Pilgramage

"Daddy," asked the girl in front of us on the foot path, "is Ben Nevis the tallest mountain in the world?" Her blonde pony tail swung as she looked to her father for confirmation.

"No, not the tallest."

"The second tallest then?" She piped up, in her perfect aristocratic accent. Ben Nevis is certainly the tallest mountain in her world. At 1,344 meters (4,409 ft), it holds the title as the UK's tallest peak.

We passed the family, and worked our way up Nevis's shoulder, pausing to catch our breath or for a sip of water, but always pacing ourselves to keep ahead of those moving more slowly and allowing faster walkers to pass. We were two of a hundred? Two hundred? Five? that streamed to the summit. So many different languages, ages, levels of fitness and preparedness. Families climbed, dogs climbed, single people, couples, and groups climbed. People in jeans and people decked out in trekking gear climbed. We passed a family speaking German and then stepped to the side as three men wearing black belt uniforms passed us. A man climbed in a kilt, sporran, and knee socks; and another in a leather jacket, cowboy hat, aviator glasses, corduroy shorts and Keds. Some climbed slowly, some plodded, some ran, all moved steadily upward. The night before we had watched the parade of ants as it crawled down the mountain, and now we were a part of it. A communal society formed around the sugar bowl of the summit.

The path turned and climbed more steeply past blooming heather and wild thyme. We passed the Half Way Lochain. Starry Saxifrage bloomed from the shelter of a rock. Down below us, the pilgrims climbed on, a serpent of aspirants, single file. The flowers gave way to sedges, then ferns, and finally lichen. We climbed through a meadow of rock: felsenmeer. The exposed contours and subtleties of color enchanted me. Fog swirled around us, parting to reveal a glimpse of Fort William then the curtains drew closed again. The mist thickened. Cairns marched into the gloom, centuries along the avenue, guiding our way.

I've never been to India or Nepal, but it made me think of the pilgrimages to a hilltop temple or shrine, and I wondered what we were all seeking up there in the clouds together. But I'll tell you, it was something. As we neared the summit, those heading down met our eyes and smiled broadly, their faces alight.

At the summit, the pilgrims held a party. They scaled the summit marker and snapped pictures, drank wine, pulled out picnics. They ducked into the once-observatory, shrugged on outer shells of bright nylon, and kept moving. They peered into the cloud as if they could summon a view from force of will. Then they turned and headed downhill, leaving their crumbs to the snow buntings. We turned, too, shouldered our packs and started down, smiling brightly into the faces of those who climbed toward us.

Adventure Holiday

We woke to a punishing wind and the tent billowing and shuddering around us. The wind had shifted in the night and the meager protection of the outcrop to our west was no longer sufficient. By 4:30 am, we decided there was no more sleep to be had, and we broke camp by headlamp. We are a good team and packed more quickly than we'd anticipated, so we paused, spooning granola into our mouths by headlamp in the lea of a south facing boulder and waiting for the sky to grow light enough for us to see our way.

By 5:15 we had our packs on an were headed to the main trail to assess the conditions. Our plan had been to rejoin our original trail, and continue on to Elgol, five or so miles further, much of the way wending along the coast. But by the time we reached the main trail, in the full force of the wind, a steady soaking roan was falling. A hundred meters down the trail, we paused by a boulder, blocked from the wind, but not the rain. We hovered over the bus and ferry timetables weighing our options.

When we reached our trail junction, we half turned, the hoods of our raincoats blocking us from the needles of rain and bid Elgol farewell. The next four miles, which we'd hiked in a rapture of sun and long views the day before was equally astonishing on our return. The mountains, by the slight-of-hand of the clouds, had vanished. At their trunks, we watched waterfalls form like ski-runs and tumble their way to the river that surged through the valley. And then we began to crossing. We waded through stream after stream of ankle and shin deep water. The wind was impossible, and we played with it, even as it played with us. We giggled at the way it plastered our clothes to our bodies, the way it arrowed across open water in gusts, ogled at the curtains of rain it pushed across the valley, even as the gusts slid our uplifted feet and packs in unexpected directions. We disturbed pipits and frogs sheltering in the incised path and sorrowed at their labored flight and chilled crawling to safer ground.

As the valley broadened, streams collected more water before meeting our trail. We approached each crossing with greater focus and communication. Always glimmering in our minds was the main tributary that we'd have to cross before reaching the road. At last, from its bank, we scouted the shallowest point to cross, looking for the wide braided riffles. We paused to unclasp the waist belts and sternum straps from our packs. Then, stepping into the swift current, we clasped hands, and faced up stream. Side-stepping, our feet found purchase on the upstream side of rocks. One of us anchored in place, while the other inched across the stream to a new anchor. Back together, we repeated the dance, all the while bracing against the current. I was grateful for Mike's expertise, and pulled him into a bear hug, when, wet to the thighs, we clambered out on the opposite bank.

By the time Sligachan came into view, pockets of sun slid through the clouds, but still, steadily, the rain continued. My raincoat, while offering an extra layer of warmth and some protection from the wind, was wet through. I could sense the full saturation seeping into my base layers.

The bus came soon enough and carried us on to Armadale. Where, on the advice of the ticket agent, we hurried to catch the ferry that was boarding. Calmac, it seemed, was considering canceling the next crossing due to the weather. So we squelched up the gangway and settled in as the ship pitched across the channel to the mainland. Once underway, I eased out of my wet clothes, turned my raincoat inside out to air, and headed to the cafe for a cup of tea.

Out there, our plans float like milkweed fluff held lightly in the palm. On this day, a gust had blown them away, and there, snuggled into our booth we wove plans anew; a campsite, a meal, a mountain. We wrapped our fingers lightly around them, knowing better than to hold on too tightly.

Skye Magic

I don't believe in magic.

I believe in the possibility of shifting weather that allows us to wake to a sweep of blue sky and unveiled mountains.

I believe in the majesty of a landscape quilted with blooming heather.

I believe in time, the time it takes for a slow seepage of magma to push through the earth's surface, and the eons of erosion, grain by grain through wind and water.

I believe in humility. In the ability of the mountains to diminish not only my stature, but my importance in the great systems of the earth as well.

I believe in the serendipity that brought us here, rather than there, at this moment.

I believe in wonder, the slack-jawed passage I made, stopping to look, to breathe, to be, to listen to the wind on the high mountain, the roar of water, and the piccolo of a rill rushing across stones.

I believe in the lessons this landscape has to offer and willingly let it instruct me in awe, patience, and the power of wind.

Call it magic if it sounds like that to you. Me? I call it gratitude for the world unfolding just the way it does and for my own capacity to witness it all.

Old

 "I had passed through lands that were saturated with invisible people, with lives lived and lost, deaths happy and unhappy, and the spectral business of these wild places had become less and less ignorable." ~ Robert Macfarlane, The Wild Places

We headed up the hill under a heavy sky, stepping around the boggy places where too many feet had cut through the heather. We angled up over the brow of the hill and came upon the cairn, circling it to find the entrance. We lost sight of each other across the dome of loose grey stones flecked with white that loomed above our heads. One of the chambers had collapsed, leaving entry unwise, but we peered inside using our headlamps. A long stone lintel rested across the pillars that created the entrance. Inside, rocks, shone with condensation. The cairn dated back 5000 years, but archeologists know little except that it houses the remains of an important chieftain or warrior. If ballads were composed in his honor, their words are long lost.

Two days before, at my request, we'd cut in off the ocean to see the chapels at Tobha Mor. The name Clanranald had drawn me, as one of the possible derivations of my name. We came into the village, now called Howmore, on a farm road at the dune side, passed the new church and turned onto the main road. A sign directed us onto a footpath behind the hostel, and there, tucked into a lot in the middle of town stood the head and footboards of celtic chapels. Each of the structures was thick-walled with a casement that narrowed to an arrow-slot like window. Lichens, plumped by mist and rain, festooned the stones in green, silver and vibrant orange. The mist hushed the village sounds, and made me feel all the more that we were walking in a sanctuary. The Clanranald chapel was the oldest of the bunch, dating back to 1200 CE, though a few stones and crosses in the yard, offer evidence of an earlier Christian presence. 

 The more recent history of the Highland Clearances had haunted our walking since we'd arrived. Empty house-shells strewn across the landscape left us asking again and again, "what happened?" Begun in the 1790s when sheep farming became a more profitable venture than tenant farming, land owners began to clear their land of its inhabitants: crofters, families, and highlanders, most of whom had called their crofts home for generations. In addition to the abandoned homes that stood on the land, the clearances ravaged the celtic and highland culture as families moved to cities or overseas toward jobs and new lives.

As I understand it, this forced emptying of the land was, at times, brutal and cruel, but so, too, was the life lived by many of those who worked the land before the clearances began. The houses were small, and provided shelter for large families. Open fires of peat served as cookstove and hearth, the smoke of which gave the dwellings their name, blackhouses. They were, for the most part, windowless, dark, and smokey. The land, long-ago cleared of trees, was marginal for farming. This history lesson accompanied us everywhere. Along Loch Lomond we waked by hollow buildings with roof thatching replaced by sky. On Mull, stone walls marked out once-domains, and out here, on the edge of the earth, sorrow seemed to draft from empty doors: sorrow at a hard life, and sorrow at the impossibility of leaving a place called home.

In each of these places, along highways and lake shores, in villages and farm fields, I began to wonder what it must be like to live shoulder-to-shoulder with history. For me, a visitor in this place, with eyes for which everything is new, the stones stirred an understanding of the depth of time. My own third of a century seemed a small, neat package in the face of fifty centuries. And deeper than our human time, lay rocks whose age was counted in millennia. In these lands, Earth became elder, and I walked more lightly upon her.

The Crofter and the Post Man

Mike has a way of getting people to talk. It may be his thoughtful questions, or perhaps the way he turns his full attention on the answer. Our hostess at the Balranald preserve, was a crofter, working the land around us with her husband. The land they had inherited from his father who, in turn, had received it from his uncle. She spoke in the gaelic lilt, softening her "ch" from the hard "k". We'd walked her land that morning, following a dirt track that cut out into the bouquet of the machair, and through fields of oats, barley, and rye. We had passed through a cattle gate, and shut it behind us, securing the bolt and the line. The headland, rocky and tree-less, was pasture for cows, but also for the wheatears, dunnocks and pipits that flitted away from us as we walked.

Crofts are small farms, worked by tenant farmers. While the Scottish Government owned the land at Balranald, the North Uist Estate, she told us, owned the majority of the island as a gift from the queen. But for the crofters, the rent wasn't high, and after a tumultuous history, their place was secure, unless they abandoned the land or let it lie fallow. It wasn't meant to be a big money maker, just a few animals and crops to see them through the winter. As she saw it, there wasn't any benefit to owning. The landowners retrained fishing and shooting rights, but otherwise the land was hers to work and pass down to her children and her children's children.

She handed us our scones slathered with butter and

black current jam, their warm weight easing through the paper napkins that held them, and gave directions to the bus stop. We left, reluctantly, and headed up the driveway to wait for the post bus.

***

The regularly scheduled 10:09 Royal Mail truck pulled over at the bus stop to let us in. We paid our fare and took a seat behind the driver next to cartons of mail. Our route took us past post boxes and offices, where the driver hopped out with his ring of keys to collect the mail.

He grew up in Edinburgh, he told us over the engine's rattle, but moved out here fourteen years ago with his wife. It was a good place to raise a family: safe and tranquil.

The mail he collected was headed down to the main office at Barra, where it would be sorted and flown to the mainland from Barra's sand beach. The flights are tide dependent, as the high tide covers the runway, and so the flight schedule changes daily. I tried to imagine it, I'd seen the air strip from the ferry. But then, here I was in a mail truck doubling as a public bus.

The postman dropped us off at Clannach where we changed to the bus for Langass, but he promised to collect us at half-two and take us the rest of the way to Lochmaddie. Though off of his scheduled run, he'd be passing by that way on his way back to town. The time allowed us two hours to explore the 5000 year old cairn of Barpa Langass and the stone circle of Pobull Fhìnn. And collect us he did, greeting us warmly, and ferrying us the last five miles into town. The red truck offered shelter from a driving mist that had just begun to fall. We quickly fell into conversation.

On the Machair

While the full bloom of the machair was past, the grass still held a mosaic of color: yellow asters and purple thistles, small violets. Here and there a poppy still clung to its petals. Unique to the Outer Hebrides, this grassland ecosystem relies on the sand dunes augmented by a multitude of shell fragments. The calcium enriched sand hosts a diverse array of endemic plants: the machair. 

A sandy track lead us out past the ancient remains of round houses, circular stone foundations excavated from a bowl in the dunes. And then on, out to the sea. We looked across the North Atlantic into the wind. The sloping white sand beach softened the surf. Oystercatchers, plovers and stilts probed the piles of kelp on the falling tide, looking for morsels.

We turned northward eschewing the blazed trail of the Machair Way for hard-packed beach and the ocean's company. 

The sweep of dunes, and inscribed tracings of blowing grass reminded me of Cape Cod, just there, south and west across the sea. I remembered walking on that Atlantic shore for hours, as the wind whipped through the insufficient protection of my clothing. But the sun here, was warm; the breeze refreshed rather than chilled.

 

A dead gannet caught my eye, feathers wet and sand-caked, set in a still life of kelp and drift wood. My aunt, a photographer, captured such scenes of found sculpture on film, and offered the viewer a chance to see through her eyes. I followed the wrack line searching for treasures. I toed a fishing float, bent for a feather, a limpet shell, a bone. 

I searched the wrack line for wishing stones, remembering my dear friend Jen who spent hours seeking out the palm-perfect rocks, traced clear around with a vein of some other mineral. It was these she offered as favors at her wedding. I stooped to pick one up, brushing off the sand and sliding it into my pocket to give her upon my return.

Walking mesmerizes. Objects spark memories and the mind wanders. And then something else, the ebbing tide, the glimmer of light on water catches the eye and draws this moment into focus. I watched the shift of clouds and light, the antics of wading birds and gulls. I breathed in the 4,000 miles of sea air, clean and cold and full of the tang of salt. Gazing out across the Atlantic, perched on this outer rim of earth, I was suffused with gratitude this sweet, simple life, for all the places my feet have walked, and for the company I have kept.