History’s weather

I confess to being a planner by temperament, but some of the best moments of any trip are serendipity. I’m just back from 2 1/2 weeks in Scotland, where one of my most poetic encounters was turning the corner onto Rose Street in Edinburgh, feeling tired and looking for somewhere to eat, and spotting a kind of writing on the wall–a series of cut steel panels, image and text. “Wait,” I said, “that’s a poem. Wait, that’s a GOOD poem.” It turned out to be “Beachcomber” by George Mackay Brown, whose multigenre book An Orkney Tapestry I described in my last post. Read about the mural’s creation by Astrid Jaekel here. The other two writing on the wall images above are from Orkney, whose main island we visited in our last few days: a tombstone in St. Magnus Cathedral and Victorian graffiti in a Neolithic cairn. People have been trying to impress their stamp on a stony-faced world for a long, long time.

I did NOT leave my literary mark on Edinburgh, because on the day I spotted “Beachcomber” I had a runny nose, and the next day it was worse, and then I understood I needed to hole up and stop going viral in the bad sense. I canceled my Shore Poets reading in the Waverly Bar and was SO sad about it–but some of travel’s accidents aren’t particularly poetic.

Our plan was to swoop around Scotland in a rough figure eight: we drove from Inverness to the Isle of Skye, down through Kilmartin (where there was some Neolithic stuff I hope to write about), and over to Edinburgh with one of our adult kids. Then he flew home to teach in a summer math camp and the other kid flew in, having just finished her teaching year. We looped back up to the northwest coast, ferried to the Orkney islands, and returned to Inverness to fly home. Basically, I was sick for the urban part of the trip but in better shape for the Highlands and islands, where good luck abounded. You have to have a physical map in those misty lands of spotty wifi, and on it we spotted some castles we’d never heard of: ruined Ardvreck, which you have to wade through icy water to access (a less extreme version of Bluebeard’s castle in Angela Carter’s “The Bloody Chamber”), and Dunrobin with its formal French gardens and fairy-tale interior (see the study in the gallery below). Those afternoons felt fortunate and beautiful.

Some other highlights for me were the weird conical technicolor hills of the Fairy Glen on Skye; the much less touristy sites around Kilmartin; driving the spectacular Drumbeg Loop on the northwest coast; and the unexpected turquoise-water beaches in Durness (where John Lennon vacationed as a child, it turns out). The ancient history of Orkney is amazing but our one full day there was a struggle: the wind and rain basically seemed like they wanted to scour us off the island. I’d also, by that point, hit repleteness with scenery, whiskey, ale, and seafood, if you can believe it–and one-lane B roads with no shoulders and steep drop-offs, and all the unpacking and repacking in lodgings that were often great but occasionally less comfortable than advertised. I’m glad to be home in sweltering Virginia for a good while, with time to write again–whether or not my scratchings hold up against history’s weather.