by Mark Boyle
You can’t see or hear them from the roof, but beyond the hills that roll out in front of me are small parishes, villages and towns. The nearest shop, which doubles as a post office, is 6 kilometres away, and somewhere far off to the north-west is Galway City.
Down below, Packie was roaring at me to ‘stop dossing and get back to work’, so I climbed off the roof and came back down to earth, where a shovel and a pickaxe were waiting for me.
~
As I was embroiled in the frustratingly slow but important details of finishing a home, I noticed a couple of birds’ nests nearby. The first was that of a swallow – the original cob builder – who had made a nest out of mud and straw in the roof of my shed. Who owned the deeds of the other nest I couldn’t be sure, as it had recently been abandoned, but I felt a great sense of admiration for them nonetheless. Built with only beaks and claws – no power tools, no heavy machinery, not even a chisel or nail – it was made of broken twigs, soil, grasses, leaves and straw, and insulated with soft green mosses and liverworts, along with other materials from the landscape. While I marvelled at the determination and dexterity involved, I wondered if these birds’ greatest skill might be their unending ability to keep their needs simple. Theirs is not a culture of progress, but one of artistic survival.
I went back to work, gently rubbing linseed oil into oak window seats and ash bookshelves, so as to strengthen and protect them. I paused briefly to consider what the swallow might think of my extravagance, before knocking such anthropomorphic nonsense out of my head. As I rubbed, the linseed oil transfigured the wood, bringing out its best, each ring and burr and knot telling stories about this place that had begun long before I was even born.
~
The cabin was finally finished. My body was sore. Sore and tired. Battling against the looming winter, I had worked every single day of the previous three months, most of which were spent carrying niggling injuries that had spread and multiplied through over-exertion. Every tonne of straw, stone, wood, earth and lime had been moved by hand, and it had taken its toll. The last week alone had been spent wheelbarrowing mud through mud as I dug out the drains – a job a more experienced builder would have done back in the dry, solid days of spring.
It was now winter solstice eve, the day before my favourite day of the year. Not only is the solstice Kirsty’s birthday, but it also marks the end of darkness’s dominance and the slow, gradual return of the light. Our ancestors, who didn’t have light at the flick of a switch, celebrated it wildly, and for good reason. This year’s winter solstice had added significance for me, it being the day I had set myself to start living without industrial-scale, complex technologies and instead to embark on a more hand-crafted path. I was planning to live in this way for a year at least, to see through each of the seasons in their turn, and to take stock of things once my opinions had been tempered by the experience. To hold strong views, either way, about the necessity or desirability of all of our machines seemed premature until then.
As I sat next to the fire, on the cusp of a new – yet much older – life, I could feel a sense of apprehension. Reality was kicking in. I was already feeling exhausted, and I hadn’t even begun living without the ease of cheap fossil fuels and plastic switches and buttons. I was under no illusion that the way of life I was about to set out on was going to be some romantic, bucolic dream. Unplugging myself from the machine-world was about to shape my entire year ahead, and possibly the rest of my life. At this point I had no idea if the insights it would offer me would be hard-won, or if I would take to it like a duck to water.
In some ways I’d been in a similar position before, at the start of my years living without money. But this time would be different. Very different. More primal, less insulated. For a start, I would have no solar panels, or the things they powered. No hot shower after a hard day’s graft. No headphones or box sets or news or social media to distract me from myself. Experience told me that, as I stripped away the layers of over-civilisation like the skin of an onion, I would, in all likelihood, find out things about myself I hadn’t known, and wished I hadn’t known. Living far from the madding crowd, I wondered if I would feel a sense of isolation, or enjoy the peace and serenity. Having no internet, radio, television or easy connection to the outside world, would I quickly get bored? How was it going to affect my relationship with those around me, and my health? Was it even possible to live in an older way within the context of a modern society? The questions were plentiful, the answers yet to come, and I had a suspicion they would be covered in blood, sweat and . . . well, I hoped not tears.
To add pressure to an already challenging proposition, I had agreed to write a column for a newspaper that would explore both the reasons for unplugging and the actual experiences of doing it. I knew that even if I was able to thrive without technology I was going to get flak, but if I failed – something, as you’ll see later, I have had experience of doing very publicly in the past – the criticism would be unforgiving. I didn’t mind the thought of this for myself so much, as I have long since been used to it, but I felt uneasy about the thought of not doing justice to a way of life that had served my more competent ancestors well for millennia.
It was 11 p.m. when I checked my email for the last time, and turned off my phone for what I hoped would be forever. By unplugging myself from the wider, distant civilised world, would I lose all touch with reality, or finally discover it? I’d find that out too, soon enough.
Winter
. . . grace tangled in a rapture with violence.
Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (1974)
I wake up this morning to two thoughts.
The first is that, from this moment onwards, I haven’t got a single bill to my name. I feel free. The second is that, from this moment onwards, all of the toll bridges linking my life to modernity are gone, and that I’m going to have to live on my gumption alone. I am cut loose from the only culture I’ve ever really known.
~
The first official day of winter, the solstice, has only just passed and already the finer details of this way of life are becoming apparent. At its heart and hearth is fire.
You never forget the moment you first make fire by friction. It feels primal, elemental, fundamental, essential. Any apocalyptic fears of economic collapse one might harbour would melt away at the vision of that primary, primeval incandescent coal, offering not only the promise of cooked food and warmth, but the reassuring knowledge that all is in hand.
I originally learned how to create fire in this way many years ago, but in the age of cheap and easy gas lighters I opted for convenience every time since and, in doing so, lost the most basic of crafts. Even when I was moneyless I would find half-empty lighters lying on the street, each one gradually eroding my motivation to keep alive something that, for reasons more important than producing an ember, ought never to be forgotten.
My story, in this respect, is a microcosm of those of a growing number of tribal peoples worldwide who, after coming into contact with the West and acquiring some of its tools, forgot how to create fire themselves. (Western ‘aid’ of sports t-shirts, jeans and trainers has similarly weakened their competence in making their own clothes and has, in effect, turned them into a new market for industrial clothing.) I remember once watching Ray Mears show a couple of tribal elders, who had lost their firecraft, how to depend on their own ancestral knowledge once again. Ray, as always, handled the situation with sensitivity, skill and grace.
Attempt one. Using a bow, I drill hazel into hazel all day, without so much as a coal to show for it. I know I’m doing something wrong, I’ve just no firm idea exactly what. What’s worse, there’s no one qualified to ask for guidance, or no instructive online video to watch. My head feels frustrated, my hips have seized up and my drilling arm feels like it’s about to fall off. By the time I finally smell smoke, the only thing more painful than continuing to drill is the thought of having to start all over again. I give it my all, but my technique is la
cking, and I’m spent. In more unforgiving circumstances, Kirsty and I would now be as good as dead.
Attempt two. I take more time preparing the wood. I whittle the drill and hearth to fit together neatly to increase friction, and select a more suitable branch for the bow. This one is longer, its arc slightly more pronounced, giving me greater friction with each stroke. Within thirty strokes it is smoking furiously, and what do I see but a magical, glowing ember looking back at me, quietly whispering, ‘Good, you’re beginning to know your place a little better now.’ I transfer the ember, carefully, to a bundle of dead bracken and birch bark, blowing softly into it, drawing the flame upwards towards the heavens, towards God, towards food. Fire.
In this moment I feel like the world suddenly makes sense to me. Up until this moment, I just wanted to go to the shop and buy a bloody lighter.
~
Ever since my teens I’ve been a poor sleeper. I usually wake up at the first signs of the blue-black light of dawn. Having fought it for years with blackout blinds, the day I moved into the cabin I decided instead to embrace it, and to sleep with the rhythms of the seasons and my own body. Now the window above my bed, under the canopy of the old beech, has no curtains at all. I wake when I wake – no frustration, no expectation. But that’s easier to say at the beginning of January than in the middle of June.
My mornings usually begin much like everyone else’s: with the toilet. But that’s probably where the comparison ends. If it is just a piss, I pick a tree and keep good my side of our symbiotic relationship. I feed it nitrogen, it feeds me oxygen.
Most mornings the situation is more serious, so I pay a visit to one of our composting toilets. I deliberately didn’t build a toilet inside the cabin, which would have been easy to do. Modern houses are so well designed you almost never have to leave them. I wanted to spend as much time as I could outdoors, so I designed with that in mind. Know thy weakness.
My toilet is much like any other toilet, except that there’s no flush. Or even water. But it has got a seat and is as comfortable as any I know. Instead of water we use either sawdust – which we collect by horse from a local backyard sawmill – or any other compostable material we have. Once the bucket is full I lift it out from under the seat and empty it onto the compost heap. Here it needs to decompose for at least a year, depending on the weather, but there’s no hurry. The result is called ‘humanure’ and the plants and trees love it. Most humans don’t. When you empty the bucket onto the heap, the smell can sometimes be rather pungent, and the first time can be quite an experience for many people. But like everything, it soon becomes normal and unremarkable.
Up in Dublin I’m told there are big protests about the water charges, which the International Monetary Fund (IMF) insisted on in return for credit in the aftermath of the banking crisis in 2008. It is the latest in a long line of new taxes which come at a time when people are having their homes repossessed by the very same banks the IMF bailed out. Up until then, water had always been free, at the point of service, to people living here. The government argued that it’s very expensive to provide drinking water for millions of people, and that it needs to be conserved. The people argued that, until the greed of the banking industry came to light in such a brutal manner, this hadn’t been an issue before.
I regret not being able to attend the protests, but I’ve no way to get there and plenty to do here.
~
If I had an FAQs page about this way of life, the first question I would have to put on it would be ‘What do you do for Christmas without technology or money?’ Everyone asks it – interviewers, friends, editors.
This Christmas Day? I got up early, fetched some manure, hauled logs from the woods for next winter’s woodpile, and then remembered it was Christmas Day. We made food – roasted potatoes, celeriac and swede, along with Brussels sprouts, salad and venison (after thirteen years of being either vegetarian or vegan, I’d decided to start eating meat – strictly wild, free-roaming creatures only) which a neighbour had dropped around – and drank some blackcurrant wine. I think we made love in front of the fire. Probably much like most people’s day, but with logs and manure instead of phone calls and shit TV.
~
I find the pigeon in the verge. Roadkill. The thickness of its neck and head suggests it is a female. To say she was killed by a car would be true to some extent, but it would be about as accurate as saying that a mackerel was killed by a bottom-trawler, an oak by a chainsaw or a hilltop by a bulldozer; on closer inspection it could be said that they were all killed by an idea, one which is too busy to consider things like pigeons, mackerel, oaks and hills.
Whatever the roots of its demise, my eyes tell me that she has been dead for at least a day, while my nose informs me that she’s probably still edible. First I cut the wings at the joints and the head by the neck, before plucking every feather out of her lean, supple body. The tail feathers are smeared in a yellow, watery, whipped raw egg-like shit, but I don’t suspect she cares for ideas like dignity now. Looking at her dead naked body, I wonder if what I hold is still a pigeon at all. Is it the very essence of a pigeon, or literally everything but?
With my knife, I cut below the breastbone, and pull out the innards. As I do so, I realise that the pigeon and I have a lot more in common – a heart, liver, intestines, flesh, bones – than we have differences, most of which exist only as matters of arrangement and extent. I hope her spirit is soaring, but her body is staying here on earth, soon to take on a new form. The cycle continues. The cycle always continues.
I wash her out. She smells a little gamy, but she is fine to eat. There’s not enough meat on her breasts to warrant taking her life, but more than enough to justify the little effort required to pluck and dress her. I stick her in the oven, and collect the feathers for some as-yet-undecided purpose. It will be a bittersweet moment if I collect enough to make a pillow.
~
A few years ago, before I rejected the internet, I was searching online for an image of a wild crab apple, hoping to make a positive identification. Instead of finding photographs of the plum-leaved or hawthorn-leaved crab, the screen was dominated by the trademarked logo of the Apple corporation. Taken aback, I typed in ‘blackberry’ and ‘orange’ to see what would happen. I was offered mobile phone deals. I hadn’t heard of Tinder at the time, but I don’t imagine pictures of wood shavings, bracken and birch bark would have monopolised the page.
Six months later I read Robert Macfarlane’s Landmarks, his remarkable, place-particularising contribution to a ‘glossary of enchantment for the whole earth’. In it he revealed source of the words that had been deleted from the 2007 edition of the Oxford Junior Dictionary. They included:
acorn, alder, ash, beech, bluebell, buttercup, catkin, conker, cowslip, cygnet, dandelion, fern, hazel, heather, heron, ivy, kingfisher, lark, mistletoe, nectar, newt, otter, pasture and willow.
In their place, Oxford University Press had added:
attachment, block-graph, blog, broadband, bullet-point, celebrity, chatroom, committee, cut-and-paste, MP3 player and voicemail.
The publishing company’s explanation – that these are the things that now comprise a child’s life – was pragmatic, understandable, honest and deeply worrying.
In preparation for a life without the internet, a week or so before I unplugged I found a 2000 edition of the Collins English Dictionary; 1785 pages drawn from a ‘Bank of English’ consisting of examples of 323 million words. My own vocabulary has improved since getting it and using it to replace the online dictionaries I had used for years. If I wanted to understand the definition of a word in the past I would simply Google it, and by the time I had exhaled the ‘w’ of ‘now’ I’d have its meaning. But nothing else. Now if I want to find out the year Gerard Manley Hopkins died, my eye is caught by curiosities from hookworm (no thanks) to horn of plenty (another name for cornucopia – yes please) instead of a screenful of carefully targeted adverts.
Reading it is interesting. Only s
even years older than the concise Oxford Junior Dictionary, there’s no mention of block-graph, blog, bullet-point, chatroom or MP3 player. There’s no entry either for currel – a word once specific to East Anglia which describes a specifically small stream – or smeuse, which Sussex farmers once called that ‘gap in the base of a hedge made by the regular passage of a small animal’.
The smartphone generation, having never played with them, will not miss words like ‘conkers’. It’s odd – when I was growing up in 1990s Ireland on a working-class council estate on the edgelands of a struggling town, no one ever asked me if I missed anything about the natural world. But the moment I choose bluebells over bullet-points I’ve found that everyone wants to know what I miss most about machines.
~
I’m trying to give up time. Obviously not seasonal time, the inescapable evolution-of-the-moment time; I mean clock-time. I appreciate that this may sound like a fanciful, impractical and odd thing to want to do, but it is at the heart of the way of life I want to lead. Reading Jay Griffiths’ deep exploration of time, Pip Pip, reinforced in my mind how recent the concept of clock-time is in human culture, and how essentially ideological and political it is. Clock-time is central to industry, mass production, specialised division of labour, economies of scale and standardisation; basically everything I am trying to move away from.