by Mark Boyle
We finish our pints in Kruger’s, bid our farewells, and take off to find a place to lay our heads until sunrise. The island, as I gaze out at it through the back window, is shrouded in a thick, mysterious fog, and I can’t help but hope that when I awake in the morning I don’t find a place that, like the face of Che Guevara, has been conveniently wrapped up, packaged, sanitised, commercialised and sold to tourists like myself.
~
Back down at the spring, Kathleen tells me that her electricity is back on. Having grown up in the period before electricity had been rolled out across rural Ireland, a day without a washing machine or the television is no drama to her. At the same time, having long since designed a dependency on electricity into her home, not having it for a few weeks now would be a lot more difficult than when her family never had it at all. The dependency is not only practical, but psychological and emotional too.
We get to talking about the land where we live, which is partially covered in thick clumps of rush. She explains to me that this was never the case before, and that not so long ago we would have been looking out over fields of good grass (though itself a denuded landscape).
Theories abound as to why this might be the case. Some farmers say it is because the micro-climate here has been getting wetter in recent years. Kathleen suggests that it’s down to the ways people like herself and her husband farm the land. Previously, farmers would take in the hay once a year; now they cut silage twice a year, a practice which ecologists know is responsible for the catastrophic decline in corncrake and curlew populations across the country. My own theory is that the weight of tractors is compacting the soil, something wet clay land like ours needs no encouragement to do. Whatever the reason, and it’s probably a combination of all of the above, farming as a livelihood may, like the corncrake, no longer be viable in places like this one unless farmers start understanding the land as a biotic community. Who knows, that may be no bad thing. Perhaps rush is a pioneer species, spreading to force humanity out, allowing other species to return and slowly bring diversity and wildness back to the landscape.
By the time we have chewed the cud, my demijohns are overflowing. I bend down to drink directly from the spring. As it gushes into my mouth and over my beard – it has now been ten weeks since I last shaved – for a moment it is no longer obvious to me where the spring ends and I begin; the spring fills my mouth, flows south and slowly meanders into my veins, skin and bladder. Living as I do now, my health and the health of the spring are interdependent. If my neighbours spray insecticides and herbicides on their land, and they leach into the spring, I’ll be poisoned with it, and so my fate and that of the wildlife here – the insects, fish, birds and mammals – are inextricably linked.
As I’m walking off, one of the farmers pulls up to fill his own water containers. It’s a good sign. Great game at the weekend, he says, and I put my demijohns down and try my best to remember that there is absolutely no rush to do anything.
~
Tuesday night means Holohan’s, a little pub perched quietly in an historic village called Abbey, 7 kilometres east of Knockmoyle. It’s a glorious cycle on a clear night, and tonight is no exception. The sky is expansive, the Milky Way set among the constellations, the polestar standing loyally to my left, and there’s not a single sight or sound of a car for the entire journey. It’s good to be alive.
I park the bike outside, unlocked. Looking at it, I get the feeling that even it is becoming too fast for me, and that the journey would have been more magical on foot, and the silence more deafening. As I walk in, the landlord Tom nods at the stout tap and holds up two fingers, to which I give the thumbs up. The other pint is for Paul – or so I think – who lives on the other side of Abbey. Every week we meet in this halfway house for a chat and a game of chess.
We have one rule: unless your mum dies, or you break a leg, you show up, as there is no way of getting out of it last minute. As Paul still hasn’t arrived by the time my pint is finished, I take out my book and get started on his too. He has no way of contacting me at short notice to cancel, and I have no way of finding out if everything is okay with him, so I hope his mum and legs are alive and kicking.
It’s hard to read in rural pubs. The people are too friendly to let you get away with it. I overhear a woman at the bar telling one of the regulars how it is all changing for villages like this one. She has been watching the English news, she says, and has heard that two hundred pubs every year are going out of business over there. I know of five pubs within a 10-kilometre radius of our smallholding that have closed over the last decade. I’m not a big drinker by any stretch of the imagination, but I understand the importance of the pub to places like Abbey. Aside from the church on Sunday mornings, it’s one of the few places where people still commune. When a village’s pubs all close, any remaining young people leave for the cities. When the young people leave, the villages themselves slowly die, cottages go into ruin and the tractors get bigger. The woman at the bar says that pubs like this one will soon have to start putting on free taxis to entice people away from their cheap, supermarket bottle of wine at home.
As there is still no sign of Paul, I decide to call it a night. On my way out the door, Tom reminds me that there is a traditional music session next week. See you then, I tell him. One of the old boys passes me on his way in, and before he even makes it to the bar there’s a whiskey waiting for him in front of the stool on which he always sits.
~
It’s my first time sitting in a library for years. I sit by a desk, scribbling some notes from a few books I requested. Of the twenty-four people I can see among the various rooms around my desk, twenty-one are tapping on electronic devices – laptops, tablets, smartphones, desktops – while two others are reading newspapers. Only one person, other than me, is looking at a book. Even those desks that don’t support an array of desktops have dual plug sockets mounted on their surface.
I climb the stairs to the first floor, both to stretch my legs and to search in vain for an old, rare classic. In among the aisles of paper I find myself alone. Looking over the balcony at the glare below, I watch a connected world grow evermore disconnected.
~
This is gorse country. It loves the place – the weather, the acidic soil and it even seems to thrive off the animosity it receives from its human neighbours. It has an undeservedly bad reputation, and I’ve never really understood why. Yes, it can spread quickly, but its bright yellow flowers – which smell of coconut on a sunny day – emblazon the otherwise green rolling hills every year between February and May. If parishioners here still made their own wine, attitudes towards it might change over the course of a single bottle produced from its flowers.
Up above the green and yellow hills falls a deep, infinite blue, and so it’s the perfect day to go picking gorse flowers. Three of us, armed with buckets, stroll off towards a nearby lane which – because of its wild growing hedgerows and stone walls covered in all kinds of mosses, liverworts and lichens – the locals call ‘the hairy bóithrín’. It’s just about wide enough for a horse and cart, and has that strip of green grass up the middle that I find strangely comforting. We’re determined to make 30 litres of gorse wine, so we’re out to pick roughly 22 litres of flowers. Unlike dandelions or oak leaves, there’s not a lot of substance to a gorse flower, so the thought of having to pick that many is a bit daunting as you start out.
The spines of the bush are prickly, and they help focus the mind. Try to work too fast and they are an excellent reminder to slow down. We know that it is going to take us all afternoon, and it’s a repetitive job, so I try to absorb myself in the task at hand. My face is soaking up the sunshine, my nose full of coconut, my fingers tingling from the spines, my eyes marvelling at the peculiar and extravagant insects flying around me, each of them absorbed in their own work. We spend most of the time chatting and laughing, trying not to think too hard about how slowly the buckets are filling up.
Back at the ranch. Using dry t
wigs found scattered around us, we boil 30 litres of water in a big, blackened pot on the rocket stove. Once it is bubbling hot, we pour its contents into the bucket of flowers, where we’ll leave it for a few days to stew. Job done, for now at least. We won’t receive the pay for our afternoon’s work until August, but the rate is good and the work pleasant. It’ll be spent together just as it was earned together.
~
The day before I disconnected from the virtual world, I sent emails and text messages out to all of my contacts informing them of my postal address, as I had realised that most of my ‘friends’ would have no idea where I lived. With it I added a note, mentioning that if any of them were ever to show up unexpectedly on my doorstep they would receive a welcome that would have been normal for my grandparents.
A handful got back to me, before I unplugged, with an address of their own, and I stored these in a small, blue hardback address book. As this was my last link to these people, I made a paper back-up elsewhere. But some close friends hadn’t replied to me by the time I signed off, and so on a wet Monday in March my mind wanders to Emily somewhere in Brighton, Mari somewhere in Finland, Adeline somewhere in France, Eric somewhere near Bristol, Markus somewhere unknown. I’ve no way of contacting them anymore, unless they get in touch with me first. That could be years, if ever. They could die and I may not even hear about it. It’s a sad, unsettling feeling.
It’s a Tuesday morning. A couple of friends show up on my doorstep, completely unexpectedly. They have come to visit for a few days, maybe a week. I’m busy, in the middle of a few seasonal jobs, and I feel an unwelcome sense of frustration come over me. Friends and strangers have been showing up fairly regularly since I sent out the message, making it quite difficult to get things done at times. But then I remember the tales my mother told me about her parents, who had more on their shoulders and less on their plates than me. We spend the day together, recounting the stories, adventures and struggles we each accumulated since we last met.
It’s Wednesday morning. I start work before daybreak, hoping to get the essentials done before anyone else gets up. But I’ve no sooner got the trowel in my hand than my friends are up and out too. I’d forgotten they were early risers. They tell me they would love to get stuck in – they came to help out, they say – and so we chat and weed and shovel shit and laugh until hunger gets the better of us.
~
It has now been three months since I spoke to Mum and Dad. Their voices have probably been the only constants I’ve had throughout my life, but even those are now absent. I’ve slowly started to find my rhythm living in this way, so I decide that it’s about time I travelled the 230 kilometres to see them. I’ve done a lot of hitching in the past, but when we bought a van five years ago its convenience dispirited my more adventurous side, in much the same way as charity shops have discouraged me from learning how to make my own clothes. I feel the urge for a hitching adventure once again, to start walking with no plan or expectations, and to open myself up to the inexplicable magic that often happens when you go in that spirit – or the tedious, depressing drudgery when you don’t.
With small packs on our backs, Kirsty and I stroll down the bóithrín and, when we get to the small back road at the bottom, start hitching in the direction of civilisation – somewhere I haven’t been for a few weeks. We’ve walked about 3 kilometres by the time the first car comes along. The driver stops to tell us she’s only going as far as the next house, and we thank her anyway. Another half a kilometre down the road, a second car stops and takes us to our nearest village, Kylebrack, which sits on the main road to Loughrea, our nearest town.
This road is busy, at least as far as semi-rural roads in Ireland go. It’s mostly used by commuters, passers-through going to work in Loughrea or, 35 kilometres further on, Galway City. Here we watch cars drive past our outstretched thumbs every thirty seconds or so – it’s rush hour – and after what feels like half an hour we eventually get picked up.
On the N17 north of Galway City, the cars come in a seamless stream, yet we spend half the morning standing in the same spot. Gandalf would struggle to muster up the magic here. It turns out to be a big mistake going to the city. But once we get back out among the small towns and villages we’ve barely enough time to say goodbye and thanks to one driver before we’re saying hello to another.
By the time we reach Ballyshannon we’ve had lifts from all sorts of people – a musician, a salesman, an ex-army engineer, a Sinn Féin politician, an accountant and a footballer. The only thing they all seem to have in common is that they spent years hitching themselves. One tells us he hasn’t seen a hitcher for a long time, and we reminisce about our younger days when there could be a queue of six or seven hitchers on any one stretch of the road, all trying to get to work, visit relatives, or be anywhere other than where they were. At the age of twelve I was in that queue. Another driver brings us 5 kilometres out of his way, to a better hitching location, despite our etiquette-induced, semi-genuine protestations that there’s absolutely no need.
Once, when I was living without money, I got a lift from a man (I think his name was Gerry) who told me he was fresh out of Portlaoise prison. Two years for assault. Portlaoise is where the hard bastards go. We travelled together for over an hour, and shared stories. His were more interesting than mine. I left a stainless steel water bottle in his car, but hadn’t realised until we had gone our separate ways. The bottle would have been as good as worthless to anyone else, but as he knew I was living without money he understood its importance to me. Nothing to be done, so I carried on hitching. Forty-five minutes, and another two short hitches later, the old battered Ford Escort I had got out of earlier came screeching around the corner. Gerry had noticed that I’d left the bottle behind in the car and had been driving around trying to find me. I gave him an awkward hug, and we went off on different roads again.
It’s mid-afternoon when our final lift drops us off in Ballyshannon, and Mum already has lunch made for us. She says she has been in and out of the doorway since midday to see if we had arrived. It is really special to see their faces, and we spend the evening by the fire catching up with all that’s happened over the last three months.
~
After a week in which warm, dry weather fooled the daffodils, gorse flowers and me into thinking that spring had as good as arrived, a biting Siberian wind – dubbed ‘The Beast from the East’ by Fleet Street – makes it as far as Ireland, bringing with it an amount of snow not seen on this island in my lifetime. There are drifts the height of sheep resting against stone walls. The snow is pure, the type that demands to be transformed into snowmen and gently explosive projectiles. We oblige. It hides everything; except, that is, the usually secretive adventures of Mr Fox & Co., whose nightly rhythms have now been revealed for the less eagle-eyed like me. The deer have given their game away, and that may cost them dearly one day. Hunter-gatherers of old wouldn’t have needed snow to understand the patterns of the fauna as I do now. They had fully functional senses, and a type of intelligence that has never been passed down to me.
There is not an event, big or small, on earth that is not advantageous to something, big or small, and therefore the question of good or bad is always a matter of opinion. To my eyes, the snowbound smallholding appears magical, but as a Blasket Islander once said, ‘You can’t live off a good view alone’, and so to the deer the situation may appear dire. To them, a late snow means that there is no food easily available at precisely the time of year that they have less fat on their bones to deal with the cold.
In Scandinavian countries, this would count as a mild, late winter’s day. For Ireland, this is Armageddon. The neighbours tell me that, after two days of snow, the supermarkets in Dublin are being raided, one having had a bulldozer driven into it. We laugh, but wonder what might happen if climate chaos, as predicted, brings us weather patterns more catastrophic than a few days of heavy snow.
It being Tuesday night I set off, on foot, on the 7-kilometre road t
o Holohan’s pub in Abbey. The snow is up to my knees in places. With the postal service out of action, I couldn’t have cancelled even if I had wanted to. But I don’t want to. With everyone else tucked up by the fire – or at least one of those gas heaters with the fake coals and flames – it means that I have the road to myself for the whole journey. I walk up the middle of it, along where the white line once was, through a glorious blizzard. By the time I make it to the pub, my beard has frozen stiff. Paul’s there too, as surprised to see me as I am to see him. Besides the landlord, we’re the only people there, and the spot by the fire looks even cosier for the walk.
Three days later, the postman is back on his round after an unexpected holiday. I receive a letter from a friend who tells me how, the day before ‘The Beast’, she met a friend in front of an empty bread section in a nearby supermarket. Her friend looked forlorn, so she offered to bake her a loaf. Her friend said no, she was looking for ‘a sliced loaf’. My friend writes that she almost offered to loan her a knife, too. And while the bread section was decimated, she says the flour shelves in the baking section were full.
Another friend tells me that, at the peak of the snowfall, some people in Dublin were selling sliced loaves online for €100 each. I’m glad I’m not on the internet any more.
~
Trout season is open again. For the past six months they’ve been under the legal protection of the Irish state, the same entity which offers legal protection to the industrial agricultural practices that decimated trout populations to the extent that they now need protecting. Feeding your family with a trout caught at the end of January is no longer the basic human right it was before we invented basic human rights.
