Retrograde

In the station at Corrour, I watched as Mike boarded the Northbound train to Fort William, waved as his face, then his window slid from view. Then I pulled out my camera, and began to thumb through the pictures I had taken, beginning with the station, where I now stood, as an isolated building surrounded by rugged moorland. And back to our campsite, the night before, and the long walk through Glen Nevis. A retrograde of our journey.

When it arrived, I boarded the train for Glasgow, settled into a window seat and watched the landscape slip by. There a pair of hikers, waterproofs donned against the day's pervasive mist, headed up a track through bracken and moorland. Sheep, high on a hill, crowned their kingdom of terraces. A haircut of grazing trails patterned into the hillside.

The tea cart stopped at my elbow, and I asked for a cup of tea, counting out the pound sixty while the server poured hot water.

At Crianlarich we hitch to the train from Oban and my mind wandered to the sun on the water, to the bagpipers along the quay, and the Isle of Mull ferry churning into the terminal.

The train lurched into movement and we continued south. We paralleled the stone wall that edged the West Highland Way. There were the ancient Caledonian pines, their crowns twisted with repeated breakages and new growth, and there the high point where we paused for lunch and watched the train pass.

We streamed south along Loch Lomond's western shore. We passed Castle Island, the white house with it's boothy, and the grand hotel at Inversnaid, traversing in an hour and a half what we took three days to walk.

At Glasgow's Queen Street station I changed for the train to Edinburgh. In the waste places along the tracks, only the upper reaches of the fireweed steeple held their pink blossoms. The rest of the plume had gone to seed. We skimmed just south of Sterling and I remembered its castle, flags flying stiff from the battlements.

I emerged in Edinburgh a bit discombobulated without my traveling partner. I headed across North Bridge and uphill to a small café, and settled in for a pint of ale and a good supper before navigating the now familiar streets to Leith and my home for the night. How different the city seemed on the eve of my farewell, than it had on our arrival.

And in the morning, my retrograde would conclude as I boarded the plane to the place my ancestors had learned to call home.