The Way Home Read online

  Shortly afterwards the dogs re-emerge, looking none the wiser.

  ~

  It has been over two months since I last used a phone, checked email or went online. As I write that sentence, I consider how much my life, and the world around me, has changed in the last twenty years that such a remark is even remotely noteworthy.

  Sitting in candlelight, the soft light accentuating the grain of the beech table, I begin writing a letter to a friend in England whom I haven’t seen since I returned to Ireland. I date the letter, and it takes me some time to move past ‘Dear Emily’. When I used electronics I could average forty words per minute, but now . . . well, it doesn’t seem to matter so much anymore. She had the thoughtfulness to write to me, so it will take as long as it takes to express the things I wish to say to her. I seal it, stamp it and put it in a small pile along with a handful of my other replies to this week’s letters, something I do every Sunday evening. I’m not sure why I still see Sunday as the end of the week, but I do.

  The following morning I walk the letters, along with the dog, the 12-kilometre round trip to the post office. The weather on the way is changeable – light rain one minute, heavy rain the next – and I feel invigorated by it. I arrive home to an unexpected and unknown visitor, who asks me how I have time for such slow travel in the modern world. I explain how, by getting rid of our van, I no longer have to work the two or three months it took me to pay for its purchase, insurance, tax, MOT, fuel and inevitable repairs, and that I certainly don’t spend anything like that amount of time walking or cycling, which I enjoy doing anyway. She laughs at me, says I am completely mad, and we share a pot of chamomile and vervain tea.

  The following day the postman calls in with a letter, and from the hand-written address on the envelope I can tell it is from Kirsty, who is visiting family and friends in Norfolk. I go inside to read it. It’s what we, not so long ago, called a love letter, and I feel the same kind of youthful excitement I remember when we first met. I read it again in the evening, before putting it away, along with her others, in a drawer. She is travelling at the moment, so I can’t reply to her, but I feel content just knowing she is out there in the world.

  ~

  There’s an old saying in Ireland that it is time to plant the potatoes when you can stand naked by your potato patch. For a hardy smallholder that could mean any time from early March onwards. Many would put them in the ground on St Patrick’s Day, so that they would be blessed, but like any self-respecting Irishman I start thinking of planting the early spuds as soon as possible.

  Packie’s brother Mick, a softly spoken farmer who lives a short 300-metre walk up the bóithrín from our place, is in his yard sorting out the cows. He’s getting on in years now, and it’s starting to show, but if he stops he says he’ll never get started again. I’d tend to agree, though his wife and hips seem to differ. He tells me that he has a mound of topsoil he doesn’t need, and that I can take as much as I like. Tonnes of manure, too, he says. His yard is full of much else – old bikes, bathtubs, parts of things rotting and rusting. Mick, who like all of the remaining natives here is part of that generation which was taught to throw nothing out, grew up in a different Ireland, one in which people had next to nothing to hold onto. That wise old maxim has a different feel to it when applied in modern times. Mick loves his spuds, won’t go a day without them, so I tell him I’ll throw him a bag or two in the summer. He offers to drop the topsoil down in the bucket of his tractor, but I tell him I could do with stretching my legs, and go home to fetch the wheelbarrow. I have a feeling that my legs will be well stretched before the day is out.

  There’s a biting north breeze, but it’s dry and fresh, with a sense of impending spring in the air. The landscape feels almost ready to burst enthusiastically into life, but the natural world is nothing if not patient. I barrow the topsoil first, as it will be laid first, shifting it the 300 metres from Mick’s to ours, one barrow at a time. I barely scratch the surface, but the days are still short and the light has faded, so I’m ready to retire to the cabin and read by the fire.

  This emerging potato patch – all being well, and all is not always well – ought to furnish us with around 150 kilogrammes of potatoes. Like the Stoics of ancient Greece and the Zen Buddhists of Japan, I try to be ‘ablaze with indifference’ to the fruits of my labour, but that can be easier said than done after a hard day’s graft. Next month I will plant some oca, another type of tuber which makes for a blight-free alternative to the potato. I’ve not grown it before, so I am interested to see how it will do. Strength in diversity, and all that. We will see.

  The day when I can stand by my patch naked is coming soon. I’m not sure, however, that the neighbours are ready for a time when my bare arse heralds the spring.

  ~

  A well-respected environmentalist and friend of mine tells me that, though he understands my perspective on the ecological impacts of industrial-scale technology – basically that it depends on oil rigs, quarries, mines, the factory system, state armies, deforestation, urbanisation and suburbanisation, and everything else that environmentalists rail against – there’s no way in the world he could give up his dishwasher. He’s a talented, determined, adaptable man, so I ask him if he has suddenly developed confidence issues. But I do take his point – if he had to wash his own dishes by hand, where would he find the time to write and campaign against the ecological and social consequences of things like dishwashers?

  I was an environmentalist once too, back in the days when it was still more about defending wild places and the natural world against untrammelled human ambition, and less about carbon and something obscure called ‘sustainability’. It seemed to me, as I got older, that environmentalism was becoming preoccupied with taming these wild places – deserts, oceans, mountains – in order to harness green energy to fuel our way of life, and that of a small percentage of the world’s people in particular. Paul Kingsnorth, in his essay collection Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist, describes modern environmentalism as ‘the catalytic converter on the silver SUV of the global economy’, and suggests that it seems to be moved these days by a strange sort of equation: ‘Destruction minus carbon equals sustainability.’ So I gave up being an environmentalist – at least that kind – and moved out of the city and into the natural world.

  My environmentalist friend and I have dinner. He’s intrigued about how I’m going to wash the dishes, not particularly without the machine – he can remember how to do that – but without running water or washing-up liquid. I take him outside to where I store the wood ash, and mix a little of it with water to make a paste that will effectively be our washing-up liquid. It’s an old camping trick, and it works excellently. If it were the spring we could have also used horsetail, a plant which invades our garden every year. I’d rather not have it at all, but we do. Having a use for it aids the weeding efforts. It is full of silica, meaning it is great for scouring pots and pans. As people need silica in their diets – it’s important for hair, skin, nails and teeth – we also chop it up and put it into our salads.

  Back inside, I fill a large bowl with spring water and get to work. Enthused by the novelty of it all, my friend wants to have a go at it. There’s no objection from me, and I crack open a couple of bottles of homebrew instead.

  After he’s finished I pour the wood ash water from the bowl among a patch of birches I’ve planted. Ashes to ashes. Full circle. Life.

  ~

  I awaken. It’s pitch black outside as I go for a night-time piss. I don’t know whether to stay up or go back to bed, and so I seek signs or suggestions of clock-time. Birdsong, the position of the moon or stars, a neighbour’s light, anything. Nothing.

  On a cloudy night, around this time of year, midnight and 5 a.m. can look much the same, especially if it is a new moon. I’ve no idea what time I went to sleep – I just remember it being dark and feeling tired – so for all I know it could be some ungodly hour of the night when I should be tucked up in bed
. Or should I? If I feel rested when I awaken, why not just get up, regardless of the clock-time; or, if I feel tired or half-asleep, why not go back to bed? As I stand naked in the dense still darkness, I wonder what age I was when I began listening to a clock over my own body.

  I come in from outside, take off my boots and put on some clothes. There’s not a stir from Kirsty, who is a better sleeper than me. I light a candle and pick up my pencil. The time before the rest of the world wakes up is my favourite part of the day, and this morning that window of tranquillity has been extended. As I’m finishing my fourth page I hear a blackbird declare that his day has also begun, and I climb back into bed with Kirsty, who is slowly coming around in sync with the sun.

  ~

  I don’t remember a lot from my childhood. It was only the 1980s, but it feels like a different age as I reflect on it now. Looking back, we had very little by way of money, or the kind of things it buys, yet I’ve no recollection of ever having felt a sense of lack. I suppose we were all in the same boat, and in the days before the proliferation of aspirational television programmes, it wasn’t so easy to feel the loss of a lifestyle neither you nor your ancestors had ever had.

  It’s funny the little, unremarkable things that stick with you through all those eventful and formative years. One of the most enduring memories I do have is of a steady flow of locals showing up at our front door with their bikes. I don’t know whether it was because my father was passionate about cycling, or if it was just the normal way of things at the time, but I would later learn that he was fixing their bikes entirely for free. As a child I had no appreciation for what he was doing, or his reasons for doing it. In fact, as a child it seemed perfectly normal.

  Life was soon to change. A beast called the Celtic Tiger economy was born and Ireland was, almost overnight, transformed from a financially poor nation to the sixth richest country (per capita) in the world. Investment was flowing in from the US, lured by tax breaks and a cheap seat in the European Union, which itself was throwing development money at us, mostly in an effort to modernise us, to turn us into an attractive market, and to make us as efficient as the more industrialised members like Germany, Great Britain and the Netherlands. Now that I think of it, it was around then that the stream of half-crocked bicycles arriving at our house dried up, too. I began hearing stories from my dad of people buying bicycles for the price of decent, second-hand cars.

  It was obvious that a lot of people, especially in industries like construction and finance, had much more disposable income than before, but none of it was trickling down to the likes of us. As a thirteen-year-old I was working in a hotel, cleaning up vomit from the floor of its nightclub for an hourly rate of £1.50 (Irish punt), hoping to find the odd note or coin in among the empty beer bottles scattered everywhere. As a schoolkid, that was my way of trying to get some of the things flooding my world, things I had seen other people buying and suddenly wanted for myself. For those adults who couldn’t work any harder than they already were, credit cards and loans bridged the gap between the new expectations of this tigerish Ireland and their daily reality.

  It was with the scrapings of a nightclub floor that I bought a mobile phone, the first of my group of friends to do so. Considering I was also the first to get my hands on a Commodore 64 and a Game Boy, I was exhibiting all the signs of being an early adopter, and none of the signs of being an early rejecter. The phone was monstrous, and to get reception you had to pull a long antenna out of the top. My friends started calling me Del Boy, but I’m sure I looked more like Rodney. I’m not even sure why I bought one – except, probably, because I could – as in those days my friends and I would just call round to each other’s houses unannounced, before going out to play Gaelic football. But within a few months, all of my mates had one.

  We didn’t know it at the time, but we were all enthusiastically taking part in the largest, most widespread social experiment in the history of human cultures, without any idea of its intended or unintended consequences.

  ~

  The sky threw a real temper-tantrum last night. It was as if the gods had just found out about Formica, and wanted to punish humanity severely. For the first time since we moved in, the cabin took a real pounding, and I barely slept a wink all night. But it felt womb-like inside, and I arose this morning somehow feeling much more enlivened by the storm than tired.

  Down by the spring, while fetching the water, Kathleen comes out to tell me that their electricity went out during the night, and she wants to find out if mine has too. She assumes I would know. It is too early in the day to get deep and meaningful about my technological choices, so I white-lie and tell her I have just woken up and have no idea. Before we know it a few of the neighbours, as usual, have congregated at the spring, and they’re all saying that their electricity is out too.

  As most people in these parts get their water electronically pumped up from their borehole and into a tank in their house, where it is often heated by a stove and pumped around its radiators, this means many will have to go without hot showers, hot water or heating until the local council fixes the problem. It could be hours, or days. Rural Ireland is never top of the authorities’ list of priorities.

  It’s cold today, so I hope for Kathleen and Packie’s sake that it comes on again soon. But I hope for the bowhead whale, the Arctic fox and the beluga’s sake that it never comes on again.

  ~

  Harley-Davidsons, SUVs and campervans are cantering along the winding, narrow road west of Dingle as Kirsty and I set off on the 20-kilometre walk to Dunquin. Its asphalted substratum has felt and supported the bare feet and hobnail boots of the Blasket Islanders countless times, and in a few moments of silent awareness I can picture them making their way home from the market, with salt on the back of a cart.

  We give our thumbs the afternoon off as the journey is easily made on foot. I want to get a sense of what life felt like for a people whose fierce sense of place now seems antiquated to my mobile generation, and who would have made this long mountainous walk not as a one-off pilgrimage on a pleasant afternoon, but as a non-optional means of survival. My own experiences of living without a motorised vehicle, deep in the back country of rural Ireland, helps me to relate to how they may have felt in the rain and hail and darkness, and to see beyond – as best as one can – the rose-tinted glasses of an adventure.

  As we ramble westwards, away from the hen and stag parties and towards the real hens and stags, the road slowly quietens. Drivers slow down and give us room as they pass, while some raise their hands from the steering wheel, a sort of muted hello to ramblers that speaks of something ancient and dormant within wayfarers of all kinds. We return the subtle salute, and there’s a genuine feeling of warmth and thoughtfulness about it, despite driver and walker being separated by windscreens.

  We stop at a pub called Páidí Ó Sé’s – a shrine to a famous Gaelic footballer from the town of Ventry we’re passing through – to rehydrate with a known diuretic: stout. It’s what the Islanders would have done, if Páidí’s had existed then, so who was I to argue? At the bar we meet a couple of local men who offer to take our backpacks to Kruger’s Bar in Dunquin, where the Islanders would have once mourned loved ones and celebrated semi-arranged marriages on Shrove Tuesdays. They are off there themselves next, while they are still sober enough to drive. Kirsty gladly gives her pack – including her purse, identity cards and clothes – to the two strangers but, while I thank them, something stubborn inside me insists on carrying my own pack for the whole of the journey. We shake hands and promise to have a drink together in Kruger’s.

  My stout is almost empty when a phone goes off across the bar. It’s one of the two men, phoning a friend to let us know that a thick fog has descended on the mountain pass. He’s advising us to take a lift with another man at the bar, who he says will also be going our way. Before I know it the phone gets passed to me, and for a strange moment I feel compromised; I had sworn never to use a phone again, yet to refuse an a
ct of thoughtfulness from a stranger on ideological grounds feels both wrong and absurd, and so for the first time in months I hear the electronic representation of the human voice. I thank him, and we walk the rest of the way anyway, fog or no fog.

  He wasn’t lying. We don’t have torches, high-visibility vests or anything else people have come to regard as essential for an evening stroll, so we keep our senses alert and stand in the ditch whenever a rare car drives past on this mostly forgotten pass. It’s not raining, but the fog is so thick that our clothes slowly become damp. I feel oddly invigorated. A woman stops to ask us if we want a lift, understands our objection, and drives on. Before dark we are having a pint with the men from Páidí’s, one of whom initially pretends to be annoyed about us not heeding his advice.

  Dotted along the walls of Kruger’s I notice old pictures of some of those whose words I had devoured over the last year, yet only in that understated way that many pubs have photographs of their locals. Scattered among these are pictures of other locals who had acted in Hollywood movies such as Ryan’s Daughter, Far and Away and Star Wars – all of which were partially filmed in the area – but unlike Páidí Ó Sé’s in Ventry, there isn’t a sign of any of their biggest stars. I was told that Tom Cruise met Nicole Kidman there. Brendan Behan would come to visit old Kruger himself and get rat-arsed at the bar. Charlie Haughey – an ex-Taoiseach (the Irish Prime Minister) who bought one of the smaller Blasket Islands, Inis Mhicileáin, for peanuts – would regularly drink there, and while he was known nationally as one of the most corrupt politicians of recent times, the locals said he was ‘great craic and much loved’. If all of these stories were true, they certainly weren’t trying to cash in on them.