Cleaning up after storms

As usual on a Sunday, I came back from Mass and dropped The Girl off at her weekly medieval camp training. A few years ago I found a local expert in medieval martial arts -- an occasional advisor and extra for shows like Vikings and Game of Thrones, both of which are filmed here in Ireland -- and he trains kids and adults to become expert sword-fighters, archers and riders. It’s become The Girl’s big passion, and she now goes to historical shows and medieval fairs across Ireland displaying what she can do.

I’m pleased to see my teenager spend her spare time working hard at developing skills, especially ones that, in her words, make her really prepared for a Zombie Apocalypse situation. Lord knows enough of her peers are involved in far more destructive activities.

Occasionally, though, we still share a movie together. Last Friday night it was Strangers on a Train, and we were reminded of all the deliciously creepy scenes -- of Robert Walker staring malevolently forward at a tennis match, when all the people around him were turning back and forth; of watching a murder reflected in a fallen pair of glasses; and of Farley Granger’s hero and Robert Walker’s villain locked in a final battle on an out-of-control merry-go-round, as children laugh and scream around them.

“Hitchcock is so dark,” she said in awe. “I love him.”

***

On the way back from dropping The Girl off, I saw my neighbour Seamus, who has lived along the canal for 86 years and knows every tree and bush of this part of the bog.

“How is your land after Ophelia?” he asked, as we hadn’t talked in the fortnight since the hurricane.

Not bad, I said -- a few willows down, but they’ll come back quickly.

“I lost one of my great apples,” he said sadly. “I planted it 37 years ago, and it had grown giant and was laden with cookers.”

Sorry to hear it, I said -- the entire tree, and not nothing salvageable?

“Uprooted,” he said. “It was one of three, but the other two survived, thank the Lord. I’ve been cleaning up the apples all over the property before they go bad.”

Our trees survived, but they were also quite small and sheltered, I said -- I’ve been gathering our apples as well. What do you do with yours?

“I always keep them in a steel barrow in the shed,” he said, “and then put hay above and below. The steel keeps it cool, and the hay makes the apples sweeter.”

It took a beat for me to follow. The hay makes the apples sweeter? I asked. Why?

“Because hay is sweet,” he said with a puzzled smile, like this were obvious “That’s why cows love it.”

He tells me things like this every time -- what plants to plant together, what to keep away from each other, and how to keep food from spoiling. He could be pulling my leg for all I know, but sometimes I'm able to test his folk wisdom, and darned if he isn't right.

***

We finally got our chainsaw fixed, so The Girl and I spent the afternoon trimming the trees that broken or strained by the hurricane. A fallen tree anywhere else on our land is no big problem, but along the front of our property any downed tree a.) blocks the only, single-lane road, b.) falls the other way and destroys our greenhouse, and c.) takes down the phone lines in which they are all tangled.

Because of the overhead lines, I can’t cut some of the trees myself, so I’ve been fighting the county for months to trim the trees, and they said they would months ago. They still haven’t done, though, and I expect more will be brought down by the winter winds.

Thus, we set off to judiciously cut what we could, with me cutting the trees one by one and The Girl pulling on them with a rope and watching for cars. One by one we took down four willows and a dead elder, and when they crashed down into the road we set upon them with the chainsaw, axes and secateurs like lions on a gazelle before any cars came along.

On the fifth tree the chainsaw broke again, but by then we had cleared the worst of it. I’m never pleased to take down a tree, nor am I happy with the gap in the hedge, but none of these trees had been around very long, nor did their irregular plantings make a proper hedge. Rather, they were all about 20 years old and still healthy, and they will send up shoots next year, and we will bend them down and weave them into a proper, near-solid hedgerow that should provide shelter and privacy.

***

I gathered the last of the apples from our trees, along with rose hips from our hedgerows, and I decided I would pickle apples again and use the peelings and hips to make compost jelly -- jelly from whatever you have.

For the pickling, I mixed about 500 ml of cider vinegar with 200 ml of water, mixed in 100 ml of sugar and added five cardamom pods, one clove, six peppercorns, about 5 ml of cinnamon and 10 ml of chili flakes. I diced the white interiors of six apples and stuffed them into a Kilner jar, with peeled and shaved ginger mixed in, and packed them as tightly as I could.

Once the liquid had boiled I simply poured it over the apples and ginger until the jar was full to the rim. I then tapped it gently to release some of the bubbles, and as it cooled the vacuum lid sealed shut, so no hot-water bath was needed.

I took the peelings and apple cores -- 766 grams of them -- and mixed them with 100 grams of rose hips from our hedgerows and a chopped-up lemon. I put them in a pot with 1.5 litres of water, and boiled them for an hour while we played Civilisation. After an hour I strained the remaining liquid -- 600 millilitres -- mixed it with 450g of sugar, and boiled it on high heat for about 15 minutes until it set as jelly.

I had tried this a few days ago, but the jelly never set properly, only gradually going from liquid syrup to soft candy without ever reaching the magic stage in-between. I realised I needed a higher heat than most recipes recommend -- perhaps because Ireland is so damp and humid, or perhaps our stove is just slightly off. The second time was the charm.

As a result, apples that would have gone to waste were preserved for the winter, and should remain good for at least a year.

Top photo: Rainbow over Dublin. Middle photo: Fallen tree. Bottom photo: Salvaged orange peels with various hedgerow fruits -- going clockwise, crabapples, elderberries, blackberries, sloe and rose hips.

After the hurricane

I haven’t posted much lately, as I’ve been busy with my day job, family duties and writing longer pieces that I hope to publish separately. That, and this week we had a hurricane.

A bit of background: Ireland almost never gets hurricanes, or even many powerful storms. A typical summer rain in my native Missouri gushed down suddenly, hot as a shower, for a few minutes and turning the baking land into a floodplain before swiftly disappearing. Here in Ireland, however rain is usually a cold drizzle that can continue for an hour or a week -- or in 2012, a summer.  

I recently checked the average rainfall in Missouri and Ireland and was surprised to find that Missouri actually receives 53 per cent more rain per year than Ireland does. It certainly doesn’t seem like it -- Missouri might go months without rain and then make up for it in a few minutes, while here it rains more than half the days of the year.

On the other hand, the Irish countryside has two settings: 1.) cool and raining, and 2.) cool and not raining just yet. We almost never get genuine warmth - say, 30 degrees Centigrade or higher -- we almost never get snow, we never get tornadoes, or any of the more intense weather that hits most of the world. When my daughter was little I took her to visit family back home and she heard a low rumble in the distance, she turned to me excitedly and asked, “Daddy, is that thunder?” She had heard of it from books, but had never heard thunder before -- it happens here, but not often.

We also rarely get the erratic floods that hit my native state; I grew up where two of the world’s largest and most wilful rivers meet, and their floods have removed whole towns from the map. Here, though, the towns are often built at the top of walled river banks that have been repaired and rebuilt for hundreds of years, as the rivers rise and fall predictably beneath them.

Hurricanes creep up the Atlantic, but rarely as far north as this -- as I’ve mentioned, we are at the same latitude as the southern tip of Alaska. The rare exceptions make our history books, and stories of them were passed down through the generations. I’ve been reading Then There Was Light, the oral history of the gradual electrification of Ireland between the 1930s and the 2000s, and in one chapter Eileen Casey describes her home after a fuse-box was installed in her kitchen:

… Cooking was still done on gas and it was always a great back-up in case a storm might hit and knock out the whole shebang.

Which is what happened in 1961 when Hurricane Debbie decided to wreak destruction. A branch of a big oak tree fell on the transformer pole and plunged the row of cottages into darkness …This tropical “hussy” intensified to Category 3, passing over Ireland, bringing record winds of 114 mph. Tens of thousands of trees and power lines were knocked out there were few telephones in those days. 

The men who lived in the cottages tried lifting the tree of the transformer pole, causing a great whoosh which could have signalled their end. Then they left well enough alone and waited for the ESB men to come out and restore their home comforts.

Until now, such events were rare, but in the last ten years or so, the old farmers tell me, the weather has gotten progressively stranger -- a heavy snow one winter, an unusual span of weeks without rain, a summer of nothing but rain, and floods that breach the usual limits and stretch over fields and towns. 

Thankfully, this last hurricane did little damage -- homes here are usually made of stone or cement, and no one’s house gets blown away. The power was out for tens of thousands of people, and we had no internet for a while -- but the government got everyone’s power back on within a few days.

In any case, some people here lived without electricity even into this century, and we only got internet at our house in the last few years. If the phones went down or the power went out, I suspect, many older people here would shrug and get on with their business.

It’s going to be a healthy attitude in the years to come, as I suspect we’ll be seeing a lot more of this. Less than a week after the hurricane, Ireland is being hit by Storm Brian, the latest in a summer of storms. I was talking with locals at the village pub Friday night, and while none of them are what you’d call eco-activists, they all accept that this will probably be the new normal.

After every such event, there’s always a week or so of clean-up; the government getting the houses back on one village at a time, the tractors clearing the trees out of the road, and repairing the broken windows and car windshields. I was out jogging this morning, and hastily turned around and jogged home when I rounded a corner and came face to face with a cow in the road. I rang Liam, the local farmer, just as he was coming out of church.

“Brian, how you keeping?” he asked.

I’m good, Liam, I said -- say, is that your pasture across from the old barracks?

“It is that - why?”

Well, I said, one of your cows has gotten loose.

“I’ve been doing nothing but mending fences after Ophelia,” he said. “Which one is it?”

She’s cream-coloured with an ear tag, I said. I didn’t inspect her too closely.

“Sure, she’s a regular Houdini, that one,” he said. “I’ll be right down,” and he was.

 Photo has been making the rounds here; I'm not sure who originally took it. If it was you, let me know.

A bridge to the technosphere

For half the Irish year I ride my bicycle along the canal in the morning to the village where I pick up the bus to my job in the city, and ride back again in the evenings. The morning ride gives me a chance to see the landscape when the sun is still drying the leaves of dew and shooing away the clouds of mist from the bog, when the fish are beginning to stir in the clear waters below and the herons are shaking off sleep on their perches.

Similar patterns stretch across the land, the water and the sky. The dendritic patters of the tree branches of the trees that line the road resemble the tributaries of the streams that flow below them, with tiny streams feeding larger ones and then joining others, feeding the fields of wildflowers. They resemble the veins of my hands, more visible now than they used to be as I grow older. They resemble the mycelium I see in our compost, which I tried to disturb as little as possible today when I spread it across our new garden bed.

As Albert Bates put it in the permaculture course, we see the same patterns across all scales – the shape raindrops take on leaves of grass are governed by the same laws that draw matter into stars and stars into galaxies. The tessellating pattern of water as it twists and curls around rocks in the stream, resemble the mist curling and twisting as it floats away, purged by the light of the dawn, or the patterns of clouds as they ripple over the Irish landscape.

The morning ride shows me the patterns of the farmers who live near me, before they are outside at work. I see that Liam mended the fence where the calf broke through, that last night’s wind blew some trees over the phone lines, and that Liam won’t be reachable by phone this week. I see that Mick’s family have laid flowers on the cross they placed along the canal, on the spot where his car went off the road last year, drowning him. His girls are only teenagers, and I suspect most people still leave his old space empty in church, his seat empty at the pub.

The ride home, likewise, gives me a chance to see my neighbours as they are busy on their plots of land. I usually see my neighbour Seamus, in his eighties and still planting his own field, and Martin, proudly showing his young cows and antique cars. I see other neighbours who never took to the car culture, and still ride bicycles or even horse-carts into the village and back.

You see, once I step on the bus to the city, the world changes. I spend three hours on a bus and nine more in an office, staring at screens, sitting in seats and dealing with the carrots and sticks of human hierarchies. I live, as most of us do out of necessity, in what Dmitri Orlov calls the Technosphere, the world of user names and passwords, computer screens and electronic noises, online profiles and digital icons.

I try to ignore the flash and flicker of advertising on the walls of cafes, office lobbies, buses, trains, cars, bicycle racks, bus stop shelters and toilets. I wear earbuds to muffle the piped-in soundtrack of advertisements, talk radio, and pop songs broadcasted into buses, restaurants, and offices. Out of necessity, I deal with the conceptual hierarchy that humans have created -- software programs, paycheque numbers and manager titles -- and pretend they represent reality.

I understand the need to visit the Technosphere, and it has its uses -- look at you, reading this on a blog. In living my life and raising a daughter, though, I always try to keep one foot in that artificial world and one foot in the real one, the one that has been here for uncounted lifetimes before us and will continue long after the Technosphere has passed into legend.