Smells Like POTEEN Spirit

The prodigal son returns! ….To the Internet. Man, I haven’t been doing a very good job keeping you updated on things, have I? One downside of actually being involved in fun stuff is that I don’t have the chance to sit around bored for hours every evening. This, of course, means that I don’t have as much opportunity to write blog posts! Make sense? Of course it does! Now, have some pictures of the Hillmans’ farm so you know what things are like here.

The house.

The entrance to the polytunnel and the fowl area.

Most of the work I’ve been doing has been clearing away the land. Reclaiming it from nettles, brambles, thistles, grass, what have you. Though I complained about weeding in the past, this is different. Instead of being on my hands and knees pulling roots – making two feet of progress in an afternoon – I’m doing, well, everything but that. The nettles are all four-ish feet tall and strong enough that if I yank near the top, the connecting bit of root will usually come out with it. Brambles and thistles come down easy as pie with hedge clippers or the mini-saw that I’ve been using as a pseudo-machete (when, you know, I’m not using it as a saw). And once I get the big stuff, we bring the lawnmower over and take down everything that’s below two feet tall. It’s incredibly satisfying to look at a freshly-cleared patch of land the size of my backyard in Troy that, the day before, was impossible to walk through.

Cleared orchard and the fire burning the leftovers. All the "grass" you see used to be a nettle/bramble patch about five feet high.

On the subject of complaining, though, I want to make something clear. I showed Dan and Rebecca my blog, and they said they liked it, but that they’d have to be extra nice to me. I protested that I didn’t write mean things about people, and they said “yeah, but you can read between the lines”. Now, I know I’ve been gushing about what a good experience I’m having on this particular WWOOF hookup, but make no bones about it: I had a great time at the Van Dams’ place in May. I had a period where I was unhappy, but I chalk that up to a combination of depression, homesickness, and culture shock. All in all, I was treated very well, got to eat great fresh food, had a lovely time playing with the kids and hanging out with Mark and Debbie when they invited me along to something. It was just very…different from the way things are going here. Different WWOOFing methods work for different people, I understand that – I simply recognize now that the kind of WWOOFing that Dan and Rebecca offer is more in line with the way I work than the Van Dams’ method. Nothing wrong with that! It was a learning experience, too. Some people, I’m sure, would absolutely love the independence I was offered in May, would have taken more advantage of all that free alone time than I did. I just learned that solitude wasn’t for me.

So, Mark and Debbie, if you happen to read this, try not to be offended by the fact that I seem more enthusiastic about my time here than at your place. I really did have a great time with you guys! It’s just that this particular style of WWOOFing is more for me. Nothing personal, I promise – just the way my social preferences work, I guess.

Anyway. On to the pun explanation!

Poteen (pronounced puh-CHEEN) is a “traditional” and “highly alcoholic” Irish moonshine made from potatoes in home pot stills. The internet tells me it ranges from 60% to 95% ABV. It is illegal – at least, the unlicensed homemade stuff is. A few companies have recently been allowed to produce and sell it. Anyway, I tried some! The Hillmans don’t make it (with good reason) but I was offered some of the homemade variety by an unnamed third party at a gathering they brought me to. Woo! You can tell the stuff is strong, but there’s a subtle sweetness and just a touch of flavor that makes it more palatable than a neutral spirit like vodka. Let’s say it’s the equivalent of the color “cream” to vodka’s “pure white”.

There’s been so much that I’ve been involved with since I got here that I can’t really organize my thoughts on everything. However, there are some highlights:

Johnny Marky (the bald dude I mentioned in an earlier post) had a huge party. Apparently I was slightly wrong when I said he was “very Irish”; he’s actually from Northern Ireland originally. So, when the Orange March was going on in the North, Johnny’s (Catholic) extended family all came down to crash in tents on his property for a few days, and that period was kicked off with this big party. The Northerners (Norties, as I heard Dan call them) were a very fun and boisterous lot. I was given food off the barbeque, then informed that I would have to muck out the latrine to work it off. Those kidders!

Learners’ session at The Swan Lake. The bald dude is Johnny, who I just mentioned. Rebecca is looking away from the camera.

The Swan Lake is a pub not terribly far from the Hillmans’ place, and only a stone’s throw from the home of their friends Natalia and Willie. So, it’s only natural that we all went to the learners’ session, where people of all skill levels were invited to perform. The pub is super weird. It’s in the same building as an undertaker’s, and I learned that the two businesses are owned by the same guy. It’s also in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by farmland and isolated farming homes, but on the inside it looks like a 70s or 80s nightclub, and could be the epitome of the word “swanky”. The room we were performing in could easily have included somebody doing coke in the corner – he wouldn’t look out of place.

The music was great, though. The aforementioned Johnny was there, as was his friend Tony, and they both played lots of Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, and…well, non-Irish trad stuff, which was a nice change. There was a guy named Sam, about six and a half feet tall, with long reddish hair and a wildly long goatee. He looked kind of like an Irish Viking, but he later turned out to be English. He’d brought a guitar, a bouzouki, and a lute, and said that he’d “traveled light” that night. His girlfriend/wife also had an enormous collection of flutes/pipes/whistles, and the two of them made an excellent (if renfest-esque) team. There was also Michael.

The coolest dude.

Michael is an extremely soft-spoken older guy. He’s got an impossible-to-identify accent (I later learned he’s from Munich originally, and now spends six months a year here in Ireland and six in Germany) on the occasions when he does speak up. The highlight, though, is his music. He plays a “coffin fiddle”, a homemade instrument about the size of a violin, but with six strings and played held strings-forward like a cello. When he sings, his voice has tons of character; he’s got an odd speak-sing style, wherein it seems like he has a singing range of four notes or so, outside of which he’s either growling or shrieking. It’s very cool, though, because everyone at the pub clearly respects him a lot: people actually invite/encourage him to play a solo song (something I’ve not seen offered to others), the place goes dead silent when he starts singing, and he gets raucous applause when he finishes.

Heck, you know what? Here’s a recording, so you know just what I mean about his weird (but great) singing style.

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=C5Z2HVIE

Tim on the left with a squeezebox, Dan on the right with a piano accordion.

Tim is another traveler. He comes from Austin, TX and is staying with Natalia and Willie. He came over a few months ago for an artist’s residency and now he’s sticking around Leitrim to enjoy the Joe Mooney music thing (which is coming soon and I don’t entirely know how to describe it, but you’ll hear about it eventually). He plays a mean squeezebox, knows tons of musicians (like Glenn Danzig and the guys from Fugazi), and has tattoos of all manner (including an awesomely weird one on his elbow which, I’m pretty sure, is a charicature of his own head done in the style of Japanese Oni demons [ like so: http://www.tattoosymbol.com/gallery/oni-big.jpg ] ).

More on the Hillmans’ friends. Natalia is also pretty cool. She’s from the Ukraine originally, but moved to the States young and lived in Oregon and Pittsburgh (and attended Carnegie Mellon, AND had my uncle Jim as a professor – twice!). She plays the mandolin and makes very neat zines. I haven’t spoken much with her husband Willie, but he seems like a good dude. He’s from Dublin, I think, and wears lots of flannel and metal band t-shirts. He also plays the washtub bass, which is so cool I don't even need to describe it. Apparently the two of them have a small publishing company and record label. Neat! Also they have cats with the greatest names I have ever heard: Chairman Meow and Pussolini.

They invited me and the Hillman clan to join them at the Arigna Mining Experience. This is a guided tour of one of Ireland’s big coal mines: the first one to open, and the last one to close (1990). The coolest thing by far is that the tours are run by former miners, so they’re interesting characters and they know everything there is to know about what went on in there. Our guy was fifteen years old when he started at the mine, and made the equivalent of €1200 a week shoveling coal into carts and running them out of the mine. Not a bad gig, even though it was “fierce hard work”. Another good tidbit: the miners who were actually picking away at the seams of coal had to lie down on their sides in order to do so, which often meant lying in an inch or two of water. This meant that they had to keep working hard in order not to get freezing cold from the soaked clothes. On their lunch breaks, they only rested for 10-15 minutes and had “cold tea and sangwiches. They was good sangwiches, though.”

Things that aren’t long enough to justify their own paragraphs:

-I made mead, which is fermenting happily as we speak.

-Eating a duck that you plucked yourself is extremely satisfying. Also, delicious.

-I’ve never spent time around horses before. I’m not seeing them daily (maybe once or twice a week) but they’re fascinating animals.

-I got a haircut from Dan’s mom, who’s visiting. It may be the best haircut I’ve gotten in quite some time.

-I think I mentioned that Rebecca gave me a camera that would have gone to Freecycle otherwise. It’s a Canon EOS 300, which is a pretty dang nice film camera, and has an even nicer telephoto zoom lens. I only had to pay €12 for new batteries, and it appears to be working like a charm! Not a bad deal at all. And definitely an upgrade from my $12 garage sale held-together-with-Bondo camera.

-The Hillmans have a blog of their own, detailing life on a smallholding. It’s actually a really neat read: http://sallygardens.typepad.com/sallygardens/

Anyway, I think that’s good for now. Talk to you all soon!