Getting to Grey Owl

by Kurt Caswell

  “Tia,” I said.

  “If you want, maybe we can have a drink later,” she said, bobbing her head from side to side.

  “Dude,” Scott told me, as we drank a bottle of wine at our hostel, “if you don’t call that number tonight, you’re fuckin’ crazy.”

  “Inverness,” I mused. “This is really a great town. The best place we’ve been yet!”

  “Call that number right now.”

  “But I’m not sure I heard what I heard. C’mon. Who says that?”

  “That’s what she said, all right. And she was hot, hot, like Africa hot.”

  “Yeah, but c’mon. There’s something else. I mean, who says that?”

  “Obviously, she does,” Scott said. He filled the glasses, and we drank. “She’s probably a guy,” he said, and we laughed at that.

  Then something soft and easy leaked in, and there was a quiet moment between us as we looked across the rooftops onto the city. Scott said, “Yeah, but you have to remember that if she is a guy, this guy is a person too.”

  “What?”

  “You know, if you get into a situation, I mean, and you reach down there and find out she’s a guy. I mean, she’s a human being too. Or he is. And you have to treat her like a person, not like some freak.”

  “She’s not a guy,” I said. “Plus, who says I’ll be doing any reaching?”

  “C’mon,” Scott said. “‘In my bed’? You’ll be doing some reaching. C’mon. This bottle is empty. Let’s go get a beer.”

  So out we went onto the town and, conveniently, we walked right by Bella Italia. And there she was standing out in front smoking a cigarette.

  This was a curious position to be in. Was I going to cross the street and make good on the offer that Tia, this perfect stranger in a foreign town, had made me? I am not a whore. I’m a respectable professional guy. I’m a divorced man who might have become a father but won’t. I’m good counsel when my friends come knocking. I’m domestic; I bake bread, brew beer, mend fences and socks, keep a tidy house, fix leaky faucets, and pull the weeds that come up. I’m a spiritual seeker of sorts. I’m a scholar, or so I think. I’m a writer. I’m an avid outdoorsman. I keep myself physically and mentally and emotionally and spiritually fit. But am I not also a man? And doesn’t a man have needs? Desires? Aspirations of the body? Doesn’t a woman? And so isn’t it natural for two creatures to spot each other across the watering hole, display their intentions, and steal away to meet among the secret trees? Was I going over there? Of course I was.

  “OK, I’m going over there.”

  “All right. I’m going back to hostel,” Scott said. “Don’t forget we have an early train tomorrow. Have fun. Be careful. Use protection.” “Hello,” Tia said. “You don’t smoke, do you?”

  “No,” I said. “That’s right.”

  “Thought not. I have to wait here for a few minutes until my manager lets me go. But you want to get a drink, right?”

  “That sounds good.”

  Minutes later we crossed the street and walked into Johnny Foxes, an Irish pub on the frontage of River Ness. Yes, that’s right, the river that flows from the famous Loch Ness through Inverness and six miles down to Moray Firth. You know that there is no Loch Ness monster, right? But apparently the Firth is swimming with bottlenose dolphins.

  She ordered a Bailey’s on ice and ordered me a Guinness, both good Irish icons, and we sat in a booth near the window.

  “You ever been to the festival in Edinburgh?” she asked.

  “No,” I said. “I keep hearing about it. Perhaps I should go. But I’m going to miss it, I think. We’ll be gone before it starts up.”

  “I’m going up there in a couple weeks,” she said. “I’m very excited. They have a drag show up there. All kinds of transvestites and transgendered people will be there. It will be the first time for me, so I’m very excited.”

  I nodded in agreement. “Sounds great,” I said. And then, of course, Scott’s voice came into my head—“She’s probably a guy.” But I had attended a drag show in the town where I live, The Kinsey Sicks. Best show I’d seen in years. I laughed and laughed. There was nothing odd about going to the festival for a drag show, was there? Perhaps it was the way she said the word “transgendered” that got up my back. Spooked me a little. Now I saw something in her face that I had not seen before, some squareness in her jaw, some firmer construction in her complexion, some yang in her yin. She winked at me and bobbed her head back and forth.

  “Where are you from?” I asked.

  “Me? Well, I’m from Jordan. Amman actually. I grew up there. But my mom is Scottish. So I moved here, but it’s so cold and rainy here. And people are not open-minded. I love the hot weather, you know,” she said. “Luuuv the sun. I love to lay out in the sun and tan myself. Yes. But my doctor told me I could not be in the sun too much right now because of the hair removal treatment. Ooh, it hurts so much,” she said. “It’s like this burning pain every time. But I have to do it. It’s like this,” she said, and she pressed the back of her index finger into my arm. “It takes a little area like this, and it hurts so terribly.”

  “You’re having a hair removal treatment?” I asked, as if I were the most dim-witted creature on earth.

  “Yes. I’m removing the hair from all my body,” she said. “You know,” and she clicked her tongue three times against the roof of her mouth, “everywhere, including the secret places. The genitals.” She whispered it. “And everywhere else too of course. Ooh, it hurts so much. But it’s my dream.”

  So then, gentle reader, how long do you think it took me to see the picture clearly? But no, I was not yet convinced. After all, lots of women have hair removal treatments. The technology by which hair is removed was developed to cater primarily to women, was it not? The market for such treatments relies on women, does it not? No. There was nothing surprising about a Jordanian woman in Inverness undergoing a hair removal treatment.

  “So you don’t like it here in Inverness?” I asked.

  “It’s beautiful here if you like the rain and the clouds and the water,” she said. “But I love the sun. I ache for the sun and to sun myself and tan my body. Oh, I love it too much. But here it is so dark and depressing to me. The worst part is not that, however,” she said. “No. It’s that people are not open-minded. So many people here are so critical and afraid. Maybe in a place like Glasgow or Edinburgh I would love it. I grew up in a city, you know. I love the city life. And people have so much experience and have seen so many things. Not like here in Inverness. These are country people who live in a very small world.”

  Have you not noticed, reader, how my little questions led to a great deal of unsolicited information?

  “I have a friend,” she said. “This friend is a transgendered person. She belongs to a very small group of us here in Inverness. Too few of us, really. And one night she came here to this pub, this very pub, with a man she had met, a man who was very excited to meet her.” And she bobbed her head back and forth and clicked her tongue again. “They were sitting at the table over there, and talking, just like we are taking now. And then another man, a local man, a very ugly man who knew about my friend, walked right up and said: ‘This woman is a guy. Don’t you know that, you fool. You’re talking to a guy!’ Ooh, was she so mortified and embarrassed. So angry too. You can only imagine it. So now I am very curious about my rights under the law. How I am protected, and what I can do. You see, it is very hard for a transgendered person to live happily in Inverness.”

  I took up my glass and drank several swallows of the lovely Guinness. The air around us was delicate, and I was filled with the milk of human kindness. “So,” I said, “you’re a transgendered person.”

  “Oh yes,” she said. “I am. But it has been such a long journey for me. Since I was fifteen, I knew I was a woman. And at that time, I started my journey. It took some time for my psychologist to confirm that I am sound in my mind. That I am not crazy. No. I am a very happy and stable person. Yes. And t
hat took about one year. It was such a long year. After that I began my hormone therapy. Then I had my breast implants in Jordan.” She removed the shirt she wore over her tank top to show me. She sat up very straight, her shoulders squared back.

  Nice work, I thought. Lovely indeed.

  “Yes, and in less than one year I will achieve my life’s dream. I will be completely a woman.”

  Perhaps you are thinking what I’m thinking now, that line by Lady Macbeth: “Come, you spirits that tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here!”

  “You will have the surgery,” I said.

  “Right. That is the most important and delicate of all the transformations,” she said. “I will have the surgery. It’s not possible to find a doctor for this in Jordan. At least it is very dangerous, and maybe impossible. I had to come here to the UK to reach my dreams.”

  “I see.”

  She drank off the last of the Bailey’s over ice. She looked at me, harder now, and a measure of tension rose between us. She had just entrusted me with the most fundamental part of her being, and as it was held in trust this way, she waited to see whether I would violate it. I think she knew that I would not. I think she also knew that I was no longer attracted to her romantically, and that tension fell away too. Something shifted between us. Was this friendship or fellowship? Neighborliness or cordiality? Or was it something else? Something without a name?

  “That sounds wonderful,” I said. “I mean, that you will be able to reach your dream. Most people don’t, you know.”

  “Yes, of course it is,” she said. “It is. It is so wonderful. I am so excited by it. And you see it’s not this way with all transgendered people, because I can so easily pass as a woman, right? You didn’t know, right? Some of my friends however will never be able to pass as a woman like me, but somehow I can do it. They will be forever stuck in between, and that is a very hard life for them. Yes. People will always look at them strangely, except other transgendered people. People will always hate them, and some people even feel violence toward them. Toward us. But for me, after I have the surgery, I think I will be completely a woman, and that is my dream since I was only fifteen.”

  Dear reader, do you remember your Macbeth? How strangely that play is consumed with lines devoted to gender—can you imagine it? Meeting Tia here in the very town where black Macbeth murders his king and steals the throne? For example, there are these obvious lines given to Banquo, who addresses the witches: “You should be women, / And yet your beards forbid me to interpret / That you are so.” That aside, do not forget that Lady Macbeth challenges Macbeth’s manhood when he first refuses to murder his king. “I dare do all that may become a man; / Who dares do more is none,” he tells her. “When you durst do it, then you were a man,” she tells him. Of course he does do it, and, in doing so, is not a man at all. I mean that the murder reduces him, as he foretells, and he becomes something else, a beast really, the rugged Russian bear, the armed rhinoceros, the Hyrcan tiger. When Lady Macbeth finishes her rant, she claims that at least she possesses a man’s murderous powers—that she could dash the brains out of even her own child. To which Macbeth exclaims: “Bring forth men-children only, / For thy undaunted mettle should compose / Nothing but males.” Well, we know they both get it wrong. A man is not so murderous, at least not only so murderous. Indeed, Duncan, on greeting his thanes after the war, is more motherly than fatherly, like a woman giving birth to these noble sons of Scotland: “Welcome hither. / I have begun to plant thee, and will labor / To make thee full of growing.” Did you notice the pun on the word “labor,” and that “growing” is about fecundity in the garden, about pregnancy? Later MacDuff redeems all men when he reveals his wounded heart. On hearing that his entire family, his wife and children, have been murdered by Macbeth, Malcolm tells him, “Dispute it like a man.” To which he responds, “I shall do so; but I must also feel it as a man.”

  If Shakespeare wasn’t Christian (for who can say what genius is), at least his plays live in a Christian world. And the Christian world, despite its protests and its present fear and paranoia on issues of gender and same-sex marriage, is a world founded on the “androgyny of primordial man,” as Eliade explains in the first volume of his A History of Religious Ideas. In Genesis, Eve is created of Adam, woman is formed of man, which points toward a relatively widespread belief (not to mention the origin of the incest taboo) that “human perfection, identified in the mythical ancestor, comprises a unity that is at the same time a totality,” writes Eliade. “We should note,” he continues, “that human androgyny has as its model divine bisexuality, a concept shared by a number of cultures.” In this spirit, it is the androgynous person who is whole, not the man alone or the woman, or even the man and woman in holy union. Androgyny is holy union. As you won’t be stymied by another leap of faith, let’s quote the Tao Te Ching:

  Know the male,

  Yet keep to the female;

  Receive the world in your arms.

  Inverness is home to an odd curfew law. At midnight the doors of all drinking establishments close. The drinking goes on inside for several more hours, of course, but the doors are locked tight. You must enter your place of choice before midnight, and when you decide to step out, there is no stepping back in.

  “I need a fag,” Tia said.

  “All right,” I said. “I’ll go out with you.”

  “We won’t be able to come back in,” she said.

  “That’s all right.”

  I stood with her on the patio near the riverfront while she smoked. “It was lovely talking with you,” she said. “I hope you have good travels.”

  “And you,” I said. “Good luck in your journey. And take care of yourself.”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “I’m headed this way,” I said, motioning upriver.

  “I’m headed that way,” she said, motioning downriver.

  And from here, gentle reader, our scene becomes so filled with mist, it’s impossible to know what happened next.*

  *Much of the final line of this essay is borrowed from, and used in honor of, Yugoslavian writer Dubravka Ugresic’s fine short story “A Hot Dog in a Warm Bun.”

  INTO THE HORNSTRANDIR

  Iceland, 2013

  Who has gone farthest? for I would go farther

  — Walt Whitman, “Excelsior”

  In Hesteyri, a collection of summer cabins near the mouth of Hesteyrarfjordur, the leftovers of a failed fishing and farming effort a century ago, Scott and I met an older couple coming out of the Hornstrandir as we were headed into it. British, presumably married, in their early sixties, visibly shaken, their faces pulled down as if they had just slipped past death. They both wore rain gear, despite the clear sky overhead and the bright sun pitching off the water.

  “You’ve certainly got a good day to start,” the man said to me.

  “We do,” I acknowledged. “A great day.”

  He stared at me then, waiting, saying nothing, and, in saying nothing, he begged me to ask. It was clear he had a story to tell and wanted to tell it, a story about something he and his wife had passed through, and he looked annoyed that the world had not noticed. Whatever drama had unfolded out there, whatever terrors they had faced, whatever joys, the world had gone spinning on, and with maybe the exception of some few people back home, nobody cared.

  “We didn’t have a good start,” he finally offered. “The weather came in. Terrible rain. Terrible wind. A fog in the passes. We couldn’t see anything.”

  “We couldn’t see anything,” the woman repeated, coming up behind him.

  “That’s right,” he said, shaking his head. “We couldn’t see anything. I thought we’d never find our way out. It was so empty. So desolate. We were lost for some while. We couldn’t see anything.”

  To consider that kind of isolation, that kind of fear, he let a silence build between us again, standing there at the waterline of that gorgeous fjord, the boat we came in on bobbing on the gentle waves, dockside. A moment i
n time, a little moment passing as the breezy clouds formed and broke apart, and the waters came into their bluey blueness, and the birds sang in the palace of summer, buzzing with summer insects.

  “C’mon,” the woman said to him, making a move for the boat, which was headed back to Ísafjörður. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”

  There wasn’t much for Scott and me to do but adjust our packs and set out, walking up the long track along the fjord into whatever weather, whatever darkness, or light, awaited us. We had come too far to turn back now. It was nearly 4 p.m., a late start, but at this latitude, it wasn’t going to get dark. We had all night to get to our first camp.

  Scott and I planned to walk the Royal Horn, a popular route through Iceland’s remote Hornstrandir Peninsula. The boat had dropped us at Hesteyri inside the first of five fjords in a greater fjord, Jökulfirðir. Day one would take us over a high mountain pass and down the other side into the bay of Haelavik, facing north onto the Greenland Sea, a distance of sixteen kilometers. Day two (fifteen kilometers), we’d walk the beach to the foot of another high pass, descend on the other side, and then climb again, up and over, descending into the bay of Hornvik at Höfn, where sits a ranger station and one of the great seabird cliffs of the world, Hornbjarg. On the third day (fifteen kilometers), we’d climb over our final high pass and descend into another great fjord, Veiðileysufjörður, where the boat would pick us up on the fourth day.

  Going out for a walk this way, four days stretched out before you, your little gear stowed in your pack—your food and stove and tent and bag, a map and GPS—you feel the long reach of the cities pushing at you, the discourteous thrum of traffic and industry, the foul air and the noise of the dispossessed; you feel it pushing at you, driving you to the perimeters of the world, where you have only a thin edge to walk, a precarious strip of quiet and solitude coupled with the kindnesses of a few other walkers. The Industrial Revolution has made the walking tour a nightmare: it has made all roads into high-speed corridors of goods and services and death. It is more and more difficult to find a good place to walk, alone or with an old friend, as I am now, and you often have to travel very far to find it.