Reunion: A Search for Ancestors

by Littrell, Ryan

  The plane started moving, then turned. It slowed down for a few seconds, and then picked up speed again and headed down the runway. I knew I had no right to expect that everyone would be able to make it to Scotland for this, but I was just wishing we could have had that one moment, when I see the two of them grin at each other right before I say: Grandma, this is Penny, and Penny, this is my grandma.

  CHAPTER 4

  THE CHURCH,

  ON TIME

  In Edinburgh, the gray stones aren’t just in the houses, but in the streets, too, and the buildings date from the Middle Ages to the 18th century. The roads are narrow and a little hilly, and so they turn and wind around. Every time you glance up, there’s the medieval Edinburgh Castle, built into the hollow of an extinct volcano that looms over everything, distant in the air, always looking down at you. It was early July, with flowers at almost every address, bright reds and blues and yellows up against stone.

  Penny and I were on our way to a pub, where we were going to meet up with my family before dinner. We spotted the pub from across the street, and as we walked toward it, smiling Americans came out to give us a welcome hug. Here were Grandma and Grandpa’s three children—Mom, Aunt Donna and Uncle Del—along with their spouses and children. And here was Grandma’s younger sister, Peggy, with her husband Dave and son Jay.

  The next thing I knew, there was a beer in front of me, and Penny and I were hearing about some of the things we’d missed so far—the explorations around the city, the coziness of their apartments, how warmly and politely people had treated them. Mom told me about hikes all over town, hikes that happened despite hunger and tired legs, because you can’t let yourself miss anything.

  The next day was for last-minute errands and little expeditions around the city. Listening to traditional Irish and Scottish music at a pub that night, I was relieved that this first full day had been low-key, because tomorrow looked to be lively: We’d have the protests to contend with.

  That’s right, the protests. Penny and I had managed to schedule our wedding weekend during the biggest protest gatherings Edinburgh had ever seen. Don’t worry—my best man would make sure to bring it up in his toast. The Group of Eight (G8) summit was about to take place near Edinburgh, so the attendees would include the leaders of the richest, most powerful countries in the world.

  And so, the next day, there were between 175,000 and 250,000 people marching through the center of the city, protesting against what they saw as the developed world’s unfair treatment of the developing world. The “Make Poverty History” campaign was popular in Scotland and throughout the U.K., and grandmothers from church groups were walking alongside college students and families and politicians, blowing whistles and carrying signs.

  We all spent the day maneuvering through the marching lines, but it wasn’t until the following night, wedding eve, that everyone came together. This was our rehearsal dinner, and the mingling was fun enough that when we had to leave, it didn’t seem like we’d been there very long. But sleep was something we all needed, because tomorrow we’d have the protests to contend with.

  That’s right, the protests. Again.

  The wedding was scheduled to take place on the same day that thousands of anti-capitalists, not satisfied with the ordinary protest march from two days before, were contemplating being a tad more confrontational. The vast majority of them weren’t Scottish, but were coming in from all over Europe. The police were going to be out in full force, and the newspapers speculated about masked troublemakers roving about. And there was reason to speculate: A few years earlier, at a G8 summit in Genoa, Italy, riots and protests and police had left hundreds of people injured.

  I was still asleep in a nearby neighborhood when Penny opened her eyes, took a look out the morning window at Edinburgh Castle, and watched my sister Brittany’s face light up when she awoke. The streets were still quiet as the hairdressers and makeup artists did their fabulous work, but that fabulous work took a little longer than expected, and as noon approached it became clear that Penny and her bridesmaids were falling behind The Schedule.

  Soon they were standing in front of our hotel in the city center, and a few cabs pulled up, but Penny’s best friend Liz had to run upstairs to get something. Penny told the others to go ahead, and they said OK—Penny, Liz and Brittany would be in another cab behind them, and they’d all meet at the reception site, out in the country, where they’d get dressed, and then cars would pick them up and take them to the church.

  But just after the cabs pulled away, the reports started coming in. The protesters were coming out earlier than expected, and they were headed in this direction. Penny, Liz and Brittany waited as a line formed behind them, but no cabs were in sight, and even if there had been, no one was sure that they’d be able to get through the barricades that were now up and down the block. Twenty, thirty minutes went by. The Schedule loomed.

  Suddenly, police were sprinting toward them from the left, followed by journalists with cameras, and the police were yelling, “If you’re not part of this, get out now!” Then Penny looked right and saw protesters turning the corner and heading toward her. The police intercepted them and held them off with their shields, but the protesters kept trying to push their way through, yelling and chanting and whistling. The three main newspapers, on the following day, would carry front-page images with headlines that read:

  THE NIGHTMARE COMES TRUE

  LIVE HATE: After the Love-In, the Mob Attacks

  Batons Drawn in the Battle of Princes Street

  For the first time, Penny let herself imagine that things just might not work out. Actually, now that she thought about it, there was a pretty good chance that things weren’t going to work out. Her face showed it, and Liz looked at her and said, “Everything’s going to be fine.”

  But the loud line of protesters and police was heaving closer and closer to them, and after a few more moments, Penny allowed herself to say it: “We might not get there in time.”

  “No,” Liz said. “No. We will. Because we have to.”

  Then a man in plainclothes wearing an earpiece walked up and asked if they were all right. The bellhop told him, “Today’s this lady’s wedding day, and I can’t get her out of the city!” The man introduced himself as Paul, and said he was a private security officer, working that day for a company across the street. He said he’d be able to help, and got on his phone. The protesters and police were coming closer.

  After a few moments, Paul’s coworker Neil ran up and said, “I think we’ve got a car for them,” and a few seconds later, a little hatchback arrived. Their coworker Andrew stepped out of the car. He’d be the driver for the afternoon.

  “Sorry, ma’am,” Paul said. “This is the best we could find.”

  “Paul,” Penny responded, “I’d take this car if you had to strap me to the top of it.”

  She thanked the three of them again and again, and offered them money for their trouble, but they wouldn’t accept it. “You just need to make it to your wedding,” Paul said, and he tapped the top of the car as it started moving down the street.

  At each police barricade, Andrew pointed toward Penny and told the policeman, “She’s going to be late for her wedding,” and each time the policeman smiled and lifted the barricade so they could get by. And soon they were speeding out of the city, passing every car and laughing. They were there within twenty minutes, and Penny insisted that Andrew, Paul and Neil come to the wedding.

  The rest of us, though, were back in the city still. Sitting in our rented bus in Charlotte Square, wearing suits and dresses. Bait, in other words.

  Everyone was here except for Namjoo, husband of Penny’s cousin Armita, who was one of the bridesmaids. Armita had been with the rest of the bridal party, getting made up, and had climbed into one of those cabs just before the protesters showed up. Namjoo was supposed to be here by now, but his ph
one wasn’t working, so I had no way of contacting him.

  But if I could have called him, he would have had this to say:

  Ryan, Namjoo here. You should just go without me, because I don’t know if I’m going to make it. After Armita joined up with Penny and the rest of the bridesmaids, I had an hour or two to spare, so I thought about all the places in the center of Edinburgh where I could go, and I settled on a place where I knew the protesters wouldn’t bother me.

  Starbucks.

  So I’m standing in line, waiting to order my drink, and the next thing I know, there’s this commotion behind me. The employees were locking the front door. And a few seconds later, all these protesters were banging on the door. But they didn’t try to break in. They stood there like they were besieging us. And they weren’t wearing black masks. Strangest thing: They were dressed like clowns, and they were doing cartwheels and handstands.

  Anyway, we all stayed inside, hoping they’d move on to some other store, but they stayed. Then the manager told us there was a side exit that the protesters maybe didn’t know about, and he took us there. He opened the door slowly, saw no clowns, and let us take off.

  I’m already late for the bus in Charlotte Square, so I’m just going to take a train out to Linlithgow. No need to worry about me.

  But I, Ryan, sitting in that bus in Charlotte Square, only knew that Namjoo wasn’t here yet. We were supposed to leave forty minutes ago. If I gave the bus driver the go-ahead, I’d be The Guy Who Lost Namjoo, but if I waited any longer, I’d be The Guy Who Had to Cancel His Own Wedding.

  With the permission of Penny’s family, I went for the go-ahead option, and as it turned out, we were able to make it out of the city without any trouble: The protesters had moved on to another neighborhood. Within twenty minutes, we could see the 18th century townhouses of Linlithgow on both sides. Together, we all walked up a cobblestoned hill to the church, with its spire and pocked stones.

  The church stood next to the ruins of Linlithgow Palace, and had been built over the course of the 15th and early 16th centuries for the Scottish royal family. Here, in 1513, King James IV was praying when a spirit appeared before him and warned him not to invade England, but he ordered an invasion anyway, and was killed at the Battle of Flodden Field. Here, Mary, Queen of Scots was baptized in 1542, after being born in the palace. Here, Namjoo strolled up with time to spare, fresh from the train station.

  And soon, standing in a passageway off to the side of the altar, I could hear the bagpipe as Penny arrived outside. Standing at the altar, I watched them come down the aisle toward me, the ones who felt like home—my mom and stepdad, my brothers and my sister, and then Penny and her mom, who took my hand and placed it into her daughter’s.

  A few hours later, while we were all finishing up dessert, someone came over to tell Penny we had a few visitors, and in walked Andrew, Paul, and Neil. Penny and I got up and announced who they were, and there was a long round of applause from everyone.

  We invited the three of them to stay, but no, they had to go. And as they turned to leave, Paul shook my hand and said, “You’d better take good care of her—she’s got family in Scotland now.”

  CHAPTER 5

  LIKE A GHOST

  I woke up the next morning in a cottage down the road from where we’d had the reception, with the odd sensation of a ring on my finger. Penny and I stepped outside onto the back porch, overlooking a little loch. Warm sunshine, and I yawned. The only other sound was the quacking of ducks every once in a while, and a breeze. No more protesters, no more wedding planning.

  Just two suitcases and the Scottish Highlands.

  A train took us out of Edinburgh, west to Glasgow, and then slowly north, along Loch Lomond and up to the small town of Crianlarich, then west again, through Glen Orchy and the Pass of Brander. Now the signs were in English and Gaelic. Houses had lochs for front yards and mountains for back yards. The sky was dark blue, and mists were settling down over the mountains, which sloped down to meet beneath our feet, like they were cradling us as we made our way through them.

  It was nearly dark when we pulled into Oban, a port town on the west coast, and saw the gray waves between us and the Isle of Kerrera, out on the horizon. We found George, a taxi driver who was willing to take us out to our bed and breakfast—an old farmhouse, surrounded by sheep, on the other side of a loch and in the hills.

  Over the next few days, our muscles worked out their knots, until they felt massaged, drowsy. Our minds slowed down. Walking up and down the hills, and sitting by the loch, and talking over long breakfasts and dinners, we got to know our new pace. My five o’clock shadow became stubble and then a thin beard.

  And all around was the chance, like a ghost, that an ancestor had walked here. This far west, this far north, some MacDonalds must have lived. Maybe right here, beneath the ruins of Dunollie Castle, my ancestors had a home, with this cold, loch water almost at their feet. Maybe right here, in the yard of this medieval priory, one of them was buried in an unmarked grave, or perhaps the stone lost its inscription centuries ago. Perhaps one of them knew this heather mountain, the one Penny and I climbed and sat atop as we watched rain come down across the green hills in the distance. Every corner hid a hint, like someone else just might be lurking.

  Soon we drove northwest to the village of Mallaig, where we inched our rental car onto a ferry to the Isle of Skye, one of the old MacDonald strongholds. Mist drizzled around us every once in a while as we stood up on deck. The water we were cutting through was clear and blue-gray and cold, and seagulls followed above us, coasting and veering. We could see the island in the distance, parts of it hidden behind a few wisps of fog, getting closer, light green and dark green and wooded.

  Once ashore, we drove down the road to our bed and breakfast, which used to be a hunting lodge for the chiefs of the MacDonalds of Sleat. Now it’s the home of Godfrey MacDonald, High Chief of Clan Donald, and his wife Lady Claire. Since I wasn’t named MacDonald, I could go in quietly, without anybody thinking of me as some long lost cousin. But if a few ancestral clues fell into my lap, I wouldn’t exactly protest. I was almost working undercover.

  No kilted chief was at the door—he and Lady Claire were away—but his genealogy was hanging on the wall nearby. Penny and I looked both ways before reading over it, like we were about to shoplift. It was big, framed, written in red and black calligraphy. There was our host at the bottom: Godfrey James MacDonald, 8th Lord MacDonald. Our eyes followed the links upward, from son to father to grandfather. No room was given for women, except as wives. We traced the names back, from the 19th century to the 18th to the 17th: Godfrey William MacDonald, Alexander MacDonald, Donald Breac MacDonald, chiefs of the MacDonalds of Sleat. The 16th century chiefs of Sleat were here, too, and the medieval Lords of the Isles.

  Moving further up the chart, we saw the name of Angus Og, the man who fought alongside King Robert the Bruce at the Battle of Bannockburn in 1314. And here was Angus Og’s grandfather Donald, the source of the clan’s name, and the man from whom all MacDonalds are said to descend. At the top of the chart, sitting alone above the rest, was Donald’s grandfather Somerled, who came from the medieval, Viking-Gaelic culture of the islands of the Hebrides, and who founded the MacDonald dynasty in the 12th century by conquest. Twenty-five generations connected him to our host, Lord Godfrey.

  As we ate dinner that night, some of those ancestors seemed to be looking at us. Their portraits, mostly from the 18th and 19th centuries, took up the walls in the dining room. A man with brown hair stood, knowingly, in his military uniform. Ladies and gentlemen wore white, powdered wigs. In a gilded frame were two young boys wearing tartan, sons of the chief, posing with their golf clubs.

  Walking around the house and the grounds, it wasn’t difficult to imagine those people being here. The chiefs and their guests must have walked through this door, right here, when returning f
rom a hunt. Over there, by that beach, must have been where ships came in. The sitting room was right for coffee and hot tea in the afternoons. The library was right for thumbing through histories of Clan Donald. Even now, in the summer, it was cool enough in the evenings for a fire in the fireplace, and for whiskey before dinner.

  But I still hadn’t forgotten Grandma’s you-don’t-fool-me look. I still didn’t see how my family was entitled to this red, blue and green tartan. We didn’t grow up surrounded by Gaelic names, and our history lessons were about Abraham Lincoln rather than James IV, and our landscapes had always been watered by ponds and lakes rather than lochs and firths. We were spinning a story about ourselves that wasn’t necessarily true. Most of us felt what seemed to be a genuine connection to this particular Highland clan, but I wouldn’t let myself forget how easy it is to believe something is real, not because it is, but because we want it to be, because we want to be part of the club.

  Then again, distant places aren’t as distant as they used to be. With globalization, once obscure locales and ways of life have become more and more real, and the exotic has inched closer to the day-to-day. Our nationality seems less like a given and more like just one possibility among others. If any of us can find a new religion, if any of us can move away for good, then why can’t we have a bond to the lands of our ancestors?

  The problem is that those far off lands don’t speak so much to our lives as to the lives of our ancestors. My family might wear the MacDonald tartan, but if we were dropped down into the 16th century Highlands, when a tartan signaled a deeply held allegiance, we’d be seen as aliens, with our tans and our body language and our attitudes. Even if your ancestors left more recently, how can you help but be embedded in your own time and place? How can you leap outside of yourself?

  These questions were on the mind of Paul Basu, author of Highland Homecomings, who talked to people from the U.S., Canada, Australia and elsewhere who’d journeyed to the Scottish Highlands so that they could be in the places where their ancestors had lived. They were trekking to an ancestor’s deserted cottage, or to a village where their great-great-grandparents lived before emigrating across the ocean, or to an ancient graveyard of their clan. And again and again, they told Basu that this wasn’t an ordinary vacation—it wasn’t a stranger’s glimpse at a new place. One of them wrote: “I am not, and never will be, a tourist in Scotland.”