We Cook To Make Ghosts

time-travel by way of a steak pie

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Photo by K. Mitch Hodge on Unsplash

In 2018, tucked into a corner of The Nook (an Irish pub), I tasted my first steak and Guinness pie.

We had toured the Giant’s Causeway some half hour before and, chilled to the bone, made our way here for dinner. The pie came served in a small brown vat, topped with a cock-eyed hat of golden puff pastry. I cut through the paper-thin layers with the side of my spoon and relished in the crackle, then sleepily ate the good, brown stew beneath. I felt like a Viking come to shore after a raid: wind-tossed and ravenous. We had not only seen the Giant’s Causeway, but spent our morning escaping with our lives from the rickety Carrick-a-Rede rope bridge. A stimulating, if profoundly unsafe, jaunt.

May through October, the bridge at Carrick-a-Rede welcomes visitors to make the white-knuckle pilgrimage between the mainland and the small island some twenty yards from it. The crossing is not for the fainthearted and knock-kneed. The island itself is nothing but a tower of wiregrass, volcanic leftovers, and seabirds: a rock standing in the way of migrating salmon, from whence comes its Gaelic name: “Carraig-a-Rade” meaning, “rock in the road.” Before the modern bridge was built, it was a flimsy thing of ropes and plank with one handrail, used by fishermen to get back and forth from mainland to island while managing the annual influx of the salmon run. To be honest, it’s still a flimsy thing of rope and plank, only now it comes with two handrails and a bit of netting for decoration at the sides.

The bridge feels safe enough when you’re standing on firm ground, surrounded by the last of the gorse blossoms and heather, far above the bit of string and wood suspended ninety feet above the open ocean. It starts to feel less so as you near your turn, beginning to imagine the first steps off the edge of proper Ireland. You see how very insignificant the bridge looks and anticipate the mincing shuffle you’ll take across the board planks with the whole North Atlantic tumbling, turquoise and silver, far beneath your shoes.

As we waited our turn to cross,  I watched a few people in the queue get to the edge and lose their nerve, then turn back and slog up the hillside toward the parking area. I didn’t blame them. Mentally I wasn’t a bit scared - we had done the Slieve League cliffs the day before and hadn’t so much as a handrail between us and a plummet of nearly 2,000 feet - three times as high as the highest point of the Cliffs of Moher.

Nevertheless, my knees shook as we came closer to our turn.

Five people ahead.

Three.

Two.

It was my turn. I’d intended to film my crossing on my iPhone but it felt incredibly dangerous not to grip the latticed rope sides of the bridge with both hands as I began the journey. I remember the way the bridge felt like a giant serpent breathing beneath my feet as I stepped forward onto its slender planks. The serpent slept, swaying only gently in this gap between wind-gusts; yet very unlike a sidewalk or a pebble path. I’d never noticed how solid solid ground is until the ground was completely gone.

I made it safely one way.

We turned toward the mainland to take photos from Carrick-a-Rede of where we’d just been standing so apprehensively, then shuffled back in line for the return trip. Somehow I was more worried this time. The wind had kicked up and the ocean on either side swirled with foam and bracken like a dark enchantment, contracting and expanding in mesmerizing eddies and flows as the currents ran.

On the way back across the gap, the rope bridge began to twist and heave in response to the November wind. It felt fundamentally unsafe, like riding a dragon, and the jacketed officials manning the crossing kept a close eye on whether or not to let people through between wind gusts. I’d never been so frightened, nor so delighted, nor so pleased to withdraw my life from the hands of a glorified macramé hanging.

By the time we’d hiked through all the quarry rocks surrounding the area, dodged a Game of Thrones tour bus, and hit the road to the nearby Giant’s Causeway, I’d worked up an appetite. Danger and natural wonders of the world will do that to a person. When we finally, finally sat down to a meal, that steak and Guinness pie seemed nearly elemental. I clung to my spoon like a man adrift clings to a life raft, and contemplated whether I’d ever eaten anything so delicious. It stands out as one of my favorite food memories of my trip to Ireland.

And somehow now it’s 2022. This month marks four years since that trip. It’s been a long time since I’ve been in any danger, a long time since I’ve seen any natural wonders of the world. I just googled “The Nook Irish pub” and Google brought up both the proper pub an ocean away, as well a seedy bar across town from our house called Winston’s. Perhaps Google thinks that when the craving hits strongly enough, a local dive bar can stand in for an authentic pub along the wild Atlantic way. (P.S. Google, it can’t.)

Winston’s bar is the first place I was ever winked at by a visibly intoxicated stranger, a place where I perched on a barstool (much too young to be there) and sipped a cup of French onion soup while my brother played an open mic night. And while the French onion soup was actually good, Winston’s is as unlike that pub near the Causeway as Chesapeake is to Donegal; I suppose each is fine in its own way if you like that sort of thing, but I’d one hundred times rather be eating steak pie in one than a cup of soup in the other.

I hadn’t had steak and Guinness pie since that trip, nor have I traveled (outside a few small trips in the US). Four years is a long time to be grounded once you’ve stretched your international wings. The habit of over-romanticizing places you’ve been may be the single most annoying trait to exist in anyone. However, I do miss international travel. I miss being repeatedly thrust into new cultures, reorienting myself, exploring, absorbing, assimilating, and then finding restoration at the end of it all in a bowl of soup, a plate of steaming cabbage rolls, or a steak pie.

I guess I miss feeling lost in that way.

It is different from, kinder than, the way I currently feel lost.

I don’t know why we pretend to know where we’re going all the time. I don’t think there’s a single one of us who has known without a shadow of a doubt exactly how their life is going to play out, and had it play out that way in detail. I guess we avoid saying we feel lost because it sounds a little pitiful, a little sad, a little “are you sure you’re okay?”

We’re uncomfortable at the idea of being made to feel uncomfortable. Of being made to question whether we ourselves know our way quite as well as we thought we did.

But I like being honest with myself, and with you: I do feel a little lost, if one can be lost while being so comfortably situated.

 When I say, “I feel lost” I don’t mean I feel like I’ll never find my way. I just mean the wild blue stretches out in front, rather disorienting. I have my husband, my home, my church community, and family who loves me. What I don’t have is the faintest inkling of what I’m practically meant to do in the next phase of life. I always thought my thirties would be spent primarily raising the family we would begin in our twenties. We didn’t start a family in our twenties. We do not have children yet.

Seasons of knowing what is next have wrapped up, or will be in the next year. I’m unearthing dreams I’ve set aside through sheer exhaustion, or a mistaken sense of having to fit my muchness to scale, or a different mistaken assumption that I would be too busy with Plan A to worry about the rest of the alphabet.

I’m a bit concerned that everything I have to offer is too much of nothing and too little of everything. That everything I love will not be viable, and everything I’m weary of will make the most sense.

There’s some grief too, as things I took as a given aren’t actually happening, and things I didn’t want to happen are going on instead.

I have few navigational systems or precedents, no sketched out plans, no quest, not even so much as a strange mark on my door that has brought unwelcome houseguests. I am lost in the middle of a story that will make sense when I read it back a while hence. In the meantime I live, and I try to live well, even while feeling a little lost. I know that clarity is eventually ahead.  I am simply trying not to flounder too much while I wait for the sense of  “this is the way; walk in it,” at my shoulder.

There is, instead, a feeling of reconstruction, of important things shaping up and being hammered out, albeit so quietly and behind-the-scenes that even I can’t guess what they are. It’s as if a painter’s sheet has been flung over the project and all I can see are shadowy figures of workers flitting in front of the floodlights. I stand by requesting to speak to the foreman and to be shown permits.

I’m reading a lot, thinking a lot: plenty of Mary Oliver, a few memoirs, a great many podcasts, sundry collected thoughts. I love reading work from people who have gotten both kinds of lost (lost in the wide world, lost in their own story) and found good things to do while waiting for What Comes Next. It gives me ideas - not any clearer idea of the answers I’m looking to find, but the idea that maybe I’m not alone in feeling lost in the story. Maybe the story is always full of a great many of us, keeping company till we discover what’s what. I think that’s the reality: a companionable lostness. Maybe more of us lost than found, just yet.

This weekend I missed Ireland so badly that I felt actually sad, which is not a frequent state for me. My internal self was confused-feeling, my throat ached, and I wanted to be in Ireland so badly it felt like a physical need. I climbed into the car and played my guilty pleasure music (The High Kings “Memory Lane” album) on the way to the store. It was a very Chestertonian way of feeling very sorry for myself:

“The great Gaels of Ireland are the men that God made mad,

for all their wars are merry, and all their songs are sad.”

All I’m saying is that if you want to feel sorry for yourself and do a good job of it, there are few songs more suitable than “The Fields of Athenry.” I’m sorry - it just can’t help but put me in the mood for a good, chummy cry.

I say I missed Ireland - the observant, somewhat cerebral part of my brain told me what I missed wasn’t Ireland, but was the girl I was while in Ireland: someone coming from a stimulating, innovative job, and an abundance of inspiration and energy, someone seeing multiple dreams spring into being, working in her favorite neighborhood, finally mastering life as a single woman, and thriving on fourteen other levels. I freaking love that version of Rachel. I also know that it wasn’t the particulars of that life I miss as much as the overwhelming sense of direction and momentum I felt in that era. I wouldn’t trade my current life for that 2018 life (Andrew entered the scene in 2019), but I want some of that momentum and direction back.

Missing Ireland and 2018 Rachel in equal measure, I pulled into the Wegman’s parking lot and put a brave face on it. Only one thing would do for dinner in this mood. Only one comfort food, last tasted in that golden age, never attempted at home. A homing beacon for all that was tidy and unrumpled and unwrinkled in 2018 me to come flying back and bless me now: a homemade steak and Guinness pie.

I pulled up a recipe from Jamie Oliver and mentally checked my pantry. Then, like a ghost, I circulated dreamily through Wegman’s, pulling together the necessary ingredients: stewing beef from the fridge section, a bottle of stout from the beer aisle, and fresh thyme from the produce. I chose a wedge of ale & mustard cheddar from the cheese counter and thought how nicely it would go with a slice of the crusty bread loaves already rising at home on my countertop. A glass of cold mountain cider to finish it off, and some blackberry-apple crumble for dessert...yes. Just the ticket.

If we were going to bother with trying to conjure Ireland, I was going to make the most Irish dinner to have ever Irish’d.

Somehow, as I cooked this dinner, it did make me feel better. The smells coming from my sturdy pot were not uncheering, and the process of slow cookery always sets things right in my spirit. I chopped the vegetables and moved through the kitchen, each movement an intuitive pattern that has seen me through beautiful and weary days these past four years. I am a better cook than I was then, if not exactly a poster-child for being able to recite my life plan off the cuff. As the stew simmered, I caught myself smiling. It smelled just the way I remembered from The Nook; we really do cook to make ghosts, as The Hundred Foot Journey says. And this time Andrew would be able to taste my memory; to experience a shadowy-version of my life prior to meeting him. I could travel with him back in time to that pub on that shore, hair tossed, eyes bright with adventure and satisfaction. He could taste an experience he’d never had, and I could show him a fraction of how wonderful it felt to be so alive in such a wild, glorious place.

I poured the stew into a pie pan and gently pulled a puff pastry crust overtop, brushing it with egg wash and a scatter of Maldon. A short while later I took the pie from the oven: burnished gold and crackling, filling our kitchen with visceral memories as the scent of steak and brown stout, buttery pastry, and fresh bread wafted through our small house.

My spoon sank through the layers of flaky crust, dredging up chunks of tender beef and soft carrots and potato. I tasted a bit and hummed, satisfied. I may not know where I’m going, but I can show you where I’ve been.

Let me cook for you. Taste my ghosts. We are all a little lost, but we will find our way together.