The Way Home Read online

  Back in June 1944, John Gillespie, a native of Ballyshannon, had warned in the Donegal Vindicator that the ‘mutilation of the river should be considered a national calamity’. His prediction that ‘future generations of Ballyshannon people will not see a fairyland on their doorsteps’ but that only a ‘shrunken and imprisoned waterway will meet their gaze’ proved all too true. The authors tell how the commercial netsmen downstream suffered from the catastrophic decline in salmon runs, but they could have added more on the destruction of what Justice T.C. Kingsmill Moore described as the ‘vanished Eden’ – the 29 pools upstream which arguably provided the finest game angling in Western Europe and, at one time, employment for around 200 water-keepers and gillies and fly-tying business for Rogans of Ballyshannon.

  We had no car growing up – which might partially explain why I still can’t drive – so Dad would often take me on the bar of his bike to go fishing. But it was now much harder for him – or me, with my little telescopic kids’ rod – to catch anything in this tamed, broken river. We’d catch the odd perch or small brown trout, but nothing that would feed a family. So, the times being as they were, we usually had fish only once a week, which my mother bought from the fishmongers, on a Friday. This would either be mackerel or salmon ‘grown’ in the salmon farm that the local authorities had established downstream from the dam. (A handful of workers now maintain the dam as a back-up for times when, like at half-time in the World Cup, everyone boils the kettle at once.)

  I grew up on a street of eighty houses, including one which my dad was born in, and still lives there to this day. The only place he’ll move to is the graveyard, and he’ll put up a fight against moving there, too. As a seventy-two-year-old he cycled the 179-kilometre circumference of Ireland’s largest lake, Lough Derg – itself 20 kilometres from our smallholding – in nine hours. He had what my generation would consider to be a hard upbringing. His father died when he was only twelve, after which he quit school and became the man of the house. Another education must have begun then, for when I was young I always admired how he could throw his hand at any job, and do it well. The same couldn’t be said for me.

  Until I was eight we all – Mum, Dad, my sister and me – lived with my grandmother, until she died in her sleep in the room next to me. I spent hours crying that day, though I wasn’t exactly sure why, as the experience of death was new to me and it still hadn’t sunk in that I would never see her alive again. Living as I do now, I wish she was still around, sitting on her chair by the fire, guiding and advising me on the best way to do many of the things she’d have known how to do as a child.

  That street was where my friends and I would play ball games like ‘kerbs’ – standing on one pavement, you got points if you ricocheted the ball off your friend’s kerb – until we were teenagers. Our parents wouldn’t see us from one end of the day to the next. There were no mobile phones to check up on us, but every neighbour for a mile around had a quiet eye out for every kid.

  There was only one phone among the eighty houses. It was located in the hallway of the neighbour directly opposite us. The door to that house was always open – as all the doors were then – and to use the phone you left twenty pence (the currency at the time was the Irish punt) on the table after your call. Phone calls were more expensive in the 1980s. I don’t ever remember needing to use that phone, but I do recall my mother going in and out now and then, phoning relatives who had emigrated to England, Australia and Canada.

  The last time I was back home I remember noticing how all of my neighbours’ doors were shut. It felt strange, almost eerie. I remember watching kids I didn’t recognise walk up and down the street, staring at their phones, scrolling up and down, oblivious to all else. They couldn’t have played kerbs even if they had wanted to, as every square inch of pavement had a car half-parked on it. And I remember Gerry McDermott, a neighbour from across the street whom I’ve known since I was born, bursting out of his house to welcome me home, and to hand my parents a brown trout he had caught for our dinner.

  ~

  It has only been four weeks since I gave up my phone, but it’s strange not hearing my mum and dad’s voices. Hard even. Harder for the fact that I know they miss it, too. They’ve supported me through thick and thin, and we’ve always been close.

  This year there is no wishing them Happy New Year, no wishing my mum Happy Birthday. It feels selfish. Then I remember all the times over the years when I felt that my phone conversations were becoming a lazy substitute for going up to spend real time with them. They live 230 kilometres away.

  I take out my pencil and paper. Dear Mum & Dad. I promise to come up to see them at least once every couple of months from the spring onwards, by which time I should have found my rhythm with this way of life.

  Dear Mark. We understand. We love you too. Can’t wait to see you soon. Take good care of yourself.

  ~

  The potato field is a half an acre of poor-draining, muddy land, and it becomes obvious within weeks of moving in that we’re going to need a good, solid path through it to the woodshed. My four criteria for any infrastructural work – natural, local, inexpensive or free, beautiful – apply to this job too, and that complicates things.

  Gillis – a twenty-three year old from Flanders who showed up on a bike one day, as many do, to stay in our free hostel for a night and who, three months later, is still here – offers to help. I gladly accept. He’s tall, broad-shouldered and strong, with a mop of blond hair and a powerful, gentle intellect which belies his age. He finds a small pile of flatstones on a patch of nearby commonage, cycles them back here, and that gets us started. But we need more. A lot more.

  Seeing what we’re up to, my neighbour Tommy Quinn drops in to have a look. Tommy’s a sturdy character, a part-time farmer and part-time builder in his fifties, and the kind of man who would do anything for you. He tells us that he has a mound of megalithic stones that he had taken out of an old wall years ago, and that we are welcome to them if we can be bothered to get at them through the briars. We can. Options are limited.

  We call in to Tommy’s yard to see if they are suitable – flat, wide, straight-edged and 10 centimetres thick is just about ideal – and although most of them are much bigger than we would like, we decide that we have found our source. We need hundreds, but he has thousands.

  Our first job is to get the best flatstones out of the mound and down to ours. Tommy’s house and yard are a good 400 metres away to our west, and as some of these stones weigh over 30 kilogrammes, we wheelbarrow them across in threes and fours, more if they are smaller. Tommy tells us we’re both mad, but I detect the slightest hint of respect in his voice as he says it.

  Gillis starts on one section of the path, while I start on another. Each stone has to be offered up to the land for size, a hole dug out to its shape, and then played around with until it sits level with those that came before it. The cracks are filled with the excavated soil, which will one day sprout grass and make the path look as if it had somehow grown up there by itself.

  The section of the path I’m working on is 15 metres long, and it will take me five days of heavy work. From my experience of using concrete, a day would have been more than enough to get the job done. But I’d rather work ten weeks at it than use bloody concrete.

  Almost finished, I walk up and down it, checking for any loose stones. It feels solid. Looking at it in the reddish light of dusk, with the feeling of a good week’s work in my body, I retire to the cabin content. That path will outlive me, I hope.

  ~

  I call in to see Tommy’s mother, Mrs Quinn, an eighty-seven year old neighbour from up the road. She is in great form for her age. For any age. She is a brilliant talker. Listening to her speak, as she sits huddled up to the range, you become acutely aware of how fast things have changed in rural Ireland over the last fifty years. We now live on the same bóithrín, but we grew up in vastly different Irelands.

  The Ireland Mrs Quinn was born into was one before elec
tricity, when the sky still had stars and people still had time for one another. It was an Ireland, Packie once told me, where people were afraid to put their first light bulb into its socket for fear of electrocution. She lived on one pence a week, eating cabbage, potatoes and other staples from the garden, along with eggs, pork and milk from their small menagerie. She earned that one pence per week from their eggs, and she usually spent it on wholemeal flour. For her, self-reliance wasn’t a lifestyle choice. It was simply life.

  These days my generation browse dating sites where everyone within the same country is a potential partner, and even national boundaries are no obstacle to love. Mrs Quinn tells me that, after she married her husband, it was a big deal to up sticks and move the 6 kilometres up the road, from where she was born and raised, to where she still lives today.

  She could talk for hours, and I would happily listen, but it is past my bedtime. I promise to call round to see her again soon.

  ~

  Having read many English translations of the books written by its last two generations of people, my first journey to the Great Blasket Island holds a sense of pilgrimage about it. My fascination with the place isn’t for any of the reasons that tourists and day-trippers go there between June and August; instead, my interest is merely based on practicalities. The island folk of the Great Blasket were some of the last people that I know of to have lived in the way I am trying to live now, and I want to better understand how they did it – economically, culturally, practically. But I also want to understand why the Islanders of this remarkable place were evacuated in 1953, so I can anticipate any major issues.

  The journey from our smallholding to Dingle – an old port town in West Kerry, which the Islanders would row into in their naomhóga (canvas-covered wicker boats) to exchange fish for salt – would normally take four hours by car. Kirsty and I stick out our thumbs at daybreak, and my clock-mind estimates that it’s roughly two hours before we get our first lift, having walked 8 kilometres down the road. There isn’t a lot of traffic, and at various points we have to remind ourselves that those who look us in the eye and pass us are busy getting to work, running the kids to school, are unused to hitchers, cautious of strangers, or a hundred and one other things I don’t know about. Eight and a half hours later we arrive in Dingle and, like the Islanders before us, we go for a pint of porter before making any big decisions.

  Dingle is throbbing with tourists like us. I remember reading James Rebanks’ The Shepherd’s Life and being struck by his account of tourism in the Lake District in England – its population of forty-three thousand residents have to cope with sixteen million visitors every year – where, in his words, ‘the guests have taken over the guest house’. We’re two more guests. As quaint and thriving as Dingle is, you get a similar sense here.

  We have journeyed here without booking any accommodation – we haven’t the capability to, even if we would have liked to – and have left it open to fate. I remember reading that, when the Islanders came in for their salt, the mainlanders would put them up for the night and offer them a horse and cart to get back to their naomhóga. We had decided to embark on this trip in these old ways, and hoped that we might meet someone over a pint and end up sleeping on a couch. After four years of running a free hostel, it’s easy to forget that the rest of Western civilisation – even Ireland, which is slow in catching up – no longer operates in the same way. Our optimism for the old ways, on this occasion, has backfired and we now wish we had brought a tent. Still, it’s good to keep that spirit alive, especially in times like these, when it is in serious danger of going the way of the dodo.

  We ask around some youth hostels and are told it will cost €55 for a bed. Eventually we stumble upon a cheap room down one of Dingle’s back lanes, throw our backpacks in, and go searching for a bit of traditional music that isn’t amplified. We decide to make for the Great Blasket Island in the morning, and wonder what we will find there.

  ~

  I decided to stop paying attention to the news in November 2015, over a year before I would reject the technologies that transmit it. It wasn’t so much that I thought the news itself to be a bad thing per se – though almost all of it tends to be bad news – but more that I no longer wished to read it. I found it had become boring and repetitive. As Thoreau wrote in the nineteenth century, long before Twitter and twenty-four-hour news, ‘If we read of one man robbed, or murdered, or killed by accident, or one house burned, or one vessel wrecked, or one steamboat blown up . . . we may never need read of another. One is enough.’ The news had become a bit like a Hollywood movie – same storyline, different actors.

  But no man, as they say, is an island, so the really big news stories found their way to my range of perception, even if only as bold headlines, whether I liked it or not. Trump. Brexit. The Syrian refugee crisis. Terrorism. Every now and then I’d overhear small talk of different people trying to be famous for fifteen minutes and not, as Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Gary Snyder recommended, for fifteen miles.

  A few friends suggested to me that it’s irresponsible not to keep up-to-date with global affairs, as otherwise politicians and big business will get away with murder. I get the logic, and perhaps they are right. But we’ve never been exposed to so much news, never had so many attentive followers of it, and yet politicians and big business are getting away with as much murder as ever. At the same time the ability of journalists to hold power to account has been eroded, as financially pushed editors favour quantity over quality to keep the Twitter feed rolling.

  It’s almost the end of January, and we’ve only had three or four wet days all winter. It’s another clear, crisp morning, the white grass crunching beneath my feet as I start walking towards the post office. I call in to see a neighbour, and ask him if he needs anything, but it’s really an excuse to see how he is. He’s an old bachelor, living out here by himself, which can’t be easy, and sometimes he gets a bit down – what our generation calls depressed. He says he’s all right for everything, and we chinwag for a while.

  Further down the road I notice that a horse has broken out. Until recently, if a horse broke out and a car hit it, the driver was responsible. The law has since been reversed, so that the owner of the horse would now be responsible for any damage done to the car. I go and find the owner, who is out fixing his tractor. Together we walk up through the waterlogged fields to find the mare and he gives me a short history lesson about the place. Knockmoyle, he says, was anglicised from An Cnoc Maol, meaning the ‘Bald Hill’. Looking around at the pasture here, I can see how it got its name.

  On the way back I find a dead fox in the middle of the road – cars drive over and around it – and spot a pine marten shoot across into a small wood, where it’ll no doubt terrorise some creature that, at this moment, has no idea that this is the last day of its life.

  ~

  I’m reading Robert Colvile’s The Great Acceleration, in which he looks at how the world is getting faster by the day hour minute second nanosecond. In it, he quotes an advertising slogan for the BlackBerry Playbook. It goes: ‘Anything worth doing is worth doing faster.’

  Good point, BlackBerry. Why spend an hour or two slowly making love when you can fuck somebody for five minutes, after all?

  ~

  I haven’t had a fridge or freezer for almost a decade. In a temperate climate, a metal box in a cool, shady place outside works just as well as a white, electrified metal box in the kitchen inside, for half the year at the very least. My decision to start eating wild meat poses new challenges. But considering that humanity made it as far as the twentieth century without an electric fridge or freezer, I’m quietly optimistic.

  Fish are no problem. Usually they’re relatively small, and so can be eaten by a small community of people over a day or two. I’d never take more than I needed. That said, some preservation for the winter months, when it is illegal to take trout and salmon (for good reason, considering how low their population levels are), would be very useful.
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  Venison, on the other hand, is a different matter. Kill one deer and you can get a lot of meat. The best place to store it is in the bellies of your neighbours, and Packie tells me that this was once the main method of preservation in Knockmoyle.

  On the list of things I want to do on any given morning, killing a deer is second from bottom, just above buying plastic tubs of US-imported peanut butter. With that in mind, I know I need to preserve as much meat as I can from a single deer to get us through as much of each winter as possible.

  Without a freezer, a smokehouse is the best option, once your neighbour’s belly is full. Some people make them with concrete and sawn timber, so that they look like small sheds. Instead, I want to apply my four criteria again. So I take off to the woods for the morning with an irrepressible Gillis. Two hours later, we return with twelve young spruce poles, all of which were wind-fallen and cut with a handsaw.

  Using a design from Ray Mears’ Outdoor Survival Handbook, the smokehouse takes me two hours to make and costs nothing. It’s big enough to smoke an entire deer. In time it will be covered by the skins of other deer, which local hunters have had no use for and have, up to now, been discarding. But as I currently only have one spare skin, I’ll need to use a tarpaulin in the meantime.

  It’s dusk, and I still haven’t taken Quincy, a dog I’m looking after, for a walk, so I bring her and Packie’s dog Bulmers up through the woods for the final half hour of daylight. We’re not long in, when I hear a rustle. I assume it’s the dogs, who are off following their noses. Instead, out springs a stag, light brown and lean, his antlers wide and proud. He’s beautiful. He stands in the middle of the track and we stare at each other, eye-to-eye, for what seems like a long moment. I wonder what kind of absurd beast I must seem to him, standing in my brown boots, muddy blue jeans and woolly jumper. And then in the next moment he’s off, bounding through the young trees growing along the verges of the track. He knows where he’s going. He knows every inch of this forest. He has to – his life depends on it.