The Way Home

by Mark Boyle

  ~

  Down at the lake. There’s a 60-foot barge moored up along the best stretch for fishing, gently rocking in the space between where I usually prey and the spot where the sun meets the horizon at this time of year. I’ve just cycled 20 kilometres in the hope of catching dinner, and so the sight of this barge is sorely disappointing. Having rejected all of the previous imported sources of protein that sustained me through my vegan years, my only sources of good quality protein now are fish, venison and eggs. For most anglers the barge would be little more than inconvenient, but for me its implications are more serious. I need to eat.

  Inside the boat, I can see what appears to be a mother with a brood of five children, all aged somewhere between twelve and twenty. They’re all on their phones and tablets – playing, posting, updating, browsing, listening or reading. The mother comes out to talk with me. She tells me that she would love to moor up in this stretch for a few more days – it’s picturesque and peaceful – but because there is no electrical hook-up here they’ll have to move on, as the children are running out of charge and are on the verge of restlessness. I never thought I would be so glad to hear about young people’s addiction to their screens.

  The sky has by now exploded into an inflamed orange, the sun reminding us of its controlled prowess before it takes off to wake up some tribe half the world away. I can see a grebe, a cormorant and a heron in different directions, all of whom I suppose have come with similar intentions as me. Out of the boat emerges one of the young women. She asks if I would like a cup of tea or food. I thank her, but tell her that I’m all good for food – I’m not really – as it feels easier than explaining my situation. Shortly afterwards she re-emerges with a cup of tea – milk, half a sugar – a ham and cheese sandwich, a packet of smoky bacon crisps and an apple. It’s the sweetest sight you could imagine – kind, thoughtful, everything that speaks well of us as people. To reject such generosity feels wrong, so I slurp down the tea and eat the rest as we chat.

  I catch nothing. It’s midnight before I get home. I’ve not had caffeine for over ten years – ham for even longer – and so I don’t sleep a wink all night.

  ~

  During my time managing the organic food company in Bristol, I would regularly notice our customers, throughout August and September, walking past brambles heavy with fruit on their way to buy blackberries – £2.50 for a little plastic punnet – from our shop. Even at the time I found that strange. Sometimes, as our customers lurked around our long fridges laden with vegetables and fruit, I would point them towards the bushes outside, and a few would put their punnets back. I probably should have put up a sign saying ‘Free blackberries along the path by the car park’, but four years of business schooling made that difficult for me to do in those days.

  It’s early, those moments before the rest of humanity powers up their myriad machines: cars, chainsaws, tractors, strimmers, radios, bulldozers, haulage trucks. I find myself getting up earlier and earlier in search of these moments. I’ve just been to the woods, twice, to collect wood, two logs each time, one on each shoulder. A practical morning walk. Now I’m picking blackberries for our breakfast. It has been a good year for fruit, so quite quickly I have gathered what I reckon to be about €10 worth of berries; my head, after a lifetime of converting life into numbers, can’t help but do the maths. Later we will go picking, as a group, with the intention of making at least 20 litres of wine for our solstice party in the sibín.

  Seeing the harvest, Packie – with a cheeky glint in his eye – asks Kirsty if she would like to go up the bóithrín blackberry picking with him after dark, and she rightly gives him a clip around the ear as he takes off home, laughing.

  ~

  Since the nearby spruce farm was clear-felled in March, a young stag has been coming to graze our grass in broad daylight. He’s a refugee, and so I don’t know whether to offer him sanctuary and protection, or to do what I would do if we were living in peace with his kind: which would be to kill him, skin him, butcher him, smoke him and use every sinew and bone in his body. I watch him now as he slowly and gracefully makes his way through our copse, his impressive antlers quietly moving among the long grass, willow, sweet chestnut and hazel, grazing on all as he goes.

  I weigh it up. The old animal rights activist in me says no, that my way of life has brutalised his long enough, and to offer him and his tribe a place of refuge. The conservationist in me is confused; there’s more deer around here than there is habitat for them now. That’s not because there are too many deer, but because there isn’t enough habitat. The primal hunter-gatherer in me says I should kill him, and to view the act as part of the only culture that has ever made any sense to me.

  As I watch him, I ponder. I remember Aldo Leopold’s words, penned on his own smallholding in Wisconsin, from his short essay ‘Thinking Like a Mountain’. When Leopold was young and full of trigger-itch, he ‘never heard of passing up a chance to kill a wolf’. At the time he believed that ‘fewer wolves meant more deer’ and therefore ‘no wolves would mean hunters’ paradise.’ But one afternoon, after he and his friends had pumped lead into a pack of grown wolf pups playing with their mother, he witnessed for the first time the ‘fierce green fire dying in her eyes’, and came to ‘suspect that just as a deer herd lives in mortal fear of its wolves, so does a mountain live in mortal fear of its deer’. A mountain without wolves, he explains, looks ‘as if someone had given God a new pruning shears, and forbidden him all other exercise’.

  I know this young copse lives in mortal fear of this stag, and his kind, entering its boundaries. And then I wonder if I do in fact know, or if there is something that I do not understand about this hill and its creatures yet. Unsure, I decide to leave things as they are for now, and to wait for the answer to come.

  ~

  After nine months of splashing warm – and sometimes cold – water over myself in the Victorianesque aluminium bath tub that usually hangs on the timber-frame outside, I feel motivated to make an outdoor hot tub. September is a good time of year for such jobs, as I’ve more spare time and there’s usually plenty of dry weather.

  My friend Matt has a garden full of salvaged cast iron hot tubs, and he kindly promises to bring one over the next time he’s visiting. The most important part of the job is picking the perfect spot for it to go. There are many factors to consider. Ideally it would catch the afternoon and evening sun, so as to gently warm up a bathful of cold water before the fire is lit below it, thus saving wood. Privacy is important, more for my neighbours’ sake than our own, as I’m not sure Packie, Kathleen or Tommy are quite ready to see me climb out of a hot tub naked. I want the tub to be surrounded by trees – to protect its cob walls from the elements and for the calming lack of urgency that they often inspire – while at the same time having unobstructed views of the Milky Way, for those times when I’ll want to bathe at night. And it needs to be somewhere the water can freely drain away without creating a mud bath.

  After a week of mulling it over, I decide upon a site near the centre of a triangle of which our cabin, The Happy Pig and the farmhouse are the corner points. I level off the ground, which is next to the fire-hut, and put down stone foundations on which the tub will eventually sit. I dig a small French drain, starting below where the plughole will be and running all the way into a bigger, older drain. With all the groundwork done, Matt and I lift the tub into place. Being built to last many lifetimes, it’s heavy, but it sits perfectly in its place, level except for an imperceptible drop to the plughole end, to allow the bath to fully drain after every use.

  Running along one length of the bath I make a bench, where glasses of blackcurrant wine and clothes can rest clean and dry. Around this I build a rockery from more of Tommy’s stones, on top of which cob will graduate into the top lip of the tub. Cob – a mixture of clay, straw, sand and water – is a wonderful, forgiving material to use, but after mixing over 30 tonnes of it by foot (you stamp the ingredients into cob in much the same way you tradi
tionally make wine out of grapes) over the course of two summers when building the hostel, I still feel sick at the sight of it. We have lots of good quality clay, however, so all temporary qualms I have about using it are set aside, and it’s what I use to decorate and insulate the sides.

  Along the top of the cob I embed a selection of coloured tiles which I found when I first moved here, which will offer it ample protection from splashing water. Both the firebox below the bath, and the chimney that emerges out of it, are also made out of cob, and they take me most of the day to get right. As the light begins to fade and the midges briefly turn heaven into hell, I smooth off the cob surrounds with my fingers to give it a natural, textured finish. Standing back, looking at the day’s work, it’s a pleasing result. Some people create art on the cob – sculptures of the sun, flowers, dolphins and suchlike – but I haven’t got an artistic bone in my body, so I keep it plain. The whole thing costs me €15, which I paid to the local waste recycling plant for a couple of lengths of insulated flue pipe.

  It will be a few days of dry weather before I’ll test it out. If I’ve forgotten something critical – it’s my first hot tub, so it’s a definite possibility – I may have to rip it all out and start again. Right now I’m covered from head to toe in sweat and cob, so I take down the aluminium bath and pour cold water over my warm body while the new hot tub teases me in the background.

  ~

  Today’s lunch: a bowl of salad – mustard lettuce, rocket, rainbow chard, horsetail, calabrese leaves, fennel, spinach, peas, parsley and grated courgette – along with boiled eggs and a fresh mackerel which, though gutted, is otherwise raw and whole.

  I wash it all down with a small bowl of mackerel blood. For those unused to drinking blood it can taste strong and intense, but from the moment it enters your body it is difficult to imagine a more potent drink on the planet.

  ~

  I wake up suddenly. I’ve no idea what clock-time it is, but the dense darkness cloaking the cabin gives me the impression that it’s the dead of night. I realise that Kirsty isn’t beside me. She said she would be home early tonight, and so all sorts of scenarios start running through my mind. I’ve no way of contacting her, and she has no way of contacting anyone. We always tell each other not to worry if one of us is out much later than expected, but it’s easier said than done when it comes to people you love. I try to go back to sleep, remembering that it’s not so long ago that not knowing everyone’s every movement was normal. I tell myself that this is Knockmoyle, not New York, and that if she has been in an accident then enough people here know her and would undoubtedly get word to me immediately.

  The darkness is fading as I get up. It’s very late. Or very early. I couldn’t sleep. I’m on my way out the door to gather firewood when the latch goes and in walks Kirsty, looking very pleased with herself. She’s had a terrific, spontaneous night of dancing with a few girlfriends. I hold her tight and tell her that I was worried. She smiles and tells me to either get a phone like the rest of the world – there are now more phones than people on the planet – or to make peace with just not knowing sometimes.

  ~

  Out blackberry picking with Jorne (or, as the neighbours call him, Captain John), who lives in the farmhouse. This, he tells me, is now considered poaching in his homeland, the Netherlands (from which he considers himself to be an industrial refugee), and is punishable with a hefty fine.

  As we continue ambling up the verges of the bóithrín, we wonder at what point in Dutch history such an imposition became acceptable, and I think about what I would do – above and beyond simply ignoring it – if such legislation were to be passed in Ireland.

  The next morning, on an adjacent stretch of road, a man in a high-visibility bomber jacket and trousers races up behind me on a quad bike, and into his two-way radio I hear him say, ‘It’s a man, I think he’s just picking blackberries.’ He asks me if I’m going to make jam, and tells me to watch out for the three tractors coming up behind. It would be hard not to. They’re huge, each with hedge-cutters attached, doing the type of rough job which the human hand of a hedgelayer would find unbearable.

  I ask him if they’ll leave the patch I’m picking from alone. He agrees, and I thank him. The tractors pass me by, each with a wave from the drivers, and make their way down the road. For the next 20 kilometres not another inch of hedgerow will be spared. Blackberry season, on this road, is over just as it started.

  I walk back home, and have enough for breakfast.

  ~

  I awoke to a flurry of phone calls. It was the morning before Buy Nothing Day 2008, the day on which I was due to quit using money, and the media had got wind of my plans. Both my mobile phone and the landline of the house I was about to move out of were ringing at once, and continued to all day; by nightfall I must have given close to forty interviews to press and radio around the world, all asking more or less the same questions. The world’s financial economy had, coincidentally, just gone into meltdown, so for the first time in a generation people were seriously wondering how they could live on less – much less, in some cases. There was unprecedented anger towards the banks and big business, and there was a deep questioning of the global financial system that hadn’t happened before in my lifetime. At the time, I was twenty-eight and impassioned, so I decided to take the unexpected opportunity to speak out about my reasons for embarking on what was turning out to be quite a timely endeavour.

  It was strange doing all that talking about it before I had even begun living without money. All I had really wanted to do was explore what a life without money might look and feel like, to see if it was even practically possible in the modern age and, if it was, what the practicalities were. After all, there was little point in talking about the intended and unintended consequences of money – on our societies, landscapes, cultures, economies, ecologies, our physical, emotional and mental health, our spirituality – if such a life were to turn out to be a form of living hell. I had wanted to give my mouth a rest in order to give my hands a chance, and so, while I played the hand I was dealt, it wasn’t the ideal start to what was going to be an entirely new way of living for me.

  I had more important, immediate things on my mind too. I had already committed to putting on a three-course meal, made entirely for free out of foraged and waste food, for 150 people the following day, which would also be my first without money. As I grew tired of the sound of my own voice, I was acutely aware that I still had only a fraction of the food needed for that many meals, and that I was about to start something – originally intended to be for a year – that I had no idea if I could finish. To add to the pressure, the eyes of the world’s media were back on me again.

  The next day came and went. Before I knew it, it was the final day of my year, and sixty volunteers and I were putting on a follow-up feast; except this time it was for over a thousand people as part of a day-long free festival of music, cinema, talks, workshops and free shops. In between those two feasts had been the most deeply affecting period of my life, the adventures of which are the subject of my first book, The Moneyless Man. I had achieved what I had set out to achieve, but it no longer felt like an achievement. Living without money had become as second nature to me as living with money had been before; or, perhaps I had finally tapped into my primal, first nature.

  By that stage I had already decided to continue that way of life for as long as it felt right. The thought of using money once again to mediate my relationships began to feel absurd, unnatural and undesirable. I had stopped missing things and had come to love what I had gained. Why give that up?

  After three years, I decided to start using money again, for a time at least. There were a few reasons. First, the whole undertaking was starting to consume me. The media’s fascination with it was one thing – I could have, theoretically at least, quit all of that and just simply lived the life, without being its spokesperson – but it was all that anyone I met would ever talk to me about. Strangers would even pull me over in
the street to give me their opinion.

  I had also come to the point where I wanted to set up a land-based community where others could come and experience some time – a day, a weekend, six months, a lifetime – living in a direct, immediate relationship with a place. Along with that I realised that the only thing I was really missing was my family, who were in the same place as they had always been. I had been living in the UK, at that point, for over a decade, and I was lucky if I saw them once or twice a year. Like myself, they weren’t getting any younger, and I wanted to spend time with them before it was too late. So I decided to move back to Ireland, and set up a small community there, using the proceeds from The Moneyless Man, which had already been translated into twenty languages. I wanted to use these unexpected funds to create a place where others could also live, rent- and mortgage-free, in a direct relationship with a landscape. The real challenge, I now know, was only beginning.

  I went to a pub with some friends in Bristol and handed the barman a piece of paper in return for ale. It all felt surreal. Stopping being moneyless felt even more strange than starting. I knew that I wanted to get back to living directly from my landscape again, and I knew that I wanted to do it at a more primal level, with none of the distractions that I had found ways of accessing, even without money. To do so I knew that, one day, I was going to have to relinquish all of the things that were mediating my relationship to the land and preventing me from cultivating an intimate relationship with everything in my immediate surroundings. It was a hard, and yet exciting, thought.

  We finished our pints, and a few more, and left. Some of the people I went out with that night I have never seen since.

  ~

  People often accuse me of being a Luddite, a term that wrongly gets used synonymously with words like ‘technophobe’ or ‘anti-progressive’. I respond by saying that I’m not worthy of such high praise, but thank them nonetheless.