"Where's Richard Dreyfus?" I asked myself, staring at what had to be something from Close Encounters of the Third Kind, the Sequel. A massive, circular building made of neatly (as in OCD neatly) stacked rocks, with a grassy meadow for a roof and a ring of large, flat stones surrounding it, I expected it to commence levitation at any moment. Or maybe spaceships would fly over us, like the air force salute at the Superbowl, and spindly-legged, tear-drop headed beings would come walking out its ancient front door.
The Newgrange Passage Tomb at Bru na Boinne is a trip.
Built around 3200 BCE (older than Stonehenge), this massive tomb has remained watertight for 5,000 years without the aid of mortar. And once a year, at the winter solstice, a shaft of light shoots down a small opening above the door and illuminates the inner chamber of the temple.
The large flat stones surrounding this mound are called kerb stones, and many of them are covered in megalithic art. Swoops and squiggles and extra-terrestrial spirals and swirls. It all looks so much like the set of a George Lucas film that I kept wondering when I was going to hear the words "...and ACTION!"
But you get over that feeling and then the real magic happens. You start to realize that humans did actually create this structure (and several more like it in the surrounding area) 5,000 years ago. They did so with precision and strength and artistic finesse. They built it to satisfy more than their physical needs, showing an awareness of a broader universe beyond this beautiful little space near the Boyne River.
The visitor center is impressive, with a large space full of dioramas showing everything from what people of that time ate to how they built these amazing structures. They also had a lottery, in which you could enter to be one of the few lucky people to spend the night of the Solstice in the tomb, waiting for the sun to rise.
I tried to imagine the phone ringing and on the other end a lovely, lilting Irish voice telling me,
"Mr. Housel, you have won the right to spend a cold winter's night deep inside one of the oldest structures know to man, waiting for the sun to shine through a small opening above the door. Of course, there is no guarantee that the sun will shine, this is Ireland, after all, and the weather can be a bit dodgy but when it is nice, it is really, really nice."
At first, I was all excited to enter, then I thought again. I rarely win these kinds of things, but if I won this one, I would face a tough decision. Do I use precious vacation time to go back to Ireland, in the winter, to maybe see this phenomenon? If it were a rare sunny day I am sure it would be spectacular, moving and until-the-end-of-my-days memorable. If it were, as is more likely, a cloudy, rainy day and no shaft of light was to be seen, I would have spent precious time on a fruitless quest. This is time I wouldn't be able to use going to somewhere else I have not yet been.
I asked myself, what would the aliens do? Evidently, those who who built this place stayed here only a few hundred years. I assume they moved on and that is what I decided to do. I didn't enter the raffle. I was lucky to be here once and I will be lucky to go wherever I go next. After all, the sequel is rarely as good as the original.
