Wild in its Way

"Like so much of Scotland's wildest land, this is not an empty landscape, but an emptied one." Robert MacFarlane

We lost the track in Glen Nevis and forged on across the moorland. We were not, ourselves, lost, as our route followed the River Nevis to its origin and then descended along the Abhainn Rath. The silver ribbon of the Nevis cut through green and russet grasses. Valley walls swept up to surrounding peaks in a gentle slope carved by glaciers. On the high terrain, green gave way to stone and then to sky. Just this, grass and stone and sky. The rush of water and startle of a pipit. The land held no trees.

The land I call "wilderness" at home, is forested, for the most part, except for exposed peaks and open water. In New England, land left unmanaged, turns to trees.

We climbed a small rise to lengthen our view. As we climbed, we came across a channel where water cut down through black peat. From the mire, silvery bones of pines glinted. A graveyard trees. They told a different story then the one we encountered on the surface: the story of an ancient forest, felled. The clear reach of human habitation on this remote and rugged stretch of Scotland.

My home ground was not always wild. The decayed stone walls and veteran trees of the Northeast whisper of another landscape. But here, in the Scottish Highlands, called by some Europe's last wilderness, the cleared land remains treeless.

There were gifts to be found in this incarnation of landscape to be sure. It held wildness in its own way: in the protesting flush of a merganser taking flight, in the last blooms of wild thyme carpeting the gravel bar of an older riverbed, in the shifting light across the felsenmeer, in the sweet juice of an early blackberry.

We walked on, circling back to avoid the worst of the muck. And as I leapt from tussock to tussock, I thought about the stumps. What must it have looked like, this landscape, forested? How long ago? Yet, despite the lurch of loss in my gut, I savored the long open views of ridge and glen, the sweeping summits, now obscured by mist, now clear. The high open land drew me onward.