Changing generations

I also saw another neighbour – we’ll call her Ava -- who rides her bike back and forth to the village, rather than pay for a car. We can see each other’s houses in the distance but our paths only cross every few weeks, so when they do we catch up on our lives and relatives.

“It’s amazing the number of people around here who have died lately,” Ava said. “Mick went into the canal last year, Tommy up the road died of cancer, my cousin across the canal died last month, and his wife died a few weeks later – they’d spent their lives together, and she didn’t want to live without him.”

“I knew your man died,” I said – locals say “your man” to mean “the man.” “I didn’t know he was your cousin – I’m sorry.” It wasn’t that much of a surprise to me, though – everyone here is related.

“You’re seeing the closing days of this area,” she said. “All the people are dying off, and they are the last ones who remember the place as it was.”

It was true – a lot of people had died lately. It reminded me of something Dmitri Orlov had said, that after his country had been through a time of stress he looked at his high school class photo, and realised that many of them were dead. Each death was isolated and natural, and didn’t seem part of a larger pattern. But you look back one day and see that a whole generation was gone.

Of course, in his case, his country had been through a time of collapse, and many of the deaths were from stress, drinking, drugs or other problems. Across my part of the USA, I can see this happening among the class that one writer calls the Unneccessariat, as people are increasingly demoralised. Here, it’s not quite the same – most of our neighbours were elderly, and it was their time. But the death and transformation of a community still creeps up on you.

“Won’t their children or grandchildren move in?” I asked. “That’s what most people here do.” All along the canal, family farms have been broken into lots, with a home for each of the children.

“It won’t be the same with the younger people,” she said. “The whole country’s changed. When I was a child, no one had anything here, and you wouldn’t believe how happy people were. But since the boom, people have actually been poorer than before, and a lot less happy.”

“Most people wouldn’t say they were poorer,” I asked. “Back then they just had a few possessions, and now they have big televisions and video games and such.”

“I think that’s what’s making them unhappy,” she said.

Going native

My neighbour's car -- he keeps them spotless in his barn, next to the cows.

Between our house and the nearby village lies three kilometres of canal, mostly on one single-lane country road. I don’t mean one lane each way; I mean one lane, with no shoulders and sharply bounded on either side. On one side a steep drop sends your car straight into the 300-year-old canal, and crosses along the canal attest to the memory of neighbours who plunged in over the years.

On the other side the road is walled in by a dense hedgerow, enclosing the cows and sheep that graze the bog-lands. Between them the road is only slightly wider than one car, so when one car meets another coming toward it, someone has to back off into the nearest driveway.

Locals know the etiquette – the westward-travelling car pulls over, usually flashing their lights at night, and then the cars pass each other. It seems a cumbersome way to drive to town, with people having to get out of each other’s way occasionally, but it also means that the road takes up no more space than it needs to. It’s no wider than an American supermarket aisle, and when I return to my country and see American roads – at least two lanes across, with a lane-sized shoulder on each side – they look like vast rivers of asphalt taking up valuable growing space.

***

I jog along this road when I can, and it gives me a chance to stop and see neighbours. This morning I met a local farmer – we’ll call him Liam – who raises cows down the road.

“How you keeping, Liam?” I said in the local way, stopping on the road and facing him across the hedgerow. After living here a short time I picked up the local turns of phrase, and they are so natural now that when I visit my family back in the USA I get strange looks.  

“Keeping well,” he said, “but the days have been soft.” He means that it’s rained a lot, which is true – we live in the Bog of Allen, and after a week of rain the cows are covered in mud and the fields have become archipelagos of grass in the middle of rippling puddles.

“It’s desperate, hasn’t it?” I agreed. “I’m just jogging during the pause in the rain, but those clouds might send me home again. What brings you out here?”

“I have a calf that keeps escaping,” he said. “I border my fields with hedgerows, dikes and barbed wire, and he gets out anyway.” By “dike,” by the way, locals don’t mean a wall to keep out water, but rather the opposite – a culvert or ditch for water to drain away, and to stop animals from crossing.

“He comes into this field – the neighbour’s field, where he shouldn’t be – and leaves no tracks in the mud,” Liam said, shaking his head. “He must be tunnelling somewhere.”

 “I heard a farmer say that he had barbed wire and a dike, and his sheep still got out,” I told him. “But there was a point where the ground dipped a bit, and the sheep snuck under the barbed wire, and rolled their bodies across the dike …”

“So they don’t leave any tracks,” Liam finished. “Clever.”

“They’re not rocket scientists, sheep, but even they can surprise you,” I said.

“They can be smarter than we realise,” Liam said. “Just about the things that are important to them.”

Locals have been grazing sheep on the Curragh commons supposedly since Roman times.