by Alex Boyd
We next made our way to Fort William and found The Lime Tree, an attractive and comfortable lodging run by a local painter and his family. They had travelled the world and decided to settle here in an old house with a lime tree out back. I felt a twinge of jealousy at how contented they seemed. But the answer to jealousy is always to get your own life together, and Calandra and I were delightfully and agonizingly on the edge of some kind of commitment to each other. In the individual rooms, small signs asked people not to smoke and to please respect the home. Sometimes the simplest way to put something is the best. Fort William is an attractive town with parks and one main pedestrian street lined with shops. Occasionally one might notice a slightly odd sign like, Tim Wynne, family butcher. We sat by the water and watched trucks move along a nearby landmass like little toys.
Although we could have climbed Ben Nevis, we chose instead to walk along Glen Nevis, a lengthy hike into the open highlands, fields and cliffs. We spotted a few people scaling cliffs without ropes, moving like snails across the great bulging surfaces. I was a little thrown off by the size and horns of ten shaggy brown highland cows. I was more alarmed than Calandra, who just wanted a decent photo of them. I kept bumping her with my hip and saying, “We’re getting off to the side!” One of them was curious enough to wander over to the edge of the road, stop and take a long look.
The first time I made love with Calandra was an awakening. This was what it felt like to simply be living your life, weary from a hike but so interested in someone you’re willing to tumble into a small mountain range of pillows and sheets with them. As we kissed and tugged at each other’s clothing, I paused in the semi-darkness, held myself above her and watched her for a few seconds. The memories of my wife and son were suspended somewhere above me, quietly looking into this world from another, a particular set of dull stars.
23: Calandra
I sometimes believe people saying good morning all over the world is what makes it a good morning, as though saying the words puts the stitching in the idea, gives it strength and a reality inflatable as a sail. In the morning, we dozed for hours, our bodies calm and sometimes comfortably draped across each other, as welcome and natural as the smell of fresh bread. I recalled a dream that involved a tiny, perceptive person lodged inside my chest behind the sternum. Not really a man or a woman, it had a jellyfish-soft body and was tuned to the number of times I’d do something, including the number of times I’d wake up with a particular lover. It cried out the numbers as best it could, but the voice didn’t often reach me through all the tissue and bone. I was giving myself answers and ignoring them.
At one point I watched Oliver sleeping. He had subtle qualities about him that suggested strength, like his thick eyebrows and wide brow. It was strange to be with someone new already, and yet I felt we hadn’t rushed anything. As a couple we were wounded.
He said, perfectly, “Good morning,” and after breakfast we were on a bus to Portree, spotting the cotton arm of a cloud placed casually around the top of a mountain. Portree was a small town on the Isle of Skye and was a good base for day trips around the island, including Dunvegan Castle, where there is an ancient silk flag that predates the crusades so the locals have no explanation for it except to say that fairies brought it. In a video, current Clan Macleod leader John Macleod takes “fairy power” reasonably seriously, though we didn’t suppose there was much choice in the matter. Some stories have it that unfurling this flag brought immense victory and family members carried photographs of it into the First World War. The gardens around Dunvegan were amazing: waterfalls, rock paths, steps and bridges, a bush that burst out into winding moss-covered branches like the varied arms of a small god. Certain paths even had branch walls complete with roof. We spotted rabbits and watched beetles move like little tanks in the dirt.
Walking around Portree, I noted an audience of bluebells on a short hill. We stopped to watch gulls glide and land around circular fishing nets writhing with live meat. Walking away from the sea, the sound of the gulls blended with the sound of the sheep. Our walk took us along the coast and then back around, complete with a dead end we only saw after climbing a steep hill. At one point we climbed a fence wondering if we were trespassing and some farmer was about to start shooting.
As we sat on a bench I heard a bird behind me and turned to see it braced perfectly against the wind, holding in the air and singing. I knew it would only last a matter of seconds and elbowed Oliver to look but he was mostly annoyed at my way of getting his attention and by the time he turned his head, that little glass moment had broken and the bird shot away through the air, which left me feeling more or less alone in the world.
We stayed at a half-finished but clean hostel where an American named John told us his travel stories, even while acknowledging that it was “about time” for him to be heading home to start a family. The only way to speak was to attempt to interrupt, which wouldn’t slow him down at all, but he’d eventually ask, “What were you going to say?” He was a nice man and had been all over, but his accent and tone could make the name of a foreign city sound like a swear word. Our window overlooked the water and when we returned at night it was a sheet of perfectly still blue glass holding the ships, two misty arms of land out to sea on both sides.
Portree also had the An Tuireann Arts Centre, where I found a book of Scottish haiku at its bookstore. On our last day we visited “the Lump,” the oddly situated point in town where they have highland games, though none were happening. It’s almost a cliff edge, but with a circular space for the games. Some of the trees have been shaped by the wind and the crows among the trees were a constant presence as we walked up the path. I sensed some kind of measured and meaningful echo should emerge from all that activity in one place, but nothing did.
24: Oliver
“Not, I think, today,” replied the employee as a decent-condition paperback was pushed across the counter back at me. Somehow, being surrounded by wall-to-wall books in a historic building with a second-floor café on a balcony gives the impression everyone will be relaxed and pleasant. I understood it was awkwardness, a certain shyness from the employee. If you’ve been around the block enough times, your antennae picks that up. Really, my mood was hurt by a feeling of guilt acting as a heavy poison in the mind. I didn’t immediately feel I’d betrayed anyone, as this felt like a whole new life, but the idea was obviously there, below the surface, quiet as an eel. It was only a twinge of feeling as we’d arrived in Inverness and wandered into the bookstore, but it was certainly there.
Next, we stood in Culloden Battlefield, a poor choice for Bonnie Prince Charlie and the Clansmen to battle government troops in his attempt to take over the throne. One of their advantages was the alarming reputation of the fierce highland charge, and yet they chose to meet on a field full of heather. I tried to imagine myself falling back to it. The government troops slaughtered hundreds of wounded men in these fields, believing the propaganda that their own wounded would have been shown no mercy. An easy lie, a small seed of anger dropped in all of their minds. I imagined myself arriving with a shockwave before the armies clashed, like a boulder in the centre of a puddle, forcing them all to retreat.
Still feeling dispirited, I went with Calandra the next day to Drumnadrochit near Loch Ness, where a sign suggested a man sold “nessie-cery” models of Nessie to finance his full-time monster search from a trailer near the Loch. I put a finger in the edge of the great, dark Loch Ness and touched the water, imagining this small intrusion was somehow sensed by the creature. “It’s cold,” I said, looking up at Calandra. Nearby Urquhart Castle is mostly a ruin though you can still climb the tower and descend into the basement. A piper played on the castle wall in a drizzle of rain and the view across the loch, through the mist and grey of the day, looked like a black-and-white photo. “I like the idea something’s out there,” Calandra said.
My preoccupation with history continued. On some level I thought standing a
round in historical settings might allow for some connection to a greater pattern, an understanding of our future. Of course I knew the future, generally speaking, but I wanted to know about my own personal future, and still thought of Penelope and Tomas. We visited the Clava Cairns, rock pile tombs dating back to three or four thousand BC. Today they’re roofless, so you walk into them down a tunnel and step into a round central area, the upper half only clear, blue sky. Trees with drooping branches were scattered around the clearing and Calandra said, “It’s like they’re slowly moving onto a dance floor.” One small part of me, like one voice at the back of a crowded room, felt the weight of all this history and longed for the future I’d lost. Where were they, my wife and son?
25: Calandra
“I’m fine,” he said, but Oliver seemed to be struggling with something. He was pleasant, but also languid and hesitant as we took a bus, a ferry and another bus to Kirkwall on the Orkney Islands. It was about as far north as you could go in Scotland and Kirkwall was a strange, cold town, at least upon first impression. Every grey, concrete building was the same colour as the sky above. We saw a young man running at older, slower tourists and then turning away at the last moment. Oliver started toward him but I took his arm, told him, “Leave it,” and pulled him away with me.
We assumed maybe the bus hadn’t let us off at the station so we asked someone where the station was. A thin man simply gestured back at the parking lot, burst out laughing and carried on his way. The hostel was an official international youth hostel where they hand you sheets and you walk a long hallway to a clean, cold bunk. You couldn’t help but think of a prison. They lock you out between ten and five during the day and lock up again at midnight.
But Kirkwall also had St. Magnus Cathedral, eight hundred years old, built of red sandstone and quite beautiful. Some tombstones only sigh and say, Thy will be done, but the ones in the interior walls talked about “cruel fate” and always ended with Memento Mori, or sometimes with a skull and crossbones or an hourglass. We stopped to look at it for long minutes before Oliver said, “I think a cathedral as old as that would feel the people only a little more than it would feel the wind.”
Local folklore was fascinating: a few signs posted around the cathedral were enough to tell us that people used to believe large stones had powers and were sites to make marriage vows; that some stones must go to the loch to drink a few times a year; and that an agreement made at the tomb of Bishop Thomas Tulloch was as good as a binding legal contract. Walking back into town we witnessed a “blackening” where the locals about to be in a marriage party get harmless, sticky black goo smeared all over them, then drive around making a lot of noise, banging and yelling from the back of a pickup. “At least wave, damn you,” I said to Oliver, and we put our hands high in the air.
Skara Brae provided a demonstration of some parts of history surviving even as others are wiped away: homes of piled stone and earth dug slightly into the ground dated back to 3100 BC, though the roofing materials weren’t as lasting and have since vanished. But how mesmerizing to stand in those spaces and think it was someone’s home at such a distant time. It’s a similar feeling to one I had at the Clava Cairns but remarkably, the stone shelves at Skara Brae have survived.
We were both deeply irritated to see modern graffiti at the Ring of Brodgar, where twenty-seven flat stones still stand out of an original sixty. Nobody is sure of its original purpose exactly, but it was likely a religious centre. When we reached the burial chamber of Maeshowe, I didn’t expect much. It looked like a hill with an entrance, hollow and made of great stone slabs. Our slow-talking guide with a bushy beard trained his flashlight on much older graffiti left in the form of runes by Vikings in the twelfth century. The scrawl, Ingigerth is the most beautiful of all women, was next to the image of a slavering dog.
I’d always been interested in graffiti but was suddenly struck by the idea of it as a mental photograph, a brief note for all time, either insightful or completely daft depending on the person and the moment. I pictured people fluttering the way they do in time-lapse photography, leaving the world a work of art or a daughter, cups and bowls used and replaced in flashes from the stone shelves at Skara Brae. What else do people leave? There must be more existing as hidden currents and repercussions. We went to the Italian Chapel built by Italian prisoners of war from a standard building. They painted walls to look like ornate brick and made lanterns from beef tins.
As Oliver stood looking around I decided I should let things take their course. It’s possible it wasn’t meant to happen for us, difficult as that might be to accept. Or maybe it wasn’t meant to last. Some islanders used to get mail to the mainland simply by sealing it up and dropping it in the water, trusting it to the currents. If something is meant to happen, the currents take care of it.
26: Oliver
In Arbroath we stayed at a bed and breakfast, though it was really just a small home run by an elderly Mrs. Brooks and her husband. He was a plume of white hair embedded in the couch in front of the TV. He didn’t speak or look at us except to wave when we arrived. Mrs. Brooks’ eyes were magnified by her bottle-thick glasses into tremendous fluttering moths. She warmly collected our bags and we went out to the main street. The town was a coastal fishing community with a harbour that extended walls of stone around a collection of boats like protective arms. Offshore, the Bell Rock Lighthouse sat on a reef twelve feet underwater at high tide. Construction required stopping work to jump on ships after a design was worked out by Robert Stevenson, grandfather of Robert Louis Stevenson. The signal tower on shore could be seen raising a pair of trousers if the lighthouse keeper became the father of a boy, or possibly a little dress.
Calandra wanted to walk around the harbour, moving from one plaque to another, and watch the locals. We stopped to eat an “Arbroath Smokie”—haddock smoked over oak chips—and read about gale winds taking apart the harbour in 1706. There were impressive waves right at that moment, pounding and breaking on the walls, and a handful of children ignored yellow warning signs about the risks of getting too close in favour of cycling over patches of seaweed and puddles, creating brief, muddy fins of water.
Maybe the slightly urgent feeling of the harbour helped it along, but I felt a slow and growing alarm, a need to make something work and not simply be buffeted around by the tides, clinging to old memories like a collection of trinkets. I could insist on at least one thing: Calandra as a living lifeboat of experience. She could become all I keep and all I need. I went over to her and pressed our hands together, pulling her away from the harbour.
Hand in hand we walked to the Arbroath Abbey, over eight hundred years old and sandstone the colour of a dull red bushel of apples. I’d long known Arbroath was in my family background so we went to a local records centre outside an office with a frosted-glass shutter that closed off a desk space in the wall. We’d failed to notice a sign that advised we ring the buzzer for service, but it didn’t matter as the dark, blurred outline of a man emerged, paused, and came toward us to lift the window. He was a slim, middle-aged man and greeted us simply and pleasantly. I liked him immediately.
We walked through the local cemetery with a map to the grave of my great-great-grandfather, which certainly gave me an odd feeling on a bright summer day. The stone declared him a cabinetmaker and listed his wife Annie and all the various children, many of them young when they died. I’d been told he started a combination furniture store and undertaker business, which strikes me as curious, but if you’re good at making things, why not include coffins? I can recall one of his sons, Alexander, was told to stop drinking the profits and took such offence that he packed up his family and began a new life in Canada. I realized I knew only this much as I put a hand on aging stone and marvelled at how little it revealed.
On our final day in Arbroath we decided to explore the Devil’s Head. On our way, a soccer ball bounced toward us and I threw it back to perfectly still, strangely tense
boys who didn’t trouble themselves to say thanks. It made me worry that kindness was an oddity here, but perhaps they were just unaccustomed to seeing strangers in such a small town. Fortunately, I had a far stronger memory of Mrs. Brooks as we checked out of her tiny home. Her traditional British breakfasts—meat and more meat, fried tomatoes—had been a challenge for Calandra and her stomach, but saying farewell to us, she came out to teeter on her front steps, blink her magnified eyes and waved repeatedly as she called out, “All the best, all the best!”
27: Calandra
“It’s possible Robert Burns deserves better than having a sketch of his face over a steaming cup of coffee outside a gift shop and café,” Oliver said. “And it’s possible he’d have simply laughed,” I replied. In Ayr we’d seen the Robert Burns cottage, museum, monument and gardens, but had drawn the line at some kind of production called “The Tam O’Shanter Experience.” Oliver said it was the only thing even approaching bad taste, and he appeared to be settling into and enjoying Scotland and its people.
