PERHAPS right now, on a frosty Tuesday morning, the punt standing at 1.03 sterling and the traffic heavy in D'Olier Street, Dublin, would be a good time ..." And so Michael Viney drops whatever he is doing and steps out to climb his neighbour mountain, looking as always for "some secret waiting to be caught off guard".
It was the urge to make such "good time" out of the fleeting "right now" that brought him and his wife, the writer Ethna Viney, to the Mayo coast from their city careers 20 years ago. As a result, a certain patch of the Earth's surface has been dwelled in and upon with an intensity and commitment that makes the distinction between outsider and local a matter of little importance.
The Viney's thorn hedged, slant and gullied oblong of ground is among the last few million acres of Europe to be dragged out of sleep by the globe's turning, but by then they have both been at work for hours, tapping away in their cyberscriptorium; theirs is a hermit life with electronic dispensations. And the outcome has been rich, with the recent publication of Ethna's work on female sexuality, and now that of the present book, distilled from the columns Michael has written for The Irish Times over the years, which in an unassuming way takes us deep into the question of our standing in the natural world.
Peregrine Disseminules is the resonant phrase Michael Viney lifts from science for organisms such as the tropical seed capsules he picks up on the shore, spread by ocean currents. The Vineys' fetching up in west Mayo is a result of the dissemination of ecological ideas and ideals in the Seventies, driven by a current from the cities and centres of learning to the peripheral and the wilderness.
"Vineys' Acre" was an experiment in living with less and living for more, and as Michael's post bag told him he was measuring his readers' dreams against reality. His weekly dispatches from the eco frontier instructed us in the pitfalls and peak experiences of growing every conceivable brassica, of milking goats and spraying for blight; sometimes we were glad we did not live within earshot of all that clatter and buzz of low impact technology. After a few years we thought we detected a tinge of disillusionment, weariness with repetitious physical effort, intellectual cramp. But dedication and perseverance paid off; the mechanics of survival fell into their rightful place, the writing caught a second and deeper breath.
A brush with despair followed over the degradation of his precious and fragile environment - the gold mining prospectors rummaging in the stream beds, the square miles of sitka spruce spreading their dead hand over the boglands, the hordes of useless, EU funded sheep reducing the hillsides to black mud. Even the great Atlantic storms that had been such a source of excitement and vigour seemed to have become mere symptoms of global warming; of Bill McKibbern's "death of nature". Throughout the years, an impressive body of knowledge of Ireland's natural history was compiled.
All these phases of mood and matter are represented in the present book, but its reordering of the past into a celebration of the turning of a single year has been done by one who has honed his writing and attuned his senses through many seasons. The accuracy of observation and economy of simile are exemplary: "The swans' reunions on the lake are noisy, demonstrative affairs, wings thrown wide, necks stretched and pumping, the calls almost wildly loud, like shouts in church." Viney's vision of the autumn migration of sea birds has the impetus of time's flow itself: "The young gannets out beyond the third wave, smiting the sea like flung axes, are local outriders of a great southern movement of sea birds: sheer waters, kittiwakes, fulmars, auks, streaming past Ireland by the hundred thousand. Just once, it is worth being in the right place at the right time: Annagh Head, say, on a September day when wind and rain are pressing the birds nearer the land. The images, however blurred, are of great numbers, implacable happenings. They include the watcher crouched among the sea pinks on the head land, awed and in tears.
Natural history and biology, Viney writes, have come to supply the fabric of this thought. "How odd it was to feel so much more rooted in nature once I had accepted the accident of human evolution, once I could visualise the planet working perfectly well - if not a great deal better - without us. It felt good to have that bit of Christian hubris out of the way. But the next step is to live with the supremacy of chance, the absence of purpose in the entire fabric of nature, and that is not so easy or comforting . . . I still feel the self regarding, totally human, demand to know what things are for'."
Well, "to end up in a book" is one famous answer to the definitively human question of what things are, for (while books, of course, are to end up in more books). Michael Viney's writing at its best could convince one that that is the best answer, however provisional, we are likely to get, this side of illusion.