A Year Walk

We return in 2020 with a piece from our books editor Marcel Krueger, on a walk in Ireland to reflect on the year gone and what is to come:

Setting sail
From a crushed rooftop
Fathoms deep
Shallow as a raindrop
- Down, The Tides

On one of my last days in Ireland in 2019 I set out for the mountains. I park my car in the car park of the Lumpers Pub in Ravensdale north of Dundalk, in the foothills of the Cooley Mountains, and set out on the Táin Way, the 40-kilometer looped trail across the Carlingford peninsula. But I'm not trying to do the whole loop in a day, or even half of it. This will be my final walk in Ireland this year, before I travel to the continent to celebrate Christmas with my family in Germany and France, and I want to walk up one of the hills that I've always bypassed on previous walks here, the 370-metre The Castle. It had been raining all night, but when I set out there's only a low-hanging, dirty-grey overcast sky and a few raindrops coming down. I walk up the small road that leads from the car park to the trailhead, past suburban houses decorated with Santas and sleighs and yapping dogs in the garden.

I first encountered the Swedish folk tradition of Årsgång, or year walk, playing an atmospheric game with the same title on my phone. Typically a year walk had to be done on Christmas or New Year’s Eve, during the night. Almost all regional variations involve having to spend a full day inside a dark room, not allowed to talk to anyone or eat or drink. At the stroke of midnight one should head for church. If the year walker managed to follow certain instructions and to solve particular challenges (such as potential encounters with supernatural beings), they would catch glimpses of what would happen the following year. I always tried to do a proper year walk myself on New Year's Eve but have failed so far, and so I guess my short excursion into the Cooleys today will have to do as substitute. It will give me ample time to reflect on both past and future, and encounter enough things in my life that might represent a challenge. 

I travelled a lot in 2019, maybe too much. I drank many beers and ate cheap airport food and put on a good few kilos, and I can feel it as I huff and puff up the steep trail that leads to the forest halfway up the hill. But due to the weather I have the trail almost for myself, and after half an hour I settle into my own rhythm and am promptly rewarded with a fine view past Drumisnagh and Trumpet Hill west of me towards Dundalk Bay and Dundalk town itself. The cloud cover is still a good hundred meters out and there is the sun glittering on the Irish Sea, so I can make out the spidery Dundalk pile lighthouse from 1853 in the bay, the curve of land at Soldier's Point on the Navvy Bank, one of my favourite locations in town, and St. Helena's Park just around from where I live. It feels good to have the sea and the mountains close. 

I'm writing professionally (as in somebody paying me to publish my words on paper or the internet) for ten years now, but 2019 was the first time I felt that my writing might make a tiny impact. People have started booking me and my words as part of academic conferences, readings and workshops, and it seems, unbelievable for self-taught history nerd like myself, that my knowledge is worth something, that I somehow can assist others in sharpening their understanding of the world. I published a magazine featuring many amazing writers living on the island of Ireland, gave a reading at the Leipzig book fair for the first time in my life, spent five months as the official writer-in-residence of wonderful Olsztyn in northern Poland, gave talks and readings in crumbling Prussian palaces from the 17th century, in a 16th-century water castle in Wroclaw, an academy set up for cultural dialogue between the Baltic states just 10 kilometres south of the Danish border, Northern Ireland's best independent bookshop, the modern library in the city of Gelsenkirchen, and in the birthplace of legendary German writer Wolfgang Koeppen in the lovely seaside town of Greifswald. It was a good year.

Like always when out walking alone, I feel a certain dread. I tried, but I can never fully and innocently seem to enjoy scenery just for itself - my imagination is always in the way. I see hidden gathering places of Neonazis in rural Brandenburg, skeletons of previous wanderers in the gorges of Crete where sheep have died, phantoms in the Irish mist. I enjoy these moments of childish dread up to a point, but then on the other hand it seems I have read too much W.G. Sebald to look at a nice place without seeing tragedy and horror. 

It is the same today. The higher I get, the more the rain clouds close in and the dark patches of conifer forest on both sides of the sandy trail seem ominous and menacing. Maybe, because of this dread that is the constant companion of many walks, it also feels as if the scales will soon need to tilt, that my personal triumphs need to be balanced by tragedy. In recent years I have the feeling that more and more misery heaped upon the world by old white men, and I'm often at loss at what to do about this. I go out and as often as possible tell my small stories about my grandmother and my granduncle and how Fascism and totalitarianism ruined their lives and killed them, and I try to write as much as possible against the rising tide of ignorance and hate that encroaches on us all, but I don't know if that is enough anymore. I often feel like the proverbial 'small chubby Berliner who tries to stop a catastrophe with a typewriter', as Erich Kästner called my favourite Weimar Berlin writer Kurt Tucholsky, a dedicated anti-fascist, once. I'm a small chubby bloke on a hill in Ireland and equally helpless. 

My dismal contemplations are interrupted by a jolly group of hikers in all colours of the Goretex range coming down the hill towards me, who must have made their way from the other side of the peninsula and covered 25 kilometres this morning - compared to my measly ten up and down a hill. They cheerfully wish me good morning and ramble on, maybe towards a late breakfast or an early pint. The scales tilt up again.

The friendliness of the locals also reminds me of the beauty of living in a small, working-class town like Dundalk; that it does not ask anything of you, but if you immerse yourself in the community it provides a lot, a lot more than other, more urban or 'sexier' places. And maybe through my travels this year this has become even clearer to me. The place I live in has all I need. I have a house with a fireplace and a cat and a room for all my books and plastic skulls and pictures of rusting ships, a lovely independent bookshop down the road of which the owner is a friend of mine (everyone needs bookseller and librarian friends is all I'm saying), all the pubs in the world, the harbour and the sea two streets down the road and a peninsula with a mountainous spine to walk in. And it provides you with a place to come back to and be yourself.    

I emerge from the treeline, cross a fence and enter the clouds. The wind is strong here, just 300 meters above the sea, and I have to put on gloves and set up my hood. I can only see a few meters ahead, the trail, the heather and the bog all shrouded in grey. I stomp on, trying to find the parting in the ways that will lead me up to the summit of The Castle. As if foreseeing the bad weather today, it is indicated by a series of stakes leading up the hill. But to me, even though I know that these have been put there to aid walkers, they seem more ominous and eery, Irish totem poles. 

The destination of my year walk is not a church, but a wide grassy summit with a small cairn. I look around and see nothing but brown-green bog a few feet in each direction and hear nothing but the wind screaming into my face and battering my waterproofs. I look right into it, in the direction of the unseen sea, and once more realise that I like living in the North as it reminds me of mortality. 

In January 2019, across Carlingford Lough in the Mourne Moutains, just a few meters higher then I am now, Robbie Robinson and Sean Byrne die. In separate accidents, both lose their way due to clouds and fog and are killed by exposure in the ice-cold winds howling down the mountains. And there it is, another reminder that death comes for all of us, and because of this we all should work together, for abstract concepts like peace and love and keeping the planet alive, but also for keeping the border in Ireland open and the communities in the north and the south linked to each other, and to help people in need anywhere we come across them, on the streets of Dublin or the beaches of Greece. In my life, and especially 2019, I made the experience that unity is always better than fragmentation, that solidarity is always better than ostracism. But standing on the hill in Ireland alone, looking into the wind, it seems that many people are terrorized and flattened by trivialities, and eaten up by nothing with the hope to take their cheap wealth and gadgets with them when they die, to paraphrase Charles Bukowski.   

Before I walk back, down the hill to my car and back to the old crooked house in Dundalk where I have to pack my bag for my travels, I lean into to the wind and look down the surprisingly steep seaward flank of The Castle, which drops away into nothingness. The clouds obscure everything here, both the bottom of the valley and the future.  

***

Marcel Krueger is the Books Editor of Elsewhere: A Journal of Place. His writing has been published in numerous places both online and in print, and he is the author of Babushka’s Journey: The Dark Road to Stalin’s Wartime Camps (I.B. Taurus, 2017) and the upcoming Iceland: A Literary Guide for Travellers (I.B. Taurus, 2020). You’ll find him on twitter here.