The Philosophy of Stagecoach

I’ve written about my love of old black-and-white movies from the 1930s and 40s, and how their simple human stories remain relevant to our lives in a way that many computer-spectacle films do not. For that reason, I often showed my daughter the works of Buster Keaton and Preston Sturgess, Frank Capra and John Ford, Charlie Chaplin and Ernst Lubitsch – and the other day, we watched John Ford’s classic Western Stagecoach.

For those who don’t know, the film tells the story of a mismatched assortment of travellers – a cross-section of rich and poor, men and women, lawful and criminal – travelling across the desert in the titular vehicle at a time when Geronimo and his Apaches are on the warpath. The film gives us a concise but clear introduction to each character, and why they must take such a dangerous journey; most of them are running to or away from something, and their time is running out.

One passenger, a proper Southern lady in the last days of pregnancy, is trying to get to her husband in the Army – only to hear that he has been sent into battle, and she spends the journey not knowing whether she is a widow. Another passenger also comes from Confederate aristocracy, a gentleman gambler who fled West after the Civil War, and he looks after the lady who represents his lost home.

The coach also includes a local prostitute named Dallas who has been driven out of town; a stentorian banker with a dark secret; a meek salesman, and a doctor-turned-drunkard. Riding atop the coach, next to the long-suffering driver, is the sheriff, there to protect the passengers but also to look for an escaped fugitive.

The fugitive is the legendary Ringo Kid, who escaped from prison to avenge the murder of his family. The sheriff knows and likes Ringo -- who isn’t a hardened criminal, but simply a kid who got into trouble – but must find and arrest him all the same.

All these people of different classes, who would never be seen together in everyday life, must squeeze uncomfortably together for the dangerous ride. Shortly outside of town, though, they run into a man whose horse went lame on the trail – the Ringo Kid himself, in the role that made a star of the young John Wayne.

The sheriff places Ringo under arrest, but as the stagecoach encounters flooded rivers and hostile natives, he unshackles his friend, knowing they need his capable hands on their side. Their mutual dependence only further complicates the sheriff’s dilemma: does he let Ringo have his vengeance, honouring their friendship and punishing the killers, yet betraying his duty and perhaps seeing his friend killed? Or does he arrest Ringo, betraying their friendship but saving his friend’s life and fulfilling his oath?

Ringo, for his part, forms a gradual friendship with the prostitute Dallas, not realising what she does for a living. When the group stops at a house for dinner, Ringo sits beside her and shyly tries to make conversation; the other passengers move to the far end of the table from her, and Ringo thinks it’s him they’re avoiding. He mumbles in embarrassment that no one will forgive him for his past, not realising how much she can relate.  

Later, after the group has fought off an attack together and delivered the lady’s baby, Ringo asks Dallas to marry him, if he survives the gunfight ahead of him. She must turn him away – not because she doesn’t love him, but because she does, and doesn’t want to break his heart.  

Of course, as my daughter pointed out, Ringo and Dallas have only known each other a few days – old movies often require you to suspend disbelief in that area. In most eras, though, marriage was both a stage of life and a job, not defined by one’s transient feelings of attraction but by one’s willingness to sacrifice for the other. Ringo and Dallas each saw that the other was brave, kind and determined, and they were pulled together not by lust but by admiration.

The other characters are painted with similar complexity and an underlying tragedy. The gambler dotes kindly on the lady in her infirmity, yet snaps irritably at his fellow passengers. He was raised to be a gentleman, I explained, yet that also means he sees himself as superior to everyone else.

Similarly, when the lady goes into labour, the doctor must sober up and help her deliver – but no one thinks he will stop drinking. When the Southern lady thanks Dallas for caring for her through her delivery, she begins to say, “If there’s ever anything I can do ….” and then stops, unsure how to finish the sentence. They both know they can never see each other socially, and there’s no promise they could make that would not be false.

Let’s pause a moment to address some common objections to classic films; for example, that in this and many other Westerns, the Apaches are the villains. From our armchair perspective we can see the centuries of injustice to Native Americans, and declare them victims and the settlers oppressors. Most of the people living at that time, however, did not act like characters in a centuries-long drama to please future historians, any more than most of us are doing regarding climate change or mass extinction. Most people today have limited choices and are simply looking out for their families, just as most settlers and natives alike were then. Also, settlers and natives lived in peace, intermarried and learned from each other, far more often than they fought over the centuries, but those days don’t make for suspenseful movies.

I know people who objected to the “political correctness” of films like Dances with Wolves, which portrayed natives as good and whites as fools or villains. Me, I loved seeing that excellent film present a native perspective – along with earlier examples, like 1964’s Cheyenne Autumn -- just as I love watching Stagecoach do the same for the settlers. All people see the world from their own limited point of view, and all films will show some perspectives and not others. Nor is Stagecoach completely one-sided; it opens with a sympathetic native, whose people are also victims of Geronimo, and the white soldiers trusting him.

I also talk to people who can’t watch old movies because of the way they depict women, and it is true that they did not show women and men as interchangeable. The women in Stagecoach did not utter sassy quips, defeat men in hand-to-hand combat or kill people without pity. They did, however, endure tragedy with quiet strength, nurse the suffering and wounded, protect a new-born from death and provide the voice of reason during male arguments.

I have heard other modern people question why they would watch films in black-and-white when they could see films in colour, or watch silent films when sound has existed for almost a century. 

Many have similar attitudes toward technology in general, thinking that newer means superior; why see a 2-D movie when 3-D exists, or a normal screen when gigantic screens exist? Different technologies, however, are appropriate for different things, with films just like anything else; just as there’s still a place for bicycles in an age of cars or books in an age of computers, some older technologies still fill certain roles best – and might be more durable in the long run.

Buster Keaton’s hour-long train chase in The General is a masterpiece of comedy and suspense communicated through physical action; it would not be improved by the addition of sound, any more than a dance routine would be improved by a sports commentator narrating the action. Silent films, also, could be shown around the world, their basic human stories equally understandable to people of every language. Only the advent of sound cut peoples off from each other.

Black-and-white film, likewise, is not inferior to colour, but more appropriate for some stories -- as shown when some misguided soul tried to remake Psycho in colour, or when some modern company garishly colourises classic films. It forces the emphasis away from visual spectacle and towards characters and dialogue, especially with the simple, minimalist sets of many classic films. And black-and-white film has a stark beauty all its own, as seen in films as different as City Lights, The Third Man and Schindler’s List, none of which would be improved by colour.

Finally, when I see old movies in the cinema these days, I often hear people laughing during serious moments, and when I ask why, I’m told the films are “corny” and “unrealistic.” It’s a strange accusation, for all films are unrealistic to some degree – compared to say, security camera footage -- and more realism does not automatically make a film better. The films often cited as “realistic,” moreover, seem to involve lots of internal organ splatter and casual cruelty – things that aren’t part of my daily reality, or yours. 

As a film critic I occasionally defended films with graphic violence or nudity, and still do, but more often I found that such content cheapened the characters. I welled up with tears at the shy tenderness of Ringo and Dallas’ courtship, and I can’t imagine having that same reaction to seeing the most intimate parts of their anatomy displayed Godzilla-sized on a movie screen. 

When films imply rather than show adult material, they generally become more subtle, able to ignite more of the viewer’s imagination – in other words, they become better films. They also become appropriate for all ages to see, so cinemas become a safe space for all people equally in a pluralistic democracy. Only when the mass media became countercultural did it stop making media for the common man and start making it for a hip elite – not coincidentally around the time that the wealthy elite began to separate from the rest of us.  

Occasionally I see critically-praised films today, and I find them sometimes worthwhile (most recently The Favourite) and sometimes disappointing (most recently Mary, Queen of Scots). I’m not too highbrow, either; I’ve defended many modern superhero films as both artistically underrated and a revival of the hero myths of classical times. Few recent movies, however, show as much depth or complexity as films from the 1930s and 40s – and those films were made with perhaps one per cent of one per cent of the budget of a film today.

Their scripts, often written by working-class intellectuals and erstwhile novelists, took on poverty, homelessness, crime and injustice, portraying society with a darkness that seems shocking to us today. In It’s A Wonderful Life – one of the only black-and-white films most people have seen – the hero spends most of his life under the tyranny of the town’s wealthy man, and as seen in the alternate universe, everyone hangs precariously close to a life of grief, or crime, or failure, kept out of it only by the nobility of everyday choices.

Finally, most of these films are relevant to people’s lives today, in a way that most modern films are not. I think of friends of mine back in the USA, who have had to deal with gang shootings in their neighbourhoods, layoffs at their workplace, who have served their country proudly overseas but who can’t afford their medical bills at home. Most of the films and television I see today dos not deal with their problems – but films 80 years ago did.  

Imagine a film about a returning veteran encountering disdain and unemployment, remembering that he is good with a gun and realising that crime pays very well. Such a film could reflect a painful reality for many Americans today, and would no doubt be controversial, as Breaking Bad was. Yet such films were made in abundance in the 1930s, such as Twentieth Century with James Cagney and Humphrey Bogart.

Or imagine a film about sex workers organising to testify against the gangster that sells their bodies, with one of the women going public on behalf of the others, knowing she will be killed for doing so. That too could be a difficult film to make – but that was 1946’s Marked Woman, with Bette Davis and Humphrey Bogart, and while of course the women’s profession is alluded to discreetly, the story was clear enough.

Or imagine a film in which an unemployed couple on the verge of homelessness inherits a bit of farmland, but who have no idea how to run a farm – so they find more homeless wandering the roads of America, some of whom know how to farm or can learn, and they bring them to work together. Many Americans today are in this position and could benefit from a movie like this to teach them – and they have one, in 1936’s Our Daily Bread.

I wrote a few weeks ago about the Great Forgetting of modern times, how most modern people have abandoned the communities and traditions of our forebears. In the same way, the simple rituals of self-reliance and neighbourliness, democracy and organising, courtship and friendship, have grown scarcer in this age of lonely indulgence, and as our resources grow scarcer we will need these things again. Many movies from that era provide just that, offered in fictional stories that were created to give people a template for people to follow.

It’s not just that such films show common people enduring hardship and injustice, but that they rise above them with determination and kindness, working with their peers and settling their differences like adults. They portrayed the alleged lowest of humanity – criminals, prostitutes and the homeless – as heroes, and the highest – bankers and aristocrats – as capable of the foulest injustices. The heroes don’t always win in the end, but they leave this world having done their duty. That, I think is what people mean by “corny” and “unrealistic” – made in a time when despair was a constant temptation, they are life-affirming, hopeful, and intentionally, unapologetically inspirational.

They set an example for people to follow, and in an era when we interact more with screens than with people, and when few people remember how to work together or build a better society, examples are what we need more of.

Thanks to Rod Dreher

I'll write more soon, but for the moment I wanted to thank Rod Dreher, author of "Crunchy Cons" and "The Benedict Option," for spending the afternoon with me this past weekend. Rod gave an inspiring and heartfelt talk at the University Church on Stephen's Green, Dublin, and was kind enough to mention me. 

Rod, thank you for everything. 

Keeping eggs over winter

No matter what else you have in your kitchen, you probably have eggs. Whether you boil or fry them for breakfast, whisk them into egg-drop soup, bake them into pastries or mix them into batter, eggs provide one of the simplest and yet most versatile of foods, prized the world over as a rich source of easy protein.

If you raise your own chickens, moreover, you have a ready source of eggs, as well as fertiliser and comedy relief. Hens convert your leftovers into your next breakfast, keep your garden free of pests and mow your lawn for free. Other animals can do some of these things, but not many of us have the time, space or will to manage a suburban herd of sheep or swine, or to slaughter them in the garage. Hens, however, require little space or maintenance, and turn any home into a homestead.

They lay eggs seasonally, however, speeding up in summer and slowing in winter. You could give them more indoor light or Vitamin D supplements, but they cost money and interfere with the chickens’ natural cycle – and saving money and being all-natural are two of the most popular reasons for keeping backyard chickens in the first place.   

Another way would be to collect the extra eggs in summer and preserve them through the winter. Eggs can be preserved in several ways; one, well-known to pub patrons here, is to pickle them. A typical recipe involves hard-boiling eggs and removing the shells, and then creating a pickling solution of cider vinegar, small amounts of salt, sugar, herbs and spices. Bring the mixture to the boil, then simmer for five minutes and pour over the eggs – they should keep for at least a few months.  

You can also soak the eggs in a solution of sodium silicate, known as isinglass or water-glass. One popular recipe from a century ago recommended dissolving sodium silicate in boiling water, to about the consistency of a syrup (or about 1 part silicate to 3 parts water). The eggs -- as fresh as possible, and thoroughly clean -- should be immersed in the solution in such manner that every part of each egg is covered with the liquid, then removed and let dry. If the solution is kept near the boiling temperature, the preservative effect was said to be much more certain and to last longer.

Perhaps the best and longest-lasting way, however, is to preserve eggs in limewater. No recipe could be simpler; take fresh raw eggs in the shell, set them gently in a jar, and pour in a simple lukewarm mix of tap water and lime powder. I’ve done this with our eggs, and they lasted for up to a year and remained edible.

“Lime” here means neither the citrus fruit nor the tree, but refers to calcium hydroxide, a white powder derived from limestone. For at least 7,000 years humans burned limestone in kilns to create the dangerous and caustic “quicklime” (Calcium oxide), and hydrated that to create lime powder (calcium hydroxide). Sumerians and Romans used it as a cement, while farmers mixed it with water to create whitewash, tanners used it to remove hair from hides, gardeners to repel slugs and snails, printers to bleach paper. 

Perhaps most importantly, farmers here in Ireland spread lime over their boggy fields to “sweeten” the acid soil and increase crop production as much as four-fold. For hundreds of years until the mid-20th century, lime supported a vast and vital network of village industry in this part of the world-- County Cork alone was said to contain an amazing 23,000 kilns, or one every 80 acres.

In his 1915 monograph “Lime-water for the preservation of eggs,” Frank Shutt describes a series of egg preservation experiments at an experimental farm in Ottawa, which found lime-water to be “superior to all other methods” – how, he didn’t say.

When I first tried to preserve eggs in lime-water, I simply mixed equal parts lime and water – which did no harm, but most of the lime simply settled to the bottom. It turned out a fraction as much lime would have sufficed – Shutt says that water saturates with lime at 700 parts water to one part lime, but adds that “owing to impurities in commercial lime, it is well to use more than is called for.” In any case, if you use more lime than is necessary to saturate in water, the rest simply condenses out.  

Since exposure to air causes more lime to condense over time, some articles recommend keeping the container sealed, either in a Kilner jar or by pouring a layer of oil over the top. I kept mine in an ordinary mayonnaise jar, and they kept fine for a year.

Eggs kept this way do come out with their whites darkened slightly, and with a faint “musty” smell like old clothes. It does not, however, have the unpleasant smell of a rotten egg – believe me, you won’t mistake one for the other. The difference can perhaps be compared to that of rehydrated milk from powder vs. fresh milk – the former is not inedible, just slightly different than expected. As Shutt puts it, nothing “can entirely arrest that ‘stale’ flavour common in all but strictly fresh laid eggs.”

I’m not aware of an upper limit on how long eggs could be kept this way, but I would not recommend going longer than several months to be on the safe side. Several months, however, still allows the homesteader to continue harvesting eggs through the winter.

Shutt recommends keeping the water at a cool temperature – 40-45 degrees Fahrenheit, or five degrees Centigrade, to help the preservation. That’s the temperature of a refrigerator, but a cellar or underground storage container would probably be fine. I kept mine at room temperature during an Irish year, where the temperature ranges from freezing (32F, 0C) in winter to lukewarm (75F, 25C) in summer, with no ill effects. Some old texts say to boil the lime-water, dissolving as much of the lime as you can and letting it cool before immersing the eggs; that might be slightly preferable simply to maximise the amount of lime dissolved or to sterilise the water, but I tried it both ways and noticed no difference in quality.

Some old recipes recommend adding salt to the eggs, but I tried it with and without salt and found that it didn’t make a difference, and neither did Shutt a century ago. Still other 19^th-century recipes mixed the lime with salt-peter and even borax, but I would not try those until I had confirmed their safety.

Experiments like this might seem pointless when we have refrigerators, freezers and a convenience store down the road. Many of us, though, like being able to do things ourselves, with simple ingredients, for a lot less money than processed food at the store would cost. Money and electricity, moreover, are less certain than they used to be; I know many friends who have lost jobs, or whose power now goes out regularly. The results are not as apocalyptic as most people imagine -- crises are rare, and even in a crisis life goes on – but in an emergency your family or neighbourhood would benefit from someone who knows how to do things the old-fashioned way.

Christmas during the Forgetting

Winter sunset over the Bog of Allen

Every year my daughter was growing up, I brought her to the Wren Day at the local forest, and was pleased to be part of a ritual that dates back hundreds, if not thousands, of years. Now that my daughter is a teenager, we haven’t been back in a few years, but I returned last year to visit it again. I was crestfallen, then, to find that the festival was cancelled … they couldn’t get enough people to come, they told me, in order to pay for the insurance they now need to pay.

I should explain that wrens are little songbirds that remain here through the winter, and their ritual here comes the day after Christmas. On that day we and hundreds of our neighbours would gather in the local woods, and in a clearing with park benches and a tea shop, musicians played traditional Irish music while locals gathered with hot drinks around fires or danced to the music, and children gathered around for the “Hunting of the Wren.”

In the ritual, local men dressed up as “wren boys” -- which for our group meant looking like Robin Hood’s Merry Men – gathered around a statue of the songbird. The wren, the men explained to all the gathered children, was sacred to the Celts – the old Irish name for it, dreoilin, means “the Druid bird.” One day a year, local “straw boys” – dressed like haystacks, their identities concealed -- hunted the wren as a prize, and the Wren Boys swore to protect the bird.

As the musicians played in the background, however, and as the children listened wide-eyed to the Wren Boys tell their stories, a group of Straw Boys snuck up behind them, hitting sticks together menacingly, grabbed the wren and ran off. The children erupted in delighted outrage, and the Wren Boys led hundreds of local children in a chase through the woods until they retrieved the bird. Eventually, the two sides came to an understanding, shook hands, and placed a small crown on the statue’s head, declaring the wren the King of Birds.

Straw boys approaching.

A friend of mine who specialised in folklore said the slaying of the wren meant the slaying of winter, and the pact to accept and cherish it meant the acceptance that winter would return – an important detail where we live, a thousand miles from the Arctic Circle where the winter nights are long and dark. In some eras, when Irish customs were being stamped out, the ritual had to be carried out in secret, but they did so anyway, so devoted were they to keeping it alive. Now, our local Wren Day is gone.

Of course, other communities will likely still celebrate it, but I suspect fewer every year. This is one of hundreds of ways in which the traditional, local and national cultures have been gradually steamrolled away by the mass pop culture of Hollywood.

I realise that I’m complaining about the loss of a tradition I didn’t grow up with myself, but the same is true of local culture in my native USA. Songs of the Appalachians and Ozarks, the rituals of towns and clans, are more and more preserved in amber by aficionados or tourist boards rather than lived by children, while family traditions grow more homogenized and dictated by the mainstream media, more focused on buying things quickly and discarding them. The same process has happened across Europe and, I’m told, non-Western countries where children are raised now by screens rather than blood.  

In each of those places – in every place we have been human – mothers and fathers, aunts and uncles, teenagers and children gathered around campfires and hearths, around tables and altars, and shared the songs and stories that made them who they were. They passed down skills and dishes, rituals and holidays. In more and more places around the world now, only the older people remember such things, while the kids play video games or watch Youtube memes, their bodies sitting next to their grandparents but with an interior world that would be alien to their forebears.  

Of course, we’ve done this with holidays as well, so that all the festivals people here used to celebrate to mark the passing of the year have disappeared in the last few generations. Mention May Day, Lughnasa, Midsummer, Twelfth Night or to people these days and you get blank expressions – except the last two as titles of Shakespeare plays, among the few who know Shakespeare anymore.

Musicians at Wren Day

A few generations ago, a neighbour tells me, local children used to gather and dance around the May Pole in a field near us; today, I doubt any of the local children would know what May Day was, and the same could soon be true of Wren Day. A half century of Hollywood has done for this country what centuries of starvation and imprisonment could not.

Nowhere is this more true than around Christmas, which has metastasized from a holy day into a shopping season. For only a few weeks lamp-posts and cubicles grow plastic boughs and wreaths, and normally functional roofs sport enough lights to be seen from space. Radio stations put aside their normal playlists to endlessly repeat a handful of Christmas-related rock ballads over and over. Haggard faces jam the malls and shopping districts, news announcers track the spending numbers like a telethon host, and grim office ladies start aggressive campaigns to cover every surface with coloured cardboard and festive glitter.  If you’re like me, you want to boycott this seasonal magic as much as possible.

Don’t misunderstand; I cherish my own memories of Christmas, love the seasonal spirit and can carol with gusto. For that reason, though, I ration my exposure to the season; the decorations become a backdrop after the first time you see them, inspiring songs quickly grow annoying, and enforced spending leeches the joy from giving.  

The radio and television floods us with images of how our holiday is supposed to be: we are supposed to eat too much, drink too much, spend too much and listen to the endlessly repeated holiday songs, whether we actually enjoy these things or not, in the name of tradition.

But most of these customs are not the real Christmas traditions, and many were just created as marketing gimmicks by corporations. Only in the 1930s, for example, did a Coca-Cola advertising campaign cement our modern version of Santa Claus in the public mind, with a red-and-white colour scheme to match their product. Some version of Father Christmas has existed before then in other forms, of course, but even in the early 20th century ago people depicted him in a variety of outfits, often a green robe. He was often shown as thinner as well – perhaps it’s not a coincidence that his obesity began when he started advertising soda pop.  

Some of the Christmas songs we treat with reverence are not particularly old either, and some of them were also marketing campaigns: "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer," for example, was invented as an advertising gimmick for Montgomery Ward stores in 1939. Families on this side of the Atlantic tell their children that Santa lives in Lapland, rather than the North Pole, but that seems to have been a similarly late addition to the Christmas legend, developed mainly by the Finnish government in the 1960s to boost tourism.

No one is saying that all modern creations are bad, of course, and you can like whatever you like. I’m simply saying that the actual customs that our forebears kept for hundreds or thousands of years disappeared quickly and recently during the Great Forgetting of modern times, replaced by less wholesome and healthy customs manufactured by people with agendas.

In fairness, this is the only time of year many Americans are exposed to classic movies like It’s a Wonderful Life; repetition has turned them into white noise, and they were of course mass media products of their own time, but they remain a window into a less wasteful past. Likewise, if people are going to read novelists like Dickens, recite poetry, visit family members or sing songs in a group, it will probably be around this time of year.

But here’s the thing: many of those things used to happen every day. People used to spend every day with loved ones, and singing and storytelling used to be normal, and while not everyone in every era read books or saw plays, they used to be far more common a century or two ago than now. Every day used to be more like the best parts of Christmas today.

Take wassailing as an example. Today a few people here and there still sing carols around the neighbourhood around Christmas, or even wassail -- like carolling, except that the carollers were invited in for drinks. Only several decades ago – in the time of motor-cars and electricity, and within the memory of people still living – it was much more normal, even in America. Here in Ireland, though, people didn’t just do it at Christmas, but all through the winter, in a union of drunken party, social gathering and prayer that has no modern equivalent.

Such customs broke up the long darkness of winter, kept families from getting cabin fever, and let them check on each other. It allowed each family share with their neighbours – food drinks and stories -- in a pooling of resources. It strengthened the feeling of community, so that burdens were lessened because they were shared, and joys were heightened because they were shared.

The other thing to remember is that there’s nothing stopping us from bringing back many of these older rituals, which we might find still serve their old purpose. Wassailing would be a great thing for many older people --- or young people, for that matter – who don’t get out much. Give it a try, offering snacks or cider as you go along – if one in a hundred houses lets you in, that’s one house that might join you next year. Most importantly, you’ve planted a seed for everyone who heard you, and made it seem more normal. It doesn’t have to stop at Christmas either – remember that the twelve days of Christmas ends January 6 – or just make plans for next year.

Try singing some of the older songs; if you are tired of hearing “Fairytale of New York” or “Santa Baby” for the thousandth time this month, try looking up the music or words for “Angelus Ad Virginem,” “Tomorrow Will Be My Dancing Day,” or other neglected carols from ages past. Alternately, try looking up different versions of familiar carols; “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen” came in many regional forms, from mournful to jaunty, before settling on our current version. For my part, I’ll talk to people about reviving Wren Day here, and see who’s interested.

Wherever you are, your climate, neighbourhood and family will have your own customs – but look at what your grandparents, or their grandparents, did and what could be revived. Many of those customs, field-tested over generations, were more fun, and healthier for body and mind, than whatever the television’s telling you to do.

The White Christmases of our forebears

This was originally published in the Kildare Nationalist newspaper. 

Across the world people celebrate Christmas – or some related Western holiday that has been caught in Christmas’ cultural orbit – with a set of familiar symbols. In California and Calais alike stores sell cards of snowy landscapes, and paint frosted evergreens on their windows in Florida and Florence. We all listen to carols about snowmen and reindeer, holly and mistletoe, stocking-caps and logs blazing on a fire. We watch White Christmas, and feel disappointed when we don’t get one. 

Yet few people question why we embrace such relentlessly Nordic imagery. Most of us are not Saami and have never seen a real sleigh or reindeer, nor do holly and mistletoe grow in most of our regions.  

Generations of Hollywood films have conditioned us to expect snowbound Christmases, even though they are no longer the norm for Missouri (Meet Me in St. Louis), modern London (Love, Actually), or most of the other cities where such movies are set. 

I realised I did the same thing yesterday; when I wanted to post a photo on Christmas Eve, I took one from a few years ago, when we had an unusual snowfall. It was the photo that looked “Christmasy” – the others would look a bit unseasonal to our eyes.

Nor, of course, do any Nordic images have anything to do with the Middle East where Jesus lived, even though most of us grew up putting stable-and-manger figurines in a little snow-bound setting.

In fact, many of our White Christmas images seem to come from one original source, the story that has been repeated so often over the years – A Christmas Carol. Almost every inhabitant of the First World knows the name Ebenezer Scrooge, of course, but few of us realise how many of our holiday customs – Santa and Christmas trees, carolling and family gatherings – were influenced, if not necessarily invented, by that book. 

When The Girl and I read the story, however, I was impressed by how much attention Dickens paid to the weather. On almost every page, it seems, he has a new description of chilled bones, nipped noses, frosted fields, iced-over pools and paths trodden through snow. Characters see their own breath indoors, and when Scrooge looks outside, he must scrub away the layers of frost on the window – inside.

Early on Dickens writes:

Meanwhile the fog and darkness thickened so, that people ran about with flaring links, proffering their services to go before horses in carriages and conduct them on their way. The ancient tower of a church … struck the hours and quarters in the clouds with tremulous vibrations afterwards, as if its teeth were chattering in its frozen head up there. The cold became intense. 

In the main street, at the corner of the court, some labourers were repairing the gas-pipes, and had lighted a great fire in a brazier, round which a party of ragged men and boys were gathered, warming their hands and winking their eyes before the blaze in rapture. The water-plug, being left in solitude, its overflowings silently congealed, and turned to misanthropic ice. 

Dickens wasn’t making up such scenes; he was a child when London saw the last of the Frost Fairs, markets and gatherings held on the frozen surface of the Thames River. His writings came at the end of the Little Ice Age, a period of two or three centuries when the global climate dipped. During this time Dutch artists painted images of skating on canals in April, invading armies easily crossed from Sweden to Denmark across their oceanic straits, and famine was common across Europe. Our Christmas images come from a time and place when the climate was genuinely different.

Since then, in the late 19^th century to the early 21^st, places like London have seen far less snow and ice at Christmas, and Ireland less still. As the climate grows hotter in the decades ahead, we are likely to see ever-warmer winters and fewer White Christmases still, unless the melting Arctic ice disrupts the Atlantic current that keeps Europe mild.

Most interesting, though, is a possible reason why the climate dipped in the few hundred years after 1600; Europeans colonizing the Americas. Columbus and other Spaniards brought disease that wiped out 90 per cent of the local population, the theory goes, which meant millions of farmers no longer farming. Billions of trees grew up from what had once been crop fields, and each of those trees contained tonnes of carbon that were sucked out of the atmosphere.

The rise and fall of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is the main factor that controls the climate; when more carbon dioxide gets pumped into the air, as we are doing now, the world gets hotter, and when more gets sucked out of the air, as happened in the 1500s and 1600s, the world sees colder winters that lasted into Dickens’ time.

Among other things, this tells us what we need to do to stop the runaway climate change scientists predict for the rest of the century. Turning more fields into trees again – something simple and within the power of most of us – would not risk even a little Ice Age at this point, and it could help our descendants one day see White Christmases again.

Listening to the land

Spider-webs along my neighbour's hedge

On these last brilliant autumn days, the hedgerows are giving up the last of their fruits to the birds and local foragers. Red haws cluster so thickly on the branches now that that they droop over the fields, on branches so thin that they wobble even when tiny birds like hawfinches and thrushes land to fatten up for winter.

When they pick one, other more overripe haws dropped from the branches to the grass below, which rustled in response – mice or voles, I supposed, waiting for treats like dogs under the table.

Sloes still cling tightly to their thorny branches, and the final rose-hips dot the vines that wind their way up the trunks. Ours are tiny, wild rose-hips, evolved to suit birds and not human foragers, but on my way to work I pass a community garden with rose-hips the size of figs. I’d love to find out what variety it is and plant some around us for making jam next autumn – roses are pretty and all, but my tastes run to the practical.

I wondered why a garden in the grimy brewery district of Dublin was doing so well, and then I realised – it’s around the corner from where rows of horse-drawn carriages line up to take tourists around Dublin. Some afternoons I see locals eagerly scooping up the manure and bringing it back to their plot, sometimes in two giant bags hanging from their bicycle handles.

Recently I visited my neighbour down the road, an old man who has lived in the area all his life, and who shows me the local castles and graveyards here and talks about the history of all the local families. On the day of our first frost, I knocked on his door to return a book, and I asked him what kind of winter he expected.

“A harsh one, I think,” he said. “We’ve had a hot summer, and we often get a harsh winter after that – as we did last year, with a metre of snow. You can’t really say anymore these days,” he added, noting that the weather was less predictable than it used to be.  

We talked a bit about the hedgerows, and I noted how many Americans didn’t have them – we all divided our properties with chain-link fences that rusted, didn’t cut the wind, and didn’t offer privacy or food.

“People are tearing them down here too,” my neighbour said. “It’s a shame – when we plant fields, we need the border to make the field work.” He explained how their fruit brings birds that fertilise the fields, they keep soil from escaping the field after a rain, and their hardy trees and wild plants soak up whatever farmers spray on the crops.

Hedges along the hills in summer

That’s interesting, I said – that the wild borders were necessary for the field to thrive. The Old Testament repeats over and over that people are not to cut the edges of their land, and were always to leave some of the crops left over – in Leviticus 19:9, for example. It was supposed to be for gleaners and people who were poor, but I wonder if part of the reason, consciously or unconsciously, was to also give some of it back to Nature. How do most farmers here feel about these things?

“It depends on the farmer,” he said. “I was talking to a neighbour here who decided to go organic. He had spread pesticides over the fields every year, but he would come out and see it covered in dead worms afterwards. He decided it wasn’t worth it anymore.”

I’ll be interested to hear how he gets on, I said. Although pesticides aren’t exactly new here -- are the dead worms a new phenomenon? I wonder if his pesticide changed. I had read a study last year that found that tillage agriculture was harming worm populations, but I’m not sure if changing to organic would help that.  

I also find it interesting that no birds had snapped up the dead worms – I was hearing someone the other day say that they remember as a child seeing flocks of birds follow their tractor around after ploughing, but now they don’t.

“That’s interesting,” he said. “I’ve noticed that birds used to follow the cows around less than they used to.”

All this is anecdotal evidence, I said, but I’d like to see some real data on this. I know that the number of insects around Europe has plummeted, but no one’s sure why -- and they’re close to the base of the food chain.

“What everyone used to do whenever they could was to let ground rest for a while after growing things on it, or let cows graze on it,” he told me. “That did the same thing the hedgerows do. The local landowner here, around a hundred years ago, used to grow the best potatoes of anyone, as he would grow them only on land that had been fallow the previous year. Of course, that was because he had the extra land to do that.”

I often see that today, I said – upper-class people will do well, and think it was all their own hard work. They might indeed have worked hard, but people don’t see their own advantages.

Our hedge in winter

It made sense to me that that letting land “rest” would help rejuvenate it; in the wild, a plot of barren land will quickly be covered by a profusion of different species, which cover the ground, protect it from erosion by rain, bloom with many different flowers, bring many different pollinators, which feed different birds. They each bear different fruit or seeds, and many bring in their own fungus or bacteria colonies with their roots. As the plants and small critters spread across the surface of the soil, much more is growing under it – from mushroom colonies to worms to tens of thousands of species of tiny beasts, from miniature to microscopic – and once living things have done their job, they turn them into soil again. In other words, the living system takes the depleted funds of the soil and rebuilds a rich credit account of nutrients, before we make a withdrawal and turn it into another round of crops for ourselves.

I suppose most people just had a small plot, and only grew potatoes? I asked.

“They had to,” he said. “Each person had so little land for themselves, and nothing else would feed them all the time but potatoes. But it meant you had to grow the same crops on the same land, over and over, and never gave the land a rest. Nothing but the same plants tires out the land, taking the same minerals from it year after year, and tires ground makes the plants sickly. I know the blight was the main reason for the Famine, but I can’t help but think that tiring out the land didn’t help.”

Tree along the canal near our house

That’s an interesting point, I said. I told him about the essay by Ugo Bardi some years ago, determining that soil erosion made the Famine worse: After Britain conquered Ireland, its trees went to make up London’s buildings and Britain’s fleet, and soil erosion took its toll on the deforested land. I also told him that in America, there are vast areas where people only grow corn, or wheat, year after year.

“I think we had the Famine because we pushed our land to its limit,” my neighbour said. “And I think we’re doing it again.”

  

Pedal power

Originally published in 2013. 

In perhaps one of the great ironies of human civilisation, mechanical devices to truly magnify human power came along as soon as we didn’t need them.  Pedal-powered devices like bicycles only appeared after coal had already begun to transform the landscape, however – mass production was necessary for the standardised metal parts -- and around the same time that gasoline was first being introduced as a fuel for automobiles.

We tend to forget, then, three important things about the bicycle. First, it remains the most efficient method of using our bodies, allowing us to attain higher machine speeds for longer than we would on muscle power alone – and without using any more fuel or causing any more weather to go haywire.

Bicycles have been used for so long as children’s toys and exercise equipment that we forget what useful technology they represent. They multiply our bodies’ speed and efficiency many times over, allowing us to travel miles without strain. Their widespread adoption in the late 19th century created a ripple of under-appreciated effects in society; for example, they allowed women to commute to jobs away from home and paved the way for the universal sufferage movement.  

Second, bicycles have seen many improvements in the last hundred years, most of which have escaped the notice of anyone but enthusiasts. Many of the bicycles we use today function mainly as toys, and racing bikes are built for speed; sturdier bicycles – often going under the name of “military bicycles” can still be ordered.

Most importantly, though, bicycles are only one of many possible pedal-powered machines that were not used for transportation. Beginning in the 19th century, factories began to make and stores to market treadles for manufacturing everything from cigars to brooms to hats. Farms saw foot-powered harvesters, tractors, threshers, milking machines and vegetable bundlers. Machinists saw pedal-powered drills.  

“…no matter how simple it seems to us today, pedal power could not have appeared earlier in history,” wrote Kris DeDecker in LowTech Magazine. “Pedals and cranks are products of the industrial revolution, made possible by the combination of cheap steel (itself a product of fossil fuels) and mass production techniques, resulting in strong yet compact sprockets, chains, ball bearings and other metal parts.”

Today, we have built a world that runs on fossil fuels, which will not last forever. Eventually we will not be able to depend on familiar machines like cars and electronics - - either because we won’t be able to afford them, or to afford continually fixing them, or because fuel prices will be out of reach.

One way or another, we will have to go back to muscle power, and the best way to do that is to revive the lost technologies of pedal-powered tools. Most of these devices exist today only as a few rare museum specimens, but we should easily be able to build more. The irony, though, is that we need to build them while we still have fossil fuels.

 “It is important to realise that pedal powered machines (and bicycles) require fossil fuels,” DeDecker writes “If we burn up all fossil fuels driving cars, we won't be able to revert to bicycles, we will have to walk. If we burn up all fossil fuels making electricity to drive our appliances, we won't be able to revert to pedal powered machines, but to the drudgery that went before them.”

Perhaps more people around here will take to bicycles again, as I will now that I have a headlamp to light my way during the winter nights. Older people here remember when the bicycle was the most popular method for getting from one village to another, and the roads were safer then with so few cars. It’s possible that the schoolchildren of today will see those days again.

Interview with a neighbour

Sorry for the light posting. I've been taking night classes in Dublin, so on school nights I've been getting up around 6 am, bicycling a few miles to the bus stop, leaving my bike in my neighbour's barn, and taking it to my day job. I work my day job, go to night classes, and ride back around 11 pm. Even on nights when I don't have classes, I've been riding home around 9 pm. It hasn't left a lot of time for writing outside of my weekly column.

I would have done this earlier in life, but was spending all my spare time with my daughter. These days, my now-teenager mainly wants to spend time with her friends. Occasionally she's willing to go to a movie or concert with me -- we went to see Charlie Chaplin's City Lights a few months ago, and is willing to see Verdi's Aida on stage with me in November -- and I'm satisfied with that. Most teenaged girls wouldn't want to go with their father to such things at all these days, so I count my blessings. Most of the time I reluctantly play the villain of her story, the Strictest Parent among all her friends.

With all this going on, it was relaxing to sleep late today, fetch some vegetables right from the garden, sautee them with blood pudding and coffee on a chilly Irish morning, and tend to the garden. Tomorrow I'll be extracting the honey from my hive for the year, which should last us through next year and make some Chrsitmas gifts for the neighbours.

Speaking of the neighbours, I've been spending almost every weekend visiting with one of my local elders, and sometimes travelling with them while they show me around. I walked with one elderly friend around the ruins of Carbury Castle last weekend, and I'll have much more to write about that. For now, here is a snippet of our interview -- I've left his name out and changed the local names for privacy.

Me: I remember when a friend of mine visited from America, and she was interested in the River Boyne knew that the head was around here. We found it on the map and looked for it on the ground, came onto the old estate there in Carbury, and met the old landowner …

Neighbour: Mr. Robison.

Me: That’s right – and he pointed out where the head of the Boyne was, and that’s where the whole river starts. I’d never seen the head of a river before – it’s just a pool. You associate the Boyne and its history with the North, but that’s where it starts. 

Neighbour: There’s also a holy well there; we hold an open-air Mass once a year, on Trinity Sunday. The family that built that estate moved out of Carbury Castle in the 1600s, the time of Cromwell, but they wanted to live where they could still see the Castle in the distance, and you can. 

The other thing I wanted to say to you is that the local burial ground is up there too, for hundreds of years but not always in the same place … When they were building the canal – according to the local history, this is what we were told -- with the route the canal was taking, there was a graveyard in the way, so they moved it all to one side. 

Me: The caskets?

Neighbour: Ah, this was a long time ago, I’d say there were only bones. I was told they moved it with horse and cart, and there were only clay and bones. When you see the local burial ground it’s much higher on one end, because a lot more bones were put there. That was the local burial ground for people of this area, their forebears going back several hundred years or more. They were the old names of this locality -- they intermarried, and it was their hands that ploughed these fields and cut this turf going back several hundred years or more.

Me: So each of the old families here owned plots of land along the canal when it was built? How big were the plots?

Neighbour: Anything between seven and ten acres.

Me: Was that enough to live on?

Neighbour: It had to be. And when the estates were broken up, they were given an additional 15 an 20 acres to go with that from the Land Commission.

Me: Because their families were always expanding?

Neighbour: Yes, and the English landlord of this area left each family seven to ten acres to live on, and in each generation some of the children just had to leave. That was supposed to feed them with the help of whatever money they made working for the landlord.

Me: But the landowners would own huge chunks of a county, wouldn’t they?

Neighbour: The local landlord here owned perhaps 20,000 acres. Often the local farmers paid rent to the landlord – that’s why there were evictions during the Famine. 

That wasn’t the case in this area – most farmers' ancestors had helped build the canal, and were rewarded with ownership of their little plots. They might have starved, but none were evicted. 

A swiftly tilting land

I take the bus to my day job in Dublin every morning, and most days that means I study, read or write articles. On the days when Liam is driving, though, I stand at the front – unlike most bus drivers, he’s chatty, and I know I can talk to him and hear everything that’s happening around the neighbourhood.

He knows that I like to interview elderly people in our area, people who grew up here in Ireland before it became modernised, and ask about the details of everyday life. I’ve told him that they represent a vast and unappreciated resource – among the last people who grew up living a low-energy life, keeping to an older set of values, and part of an organic community rather than as atomised individuals staring at screens.

That culture is disappearing quickly here in Ireland – the last few years have seen one tectonic political shift after another, mostly funded by the technology corporations that have come to dominate the economy. Pope Francis visited the island last weekend, and while he got a sizable crowd, it was much reduced from previous visits – and disproportionately elderly.

I’m seeing fewer and fewer of the old men and women who still garden their own plot, repair their own tools, bicycle to church and can join in old songs at the pub. The younger generations here, I find, have no country but social media, and their grandparents feel like aliens in their own birth-village.

“Have you talked to the local historical societies?” the bus driver asked.

I have, I said, and they have been of some help – but their interviews often asked about family genealogies or big historical events, and I’m more interested in the minutiae of life. My elderly neighbours usually insist there’s nothing interesting to say about their lives, or they try to turn the conversation to whatever was in the newspapers at the time. I’m more interested in how often they ate, what dinner was like, how they courted, what they wore to swim in the river, and how long the washing took. 

I want to hear how they kept silence as they walked past a bend in the path where a man had died a hundred years’ prior, how they and their school-mates walked across the fields in deep night to a school dance, and how they pricked their fingers and wiped their cheeks with blood to give them a flush.

 “You know who would have been great to talk to is my Auntie,” Liam said. “When she was a young Irish girl she somehow became the hand-maiden of a French duchess, and met all the nobility of Europe.”

That would be a great story, I said – but she’s gone now?

“Yes, we took care of her in her final years, and the doctors told us she was getting senile. ‘She seems to be delusional,’ the doctor said, ‘She's telling wild stories that she used to be hand-maiden to a French duchess.’”

***

If my neighbours don’t recognise their country’s culture anymore, neither do they recognise the weather. This past spring we got a metre of snow, in a country where we never get more than a light dusting of snow once a year. Thankfully our bees survived, but many other beekeepers in the area say their hives did not.

A hard winter alone doesn’t doom the crops or animals here, but then we got one of the hottest, driest summers in recent memory. The result was lovely and comfortable for me, but not great for our neighbours; the lack of rain meant far less grass for the cows to eat, and far less grain to harvest for humans. As a farmer friend of mine told me the other day, they won’t have silage for the winter either.

Here in the bog, moreover, a hot, dry summer brings dangerous fires – not of trees or other above-ground vegetation, but of the ground itself. The very land below our feet is made of peat, which we and other Irish use for fuel, and which burns slow and hot like coal. I was talking with one of my neighbours about local history when our neighbour Jack drove by on his tractor, shouting, “The bog’s on fire again!” and sure enough, we saw the column of smoke in the distance. Thankfully, the bog was still damp enough that no fire spread very much, but any drier summers ahead could bring genuine catastrophe.  

Even now, in September, we have felt an unseasonal warmth, and everything is delayed. Butterflies cover our mint plants, and my bees are as busy as they were in May. I haven’t harvested any honey from them yet, instead letting them have their fill while they can.

The swallows have still not left the rich feeding grounds for their usual winter holidays in Africa. On the other hand, I am seeing more of the predatory birds that almost disappeared from Ireland, which I take as a good sign for the local ecology. The other day I was walking to the woodland when an explosion of small birds burst out of the trees, followed by a goshawk, expertly weaving through trees in pursuit.

The potential of willow

A living chair we made. 

This appeared in the Kildare Nationalist, last week. 

Every few years the owner of the land next to us clears away the brush, giving us a front-row seat to what biologists call succession. Bare ground is quickly covered with an army of sprouting weeds, the first being the fastest to grow, seed and die, and each new entry grows more slowly and lasts longer. A year or so into the succession the first trees appear, and pioneer trees in Ireland are willows.

Because they are the tree closest to a weed in behaviour, willows – also called sallies, silver-sticks or osiers -- make an amazing resource everywhere they occur, but such thirsty plants do especially well in our wet climate. They can survive an amazing range of conditions, grow so quickly that a new crop of branches up to two to three metres long can be harvested each year – and few trees have as many uses.

The bark of the white willow (Salix alba) can be boiled to form acetecylic acid, or aspirin. Their fast growth makes an excellent windbreak, and makes them particularly useful for pulling carbon from the atmosphere, repairing some of the damage of climate change. Their wood has multiple uses, and can clean up toxic waste. 

Basket-weavers preferred willow over all other plants – the word for willows, “vikker” in Old Norse, became our word “wicker." Its shoots are highly pliable when wet, lightweight and tough when dry, and grows so quickly that shoots two or three metres long can be harvested every year. Willow groves here were coppiced (cut at the base) or pollarded (cut higher up) from stumps that grew wider every year, growing new foliage and branches that kept the tree alive. The shoots --"withies" they were called in Ireland -- were harvested each spring around St. Bridget's Day, Feb 2, before the spring, from giant stumps that had never been full trees. 

Their roots spread rapidly under the surface of the soil, making them an ideal crop to halt erosion – an important issue in Ireland, where the dramatic felling of the island’s forests over two hundred years washed away much of the soil. Widespread planting of willows back then might have halted some of the erosion that so devastated areas like the Burren.

In addition, the most common willow variety in Ireland, Salix viminalis or “basket willow,” has been shown to be a hyper-accumulator of heavy metals. Many plants help “clean” the soil by soaking up disproportionate levels of normally toxic materials, either as a quirk of their metabolism or as a way of protecting themselves against predators by making themselves poisonous. Many plants soak up only a single toxin, others only a few; Viminalis, it turned out, soaked up a broad range, including lead, cadmium, mercury, chromium, zinc, fossil-fuel hydrocarbons, uranium, selenium, potassium ferro-cyanide and silver.

Willow can also be used for more mundane forms of waste: researcher Alastair McCracken of the Agri-Food and Biosciences Institute of Northern Ireland is conducting trials to see how willow can help clean up effluents like sewage sludge and farm manure.

Perhaps most importantly for us in Ireland, however, willow wood makes an excellent fuel, and since the trees can quickly be regrown, the fuel can be 100 per cent sustainable and zero-carbon. Basket weavers in Ireland harvested ten tonnes per acre per year here in wet Ireland, and in the dry Midwest 19th-century farmers still got nine tonnes per acre. If the wood is for fuel, though, McCracken recommends a three-year rotation, however, for the maximum yield.

Ireland stands out among European nations: no other country has more potential for biomass production, and no other uses it less. Ireland has the highest potential annual yield of wood in Europe according to the SEI. Yet Sweden, Germany, Finland, Austria, the UK and even dry Spain manufacture more than ten times the amount of biomass as we do in numbers, and while some of those countries have more area than we do, many also have more population; Britain is many times more crowded than Ireland, yet devotes more of its land to growing energy. Finland gets 18 per cent of its energy from biomass, according to a study by Sustainable Energy Ireland, in contrast with our 1.3 per cent.

In short, one of our commonest and most easily overlooked trees could be the key to solving many of our problems at once. 

Sources:

A few baskets I made.

Sustainable Energy Ireland, fact sheet: “What is Biomass?”

“Growing Willow for Energy,” by Alastair McCracken, Local Planet, 30 October 2006.

Phytoremediation. By McCutcheon & Schnoor. 2003, New Jersey, John Wiley & Sons, page 19.

“Enhancing Phytoextraction: The Effect of Chemical Soil Manipulation on Mobility, Plant Accumulation, and Leaching of Heavy Metals,” by Ulrich Schmidt. Journal of Environmental Quality 32:1939-1954 (2003).

“The potential for phytoremediation of iron cyanide complex by Willows,” by X.Z. Yu, P.H. Zhou and Y.M. Yang. Ecotoxicology 2006.