The Way Home Read online

  ~

  Over a year before I finally stopped using electricity altogether, I took my first baby step and quit social media. Like all good decisions, it was made in the pub. I had never actually liked anything about social media – the Silicon Valley companies behind it, the privacy and surveillance issues surrounding it, its ecological impact and antisocial nature – and yet I still continued to use it for work. Publishers like writers with a strong social media presence, I was told, and it was how most writers promoted their books, events and all the terribly important things they had to say.

  It was after the third pint that I decided enough was enough. To say that it would have been too hard a decision to make when fully sober sounds overly dramatic – it’s just a bunch of websites, after all – yet it felt a little like a carpenter deciding to give up his power tools. Whether I liked it or not, I knew my livelihood was aided and abetted by a handful of shadowy, too-cool-for-school corporations. I had often thought about quitting before, but my rational mind created all sorts of arguments for why it was a necessary evil. The stout offered a temporary shortcut to the soul.

  The soul was much clearer on the matter. The soul said fuck it. The soul said stop buying in and stop selling out. The soul reminded me that I wanted to live entirely off the land anyway, and that any financial income would only hold me back and stunt my progress. The soul told me to live as I believed, first and foremost, and to let fate take care of the rest. The soul said enough. And then the soul, emboldened and thirsty, ordered another couple of pints.

  I woke up the next day (with an unforgiving hangover), logged on to each of my social media accounts, and told people I was leaving. No big deal, I just wanted to say goodbye to the many people I would likely never see or hear from again, with a short explanation why. Lots of friends replied, imploring me not to quit, but instead to speak out about my views on industrial technology using the master’s own tools. But I felt that there is only so long you can be critical of the very thing you are using, and that the best way of denouncing something might ultimately be to renounce it. Others agreed, and said they were thinking of signing off for good, too. I found the whole hullabaloo around someone leaving a few websites insightful, until I remembered how much I had struggled with the decision myself.

  The following day I logged back on to each of my accounts and quit – it only took half the morning to figure out how to do it – and then went for a walk in the woods.

  ~

  While I’m out working with Tommy Quinn, we get chatting about a session, a few nights previous, in a local pub called The Hill. It gets its name from the plain fact that it sits on top of a hill. The conversation moves on to the state of rural Ireland, and rural everywhere for that matter. He’s lived here in Knockmoyle for all of his life, so his opinions on the subject hold weight with me. He asks me what technology I think had the most dramatic impact on life here when he was growing up. I state what I feel are obvious: the television, the motor car and computers. Or electricity in general. Tommy smiles. The flask, he says.

  I ask him to explain. When he was growing up in the 1960s, he and his family would go to the bog, along with most of the other families of the parish, to cut turf for fuel for the following winter. They would all help each other out in any way they could, even if they didn’t always fully get on. Cutting turf in the old ways, using a sleán, is hard but convivial work, so each day one family would make a campfire to boil the kettle on.

  But the campfire had a more significant role than just hydrating the workers. As well as keeping the midges away, it was a focal point that brought folk together during important seasonal events. During the day people would have the craic around it as the tea brewed, and in the evenings food would be cooked on it. By nightfall, with the day’s work behind them, the campfire became the place where music, song and dance would spontaneously happen. Before the night was out, one of the old boys would hide one of the young lads’ wheelbarrows, providing no end of banter the following morning.

  Then one day, out of nowhere, the now commonplace Thermos flask arrived in Knockmoyle. Very handy, Tommy says, and everyone wanted one. Within a short space of time families began boiling up their hot water on the range in their homes, before taking it with them to the bog. After millennia of honest service, the campfire was now obsolete.

  It probably saved a fair bit of time, I say to Tommy half-heartedly. Aye, Tommy replies, no one had to go looking behind bushes for their wheelbarrow first thing in the morning.

  ~

  Kirsty is using natural horsemanship techniques to train up a couple of horses to pull a gypsy wagon, as being gypsy-spirited herself she wants to spend time on the road in the way that best tells the story she wants to tell with her life. We were hoping to have the horses on fresh grass again by St Patrick’s Day, but the weather decides to get wet again. Put them into a new field now and the poor-draining land around here will turn into a quagmire. They say Ireland would be a great country if only you could put a roof on it. The horses look longingly at neighbouring green fields, but patience is most critical at precisely the moment it is most difficult.

  On my way up to give them hay, one of the neighbours reminds me not to forget to put the clocks forward tonight, remarking – as is required by convention – how it will be great to see a stretch in the evenings.

  It has been a week since I’ve last known what clock-time it is. I know it’s Saturday – well done, Mark, you’re thinking – but that’s about it. The clocks going forward tonight will make little or no difference to my life, most days at least. Tomorrow will be just the same as any other between winter solstice and summer solstice, simply a few minutes longer.

  But tomorrow will be spring, and that’s a whole other matter.

  Spring

  I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.

  Henry David Thoreau, Walden: Or, Life in the Woods (1854)

  Spring has sprung, and the song thrush and goldfinch are curating an exhibition of life, one which they’ve been working hard and thanklessly on, behind the scenes, over the long tough winter.

  There’s a certain magic in the air, and every living thing knows it. The old Irish had a word, tenalach, to describe the sense of connection you can feel with the rest of life on this annual day. Metamorphosis has the peacock butterfly foraging in my vegetable garden, frogs have abandoned all caution and are abroad in daylight, and the lambs in the next field up are leaping around in fresh pasture, lightening the hearts of hard men. I’ve a lot of work on – normal for this time of year – but I remind myself why I chose to live this way, and decide that nothing is too important to keep me from fishing this afternoon.

  I call in to Paul, to see if I can tempt him into an impromptu ramble to a river. It’s short notice – none – but the day is too inviting to refuse. There’s a small river, called the Cappagh, across a swathe of fields at the end of his long bóithrín, and so we set our minds on exploring a hidden, disregarded stretch of it.

  We settle by a pool where the Cappagh meets a tributary, the confluence of which appears to be the nexus for a complex web of life. A streak of blue-orange lightning we call a kingfisher darts downstream, while a heron holds court on the bank, ensuring that everything is as it should be. A monstrous, marvellous brown trout rises clean out of the water where a cluster of swirling flies roll the eternal dice of life and death. We’ve all communed, at this secretive spot, for the same reason. Food.

  Unlike me, Paul has some experience with proper fly fishing, so while he is carefully selecting the right fly to use, I cast in with a small spinner, looking for something lurking in the banks. Fly fishing is an art; in fact it’s more than an art. To do it well you need to become something of an ecologist. To know how to fly fish is to know your place.

  All is calm and serene until bam! and something takes t
he bait. Through the clear water, I can immediately see the ferocious, Jurassic head of a pike. He looks sorely disappointed, as he thought he was onto a meal himself. Well, it is April Fools’ Day, but I take no pleasure in cruel pranks. Nevertheless, I have an important role as a predator. Pike, ecologically speaking, are a problem in some lakes and rivers around Ireland. But because touring anglers prize them – for their size and photogenic qualities instead of their dead flesh and bones – the pike has inadvertently made fishing big business in Ireland.

  As a thank you, the state has granted pike a protection of sorts, despite the fact that such protections are having an impact on other species. There are strict rules about the size of the pike you can kill, and within that range you are only allowed one. So while bottom-trawlers legally make deserts out of oceans, kill a pike over 50 centimetres long and you could be facing jail time. That is, unless you’re the government, and the pike are in places where trout angling is considered to be more lucrative. Then it spends taxpayers’ money to kill them. According to the ecologist Pádraic Fogarty, between 2010 and 2014 Inland Fisheries Ireland ‘spent €725,037 removing 35,738 pike using a combination of gill netting and electro-fishing’. That’s about €20 per pike. Hard to make it up, really.

  The pike on the end of my line is slightly longer and heavier than the legal limit. I have a choice: to knock him over the head and break the law, or to go and buy a packet of bottom-trawled fish fingers sold legally from the supermarket for €3.99.

  It’s a tough choice. It’s a time of tough choices.

  ~

  Looking up into the abyss of what John Muir called ‘cloudland’, I notice the swallows are back, uttering their sharp ‘vit’ call as they go. A small congregation of males are twittering away on telephone wires connected to Packie’s house, taking their rightful place in God’s choir. They could be recounting tales of their winter adventures, or alerting the females to the presence of a magpie perched high on a distant tree. Who knows?

  After a long sojourn in some particular part of Africa that I will never know, a couple of last year’s migrants have travelled the thousands of kilometres back to Knockmoyle (53°05’N, 08°30’W) by way of their wits and wings alone. No satnav, no engines, no paper maps. They’ve nested in the same rafter of my woodshed as last year, and are getting themselves reacquainted with the place and prepared for the next turning of life’s wheel. Though I have an inkling, I will never know why they’ve come back here, but it’s a reassuring, life-affirming sight nonetheless.

  We think we’re intelligent, and at our best we can be. But from where I stand now, axing beech and birch in a woodshed, our intelligence looks no lesser or greater than the swallow’s. No, it only looks different.

  ~

  I hadn’t seen an advert for the best part of a month, until this morning. An energy drink. It was on one of those A-shaped trailers that vans haul around cities all day. It came past our smallholding, I can only assume, on its way from one city to the next. The fifty- to eighty-year-old farmer demographic probably isn’t their target market.

  I studied marketing for four years, as part of an undergraduate degree in business. At the time I remember reading how each of us is exposed, on average, to around three thousand adverts every day – in shops, magazines and newspapers, on billboards, vans, radio and television. That was between 1996 and 2002, before the internet copy-and-pasted itself into every nook and cranny of our lives. I can only imagine what the figure might be in the digital age.

  Seeing that advert felt strange, like a jolt. I can hardly complain, considering that my current exposure to advertising is tiny in comparison. Yet, as it drove past, its abruptness and overconfidence contrasted starkly with the woods behind it. If it didn’t need permission to expose my mind to irresponsible, sexed-up marketing for an unhealthy, addictive product, does that mean I don’t need permission to put an axe through the advert the next time it drives by? My mind is private property too – perhaps the most private of property.

  Home from the woods, I find a bank statement waiting for me in our letterbox. The bank is legally required to post one out every few months, whether I like it or not. Scanning through it, I notice that there is almost nothing in the debit column, which is good news, as there is almost nothing in the credit column either. The only work I receive any money for is writing, and everyone is telling me that quitting social media, phones and email isn’t exactly going to boost my prospects with that. Everything else I do gratis, and always for something or someone I care about. Therefore the statement is mostly a small collection of bank charges which everyone in Ireland with less than €2,500 in their account has to pay – above that and banking is free. It’s effectively a tax on the poor.

  I put the statement on the fire grate and set some tinder and kindling on top, preparing it for the evening – better to do it now than when it is cold and dark – and take my breakfast outside to capture the morning sun. For possibly the first time in my life I realise that I feel content, without the desire for anything other than what’s in front of me in that most elusive of moments, the here and now. I’ve been happy, hopeful and full of excitement plenty of times, but I can’t recall a time when I was simply content.

  ~

  The potting shed looks like Oliver Mellors has been in there with Lady Chatterley. There are empty compost bags strewn over tables, a few of those cheap, green watering cans dot the floor, and the plastic pots and cell trays which you use to germinate seeds are scattered everywhere. It’s the start of April, so I need to get this place in shape for the next wave of the growing season.

  Our plan is to grow enough vegetables to feed eight people over the coming year, so I begin the sort-out by making tables out of old wood and discarded pallets. Having already tidied up, I lay out a hundred black plastic seed trays across the tables, each containing twelve cells. All going well, that should allot us somewhere between a thousand and twelve hundred plants. I pack each cell with potting compost, give them a good watering, and plant one seed in each. I’ve planted everything from peas and pinto beans to all sorts of varieties of kale. You can’t grow too much kale. On little plastic labels and strips of cardboard I write things like sweetcorn, Yokohama squash, echinacea, spinach, rocket, courgette, cucumber, swede, calendula, Brussels sprouts and beetroot. Before the day is out I’ve planted over thirty varieties of herb, vegetable and salad. I’m not a man to get too easily excited, but I’m already looking forward to the sight of the first seedlings bursting their way above the soil and into life. Such work is both satisfying and reassuring.

  But then I make the mistake of thinking, and suddenly very little of it makes sense. Between the labels and watering cans and trays and compost bags it is wall-to-wall plastic. Literally. The walls themselves are plastic, the last of the polytunnels we inherited to remain standing. I know that food growing hasn’t always been like this, but agriculture was the precursor to industrialism, and it was only a matter of time before they would marry. I’ve no idea what the word ‘sustainable’ means anymore – does anyone? – but this cannot be it. Nor do I have any desire to help sustain a culture dependent on plastic.

  I know I need to become a much more proficient forager. Gathering plants in hedgerows, meadows and wherever they grow self-willed and naturally, without recourse to plastic or shed loads of tools – now that makes sense to me. I know I need to make leaf mould instead of buying potting compost, to focus on perennials instead of annuals, and a hundred other things to boot. But then I remind myself that these things take time – a forest garden takes at least fifteen years to get going – and that Rome wasn’t demolished in a day.

  Before I leave I water the plants, and marvel at how the wooden box of embryonic, fragile seeds in my hands will continue to keep us in vegetables over the coming year.

  ~

  My fingers are tingling as I write. I’ve been out picking nettles to make soup for lunch, and dried tea for whenever. They’re easier to gather than most people imagin
e. Such was their place in the diets of old that there’s an old Irish rhyme which reminded children how to pick nettles:

  If you gently grasp a nettle,

  It will sting you for your pains.

  Grasp it tightly like a rod of metal,

  And it soft as silk remains.

  If your mind is entirely focused on the nettles, you can pick them all day without getting stung. The moment you start daydreaming, they will get you good. Each leaf is a Buddha.

  Secretly, I quite enjoy the sensation, and I’m told it’s good for your circulation. The tingling mysteriously resurfaces at night, just as I take off my clothes for bed, reminding me a little of my day.

  ~

  Up until recently, I had never really been one for walking just for walking’s sake. Growing up in an industrial culture like mine, walking time was considered to be idle time, and idleness was not a virtue. It was something older people did, in an attempt to regain their health in retirement, and not something for young men who had careers to pursue, families to feed, businesses to grow and good health to deteriorate. That was before I read Thoreau’s paean to ‘Walking’. It’s hard to ignore an essay that begins:

  I wish to speak a word for Nature, for absolute freedom and wildness, as contrasted with a freedom and culture merely civil.

  After this, the art of walking became not so much a political act against the dogma and tyranny of ideas like efficiency and productivity, but a tradition worth keeping alive. As my legs began moving without any pre-planned, pre-conceived notions, I discovered something surprising, something at odds with what I had once imagined.

  It’s a wet morning – I mean Irish wet – so I decide to stay indoors and do some writing. But by lunch I’m restless. I remind myself that I am an animal, not a disembodied thinker, and so I follow the urge to go sauntering. I call in for Bulmers. He’s never been trained, and isn’t the sharpest tool in the box, so he needs to stay on the lead while he is on the road.