by Mark Boyle
His oak had eighty such rings, and was as such only an adolescent. He starts at the year that the ‘bolt of lightning put an end to wood-making by this particular oak’ around the end of the Second World War, and by the time he gets into the heartwood he is back at the end of the American Civil War. The ecology of Wisconsin, and the US as a whole, changed a lot in the time it took a tree to put on 75 centimetres in diameter.
The spruce in front of me has only twenty-five growth rings, meaning it was planted by a forester (Leopold’s oak was almost certainly planted by a squirrel) in 1992, when I was only thirteen, which was also the last time I lived without a mobile phone. In the time it took for this fast-growing tree to fatten up to twenty-five rings, the world became governed by the World Wide Web and countless species had their niches and ancient roles ruled obsolete by mankind. But as the last cut hits the ground, I wonder what stories the rings of trees that I have planted, and watched grow, will one day tell someone else long after I am gone.
~
I walk to Kylebrack to fish for trout. Kylebrack, a neighbour told me, is an anglicisation of its original Irish name, Choill Bhreac, which means ‘the trout forest’.
There’s no longer any real forest left in Kylebrack, and from what I can tell there are no longer any trout in this river either. I try to imagine what this place looked and felt like when it was first named by its earliest inhabitants, as I put away my rod and walk home.
~
Thoreau once wrote that wood warmed him twice: first when he chopped it, and again when he sat by the fire. Well, either Thoreau was being terse or he had it a lot easier than me. I’ve found that wood warms me six times: hauling it 300 metres by shoulder, sawing it, chopping it, stacking it, sitting next to it as it burns and, finally, by eating the food that it cooks for me.
We’re prone to forget that, first and foremost, we’re heated from the inside. The Blasket Islanders understood this. Not only did they eat well – very well by today’s standards – their food would have warmed their bones more than once, which, considering what the weather could be like there at times, was no harm at all. Sometimes the winds blew so hard the doors would shake and, when they had to go outside to get fuel for the fire, they would tie themselves together with a rope to prevent them from being blown off a cliff.
Unlike me or Thoreau, the Islanders had no wood available to them for heating. Not a single tree grew on the island in the nineteenth century, which is still the case to this day. Like me, they all had turbary rights to cut turf on the island (I don’t exercise this right as bogs are now endangered landscapes in Ireland, while turf’s direct emissions put it in the same league as coal), which they invariably did using the same kind of two-sided sleán that is now on display in the Blasket Centre. It was usually the women who would make the nearly 5-kilometre round trip to collect it with their donkey, hauling it in wooden baskets known as creels. They supplemented this with gorse and heather, both of which were plentiful and renewable, along with any driftwood they found which was not considered useful enough for their homes.
To protect themselves against the elements, they usually built their houses into the hillside. These houses were smaller than most modern living rooms, and were built simply from stone and clay mortar from the island. Their doors had latches, but no locks. A dresser and cupboard, across the middle of what modern interior decorators would describe as an open-plan design, divided the house in two. On one side you had the sleeping quarters. Potatoes were stored under their wooden beds. Their mattresses were made from goose down, their bed sheets from used flour sacks, and their blankets from sheep’s wool. In between beds they kept a piss pot, which all of the family used throughout the night.
The kitchen side of the house was usually the larger of the two – it was important that it was big enough for dancing, or to set a wake if someone died. Every house would have a sturdy table, built like a kneading trough, with a raised frame around the sides to stop potatoes rolling off and into the dog’s eager mouth. Around this they arranged sugawn chairs, made from straw rope – I use one of these myself – while a long wooden couch, set against a wall, was where the night fishermen might have an afternoon nap. It was below this pew-like seat that a family usually kept the hen coop.
The kitchen was the domain of the women, of which three generations would sometimes be found in the same house. In it you would expect to find a skillet, an iron pot, wooden mugs, plates, bowls and a pot oven for baking and roasting on the turf fire. When Tomás Ó Criomhthain was a young man, families would squeeze their cow, donkey and dog into the kitchen at night to keep them warm by the dying embers of the fire. The iron pot was used to soak clothes for washing, yet the Islanders themselves bathed in the cold salt water of the Atlantic. I suppose if you never get accustomed to a hot, soaking, relaxing bath, you’re hardly going to miss it.
The Islanders’ greatest protection against the elements was their own hardiness, something cultivated from birth. Most men and women, in Peig Sayers’ time, would have put on their first pair of boots on their wedding day. Boys wore short trousers, girls home-made dresses. Tough as they were, in both winter and at sea they needed protection from the merciless conditions. The fishermen wore oilskin jackets to keep themselves dry. Their sweaters – the geansaí – and socks were knitted by the women, who used a spinning wheel to turn the wool into yarn. The men took pride in wearing a flat cap, while the women often wore a shawl around their head and neck. The priest always saw their best clothes, whether it be at mass in Dunquin, or in a coffin.
As I get up from writing, to go outside and pick nettles – Kirsty will later dry the seeds, one or two teaspoonfuls a day of which work wonders for your hair, skin and adrenal glands – I notice it’s raining. Putting on my waterproof jacket, which was made in Malaysia, I remind myself that I’ve a long way to go before I can even dream of calling myself self-reliant.
~
Kirsty has just got back from the city, where she has been busking. She hitched out, something she has been doing more of recently. I admire her courage not to be too swayed by other people’s often fearful advice, yet I always find myself glad to see her come through the door safe and sound.
She tells me that she just had a lift with a builder, and that as soon as she got into his van he said, ‘You look like a free spirit.’ They got to talking. He told her that he used to be too, but that he now needed to bring in €4,500 every week just to pay his lads, whom he feels a lot of responsibility towards. He said the pressure is unforgiving, and that he’s not sleeping well any more. Kirsty suggested that he should pack it in, as life is short. Not that easy any more, he said. The bank’s involved. Heavily involved. He’s bought in and now he can’t easily get out.
He asked her what she’s up to. Busking on the streets, she said. Can you make a living out of that, he asked? Depends on how much of a living you need to make, she said.
~
I’m meandering through a mosaic of stone-walled fields, trying – failing – to find a pool where two rivers converge, when I meet Michael. He’s a farmer, and he owns one of the fields I’m wandering around. It turns out that we met for the first time a few nights earlier, when he was playing the bodhrán at the monthly trad session in Holohan’s. He tells me that the pub might be closing – young people are leaving rural Ireland, supermarket cans and bottles of wine are so cheap, and Gardaí have been targeting small villages with their breathalysers – and so that session may have been our last.
I’ve heard better news. That’s the second pub, in the space of a week, that I’ve been told might be closing. Soon the only watering hole around may be our own sibín, and the last thing we want is a monopoly. It seems like our free pub is the only one not in danger of going out of business – a peculiar scenario due, perhaps, to the fact it has never been in business.
Something needs to be done. But as I stand in a field talking to Michael about hurling, music and the future of farming, I’ve no idea what that something mig
ht be.
~
Casting out into the lough, my mind wanders to past stages of my life, times when I was sure of what I believed, times when I knew. Only a decade ago I would have considered myself a vegan and an animal rights activist. Now here I am, actively trying to take the last breath of a breathtaking creature who, if I’m lucky, I’ll have to knock over the head before transforming its flesh and brains and heart and eyes into my own.
I cast in again. Still not a bite. The fisherman next to me is throwing in maggots and other bait around his float to attract rudd and roach and perch to his barbed hook. Unlike me, he is taking them out at will, counting them as he goes, before throwing them back in. He’s got an awful lot of gear, thousands of pounds’ worth perhaps, and 10-kilogramme plastic tubs of bait. He tells me that he just enjoys seeing how many he can catch, and that he lives in hope of a record fish. Says he doesn’t like the taste of them anyway. As he pulls in a specimen rudd, he looks very pleased with himself.
I cast in again. My mind has finally stopped wandering, and I focus on the tip of the rod, dragging it every few moments to give the impression that my lure – the head of an old silver spoon with a hook and a streak of red painted onto it – is an injured fish.
The top of my rod bends viciously. I can tell immediately that it’s a pike, almost certainly a male jack pike (they are smaller and more likely to go for my spoon bait than the females), but a decent size. He fights like hell. He doesn’t want to die – I don’t really want to kill him – and I respect his spirit. I take no joy in his struggle, but feel no sentimentality either, as I remind myself why he got himself caught in the first place. He breaks the surface, tries to lose the hook with his ritual death shake, before diving down with all his might. Eventually he tires, and the world as he knows it is about to end. I don’t pretend to know what he is experiencing in this moment. Fear? If there is one thing anthropology has taught me, it’s that the fear of death isn’t universal even among people, let alone species.
I pull him up, and look into his eye as I take his life. I wish him well on his journey, a sentiment I mean sincerely. I’m going to have to face that moment one day too. For a time after, his body pulses. I wonder where his wild spirit has floated off to, or whether I will also take it inside me when I eat his flesh later. The fisherman next to me, who had stopped to watch, tells me it’s a fine fish but that it’s a shame to have to kill him. I agree.
Cycling back towards Knockmoyle, I stop on an old arced bridge above a shallow, gravelly brook with a pool. I watch a couple of mallards drift over its surface, in no particular hurry. Do they revel in the glory around them? Quietly and unremarkably the female ducks below the surface, before re-emerging shortly afterwards with something dying in her beak. No rod. No rocket stove to cook it on. No ethics. They slowly drift towards the bank, where they come onto land and bask in the final moments of light before nightfall.
Thunder rumbles dramatically, and the rain comes down hard on the way home. I’m wet. I’m tired. I’m alive.
~
It’s morning and just before twilight, so at this time of year it’s got to be early. Not even the blackbirds are up.
I’m already up in the woods. I need to wheelbarrow around 450 kilogrammes of wood from the woodland to the lean-to, and since much of this has to be done along public roads, this is the safest part of the day to do it. Each barrow-load of roughly 125 kilogrammes has to be pushed for the guts of a kilometre, before returning the same distance for the next lot. That’s after hauling each of the logs for roughly 100 metres to the point where they can be wheelbarrowed. It certainly gets the blood circulating before breakfast.
It’s at times like these when I wish that my parents had made me push heavy wheelbarrows long distances in the rain when I was a child. That way I probably wouldn’t moan and complain about some of the unimportant, stupid stuff I moan and complain about today.
~
I pull the cover off one of the raised beds, whose dry, bare soil has not seen the light of day since it was dug out from the place where the cabin now stands. I’m planting out rainbow chard, winter purslane, endive and rocket which, along with sturdy crops like Brussels sprouts and kale, will keep us in salads for the winter months.
The bed is free of weeds and appears deceptively lifeless, until I spot a furore of frantic activity happening in one of the corners. A colony of ants have had the roof ripped off their home, their world in tatters, their eggs exposed to predators, their future teetering on the edge.
I kneel down above them, and watch intently. At first they appear to be panicked, scurrying around rather aimlessly, yet on closer inspection a pattern emerges from the chaos, with one half finding their way to their eggs and the other going underground through a tunnel against the wooden frame of the bed. One by one they carry their white eggs, which are almost as big as they are, down the hole to some kind of safety. None of them appear to be moaning, none are filming the chaotic scenes for the media or YouTube. They’re simply getting on with the job of rebuilding their world, one no longer based on plastic.
A part of me wants to throw the plastic cover back on, but it seems that the more I interfere and disturb the natural order of things, the more havoc I create for others. So I go back to planting out my salads, knowing that one day soon the ants will be back milking aphids and blackfly for honeydew, making people like me question the distinctions between words like ‘agriculture’ and ‘wild’.
~
Watching me writing by candlelight late one evening, a visitor warns me to take care of my eyesight. He tells me that he heard somewhere once that the master scribes of the ancient manuscripts often went blind from squinting in the dark rooms of monasteries. There’s truth in what he says. He’s wearing glasses himself, the black, thick-framed geeky type, and as he’s a young man I ask him what happened to his own eyesight. He doesn’t know, he says. He just has bad eyesight.
Today is the sixth and final day of his stay. He wanted to get a break from the city to clear his head, to figure out what he wants to do with his life, and to see how he finds life in this way. He tells me that he’s enjoyed his week here and that, in many ways, he’s very envious; yet at the same time he’s looking forward to getting back to his creature comforts – his games console, central heating, television, his music. Especially his music.
Strange, isn’t it, he says.
~
After a year of heavy use, my bike needs care and attention. I flip it upside down and get to work on it. The first job is a fiddly one: brakes. I stare at them for a short moment. Odd, confusing little things, I think. On one hand they’re going to stop me from careering into an oncoming car and near-certain death; on the other hand, I’m painfully aware that they’re the fruit of a political ideology that is careering head first into a natural world it has forgotten its dependency on, and near-certain death.
Brakes fixed, I take off one of the wheels to mend a slow puncture I picked up last night. The ingredients of the glue are in a foreign language, but the three warning symbols are universal: ‘Highly flammable’, ‘Irritant’ and ‘Dangerous for the Environment’. I wonder if the danger has already come to pass before I open it. There’s a small piece of PVC-backed sandpaper and a selection of patches, each one protected on one side by foil and on the other by clear, light plastic. All of this is packed compactly into a green, hard plastic box; which, it seems, is the only green thing about my bike.
I know that none of this is primitive, medieval or even pre-industrial, and it sits uncomfortably on my mind. Such philosophical troubles are clearly a First World problem, yet my dependency on global products like repair kits makes it a Third World problem too. When a man pulls on his brakes in Ireland, whole tracts of ocean and soil are laid to waste in places Western consumers have never even heard of. I tell myself that the bike is a very different proposition to our old Transit van, but only as a matter of degrees, and while it doesn’t pump pollutants and emissions into the collective lu
ng, it’s still dependent on the same flawed ideology.
The situation, as always, is complicated. In pre-industrial, pre-enclosure times, before people began moving en masse to cities, most of your friends would be living in your parish or village. Nearby streams and rivers were full of fish. But that world went the way of the passenger pigeon, and there’s little point pretending otherwise. I don’t live in pre-industrial society, the local rivers are dead and my friends are scattered. Yet something inside me still feels that the future – or my future at least – is on foot.
I put the wheel back on, pump the tyres, oil the sprocket and clean out the dirt from the derailleur. It’s in good shape. There’s a strong argument for not using a bike, but there’s no argument for not looking after it well.
I’ve had this bike a long time, and I’ve many memories of journeys with it. Once, as I cycled through a wooded area of south-east England called Forest Row, I recall meeting a pure white albino deer – a significant creature in mythology and the only time I’ve ever encountered one – by the side of the road. I was spellbound, captivated, in awe. Energised by its sight, I was speeding along the road shortly afterwards when a new thought ran through my mind: what would I do if a deer ran out in front of me while I was cycling this fast? I’d seen it happen a couple of times in cars. Moments later a great beast of a stag comes out of the woods and parks himself in exactly the spot I’m careering towards. Wyrd. I slam on the brakes, and for a long moment we stare at each other, before he slowly continues onwards to the other half of the woods.
Crazy as it sounds, I got the sense that this stag stopped me in my tracks to tell me something. I’ve been trying to heed it ever since.
~
I clumsily spill a wooden tankard of water on the table, and it’s inches from soaking my morning’s work, which is little more than a sequence of pencilled words on a handful of flimsy, vulnerable sheets of paper.
