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.

Trees on the edge

Our front hedgerow – its trees so far apart and untidy that it could almost be called a grove – has gotten tangled in the phone wires, and when the winds whip across the bog-lands as they did last week I hear them creaking loudly, pulling the wires alarmingly to and fro. Last week’s storm pulled down one of our trees already, and I’m expecting the overhead wires to go any day now.

It’s not safe for me to trim them myself, so I called some tree surgeons I know, but the trees are on the border of our land, next to the road along the canal – so they said the phone company had to do it. The phone company, in turn, said it was the responsibility of Irish waterways, who said it was the responsibility of the county, and so on.

I often talk about the kind of close-knit communities that have disappeared across most of the modern world and are fading even here. One disadvantage to them, though, is that people tend to look out for those people they know, and prioritise everyone else last. Also, Ireland only recently went from being a slow and agrarian country to being a modern globalised nation, and many civil servants still behave as though they still live in that slow country. Thus, I’ve spent months making calls to various people, finding that delicate balance between building a relationship with the people there and having them file a harassment order against me.

Finally the council said they would do it, to my great appreciation. They can’t tell me exactly when they will do so, and I wonder what it will look like when they’re done, whether they will simply trim a bit from the top or raze the front of our property like a tornado ripping off tree trunks.

Whatever they do, however, it will probably help me in my ongoing struggle to turn this untidy clump of trees into a proper hedgerow. In the past I’ve planted willow saplings in the gaps, lain rotting planks underneath to feed the soil and keep down weeds, and have cut and folded saplings to repair the hedge and make it whole again. 

If it sounds like I’m talking about repairing a hedgerow as one would repair a wall or tractor, that’s because the principles are similar, except that the hedgerow is a living thing – patches grow out of control or die off if not maintained, and it must be repaired a bit at a time over years. By hedgerow, I don’t mean the decorative evergreen sculptures I see in front of modern businesses, often a monoculture of invasive species. I mean lines of densely-planted trees – fast-growing breeds like willow, elder, hazel, birch, chestnut, pine, hawthorn, blackthorn and rowan – cut, folded and woven together into a wall of greenery.

The principle of a hedgerow is simple, but hedge-laying was an art form in traditional Ireland and England. Every year farmers would take a few days out to maintain their hundreds of metres of hedge, re-weaving or pruning the new growth, and each area had its own style and tricks. Ireland has hedge-laying associations, contests and awards, and some farmers take pride in maintaining the same hedges that have existed for decades or centuries.

Typically the hedge-layer takes each upward-pointing sapling, holds it at whatever height he wants the hedge to be, and cuts diagonally downward through the wood – but only partway. He then lays everything above the cut down horizontally, often weaving it through the other saplings and beating the woven branches down with a club until they were densely matted. A bit of bark and wood still connects the top and bottom of the tree, so the top remains alive and growing even as it lies flat amid many other branches. In this way, the weave itself gets thicker over time, until it is an impenetrable barrier of living wood.

They add variety to fields that would otherwise go sterile. Each plant adds its own chemicals and removes its own nutrients from the soil, so fields of monoculture need to be continually fertilised. Single crops provide our bodies, too, with a single set of nutrients, and only at certain times of year. They also encourage a glut of certain animals, like pests that eat our crops, and offer no homes to the birds and insectivores who would eat the pests.

Hedgerows, however, give your garden a third dimension, a vertical salad bar that middle-aged and elderly can reach with a minimum of back pain. Unlike field crops, it provides for much of the year; hawthorn shoots for salads in March, linden leaves in April, elderflowers in June, rose hips in August, blackberries in September and sloes in October.

Whatever kind of job they do on our trees, I’ll get home from work that night and look at the remains – and start trimming and weaving the rest into a vertical garden, planting the things that will help feed my family when they are older, and pulling and pushing the rest into a solid wall for security and privacy. When I see it, I’ll have my hedge-laying schedule for years to come laid in front of me. 

The Land in February

Sunset in winter. You can see the row of stumps in the foreground.

We’re seeing an unseasonably warm winter here in Ireland, with the temperature in the double-digits in February (Centigrade, of course – 10 degrees Centigrade is about 50 degrees Fahrenheit), and the days have been unusually dry until last week, when we got what locals call “soft days” of drizzle and mud.

I stopped by to visit my neighbour Seamus, now 86 years old and still tending a half-acre or so of vegetables. He grew up here in the bog, in the shadow of the Hill of Allen, worked for years cutting turf – the millennia-old compacted peat moss that the Irish use for fuel – and retired to a home a kilometre or so from where he was born. He can tell me which plants do well next to each other, what time of day the cows graze in different fields and why, and what kind of seasonal weather brings out the best flavours in his fruits – the kind of intimate land-knowledge that all humans once had, and only a few do anymore. He used to know the weather better, he says, but it feels different than it used to.

He gave me several cuttings from his gooseberry bushes, and this weekend I’ll be building new beds for them down at the back of our property. It was there that we had rows of lilandia trees that blocked the low winter sun, and a few years ago we cut them all down – it means we get more of the fierce winds that whip across the bog-lands here, but I’m happy with the exchange.

The cows gather to watch hungrily when I or The Girl mow the lawn.

On the other hand, our neighbour’s cows now have only a barbed-wire fence blocking their passage to our garden, so I’ve been planting something more substantial that will keep growing after the fence has rusted. We cut unwanted sapIings from our garden and wrapped them between the trunks to make a wattle-fence, and I’ve been building garden beds along the lilandia stumps and planting Seamus’ gooseberry bushes, whose thorns should discourage the cows.

We also planted the apple trees we grafted, and I’ll be uprooting our logan-berry vines and wrapping them around the stumps. The apple trees should block the upper deck and the thorn-bushes the understory, leaving a wall of vegetation that will reduce the wind yet not block the sun. The only gap in this wall will be taken up by the bee-hive, and if the cows want to try to get through that, the bees will have something to say about it.

The days are getting longer again, and our garden remains only half-built; we tore it all down last year, as the planks had rotted through, and we arranged to rebuild the entire thing in brick. It’s a slow process, though, and while we completed one of the beds and have been using its bounty through the winter, the other beds lie fallow; I’ve been removing the weeds and covering them in cardboard to see that we don’t spend all our time weeding in summers to come.

I spent the weekend pulling blackberry brambles from the crannies of the land; they grow profusely here, their fruits consumed voraciously by birds in the autumn and their seeds spread across the fields. They are also quite aggressive plants, worming through bushes and hedgerows, wrapping their vines around trees, climbing to the light or descending back to earth, where they turn into root systems for new plants. Worst of all, they hide among the lush greenery of Irish summers, unseen until their hooks have ripped your clothes or flesh.

Thus, in the winter, when the knee-deep tangle of other plants have died away or shrivelled to brown threads, I scour our acreage and pick out every new bramble-vine I find. This is also a good time to yank weeds around the property, gather up unused and rotting lumber, and burn wood, weeds and thorns alike on a bonfire.

I don’t destroy everything people consider weeds; indeed, many of them I look forward to, and want to collect while we can. Dandelion leaves are great in salad, their flower-heads make wine or – dipped in batter and fried – make fritters. Nettles taste great as a vegetable, can be made into wine or dried for tea. The blue-green leaves of Fat Hen make a great addition to a salad, as do the dark green leaves of the Jack-by-the-Hedge. Finally, cowslips and oxlips make the best wine I’ve ever tasted, and will be emerging soon.

The best gardens grow in three dimensions, not just fields and beds but hedgerows and woods. We have a small copse of trees in the back of our property, and while it is no bigger than an average back garden, it has room for hazel trees that produce nuts this time of year. Some people plant blueberries and other shade-loving plants under the hazels, so they too can produce food, and under that sorrel, radishes and other ground crops– multiple levels of crops going upwards.

In preparation for planting I’ve been turning over our compost, laying newspaper and cardboard over our beds to keep the weeds out and securing it with planks of wood. Some people put newspaper or cardboard over their garden during the growing season, poking holes for the seedlings while keeping the weeds down.

Here, the Bog is only the Bog on a rainy day. The rest of the time it's forest.

We’re about to get the first buds, and that includes many edibles – hawthorn shoots are great as a salad, bramble shoots make a good tangy tea (use plenty of them), and cowslips and primroses are tasty raw and make a good wine. The first rhubarb is coming in, offering an infusion of flavours and vitamins after the long darkness of the Mother Night. Now the mornings and evenings are seeing a bit of twilight again, and it’s like exhaling after the winter – but it also means there’s no time to lose.

The changing face of college

Most of my readers know that I count John Michael Greer, author of "The Archdruid Report" and many books, as one of my main influences, and I often comment on his posts. Some time ago he wrote about the changing face of college in the Western World -- especially the USA, and I added my own thoughts. 

College, he pointed out, has evolved from being an advanced institution for elite specialists to a prerequisite for a good job, and a massive machine for keeping young Americans indebted through their best years. I commented: 

This was before my time, but when I read accounts of college in the late 19th to the late 20th century, a few things stand out:

1. Massachusetts in 1850 was estimated to have a 98% literacy rate, and you could probably find similar rates for most of what is now the USA – far higher than the USA’s literacy today.

2. At the same time, people took for granted that college was not for most people. Clarence Hall Robison’s “Agricultural Instruction in the Public Schools of the United States,” published in 1911, wrote that public schools “have a duty to the majority of its students who will not go to college.” They didn’t mean that students would miss out on college because they were poor – although there was some of that – but that most would become normal farmers, printers, builders, carpenters, and so on. Being a professor isn’t everyone’s speciality in life, and they knew that.

3. College sports involved students showing up to support their fellow students, not millions going into a money-making machine of television contracts, bidding, scholarships and sponsorships. Look at a picture of fans at a sports game circa, say, 1950, and you’ll see no screaming or painted faces, no obese people, no beer-cap cans – just rows of healthy-looking teenagers in suits and ties. It was a social, formal event, like a dance, and people dressed up for the occasion.

4. Most students took courses to specialise in their field, but then, in their final year, took a “capstone” course, taught by the dean or some venerated professor, to tie together everything they had learned. The idea was to bring the disparate strands of education together into a common cause, as they would all be members of the same society.

5. By the time I got to college in the 1990s, of course, some courses existed solely to teach grade-school-level remedial reading, and the fashion was for literature and film teachers to ignore things like plot and characters and focus instead on the lurid sexual subtext they imagined to be there. It was all very postmodern and useless.

Photo: 1943-44 Michigan Wolverines basketball team.

Taking part

Not many of my readers here will be able to see it, but I'll be on Irish television Friday to talk about the state of US politics. If you're in Ireland, feel free to look me up around 4 pm Dublin time.

***

Every morning I journey to the nearest village and wait for the bus to bring me to work in Dublin– usually in rainy darkness this time of year – and chat with my neighbours doing the same. A flimsy shelter of two plastic walls and an awning provides the only protection from blasts of wind and cold rain; when the county took it down for a few months of road repair, we felt its absence each morning.  

Unfortunately, teenagers with too little supervision and too few manners have etched words in the plastic that I used to shield from my daughter, before she became a jaded teen herself. Also, a single Irish winter can coat anything with layers of grime and algae – by spring most road signs are illegible.  So I was pleased to come out of Mass the other day and find some neighbours I knew busy scrubbing the shelter clean.

“That’s good of you, Bridget,” I said – she works at the village shop and is grandmother to two of my daughter’s school-mates, so we know each other well. I hadn’t realised, though, that she spent her weekends cleaning up the town.  

“Ah, we’re only after doing this once in a while,” Bridget said, as cars moved down the road in one direction and horses clopped down the other. “Youngsters can scratch it up faster than we can fix it. Other days we walk the roads picking up rubbish.”

I told them people dump rubbish on the side of the road along the canal where we live, and my daughter and I go pick it up sometimes. I gather that many rural Irish used to throw their rubbish away in hedgerows, which was fine when it was broken stones or cinders – but once the age of plastic arrived, the rubbish never disappeared.

“Sure you’re very good,” she said, sounding pleased. She handed me one of those hand-held devices that allow you to pick up trash without stooping over. “Here – take this,” she said. “You’re part of the clean-up crew now.”

I feel like I’ve been deputised, I said.  

“Well, if you’re going to do it anyway, you might as well be part of something,” she said. I couldn’t argue.

A difficult year, part 2

This probably should have been Part 1.

Many of my acquaintances declare this to be “the worst year ever,” which seems a bit melodramatic to me – I might have picked, I don’t know, 1940 or 1666 or 1348 or any number of other possibilities. Nonetheless, I understand that a lot of friends of mine in the USA, UK and Ireland have all seen particularly contentious political debates, Europe continues to see a flood of refugees from the Middle East, and the Middle East … their tragedies dwarf anything we have seen in generations.

Interestingly, though, few people I know mention Syria, or the shrinking Arctic ice, or the increasingly dubious quality of tap water in US towns, or all the other things that affect their lives. What they usually name are celebrities – singers and actors – who died this year, from Prince to Alan Rickman to Carrie Fisher. And they don’t just feel disappointed, they feel betrayed.

With no disrespect to their genuine grief, I keep in mind that these celebrities were not people who spent their lives feeding Third-World orphans or facing down authoritarian death squads. They were show-business performers who made it big – at best, nice people who used their fame and wealth generously. I know no one who knew them personally, yet I know many people who mourned them as though they were family.

 A few reasons for this stand out. Most modern people have their first crushes and obsessions for celebrities who were famous when they were teenagers, say, 10 to 20. Since most of those teen idols will be a decade or two older than their fans, and many actors and singers have a decade or so at their peak, modern people go through life idolising people two to three decades older than themselves.

 People who were famous outside that generational window don't bother us when they die. Most people my age were hit hard by the death of Carrie Fisher or George Michael, but not by Maureen O'Hara or Stan Freberg last year, as people my age were not likely to know or care who those people were. Likewise, most of my daughter’s teenaged peers wouldn't know who Carrie Fisher or George Michael are, so those deaths wouldn't affect them.

In other words, I told people my age, we're getting to the middle-aged window when celebrity deaths tend to hit us. It’s a normal part of a cycle, and not an unprecedented catastrophe – but most of my peers had never experienced this, as they’ve never been this age before.

Another factor in our common grief is that these days, popular singers and actors fill our media screens, talk to us out of our televisions and phones, and we hear their songs and words on grocery-store loudspeakers. A modern Westerner might hear George Michael several times a day, but their grandmother a few times a year. Thus, celebrities become far more familiar than cousins or neighbours, and we feel their loss.

Celebrity deaths seems like a minor issue compared to so many others in the world, but I think it helps illuminate why other world events caused people such grief this year. Take the US election; whatever you think of Mr. Trump, we’ve had far worse elections than this, just outside of the tiny window of pop-culture memory. Yet most of my peers have never experienced a more contentious election, so this one seems like The Worst in Human History.

In the same way, our modern media spends an inordinate amount of time talking about one office (president) in one branch (executive) of one level of government (federal) in one country (USA). So many news stories focus on the individual in that one office that we see them more often than we see our neighbours, and our hopes and fears cling to that individual’s persona.

Either way, 2017 is likely to be the new Worst Year Ever, as all the trends of 2016 are likely to keep happening. I have, however, noted one group that were not devastated by the events of 2016 – those people who didn’t follow most pop culture at all.

Those people – some elderly neighbours of mine, some homesteading friends in the USA or Europe -- lived in a world with real consequences and victories, and their life was moored to people they knew. They wouldn’t feel grief at the loss of someone on a screen, but the loss of a neighbour or friend. I’ve learned a lot from my neighbours, and will feel genuine grief when they are gone – and with luck, someone like them will miss me someday.