Before the Covid virus hit, I went
on a cruise through the Hebrides Islands. Those wild northern shores of
Scotland had long called to me. The swirl of birds above the rocky coasts; the distant
skirl of bagpipes; the loneliness. I always thought it was in such a place that
I could at last write some concentrate of poetic truth.
Unfortunately, it seems likely it’s
too late in life for me to pack up and relocate to a place so different from my
accustomed Chicago. So I had to settle for an organized tour on board a cruise
ship. Even though this was going to be such an abbreviation of my initial
dream, I still looked forward to the trip. I especially looked forward to
getting away from the endless drum beat of politics, of Trump, Trump, Trump,
here in the States.
It was no huge luxury liner that
carried us. It was a smaller, more intimate ship wending its way through some
of the Hebrides, through some of the Orkney Islands. I never do much research
about the places I’m scheduled to visit on tour. I suppose I should, but I look
on these trips as time away from research, as a respite from study, from
getting my facts straight. When I tour, I prefer to just be surprised.
I was indeed in for some surprises
on this trip, as for example when I learned the northernmost of these islands
were in fact close to the Arctic Circle. Despite that, we saw beautiful
jellyfish floating, delicately fingering the waters around us, as if we were in
the tropics. Their ability to survive here was likely due to the North Atlantic
Ocean Current that threads its way to these farther shores. That current spreads
a general warmth along the coastlines, perhaps incidentally enabling the famous
“fairy gardens” of Scotland. These gardens are the remarkable, mysterious patches
of lushness that some gardeners can wring out of the rocky substrate of this
land and that they populate with all manner of gnomes and sprites.
I was further surprised to learn how
much Norwegian influence there was in these islands, especially in the Orkneys
and Shetlands, some of which are almost within swimming distance of Bergen. (Well,
that’s a bit of an exaggeration. They are over 200 miles apart, but still –
surprisingly close.) Some enclaves of people in the Orkneys speak a dialect
heavily influenced by the Norse language. Our group walked down “Hell-hole Road
in Stromness on the Orkney Mainland Island. “Hell” is likely derived from the Norse
word “Heilagr” meaning “holy.”
We could all laugh that we’d been
to Hell and back as we returned to the ship from that excursion ashore. There
was in fact quite a bit of laughing and conviviality among our tour members.
Because it was a smaller group, most of us got to know some of each other’s
backstories – the parts that people cared to reveal – the parts that made
amusing public fare. But, as is almost always the case, there was usually a
sadness hiding behind the high joviality with which we all curtained the bulk
of our lives.
There was one particularly notable
couple on board whose story everyone came to know due to the always slightly
inebriated loquacity of the man. Joe circulated around telling how he and his
partner, Lisa, had been dating for forty years. Then he whispered to each clutch
of us in turn, “But things are going to change soon” and he winked. We wondered
– what did it all mean? Was that wink intended to mean he was going to break up
with her? Was he making jesting suggestions that he’d like to throw her
overboard?
But no. The wink was meant to
signal the fact that he was finally going to pop the question. And pop it he
did. He had forewarned the cooking staff on board and they baked an elaborate
cake. He popped the question and presented a ring. Lisa accepted. They set a
date. The cake was brought out on a silver platter, ablaze with candles, just
like a birthday – the birth date of their new life together, finally as a
committed couple. We all cheered and applauded. We all got a piece of the cake.
I was glad to see my piece had an especially large chunk of pink frosting on
it.
Having accomplished that goal he’d
set for the trip, the new fiancé felt able to chatter even more openly about the
couple’s long dating history. He told how they had a ranch in Montana. Sipping
on the margarita he’d ordered from the bar, he congratulated himself jokingly
on how he managed to fob off most of the hard work of the place onto Lisa,
while he “supervised.” Although he did concede that Lisa had good managerial
skills and a good head for figures. She kept careful track of the finances of
the ranch so that they showed a profit most years. They’d really raked in the
money awhile back when it became apparent that their ranch was right in the
prime path of the total solar eclipse. They’d rented out every room, every shed,
every piece of ground where a tent could be staked on their property for top
dollar.
“Yes,” the man granted – “Lisa has
a good head on her shoulders. But she’s such a flirt. Look at her. Look at how
she’s working the room, as usual. Talking to all the men. She does the same at
home. She does the same whenever we go ashore. If the salesclerk in the gift
shop is a man, she’ll talk to him no end. But I’m not worried. At this stage of
things, the men just don’t want to go there.”
In all innocence, the older woman
sitting next to me asked, “You mean they just don’t want to go to Montana?”
All the rest of us laughed
uproariously at her naivete. The man explained, in-between guffaws, “No, no.
Lisa is, you know, over sixty now. Although it’s true, she doesn’t look it. But
nevertheless – with a woman in her sixties, the average man just doesn’t want
to go there.”
My table companion caught on and
blushed. We laughed again - at what had been her child-like obtuseness, and at the
oxymoron of the man’s bawdy delicacy. However, news of the initial
misunderstanding circulated amongst the select group of us who typically dined
together, and it became our in-joke, our secret catchphrase. Whenever the topic
of some failed Hollywood romance where the man had dumped the woman came up, we’d
knowingly intone, “He just didn’t want to go to Montana anymore.” Soon we
expanded the use of the phrase to indicate enthusiasm. Whenever we discussed a
couple that seemed to be clicking, we’d lewdly predict, “Soon he’ll be going to
Montana.”
As it turned out, we in fact had
occasion to use the phrase in that more positive sense quite a bit in the
course of our trip. Our tour guide was a good-looking Scotsman in his late
forties, a native of the Hebrides, which in many ways made him an ideal person
for the cruise company to have hired to lead this tour. But in other ways, he
turned out to be a little less diligent in his duties than he might have been.
Most of the passengers were
retirees, as is true of most cruises. But there was one young woman among us.
She was a daughter who’d sort of been roped into the trip, dragged along under
protest by an enthusiastic mother intent on seeing the Hebrides. This daughter
was in her early thirties, statuesque, and quite attractive. She became the
inevitable focus of our guide’s attentions. He gave the required narration of
the landmarks and notable geographical features we passed along the way. He even
demonstrated his resonant singing voice when he sang a hymn in Gaelic in the
wayside Italian Chapel that had been built by WWII servicemen on one of the Orkney
Islands.
He did his duty. But it was plain
his heart wasn’t in it. So then there were two people whose hearts weren’t in
the trip. There was the pretty daughter who’d been more or less coerced into
keeping her mother company, and there was the guide whose attention strayed to
the pretty daughter keeping her mother company.
The guide regaled us with a fair
amount of his own biography. He’d been born in the Hebrides but had soon been sent
to an orphanage in England. There was a whiff of Dickensian grimness in his
upbringing as he told it. As soon as he’d come of age, he returned to the
Hebrides where he felt he rightfully belonged. He’d started his own tour
company. He’d accumulated his own flock of sheep and became a part-time sheep
farmer. Through most of these dabbling endeavors, he’d had help from his “ex-girlfriend.”
Whenever he mentioned her, he emphasized the “ex” part of her status, clearly
wanting to signal his current availability to whomever on board might be
interested – mentioning no names.
Again, doing his duty, our guide circulated
among us passengers, sitting at various tables in turn at mealtimes. Once when
he made his requisite stop at the table where I and my two regular mealtime
companions were sitting, he started to wax on again about the collaborations he
had with his ex-girlfriend. They’d broken up as boyfriend/girlfriend
fifteen years previous but remained on good terms. They lived near each other
on one of the islands. So whenever our guide wasn’t away conducting tours, the
two seemed to enjoy a certain abbreviated domesticity together. He said his ex-girlfriend
would come over every morning and cook him breakfast. His ex-girlfriend
would help see to the sheep. Yes, he and his ex-girlfriend…
Finally, my table companion felt
compelled to interrupt. She was the innocent who had initiated the Montana
catchphrase. Now though she was showing just a trace of more worldly-wise
irritation. She said softly, with a touch of sweet reproach, “After fifteen
years, I think you could call her just ‘a friend.’”
She clearly wanted to get the man
off his jag of referring to the woman only in reference to himself. She wanted
to strike a blow for feminism, for women being able to claim their own identities.
After fifteen years of being old post-graduate chums, a man would hardly keep
on referring to another man as “my ex-college roommate.” Similarly, a woman
should have graduated to the independence of being simply “a friend” by that
time.
Our guide didn’t catch on though.
He nodded and repeated, “Yes, my ex-girlfriend” and went on with his account of
how she’d make the best pasties sometimes for his meals. Had we ever tried
those?
Ah, there are still wild and remote
plains where the sheep graze free and where there never is heard a discouraging
word – from the likes of Gloria Steinem.
I hated to distract the guide from
himself, but I had a question. Before coming on this trip, I’d happened to read
Adam Nicolson’s book, A Sea Room: Island Life in the Hebrides. Nicolson
told about his private ownership of a triad of tiny islands, The Shiants, in
the stormy waters of the Minch Strait in the North Sea. The islands are
beautiful, but problematic. They are overrun with rats. Sheep sometimes fall
off one of their sheer shoreline cliffs and are killed even before they’ve had
a chance to be taken by boat to the mainland to be slaughtered. The Islands are
dotted with old cairns and the forlorn remains of croft houses that residents
were forcibly expelled from in centuries past during one or the other of the
King’s ordered evacuations.
But Nicolson had found the remote
inhospitality of the place just what he needed to concentrate on his own
writing and to think his own thoughts. He looked forward to passing the Islands
on to his son as the kind of retreat from the modern world that the boy would no
doubt also need. I asked our guide if he knew of the Shiants and of Nicolson’s
residency there.
“Oh yes! I know Nicolson very well,”
our guide flashed. My question triggered a spark of real fierceness in what had
otherwise been his generally non-committal demeanor. It turned out that he
intensely disliked Nicolson, almost to the point of having an on-going bloody
feud with him. He disapproved of snooty, high-born Englishmen, or of anyone,
gaining private ownership of any of the islands. What’s more, he vigorously
opposed Nicolson’s philosophy of stewardship of the islands. Apparently regular
meetings are held among the inhabitants of different groups of the Hebrides,
and topics such as the introduction of new pig farms are hotly debated.
Whatever side Nicolson was on in these matters – our guide was decidedly on the
other side.
But he said we’d be passing the
Shiants. He said he might even arrange for us to land there briefly, if I was
really interested. As it turned out, he did point out the Islands in the
distance as we sailed by – and he pointed to the departure of a puffin from one
of their rocky cliffs. I saw the bird only as a distant black dot in the sky,
just about the only wildlife I spotted on the trip. But there was no thought of
landing there. In his book, Nicolson had made it clear how difficult landings were
with small, well-crafted canoes in even the best weather. It would have been a
major project for a cruise ship to have off-loaded a handful of us onto a tender
boat to go ashore. I don’t know why our guide had even suggested the
possibility in the first place.
So we cruised on. And the romance
between the guide and the otherwise bored daughter progressed apace. Soon
enough though, it became clear that their relationship was not going to be
clear sailing. The young woman’s mother did NOT approve. Well, I did think it
would be rather against Company policy for tour guides to “affiliate” with
passengers. But the young woman’s mother took an especially Victorian form of
offense to developments. When she joined us at our table one time, she made it
known that she was going to write a searing letter of protest to the Company as
soon as the trip was over. She was going to accuse our tour director of “moral turpitude”
and insist that he be fired – forthwith! She was going to make it plain that he
had launched on a campaign of seduction, corrupting her daughter – a married
woman – with two children no less!
These were all phrases that indeed
haven’t been heard much since the Victorian era. “Moral turpitude, seduction,
corruption of virtue” – the mother’s outrage was in full spate. All her anger
seemed to do though was to drive the couple farther underground in their
shipboard romance. Our guide became more discreet about his attentions. I think
he bought the young woman a bracelet of Skye marble from a giftshop while her
mother had let her guard down, lagging behind to look at some archeological digs.
Then one of our more advantageously positioned cruise mates reported sotto voce
that he had seen the young woman slip out of the guide’s cabin at 2:00 A.M. We
concluded that some “going to Montana” had taken place.
Even though the guide must surely
have gotten an earful personally from the mother, he wasn’t much deterred. Making
a second round fulfilling his duty of talking to all the passengers in turn, he
again came to perch briefly at the table where I was sitting with the two women
who’d become my regular companions. I was determined not to detain the man with
any questions about Nicolson or anything else this time. But the Montana woman
urged me to tell him the side-splitting story I’d just told the rest of the
table about how the cows in Cuba had become so prone to committing suicide.
(See my Blog “The Suicidal Cows of Cuba.”)
Oh, I wished she hadn’t mentioned
this. The guide clearly wanted to be up and away from us as quickly as possible.
But there was nothing for it. I had to launch into a repeat of my story. I tried
to cut it as short as possible. I told how all the cattle in Cuba were
considered to be government property. Castro had issued a strict prohibition
against the killing and eating of any cow consigned to a farmer for caretaking.
As a result, cows started to “commit suicide” en masse, throwing themselves on
upturned pitchforks, drowning themselves, etc. Any farmer who’d been assigned
to tend one of these depressed bovines claimed he’d been forced to carve up the
animal and eat the meat to avoid its rotting and going to waste in the field. Of
course, Castro soon caught onto this ploy and added a severe threat of a coda
to his earlier prohibition. He made it clear that the deaths of ALL cattle,
whether the result of suicide or of intentional butchering, must be immediately
reported so that the meat could be claimed by government officials.
That was supposed to be the whole
story. But as I started to tell it, a sort of rictus of a smile stretched
across our guide’s face, indicating that he was straining himself to make a
show of listening and being amused by my tale. Then, as I was right in the
middle of my pitchfork sentence, our guide caught sight of the daughter, making
some signaling gesture behind her mother’s back. The man made an excuse and
hastily departed, going off into the wings of the dining room.
The two retirees and I laughed,
knowing only too well that suicidal cows couldn’t compete with the travel
adventures he felt were in store for him. We laughed - but also, I inwardly
cried. I sharply realized how now, and for the rest of my life, I was in the
same boat as Lisa who would become a bride after forty years of dating,
presumably having no prospects other than her rather less than gallant, long-time
ranch-hand of a partner. Lisa, and me, and all women “of a certain age,” are
unlikely to ever again have anyone eager to go to Montana with us. There’s
nothing left to us but passive sight-seeing. And sight-see we did.
We were ushered into one of the
famous “black houses” that are preserved on the Islands as tourist attractions.
That’s a house with a thatched roof that’s often been packed around with earth as
protection against the sweeping cold sea winds. Some think they got the name “black
houses” because their interiors became sooty as the result of having no chimneys.
Smoke was allowed to just filter up from the fireplaces through the permeable
wood-and-straw roofs. This style of building houses partially underground is
getting to be popular again with our new energy-saving, environmental
awareness. But on the Hebrides, the remaining restored black houses are symbols
of a bygone era.
The local tour guide who spoke to
us in one of these houses tearfully reminisced about her own childhood in just
such a hutch of a place. But really, I was hard-pressed to see how the inside accommodations
were so very different from my current house in Chicago. My own home hasn’t
been re-decorated since the 1950’s. I have a dining table covered with the same
kind of checkered dime store oilcloth that I saw here. I too have a curtain walling
off one corner of a room, to make the space serve as a closet. The only thing I
lack in Chicago is the cozy, peat-burning fireplace that was in one wall of
this house. I wondered if I could turn my Chicago home into a tourist
attraction – a time capsule of the 1950’s.
We drove away, past expanses of peat
bogs. We were told almost no one burns peat anymore for warmth. Everyone has central
heating in these modern-day Hebrides. But then we did see one couple, bent over
in gnarled labor, wearing knit shawls, digging up some peat. They reminded me
of some famous painting, maybe one of Van Gogh’s paintings of peasants digging
in the soil or maybe Millet’s “The Gleaners.” We were told that peat is
actually an ideal fuel source because it grows back so quickly. That surprised
me. I had read that another tragedy suffered by Ireland has been the decimation
of its ancient peat bogs. The bogs had been over-culled there, and so
permanently destroyed. I’d read that it takes centuries, nay eons, for such
accumulations of vegetable matter to grow back. So they are gone forever, irreplaceable
in Ireland. Why were they considered such an easily renewable resource in the Hebrides?
When I later mentioned this to friends, we speculated that maybe “They have a
different kind of peat there.”
We went on to another island where
I was chilled to see the locals in the midst of building a big effigy made of
wicker, wood, and other combustibles. A young resident bounced up to us and told
us they were preparing for a Wickerman Festival.
Could it be true? I thought The
Wicker Man, one of my favorite horror movies, was purely fictional. The
original movie starring Edward Woodward features him as an English policeman
sent to a remote Scottish island to investigate the disappearance of a young
girl. He gets caught up in the terrifying sacrificial rites that are an ancient
custom on the island. Now here I was faced with a scaled-down replica of the
movie’s towering cage of a figure, which I was assured would be ignited that
very night. “What? Does that really happen?” I gasped.
When the young man saw that I was
genuinely frightened, he reassured me. “Oh, don’t worry, don’t worry. We don’t
really sacrifice anyone. We just decided to do it this year - you know, to
capitalize on the movie. Some news crews are coming. We’ll have this big
bonfire and pretend.”
But there was something a little
too ready and rehearsed about the young man’s reassurances. And there was
something a little too menacing in the gleam of eagerness on his face when he described
the imminent burning of the straw man. So I had my doubts that this was “all
pretend.” I was glad our group was going to set sail and be well away from the
island before nightfall.
The following day brought us to a highlight
of our cruise, a tour of Lewis Island, one of the larger islands in the
Hebrides. We landed at its port capital of Stornoway and promptly got channeled
into a gift shop. But from there we were taken farther inland to see something
more authentic, the famous “Stones of Callanish.” These are a set of monumental
stones made of local gneiss set upright in a roughly cruciform pattern
stretching across the landscape. It’s a somewhat smaller version of Stonehenge,
but this construction is two thousand or more years older than Stonehenge. Scientists
haven’t been able to fathom its purpose. The stones may have framed some recurring
astronomical event, but that possibility is not as clear as it is with
Stonehenge. Some guess that the stones were a Viking, rather than a Celtic, devotional
– perhaps placed in acknowledgment of the Jötunn, the Titan Norse Gods of
mythology. The ancient residents perhaps wanted to greet those Gods with
something that was on the Gods’ own scale – a massive offering made to massive power.
The Callanish stones are said to
have the same mystic, vivifying effect as Stonehenge. But not nearly as many hippie
worshippers make their way out to this more difficult, distant spot. Our group
saw a few though, quiet and awe-struck – seeking to absorb the healing vibes of
these monuments.
After we spent a little time ourselves
trying to bask in the stones’ aura, we were let off to just explore the island
on foot on our own for a while, with an agreement that we’d all meet up outside
Stornoway in a few hours to go back to our ship. So I set off, over hill, over
dale, in the place I’d dreamt of being since I was a child. I wasn’t here to
settle into that brilliant writing career I’d imagined. I was just a common
tourist being hurried from one gift shop to another as fast as feasible. But
still, I was here. I was away from my Chicago routine, from all the clutter of
my 1950’s house. Most important, I was away from the clatter of the daily news –
with Donald Trump’s endless, inane tweets and the opposition’s endless
enforcement of new rules of political correctness.
I walked on along the road, with
the sweep down to the sea on one side of me, and a clutch of black-faced sheep
grazing placidly on the other side. This truly was “free-range” country. And I
was ranging freely. It was a bittersweet sense of freedom I experienced though.
I’d learned once and for all on this trip that I was too old now to get
invitations to Montana. I was too old to ever hold the interest of a handsome
Scotsman - even if I had a hilarious tale about the cows of Cuba to tell. But I
comforted myself with the thought that age brings a new sort of freedom. I let
the bracing sea breeze blow all the bickering political battles of present-day
America and all the let-downs of my own private life out of my mind. I was free
of all that, temporarily. I was here and away.
Soon the road led into the
outskirts of a hamlet. There were houses spaced far apart on each side of the
road. Lewis Island is studded with hamlets. You walk across what seems like an
endless grassy expanse, but then you go up and over the next rise, and there’s
a cozy little village. I walked toward the town that our maps designated as “Tong.”
An odd name for a Scottish town, I thought. But how removed from everything intrusive
in my daily life, I thought. I paused in front of one of the town’s stone
houses, set back behind a low stone wall. This house had, not quite a bay window
– it had something that looked more intentionally utilitarian on its facade. It
was a rectangular enclosure of windows, like a conservatory or solarium
reaching out into the sun. I craned over the low wall, trying to make out if
there were any plants growing in that sun-catcher extension.
Just then, another passenger from
the ship caught up with me. He tapped me on the shoulder and said, “I see you’ve
found the house.” When I looked baffled, he said, “Don’t you know? That’s
Donald Trump’s house. Well, it was his mother’s – his mother’s birthplace. Trump’s
cousins live there now. But I don’t advise that you go up and try to talk to
anyone. They really don’t like tourists pestering them all the time. Actually,
I hear they find Trump to be sort of an embarrassment. They don’t agree with
his politics at all. I hear they think of him as the black sheep of the family.”
So I wasn’t so free and far from it
all as I’d thought. Things always seem to catch up with you, no matter how determined
your attempts at escape.
After standing there a few more
moments, trying to absorb the impact of this astonishing coincidence, my
shipmate and I walked silently together out of the town. Just as we passed by
one of the last houses that might have claimed being part of Tong - we saw a
group of animals grazing. These weren’t black-faced sheep this time. This was a
group of Highland cattle. We’d been told how the ancestors of this breed had
been brought to the Hebrides in ancient times, in Neolithic days, perhaps near
the time those Callanish stones were being set in place. Now it was rare to see
any of these symbols of the Hebrides on the Islands. Here again, it had become too
expensive and time-consuming to transport them to the mainland for slaughter.
But there are still a few herds scattered around the Islands, and we were
privileged to have found one.
As we looked at this small herd,
one of their number separated itself from the rest, turned, and stepped toward
us a little way. It stood staring at us, with a look of baleful petulance. It
seemed clearly put out that it had been banished in embarrassment to the
fringes of the town. Its sweep of an orangish forelock threatened to drape down
further to obscure its vision altogether at the first gust of wind. We
recognized its mirroring of Tong’s most famous son. The resemblance was
uncanny.
