A sea gull drifted in from the ocean to look us over. Watching it, we saw a raven circling even slower, in a higher orbit, and watching the raven, trying to focus against the sun, we saw a still-higher shape, an eagle, all but motionless it was so high, as if loch, hills, and birds all circled around the brown fixed center of its wings.
The afternoon was largely an expansion of the morning, with more trout, more sun, and the funny footnote of lambs coming down to the edge of the loch to look us over. On our way back to the lodge, on a whim, we detoured off on a trail to what are called the Fairy Lochs—three interconnected lochs set high on a miniature plateau.
“Hear it?” Celeste said, as we paused to catch our breaths.
I glanced at my watch. “Four o’clock. Right on schedule.”
There were no jokes about cuckoos this time—we kept on climbing. The lochs, once we got there, reminded me of the remote ponds we have back in New England, minus the trees. Celeste stretched out on the heather to nap while I made my way around the perimeter of each one, trying a few casts, exploring, not really caring if I caught fish or not.
As I completed my circuit and made my way back I noticed something scattered in the heather and by it partially obscured: bright shiny pieces of metal. Some of them were small and curled like shavings, but some were ruler-sized, and one piece was as long as my arm and violently bent.
What I was looking at was the scattered wreckage of an army transport that had crashed on its way back to the States in June of 1945. We got the story later from Colin. The plane had been full of returning GIs, and it had hit against the plateau’s summit during a storm, killing all thirty aboard. A band of local farmers and ghillies had climbed through the snow and gotten to the bodies first; a shred of brown fabric had been their first clue, and then there was more of it, until it was as if they were following a deliberately laid trail of torn uniforms.
It’s a sad and eerie sight, that unstainable silver metal. It’s American, but the touch is unmistakably Highland—the bitter under the sweet, the farewell that is tragic, the ghosts amid lochans meant for fairies, fishermen, and trout.
I can catch wild one-pound trout for a long time without getting bored, but after another day on the lochs we decided to take a break from the fishing in order to make a literary pilgrimage to a place I had wanted to see since I was a boy: Camusfearna, the remote coastal home made famous by Gavin Maxwell in his 1960 best-seller about otters, Ring of Bright Water.
Maxwell is all but forgotten in America, I suppose, but he’s still in print in Britain, and thirty years ago his books were as popular as Joy Adamson’s Born Free series about Elsa and her cubs. It was a time of dawning environmental consciousness, an awakening to the fact we were exterminating so many species, and at some level people probably wanted to be told the animals forgave us for this—that lions would lie beside our cots at night in perfect contentment; that otters, for all our sins, bore us no grudge.
Maxwell was a lyrical writer, and reading his books as a child I was even more enchanted with his descriptions of the lonely Highland setting of Camusfearna than I was by the otters. An old sea-weathered house set on a beach where no one could bother you, with nothing to do all day but the chores of running the place, a spot of beachcombing, then long, slow evenings filled with books? It was the kind of place Holden Caulfield was looking for; it was the kind of place I was looking for, even at twelve, and the magic of his evocation settled so deeply it became at least partially responsible for who I turned out to be.
Camusfearna wasn’t its real name, but a protective alias. “This is from no desire to create mystery,” Maxwell wrote, “but because identification in print would seem in some sense a sacrifice, a betrayal of its remoteness and isolation, as if by doing so I were to bring nearer its enemies of industry and urban life. Camusfearna, I have called it, the Bay of the Alders.”
Maxwell could have had no way of knowing, writing those lines, how immensely popular his book was to become—and how many thousands of readers would take it into their heads not only to discover where Camusfearna was located, but to visit it in person. He was dogged by sightseers for the next eight years; there is no law of trespass in Scotland, and anyone who happened along had to be put up with. By the time he came to write the third book in the Camusfearna trilogy, Raven Seek Thy Brother, the disguise hardly seemed worth the effort. “It will be obvious to any interested reader that Camusfearna is Sandaig, by Sandaig Lighthouse, on the mainland of Scotland some five miles south of Glenelg village.”
And five miles south of Glenelg village is where we were driving, visors down to keep the sun from our eyes, Maxwell’s book open on the dashboard like a compass pointing the way. There over the cliff on our right was a sand-fringed promontory jutting out into the Sound of Sleat—Sandaig Lighthouse, we decided—and a little farther up the road stood a simple green cottage that was boarded up and empty.
“This must be the Macleods’ house,” I said, slowing down to park.
“The who?” Celeste asked.
“The family who lived here when Maxwell did. He was always writing about them. They were his support system. No, more than that. They were his link to the human race.”
The next part should have been easy, but wasn’t. We knew where Sandaig Lighthouse was—we had the cottage at our backs—but that still left a large space in between with nothing to point the way. Since Maxwell’s day the bare, bracken-covered cliff has grown over with Sitka and larch, and the forest is high and thick enough to obscure the views in every direction.
There were some overgrown woods roads, nothing more. We took the one that pointed most directly toward the ocean, and almost immediately came upon our next clue: a burn, a narrow, primrose-lined burn that dropped out of sight in the direction of the coast.
Anyone who’s read Maxwell remembers All Na Fearna, the Alder burn—how important it was to the life of Camusfearna, both as a source of drinking water and as a playground for the otters Edal and Mij in Ring of Bright Water he describes balancing his way down it when he first came here to live.
“Presently the burn became narrower, and afforded no footholds on its steep banks, then it tilted sharply seaward between rock walls, and below me I could hear the roar of a high waterfall. I climbed out from the ravine, and found myself on a bluff of heather and red bracken looking down upon the sea and upon Camusfearna.”
This was the fastest way down then, but the waterfall part made me hesitate—despite the drought, the burn was high with snowmelt from nearby Ben Sgriol—and so we decided to try and find an alternate route. I won’t list all our false starts and disappointed backtrackings, other than to say that finally, just when we were about to give up, we found something all but miraculous scratched there in the dirt beneath our feet: an arrow pointing toward a vague break in the Sitka near the cliff’s edge.
“Shall we try it?” Celeste asked.
“Someone must have drawn it for their friends to follow,” I said. Then, shrugging: “Sure, why not?”
The gap in the Sitka grew larger, we came upon some poles carrying a single strand of wire, the path widened and dipped, and then suddenly there we were on the edge of the cliff staring down at the scene that had greeted Maxwell the morning of his first glorious descent.
The landscape and seascape that lay spread below me was of such beauty that I had no room for it all at once; my eyes flickered from the house to the islands, from the white sands to the flat green pasture round the croft, from the wheeling gulls to the pale satin sea and on to the snow-tipped Cuillins of Skye in the distance. . . . Immediately below me the steep hillside of heather and ochre mounting grasses fell to a broad green field, almost an island, for the burn flanked it at the right and then curved round seaward in a glittering horseshoe. The sea took up where the burn left off, and its foreshore formed the whole frontage of the field, running up nearest to me in a bay of rocks and sand. At the edge of this bay, a stone’s throw from the sea on one side and the burn on the ot
her, the house of Camusfearna stood unfenced in green grass.
Staring down at this my mind raced with the frantic regauging that comes when you finally see a place in person you’ve fallen in love with through books. There below us was a grassy meadow waving in the breeze, a corner of sea that was almost tropic in its turquoise, the bright, pebbly curve of burn that suggested Maxwell’s title—all these, and not just flat as they come off the page, but round and splashy and colored, with the rolling bass note of incoming breakers and the sandier hiss of their retreat. Beyond the burn were the ridges of the miniature islands, and beyond these, repeating their anticlines with more emphasis, the first blue mountains of Skye.
It was just as Maxwell described—with the exception of the house. On January 20, 1968, it burned to the ground, and the ruins were later bulldozed over, so that except for a small memorial marking the spot where Maxwell’s ashes were spread when he died the next year, there is nothing left of it whatsoever, not even its foundation.
We climbed the rest of the way down to the grass, instinctively lowering our voices, not so much out of respect, but at the pure shattering beauty of the spot. Meadow, beach, ocean, burn. Here in front of us were perfect specimens of each, as if nature had decided to show exactly what she could do with each form in the briefest possible compass, and then display them beneath a sun and sky that were perfect, too.
Knowing nothing of Maxwell, coming here quite by chance, you would still sense something bittersweet in this scene, breathtaking as it is. Simply put, it’s hard to look at all this and not want in some way to want it. No, not want it. Want never to leave—to have the ability to open one’s eyes each morning on exactly this landscape, and not just for an afternoon, not just for a summer or even a lifetime, but forever.
It’s too much to want of a place—if nothing else, Maxwell’s life here was evidence of this. His books, for all their delight, read like an endless shopping list of misfortune. Lawsuits, accidents, sinkings, divorce, illness, the killing of Mijibal, his first otter, more accidents, more illness, more sinkings—not without reason, Maxwell ended up believing he was cursed.
These calamities have an unintended effect, as depressing as they are—they reinforce his picture of Camusfearna as sanctuary, a preserve surrounded by danger on every side. Even at twelve I responded to this, and it’s clear, the modern world being what it is, this note gave the book much of its appeal. “Whatever you’re going to do in the future,” a reader wrote him, “please never say that the Camusfearna of Ring of Bright Water never was. Say that it’s gone, if you like, but not that you lied. I couldn’t take that, because it was the only evidence I had that Paradise existed somewhere.”
Well, Maxwell did in effect say all this—that in the end life was too much for him, and even the love of otters couldn’t pull him through. There can’t be too many examples of a writer creating a dream in so many hearts and then taking such pains to shatter it, but perhaps Maxwell can only be blamed for not shattering it correctly—for not taking pains to explain that Camusfearna, seen on an afternoon like this one, was so perfect it made you all but sob at the limitations of mortality.
We didn’t sob. We stared at all this, felt these things, then went down to the beach to take a closer look. It’s to the left of where the house was located, curving inward for a longer distance than I had pictured. The breeze was just strong enough to add manes to the waves lazing in through the turquoise—again, the effect was tropical. Celeste took off her shoes and waded across the burn’s mouth to the first miniature island; an old boat was cast up and neglected there on the rocks, undoubtedly one of Maxwell’s shipwrecked fleet, though her name had long since been weathered off the stern.
We spent an hour or more beyond the burn, bending down to examine the wild roses, picking up pieces of shell and brightly colored pebbles, turning over the wooden fish boxes that had drifted ashore (in Maxwell’s time, they had been the chief source of Camusfearna’s furniture). When the tide turned, we retraced our footsteps back across the burn. There was an English couple sitting in the grass beside Maxwell’s stone; the man was reading a paperback edition of Ring of Bright Water. We talked for a while. No, he had never heard of the book before, not until coming up to Scotland. Yes, it was good to look up from the page and see illustrations, as it were, of what he was reading.
To the rear of the meadow, tucked in a fold of the cliff, is the waterfall and the basin that served as Camusfearna’s swimming hole, not just for its human inhabitants, but the otters as well. It’s high and serene and rocky, so that resting on the ferns by its edge, smelling the wild garlic, it’s hard to remember you’re not deep in mountains but only a Frisbee toss from the sea.
We plunked our toes into the frigid water, then pulled them quickly back out. Sitting there we could summon up a happier Camusfearna, the haven where Maxwell brought his otters to let them roam free.
“She rejoiced in the waves,” he says, writing of Edal, his second otter.
She would hurl herself straight as an arrow right into the great roaring gray wall of an oncoming breaker and go clean through it as if it had neither weight nor momentum; she would swim far out to sea through wave after wave until the black dot of her head was lost among the distant white manes, and more than once I thought that some wild urge to seek new land had dizzied her and that she would go on swimming west in the Sea of the Hebrides and that I should not see her again.
Eventually, with all the disasters that befell Camusfearna and its owner, Edal had to be kept locked up in the house. In Raven Seek Thy Brother, Maxwell describes the gradual reestablishment of their trust, and how they were at last able to resume much of their old life together . . . a life that was destroyed when, after so many new beginnings, the house burned and Edal with it. She is buried beside the burn underneath a rowan tree; on the flat top of the rocky monument is cut the epitaph Edal, the otter of Ring of Bright Water, 1958–68. Whatever joy she gave to you, give back to nature.
On the weathered metal beside these words we found earlier visitors had left their small tributes—a shell, a twist of flower, a small blue feather shed by a bird. Celeste walked over to the beach, found a stone that was white and perfectly oval, then—tapping the other gifts gently aside to make room—added its brightness to Edal’s collection.
Maxwell wasn’t the only one we were reading on the hills. There was John Inglis Hall’s Fishing a Highland Stream, about the Truim, Robin Ade’s Fisher in the Hills, about the burns and lochans of Galloway, and, with special enjoyment, the novels of a writer who was famous in Scotland yet all but unknown in the states, Neil Gunn. Read his Blood Hunt and you’ll see what a talented novelist could do with this landscape—a landscape where people have enough space between them that they stand out as men and women should stand out, craggy and individual and proud.
Between reading these, driving past salmon rivers and sea trout streams we wouldn’t have time for, hearing stories in the pubs about the fabulous lochs in Sutherland and the Orkneys, we were storing up resolutions about where we would fish on our next trip. As for this one, there were only two days left now before our plane left Prestwick—just enough time to take care of what for me was some very important unfinished business.
It didn’t concern trout this time, but mountains—one mountain in particular. On my first trip to Scotland, nine years before, traveling mainly by bus and foot, I had splurged one morning, rented a car in Inverness, and driven northwestward toward the coast. I ended up in Ullapool around three—it was November and the shops and hotels were shuttered closed. I found a chips shop down by the harbor, and nursed a cup of coffee while I watched a rusty trawler unload its catch. Finishing, I decided to drive a bit farther on, look the scenery over, then turn back toward Inverness.
I hadn’t gone far when I saw a man beside the road with his thumb stuck out. Ordinarily, I’m wary of picking up hitchhikers, but in this kind of emptiness it seemed a moral imperative to stop.
“How far you going?” I
asked, rolling down the window.
The man was already opening the passenger door, sliding himself in. “Not far,” he said, or something like it. “Oh, just up the road a way.”
He was an angular, ruddy-faced man in his twenties, dressed in a brown duffle coat patched with tape. His “just up the road” turned out to be twenty miles along a one-track road through the grandest hill scenery I had ever seen in my life—grandest, and with the sun going down, the road getting twistier, loneliest. It turned out he was a mason working in a village called Achiltibuie on the coast facing the Summer Islands, a small chain of the Inner Hebrides. In the usual Highland pattern, the government was moving everyone off these islands into the equivalent of council houses on the mainland—houses he was involved with building.
“What does Achiltibuie mean?” I asked him.
“The place where the fair-haired boy lives,” he answered.
I nodded. “Does he live there still?”
It was a throwaway line, but its effect was as if I had just stuck my finger in his ribs and started twisting. He laughed so hard he toppled sideways against the car door. For minutes he laughed; he would recover himself, take a deep breath, remember what I’d said, then start off laughing again, his whole body wracked with spasms. For all I know they speak of my reply in Achiltibuie to this day as the wittiest thing ever said there; “Aye, he was a grand comedian, that Yank,” someone will say, shaking his head in nostalgic admiration.
Despite the communication gap of his Gallic swallowings and my New Yorkese, we were old buddies by the time we made it to the village. I stayed long enough for a mug of whiskey, then started back along the road far faster than I’d driven up it, trying to reach pavement before the light disappeared.
A River Trilogy Page 28
