The Way Home Read online

  Actually, I’m being unfair to him. Instead of calling him untrained, I could have called him wild, self-willed, undomesticated, unbroken, all the things I would like to be again. He is more than capable of going off to the woods and the pasturelands for weeks on end, with nothing but the hair on his back, and making a good living for himself; which, let’s face it, is more than I’ve yet achieved. But on the lead he’s a pain in the arse, always pulling, chomping at the bit to follow his own heart’s desires. It’s exactly this indomitable spirit, this unrelenting enthusiasm for life, that rather annoyingly means I can never pass him on my way out for a walk.

  We set off through what was, only a few weeks ago, a wood but which is now . . . well, I’m not sure what to call it anymore. The machines have finished and taken what they need to keep the machine economy running for a little while longer. At first I find my head still in writing mode, struggling to just be on a walk, thinking too much for my own good. That said, it reaps rewards of its own, as the fresh air and movement leads to breakthroughs on thoughts, sentences and paragraphs on which I’d got stuck. On which I always get stuck. I wasn’t born a writer.

  It’s a kilometre and a half before I feel grounded and present. I notice deer tracks going into a few acres of adjoining woods. Noted. There are dandelions and nettles everywhere, both of which make good beer. Noted. The machines have left a trail of imperfect, unprofitable wood in their wake, which – in theory – looks perfectly profitable for my woodpile. Noted.

  I finally make it back to the cabin, just in time, as the skies unburden themselves again. Enlivened, alert, clear, I work long into the night.

  ~

  There’s a megasylvan pile of old floorboards, rafters and joists in Mick’s yard up the road. It’s mostly pine and oak which has been ripped out of a house Mick’s son is renovating, and he tells me to take as much as I like before it’s made into a bonfire. It’s low-hanging fruit compared to hauling logs out of the woods, and as this is the time of year to be getting wood in and dried, I take him up on the offer.

  Rummaging through it, I sort out the good from the bad. Anything strong and without rot or woodworm I put into one pile, which I’ll keep for any small DIY projects that may emerge over the coming year. The rest – mostly floorboards that were broken up as they were being taken out – goes into a woodpile. Many are still almost 4 metres in length, so I saw them in half to fit them sideways down the bóithrín to my lean-to, which is a good 300 metres away.

  I knock on Packie’s door to ask him if I can borrow his wheelbarrow. What are you even asking for? His is no ordinary wheelbarrow. It was handmade when he was a young man, and is still working perfectly fine today. It was designed and built with turf in mind, in the days before heavy machinery made such human-scale tools obsolete. The thing is imposing and without sides, meaning you would have been able to stack and move a lot of turf in it; as long, that is, as you had the shoulders to move it through wet, boggy land. Instead of taking ten to fifteen trips up and down the bóithrín, it will only take three with this contraption. Such logic can lead to quad bikes and tractors, though, so I remind myself that the law of diminishing returns applies to efficiency, too.

  Back up at Mick’s yard I stack the boards as tight and high as I think I can get away with. On each load I manage to get almost fifty 2-metre floorboards in, and the wheelbarrow is still not full. It’s heavy though, and it takes the best part of me to make it safely to the lean-to without it tipping over. As I walk up the hill for the third load, I feel a renewed sense of admiration for the folk who would have once done this, from dawn until dusk, for days on end as they took turf from the bog.

  I spend the rest of the morning on the sawhorse, where I break it up into stove-sized pieces. Anything thick is cut up with the bow saw, while the sledge-hammer takes care of the rest. It’s all done before hunger gets the better of me, and I estimate that I have about six weeks’ more wood stacked up.

  I stand back to admire the woodpile. The work was not as satisfying as spending the day in the forest, and the stack itself reflects that. It’s just a pile of smashed-up timber and not the chopped and well-stacked row of spruce, beech and ash that I could look at all day.

  Still, wood’s wood.

  ~

  On the same day in 1996 that all of my boyhood mates took off for university in Belfast, I got on a bus destined for Galway City and, for the first time in our lives, our paths diverged. We had known each other since we were kids, and we had seen each other through the turmoil of adolescence. We played football together, and won and lost together. We got in trouble together, and got ourselves out of it together. They were my tribe.

  There was a sadness about leaving. Even though we had planned to see each other at weekends, part of me knew that we would never again all live in the place which we had always considered home. Moving to Galway was like starting life over again – there was no history, no ties, no bonds, no familial connections and no reputation to rely on. Up until that point, I had only been to a city – what farmer and writer John Connell calls ‘those farms of men’ – a handful of times, and suddenly I was living in one. It was scary, and exciting, like many scary things are.

  It soon turned out that I had about as much interest in being in lecture halls as I’d had in classrooms. I found myself taking subjects like economics, IT, accountancy, maths, retail marketing, labour relations and entrepreneurship, but my heart wasn’t in any of it. The problem was, having now left my hometown, I no longer knew where my heart was.

  It was because of this that I was found more often in pubs than at lectures. Or perhaps it was because I had suddenly come into a bit of money. When I was thirteen, one of my best mates and I were hit by a car travelling at 60mph. I was considered dead. Those who had come onto the scene had put a blanket over me, as I lay motionless against a concrete post, while they tended to my friend, who was semi-conscious and badly broken in the middle of the road. The woman who had hit us had been trying to overtake, and when she realised that she couldn’t get back into her own lane before meeting with oncoming traffic, she cut across into the hard shoulder, where we were walking. Within three days, however, I was out of hospital with no broken bones (my friend was out of action for over a year), and I was eventually awarded £13,000 (Irish punt) in compensation. It’s odd, I don’t remember having had any sense of being awarded another shot at life.

  That was an awful lot of money for a young man who hadn’t had two pennies to rub together before. Yet on the day the money was transferred to my bank account, shortly after my eighteenth birthday, something in me didn’t want anything to do with it. I don’t know why. It wasn’t like I had critiqued the concept of money at this point. I just didn’t want it. I had planned to give it to Oxfam, but my mother convinced me to hold onto it until I was sure. She was only looking out for my best interests, as that had been the most money any of us had ever had. So I drank it instead, and made sure that my new mates in Galway drank it with me.

  By the time I’d started second year I felt the whole thing was bullshit, a big waste of time, and on a couple of occasions had decided to pack it in. I remember once quitting and going for a job with a window cleaner. He told me at the end of the interview that he would be happy to give me the job if I wanted it, but implored me to finish my studies instead, and to make any decisions after that. There was something about the look in his eye that held weight with me that afternoon. So I went back. A week later I lost the floppy disc on which I had saved a three-thousand-word essay I was due to submit, which felt like the final straw, so I quit again. This time it lasted a few hours until, walking through a field I hadn’t recalled being in before, what did I find lying in the grass, fully intact, but the floppy disc. I took the hint and decided to finish out the year, and to leave taking stock until afterwards.

  Miraculously, I made it through second year, passing one exam on repeat. I was glad I had stuck it out, but I needed a change of scenery. I decided to take a gap year. What I
would fill the gap with I wasn’t sure. Up until then I had lived for football, and the feeling that you would live and die for your tribe, on or off the pitch. But as I fell away from football, that sense of togetherness slowly slipped away with it. I felt uncertain in the world, like I didn’t quite know who I was or why I was here.

  I wanted meaning and purpose back in my life. So what did I go and do: I got a job on the assembly line of an American pharmaceutical company on an industrial estate in Galway, and went out drinking every night with the wages.

  ~

  I spend the morning hunkered down in the herb garden, weeding. I find it repetitive, quite boring work, yet I find it affords me plenty of time to think. I use that time to wonder what my hunter-gatherer ancestors would think of me now, as I spend my time picking the plants I don’t want.

  I accidentally slice a worm in two with my trowel, and it writhes around manically, in much the same way I would if someone speared me. It isn’t the first and it won’t be the last. Does that mean my herbs, or anyone’s herbs for that matter, are still vegan, or is a worm’s life of less value than a deer’s? Some of the plants I pull out I know only too well, while others I don’t know well enough. There’s a certain arrogance to the job that I’m not entirely comfortable with. Without understanding their qualities, or their place within this place, I defame some plants and call them weeds, while others take their lofty place as herbs. To those whose qualities our culture understands, we grant life; the others we kill. But one man’s weed is another man’s medicine, and only some phenomenon greater than myself knows the real purpose of anything.

  I know many excellent gardeners who frenetically pull out nettles – a weed packed full of nutrients, flavour and potential for high-protein leaf curd – while simultaneously struggling to keep slugs off their lettuce. Dandelion and horsetail suffer the same fate, all for the want of a little understanding.

  Over lunch I sit and watch the little red face of a goldfinch bob up and down on a dandelion flower, and he (the male’s face is a more vibrant red, the yellow streak on his wings a little wider) is soon joined by a mate. In close attendance is the honeybee, who is getting on with business in among a patch of primroses and bluebells. Everything knows its place. I need to be careful I don’t forget mine.

  ~

  I’m out working in the garden when Jim, a local farmer-cum-road worker, stops in for a chat. He asks me if I know that it’s Good Friday, a sacrosanct bank holiday in Ireland and one of only two days in the year that even publicans are forced to take off. I tell him that I didn’t even know it was Friday, let alone a particularly good one. He thinks I’m joking, and laughs.

  He tells me that this will be the last year the pubs will be forced to close on Good Friday. The Easter weekend is a big, international holiday break, and politicians and business leaders in Dublin had successfully argued that the capital was losing millions by not having pubs open on this religious holiday.

  ~

  The boat ride from Dunquin to the Great Blasket takes around twenty minutes, with barely any human effort required other than the starting of the engine and the steering of the wheel. Being out of tourist season, we are alone, but I imagine it could ferry a hundred people without having any impact on the speed of the journey. The naomhóga which the Islanders travelled to and fro on, using oars and carrying up to eight people, would take anywhere between forty-five minutes to an hour, depending on the conditions and the load, which ranged in weight from a boatful of mackerel to the heavier burden of a child’s corpse.

  It is a calm day, and we have an easy landing. I remember reading archives of stories about Islanders getting caught out in merciless storms and being unable to land at all. We ascend the steep, grassy path from the rocks, and I make a beeline for Tomás Ó Criomhthain’s house, or whatever is left of it. As it turns out, there is more than expected. The Office of Public Works, which generally does good work, is renovating it. Whether or not such ruins should be restored and preserved for eternity, or allowed to return to the earth, is a matter of opinion. My main reservation with this particular renovation, as I stand examining it, is that the builders are using cheap, mass-produced materials, giving Tomás’s old abode the tinge of bland suburbia. They certainly aren’t using the flotsam of shipwrecks, which the last human inhabitants often used in the maintenance of their homes. Instead, they’re helicoptering in the materials. Looking at the skill in Tomás’s own stonework, it strikes me that they are in danger of preserving the fact of the cottage while doing nothing to preserve its spirit.

  I follow the tourist map around the other houses. You can still, just about, make out the web of pathways running from house to house. Robert Macfarlane and Roger Deakin have, in the past, drawn attention to how such tracks are signs of connection. Today, however, these paths are not kept worn and alive by economically interdependent villagers, but by day-trippers between whom there is no real connection beyond the passing moment. Following these tourist-trails, I find myself visiting the houses of its famous writers first, though all of the houses were made of the same stone. I walk to the childhood home of Muiris Ó Súilleabháin – author of Twenty Years A-Growing (Fiche Bliain ag Fás) – next, and then to that of Peig Sayers. But it suddenly feels quite wrong to do so, like I am getting myself caught up in a strange variation on the cult of celebrity. So instead I visit the village well, the gathering house (An Dáil), the unconsecrated graveyard, the tiny school and post office, along with Tigh na Rí, the house of the last Blasket King, which appears to be the smallest house of all.

  It is at Peig Sayers’ house that I meet a man called Diarmuid Lyng, who stands out among us tourists. He’s wearing work clothes and has a rough wiry beard, while his face has an open, friendly look about it. Having walked past other visitors silently all day, I find myself saying hello, and we get to talking. He is out here volunteering, working on Peig’s old house. I later find out from the boatmen that there was a TV documentary aired about him a few months earlier. Apparently he was a well-known hurling star, but – in the words of the ferrymen – he ‘lost the plot’, gave it all up and moved out to West Kerry, where he now spends time volunteering on the island. As we speak over the course of the afternoon, I see nothing in the contours of his face that suggests he has lost the plot at all.

  It transpires that he is a good friend of a good friend, and that we have many other friends in common, something I’d oddly already suspected. He tells me that, contrary to what I had been led to believe, visitors are allowed to camp on the island; that is, if they are hardy enough to want to. We haven’t brought a tent, thinking there to be no point, so he invites us to stay the night in one of the old houses that, despite being extremely basic, still has its roof and walls intact. It’s more than good enough for us. We offer to help him with his work for the evening, and I feel excited about how the adventure is unfolding. But just as the last boat is taking day-trippers back to the mainland for the evening, he decides to check with his boss that our staying the night isn’t a problem. We had all spoken at length earlier in the day, sharing many common interests and perspectives, so he had presumed that it wasn’t going to be an issue. He was wrong.

  The owner – a friendly, thoughtful man – tells him that our staying the night is an insurance risk, and that we therefore have to go back on the last boat that is still waiting down at the landing. Diarmuid looks frustrated, but I tell him we understand, and that this is just the way of the world at this brief moment in time. I laugh – not a joyful laugh, but a laugh nonetheless – and wonder if I am the first person to be refused a bed for the night, here on the Great Blasket, on insurance grounds.

  With that, we run down the hill to the landing area, where the good-humoured ferrymen are patiently waiting on us. We get off the boat and start walking the long road back to Dingle. I have a feeling I’ll be back again.

  ~

  Cuck-oo, cuck-oo. Forget the Gregorian calendar, I hear the first cuckoo this morning, and that means that it’s
the third week in April. The male’s song feels serene and calming – to me, that is. For songbirds, it is a grave warning. Soon one unfortunate little bird will return to her nest to find her own eggs gone and the cuckoo’s egg in their place, and she will care for the imposter until it hatches.

  There’s an old superstition in Britain and Ireland which says that if you have money in your pocket when you first hear the cuckoo, you’ll never be without it for the rest of the year. I’m wearing just shorts today, and I don’t even have pockets.

  I stand by the spring for a while, hoping to catch a glimpse of him, before eventually leaving disappointed.

  ~

  There’s an unusual letter in the post. It’s from a stranger who writes that he has recently quit his job as a senior claims manager for an insurance company in Australia, and says he is now looking for work he would find more meaningful. He explains a little about the pressures and criticisms he has received from family and friends because of his decision, and wants to know if I have any advice. I’m a poor career guidance counsellor, but I tell him to follow his heart. He goes on to tell me about how his search has uncovered work in what is now being called ‘the spiritual services’ – menopause mentors, death doulas, walking companions and so on. Apparently demand is growing for such things.

  You know that industrial capitalism is nearing the completion of its ultimate vision when people have to pay their neighbours to go for a walk with them.

  ~

  With the exception of ‘the long farm’ – oldspeak for the grassy verges along the sides of bóithríns which serve as some of the last vestiges of commonage in Ireland – it’s never easy to find grass for horses in April. It becomes clear to me that they need a paddock on our own smallholding, which means I need to get fencing, something I am disinclined to do. Electric fencing isn’t an option, so I opt for post-and-rail on a shoestring instead.