by Mark Boyle
Praise for The Way Home
‘A beautiful and thought-provoking story that will inspire you to live differently. Mark asks the most fundamental questions then sets out to live the answers.’
Lily Cole
‘Don’t buy my books: buy this instead, while there’s still time for you to change. This one matters. Boyle is the real thing: vital, angry, and kind. And real things are terribly rare. You might think his ideas are dangerous, but in fact they represent the only possible safety.’
Charles Foster, author of Being a Beast
‘Illustrates beautifully that giving up many of the things in life that we treat as indispensable may actually be less of a sacrifice than a liberation.’
Neil Ansell, author of Deep Country
‘The Way Home paints a picture not only of how broken our culture has become, but of how to begin building a new one. It demands to be read – and then lived by.’
Paul Kingsnorth, author of The Wake and Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist
‘In a world more connected than ever before we have never been so disconnected. Boyle takes us along with him on his experimental journey to reconnect, with himself and to the rhythms of the natural world around him. A thought-provoking read which encourages the reader to appreciate many of the things we take for granted.’
Megan Hine, author of Mind of a Survivor
Mark Boyle is the author of The Moneyless Man, The Moneyless Manifesto and Drinking Molotov Cocktails with Gandhi, which have been translated into over twenty languages. A former business graduate, he lived entirely without money for three years. He has written columns for the Guardian and has irregularly contributed to international press, radio and television. He lives on a smallholding in Co. Galway, Ireland.
For Kirsty Alston,
my mother, Marian Boyle, and my father, Josie Boyle
I am here not only to evade for a while the clamor and filth and confusion of the cultural apparatus but also to confront, immediately and directly if it’s possible, the bare bones of existence, the elemental and fundamental, the bedrock which sustains us. I want to be able to look at and into a juniper tree, a piece of quartz, a vulture, a spider, and see it as it is in itself, devoid of all humanly ascribed qualities, anti-Kantian, even the categories of scientific description. To meet God or Medusa face to face, even if it means risking everything human in myself.
Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire (1968)
Everything not saved will be lost.
Nintendo ‘Quit Screen’ message
Contents
Author’s Note
Prologue
Knowing My Place
Winter
Spring
Summer
Autumn
The Complexities of Simplicity
Postscript
A Short Note on the Free Hostel
Select Bibliography
Acknowledgements
Author’s Note
Throughout this book I speak of places that are of special significance to me. But this is not a travel book, nor an encouragement to explore far-off lands that bear no relevance to your own everyday experience of life. Anything but. Instead it’s an invitation to immerse yourself in your own landscape, to foster an intimate relationship with it, to come to depend upon it; to find your own place within your own place. This is work enough, believe me. As Patrick Kavanagh wrote in his essay ‘The Parish and the Universe’, ‘To know fully even one field or one land is a lifetime’s experience.’
Woven into these pages is the story of one such place, the Great Blasket Island, and the lusty people who scratched a living from its sandy soil and turbulent seas until their evacuation in 1953. As this tale of connection, loss and hope unfolds outside the book’s seasonal rhythm, I have italicised those passages that step beyond the landscape around my neck of the woods, Knockmoyle, and enter into the lost world of ‘Blasket time’.
Books tend to have the unfortunate habit of attracting thoughtless tourism to the places they reveal, the upshot of which can be the dilution of its essence and the particular things which made it worth writing about to begin with. If, for good reason, you still feel compelled to visit the places made known, all I ask is that you consider doing so in a way that their inhabitants, or the spirits that still haunt them, would welcome.
Places of character are full of characters, some of whom are human. All those I mention in this book are real, as are the stories and musings they imparted to me. To protect the privacy of my neighbours, however, I have given them fictitious names. On the off-chance that one of them ever stumbles upon a dusty copy of this book, I am sure they’ll recognise themselves, and a few of the other characters, and chuckle. No one else need care; except, that is, for the names and characters of their own neighbours – human, and non-human, alike.
Prologue
I have written minutely of much that we did, for it was my wish that somewhere there should be a memorial of it all, and I have done my best to set down the character of the people about me so that some record of us might live after us, for the likes of us will never be again.
Tomás Ó Criomhthain, The Islandman (1937)
The afternoon before I was set to begin living in a cabin, without electricity or any of the basic conveniences which, for most of my life, I had taken for granted – a phone, computer, light bulbs, washing machine, running water, television, power tools, gas cooker, radio – I received an email, perhaps the last I might ever receive, from an editor at a publishing house. He had read an article I had written for a newspaper, published earlier that day, and wanted to know if I would consider writing a book about my experiences.
One year before that, when I first thought about building the cabin – the bedrock for what I hoped would be a simpler way of life – I came to the tough but realistic conclusion that, personal journals aside, I would probably never write again. I was told that publishers no longer accepted the hand-written manuscripts of D.H. Lawrence’s time, especially from people who were no D.H. Lawrence; therefore my decision to start using less complex, more convivial tools was, I believed, a death knell to the only financial livelihood I had. This I accepted, as I had always maintained that, to borrow the words of nineteenth-century writer and transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau, it is more important to ‘stand up to live’ than to ‘sit down to write’. Still, the prospect weighed on my mind.
So his email came as a surprise. I told him that I was interested. I had no idea at that point how it might work, if at all. For my entire adult life I had used computers to write everything from essays and theses to articles and books. I was already discovering that hand-writing was not only an entirely different craft to machine-writing, but that it involved a whole new way of thinking. There would no longer be the speedy convenience of the typed word or online research, no spellcheck, no copy and paste and no easy delete. If I needed to restructure a page, I would have to start over again. I wondered how editing might work without the instant communication that the modern publishing world has become accustomed to. My mind boggled. There were a hundred reasons why it might not work, so I picked up my pencil and set about making that ninety-nine instead.
~
Almost a decade before I decided to unplug myself from industrial civilisation, I began living without money for what was originally intended to be a one-year experiment. It ended up lasting three years, and money has played only a minor role in my life since. At this point, you’re probably thinking that here is someone with acute masochistic tendencies. I could hardly blame you.
Strangely, the opposite is closer to the truth. Phrases like ‘giving up’, ‘living without’ and ‘quitting’ are always in danger of sounding sacrificial, limiting and austere, drawing attention to the loss inst
ead of to what might be gained. Alcoholics are more likely to be described as ‘giving up the booze’ than ‘gaining good health and relationships’. In my experience, loss and gain are an ongoing part of all our lives. Choices, whether we know it or not, are always being made. Throughout most of my life, for reasons that made perfect sense, I chose money and machines, unconsciously choosing to live without the things which they replaced. The question concerning each of us then, one we all too seldom ask ourselves, is what are we prepared to lose, and what do we want to gain, as we fumble our way through our short, precious lives?
As also happened with this book, the afternoon before I was due to begin living without money – living with nature still sounds too cheesy – I was asked if I was interested in writing a book about my experiences. One year later it, and I, would become known as The Moneyless Man. It was the story of all the challenges, lessons, miracles, struggles, joys, mistakes and adventures I had experienced during my first year of moneyless living. In the process of writing that book, my editor asked me to write a short chapter clarifying the ‘rules of engagement’. As money is easily definable, the rules were straightforward: I couldn’t spend or receive a single penny for at least a year. Considering my motivations were ecological, geopolitical and social as much as personal, I went to stupid lengths not to use the fruits of a global monetary system I was trying to live without. Ultimately, however, my self-imposed limitations were relatively clear and simple: no money.
So when the editor who first contacted me about the book you are now reading asked me to clarify the rules of my life without technology, it must have seemed a reasonable request, yet I instantly felt uneasy about it. Unlike money, it’s not easy to draw a clear line in the sand in relation to what constitutes technology and what doesn’t. Language, fire, a smartphone, an axe – even the pencil I write these words with – could all be described as technology, though I shy away from using such a rough brush to paint life. Where I would draw the line – the Stone Age? The Iron Age? The eighteenth century? – became an impossible question when the words themselves could be considered technology; and the more I reflected on my years without money, the less important finding the perfect answer seemed to become.
On top of that, those years taught me that rules have a tendency to set your life up as a game to win, a challenge to overcome, creating the kind of black-and-white scenarios our society leans towards. My life is my life, and it’s prone to the same contradiction, complexity, compromise, confusion and conflict as the next person’s. My ideals are often one step ahead of my ability to fully embody them, and that is no bad thing; in fact, as we will see later on, I wonder if hypocrisy might be the highest ideal of all.
I felt strongly that, if I were to write a book about my experiences, it ought to mirror what was the real point of unplugging: to deeply explore what it means to be human – in all its beautiful complexities, contradictions and confusions – when you strip away the distractions, the things that disconnect us from what is immediately around us.
Ten years on, I feel more drawn towards honestly exploring the complexities of simplicity, and less inclined towards being right. At the heart of how I live is the burning desire to discover what it might feel like to become a part of one’s landscape, using only tools and technologies (if I must call them that) which, like the Old Order Amish people of North America, do not make me beholden to institutions and forces that have no regard for the principles and values on which I wish to live my life. And then, as life inevitably pulls me further afield – away from the hard-won simplicity of the cabin and the smallholding and into a society that seems to become more enthralled by virtual reality by the minute, to be free to recount the compromises and dilemmas I face, frankly and straightforwardly. Insofar as there are rules to my life, this is as much as I can say.
Within the limitations of words to accurately describe reality, the first chapter of this book intends to give you a flavour of the landscape which I am attempting to become a part of, and the cabin within which my new life began. The rest takes you through the seasons as I strip away the distractions whose convenience, I’ve come to believe, is killing us in more ways than one. Therefore the pages that follow are not so much the story of a man living without technology as they are a collection of observations, practicalities, conversations over farmyard gates, adventures and reflections, which I hope will provide an insight into the life of someone attempting to pare the extravagance of modernity back to the raw ingredients of life.
Actually, now that I think of it, this book has very little to do with me at all.
Knowing My Place
Would I a house for happiness erect,
Nature alone should be the architect.
Abraham Cowley, ‘Horace to Fuscus Aristius. A Paraphrase Upon the 10th Epistle of the First Book of Horace’ (1668)
‘This is the most beautiful place on earth,’ remarked American writer Edward Abbey in his opening line of Desert Solitaire. For him that was the Canyonlands, the slickrock desert around Moab, Utah. But it was a title, Abbey knew himself, which had – and ought to have – no end of claims to it.
Such claims have been most vocal in the US. According to the poet and essayist Wendell Berry, heaven is Henry County in Kentucky, where he has farmed and stayed put while the rest of his generation, as Roger Deakin once put it, has been ‘playing musical chairs’ around him. There his tools of choice are a team of horses and a pencil. The conservationist Aldo Leopold probably felt the same about his shack on a sand farm in Wisconsin. To Henry David Thoreau, that place would have been Walden Pond for the two years, two months and two days he lived by its shore. For wilderness guardian John Muir, God’s country was more expansive: the Sierras of the American West, from Alaska to the Yosemite Valley all the way to Mexico, where he searched out truths and challenged conventional wisdoms while ‘carrying only a few crusts of bread, a tin cup, a small portion of tea, a notebook and a few scientific instruments’.
Over here, on my side of the Atlantic, Peig Sayers and Tomás Ó Criomhthain could have echoed Abbey’s words on the Great Blasket Island, which is stranded 5 kilometres off Ireland’s Dingle Peninsula and is the home of one of the most surprising, and forgotten, literary sub-genres of the early twentieth century. Over eighty books were written about or by these Blasket Islanders (though few are still in print), no small compliment considering only 150 people lived there in its heyday. Why the interest? Who knows. Perhaps intrigue, perhaps anthropological voyeurism or perhaps a sign of a generation who had lost something important and were told that it was last seen there.
To me, the most beautiful place on earth is this unsophisticated, half-wild three-acre smallholding in the middle of somewhere unimportant. It is here I wish to stake my own claim.
~
I landed on this smallholding in the summer of 2013, along with my girlfriend at the time, Jess, and a close friend called Tom. We were full of energy and bold, often unrealistic, ideas. After a decade living in England, the call to move back to Ireland was strong. I had missed my family, the people and the nuances of the culture. I had been away long enough for my Donegal accent to fade and for other Irish people to wonder where I was from. I was starting to wonder myself.
This was the first smallholding we had looked at. It was about as far from prime agricultural land as you could imagine, but it felt unpretentious, a place that was happy just to be itself. I remember, as we went to view the place, being struck by the gentleness of its atmosphere – the rustle of breeze on leaves, the hee-haw of a donkey, the coo of a dove – as we turned off the ignition in our camper van and walked up the track to where the potato field is now. The fallowness of the land seemed to me like it had important lessons to teach, lessons that might involve listening. We met a few of the more curious neighbours by the farm gate, and they were open, mischievous and warm. The air was alive with fresh manure, and we found it all strangely alluring.
As endearing as any of its qualities was the fact we co
uld afford it. Ireland was in the aftermath of the 2008 financial meltdown, and we were offered the smallholding, and the farmhouse that came with it, for a rock-bottom price. My gain had been another man’s loss. What could I do? Our budget was tight – stupidly tight – but I knew that having little or no money would mean that we’d have to get creative, and that this limitation could ultimately be our greatest ally.
We got to work immediately. We fixed up the house and converted living spaces into bedrooms, so that more people could live here. We planted trees, lots of them, while in other places we pollarded trees to let in light to the orchard and vegetable gardens we began to grow. The land was wet, so we dug out drains with our spades. We acquired a flock of hens, built a coop, planted a nuttery, created a pond, grew a herb garden, scoured car boot sales and junk yards for good quality, inexpensive hand tools that, for the sellers, were long-since obsolete. We made compost bins, composting toilets and, eventually, compost. We built a reciprocal-framed fire-hut that would quickly become a focal point for music, dancing and terrible hangovers. We only had a couple of months to get wood in and dry for winter. We scythed every blade of overgrown wildness in an unconscious attempt to put our own mark on the land, something I would later regret.
As I was also writing another book at the time, the workload took its toll on my relationship with Jess, which was already complicated by the fact that she wanted kids and I didn’t, and we parted as good friends. I stayed here and she moved to County Cork. I promised myself I would never again put anything above a relationship, but I also knew that old habits die hard.
By the end of the first year I thought the hard work was done. What I have learned since is that the hard work is never done, especially when you reject all the things that fool you into thinking that self-reliant lives are meant to be simple.