Strange Days: Fabulous Journeys With Gardner Dozois

by Gardner R. Dozois

  Hurry outside after the main course, before we have a chance to have dessert, and climb aboard the familiar Land Rover again, me in front, Susan and Amy crawling in back with three giggling Polish girls who, as far as I can tell, speak no English at all. Then we’re off. Although Cameron drives unnervingly fast, attempting to make it to a scenic overlook near Duntulm Castle before sunset, the light is already failing, and it’s clear that we’re not really going to see all that much on this tour—but still, it’s a pleasant way to spend a couple of hours, and no more expensive than, say, going to a play—which we certainly would have been willing to pay for—would have been, so I don’t feel that we’re being cheated; we do get to see some more of Skye this way, a part we wouldn’t have gotten a look at otherwise, even if we’re not seeing it under the best of viewing conditions. After a wild, swaying ride, during most of which Cameron is doing at least eighty on these narrow, twisting roads, we do manage to arrive at Duntulm Castle in time for the last of the sunset, which, as advertised, is spectacular, the light bleeding out of the sky in a swirl of red and purple and gold, out over the expanse of the North Sea and its freight of hump-backed islands. We stop for a second outside the now-closed Skye Cottage Museum to look at the various styles of old buildings once prevalent on Skye, and to be stared at by curious Highland cattle in the adjacent field, who look more prehistoric than ever with their shaggy, horned heads silhouetted against the darkening, blood-red evening sky. Around the end of the peninsula in the fading light. There’s just enough light left in the sky in these Northern latitudes—although it’s almost ten by now—to make out the oddly sculpted landscape of the Quiraing, rocky pinnacles and cliff faces that have been blasted by the constant howling wind into a thousand fantastic shapes. As full dark closes in, we turn up into the hills, climbing up a steep, sharply hairpinning road and across a high moor before turning down again to join the main road to Portree. Cameron is still driving very fast, in spite of the now almost total darkness, the steepness of the road and the sharpness of the turns, and the fact that there are sheep sprawled at the margin of the road, so close to the speeding Land Rover that we almost seem to graze them on a few occasions. They don’t flinch, however, gazing at us incuriously as we hurtle by; you’d think that having several tons of metal roar by a couple of inches from your nose at seventy miles an hour, especially at night with the headlights blazing, would be enough to startle any animal—it would sure as hell be enough to startle me—but the sheep seem as placid and undisturbed as ever; I suppose that this is the reason why we refer to those who blindly and unquestioningly follow a leader as “sheep” instead of calling them after some more skittish and wary animal such as coyotes or cats. When we hit the main road to Portree, Cameron, who has been driving very fast, now begins to drive very fast, driving like a madman, in fact, and I begin to get a bit nervous, although, as someone who once chased tanks across fields and up steep hills at high speeds in a jeep, I’m not an easy person to unnerve in these matters. Still, Cameron is going well over ninety at a few points during the trip home, in spite of the black night and the tiny twisting roads, going fast enough that we on occasion begin to hydroplane, with the rear end starting to swing a bit, fishtailing, as the wheels start to lose their grip on the road, and I think ironically that Our Host will probably feel a grim satisfaction if we’re all killed on the way back, shaking his head sadly and saying to the other guests, “I told them he wasn’t a Skye man.” We cruelly deprive him of this satisfaction, though, by actually making it back to Viewfield House alive.

  Back at the inn, we have drinks and coffee and a belated dessert, which Our Host has been kind enough to save for us, in the sitting room, in front of the blazing fire. Among the new guests are a very young American girl, who has been studying at Oxford, and her mother, who is visiting her; they are vacationing together, touring Scotland, before the girl goes back to Oxford and the mother goes back to America. In spite of only having been at Oxford for six months, the young girl is now affecting a Teddibly Teddibly refined British upper-class accent, like a noblewoman or a high-born lady in a BBC production, and she sits solemnly by the fire discussing scholarly matters, being Very British and Very Intellectual and Very Solemn, straining to make her every gesture elegant and graceful and aristocratic, while her mother, who speaks with a broad Midwestern twang, watches her in wonder and bewilderment, obviously very proud of the rare and rarified creature that her daughter has turned herself into, while at the same time a bit uncertain as to how to relate to her now, and perhaps a bit afraid of no longer measuring up. Angus makes a half-hearted pass at the daughter, inviting her to go out dancing with him, but even he seems to realize that she’s not really for the likes of him—she’s waiting to be swept away by some wild-haired, wild-eyed, Byronic young poet who will take her on long melancholy walks on the moors in the mist and ply her with love-poems and long-stemmed roses and romantic existential angst about the blackness of the world, and with whom she can talk about Shelley and Baudelaire long into the night, between candle-lit bouts of leisurely but passionate and fevered lovemaking; no working-class, unshaven Scot with mud on his boots who merely wants to buy her a beer as the price of a quick hump in the back seat of his car need apply. I am amused by her pretensions, yes, but in a very tender way. She is so solemn and earnest and so pretentious, and trying so hard to be something that she is not but that she desperately wants to be, like a girl playing grown-up in her mother’s old clothes and begging you with her eyes to play along and not shatter the pretense, that it is rather sweet, actually. She reminds me of myself when I was that age, also full of callow poses and pretensions and burning with the ambition to be something other than what everybody else expected me to be, making up my role in life as I went along, made brave by the knowledge that wherever I did end up, it had to be better than where I was supposed to end up. Yes, I was that young once.

  Angus gives up—no nookie for him tonight, at least not from among the guests at the Viewfield House—and goes off into Portree for another pub-crawl. The rest of us finish our drinks, and then go up to bed.

  Wednesday, August 23rd—Armsdate & Gaelic College, Crianlarich

  Up about 7:45, have breakfast, check out, and then pack the car with our suitcases and Amy’s stuff; we’re giving Amy a lift to the train station at Mallaig on the mainland, since the road to our next inn goes right by there anyway.

  The weather today turns out to be the exact opposite of yesterday’s weather—when we come down for breakfast, it is brilliantly clear and sunny, and looks like it’s going to be great weather for driving, but by the time we’re actually ready to leave, it’s raining, and the weather worsens from then on for most of the day, with an occasional half-clear patch here and there where the rain sinks to a sporadically spitting drizzle. Everything packed aboard, with a few mostly empty spots left so that we can peer out through the windows, we take off.

  By the time we near the Red Cuillin, it is pouring, the hardest rain of the whole trip, with each lorry that passes us going the other way throwing a sheet of water across the windshield with a heavy thwack, blinding us for a moment. Unnerving driving conditions, particularly on these small and twisty mountain roads. The downpour has dwindled to an intermittent drizzle by the time we get to the Gaelic College, where Amy stops briefly to buy some Gaelic language audio-tapes (she is bravely attempting to teach herself Gaelic, one of the most difficult languages in the world, and talks wistfully about coming back here some day and actually staying in the college while taking a Gaelic language course in person, from live instructors; for now, she’ll settle for the tapes). We continue on to the Clan Donald Center, where we tour the Clan History Museum. Notice some Scots here who are reading the displays with actual tears glistening in their eyes, obviously deeply moved by this chance to get in touch with their roots; also hear an American woman behind us, when faced with the same wall-displays, exclaim “Oh, no! I’m not going to read about Bonnie Prince Charlie again!” . . . and must sa
y that, to some extent, I sympathize—you tend to run into the same bits of Scottish history again and again and again as you follow the tourist routes; in Edinburgh, for instance, last trip, we had gotten tremendously tired of hearing about Mary, Queen of Scots, whom everyone talked of constantly, to the point where it seemed like they were saying things like “Mary, Queen of Scots once walked past this street-corner, on a day in July, hundreds of years ago . . . She also stopped here, next to this tree . . .” Still, the details of the Clan Donald’s history are interesting, if dismayingly bloody, and it’s clear that this is a much more profound and moving experience for the Scots themselves than it is for us Ignorant Outlanders.

  Hit the inevitable Gift Shop—there are two of them here, in fact, both very large and extensive—and then walk down to the restaurant for lunch, passing on the way a sign on a building that reads “THIS BUILDING IS ALARMED!”, although, to our untutored eyes, it looked no more nervous than any of the other buildings in the complex; still, we steer clear of it. In the restaurant, we run into Angus from Glasgow—looking, if possible, even more massively hungover than he had the morning before—and one of the other older American couples from the Viewfield House; the tourist routes funnel everybody to the same attractions eventually, I guess. Angus sits gloomily by himself while he eats, making no attempt to join us; perhaps he’s too hungover, or perhaps he’s sulking over his failure to score with Amy. We have a quick lunch; I have a venison stew in which the meat is so tough that it can’t even be cut with a knife, let alone chewed. Perhaps Angus is having the same thing, and this is why he looks gloomy. (No McDonalds yet, at the Clan Donald center! Surely someone is missing a bet, here! And, actually, the food would be an improvement. (They could put up tartan arches, in the Clan Donald tartan, instead of the usual golden ones . . .))

  After lunch, we drive down to the ferry slip at Armsdale, get our tickets, and then wait in a long line of cars for the ferry, which arrives about a half hour later. On board the ferry, we go up to the upper deck and stand by the rail as we cross to the mainland (this crossing takes about a half-hour, covering a much greater expanse of water). We stand there by the rail in the sharp cold wind, me holding my hat on my head with one hand to keep it from blowing away, watching military jets swoop by as they play chase-and-hunt games overhead, one screaming by us quite near to the water, as though it was about to strafe us, probably targeting us for practice (the air war in Bosnia is heating up at just this time, after all).

  Back on the Scottish mainland, at Mallaig, we drop Amy off at the station to catch the train for Glasgow, telling her to warm the convention up for us; we have another night on the road before we’re scheduled to get to Glasgow, on Thursday, and plunge into the chaotic swirl of the Worldcon. Waving at Amy as we leave—she’s already found someone else she knows, waiting for the same train, before we’re even out of sight—we drive on down the twisting A830, past the coves and beaches of the Sound of Arisaig, and up into the mountains, where it begins raining lightly again. Down into a pocket of clear weather in the valley. At Fort Williams, the west bank of Loch Linnhe, where we just came from, is in dazzling sunlight, while the east bank is grey and threatening, with ominous black clouds swirling up where Ben Nevis is, although the mountain itself is invisible. Turn on to our old friend, the A82 (we would have ended up in just this spot if we’d continued south from Drumnadrochit a few days ago, instead of turning west toward the Kyle of Lochalsh), and climb sharply up into the mountains again, past the still-invisible Ben Nevis, which is buried in grumbling clouds, past Glencoe, through Rannoch Moor. At last, two-and-a-half hours after leaving Mallaig, we come to our last inn of the pre-convention part of the trip, the Alt-Chorrin House (which, we learn, is pronounced Alt HOOR-in House), situated right off the A82 between Tyndrum and Crianlarich.

  The inn is a little closer to the road than I’d thought it would be—the train line to Glasgow is clearly visible from here, so that Amy, if she’d looked out the train window at the right time during her journey south, could have seen us standing in front of the inn—and there’s no lake here, as the photo in the brochure seems to indicate that there is (it turns out that the photo was taken in extremely forced-perspective by someone laying on their belly next to a small pond, making the pond look like an extensive mountain lake), but the view from the glassed-in front porch out over the mountains is very nice, including a fine view of Ben More with its head lost in clouds. The sun is struggling to come out here at the end of the day—although it never entirely succeeds—and we sit for a while on the front porch, watching the patterns of light and darkness shift dramatically along the hillsides, waves of shadow sweeping over the hills as clouds rush by, swallowing the sun for a moment, and then setting it free again, sending fans of brilliant light scything across the mountains; because of the way the light falls, it’s possible to see one peak picked out in dazzling white sunlight while an adjacent peak is half-lost in gloom and shadow. Light and shadow wash back and forth, up the hills and then down again, like some sort of tide.

  Have dinner at the inn—good thing we booked for it; there’s nowhere else to eat within dozens of miles, except for a Happy Eater fast-food place way back up the road near Tyndrum—and then sit up for an hour or so on the front porch with a few of the English couples who are staying here, discussing small cultural differences. We talk about how you can’t seem to get real custard in America anymore, of the sort that’s served on pies here, and, for their part, they lament that you can’t get really good ironing-board covers in England, of the sort that you can buy in America. In fact, these ironing-board covers—made of “a sort of fabric we don’t have over here,” probably Teflon, is my guess—are really all that seems to impress them about American culture; they go on for some while about how wonderful these ironing-board covers are, and how they never wrinkle or need to be replaced, and we work out a mutually profitable scheme that involves them sending tank-cars full of custard to America in exchange for boatloads of the wonderful and invulnerable ironing-board covers. Then, with future international amity thus ensured, we go to bed.

  You can tell that it gets cold here in the mountains, particularly in the winter. The room is equipped with electric blankets, the only ones we see in Scotland, as well as piles of more conventional blankets. The Alt-Chorrin House is also the only place in Scotland we visit that has double-glazed storm windows (still no screens, though).

  Thursday, August 24th—Monday, August 28th—Glasgow

  Up about 7:30, pack, have breakfast, check out. The weather is miserable and grey, the wind occasionally gusting so that sheets of rain sweep by. The drive into Glasgow Airport takes about an hour, past the choppy waters of Loch Lomond, where the tour boats are out in spite of the stormy weather. At the airport, we have difficulty—as usual—finding the car rental place, but finally do, turn our car in, and take a taxi into the city, discovering that we have no cash left on us to pay for the ride. The driver very courteously (the Glasgow cab-drivers turn out to be almost uniformly polite and considerate) waits outside the Glasgow Marriott while I run inside and borrow twenty pounds from Lee Wood, who is almost the first person I see, with which to pay the fare.

  Check in to the Marriott, and the Worldcon begins.

  It would be more than usually tedious to detail a day-by-day report of the convention—although I did keep up with my diary every day, it’s mostly filled with such things as what panels we did and which publishing parties we went to when—so I’ll just give a series of brief impressions instead.

  My first impression of the cavernous space of the Scottish Exhibition and Convention Center, with its high, latticework glass roofs, is that it’s like having a Worldcon in a train station, an impression reinforced by the little stands along the walls selling hot-dogs and pizza. The acoustics are so bad in the program area, because of those high ceilings, that it’s more like trying to do a panel in a bus station, with the voices spilling over from adjacent panels (no interior walls, just partitions) const
antly rolling around under the roof, like an announcer with a bad PA system continually calling out the destinations for which buses are about to depart. I’ve never heard worse acoustics at any Worldcon anywhere—even people in the front two or three rows can’t hear what the panelists are saying, in spite of the functioning microphones.