by Mark Boyle
For the rails, I want to use up some spruce boards I have left over from the cabin build. Having only eleven boards and needing twenty-two, there is good news and bad news. The good news is that the boards are twice as wide as they need to be, and therefore can be cut in half. The bad news is that these boards total 80 metres in length, and will have to be cut with a handsaw along their longitudinal axis, something wood is never keen on. That’s an awful lot of sawing.
Needs must. I decide with Gillis – still here – to take one board at a time, each starting at opposite ends and aiming to meet in the middle. Starting early, we go at it as hard as we can, focusing on each board in its turn. Despite switching arms regularly – it’s important for the physical balance of your body to learn to cut straight with both arms if you do a lot of sawing – I can feel them by the time we’re finished in the afternoon.
I hang up the saws in the tool shed. On the floor I notice a bandsaw that Tommy left here a few years ago. Half-broken, it still would have done the job in fifteen minutes, with little effort on our part. I had thought about it a few times this morning, and I’d be dishonest if I said I hadn’t been tempted by it, lying there, like a siren, luring me in with all its electrical glory. But I have made my bed, and feel content in my monogamous relationship with hand tools.
~
The machines are back, in a different part of the woods this time. I can hear them as I write. They don’t stop, from dawn until dusk. There were paths I had made in those woods, my own secret pattern by which I could roam and explore. There was one little holly sapling, among the stand of spruce, which I had watched grow over the last two years and had for some peculiar reason become attached to. The landscape is so utterly changed that I wouldn’t even know where to look for it now.
But I suppose it’s jobs, prosperity and growth. What kind of jobs, prosperity and growth, I’m not sure. It’s certainly not growth for that little holly.
~
May Day, and the orange-tipped butterfly, buff-tailed bumblebee and the German wasp – all proud, hard workers (or is it play to them? Or simply life?) – are on riotous form. I’m awoken by the sound of defiance, irrepressible joy and small talk, all chirping, twittering and singing their way through the open window above my head. Feeling too enlivened to go back to sleep, I decide to make the most of the sunrise and to go foraging for broadleaf plantain (Plantago major) for the first time this year.
Like many hayfever sufferers, for much of my life I’ve looked forward to June and July with mixed feelings. Hayfever plagued my childhood. Glorious sunny days were often spent sneezing indoors with a wet towel over watery, itchy eyes, along with a nose full of snot on the inside and a parched red look on the outside. It made making, and keeping, friends more difficult, especially in my self-conscious teenage years when it was at its worst.
It used to be that people who suffered from hayfever in their youth grew out of it later in life, but with increasing levels of carbon in the atmosphere promoting pollen production in trees, we are now seeing the trend in reverse: people who never had it in their youth are developing it in their thirties and forties.
I tried every product in the pharmacy when I was growing up. Nothing really worked and it felt like most of them just made me drowsy. By eighteen I’d had enough, and went to my doctor to get a steroid injection for relief of the symptoms. He told me that it would work for three years. He was right. Life improved until I was twenty-one, when it came back worse than ever. At that point I resigned myself to buying the tablets again, and basically learning to live with it.
At twenty-eight, when I began to live without money, I no longer had any way of buying anti-histamines, so all of a sudden I was forced to find a new way of dealing with it. That was when a visitor told me about the secretive qualities of broadleaf plantain, a robust and determined weed that you will often find growing up through the cracks of pavements. It’s a natural anti-histamine, and it starts to emerge at the beginning of May, which is precisely the time you want to start taking it. She told me that staying unstressed throughout the summer months, and avoiding dusty or polluted environments, would also help my body respond better to what it considers to be an attack.
It worked. Not entirely, but within weeks it became more like a blocked nose in the morning, and the odd sneeze, rather than something which dominated my life.
Back outside, in the ‘farmacy’, the plantain doesn’t appear to be widespread yet, but I come across a patch here and there, which is enough to get me started. The leaves are still young, so I pick only one leaf from each plant, otherwise I may stunt its ability to photosynthesise and flourish. Patience now will benefit us both in the long run.
I basket about twenty leaves, take them to the fire-hut, and boil up enough water on the rocket stove for a large teapot. While it brews – it needs two hours upwards, ideally – I make myself a cup of chocolate mint picked fresh from the herb garden, lie up against an old willow tree, and watch the world go by. I’ve a lot of things on my mind to do but, for medical reasons, I decide that it’s best to just lie here for a while. The two wood pigeons in the Scots pine in front of me are doing much the same.
A robin comes up close. I recognise him from his breast markings and stout shape. He has eaten worms out of my hand before, and has a character not unlike Packie’s: cheeky. He’s hoping as always for food, but he’s out of luck for now; like any ambitious boss, however, he’s keen for me to get back to work soon. Up above a raptor – is it a hen harrier? Hard to say from here – is loitering with intent. For a creature down below, the world is going to end on this beautiful day.
~
It’s my birthday today. Thirty-eight. I wonder if I’ll have a mid-life crisis soon. Most people probably think I’m already having one.
I’m not one for making a thing about my birthday, or so I tell myself. But even so, I would usually get a feed of well wishes on social media from people who only knew it was my birthday because Facebook sent them an alert (though, strangely, it was still nice to have felt remembered). Family and friends would call or text, all asking me what my plans for the day were, or encouraging me to get drunk. The usual stuff. Mum would phone religiously. I’d reply with things like ‘oh it’s just another day’ or ‘I’m trying to forget them at this stage,’ and other half-truths.
Today I hear from no one, so it’s not hard to forget that it’s just another day.
~
The orchard looks a mess. Disorderly. Wild, even. As every spare moment last year was taken up with building the cabin, it has been almost twelve months since the orchard has been mown. The grass has now matted together, while thick tufts of rush and last year’s dead weed stalks draw the attentive eye away from the usual orchard aesthetics.
I grab my scythe. I probably should sort the situation out, I tell myself, and make the place photogenic again so that when visitors come here it looks something like what they are expecting. The scythe is sharp, and ready to be swung systematically up and down the field. Used well, it can be just as effective as a strimmer. In fact, in the annual scything championships, some of the contestants with the scythe can actually beat the contestant using the strimmer. Used badly, however, it can be a slow, dull pain in the arse. Keeping it keen-edged is key to pleasant, effective, skilful scything. As with many things, if you try taking shortcuts it will take you much longer.
I’ve barely begun when a well-fed frog leaps over the blade, and not a second too early. I bend down to see him better, and it suddenly dawns on me how many more frogs there were here when we first moved in and began acting like we owned the place. Beforehand it had been more or less abandoned by humanity for over five years. The whole thing reminds me of Chernobyl, and how the wildlife there has been faring better from living with the fallout of a nuclear disaster than it was with industrial man.
I drop my scythe, and go exploring instead. There are forget-me-nots in places I’d forgotten. Creeping buttercup – the agriculturalist’s adversary – has
taken over in patches, and in among it I find bees – the agriculturalist’s friend, though the fact may be forgotten – enjoying a food source that hadn’t been available to them a year earlier. I finger my way through a section of matted grass and discover a web of insects I hadn’t, until now, paid the slightest bit of attention to. They seem to be getting on with the old, art of survival. A few metres from the hedgerow I notice that knee-height saplings have burst through the earth’s skin in places where I had been too busy to scythe. In fact, these saplings are everywhere; there must be thirty, forty, fifty around the edges alone. I had planned to organise another round of tree-planting for this coming November, but now there is no need. The land knows what is best for itself much better than I ever will and, better still, it will do the job for free and with no effort from me. According to Peter Wohlleben, a German forester and author of The Hidden Life of Trees, this wilder approach gives the trees that do come up a much greater chance of becoming ancient, too.
Further up the field I notice docks, which I’ve always found unsightly. Modern farmers hate them, but they oxygenate the soil, something which does no harm at all on these heavy, compressed clay lands. Maybe the docks understand something we don’t? I look at the rush. Again, it’s ugly when viewed through eyes that have become accustomed to manicured gardens. Yet I know they give me candle wicks, and once provided thatch for roofs. I’ve no doubt they provide other ecological functions, too, I just don’t understand what they are.
This land I call mine clearly wants to be woodland again. Maybe I should start listening to it better.
The apple trees (Malus domestica) I planted four years ago are back in leaf, and now doing well. They wouldn’t complain if they got a bit more care – what domesticated creature would? – so I put the scythe away, grab the fork and wheelbarrow and make for the compost bay instead. Like all things domesticated by human beings, the grafted apple tree is dependent on us, which means that, as the old ways pass into extinction, it has become dependent on industrialism, the very thing that is now making the climate less hospitable.
~
It’s hard to escape the news. Packie tells me there has been another terrorist attack (I wasn’t aware of the others) in another European city. He couldn’t recall which one. Someone drove a truck into a throng of people, killing many. The world’s gone mad, he says. I nod. The world has certainly gone mad.
One part of me feels like I should keep up-to-date with important global affairs such as this. The other part feels like I would be better off calling in to see if Kathleen needs a hand with anything.
~
There’s a real battle going on up above. A song thrush and a magpie tumble around in the air; the magpie – the original aggressor – is now doing its best to escape, while the song thrush – who was minding its own business – appears hell-bent on ensuring that the message is clear: fuck off, and leave my nest alone. What drama. No police, no courtroom, no victim support. Just life, lived immediately and directly.
The advantage swings. The magpie makes a different call, to which its mate responds by flying in the direction of the nest, near which the battle first begun. There’s an old nursery rhyme about the magpie, which starts ‘One for sorrow, Two for joy’, but it doesn’t hold true for the song thrush. Outnumbered and outflanked, it races off in the same direction and, despite its physical disadvantage, somehow succeeds in chasing the second magpie off too. The nest is safe. For now.
Down below, another song thrush has arrived and, taking three small jumps at a time, scours the soil for worms, insects and other living things that are minding their own business.
In between sky and earth there is man, chasing success, scouring his new asphalted terrain for meaning, driving to the supermarket for milk and cereals, bacon and diesel, convenience and value-for-money, elevated above the savage violence of barbaric creatures like the song thrush and magpie.
~
I hand the postmaster my letters for the week, and he tells me that the price of stamps has just gone up by almost thirty per cent. I do some quick maths. The cost of the twenty or so letters I currently post each month is equivalent to my old mobile phone bill, and roughly half the cost of an internet connection, the prices of which are going in the opposite direction to the stamp. Rumours persist that the postal service is struggling financially, but no one seems to know yet what the upshot of that will be.
On my way out the door, I notice a couple of posters on the noticeboard: one is a fundraiser for a local table tennis Paralympian, another for a trad session in a pub up the road. Must go to those. I overhear a couple of men talking about Brexit and, despite being two farmers living many hundreds of kilometres west of Britain on the Atlantic coast of Ireland, the impact it might have on their livelihoods. They disagree. One says he’d have stayed in the EU, and that he thinks there’s a lot of racism going on, while the other says he ‘couldn’t give a shite’ if it means a few quid less or not, and that he would have pulled out too, given the chance. He’s sick of being ruled by Merkel and bureaucrats who know nothing about life on a small farm in rural Ireland. On that point they do agree, and laugh, and arrange the loan of a trailer later.
~
Eugene offers me a whiskey. The half-light of dusk is fading fast, and I should be making inroads into the 20-kilometre cycle home, but I already know that resistance is futile. Eugene’s a farmer, and he lives next to one of the lakes where I fish. One evening I met him on his bike – a normal push bike fitted with a taxless 49cc engine – and we spent some time talking as he rounded up his cattle. I told him that the next evening I managed to catch a few fish I would drop him in one.
He’s surprised to see me again. Fine fish, he says. Not quite as fine as the one in my pannier, I tell him. As he pours me and a friend a couple of large glasses – doubles? Triples? – he tells me that having ‘the word’ (shorthand, in these parts, for doing what you say you’ll do) has become an endangered trait, and that he hadn’t expected me to actually drop one in.
We get talking. Shaking his head, he tells us that he would love to go fishing in the evenings himself, but that he works every spare minute God sends. Most of his income goes towards paying off loans he took out for all the farm machinery he invested in. Without the machinery, he says, he can no longer compete, such is the nature of farming today. His grandfather, also a farmer, was a keen fisherman, however, and loved nothing more than to go out on Lough Derg.
We have a parting glass, and he walks us down his drive. We pass his new digger, and I think about the spade I bought for €5 at a car boot sale. It has a wooden handle, is at least twenty years old, and has a fine edge on it.
~
It was 1999, and I had just spent seven months working on the assembly line of a pharmaceutical factory. The repetitious nature of the job gave me much time to think, yet I was no closer to figuring out what I wanted to do with my life. My old friends were all planning to go out to New York for the summer, to work and play football, so for the want of a better idea I decided to do the same.
The first thing you notice about New York is that everything is for sale. The place is the economic theory of division of labour taken to its logical conclusion. As a labourer renovating pubs at night, I usually worked six days a week – often seven – and sometimes found myself doing twenty-four hours in one shift. Being illegal and skint, I had no other option. Not that being a US citizen necessarily makes life any easier in New York. Many citizens only get two weeks’ holiday per year. It’s a money-rich, time-poor city, the upshot of which is that most people do their week’s work and then pay for everything else with their earnings. I mean everything.
I can’t remember once cooking in all of my time there. I was usually too tired. When I ordered pizza over the phone I could ask the delivery guy to pick me up toilet roll or toothpaste on his way. As long as I tipped well enough, it was never a problem. If necessity dictated that I use my own legs, by the time I’d made it to the closest grocery store I co
uld have bought drugs, souvenirs, cleaning services, sex, a manicure and about ten different types of fast food. The shop was only 50 metres away from our flat.
Things in New York went badly, quickly. My first job was the worst I’ve ever had. It was an Italian crew, and they hated the Irish, who had historically competed with them for the same shit jobs. We still do. Sometimes they would throw things – chairs, tools, bars – at me and the other ‘micks’, allow us virtually no breaks, and regularly warned us that they were going to pop a few caps in our asses. It was like being in a poorly produced Mafia movie. It wasn’t pleasant, but I personally didn’t find their attitudes towards us racist. It was simply economic.
To add insult to injury, as I went to get off a busy train after my first week’s work, I realised that my bag had been stolen, seemingly from right under my legs as I dozed. I felt like a fool. Everything I owned was in it – all of my clothes, my first week’s pay, my passport, my camera, and the number of a girl I had met the night before. All I had left were the work clothes on my back. The friends I had come over with loaned me some clothes and cash, and we went to an Irish bar in the Bronx where your accent was still as good as any ID.
I hated New York, and I was beginning to hate cities. I had no idea what I was even doing there. I wanted to do something that had meaning to it. But what? And what did meaning even mean?
After a summer in New York I left as skint as I had arrived. I decided to go home, finish my degree, get my head down, and take it from there. What I did know was that New York’s money-rich, time-poor way of life was not for me, and for that lesson alone I was grateful.
~
I miss Liam Clancy. I miss Joni Mitchell and Luke Kelly and Pearl Jam. I miss hearing Ewan MacColl singing about ‘The Joy of Living’.
There’s something strange and unbalanced about missing people who you’ve never even seen alive and in the flesh, people who don’t know you exist, or care for that matter. I ‘got to know’ these people through audio and video recordings, but know nothing of what they are – or were – like as people. Many of the musicians I grew up listening to are dead, preserved for posterity by the magic of electricity, through which people continue to enjoy them as if they had never died. The moment I decided to reject the immortalising world of television, radio and the World Wide Web, their voices and music suddenly followed them to the grave, as far as I was concerned. It was if they all died on the same day. It can be a sad thought, whenever I think about it.