Round the corner, out of sight, I text my sister: ‘At Dad’s. Just chucked all that food we brought, trying not to boak.’ Later, I confess, I shouted at him: ‘Dad, what are we to do?’ He snapped back, ‘Just leave me to my own devices.’
On the Friday, two friends arrive to collect me. We’re going north for a long weekend. They are both older than me, retired, and skilled and competent hillwalkers. I think they’re glamorous. One of their chief hill-sports is to receive the slightly patronising comments of men, then turn the conversation to reveal that they have both done all the Munros, and even climbed Himalayan peaks. Both were widowed quite young, for very different reasons.
Into the car go boots, ice axe, walking poles, and myself bearing another small dish of mashed potato.
‘Can we stop at my father’s, so I can nip in?’
‘Of course!’ they say. One of the two recently lost her own mother, who had been very elderly and confused.
* * *
* * *
Forests and peatbogs and abrupt snow-shining mountains. Buzzards on tilting telegraph poles. Passing places. Snow and deer creeping down to the roadside, because it was February, still winter. We have hopes of climbing Ben Loyal. We stay with friends in their cottage, where a peat-fired Rayburn warmed the wood-panelled rooms.
In the evening, the talk ranges over land ownership and politics and life-choices. Housing, or getting round to thinking about it. How and where it’s best to live, now they were retired. What was affordable. If you were able to make choices. We all know people who are now in their seventies, still with parents alive. People who will never know life without a living parent until they are elderly themselves.
‘We should live together in a commune,’ someone suggests. Yes, we should.
The forecast is not great, but we go anyway, for a look-see. In a deserted farmyard we gear up, and from there begin walking to the hill over land which is boggy, reedy, heathery. The hill is clear of cloud, its complex snowy summits bright against cold blue sky. Though not a Munro, the hill looks high, rising alone from the moor. Its summits come and go, out of the cloud.
But the sky soon darkens and a squall drives down the glen. The three of us fan out, hunched, battered on our right shoulders by sleet, each picking our own way among bog-pools, thinking our own thoughts. None of us likes chatterboxes on the hill. We enjoy the freedom of our own interiority. The squall passes, we gather to cross a river by a ford. Then the land climbs steeply and we follow a burn up toward a low ridge. It’s heavy going and the snow-field above looks like it might be wind-honed, icy. Soon the sky darkens again and a fresh squall drives in.
Now we’re glancing at each other, laughingly. Who will speak first?
We descend back to the car, peel off gaiters and coats and muddy boots, enjoying ourselves.
I trust these women deeply, who are older than me. As we drive back down to the Kyles of Tongue, I feel free to voice what I’d been thinking about of late, out of this phase of my life. I tell them I feel as if I have a window of opportunity, but it is closing fast. No, rather I feel it has barely opened at all, because I’m being delivered straight from childcare to eldercare, without passing ‘Go.’ And the day job, of course.
But this is my chance, or should be. My own health is good, the kids are grown. Soon they might even be making their own money. My husband is older than me and he’s fine for now, rich with his own interests and happy to wave me off on adventures; but give it a few more years...
Life has been good to us.
‘Chance for what?’ they ask.
‘I can’t actually say. But sometimes I think about going on a gap year, backpacking. Or sailing south, somehow, through the tropics. Somewhere out of Scotland! Get a sense of the majesty of the world.’
‘Do it!’ they urge. ‘Before your joints give out!’
I’m not sure I can imagine it. Anything can happen, as we all know. Life can turn on a sixpence. The walking axe I’d brought was my mother’s. She’d used it before the stroke. She was sixty. Had she ever felt free? She was the only child of a single parent who needed a lot of help.
We congratulate ourselves several times on making the right decision, in retreating from the hill.
‘Imagine the headlines,’ the others say. “Pensioners rescued from mountain blizzard!”’
‘“Old ladies”!’
‘Speak for yourselves,’ say I.
* * *
* * *
I nip round to Dad’s the next day. ‘Well, did you eat your tatties?’
‘Aye.’
‘Good. You know, there’s a company that delivers frozen meals ... small portions. You could give that a try, too.’
* * *
* * *
Two months passed, to the day. The late snow was gone, the daffodils were in bloom and Dad was in his chair where he often sat, next to the table with the chair turned toward the window so he could see the railway through a gap between houses. He watched the trains pass, noted their numbers. He had a dram at his elbow and also on the table lay his notes and letters in his neat handwriting. It was the morning. A kindly neighbour had called us to say she was concerned because his milk was still on the step.
The milk was on the step, and oh, we all agreed, wasn’t that the best way? Everyone, everyone said it. That’s the way to do it. Isn’t that the best way? In your own chair at home. Who wouldn’t want that? Och, he even got to finish his whisky.
Voice of the Wood
SO YOU’VE REALLY gone and done it this time you are lost in the wood how did that happen? The crazed Scots pines camped all around and blaeberries beneath and bracken shrivelled because it’s October and you stand hearing nothing, the non-sound of one leaf dropping to join its siblings on the ground.
You stand still. Behind each tree, more trees. Above: glimpses of bone-white sky.
You stand. The Scots pines arrange their great limbs with no heed of you. They are weighty but also like breath on a winter morning, but it’s not winter yet. Pines, and also birches, cold yellows aflame. The young birches are fragile, as though the first wind would send all their leaves fainting at once, but there is no wind.
How lost is lost?
You are not lost. You followed your map. There is a path – there is always a path through the wood; there has been since the dawn of time. The trees step aside to make one. It’s a ghost trail, an animal trail maybe for deer or badgers. There are no animals, it’s daytime. No wolves for sure and no bears.
You sense the woods miss the bears; they ought to be here huffing around the old trunks and berry-shrubs, but there’s no huffing now. Wolves, though – the wood is old enough to remember them, just.
But you’re standing in the wood, stock-still and listening and your hearing has sharpened. There fall the tiny tin-tack calls of birds foraging in the treetops, the race of water in a burn.
And now there is a moth. She appears fluttering in front of you. If this was a fairy tale she might want you to follow her, but she passes and will flatten her grey wings against the grey trunk of a tree. She has never been seen before and never will again, that was it – her sole appearance in our human world, and now it’s done.
What are you doing here anyway, in the woods? Ah, well, that is the question. You wanted to think about all the horror. The everyday news – the guns, the wars, the children’s tears down ashy faces, the chainsaws, the sea creatures tangled in plastic...
No, not to think about it exactly but consider what to do with the weight of it all, the knowing ... how to cope with it scroll down flick the page unplug the telly send a few quid. Really? Or take a long walk in the wood ’cause you are the lucky one and can do that, you can just shut up shop and go let the wood embrace you.
And here you are.
The trees all around, they commune with each other you can sense it, a knowingness between them
. They’ve been rooted here centuries already and seen it all.
A plane is passing, up in the bone-white sky, above the branches and going where? Maybe over the shrinking icecap.
Concentrate.
Green ferns in the groin of an oak. Green moss cloaking a stone. Voice of a crow. Voice of a chiding wren. A smirr of rain too soft to possess a voice. Voice of the shrew, the black slug. Voice of the forest ... Did you hear something move out the corner of your eye? The same moth come back? Or another leaf falling? You are not lost, just melodramatic. The path is at your feet, see? Now carry on.
Acknowledgements
Many wonderful people made this book, giving of their expertise and knowledge, allowing me to tag along. Some have become friends, the best outcome.
Andrew Kitchener and Fraser Hunter of National Museums Scotland allowed me into the wondrous stores. Jenny Downes of Aberdeen University Museum introduced me to the Nunallaq excavation project, and in particular to Rick Knecht and Melia Knecht. I owe particular thanks to the generosity and enthusiasm of Rick and Melia. I'm grateful to Charlotta Hilderdall, and all the Nunallaq archaeologists, to Erika Larsen and of course to the people of Quinhagak, whether they be named in the book or not.
For those interested, the site blog is here:
https://nunalleq.wordpress.com/about/
On Orkney, special thanks are due to Hazel Moore and Graeme Wilson of EASE Archaeology, Westray, and all the Links of Noltland diggers, whether named or not. Some images of the site can be found here:
http://linksofnoltland.co.uk/index.html
Sandy and William McEwen of West Manse were delightful hosts. I’m grateful to Nina and Jason Wilson, and their lovely cows. In Kirkwall, I plundered the expertise of Caroline Wickham Jones. In Stromness, there is Calum Morrison (but no more Cognac, Calum, thank you). I’m grateful to Sean Mayne Smith. And to Liz Duff and Marjory Stevens; indeed, all the climbers and ‘baggers’ – we go back a long way. To Freya Butler, Shona Swanson, Fergus Jamie, Duncan Butler, my love.
Yet again, Nat Jansz shared her deeply insightful thoughts throughout. I’m grateful to her and Mark Ellingham, and to Jenny Brown for her clear thinking and unfailing enthusiasm. Peter Dyer’s book-cover designs are special. Creative Scotland and the Leverhulme Trust awarded funding for travel, without which the book could not have been written.
Since I began this book, my children have grown and gone out into the world, and my dear dad has passed away. So we go on. Surfacing is dedicated to Phil Butler, for his constancy.
Photo credits
I’m grateful to the following photographers and agencies:
Quinhagak images (here, here, here, here, here, and here) © Erika Larsen (www.erikalarsenphoto.com).
Reindeer Cave (here) © Mike Brockhurst (www.walkingenglishman.com).
Scoresby’s boat (here) from The Life of William Scoresby by Robert Edmund Scoresby-Jackson.
Inuit bird purse (here): photo kindly supplied by Arbuthnot Museum, Peterhead, and courtesy of Aberdeenshire Council.
Eagle (here) © iStock/Getty Images.
Westray Wife (here) © Carole Bumford.
Author on site (here), Links of Noltland (here) © Graeme Wilson.
Family photo (here), author’s notebook (here), wind horse stamp (here): author’s collection.
Novice monk with author (here), old woman with wind chimes (here), Xiahe Fair (here) © Sean Mayne Smith.
Ben Loyal (here) © iStock/Getty Images.
Black Wood of Rannoch (here) © David Robertson/Alamy Stock Photo.
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Surfacing Page 18
