be home,” she said. So am I; and amazed that all it took for the native to return was sitting down in a reasonably comfortable chair, enjoying a full meal, a glorified snack, and watching a couple of movies—all while 3,000 miles of open ocean followed by the endless wilderness of Quebec passed unnoticed[1] underneath.
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© 2025 by Eric Nilsson
[1] I know, because Beth always reserves an aisle seat. I prefer a window seat—so I can . . . look out the window.
