IT’S NOT every day you get a letter addressed from “Paradise”, and in certain circumstances such an event could be worrying. But the Paradise in this case turns out to be a town in California, from which Richard and Melissa Stevens have written with a rather touching plea for help.
Richard and Melissa are trying to contact an Irish couple they met on a train a few years ago, who clearly made a big impression on them. The train was Amtrak’s Californian Zephyr, which plies one of the great US rail routes, from San Francisco to Chicago. It was late September 2005. And the Stevenses met them in the lounge car while crossing the Sierra Nevada mountains, en route east.
Their subsequent conversation, which ranged “from Irish independence to American politics and everything in between”, left a deep impression on the Californians: who claim, remarkably, that the couple were “the only Irish tourists we have ever met here”.
As a consequence, Richard and Melissa have since made a point of finding out more about Ireland: from history books, films, and Frank McCourt. They have also tried every way they can think of to track the couple down again.
The problem is they only know their first names – Patrick and Anne – which doesn’t help much; and that they come from “the Dublin area”: which narrows it down to half the population of Ireland. More promising clues are that they have five grown-up children and that Patrick is an electrician, facts that reduce the potential short-list to several hundred couples, maximum.
Still, if the right Patrick and Anne read this, and if they found the Stevenses even half as friendly as the Stevenses found them, they will surely recognise themselves.
The letter from Paradise brought me back to my own experience riding the rails in the US, during the World Cup summer of 1994. My wife and I missed out on the Californian Zephyr, and on the west in general, unfortunately. But we completed a great eastern triangle: from New York out to Minneapolis, down to the deep south, then back up via Washington. And in the process we made the quintessential American rail journey: on the train they call the City of New Orleans.
Maybe the Zephyr is the most scenic of Amtrak’s routes. But the City of New Orleans is surely the most resonant. You could almost hear the music from the interplay of wheels on tracks as the train sped southwards along the spine of America: from Bluesy Chicago, down through Memphis, Greenwood, Jackson, and finally across Lake Pontchartrain into the Big Easy and the birthplace of jazz.
I’m sure that at one point during the trip, I heard Willie Nelson singing the next carriage: “. . . And the sons of Pullman porters/ And the sons of engineers/ Ride their fathers’ magic carpets made of steel/ Mothers with their babes asleep/ Are rockin’ to the gentle beat/ And the rhythm of the rails is all they feel.” But then again, it was the middle of the night. So I might have been dreaming.
As the Stevenses found, you meet very interesting people on Amtrak: all the more so because rail travel is considered an eccentric form of transport in the US. Our friends in Minneapolis, who came to the station to meet us, admitted afterwards they had to inquire where the train station was first.
But with such Americans as do travel by rail, you’re guaranteed some unusual topics of conversation, whether about history or politics, or how Irish and US place-names influence the respective nations’ outlook of life, with particular reference to “Paradise” and “Hackballscross”.
Of course, having an accent, you will be considered exotic by other passengers, which is half the fun. But I must say I’m puzzled that the Stevenses’ have found Irish tourists so rare. The feckers are everywhere, in my experience.
In fact, on the train from Chicago to Minnesota – typically – I found myself engaged in a long animated conversation with a man from Donegal. We expounded on a wide range of subjects including, I recall, the comparative qualities of Irish whiskey vis-a-vis Scotch and Bourbon: both of us growing intoxicated, not from drink, but from the knowledge that we had a rapt of audience among the local passengers, who thought we were hilarious.
I can’t speak for the Donegal man. But you could have written what I knew then about Irish whiskey, never mind Scotch or Bourbon, on the back a beer mat. And yet I held forth on the subject so volubly that, what with it being dark outside, we nearly missed our stop. It would have served me right to end up stranded somewhere up the line: like Fargo, North Dakota.
Anyway, enough of my reminiscences. The point is to find an electrician called Patrick, or his wife Anne, who were on a train in California in September 2005. If neither they nor any of their children are reading this, maybe there are amateur detectives out there who can help.
Other clues are that the couple are "probably in their 50s", that Anne has "red" hair and her husband "white"; and that Anne's maiden name was "Byrnes". The pair are urged to contact The Irish Timesimmediately, at the address below, for the Stevenses' details. Then they should ring the people at Tourism Ireland, who may want to give them a medal.
fmcnallly@irishtimes.com