Strange Days: Fabulous Journeys With Gardner Dozois

by Gardner R. Dozois

  Susan crashes hard, falling onto the bed and into a heavy sleep almost immediately, telling me, before she topples over, to bring her a sandwich from somewhere; she has no interest in going out to dinner, or going anywhere—she’s down for the night. Parris also says that she’s not interested in dinner, and also goes to bed immediately, which leaves George and David and me on our own, three wild and crazy guys, free to seek adventure in the streets of swinging Tarbert! . . . which, unfortunately, are by this point almost completely shuttered and deserted, although it’s only about eight o’ clock by now, and there’s still light in the sky. Tarbert folds up early. Except for a swirl of activity around the TV shoot at the Tarbert Hotel, everything is closed down, except for another pub up the street and one restaurant, and, once you get a few blocks away from our hotel, there’s almost no one around on the streets.

  We walk up the road along the shuttered seafront, looking for a restaurant, and finally make a reservation at a tiny place called The Anchorage, where they kindly agree to sit us late, at nine o’clock, although they’re technically closed by then; since the pub at the Tarbert Hotel is being used by the TV crew, there’s really no place else in town to eat, except for the somewhat seedy looking other pub, so we count ourselves very lucky to get into The Anchorage, even if we will have to wait an hour.

  To kill time, we walk further up the road and sit for awhile in the gathering dusk on a bench overlooking the harbor and, past a few small humped islands bristling with trees, like miniature versions of the offshore islands near Skye, out over Loch Fyne itself. Seagulls wheel and scream overhead, returning to rest on the harbor mud flats for the night, occasionally sweeping low over the water in hopes of a last-minute fish to snack on before going to sleep. We discuss whether or not we could live in a tiny village like this. George thinks that it would be a wonderful place to live, so remote and quiet and picturesque, but I think that it would drive me crazy to live here in hardly any time at all, and David, a big-city boy, tends to agree with me. George counters by waxing eloquent about the peace and solitude and serenity to be found here, and how inspiring and uplifting that would be, pointing at a seagull that is skimming the surface of the waves and crying repeatedly as it flies and saying, “Listen to that! Where else could you hear something like that? You couldn’t hear it in the city!”, and I reply, “I’ll make a tape.” It’s almost full-dark by now, and we think we see a seal swimming along below, on its way out of the harbor into the deeper waters of the open loch, although, in the dusk, it could be anything from a seabird to a selkie. Perhaps it’s a Lake Monster.

  Dinner at the Anchorage is quite good, although the dinner conversation is a bit gloomy. The recent deaths of Roger Zelazny and John Brunner have left us all a bit somber, and the talk turns to the economically ravaged scene of the British science fiction publishing world, and whether the same thing is likely to happen in the States. Whether it does or not, we all agree that it’s gotten tougher to make even a marginal living as an SF writer in the last decade or so, and that it’s likely to get even tougher in the future—that, in fact, it may now be impossible for all but a very fortunate few to make any sort of decent money at all out of writing SF. We all know five or six SF writers, in fact, who are only a step or two away from having to sleep out on a hot-air vent. This depresses George. Although he has a yen to live in baronial splendor, and to this end is planning to build a luxurious house on a private mesa of his own in New Mexico, he is soft-hearted enough to wish that everybody else could live in baronial splendor as well—or at least that his friends could do so. Instead, although George himself is moderately financially secure, many of his friends probably will end up living on hot-air vents, or the next thing to it, and this distresses him. I’m quite likely to end up on a hot-air vent myself, sooner or later—editors don’t have retirement plans. We suggest that perhaps George should prudently make provisions for his soon-to-be-indigent friends by thoughtfully providing a row of hot-air vents for us outside his baronial manor . . .

  The proprietors of the Anchorage very thoughtfully make up a sandwich for me to take back to Susan, since there’s no place else in town I could get one, although all they have to make a sandwich out of is cheese. They even, in spite of my protests, give me a plate to carry the sandwich on, saying that I can bring it back to them later, or not, as the chance occurs—which strikes me as kindness above and beyond the call of duty, especially as, by seating us late and letting us linger long over our dinners, talking of gloomy matters, they’ve had to stay open at least an hour or two after their usual closing time. I thank them profusely, and we leave, walking back through the dark streets of Tarbert, by the side of the now mostly invisible sea, past one or two young people leaning aimlessly up against the walls, or strolling restlessly around in the empty streets, which is really all there is to do in Tarbert by night, except drink or listen to the tape you’ve made of the lonely cry of a gull.

  Back at the Tarbert Hotel, the ever-energetic David sets off for a pub-crawl, now that the hotel pub is open again after the shoot has wrapped for the day and is once more full of its usual customers, but George and I throw in the towel for the night and go upstairs. Back in the room, Susan wakes up long enough to sniff at her sandwich disdainfully—it does, I admit, look pretty unappetizing—and then go back to sleep. I follow her as quickly as I can.

  Wednesday, August 30th—Tarbert & Loch Awe

  We’re woken by a call from the front desk; they’ve arranged for a hotel down the road to give us breakfast, since their own breakfast room is being used by the TV crew, but we have to be there before ten A.M. if we want to eat. We get dressed hurriedly, walk down the seafront road and up the other arm of the V-shaped harbor to the Victoria Hotel, where we have breakfast with George and Parris and David. On our way back to the Tarbert Hotel, we run into Scott and Suzi, coming out of the local chemists, where they have been dropped by Lisa, who is now on her way to pick up her young daughter, Emily. We stand on the sidewalk chatting with them until Lisa comes by to pick them up; they are all on the way to Campbeltown, where Emily has an appointment with the optometrist; Scott and Suzi are going along for the ride. We make arrangements to meet them all later for dinner, and then they are off for Campbeltown, me reminding them not to miss the big statue of John W. in a heroic pose, blue-pencil held proudly aloft, that dominates the town square.

  Susan has stumbled over to breakfast with us, but now she has run out of steam and goes back to the room to take a nap. David and Parris set out to drive all the way back up to Inveraray to browse in the little craft shops there, and George goes back to his room to get some work in on his Big Fat Fantasy Novel (you can hear the initial capitals each time he mentions the phrase), leaving me on my own for the moment, although I make arrangements to drive up to Loch Awe with George later in the afternoon.

  In the meanwhile, I explore Tarbert, looking into every store in town, all five or six of them, for the gold charm that Susan wants for her charm bracelet, without success. I come back to a bench at the harborside, next to the hotel, and sit down to work on these notes. The tide is out—Loch Fyne is a sea-loch, open to the sea on its south side through the Sound of Bute and the Firth of Clyde—and the point of the V or arrowhead-shaped harbor directly in front of me is now all dry ground and mud-flats, with the sour smell of the mud in the air, and with seagulls walking around on the mud-flats, mewling and squawking and squabbling over some tasty bit of garbage they’ve found. In the deeper part of the harbor, perhaps a hundred yards away, many small sailing boats are moored, making a forest of masts. Most of them seem to be pleasure-craft, and I wonder how much of a commercial fishing-fleet the town has anymore, although there clearly are still at least a few commercial fishing craft here. A ridge of low, rocky hills, covered with bracken and brownish heather, rises up from just behind the houses that line the sea-front on the far arm of the V, on the road that leads back north toward Inveraray. When I walk over to that side of the harbor, the same kind of hills a
re visible rising up from behind the buildings on this side too, plus the ruins of Tarbert Castle, which, covered in vines as it is, looks like a topiary sculpture. Except for the castle ruins, and the architectural style of the houses, Tarbert isn’t all that different from some small New England fishing towns I’ve known, all of them centered around their harbors, with the sailing boats riding at mooring and the flights of seagulls wheeling and screaming, and the landscape changing dramatically depending on whether the tide is in or out, the sea changing the whole look of the town, as though investing it with a different identity, when it comes flooding back in again.

  Later, Susan decides to skip lunch and continue napping. George and I have a mediocre lunch at the town’s other pub, The Frigate—tough, stringy beefsteak; I’m glad we didn’t have dinner here last night—and then we set off in George’s car to drive around nearby Loch Awe, something that Scott had recommended to us that morning as a particularly scenic and interesting drive. We drive back up the A83 north toward Inveraray, then turn off at Lochgilphead (which we both find ourselves pronouncing as Lochgliphead) onto the road to Oban, turning off that on to a small B road that runs alongside Loch Awe. I’ve seen small roads by now all over Britain, but this is a small road, one of the narrowest I’ve seen, and George is understandably somewhat nervous about driving this less-than-single-track road, particularly when we met local cars being driven in the other direction at the typical seventy or eighty miles an hour. We drive slowly north along the shores of Loch Awe, listening as we drive to a tape of “Picnic-Time for Potato-Heads,” cars zooming impatiently past us from time to time when we stubbornly refuse to do eighty ourselves. Somewhere up the road, we see in the flesh the prototype for the cover art for a hundred Celtic fantasy novels: a pure white horse running in a lush green field next to an old stone building, above the gleaming waters of Loch Awe. The sight is so powerful that it takes the breath away from you for a moment, and reminds you of the potency of this kind of archetypical image, which is why it has been used enough times to turn it into a cliche in the first place, of course; the power still lurks there somewhere behind the overfamiliarity and overuse, though, if you can see it again for a moment with new eyes, as we just have been granted the privilege of doing.

  We stop once to walk down to the lake shore; George, remembering my anecdote about Chysauster, keeps calling “Come out, little adders!” as we peer under gnarled tree-roots and piles of logs, but they refuse to come out and play with us. I take the opportunity to dabble my fingers in the loch, noticing, as I do, that the pebble beach is covered with foam along the waterline; dismaying to think that a remote lake in a rural part of Scotland could be heavily polluted enough (with detergents, perhaps?) that the water foams as it washes up on to the shingle beach. We drive on to the northern end of Loch Awe, but then, rather than turn south again on an even smaller road that hugs the other side of the lake, the route Scott recommended, and one that would clearly take a couple of hours more to drive, we decide that although Loch Awe is pretty, it’s not all that much prettier intrinsically than Loch Fyne, and so turn east, taking a—somewhat, at least—larger A road back into Inveraray. On the way, we are buzzed startlingly at one point by a military jet that seems to appear out of nowhere and screams by overhead only about twenty or thirty feet above the road, actually shaking the car with the force of its passage, before hopping up and over a hill on the other side of the road and disappearing. Practicing strafing runs again, is my guess. In Inveraray, George, in an antic mood, drives around and around and around the same traffic circle eight or nine times, while the locals stand on streetcorners and solemnly watch us go by, dourly shaking their heads.

  Back at Tarbert, George goes to get ready for dinner while I go for a walk along Harbor Street, the street that runs along the seaside, with Susan, who is obviously feeling much better. We sit for awhile on the same bench by the curve of the road away from town, overlooking the loch, where George and David and I had sat the night before, watching a dog swimming quite happily in the water as his master beaches a boat, watching other boats glide like ghosts into the shelter of the harbor at dusk, watching seagulls swoop and dart out across the water. We walk back, and meet David as he is returning from another expedition, one that he set out on after returning from this morning’s trip to Inveraray; this time he’s driven halfway to Campbeltown, on the west side of the peninsula alongside the Sound of Gigha, and returned with a bagful of sea-shells. We sit with him on the same bench where I wrote up my notes this morning and talk with windy eloquence about the uncertainties of life. I watch a swan who is using his own body for a pillow, twisting his head around in a way that looks uncomfortable if not downright impossible to rest it on his own flank. After a minute, he rouses from his nap and picks his way hesitantly over the mud flats toward the sea, waddling and comically awkward on the land, but suddenly becoming smooth and flowing and incredibly graceful when he gets into the water and glides serenely away—he looks back scornfully at us as though to say, you may have seen me being awkward and clumsy for a minute, but now I’m elegant and graceful . . . when are you going to be able to say the same?

  Susan feels well enough to be up to going out that night, and so we have a loud dinner back at the Anchorage—I give them back their plate, all neatly washed and dried—with George and Parris, David, Scott and Suzi, and Lisa (Colin has stayed behind to baby-sit Emily), the other patrons eyeing us in surprise (or perhaps alarm) as we break into a chorus of “One Meatball (But No Spaghetti).” After dinner, we say goodbye to Scott and Suzi, who are going to be returning to Glasgow for their flight to Paris early in the morning; they drive off with Lisa, with whom we’ve made arrangements to get together tomorrow.

  We return to the Tarbert Hotel, where Parris goes up to bed, while George, Susan, David, and I go into the hotel pub for a drink. David, who stayed up here all last night drinking with the locals, knows everyone by name already, and exchanges shouted and exuberant greetings with several of the patrons crowded around the bar. He asks one of the locals, who is very large and very drunk, to take a group photo of us. The local takes the camera, and keeps urging George to smile, without effect. I finally tickle George clandestinely, which gets a smile out of him just in time for the photo. The local man bellows, “Ah, ya smiled, ya great bastid! I finally got a smile out of ya, ya old bastid!” and joyfully seizes George in a celebratory headlock, shouting “Ya smiled, ya great bastid!” and squeezing George’s neck until George starts to turn blue, and I am afraid that we are going to see a murder done here in the pub, right in front of our faces. I can already see the headline in Locus: “HUGO-WINNER STRANGLED TO DEATH IN BIZARRE PUB INCIDENT,” followed by the sub-heading “GREAT BASTID SMILED BEFORE HE DIED.” The giant bellowing drunk lets George go before George can quite die, though, and stumbles back to the bar for another drink, still throwing an occasional “Ya smiled!” across at George and lifting a glass of whiskey to him in a toast to this remarkable accomplishment.

  We decide to beat a retreat before someone casually rips our arms out of their sockets, just to see how they’re fixed on, or perhaps tears George’s head clean off in an attempt to get him to actually laugh. We say goodbye to David, who is going to stay up all night again, drinking with the boisterous locals, and then take off for Glasgow Airport at six o’clock in the morning, and hurry upstairs to bed.

  Thursday, August 31st—Tarbert, Torinturk, Stonefield Castle, Skipness Castle & Glasgow Airport

  Up about 8 A.M., go down to breakfast, at the Tarbert Hotel this time, the BBC crew having finally departed. David has either departed also, as planned, or else perhaps has been completely torn into small shreds by the locals with whom he was drinking last night, the shreds hidden away in the trash, or perhaps ground fine and made into the greasy breakfast sausages we’re served; at any rate, he’s gone. We eat alone, in an empty breakfast room, joined after a while by George; Parris is sleeping in this morning, and won’t be joining us on this morning’s expedition.
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  After breakfast, Lisa picks us up in her car and drives George, Susan, and me out to her house in Torinturk, a small village about ten miles outside of Tarbert. On the way, we pass deer grazing in a fenced enclosure, and, at the edge of a farmer’s field, the Firestone, an ancient Celtic standing stone that is said by the locals to glow in the dark with otherworldly energies—a sort of Celtic night-light, I guess. (Lisa says that she hasn’t seen the Firestone glowing, although she’s passed here many times at night—I guess that it won’t perform in the presence of Unbelievers and Infidels.)

  Lisa and Colin’s place is a small white house at the end of a country lane, adjoined by a connecting wall to an identical small white house next door; except for these twinned houses, there are no other houses in sight, although I assume that there’s more to Torinturk tucked away somewhere else (maybe not, though!). There’s a rowan tree in front of the house, ablaze with red blossoms; Lisa tells us that rowans are supposed to keep witches away, and it must work, since we see no witches there.

  Inside, Lisa and Colin’s place is fairly typical of the house of a writer or fan with small children—toys and books scattered everywhere, especially books, which clearly will always proliferate here far beyond the ability to find bookshelf space for them; our own apartment looks much the same, except there are fewer toys and an even greater number of books, and I suspect that no matter how large George makes the baronial manor he’s planning, he too will run out of shelf space after only a relatively short respite. Books accrue. They seem to appear in odd corners even when you don’t remember buying them—which is one thing that inclines me emotionally toward the Steady-State Theory of Creation. We sit in the living room and have coffee, stared at incuriously by ranks of dolls and stuffed animals. (Lisa tells us that her daughter, Emily, won’t let her throw any of her toys or clothes away because she’s saving all of them “for my baby.” Obviously a child who plans ahead!) Colin, who is working upstairs on a book of political memoirs he’s editing, pops in from time to time to ask us things such as “Is there a Post Office on Fifth Avenue in New York City?”—things you’d think that, as Americans, we’d know . . . but even though I travel along Fifth Avenue almost every week, I can’t remember, and neither can anyone else; shows you how little attention you pay to your own surroundings, something Sherlock Holmes pointed out almost a century ago (Quick! What’s the color of the house across the street from you? No, I couldn’t remember either). Eventually, we all troop upstairs for the ritual Viewing Of The Office, an odd rite that is often a feature of a visit to a writer’s home—Lisa’s office, which is considerably tidier than mine, is upstairs in the attic, under slanted ceilings, with a laptop sitting neatly on a desk in place of the more usual full-size computer. There’s an odd, waist-high door in one wall, which, George suggests, is where the dwarves come out of at midnight when they write Lisa’s stories for her in exchange for a saucer of milk ... or perhaps of Scotch, considering that Lisa mostly writes horror stories these days. I notice that, not surprisingly, she has many of the same books in her office that we have up on the shelves at home—a touch of fannish continuity in two homes thousands of miles apart.