Moving to an island

I heard an archival interview recently with a couple that moved from the city to one of the islands off the coast of Ireland decades ago, and were introduced to a very different world. All their neighbours, they discovered, lived in isolated self-sufficiency, taking care of their own gardens and animals, and few people used phones. Yet they had a powerful sense of community, helping each other out through the year and sharing whatever they had when a neighbour stopped by.

When they first moved there, they tried to send out invitations to a gathering, and found it took weeks; they had to walk to each house in turn, since no one used phones. At each house people would invite them in and insist they stay for dinner, and pile their arms full of whatever was ripe. At the time the rhubarb was ready, so they walked away with bushels of rhubarb from each house.

A tank of petrol lasted them months, since people had cars, but there was almost nothing to do with them.

Kim chee at home

Originally published in the Kildare Nationalist newspaper.

Few peoples on Earth are as devoted to their national dishes as Koreans are to kim chee. Few Irish have had this amazing dish, but few things have a richer or more powerful flavour, and it can be made easily at home with everyday ingredients. I don't feel compelled to stick reverently to their ingredients, and I've been able to adapt it to whatever is ready in the garden at the moment.

Kim chee can be best described as a kind of Asian sauerkraut, a spicy pickled cabbage with ginger, garlic and other spices. It’s made with the same process that creates dill pickles – the technical term is lacto-fermentation – using a salty brine to preserve the food and give it a tangy bite. It can keep for as long as a few months, but can be ready in as little as a week.

To make kim chee, you will need:

• A kilo of cabbage from your garden – Chinese cabbage or bok choi is the traditional choice for Koreans, but regular Irish cabbage will do just fine, or even leaves from other brassicas.
• 60 millilitres of salt.
• 15 millilitres of grated garlic – if you don’t have a garlic press or hand grater, just run it through the smallest holes of the cheese grater.
• Five millilitres of grated ginger
• 15 millilitres of chopped hot pepper
• 100 grams or so of chopped radishes
• 100 grams of scallions or chives

To start, chop the cabbage into quarters, remove the cores, and slice into strips about five centimetres wide. Mix the cabbage and the salt in a large bowl, and with your hands massage the salt into the cabbage for a few minutes. Some people like to use gloves for handling the salt again, especially if you have sensitive skin. Then find a plate smaller than the top of the bowl, and place it on the cabbage to keep it in the salt. You might want to put some jars on top – I used pickle jars evenly around the edges – to weigh it down. Leave it there for about two hours.

At the end of that time, the cabbage will be soft and sitting in a brine of its own juice and some salt. Take the cabbage out and drain in a colander, and clean the bowl to use again. Then you make the kim chee paste, mixing the grated garlic, grated ginger, and chopped pepper together in a bowl. Some recipes, I find, call for using flour to thicken the paste -- I've tried it with and without, and haven't found it to make much difference.

Some people put in a bit of sugar at this point, some a bit of soy sauce, some a bit of seafood flavour like fish sauce or oyster sauce. Chop up the radishes and scallions and add them to the mix.

Finally, mix the vegetables and paste with the cabbage, and massage them together as you did with the salt. There are hot peppers in there, so some people like to crack out the gloves again at this part. Pack the cabbage into a clean glass jar – I used a pickle jar – pressing down until the brine rises to just barely cover everything.

Leave a bit of space at the top, and seal the lid – not too tightly, though, in case gas needs to escape. Check every day or two to loosen the lid just a crack, to make sure it’s not going to explode, and then when the gas has escaped tighten it a little again. Let the mix stand for at least a week, and give it a try.

This recipe uses only minimal spice compared to the Korean original, but if it’s still too much, use less next time. The best thing about this recipe is that, when people here grow cabbages, they tend to use the head only and throw the outer leaves away – they are tough and would not be good to chew. Kim chee, though, can be made from some outer leaves of cabbages, and so less goes to waste.

The Postman

After Mass I talked with our postman, who lamented the changes he was seeing in Ireland.

“People used to gather together every night around here, and in the village, and now they’re all watching the telly,” he said. “It’s getting way too commercialised.” “With the older people I can do what I always used to do, and just open the door to their home and walk in.

‘Hello Paddy,’ I would say, and they’d say ‘Tom! How’re you keeping?’ I ask if they need anything from the store, so when I would bicycle to the houses around here I would bring some food or newspapers too.

We’re all going to be old someday ourselves, God willing, so it’s just respect.”

Why don’t you deliver the post by bicycle any more, I asked?

“Ah, they’re making me take a car,” he said. “And people get big deliveries these days, to a house full of stuff. Not the same as the old days. But the older people still greet me the same as always.”

Interview at C-Realm podcast

If you look at the little blogroll down the side of my web site, you'll notice that they seem an unusual mix. Some, like the Archdruid Report or the Automatic Earth, write detailed epistles on the future, examining what current trends mean to the world we or our children might see someday.

Others, like American Conservative, Imaginative Conservative, First Things or Front Porch Republic, are thoughtful and intelligent political publications. Still others, like Orion, contain some of the best writing on ecology.

Grit is a farming and homesteading magazine, Mother Earth News focuses on sustainable living, and I read Dragon's Tales just for some of the most entertaining new scientific papers. Some of them simply focus on simple living, one of the best kinds of activism around.

From all this, you can guess that I don't ally with people simply because they tick the same political or religious box that I do. I'm more interested in listening to people who try to understand some of the global problems we face, who are doing something to make their corner of the world better in some way, and who are of all backgrounds, countries, political bents and religions. I want to hear ideas I haven't heard before, and to build bridges with other people who understand that we're all in this together.

I also like listening to other people who do the same, and one podcast in particular does that consistently - the "C-Realm," which I have listened to for seven years. The show's host, KMO, features authors I've often enjoyed -- Charles Mann, John Michael Greer, James Howard Kunstler, Derrick Jensen and Dmitri Orlov -- and introduced me to many more. An episode might feature a podcaster like Jordan Harbinger or Frank Aragonna, a blogger like Chad Mulligan of the HipCrime Vocab, an economist like Ilargi -- and all those examples are from the last six months. KMO demonstrates that one man with a microphone and a phone can create more thought-provoking shows than most radio networks.

Now, he's featuring an interview with me, over the article I wrote for the American Conservative about the riots in my old neighbourhood of Ferguson, Missouri. Check it out.

Photo: Ferguson protests, courtesy of Wikipedia.

New article at Mother Earth News

Most of you reading this are familiar with author John Michael Greer, whose influence I've cited and who I spent time with in London earlier this year. Most of you also know that I write a regular column for Mother Earth News, one of the best resources for homesteading and traditional crafts.

Now you can get both in one, for Mother Earth News has generously published my review of JMG's science fiction novel Star's Reach, a portrayal of an America transformed by centuries of declining energy and changing weather. The magazine prefers that I not duplicate content, so I'll just excerpt the first paragraphs:

Just for a moment, picture the future. Not your future - not this year’s harvest or your daughter’s graduation -- but The Future.

You remember The Future; you’ve been seeing it all your life. If you were a teenager in the 1990s you remember the flying cars and giant holograms of Back to the Future II, set in the impossibly distant 2015. If you were a kid in the 1960s you probably remember the talking robots and interstellar travel of Lost in Space, set in the faraway 1990s. Similar-looking sci-fi fantasies date back to the 1800s, always looking about the same, and always just a few decades away from whenever Now was.

These examples are fiction, of course, but they reflected what serious pundits predicted in publications like Life or Popular Mechanics – one day, they promised, we would all live in domed cities, swallow pills for food and take moon vacations. For generations of boys it gave science fiction an almost religious gravity; we weren’t likely to grow up to be actual cowboys or pirates, but for a time it seemed like we would all be astronauts. Real technology got fancier, of course, so now we download music files instead of spinning records, and drive cars that … um … have more cup-holders than cars used to. The really important changes never happened, though; no androids, no jetpacks, nothing. We never got to Mars, or even went back to the moon; there’s just not much there to see. For generations that future was always right around the corner, and we’re beginning to realise that it always will be.

As more people grew disillusioned with hi-tech utopias – either because they didn’t think we were going to achieve it, or because they didn’t want it – science fiction offered the other extreme of total apocalypse. It’s also a fantasy, in its own way: a war, disease or some other catastrophe wipes out everyone but you and your friends, you get everyone’s stuff, and everyone wishes they had listened to you. Also, just like utopia, doomsday was going to happen any minute now, and never quite got here.  

 Check out the rest here.

Local pub

Not far from us, in Newtownmoneenalunagh. That's not a typo.

Published at First Things

Good news, everyone; First Things, a superb Christian magazine that I've been reading for years (note the blogroll on the side there), has just published a piece I wrote about folk music through the generations. It's behind a paywall, but not expensive to buy. Check it out.

Days of the forges

My first memory is of the forge; I don’t know what age. It’s a memory filled with sounds and smells, the sounds of men’s voices and the clatter of hooves coming down the street, another horse on its way, people warning me to stay out of the way and to watch the hind legs, of course. It was like a painting all crowded with people.

I remember as a child I turned the light on for my father -- I had to use a stick to reach the switch, I was so small. I must have been holding this iron for my father in the yard, and he struck before I removed my hand from the place, and he hit my thumb with the sledgehammer, and all that was troubling me was that I might curse – I remember the trouble he went to stop me cursing at the time.

You can imagine there were a lot of carts at the time, and those wheels had metal bands, so blacksmiths were kept in business until a few decades ago.

Every anvil must have its own musical tone when struck, and you could tell at a distance whose it was. I remember this anvil, and it was different than any before or since.

--  Remembrances of a blacksmithing apprentice on Radio Telefis Eireann, June 2013.

Farm work

"My father was one man and ten men. He was the local vet here. He was the butcher. He was a storyteller. He was a farmer. And everything that was to be done in the village, he was involved in it. And he was the slaughterman.

There were many here who killed pigs, but my father was the best – every time he stuck a pig, the heart rent in two halves when you opened it. Then he’d go to Scotland in June, do the little bit of the harvest we had to do. Come home at Christmas with a few pounds. He might buy a few cows or pigs and sell them again in March for the price of going over again to Scotland. I began going there myself, to help with the harvest, when I was eleven. 

You got the boat on the north wall of Dublin – a boat full of cattle. Eighteen hours at sea, in a hold I cannot describe. When you got to Scotland the cattle were let off, and when the boat went to Clyde and we were let off, not much different than the cattle.

You had to keep a steady pace picking the potatoes; you put a 13-year-old out at this day and age at a 30-yards, you think they'd be able to?

At the end of the day, when you were done with the harvest, you had to make your own bed. I mean you actually built one – you got a tick, filled it with straw, and packed it between vegetable boxes."

- Remembrances of Irish growing up in the mid-20th century, as recorded in an interview by Radio Telefis Eireann documentary "Leaving Belmullet," 2005. Photo used with permission of Irish History Links

Men of the island

"There was a hat which was left on some kind of post or other. At the time, the men of Achill would have worn a cap, but when going into town … he would put on this formal hat and then leave it again when he returned"

"Paul Henry, who visited the island in 1912, said that 'the habitations of the islanders are very singular. Their houses were of rude stones rounded by the tide, procured from the beach, un-cemented.'"

"They are rounded at the gables and roofed with fern, heath and shingles, fastened with straw bands. In the village of Dua, consisting of about 40 cabins, there is not a single chimney. Some of the wealthier graziers, however, have an odd custom of residing in such houses, or in houses of a still more simple construction, only in the summer months, when the season for fishing is on, and their cattle are brought down to the coast to feed on the young herbage. These hovels they call Booley houses."

"At one point Henry reported watching a race of two men around the island, for the right to be the first to ask a certain woman to marry them, 'which was by no means uncommon.'"

-- From interviews on the Radio Telefis Eireann documentary "Leave Your Hat at the Sound," broadcast 1974. Photo of the men of Aran island, courtesy of Irishhistorylinks.com.