by Mark Boyle
~
On the odd day I find myself feeling upset, or angry, or both. I don’t really know why. I mean, I know why, I just don’t know why it only happens on the odd day. I’ll see a badger on the side of the road – big, wild and dead – or hear from a visitor about a tribe of indigenous people struggling to exist in one of the few remaining wild places of the world while resisting the pressures of oil companies, stock markets and ambition – and feel disgust at my own participation in the mechanising, homogenising, industrialising, killing culture behind it all.
I realise that by tomorrow these feelings will have passed, and I’ll feel content again in this mislaid patch of Western Europe, and I don’t know what to think about any of it.
And then I pick up Wendell Berry’s poetry, and I find solace. In ‘Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front’, he writes:
Expect the end of the world. Laugh.
Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful
though you have considered all the facts.
Laughter changes little but the quality of our days. That sounds all right to me.
~
‘Mr Boyle, please explain to the class how . . .’ something or other is calculated in a company balance sheet. Oh fuck. It was my first day back after a two year sabbatical, and not only did my accountancy lecturer George Clancy – who had failed me two years earlier – still remember my name, but within a minute he had picked my head out of a class of two hundred. He must have taught a thousand wannabe entrepreneurs and don’t-wannabe-but-will-be bureaucrats since he had last set eyes on me. I knew he disliked me, but I hadn’t realised how much. I could hardly have blamed him.
Thanks, George, I said, and gave him an answer that I can no longer remember. He nodded back. I had wanted to get ahead of myself, so a few weeks before we were due back I started to read the recommended books on accountancy, economics and marketing. After a summer working in New York, George Clancy was a comparative pussycat, and even accountancy seemed relatively interesting. Relatively.
I took on a part-time job in a corner shop, earning £4 per hour. This was 1999, the days before minimum wage and the euro in Ireland, so in a week where I was either working or studying – usually both – all seven days, I would earn £100.
I found most of the subjects – retail marketing, statistics, IT, management accountancy – excessively boring, but by now I had committed to doing it and seeing it through, and for the first time in a long time, I wanted to do something well. The exception to the monotony was economics, and I developed a rapport with its lecturer. Without my knowing it, she had started the process of my politicisation, and brought to my awareness ideas like fair trade – a concept that was still quite radical in the early 2000s and, considering its minuscule market share compared to unfair trade, still is today – while teaching me how to critique ideologies like capitalism, socialism and communism. Most of all, she urged us to think for ourselves, and to question everything. Years later she would invite me back for a guest lecture on my experiences of living without money.
My experiences of studenthood changed with my attitude towards it. Within two months I had been voted the student representative for my year. By Christmas George Clancy was stopping to give me a lift into class in the morning, and it was he who handed me a First Class Honours degree at my graduation as he shook his head and smiled. But by then I didn’t give a shit about the piece of paper, or the result.
After four years of studying business, one thing stuck with me: in all of that time, not once did the word ‘ecology’ get mentioned. Even back then I found that odd. How could I claim to understand economics when I knew nothing of the natural world on which all economies ultimately depend?
I had done what I set out to do, but I knew I needed to change something important in my life, and not just the scenery; for no matter where I would go, I knew I’d always find myself there. I had been wanting to give up booze for a while and become vegetarian, neither of which I imagined would be easy to do while hanging out with the groups of friends I had in Galway. They were only vegetarian when they were sleeping. Come to think of it, most of them were only sober when they were sleeping too. I packed my bags, said my farewells and, like so many of my ancestors, I took off for foreign lands. I didn’t know if I would ever come back to live in Ireland.
I found a flat in Edinburgh within days, and a few weeks later I started a job at the checkout in a supermarket. The work was simple, and it paid the bills – just about – but reading manuals detailing how we had to greet customers and wear our clothes soon started to pall, as did having to offer plastic bags to every customer who bought a sandwich or a soft drink. In the little corner shop I had worked in, I knew most of the customers by name, what cigarettes they smoked, the newspaper they liked to read on any given day. I almost knew their lotto numbers. Now I was being told I had to say things like ‘How can I help?’ and ‘Thank you for shopping with us’ instead of what would naturally come out of my mouth.
I bought my own weekly groceries from a rival supermarket. The food there was cheaper. Back then I still assumed cheap to be a good thing, not thinking that my gain may be considered a loss to somebody (farmers, factory workers) or something (land, insects, animals, fish, rivers, forests, oceans) else. One week I picked up a plastic packet of South American tofu which was labelled ‘organic’. I hadn’t a clue what that meant, so I read the story on the back of the packet. Having been versed in marketing, I assumed that most of it was exactly that – a story – yet it got me thinking. Since I was a child I’d had a fondness for the natural world, but it wasn’t until this moment, standing opposite an aisle-length fridge in a multinational supermarket, that I realised I wanted to start engaging with it.
Within two weeks I had quit the supermarket job and was working as a logistics manager – a storeman – for an organic food company. It was here that I would learn how little I knew about real economics.
~
As the pike lies dead on the butcher’s block, fierce and beautiful and ancient and strong, I remember the moment I killed him. He was flipping around on the grass, tired but still fighting hard, his eye – the one that I could see – fully alive with none of the fear you might expect. Of all the wild creatures of Ireland, the pike is one of those I’m least concerned about killing. Still, taking the life of another creature – especially one so wild and free as this – should only ever be done with the reluctance of one who needs to eat.
The pike had displayed no such civilised sentimentality as he pounced on what he thought was another fish at the end of my invisible line. A fatal error of judgement. Instead of getting food, he was becoming food. I tried to keep this in mind as I held him on the cold stone, before whacking him over the head – once, twice, three times – until his eye opened up with that enlightened look of one who suddenly understands something no living creature knows, or can ever know.
Squeezing the underside of the pike gently, the remains of his previous dinners squidge their way out of his anal opening, from which I slit him all the way to the gills. His internal organs come out easily. I feel something hard in his intestines and, curious, I cut them open to discover a small piece of gravel. These guts will be an offering to the local wildlife later.
With two angled cuts behind the gills, off comes the head, before I work my way through the fins. All of this offal goes into a pot, along with his innards and the scales I’ve scraped off, and will soon be cooked on the rocket stove before being left to stew in a hay box, where it will slowly become chowder. Brains, bones, fins, skin, heart, eyes – potent stuff. I cut his body into steaks, keeping the liver for the pan – there will be more than enough for myself and the five others who live on the smallholding.
The pike soup is thick. I’m no scientist, and have no desire to be, but as I drink the first cup my body tells me it is packed with nutrition and goodness. It couldn’t not be. In the old times this bone and offal soup would be passed around from neighbour to neighbour, each bo
iling it up and getting a turn out of it. But those were the days before easy come, easy go. Now even some of my friends who are local food advocates won’t eat it. Too fishy, they say.
~
For the Great Blasket Islanders, living off the land and the open sea surrounding them was not the lifestyle choice that some might, understandably, argue it is for me; though I, for my part, no longer consider it a choice. Not really. No, for the Islanders it was hard economic reality, and something ingrained in the sinews of their culture.
Aldo Leopold once wrote that one of the ‘spiritual dangers’ of not spending time on a small farm was that you may ‘suppose that breakfast comes from the grocery’. In order to avoid such danger, he said, ‘one should plant a garden, preferably where there is no grocer to confuse the issue’. These Islanders were in no such danger. Their nearest shops were in Dingle, a 5-kilometre row and 20-kilometre walk away; that is, if the ocean was even passable, which it often wasn’t. Therefore it was critical for them to make full use of what grew around them, and not to be dependent on the vagaries of the Dingle market, or the money they seldom had.
They ate a natural, balanced diet, and were said to be among the healthiest people in Ireland at the time. They had to be, for there was no doctor or nurse on the island either. Potatoes were a staple which everyone grew. The famine hit their crop just as hard as on the mainland, but because they had a more varied diet – and the skill to attain that diet – they fared much better than those in Ireland’s towns and cities.
On top of this they grew oats and rye, and would sometimes buy large sacks of flour in Dingle with the money they received from selling mackerel. Other vegetables were not a major part of their diet, probably because the weather there wouldn’t have been conducive to good growth. Instead they would eat seaweed – sea-belt, murlins, dillisk and sea-lettuce. They would dry dillisk on their roofs, before making it into a chew. Seaweed was abundant, though tough work to collect and haul up the steep hill to their village. Along with soot from their chimneys and mussel shells from the nearby island of Beiginis, they also used seaweed to fertilise their potato ridges, and so they effectively ate it by way of their spuds too.
Seafood of all sorts was a major part of their diet. They collected limpets and periwinkles down at the shore. In the summer they would eat fresh mackerel, roasted on the tongs. With the exception of that and bream, they preferred to boil fish for their dinner. They had no taste for salmon and so, according to Pádraig Ua Maoileoin, whenever they caught one they would either throw it back or cut it up as lobster bait. Nowadays a single, good-sized salmon can fetch in excess of €100.
In the winter they often ate cured meat, which they had earlier hung over the mantelpiece to dry. Those not keen on fish for breakfast might have an egg or two from their hens, who were known to make a mess of the houses’ reed-thatched roofs, within which they would often be caught nesting. One time, while Tomás Ó Criomhthain’s father was having dinner, a young chick fell from the roof into his mug of milk.
Others would have their own oats for breakfast. Those who had a cow – most people – might have it with a glass of thick, sour, unpasteurised milk. The same cow would give them butter, and buttermilk on churning day. In order to keep the supply of calves – and thus milk – steady, they had to row a cow to the mainland on one of their canvas-clad boats, where she would be serviced by a bull. This was a tough, dangerous job that would often take a day. Once, a cow drove her horn through the canvas, almost drowning all of the men on board. Eventually they were awarded a free bull from the Kerry County Council, which they took out to the island so that he could impregnate the cows one by one where they were. The first year, after he had seen to them all, a few of the Islanders took him off to the small neighbouring island of Beiginis, and out of harm’s way. The next morning they found him back on the island; the horny fellow must have swum through the night to get back to his harem.
Meat naturally played a less important role in their diet than fish. Seal meat – which there was plenty of, though dangerous to hunt – was highly valued, and it was easy to barter for its same weight in pork when they went to the markets in Dingle. The skins could fetch £80 alone in Ó Criomhthain’s youth. By the time he was old, however, the taste for seal meat had gone. Most families killed a sheep twice a year, some of which would be eaten fresh, the rest cured. You were allowed to graze twenty-five sheep on the island for every one cow you owned, and the minimum most families kept was ‘a sheep to sell, a sheep to shear and a sheep to eat’.
The islands were teeming with rabbits. Muiris Ó Súilleabháin and his young friends would hunt them with ferrets or snares when they weren’t stealing seagulls’ eggs on Beiginis. Pádraig Ó Catháin – the man who would become the King in a place where Ó Criomhthain remarked that ‘kings weren’t so hard to satisfy’ – caught a dozen rabbits one day when the new island school had closed because the teacher had died. Their parents would have caught seabirds – young gannets, puffins, storm petrels, razorbills – at any given opportunity, and roasted them in the pot oven on the fire.
It was this diet that kept them well. There was no industrial healthcare system at the time – no dialysis machines, no stents, no replacement hips, no ambulance to come and save them if they got ill. Whenever they did get sick they mostly relied on home remedies. In his memoir, Michael Carney recalls how, after breaking his leg, his father took him by boat, over the rocky waters of the Sound, to a bonesetter – a local farmer – in Dunquin, who duly set it back in place without anaesthetic. His father was also a rudimentary sort of dentist, using pliers and pieces of string tied to the door as his methods of extraction.
The women would usually fetch the water from the well, which was located in the upper village, itself not even a stone’s throw away from the lower village. This, often to the men’s dismay, was also the scene of much gossiping. If they were working in the fields, the Islanders would usually mix this water with a dash of milk for extra sustenance. They knew nothing of tea until a tea chest washed up on their shores one day. At first they used it sparingly at Christmas, with ‘the remnant saved up till the next Christmas’. But before long they were having it every day, and its introduction seems to have changed the entire eating habits of the Islanders. Instead of having two meals a day – a sturdy breakfast and dinner – they began having four small meals, two of which consisted only of tea and bread, what Ó Criomhthain lamented as ‘a miserable bite or two’.
They managed their diets of vegetables, eggs, milk, meat and fish without a fridge or freezer, or electricity for that matter. They cooked without gas or oil. It wasn’t an easy life, but then none of them ever grew up expecting one. I remember M. Scott Peck writing, at the beginning of A Road Less Travelled, that once you stop expecting life to be easy, life suddenly becomes a lot easier. This was true for the Islanders. Considering the scale of anti-depressant use in contemporary society, it appears that life in the industrial world isn’t easy either.
Looking back from our vantage point, my generation would consider the Islanders’ way of life extreme, though to them it was normal. We’ll never know what they, if they could have looked forward, would have thought of our world.
~
The pub is packed. Kirsty is lured in by the sound of John O’Halloran on the melodeon intermingled with raucous, melodious laughter. As we walk in the door the scene reminds me of Kavanagh’s ‘Inniskeen Road: July Evening’:
There’s a dance in Billy Brennan’s barn tonight,
And there’s the half-talk code of mysteries
And the wink-and-elbow language of delight.
It’s an older crowd, but there’s a young couple, I guess somewhere in their twenties, sitting below us at a table to our left. He is scrolling down his smartphone, whose glare catches my eye among the darkness of the pub. She is trying to hold his hand, but he doesn’t appear to notice her gentle attempts. The philosopher Alain de Botton has said that ‘True love is a lack of desire to check one
’s smartphone in another’s presence.’
By now Kirsty is out on the floor, tapping the steps of the traditional sean-nós dancing – a much older, more fluid, less rigid form of Irish dancing than the modern style popularised by Riverdance – to her friend O’Halloran’s reels. It’s a wonderful thing to watch her dance, not so much for the spectacle – a fine thing in itself – as for the fact she is most alive and radiant when she is dancing.
O’Halloran has finished his third reel when I notice, out of the corner of my eye, that the young woman is still trying to hold her partner’s hand. He’s checking the football scores. Part of me, momentarily, wants to ask him who won, but I catch myself. She heads for the toilet as Kirsty makes for the floor again.
~
When I turned the light switch off, for good, on winter solstice, the natural light was either dim or dark for sixteen hours out of the twenty-four. On those days when the sun struggles to raise itself above the conifers to the south, we could easily get through two or three beeswax candles a day. Almost six months later, we use none.
Because of energy policy in Ireland, electricity consumers pay a hefty standing charge, on top of which a small per unit cost is applied. I’ve no doubt there’s plenty of sound financial logic behind it, but at a time when the world’s scientific community is pleading with governments to reduce their emissions, policies like this effectively mean that there is little or no financial incentive for people to minimise their energy usage, as the cost of actually using the energy waiting behind the switch is so marginal. Reduce the standing charge to almost zero, and hike the cost of the electricity so high that carelessness matters, and unused lights, computer screens and devices would go off overnight, quite literally. At the moment you still have to pay the charge, even if you don’t use a single unit in June. It all reminds me of an old Irish proverb we’ll likely learn when it is too late: taréis a tuigtear gach beart. ‘We learn when it is too late’.
