The Way Home Read online

  The doe’s guts have been spilt, and a crow appears to have taken out one of her eyes. Nutritious. But it is a cold, crisp day and there are no bluebottles near her yet. I put my hand inside her body, and find her still warm. She should be good to use. The problem is, I’ve not butchered a whole deer before. I had been waiting for the deer season to reopen for six months, but as I found myself busy with other things, this has caught me unprepared. In some ways it is perfect, as it means I don’t have to kill a deer, the thought of which my civilised mind has never found easy. But in other ways I feel stupidly rushed. I had intended to read books about how to butcher deer, and make use of every part, well in advance of the event. Now I have a matter of hours to make decisions which I feel a lack of competency to make.

  Back at the smallholding. I hang the deer, by her neck, off the skinning frame in the fire-hut. I sever and snap her front legs, which are single jointed, and make incisions into the skin, both around the neck and where the brown and white hair meet on her legs. This much I do know how to do. Being fresh, the skin peels off relatively easily, leaving a red, raw, lean and muscular body dangling on a rope. Only the head now resembles what I once considered to be a deer, and her intact eye looks right at me.

  The light is already fading. Just as my gardening books are soiled with muck, my butchering book is now splattered with blood. I realise that I should have left the skin on, for a day at least. Mistake number one. Nothing to be done but keep going, as I can hardly put it back on now. It’s getting difficult to read the book, so I make cuts instinctively. Slight mistakes two, three, four and five, but nothing fatal, as it’s all just meat and tallow and it’s not as if I am selling to the public. With all of the meat cleaned from the bones, I saw off the poor beast’s head, from which I’ll later finger out the brains to use for tanning the skin. I put the meat in containers, along with her heart, liver, lungs and sinews, and take it away to hang for a few days, where I will later make mistake number six. It’s now dark, and I’m tired, and in need of food.

  I feel disappointed with myself. If I had prepared myself properly I’d have done a much better job. But I didn’t grow up like Huckleberry Finn or Tom Sawyer, and there have been no elders in my life to link the ancient with the present. The maps of my journey home are scattered and piecemeal. As I attempt to bring these maps together under one whole, I have to accept that wrong turns are inevitable along the way.

  Changing out of my clothes in the cabin, I become aware that I’ve been wearing a yellow T-shirt I bought from an animal rights charity in Bristol ten years ago. ‘Stop animal testing,’ it reads. It’s a sentiment I still strongly agree with – there’s never an excuse for unnecessary cruelty – but right now it’s covered in deer and sheep blood (a neighbour had dropped over a fresh sheepskin that needed fleshing the day before). When I bought that T-shirt I couldn’t have imagined my life as it is now. I thought that people like me were big-time idiots lacking empathy for other sentient beings. But back then I lived in the city, and I lived a city life where I was insulated from the violence and cruelty my city ways were dependent upon.

  Recalling some of my old animal rights comrades, I’ve no doubt some would disown me now. To them my words will probably feel treacherous. It’s a thought which saddens me, as having held their views for long enough myself, I understand and respect where they are coming from. Yet I have to remind myself that it wasn’t me who killed this deer. A car did. Cars aren’t vegan. Phones aren’t vegan. Plastic tubs of vitamins aren’t vegan. Chickpeas, soya and hemp seeds – none of it is vegan, not really. It’s all the harvest of a political ideology which is causing the sixth mass extinction of species, one which is wiping out one habitat after the next, polluting rivers, soil, oceans and every breath of atmosphere as it spreads. From where I stand now, this bloody carcass in front of me feels more vegan than the plastic packet of cacao nibs I once sold, or the T-shirt – dyed yellow with who knows what – on my back. Well, if not more vegan, at least more honest.

  Looking at it in my hand, I notice how similar her heart is to my own. How many people passed her on the side of the road today? I pay my respects to the life it once was, store it in a cool place, and leave the rest of the work until morning.

  ~

  The clocks going back doesn’t only affect deer. For almost everyone – excepting babies, the comatose, myself, rocks, fish, trees and wildlife – it meant an extra hour in bed this morning, followed by six months of seemingly darker evenings. People will, for weeks to come, inevitably comment on the terrible, sudden shortness of the days, but today or tomorrow won’t be getting shorter any quicker than any other day since summer solstice. Untied from clock-time, this evening won’t feel significantly shorter in length from yesterday.

  Still, the days certainly aren’t getting any longer for a time, so I ought to stock up on candles. Having fields dotted with rush, I have an endless source of candle wick. I cut a clump of its green, cylindrical shoots, and peel them one by one. The outer skin comes off easily enough, leaving a soft, dry, absorbent pith, which is what I am after. I fire up the rocket stove, cook dinner and, once it’s done, melt a bowl of beeswax in a pot of hot water. It smells as good as honey straight from the comb. Taking care to keep an 8 centimetre length of rush pith centred, I pour the melted beeswax around the wick and into one of a collection of shot glasses I once found in a charity shop. I hold the wick steady, keeping it in the middle of the glass and touching the base – as I watch the beeswax gradually solidify again in front of my eyes.

  Making a candle is easy. The real craft lies in the first part of the process: the keeping of the bees. Actually, the most difficult part of candle-making is deciding to reject electrical lighting.

  ~

  I’m on a rare foray into Galway City, where I’m due to give a talk to a ‘Slow at Work’ group about my experiences of living without technology. On my way in, I’m struck by how many more people are living on the streets, homeless, than when I lived there as a student.

  I get to talking with one man who is sitting on the ground with his dog. I ask him how life is. He says it’s hard, and that he feels shit about begging. He never thought he would be a beggar.

  I tell him we’re all begging – pushing our wares and services on social media, singing our own praises, trying to convince people that they really need what we have to offer – and that he’s probably the only honest one among us.

  You’re right, he says, and laughs, and we laugh a while longer before I head off towards a posh venue where I will also be staying for the night.

  ~

  The week before I quit email, phones and all electronic modes of communication, I sent a group email to the thousands of contacts I had accumulated over twenty years of life spent trying to embrace the new ways. The message simply informed people that I would no longer be available by email, that I was leaving Cyberia, while letting them know my postal address, something only a handful of them would have known. It went to a mix of close friends, family, ex-colleagues, ex-girlfriends, collaborators, acquaintances and random strangers who, at one point or another, must have got in touch about something neither of us can probably remember.

  The reaction, initially, was overwhelming. Most days, in the weeks that followed, I would find my postbox stuffed. I imagined the postman wondering what was going on, as all I had received from him in the past were bills, or official letters with clear plastic windows and automated addresses. Now addresses were hand-written, often in colourful or hand-crafted envelopes. Some were from close friends, wondering how we were going to see as much of each other from now on, while others were from names I didn’t recall, wishing me all the best or explaining to me why I should minimise my use of electronics rather than rejecting them outright. On top of that I was receiving letters, via the editor at the newspaper, from readers who wanted to share their opinion about my decision to unplug.

  It’s now a Friday in October, almost ten months later. I check my letterbox for the last t
ime this week. Unlike email, it’s pointless checking it more than once after the postman delivers, or over the weekend when he doesn’t come at all.

  There’s a letter from my mother, telling me that an old neighbour has died. It’s too late to go to his funeral, as people are buried within three days in Ireland. Other than that, nothing. No letters from acquaintances, no junk mail, no random strangers, no close friends, no bills. Whereas in January I was spending as much on stamps as I had previously done on a mobile phone, now I’m only spending a fraction of it. It’s an odd mix of feeling forgotten on one hand and, on the other, feeling liberated from relentless communication with people who, in all likelihood, live too far away for our relationship to deepen.

  Those letters I do receive tend to be from people who really want to get in touch. Inconvenience is a great filter.

  ~

  It’s bin collection day. Out here it comes once every two weeks. We don’t have a bin, but everyone else puts their bins out as usual. Each time, before the waste company comes, I walk down to one end of the bóithrín, where they are left out, and search through the blue recycling bins for old newspapers with which I can light the fire.

  In Ireland rubbish is charged by weight, meaning that every bit reused saves in a few ways. I understand the logic behind it – if people have to pay for waste, their financial self-interest should motivate them to create less of it. Reality is another thing. Instead of generating less rubbish, some people come out to places like this and dump it all over the sides of the roads and forests for free. If rubbish collection was free at the point of service, the littering of rural Ireland would cease immediately. When I go on strolls through the woods I sometimes wonder if the people who come up with these policies ever spend time in places like this.

  ~

  After a week of lumping, sawing, chopping and stacking beech, spruce and birch, I have finally managed to get two years ahead on firewood for the first time since I moved here. It’s taken me that long to reach the standard set by any smallholder worth his salt, though most smallholders these days earn that salt with chainsaws, tractors, diggers and other earth-shattering innovations. And so standing back, looking at it on a wet, darkening October evening, I’m surprised to hear myself thinking, ‘I’ll just get a little bit more in tomorrow morning, before breakfast.’ Be careful of that mentality, Mark, I say to myself, as I put away the axe.

  I notice a couple of men, with brown bags of spruce saplings in their hands, replanting the clear-fell across the field from us. It strikes me now that while machines may be unparalleled at reducing forests to numbers, it is still the intimate human hand which excels at planting trees.

  ~

  I’m back teaching at Schumacher College in Devon, where I first met Kirsty. This time it’s a week-long course with another friend, the author Shaun Chamberlin. The plan, as always, is to mess with their heads. Heads need messing with every now and again.

  On the first day of the course I lay out my teaching fee for the week – £1,000 – on a table in front of the students, and tell them that they have got to decide what to do with it. It’s a session on money and ‘gift culture’, and I’ve decided to make it a practical one. I offer four options, and make the case for each one in its turn. The aim is to come to a consensus, but it’s immediately obvious that opinions vary wildly.

  At the start of the session there is no interest in Option 1, which is to burn it all and stop the cycle of ecological violence it inflicts almost every time it is spent in an industrial economy. Some argue for Option 2, which is to give it all to a good cause of their collective choice. Most make the case for Option 3, which is to give it back to me, while the remainder want to choose Option 4, which would involve dividing it up equally among the group and letting each individual decide anonymously what they want to do with it themselves (which could simply be to go shopping with it).

  After hours of heavy deliberation they decide on Option 2, and to split the money between a rewilding organisation in Wales, the Cambrian Wildwood Project – whose work is ground-breaking for the fact that it doesn’t break ground – and the translation and promotion of the works of the late David Fleming, whose ideas and book, Lean Logic, this particular course is based upon. In the end, however, it is spared from being burnt by one vote.

  In the next session, on appropriate technology, I put a sledge-hammer to what appears to be Shaun’s laptop, apparently against his will. It is actually an old, broken laptop of my own, but Shaun’s acting is so convincing that people think I’ve gone mad. The animosity towards me in the room is palpable for about five minutes, until the truth is revealed. Deep sighs of relief are heard and people start smiling at me again, though a few are still annoyed that their emotions have been played with. I ask the group how they felt in those five minutes. Many explain they felt angry since, they had believed, I hadn’t had permission from Shaun to smash his computer, no matter what I thought about tech or its impact.

  I asked them if they had ever experienced the same emotional response towards the corporations that make their own laptops and smartphones, considering they devastate entire habitats on their customers’ behalf without any permission from the life that dwells there. No, they say, they hadn’t. Not really.

  On another occasion we go out with resident scientist and author Stephan Harding on what he calls a ‘Deep Time Walk’. This is a 4.6-kilometre walk around the surrounding woods and coastline, with each step of the journey representing one million years of the earth’s history.

  Not much happens at first, as we reflect on the enormity and incomprehensible beauty of the earth’s life thus far, but by the time we reach the Devon coast, halfway through the walk, Stephan is already explaining to us how life has slowly begun forming and cascading into its myriad, enchanting forms. As the ocean crashes against the cliffs below us, a number of the students are clearly having a profoundly moving experience, their own lives put into clear perspective against the spectacular expanse of existence.

  The final millimetre of the 4.6-kilometre walk, Stephan tells us, contains industrial civilisation, and in that one millimetre we are in danger of wiping out much of what came before it. What the next millimetre, metre and kilometre have in store for planet earth and ourselves, none of us pretends to know.

  ~

  I receive a letter from a prominent Irish thinker and advocate of localisation. It’s typed up. Times New Roman, I believe. He starts off by saying that he had begun hand-writing it, but that it was so illegible that he could barely understand it himself. It has been a long time since I’ve actually had to write something, he says. He also happens to be a writer.

  He’s not alone. A lot of my time responding to letters is taken up trying to interpret the hand-writing of my correspondents. That a few of the letters even get here is of great credit to the postal service, as sometimes even I can’t make out the address, and it’s my address. Some of it looks like it might be written in shorthand or Arabic. Still, I prefer it to Times New Roman.

  Lack of use is certainly one cause of its demise, but I’ve found that the first obstacle to good hand-writing is the expectation of producing forty words per minute, or the need to knock out a letter at email-speed. Once you slow down, good hand-writing becomes easier. Once you slow down, good anything becomes easier.

  It strikes me, as I read his letter, that he has become entirely dependent on the machine that eroded his ability to write legibly in the first place. This pattern is not uncommon: in fact, it’s the history of our relationship with technology. After all, this cheap pencil in my hand, and the even cheaper paper I’m writing on, replaced my ancestors’ ability to make their own writing materials from the landscape around them.

  As I write those words, my writing suddenly feels like an intellectual exercise, the act itself disembodied from the place which induced and inspired the words themselves. I’m not sure a disembodied art can help bring about a more embodied culture. But it’s one step closer to home, towards which
I want to keep walking.

  ~

  Our event space is throbbing with a group of home-educated children, who are here for a free art class with Caroline Ross. But this is not your regular art class.

  Caroline – who, when I first meet her, is wearing moccasins made from buckskin she skinned and tanned herself – was inspired by Paul Kingsnorth’s first novel, The Wake, a post-apocalyptic story set in 1066 (until I had read that book I had never thought of history as a long series of apocalypses before). After reading The Wake herself, Caroline wondered what art would have looked like in the days of Edward the Confessor. Back then they had none of the commercial pens, brushes, acrylics and oil paints that artists use today, so what did they use?

  She begins the lesson by telling the children about pigments that have survived for five hundred years, along with stories of ochres on cave walls that are fifty thousand years old. She shows us – I’m as keen as any of the children – how to make a goose-feathered quill pen. Being left-handed, it takes a bit of practice not to smudge the ink across the paper, but it works perfectly well otherwise. I wonder if it is because of these original pens that so few of us were, and still are, lefties.

  We make pencils from small sticks, sharpened at one end, which are then dipped in ink. But this is not just any regular ink, either. She has pigments of green earths from the Lake District, yellow sinopia from Oxfordshire, red ochre from the Forest of Dean. To make coloured paints, she cracks open an egg, before whipping the whites and waiting for the liquid to settle underneath. This she mixes in a mussel shell with some of the ground earths. They make a brilliant paint, the kind used in the old, illuminated manuscripts.

  She shows us mushroom paper, and ink made from ink-cap mushrooms; there’s gesso, a mix of chalk, animal glue and white pigment, with which artists in the Renaissance prepared canvases; rich black colours made from Welsh oak galls and rusty nails; she has even created her own pencil cases from birch bark stitched with deer sinew, while the pouches for her other materials have been crafted from fish skins.