The day they dropped the giant turf? It never happened, of course, but it was something. The sky was packed with balloonish clouds as dark as the turf itself. When we looked up, turf and sky were seamless, and it appeared that everything hanging over us, the entire universe, in fact, was turf. Only when the planes flew at a lower altitude of a few hundred feet could we distinguish the substance from the sky whence it descended. Even Mickey Kelleher, who was never impressed by anything, including The Great Houdini, had to admit it was worth looking at—the great brown grassy mass in the shape of a humongous brick, at least three and a half miles long and nearly as wide, suspended over the island and held in place by four hovering World War II B-24 Liberator bombers. The noise from the engines was dreadful. Thick wire cables extended from each of the huge planes to a sort of hammock on which the turf rested. At the scheduled moment, the planes would release the four cables, and the vast turf brick would drop on Inishmaan like a fallen star.
