It was two months later, with Gosfield Maid parked in a cove on the Scottish west coast, that I ran into Harvey Swanson, the kilted and sporraned Minneapolitan tourist.
Running fast out of time and weather, I had taken a shortcut through Scotland, sailing down the Caledonian Canal from the Moray Firth through Loch Ness to Fort William. It was a leaden, windless afternoon when the lock gates at the bottom of the staircase opened on Loch Linnhe, a crooked gullet of sea, fifty miles long, which advances deep into the Highlands from the open Atlantic. Though the water was still and the air dank around the boat, there was a lot of high-altitude activity overhead, with the sky clearing and Ben Nevis growing rapidly in size behind my back. Every time I checked it, it appeared to have added another five or six hundred cubits to its stature. As the sky emptied of gray, it disclosed high streaks and puffs of cloud, ribbed like jet-trails, traveling at improbably high speed over the mountain tops, while on the boat the mizzen sail hung limp and wet, without enough wind to shake its creases out.
The forecast was bad: South, veering West, Gale 8 to Severe Gale 9. But Loch Linnhe was so deeply sheltered, so studded with protective bays and islands that it seemed sensible to keep on moving until the wind actually arrived. I was motoring placidly through the Corran Narrows, smelling woodsmoke on the shore, when the gale showed up with all the exaggerated bustle of the latecomer at a formal dinner which has been kept spoiling for him. It came funneling through the sea loch, turning the water white and darkening the trees on the hills and islands. Gosfield Maid bowed and shivered as the wind hit her, and the four-mile run to a safe cleft in the granite and pine near the mouth of Loch Leven was slow and splashy. It took only minutes for the jagged little whitecaps to build into a strong sea swell which plumed over the bows and made the frames and planking boom like a drum.
I ran close inshore under the trees, put both anchors down, and rejoiced in my luck. The place I’d found was beautiful, deserted and wonderfully snug, surrounded on three sides by rock, tamaris, heather and pinewoods. A big sea trout jumped near the boat and fell back into the water with a smack. The breaking wavelets in the cove were brown and thick with peat. The gale could go on blowing for a week as far as I was concerned; it was a luxury to be marooned here, with fresh run sea trout for the taking, the companionable chatter of the trees in the wind, the wild view astern of torn water and sunlit purple mountains. I sat contentedly up in the wheelhouse, sketching and drinking whisky, while the gale got into its full stride.
It blew all night, through the whole of the next day and into the day after. As it veered, it discovered chinks in the landscape and harried the cove. Gosfield Maid was snubbing and fretting at her chains, and I thought it wise to keep an anchor-watch, getting up every two hours and struggling forward through the wind to inspect the rocks and trees by torchlight to make sure they were still where I’d last left them. In the morning, the rain came in a magnificent storm, whiting-out the hills behind and making the water nearby look as if it had been deluged in confectioner’s sugar. By afternoon, Loch Linnhe was arched and cloistered with rainbows and the hills had changed color, from purple to a livid Astroturf green.
There was no question of rowing ashore: this tremendous wind (which had lately been officially promoted from Severe Gale 9 to Storm 10), would easily mistake my inflatable dinghy for a toy balloon. I spent a whole day reading Robinson Crusoe, a book I’d been meaning to bone up on since I first left Fowey. Crusoe, the exemplary busy Protestant, set about the painstaking work of empire, colonizing and Christianizing his island, while I loafed in the wheelhouse, leading a lax, unshaven, Catholic, shirt-tails-out sort of life. The trout, which were now jumping all round the boat, trying to shake themselves free of their sea-lice, were safe from me: I’d lost my only mackerel lure to an underwater snag on the previous evening. I ate things out of tins at irregular intervals, failed to do the washing-up, forgot to listen to the news, and generally made a poor showing as a castaway.
Occasionally a car would pull in off the road, barely fifty yards off from the boat. People got out, took their pictures, and drove on to the next scenic spot along the route. The wind kept on coming in tornado squalls, which corkscrewed their way round the cove and brought the water to the boil, and as I went into my second day of forced exile from a world so near that I could almost touch it, I realized that I was quickly running out of rations. How long can one sustain life on two tins of mandarin oranges, half a stale loaf, three eggs, a steak-and-kidney pudding, a couple of packets of noodle soup and a tin of processed peas? I began to have fantasies about sending SOS messages to the motorists by heliograph.
The gale blew out in the late afternoon of the third day. I rowed the few yards ashore and dragged the dinghy up the beach. I was ferociously hungry, since I’d cast lots for breakfast and the short straw had fallen to the steak-and-kidney pudding, leaving only dried noodles and flakes of chicken for lunch.
While marooned, I’d spent a long time studying a wooden sign on the shore through the binoculars. It was three-quarters hidden by a tree, and I’d been unable to decide whether it was a Forestry Commission warning against starting fires or an announcement of the imminent presence of a hotel. It turned out as I’d hoped. HOTEL 1 MILE—NON-RESIDENTS WELCOME. I followed the arrow up a track that led round the top of the headland, squelching through pine needles under the dripping trees. It went on for a good deal longer than a mile. The first sign of civilization was a thicket of blowsy rhododendrons which had lost their petals in the gale. Then, in dim gray outline through the pines, there was a large hunk of late-period Scottish Baronial, with mullioned windows, clustered chimney pots and ivy. There were no notices anywhere, and no car park; there was what sounded like the Laird’s Irish Wolfhound, and I prayed that the dog was kept chained.
My mistake was clear when I got to the porch inside the door. It was jammed solid with the usual clobber of country amusements—shooting sticks, umbrellas, gumboots, gardening baskets, croquet mallets, balls of twine, chewed tennis balls, cartridge bags and rusty ice skates hung on hooks. Through the inner door I could see a lot of people in kilts and evening dress holding sherry glasses and baying at each other across the hall.
I was making my apologies to a pair of green rubber waders and backing out as inconspicuously as I could when the inner door opened and a woman in a ball gown said, “Why! How nice of you to come!”
“I’m awfully sorry—I thought you were the hotel.”
“Do come in. You’re just in time—”
“I’m not dressed properly—”
“Oh—you’re just fine!”
It took a little while to register the fact that not only was the woman’s voice American, but so were all the voices of the hearty kilted gentry.
“You mean this is the hotel?”
“Well, we just prefer to think of ourselves as a home.”
A glass of sherry appeared out of nowhere.
“This is my husband—I’m sorry, I didn’t catch your name?”
I was whirled round the hall and introduced to everybody—MacPhersons and McFarlanes and Mackintoshes and Campbells and Hendersons and McPhees and Kitzingers and Swansons.
I had indeed gate-crashed an authentic Scottish country houseparty, but it was a houseparty whose guests had been selected, discreetly, through the advertising columns of The New Yorker. It was inauthentic only in the nicest possible ways. The food at dinner was an incomparable improvement on actuality. A serious stickler for realistic detail would have insisted on burned mutton chops, black gravy and cold mashed potato; we had roundels of pink beef, delicately sauced, with half-moon side plates of nouvelle cuisine vegetables. The realist would have limited conversation to waspish huffs and grunts; the talk here was loud, bright and continuous. Dusty wines were fetched up from the cellar, more courses came.
I covertly inspected the inside of my wallet. With no menu, no wine list, no hint of prices anywhere, it was impossible to guess how much all this was going to cost; imposs
ible to ask, too, for fear of shattering the make-believe. It was simply not the sort of question you could put at an authentic Scottish country houseparty.
“You know our hosts are Mormons?” my neighbor said. “From New York State.”
I should have guessed. Such an impeccable mise-en-scène could have been mounted only by an artist serenely detached from the world of his artifice. No genuine Scottish nobleman, trying to find a new way of paying for his leaky roof and collapsed fences, could possibly have pulled off a theatrical coup like this: it required the controlled and alienated vision of a pair of total abstainers from another culture altogether to create this event, which was both plausibly accurate and romantically gilded.
After dinner, we retired to the hall, where just the right brand of elderly female golden labrador dozed in front of just the right sort of warmthless log fire. The Mormons brought us port and brandy and cigars.
I was joined on the club fender by Harvey Swanson. Mr. Swanson had a spray of lace at his throat, a short green velvet jacket with silver buttons, a kilt and a toggled leather sporran. Somewhere in his wardrobe there must have been a tam-o’-shanter to match.
He and his wife had flown over from Minneapolis, and I caught in his voice that dry, gravelly sound of the Scandinavian northwest of the United States. Swanson/Svensson, I thought. Perhaps I was eyeing his fantastic costume with rather too obvious curiosity, since he apparently felt called on to explain it. “This is Gordon,” he said. “Dress Gordon.”
“It’s terrific—”
“The Gordons are on my mother’s side.”
“Ah, I see.”
Big, fair, bespectacled, in fine shape in his prosperous sixties, Mr. Swanson was having one hell of a time, he said. He’d gone fishing, he’d seen cabers tossed, he’d lunched in castles, searched Loch Ness for its monster, had taken about a thousand pictures and wasn’t looking forward one bit to going home next week. This, he said, was really something else. He tugged at his spray of lace, which was tickling his chin.
“And you? Are you vacationing in Scotland too?”
I explained what I was doing—the voyage round Britain, the two-day gale, the boat at anchor in the cove, the walk through the pines and rhododendrons, my surprise and pleasure at finding myself in this scene of the play.
No one I had met so far had shown a fraction of Mr. Swanson’s enthusiasm for my journey. He was bowled over by it. He slapped his bare knee in vicarious enjoyment—for as I described it, so it became Harvey Swanson’s journey too. He called his wife over. “Shirley! Listen to this gentleman, will you? I want you to hear this.”
Mr. Swanson wanted the measurements of the boat, the details of the rig, wanted to know how I cooked, where I slept, whether I had a shower on board, radar, satellite navigation, icebox, TV, fish locator, life raft, barbecue grill. “This I want to see,” he said, and we made a date for him to visit with me at nine the next morning.
“And you’re sailing, all on your own, into all these little harbors round the British coast?”
“Yes. That’s the idea.”
“And you just hang in there for as long as you like and then put out to sea again?”
“Right.”
“You must be having some adventures.”
“Well, you know—one or two.”
“Some of the guys you must meet—like the old guys? They must be really something. And all those places—”
“Harvey likes to fish,” Mrs. Swanson said. “He’s a big fisherman. Me, I don’t care for the water too much. I like to go by car.”
“God, I envy you. That is what I call a real adventure. All those crazy characters …” He shook his head, flicked cigar ash out of his lace jabot. “That boat … This must be the trip of a lifetime for you right?”
The more that Harvey Swanson talked, the guiltier I became. Mr. Swanson’s voyage was a rhapsody in blue, punctuated by wonderful characters, wonderful old streets, lashings of thatch and half-timbering, folk tales and customs, the tossings of cabers, the jingle of Morrismen, the skirl of the pipes—it was a glorious summer excursion through wonderland, with a dash of heroic danger added, like Tabasco, to sharpen the cocktail. When I set it beside my voyage, mine lost on every point. It was glum and lackluster. It was reprehensibly short of the wonder and delight with which Mr. Swanson had generously endowed it. Yes, I said, yes; meaning sort of, and almost, and not quite. I did my best to save Mr. Swanson from realizing that by his lights, I was a sad-sack voyager, that the things I saw were not a patch on his bold and colorful visions.
It was only when I was rowing back to Gosfield Maid, with sea trout leaping by moonlight, that I cheered up. There were some crazy characters to be encountered on my voyage too. If you were looking for a memorable player in the Masque of Britain, could you do better than to find a Minneapolitan of Swedish extraction, wearing Dress Gordon and pretending to be a houseguest at a shooting party in a Scottish baronial lodge which was actually a hotel run by Mormons from Upper New York State?
CHAPTER 6
VOYAGE TO THE FAR NORTH
It took a fortnight to restore my standing as a citizen and settle my differences with the authorities in London, then I was blessedly free to catch the morning ebb and set out on passage for The North.
The North! When I heard myself using the phrase at dinner in Notting Hill, it sounded uncomfortably grandiloquent; after all, the train from King’s Cross to Paragon Station in Hull takes only two and a half hours—not quite the stuff of geographical epic. But I was conforming to the custom of the country. In the south of England, good manners demand that you speak of The North as if it were a fabulously distant realm. You should try to imply that places like Wigan, Leeds or Hull are well within the Arctic Circle and that they probably eat babies there.
People who live on small islands fall easily into this ostentatious way with the points of the compass. It is a famous specific against claustrophobia, and it endows the most tin-pot places with marvelous sweeps of airy latitude and longitude.
The Manx were expert at it. In Port St. Mary, on the southern edge of the island, it was reckoned improper to go north of the fairy bridge without giving at least a day’s advance notice of the journey. A shopping trip to Douglas, fourteen miles away, was something to be announced a week ahead. To go to Ramsey, farther north even than the great mountain of Snaefell, was justified only if you had relatives there, and then only on official festivals like Christmases and birthdays. A lot was made of the fact—if it was a fact—that tomatoes ripened in Port St. Mary a good nine days (make it ten) before their sun-starved cousins in Ramsey and Andreas; and tourists were encouraged to call the south of the island The Manx Riviera, a tag designed to suggest that the men of Ramsey went about in snow boots and fur hats with earflaps. On an island nine miles wide and thirty miles from top to bottom, this mythologized geography was a necessity: it gave Man depth and space, enlarged it with shadowy, unvisited regions, and rescued the Manx from stifling in their cramped quarters.
England was bigger than Man, but it wasn’t so very much bigger. As nations go, it was a Lilliput—less than half the size of Italy, less than a quarter that of France. Quite small American states, like Florida and Iowa, were bigger than England. But it was larger by a few square miles than Tennessee. Any country which can only just top the acreage of Tennessee needs to lay claim to frozen wastes at one end and palm trees and parasols at the other—an imaginary terrain which matches up to its sense of dignity and importance in the world.
So Hull was a long, long way from London. I was advised to pack warm clothes for the journey. “Up there, you get the wind coming straight off the steppes of Russia.” I was warned of midsummer nights of perpetual twilight in the high latitudes of England. Whenever I said “Hull,” someone would chime in, pat on cue, with “From Hell, Hull and Halifax, good Lord preserve us” and look smugly witty.
Aboard Gosfield Maid, trudging along at four to six knots, it was at least possible to honor this legendary English
distance between The South and The North. Harborbound for days on end by gales or warnings of gales, setting out on a morning and turning back after an hour of being rolled, slapped and tumbled, I made satisfactorily slow progress. It took three weeks to reach the Humber from the Thames—about the same time as most small boats take to cross the Atlantic. This made excellent sense: it put Hull at a distance of approximately 2,400 miles from Tower Bridge, which sounds just about right.
The character of the North Sea was bad but interesting. It was shallow, riddled with shifting bars and shoals. The sand in the water gave it a fierce crystalline glitter in the rare shafts of sunshine. There were patches of trouble even in calms, as the strong tide sluiced over the uneven bottom and the boat careened about in the slop. In any wind, the waves broke short and sharp, crowding on one another’s backs. In gales, watched glumly from the safe vantage point of a drenched promenade, with Gosfield Maid lying in retirement behind a harbor wall, the North Sea shattered into surf like boiling yellow cat-sick. It threw up sand, and more sand, and more sand, converting roads into temporary beaches and the ends of fields into strips of desert.
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