The Difficulty with Difficult Things

When I look at the state of my hallway, muddy boots piled up, I would be forgiven if I thought that the planet I live on was a ball of dirt, not rock; that the rocks I see here about – that make my climber’s heart skip – are just like teeth or nails: appearing only here or there about the body of the place, but not the meat of it. Really the opposite is true, that the body is all tooth, nail, bone, hardness, the mud we live on, just a thin skin of dirty flesh.

If you take a trip over to the Aran islands, a couple of boney limestone lumps out at the boundary between Galway bay and the wild Atlantic, you’ll find it surpassingly green, for such a hard place as that. This was not by chance, but by design, dint of centuries of work, the islanders carrying up seaweed after every big storm – of which there are many, and much of – laying it out on the bare rock, layer upon layer, and encircling it with stone walls. 

Do this for a year or two, and you’ll find what doesn’t get washed away by the rain, the rain vital in removing the plant-killing salt, or blown back into the sea by the wind, a wind that also brings fresh seaweed, creates a thin mat of threadbare organic carpet. 

Life does not thrive on the West Coast easily, and so what life that does thrive, do so even in the hardest conditions, and so such life will flourish on whatever it finds, a thumbnail of dirt, a damp rock, zombie sea weed stain. Look at Tom Crean, one of the hardest men of his age, grown in the West coast village of Annascaul.

Measure that work of seaweed transplanting by the decade, and then a century, and the countless walls built to protect and retain that multi-generational investment in time, and you go from a few millimetres of organic matter to a couple of feet. 

To begin with you might be able to grow hardy weeds, that bloom fancy and wild in the summer, but cannot be eaten, but eventually, something edible will grow, and potatoes will sprout. Give it another hundred years, and you could even turn a calf into a cow.

I can see the Aran islands from this window, but on this side of the bay, the only limestone you’ll find will be in fancy garden walls, fancy, because on this side of the bay there’s only granite, the whole landscape, both above and below, awash with the stuff, one big glacial graveyard. 

Dig a hole anywhere, and beyond the pebbles and potato sized stones, ten percent of the soil you dig, you’ll hit a loaf sized rock within a foot radius. Dig out and within ten you’ll find a TV sides boulder, a car sized one within a hundred. When they build a house around here you tend to end up with both a house, and house sized pile of boulders, and many Irish house names translate into some variation around “lots of bloody stones. 

And so, material for building walls is easy to find, as long as granite is your stone of choice, hence why only posh people have limestone walls.

As an aside, frustratingly, although the granite is often immaculate, all boulders peak at sub climbing height, the only people who would find this a bouldering mecca, Munchkins, Ewoks or leprechauns. The only real climbing on this side of the bay is about an hour away, the longest rock climb in Ireland I’m told, only it’s not a buttress made of granite, but of quartz. Maybe once upon a time I made a wish to live in a place with endless rock, and as wishes often twist what the wisher wanted, this is where I ended up. 

I put my mind to building a wall a while back, to help hold back a border of mid that had bullied away a triple stack of concrete blocks. Initially, I liked the idea of making one out of railway sleepers, thought it would look fancy. But when I cast around my driveway and garden, strewn with kayaks, boats, toys and junk for both young and old, like a Steptoe junkyard, I realised that making one bit a bit better would only result in everything looking worse. I needed something more fitting. 

If sleepers were out, the obvious choice was to build a wall using what was at hand. Granite.

Luckily, like most houses round here, I am not short of rocks in my garden.

I do a lot of digging these days because digging is honest work, not like this. When people tell me I should just hire a digger, as one could do what I can in a week in ten minutes, I think they’ve missed the point. What I like most when digging, as if digging wasn’t enough, is hitting those rocks and boulders, hole long jams, that have to be dug out and trundled from one part of the garden to another. When I dig holes I do so half with a shovel, half with a crowbar, and no part of the process is ever easy. In fact, I used to get up at 5.30 am to work out, but now, I just get up and start digging and moving stones, a 50 kg boulder and an equal match for a body weight deadlift any day. 

I suppose rocks to the landscape gardener are like flour to the chef, in that you can do a lot with them, and just as I tend to always have at least 60kg of flour at all time (00 and heavy), just in case, I now also have a lot of rocks, including a few that would need some Stonehenge style engineering to move.

So granite it was, but how to build the wall? 

Most of the walls around, the walls that Americans seem to love taking photos of, are not so many walls, like the drystone variety, but more just a vertical and horizontal collection; not really walls at all, but just somewhere to put all the rocks. Each rock is balanced on the other, and although there must have been some great skill in it, perhaps each balanced on three points, not four - which would lead to wobble and insecurity - none of the walls would hold back the earth in my garden.

I could see then that I’d need to bind the stones together, but how? One thing I noticed was that concrete and cement did not fair well here about. Walls build with cement seemed to break up and collapse, probably due to the amount of rain we get, which is why the walls were built as they were, maybe even the gaps required to let the wind pass through. 

I wanted an option that could last a long time, or at least long enough that I’d not be around to explain to anyone why it had fallen apart. 

Reading up on the subject, and by reading I mean watching Youtube, I discovered that the reason five-hundred-year-old buildings were still standing, while Celtic Tiger builds were not so much, due in part to lime mortar, proof, if it was needed, that people in the past thought long term and multi-generational, not just until the money cleared in your account. 

It seemed that mortar made using lime was more elastic and breathed, which sounded good, but also took a long time to set, something I guess old stone masons thought was a good idea. 

But on buying a big sack of lime, I also discovered why concrete cement is far more popular: it’s pretty much foolproof, and you can get any building site skivvy or labourer to mix the stuff. Lime mortar or cement is not. 

The first attempt at building a wall did not go well, or the next, or the one after that, each being an experiment in how to make lime mortar that failed. It’s not that the section of the wall fell down or anything, only that it wasn’t anyway good.

Worse still was the fact that lime turned out to be dangerous stuff, it’s what you’d dispose of bodies in horror stories, or throw over dead Vietcong. When you worked with it you had to wear rubber gloves and safety glasses and keep it off your skin.

In search of lime lore, I dug deeper and found that making lime cement was not a skill, but an art, even dark magic. The secret of ‘the mix’ had been handed down from one generation to another, from father to son, and never fully disclosed to the future. Just as no one can fully recreate a Stradivarius, how it was made lost to time, so too is the perfect mix that held up the Pantheon for nearly two thousand years.

It seemed like world war I broke this chain of knowledge, a whole generation of craftsmen wiped out, much of that knowledge going with them, leaving future generations to just guess.

As for me, all I could work out was there was the lime itself, either power and mixed in a paste, then the right sort of aggregate, sand etc then the secret ingredient, brick dust, maybe something else, the blood of a virgin perhaps, volcanic ash, or the tears of a seahorse. 

Like making a perfect white sauce, the way to mastery and close-as-perfection tends to follow a path of failure and disaster, the key to some sort of fruit-full end, and half mastery, and more-than-incompetent, overcoming endless setbacks and hard disappointments and obvious-after-the-fact-mistakes. Each time you fail, you can either give up, or do an audit of why: too much of this, not enough of that, too fast, too slow, not enough care, or too much. But always a lack of understanding. 

Mastery, or sorts, is the aim, but the more you learn the less of a master you feel, as well as the more you wish to master, the less you can masterfully. I don’t fully believe the 20,000 hours to perfect skill, but it’s a good approximation (white source only requires about 20, while to be a three-star Michelin chef perhaps takes 50,000). 

The big things are easy to understand, two and half sand to one lime, but is it in that order, how long should you mix, how long do you leave it to rest, and does the rock need to be wet so it does not rope the mix of moisture? If you’re making bread, a loss of moisture when it’s raising is a problem and has to be avoided, but in pasta, it’s a vital step, otherwise, it’ll stick together, so what about lime?

Perhaps the answer to these questions just requires some little bit of extra thought and observation of cosmic sense, like when cooking unions, they sizzle because they’re full of water, and it’s when they stop sizzling if you’re listening carefully, that you know they’re done, and it’s not an invitation for more heat (without the water, they will burn).

I suppose difficulty brings its own reward, even when it’s impossible, where you don’t have enough time, or enough skill, dexterity, and brain power. Some things are not as hard as they might seem, while others can be impossible to all be the ablest to bend them to their will. Looking back, when I started writing, it was probably the impossible thing I could imagine, and still is. I could work out the big things myself, the stuff I didn’t know, like spelling and grammar, or at least understand that everything would always be imperfect and improper, but then there were the unknown unknowns. It took time and energy - and stubbiness to develop enough skill to understand those things. I would stare at the pages of a book, not at the words, but just the blocks of text, to try and work out how long should a paragraph be. I would try and formulate my own understanding of a semi-colon, as no one else seemed to be able to explain; seeing it like an actor breaking the third wall. How do you convince a reader to follow you from one thought to another, from one scene to the next, or to places unset, still undressed? After stringing a couple of million words together I noticed that it was less about the words or the subject, but more about the tempo, cadence, and flow. As writers, we tend to get bogged down in search of a great story, or arc, but really, it’s all just a tune played in someone else's head. 

I’ve not finished building my wall, in fact, I’ve stopped for the moment, and instead, I’m putting all my energy into lime, mixing different amounts with sand, and placing it in cups to discover the perfect mix. After each failure, when all I get is dust, neither lime, sand or cement, my wife would say, “why don’t you use instant cement?”, or “why don’t you pay someone to build a wall”. To me, and back to the flour, it’s like when someone eats your toast, made from homemade bread, and say’s it’s the best toast he’s ever made. When you explain it’s good because it was not steam-cooked in 40 minutes from preprepared wallpaper paste dough, but required a multi-stage process over two days, based on centuries of learning, and learnt and practised over months and years, they just ask how much it would costs. Nine times out of ten, when they tot up the time involved, the care, skill, ingredients, commitment, failures, the burnt bread, the dead bread, they judge perfection not worth the effort, that somehow, even when something is as close to perfection as you can get, the more something costs the less it’s worth.