The Way Home

by Mark Boyle

  As we enter the pub, everyone comes over to ask if she’ll do some dancing. The hula-hoop is still a great novelty in these parts. Everyone around here loves her, as people do anyone who is doing what they love. As she dances the steps to ‘Cooley’s Reel’ and ‘Drowsy Maggie’ she is reborn and rejuvenated.

  I know I need to make more time for this, and for her. I tell myself I’ve been busy, but it’s more a case of getting my priorities wrong. Again. I know this now, and I hope I haven’t left it too late.

  ~

  A friend of mine, who runs an organic farm nearby, calls over with 22 kilogrammes of blackcurrants in a couple of crates. He tells us that he planted lots of blackcurrants years ago, but because people have stopped making jam and other preserves, he no longer has a market for the produce.

  We’re only too happy to take them. A quick calculation tells me that they’ll make 75 litres of wine and twenty jars of jam, with enough left over for breakfast for the next week. There’s a day and a half’s work in it, but that should keep everyone in booze and jam for the winter coming, and we still have blackberries and raspberries to come.

  I offer to buy the currants from him – I know only too well the amount of work involved – but he won’t hear of it, and so we settle on as much wine as he likes, instead.

  ~

  A neighbour of mine asks me if I’ll put the credit he has just bought at the post office on his phone. He says he has forgotten his reading glasses, but I know that he can’t read. He told me so one night after a few drinks. It’s funny how, in these times, we’re embarrassed by any lack of intellectual skills, yet we seem perfectly fine with our insufficiency in the most basic of life skills, such as feeding and housing ourselves. The same neighbour knows things about horses that I will never know.

  It’s no time for ideology, so I take the phone from him. For the first time in nine months I tap numbers into his phone, which allows me to tap in some other numbers from the voucher which he bought with a bunch of other numbers. The computer-generated ‘voice’ tells me he’s all topped up. He can now, almost instantly, talk to people on the other end of the world, and do many other things I’m no longer able to do.

  ~

  The gooseberries are out, and almost ready for picking – but not quite. Timing is everything. Too early and they are too bitter and small. Too late and the birds will have them all before you even know about it. When I lived without money I emerged from my caravan one morning to see thirteen grey squirrels gathering walnuts in the nuttery. Before that I had only ever seen one at a time. They had known exactly when to come, and they had got there just before me. In nature those who thrive are those most in tune with their landscape, those most alive to the rhythm and pulse of life. It is not so much survival of the fittest as survival of those that fit in.

  I pick the gooseberries at dawn, most of which will be for breakfast. The birds have already had the first of them. I take what I need for now, and leave the rest to ripen for myself and the birds, whose ways and song are sustenance for the soul. As I sit and jot down these words in the garden, a blackbird forages from what I have left behind.

  ~

  The pencil is in my hand. I remember holding it, back in January, and thinking, ‘This is fucking impossible.’ I had just spent three weeks attempting to write without the aid of copy-and-paste, delete, spell-check, the World Wide Web and all of the research and editing tools that a flat, rectangular piece of plastic once afforded me. Before, writing had been relatively easy; I would blurt out my thoughts onto a screen, which I would then make sense of using Microsoft Word. Quitting computers and the internet, however, made it clear to me that, for all of my adult life, I had been a cyborg-writer, the words on my pages the result of something part man, part machine. My previous books would certainly have been a lot different, for better or for worse, if I hadn’t used a computer to write them. Actually, they probably wouldn’t have been written at all.

  In the heart of winter I noticed myself scrunching up piece of paper after piece of paper, each one containing too many errors of grammar, type or judgement, or needing more editing than one sliver of wood pulp could endure from a rubber. I had been getting accurate at throwing these balls of paper into the wood basket, and I consoled myself that at least my day’s work was useful for starting the following day’s fire. The pads of paper I used were cheap – much too cheap. If I’d had to make my own paper, like my friend Fergus Drennan did for The Foraged Book Project, there was no way I could have been so extravagantly wasteful with it. My plan had long been to start making my own mushroom paper, but I knew I needed to relearn how to write first, otherwise making paper would become a full-time job in itself.

  By April, there were some signs of progress and hope. Writing was still bloody challenging. But impossible? I wasn’t so sure any more.

  It’s now July, and I’m halfway through this book. For the first time in my life I’m actually enjoying the process of writing. My head no longer hurts at the end of a long day. I find myself staring into the orchard for prolonged periods before I even put pen to paper, but when I finally act I can write fifteen hundred words without stopping. My thinking has got slower. Just as carpenters always recommend measuring twice and cutting once, I’ve begun thinking twice and writing once.

  What comes out may be as stupid and shoddy and humanly imperfect as ever, but at least they’re my own thoughts in my own order. As the way we live and think is shaped by the technologies we use, writing without the aid of computers feels important to me. For as Sydney J. Harris once said, ‘the real danger is not that computers will begin to think like men, but that men will begin to think like computers.’

  ~

  While the rest of Knockmoyle is sleeping restfully, the irrepressible JP and I are at large. He’s working away two fields up from where I’m collecting horse shit for our vegetable garden. I throw him a wave, and before I know it he’s in the field next to me. He tells me that he was meant to be on the road half an hour ago, but he doesn’t seem the slightest bit bothered about it. As well as being a farmer, JP is also a carpenter and a general builder, and like everyone else around here he uses his skills to supplement his farming.

  Before he goes off to work on his daughter’s new house, he tells me some of the latest news. The banks, he says, have given out twenty thousand mortgages, despite there only being ten thousand houses on the market. He says it’s all going to go ‘cracked crazy mad’ at some point again. Taréis a tuigtear gach beart.

  In the same breath he adds that the US government has decided to reduce its corporation tax rate and that, because the big American technology companies are mostly only in the country for its ‘competitive’ tax rates, our politicians are falling over themselves to find ways of keeping the likes of Facebook, Google and Apple from leaving Ireland and going back to where they came from. We shed blood and countless tears to win our political independence, it seems, only to give away our economic independence – our self-reliance as a people – without so much as a murmur. He says that we’ve always been influenced by America, and that its sway over us is only getting stronger.

  As he is walking away, he tells me that when he was a young man he heard rumours that Americans had nursing homes where people would put their elderly parents while they tried to get ahead, stay ahead or simply stay afloat. He says he remembers thinking, at the time, ‘Isn’t that a terrible country that would do that to its old people?’ And look at us now, he says.

  See you later, Mark, isn’t it a great morning to be alive and have your health. And with that he is gone, and I go back to picking up fresh shit from the field.

  ~

  Science is a lot like my father. When I was growing up he would be forever taking apart things that were already working fine, more out of curiosity than anything else. He could then tell you how everything worked. It was interesting. Unless you were my mother. It would drive her mad. More often than not, whenever Dad went to put the radio or telephone he had been t
inkering with back together, he would realise that he had lost a few components, sometimes important ones that weren’t easy to replace. For a while, he would claim that it didn’t need that part anyway, until it would find its way onto a shelf in the shed, no longer able to work.

  ~

  Almost-empty glasses dot the round, wooden tables of the sibín, and signs of a good night linger everywhere – guitars, mandolins, banjos, fiddles, tin whistles and bodhráns are strewn across the bar and chairs, embers are still glowing in the fire, and the smell of stale homebrew fills the air.

  I pour the bilge water from the glasses into a bucket and make for the vegetable garden, where I decant it into small bowls, each of which has now become a slug trap. Like most of those waking up in the hostel, slugs suffer from a fondness for beer; but while excess has certainly ruined many a good person or family, one drink can prove fatal to slugs.

  The next morning I examine the bowls. Carnage. There’s six in one bowl, four in another, two in the next, and on and on. It’s highly effective. Too effective for my liking. My civilised mind kicks in and I start to question the ethics of it all. On one hand, I have to eat, and slugs are only too proficient at finding precisely the plants that I’ve developed a taste for. On the other hand, I’m knowingly drowning – albeit in beer – other sentient creatures for the crime of enjoying those greens which, by way of having planted them, I consider mine. I’m not sure what exactly, but something about it doesn’t sit right with me.

  I pick each slug out of the beer bowls and leave them to dry out on the wooden frame of the raised bed. For a moment I consider eating them, but when I go back to where I left them they’re gone. Either they’ve woken up with a frightening hangover, and have gone to hide somewhere dark, or there’s a couple of wild creatures trying to get merry in the hedgerow.

  ~

  It wasn’t exactly every schoolboy’s dream job – do schoolboys dream about any job? – yet I found a strange sense of purpose the moment I started working for a small, independent organic food company in Edinburgh around 2002. Unlike my previous supermarket job, the people who worked there were passionate about selling real food that was good for people, booze that was fairly traded and, like me at the time, the shop was entirely vegetarian. And, though my perspective would change quite dramatically five years later, at that moment I felt I was part of something bigger than myself, something that mattered.

  The enthusiasm of the people who worked there quickly rubbed off on me. I was working almost as hard as I had in New York, but I was learning a lot; less about myself and more about the political world around me. Part of my job was to build relationships with local, organic producers of food and drink. I found myself learning more from them about economics than I did in four years of a business degree. Every day I would hear a little about what they did for a living, and why they did it, along with some of their stories and the difficulties they encountered in a world going in the opposite direction. I found myself admiring their belief, their patience, their tenacity to do it anyway.

  Beekeepers would teach me about the fundamental importance of pollinators, the uses of beeswax and impact of neonicotinoids on honeybee colonies. I would learn from salad growers how pesticides and chemical fertilisers were polluting the soil and eroding biodiversity, making rivers and streams undrinkable for people and uninhabitable for aquatic species. Local chicken farmers, operating on a small scale, would tell me about the conditions that factory-farmed – and even so-called free range – hens would have to live in. Before I knew it I was reading books by Noam Chomsky, Naomi Klein, Jared Diamond and Vandana Shiva. Work was no longer just work, it felt like a political act.

  Through working all the hours God sent, I managed to pay off the student debts I had acquired despite having worked every hour God sent in the little corner shop in Galway. But after two years living in Edinburgh, I still didn’t feel at home. It was clearly an affluent city – manicured, controlled, sanitised – and yet homelessness was rife. I was becoming increasingly drawn towards activism – something, anything – but I couldn’t find any movements for change there. As long as wages are high, desire for change is low.

  Together with my first love, a Finnish girl called Mari, I decided to move to Bristol, where I was told that all of the action happened. We got ourselves a second-storey flat directly opposite a busy motorway on stilts, under which we would see prostitutes give blow-jobs to drunk men early on Sunday mornings. The noise was relentless and I would often worry about Mari if she was out at night alone.

  Two weeks after landing in Bristol I went for a part-time job with another organic food company which had a supermarket, café, box scheme and walled garden. I wasn’t impressed by the place on first sight, or how it was run, and I didn’t hold back in telling the owner so in the interview. I left assuming I would neither get nor take the job. Five minutes later I got a call from the owner, asking me if I wanted to manage the company instead. Surprisingly excited by the challenge, I said yes.

  Within a year, and with a lot of graft and risk, we managed to turn the place around. I was a hard boss, driven by the fact that I knew that good people – growers, beekeepers et al. – were struggling, and I didn’t want to see them struggle so much any more. It was my job to make sure local people bought the food these producers made and not something that was abused, somewhere on the other side of the world, by some faceless corporation. But one day I walked out of the office, down one of the aisles, and suddenly found myself frozen still. All I could see was wall-to-wall plastic. Cacao nibs in plastic packets, vitamin pills in plastic tubs, water in plastic bottles. Bananas from the Dominican Republic, sweet potatoes from Israel, mangoes from somewhere else not very near. For three years I had been ranting and raving about sustainability, but it only hit me there and then that even this organic industry was five thousand miles from being sustainable. And even if it was possible, why would I want to sustain a plastic culture anyway? It wasn’t even sustainable for me. I was working over sixty hours a week (and pushing our own staff too hard) for a company that supported fair trade for African farmers and opposed sweatshop labour in south-east Asia. Because of the pressure to grow the business and its effect on my own personal time, Mari and I eventually broke up.

  Disillusioned with what I considered to be the ‘green-lite’ world of organics, I quit my job and took time out on a houseboat I had just bought on Bristol Harbour. It was the first time since finishing my degree that I had a chance to think clearly, to reflect and, when no one was around, to cry. I realised I had been keeping myself busy so that I wouldn’t have to think about all of the things my culture and I were doing to faraway, out-of-sight out-of-mind places, and the people and creatures that inhabited them. I felt my own complicity in it all, and my own impotence to do anything meaningful about it.

  Confused, upset and riddled with Western guilt, I decided to do something completely different, something ridiculous, something that would alter the course of my life in ways I could never have predicted.

  ~

  I’m in the city, to meet an old friend down by the quay, and find myself in a chain bar. The sign on the front door tells me that the toilets are for customer use only, but considering there isn’t a tree in the whole city centre under which I could piss without the likelihood of arrest, I decide to honour the spirit of my forebears and completely ignore it.

  Above the urinal, no more than a foot from my face, there’s an advert. Under a certain kind of logic every blank space is a missed opportunity, and so such innovations are considered astute. This particular advert is for a range of flatulence filtering underwear. I double-check it to make sure it’s not a satirical piece of art or subvertisement.

  No, it’s not, it’s a genuine product.

  ~

  Packie tells me that today is the hottest day ever recorded in Ireland. Tomorrow is going to be the hottest day since today. Thirty-three degrees. Knockmoyle has been hotter than Lisbon and Los Angeles over the last week.


  I awake naturally, at day-peep, to go fishing on Lough Derg. Pike go deep into cooler waters when things get hot, and so if you want to eat in this weather, necessity dictates you get up early. Ireland is still asleep, and so during the 20 kilometre cycle there I don’t encounter a single car. That’s fine by me. The sky turns pink, then orange, then blue over the course of the journey, and it is in moments like this I understand the meaning of life.

  After a couple of hours, Eugene appears down at the pier, pumping water from the lake into a tank on the back of his tractor. I ask him how he’s enjoying the weather. It’s killing him, he says. There’s been barely a drop of rain for six weeks. No rain means no grass, no grass means no feed for dairy cows, no feed means no money for Eugene. This at a time when small farmers are already struggling with supermarket prices and ruthless competition. The barley growers are in big trouble, too. In Dublin they are issuing fines for anyone caught washing their car or watering their lawns. Drought in Ireland. Strange times indeed. My spring, I’m told, hasn’t dried up in living memory. I hope that’s not the next record to be broken this year.

  I catch one rudd. It’s small, smaller than I’d normally kill, but I’m hungry so I pay my respects and eat it raw. I have a wash and swim in the lake, and dry myself by the water’s edge with no one else around.

  ~

  On the sawhorse, I saw a log into 60-centimetre lengths using the crosscut. It’s a tool quiet enough to fit Wendell Berry’s definition of a technology appropriate for the task at hand: ‘Will this disturb the sleep of a woman near to giving birth?’ As I saw I think of Aldo Leopold’s essay ‘Good Oak’. In it he narrates the ecological history of Wisconsin, the state where he has a small farm, as he draws his own crosscut through an oak tree felled by a bolt of lightning, the saw ‘biting its way, stroke by stroke, decade by decade, into the chronology of a lifetime, written in concentric annual rings’.