Following the Sun

by John Hanson Mitchell

  The problem Mackenzie had to face was wind. The west coast of Scotland is famous for wintry blasts, out of the southwest especially, and this carries with it salt spray from the loch. Osgood solved the problem by planting a sheltering belt of native pines and constructing walled gardens that he improved upon by importing rich topsoil—a great rarity in this part of the world. He set about creating woodland walks among which he planted a variety of species collected from around the world. By the end of the century he had established one of the finest plant collections in the Northern Hemisphere.

  I spent the rest of the afternoon wandering the little garden paths, smelling the tropics, sheltering myself from a little downpour, and then venturing out again to smell plants. Sitting on a bench, under the spell of this mythic subtropical site, I was suddenly seized with a desire to eat an orange. Andalusia came flooding back, the rich blossom-scented air of the streets of Seville, the smell of the grove-strewn roads on the way to Córdoba, the hot light, and the bull-haunted, Catholic landscape. How good it would be, I thought, to eat an orange.

  On my way back to Gairloch I stopped at a turnout above the Loch Gairloch and the Sound of Raasay, found a place in the evening sun, and sat there for awhile, watching the wheeling flocks of seabirds and the illuminated cloud-scape. It was seven o’clock and the sun was riding above billowing rows of white and gray clouds with black rims and yellow blue streaks above the bank. In front of the clouds, over the waters of North Minch, I could see the jagged, misty peaks of the Isle of Skye, and west, far beyond the Minch, the mountains of Harris.

  These were the storied Western Isles, my final destination.

  Fifteen

  The Longest Day

  I was still hungering for an orange when I got back to the bed and breakfast but Mrs. McLeod, the blue-eyed hostess, could not think where, in all of Gairloch, I could find such a thing. If ever I was to find an orange in western Scotland, I would think it would be here. Gairloch, because of its location, is one of the more visited towns on this barren coast. There are fine views out to Skye and the Torridon Mountains; there is angling and sea-angling, and golf, and there are even sandy beaches. The best of these is a great dune-backed sweep of beach called, not with a great deal of imagination, Big Sand. In a pub after dinner, I met an older gent with a white moustache and a plaid waistcoat who told me, in horror, about the Germans who come to the beach at Big Sand.

  “And d’you know what they do?” the gentleman said.

  “I do not,” I said.

  “D’you know that on summer days, when it’s sunny, they ha’ been known ta strip aff their clothes and go stark naked upon the strand.”

  “Oh my,” I said.

  “But that’s na’ the worst of it,” he said, taking hold of my sweater with a shaky hand. “And I ha’ seen this myself.”

  “What?”

  “They SWIM.”

  In the middle of June in Gairloch, as the summer solstice approaches, the light begins to show across the east around three-thirty in the morning. At noon the sun stands directly above your head, and then as the earth rolls slowly eastward it begins a long raking descent and sets in the evening at about eleven-thirty. Just north of here, above the Arctic Circle, after the twenty-first of June, it never dips below the western horizon, but rolls across the sea and slowly rises again.

  All this is most excellent for creatures who love light. But it is not good for sleeping. Birds begin to sing at three in the morning, and by midsummer night in circumpolar regions the world around, parties can go on all night long. There’s plenty of time to sleep. You can say good night in November and sleep in near darkness until February 2nd, when the sun reappears and the days begin to lengthen.

  The darkest of the various solar-based holidays, and yet in some ways the most hopeful, is the ominous winter solstice, the longest night of the year. All year long in ancient cultures the magicians, wizards, and astrologers would have watched the slow decline of the light that begins on the day of the summer solstice. In their world, living as they did within the bounds of their own culture and understanding, there was no absolute guarantee that on the day after the winter solstice, the sun would not continue in its disappearance, never to return. It was only by the hard work of propitiation, of sacrifice and appeasement that the sun’s return could be assured. The end of autumn was a dangerous time of year.

  After the winter solstice, there followed a series of pagan holidays that are, somewhat ironically, best preserved in the celebrations of the Christian church, which subsumed so many local festivals as it spread around the globe. Twelve days after the winter solstice, there was a festival known as twelfth night, which involved, among other rituals, a “blessing” of fruit trees. In the north this was carried out by songs and music and the spilling of strong drink around the trees. Following this, on February 2nd, was the old Roman festival of Floralia, when the birds traditionally returned from migration, and then, at the end of February, the ancient festival of Saturnalia, which was celebrated on the Christian calendar as Mardis Gras and carnival. Next to arrive was the beginning of Lent and the progress toward the spring equinox, which is marked by Easter in the Christian calendar and Passover in the Jewish year. This was traditionally followed by Lady Day in Britain, when the sun enters Aries, and in pre-Islamic Afghanistan by a festival known as Nauroz, in which celebratory kites were flown and livestock was auctioned. Then Pentecost, in the Christian calendar, then Rogation Days, which marked the traditional blessing of the fields in ancient Rome, and then May Day, when the maypoles were once set up all across Europe and strewn with flowers, and on and on, one festival after another at each of the sun’s stations, until finally, at the opposite end of the year from winter, the happiest, universally brightest, and best celebration of all, midsummer night, the summer solstice.

  In parts of Italy, no one would go to bed on this night. In Sweden, maypoles were set up, no one would sleep; there was dancing and singing and coupling. In France, and in fact all over Europe, bonfires were lit, the so-called fires of Saint John; in Spain these fires were allowed to burn low and people celebrated by firewalking. Midsummer night is, as we know from Shakespeare, a night of mixed identities, song, and sex, and mystery, when fairies walk abroad and the two kingdoms, the seen and the unseen, can intermix. But by dawn it is over; the masque ends, normalcy returns, and day by day, as the earth sweeps around the sun, night gains ground.

  It was now June 7th, I had two weeks to get over to the western coast of Lewis where the stones of Callanish stood guard, so I bid farewell to nice Mrs. McLeod and rode down the Loch Torridon coast. I had been assured that the road was passable, and it perhaps would have been in a car, but after a few miles it broke down into a gravel road that was hard going, and halfway down the coast I suffered my requisite flat tire. It was about time, I hadn’t had one in three weeks. I wheeled the poor, limping Peugeot to an overlook and showed her the island of Skye, which we could see off beyond the loch. Not far now, I soothed her as I fixed the tire, hoping that this would be the last time.

  That done I pedaled onward and southward, weaving in and along lochs and cutting over high hills, with splendid views out to Skye. By late afternoon I came to the Kyle of Lochalsh and caught the ferry for the short ride across the straights.

  On the ferry ride I spotted a man in full regalia. He wore a Prince Charles jacket, a kilt of some greenish colored clan, a Glengarry cap with his clan badge affixed to the side, clan kilt hose, garters, and a squian dubh, the black knife sheath, fixed to his leg, and he had a dark otter or muskrat pelt sporran. He was first in line to debark as we approached the pier and was the first off the boat as we touched. I watched from my perch on an upper deck and saw him go striding up the hill without a break. About twenty minutes later as I rode along the high shores of the Kyle of Lochalsh and the Inner Sound, I passed him. He was mounting a hill at a vigorous pace, his kilt swinging from side to side as he strode along. He carried a small pack on his back, and wore the light shoes
known as ghillie brogues, more suited for formal wear than hiking. But he was making good time, all told.

  I whistled as I approached from behind to warn him, and greeted him as I pumped by, and once I crested the hill I left him far behind. I stopped at the next hill and looked back. Here he came, striding onward in an unceasing, determined march.

  I hadn’t eaten all day and at Broadford I put in to a place called the Claymore, and had a lobster stew with boiled potatoes and green peas. As I was ordering, I looked out the window and saw the kilted man go by, still advancing in his unbroken pace. He was making better time than I was.

  I was told that there were not many places to stay along the coast road past Scalpay, and was directed to the house of a woman who would take in boarders. It turned out to be another one of those lovely little spots that one tends to find accidentally, a white-washed croft with thick stone walls and upstairs bedrooms overlooking the tidal flats on the Bay South shore, run by a pleasant woman named Mrs. MacBrayne, who fussed over my bicycle and of course gave me hot tea.

  After tea I went for a walk out on the flats to watch the oystercatchers and dunlins feed. When I got back there was a man in the house named Martin, possibly the husband of Mrs. MacBrayne, although he wasn’t introduced as such. Martin was familiar with the house though and offered me a snort of whiskey and sat me down at the dining room table to give me a lecture on the Common Market, the current political environment in Scotland, the role of the United States in international affairs, the Chinese situation, and other local matters. “It’s a world economy,” he said, “a one-world economy, and we must face it.”

  Martin was from Broadford, I learned, and rarely left town.

  Everywhere I had been on this trip people in rural areas, the farmers and local tradespeople, were very wary of this approaching world economy. I told him as much. I told him they all feared homogenization of both culture and food, especially the French peasants.

  “I dinna like it either,” said Martin. “Look at our poor fish trade here, look at the condition of it,” he said. “But we’re stuck wi’ it.”

  He poured me another dram.

  “Ah hell wi’ it,” he said, belting down his whiskey. “Let’s go look at the sunset.” We walked out again over the flats under a fiery green sky.

  The next morning the wind came up again, a stiff charger out of the northwest, just the direction into which I was headed. It was a clear, bright morning, with clouds rolling in and out of the high wild peaks of the mountains of the interior, and I began a long and difficult climb, against both the wind and the hills. Of the two, the wind was far worse. Hour after hour I pushed and pedaled and pumped up the coast, past Scalpay Island, up along Loch Ainort, with the hardest slog of all at the end of the loch where the wind funneled down through a cut in the hills.

  Unlike the Highlands, which had been cool and misty, with periodic showers, the weather had changed at Inverness and I had been riding under clear skies all the way west, with only an occasional shower. Here on Skye the fine weather continued, but the light had changed. The air was sterling and sharp so that even distant, cloudy mountain peaks seemed close at hand and the sunlight seemed brighter and more translucent than anywhere I had been so far. It was a clear glass landscape, like looking through new black ice, and the light held all the way to Portree, where I found a place for the night.

  The light was still clear even after the late sundown, with green sheets of fire rising up in the slopes above the town, and a clean blue black sky rolling up to the east over the isles of Raasay and Rona. On a walk after dinner in this green, half-lit world, as I was passing through the town square, I heard a distinctive echoing of clipped footsteps, and into the open plaza, still at a quick-paced stride, came the full-kilted Scotsman, his plaids rising and falling with each hearty step. He made directly for me.

  “Didn’t I see you on the ferry?” he asked. To my surprise he had the broad flat accent of an American midwesterner.

  I told him, yes, I had been on the ferry and had passed him on my bicycle. I couldn’t resist asking where he was from. “Certainly not Oban?” I said.

  “Racine, Wisconsin,” he answered, curtly.

  He was over for a little walk, he said, and would come every year at this time. His family had come to America from Lewis in February of 1842 and Scots have long memories, as he explained. He had spent the day in the mountains, and now was hunting for a place and having no luck. I told him where I was staying but he had already been there. It was now almost midnight, and true to Presbyterian form, things had shut down everywhere.

  “Thanks,” he said, and strode off purposefully.

  I was bound for the small town of Uig on the northwest coast and was disappointed to find that the wind was still blowing the next day, meaning another hard plod into its teeth. It was even worse than the day before, blowing harder, with long eight-mile level stretches and no pleasant downhill grades to coast and rest. At Uig I found a sheltered bed and breakfast run by an old couple from Glasgow. I also found a benign grove of deciduous trees with a little freshwater stream running down to the sea loch, and as soon as I was settled I went out again, headed for the greenwood and began climbing a little trail under the trees. Here the air was calm, although I could hear the wind howling overhead and buffeting the upper storey of the trees. I was tired from fighting headwinds, and for the first time went to bed before darkness had completely fallen, which in these parts was not that early, eleven-thirty or so.

  I took the morning ferry across Little Minch to North Uist, and landed at Lochmaddy, surrounded all the while by wheeling gulls and lines of shags. Just as the vessel was pulling away from Uig, out onto the pier, apparently hoping to catch the boat, came the American Scotsman himself, looking none the worse for all his walking, and still moving at his high-paced longstride march. When it was clear that he had missed the boat, without hesitation he turned on his heel and marched back up the pier.

  That night at a small hotel in Lochmaddy I had a whiskey and enjoyed a long warming meal, followed by coffee in a warm parlor with a coal stove. Here groups of outdoorsmen and women had gathered and I fell into conversation about a wildlife sanctuary I had heard of on South Uist, where there was said to be an aerie of golden eagles with young.

  A pretty, sensible woman with crinkly ginger hair cornered me and, fixing me with an unblinking stare, commanded that I must go see them, if I was interested in birds.

  “You should go there,” she said. “You can na come here and not go out to see them.”

  “I will,” I said, not knowing whether I actually would.

  “No, but you must,” she said.

  “I know, I will.”

  “Yes. Go then.”

  Later she brought over her gentleman friend, a florid Scot in a Prince Charles jacket.

  “Tell him to go out and see the eagles, Angus,” she said.

  “Go lad, you’ll like it,” he said.

  “I intend to.”

  “It’s a bitter ground, there,” he said. “Like the end of the earth.”

  Suddenly it did begin to sound interesting. I got directions, including a recommendation of a bed and breakfast within striking distance.

  “What church are you?” Angus asked, seemingly out of the blue.

  I stumbled at this one, but before I could answer Angus explained.

  “Not Free Kirk, I take it, you not being from these parts. But be sure to stay put Saturday night, or make your way down to South Uist by Sunday. They won’t take you in, no matter what on Sunday up here in the north, you must get down to the Catholic island.”

  Back at the bed and breakfast I had a talk with Johnny McLeod, the owner, about the wildlife sanctuary and the eagles. He too knew of it. “A desolate, glorious place,” he said. He also knew about the otters that you could see from time to time in the harbors. In fact he was partial to otters and had worked to help conserve them. He knew Gavin Maxwell, author of the otter book Ring of Bright Water, who had liv
ed at Sandaig, not far from the ferry landing for Skye. Maxwell’s house had burned a few years back and then Maxwell died a year later. But the otters of the Hebrides were doing well, Johnny said. “You’ll see them up and down the west coast here, and over on Harris,” he said.

  As luck would have it, the next day as I was crossing a causeway in the wind, I did see one out among the rocks. I also saw seals basking on the bars and sporting in the deeper coves.

  At the hotel at Lochmaddy the night before, among the bird and wildlife people, I had, I’m afraid, instigated a fairly heated (for Hebrideans) discussion about seals. I had pointedly asked if people here thought seals “worshipped” the sun. This was not entirely out of context. I had been telling them about the lemurs of Madagascar, whom the local Madagascans believe are sun worshippers, and had held forth perhaps a little too long on the bears of North America. I told them how some Native American tribes there believe that bears worship the sun. Then I asked if they thought that seals worship as well.

  “After all, you see them out basking, like turtles and shags,” I said.

  “Seals do no’ worship the sun,” Angus said. “They’ve no god at all. They’re dumb animals, they just like to dry out from time to time.”

  “No, he’s got a point though,” said a small dark-haired man, who seemed to have had his share of single malt. “After a fashion, they worship. They haul out in sun, and throw back their heads like.”

  “They haul in fogs and rain, too, Jimmy,” someone else chimed in.

  “Na, but more i’ the sun,” said Jimmy.

  “Wha’ they got no god—neither sun, nor moon, nor Jesus Christ hisself, Jimmy, don’t be daft.”

  Jimmy said something in Gaelic.

  Angus said something back in Gaelic, and then someone said something else in Gaelic and then they all laughed, except for the ginger-haired companion of Angus.

  “Keep civil, lads. There’s ladies present.”

  “And visiting dignitaries to boot,” said Angus, winking toward me.