Scottishness

Here at the coast, the air comes briny and cool off the ocean, the wind makes a dance with the trees in the garden, and the sky when it’s clear of rain is as blue as kindness.

As I’ve traveled throughout the United Kingdom, as people have asked me where I’ll go next, invariably they say, “The further north you go the nicer the people are.”

Each time, I think, But the people here are nice.

Still, as I venture north and norther I am finding the people to be, if not nicer, at least equally as nice as the people I’ve met so far along the way.

My Italian housemate says, “When people ask me what my favorite part of Scotland is, I always tell them, ‘The people.’” And this, because the people are warm, generous, neighborly, and kind.

She goes on to speak of L, the Italian man who manages the boatyard where she works and who is also her friend, “If he and I were back at home we might be friends but only on Facebook or something. I think in the years he’s been here he’s absorbed some of the Scottishness.”

I think my housemate has too. For she keeps inviting me along to do things with her and her friends.

First, down to the pier to watch them shift an old fishing boat built in 1926, inch by slow inch, from its dryland supports onto a trailer. She, the boat’s owner S, and M, another boatyard volunteer, do the work over a four-hour period. It’s a tedious and precarious job when done with jacks and wooden supports. I sit in the sun and watch, and this because if I tried to help I’d only be in the way.

Then secondly, when later that day she invites me along to the pub for a dinner out with the three of them. After dinner, with everyone still up for company, we go to S’s house and sit around drinking cider and listening to the LPs he puts on, one after the other. He lights a fire in the fireplace and we talk of our lives.

While we’re sitting around like a good joke (an Australian, an Italian, a Brit, and an American walk out of a pub) someone brings up the Ceilidh planned for Friday night in a neighboring village. A Ceilidh (pronounced Kaylee) is a traditional Scottish event with dancing and live music. My host in Eckford had said I should go to one if I could. “It’s a very Scottish thing to do,” she’d said. G says she’d want to go if S went, S says he might be talked into going, M says she’d need a babysitter and asks me if I’d want to go.

“I’ll go if everyone else does,” I say.

As if that tips the balance, M texts her babysitter. S fills our glasses and goes to change the album on the record player. M adds another log to the fire. We talk about family, books, and how one might go from a degree in math to a job restoring old boats (as S has done). 

“I’ve got a babysitter,” M says looking up from her phone after a few more records have played, “I guess we’re all going.”

That night, when it’s time to go on home, G and I walk back to our shared house. Friday is still nearly a week away.

Soon enough, Friday arrives.

In the evening, G, L, and I walk to M’s house as she’s volunteered to drive us all to the Ceilidh.

The Ceilidh is held at the Cambo Stables Visitor Centre. It’s a charming venue, cozy and warm with outdoor firepits already lit and the day’s light still strong. Inside, the band is set up at one end of the room and people, some in kilts and some not, are filling up the space.

For the first dances, I stand and watch. Then at some point, M motions me over and partners me with a man in a kilt (who it turns out is the co-owner of the café with his wife and has organized the event).

“I’ll say I’m sorry now in case I step on your toes,” I say.

“I will too,” he says. But I have a feeling he knows what he’s doing.

As we stand in place behind another couple, we’re given a brief instructional by the Ceilidh band leader and then the music begins and we’re off. We start out with our arms around each other’s backs. Kick with one leg, kick with the other, separate and step to the side, clap, come back to the center. There, we join hand to hand and shuffle step to the right, shuffle step to the left, add in a few miscellaneous steps in the middle which I’ve forgotten, and then there we are at the starting step again. The dance goes on forever. We make a circuit of the room, once, then twice, then I lose count. It’s fun even if I feel clunky and heavy in my walking shoes, jeans, and body.

My dance partner tells me, “You’ve gotten the hang of it.”

It’s a very rough hang of it, but it’s nice of him to say so.

When the dance is done, I thank my partner, go to stand back in the corner, out of breath, sweaty, and happy having danced a traditional Scottish dance to Scottish music with a Scottish kilt-wearing man in Scotland. As my Eckford host had said, “It’s a very Scottish thing to do.”

Normally, at a Ceilidh there is a caller—much the same as a square dance event would have—who calls out the steps as they’re to be made. But this night we only get a pre-dance explanation and demonstration and then we’re all left on our own to the chaotic and fun mess of steps and movement.

“No one really knows what they’re doing,” the café co-owner tells me at a later point, over the sound of the music as we stand back to watch the dancers dance. But it doesn’t seem to matter, everyone looks to be having a good time.

Much later, when I join hands with my group of four for the Runaway Train, our partnering group of four standing opposite us, as I duck under their raised arms, weaving like a wild, curving, snakelike train through the tight space left between person and person, I don’t know when I’ve laughed so hard. When the dance is done (a laughing lifetime later) G says, “Let’s do that one again!”

The band moves on to another song. The last dance is danced. The final note is played. We make our goodbyes as M collects us all, “These are my kids and I’m the mum,” she’d told one of her friends when we’d all arrived, and then she drives us home again.

“Thanks for driving,” I tell her at the bottom of the hill where she’s dropped me and G.

“That’s all right,” she says, which is English for “You’re welcome.”

“What do you have planned for the weekend?” G asks me as we let ourselves into the house.

I mention a few minor things and then ask, “Why? What are your plans?”

“I heard about this rock,” she says. “I thought we could go Saturday or Sunday.”

“By bus?” I ask.

“Yes.”

“Okay.” I like rocks.

The next morning, G checks the bus timetables and we discover that if we want to go see this rock – the Bunnet Stane – then we’ll have to leave straightaway as the buses don’t run that way on Sunday and if we don’t hurry today we won’t have the time to visit the stone and get back in time for the last bus home.

Ready for adventure, we throw together some snacks, fill up our water bottles, pack up our cameras, and go catch the bus.

As we climb aboard, I ask the driver if he’ll tell us when we’re at the stop for the Bunnet Stane.

“If I remember,” he says, with a twinkle in his eye.

When we get near the stop I think is the right one, I go ask him, “Is this the stop that’s closest to the Bunnet Stane?”

“It’s as close as the bus can get you,” he says. “It’s still a ways from here.”

I know it’s a mile and a half walking and I’m not put off by that. Then, as if he has all the time in the world, the driver points down the road and gives me detailed directions on how to get to where we’re going.

I thank him, and G and I head off for our walk. As we make our way down the road and turn where we’d been instructed to turn, a few cars pass us by, then no cars, then the road becomes a gravel lane, then the gravel lane becomes a foot path with tall grass on either side. We pass fields of baaing sheep. And then, there before us is the Bunnet Stane.

The Bonnet Stone is a rock formation at the foot of the Lomond Hills. A charming and strange little formation in the middle of a green field, with the impressive West Lomond Hill behind it. 

We skirt the rock, checking out the cave called the Maiden’s Bower which is where legend says a heartbroken lass lived after her beloved lad was killed by her father and his men because he was from a rival village (a far cry from the Scottishness that G and I have experienced). It’s cold and dim inside the stone room and I turn to tell G, “I wouldn’t want to live in here,” before making my way out into the sunshine again.

From there, we go to sit atop the stone. The land, hill, grass, field, distant hills, and sky calm me in a way the coast never does. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy the coast, but I feel more at peace in the mountains, in the hills. I wish I could stay here forever to think and to be. Soon enough though, having gazed out at the far away hills, having listened to the bleating sheep, we talk through our options: have our snack lunch here and now, walk up the hill behind us (which we’ve seen people going both up and down), or head back the way we came?

We decide to go check out the view from the hill.

“We’ll just go to that point,” we say each time we make it to the point we’d previously agreed upon. We find ourselves higher and higher, looking down at all the world. I want to know what’s on the other side of this hill (I don’t find out we’re climbing up West Lomond until later), I want to know what’s just beyond that rise.

“At some point we have to say this really is the last one,” G tells me. But she also wants to go just a bit further.

“That point,” I say, pointing. “That’s the very last one.” She verifies that we’re looking at the same place and then, agreed, we go.

And we’re both happy. For from there is the view we’ve been after. There’s the sea. There’s East Lomond, the twin hill to the one we’ve nearly (but not quite) summited. The sand colored path we’re now on is like a proper road with twin ruts and it goes down before us ever ever on, as the saying goes.

“I wonder where that would take us,” I say.

“Maybe to Falkland,” G says.

A woman walks by as we’re standing, staring off into the distance.

“I wonder if we could ask,” G says.

At this point, the woman’s walking partner starts to pass us by.

“Do you know where this road would lead us,” I ask, “if we kept on it?”

“It’ll take you to the car park near Falkland,” he says. “Why do you ask?”

“We were just wondering where it went.” I explain that we’ve come from the opposite direction and still have to get back by bus to our home base, that we didn’t know if we needed to go back the way we’d come or if we could venture on this new path to make some sort of full circle.

“My wife and I have our car at the car park. You could follow me and if you wanted we could drop you off in Falkland for the bus.” He says it’s about a mile and a half to the car park. G and I look at each other. Why not?

Seeing no reason not to, we join up with our new friend and when we catch up to his wife I say, “Your husband has adopted us.”

She doesn’t seem too alarmed by this and we all carry on walking together, chatting about who we are and where we’re from. To stretch their legs, they’ve stopped off for a nice walk to the summit of West Lomond (which G and I just missed by turning left for our final point instead of right and ever ever upward) on their way to Dundee to see their daughter and her family.

With the sea to our right and the winding path before us, we make it to the parking lot and they assure us it’s no problem to take us into Falkland.

Once there, when we see a bus stop sign, the husband and I jump out to look at the times and before I can tell him that this place is okay, he decides they’ll take us all the way back to Anstruther. Despite our protests that in this town or the next one we could catch a bus, they do.

They go about 25 miles out of their way to take us home. “We haven’t been to Anstruther in years and years,” they say. “It’ll be nice to see it again.”

When we arrive, we try to talk them into letting us treat them to an ice cream, tea, coffee, or fish and chips, something. But they say they must carry on. However, before they go, G shows them some of the old fishing boats in the harbor and they seem to really enjoy the impromptu tour. They’re reminded of the working fishing boats of the village where the wife grew up.

Saying our final goodbyes, G and I thank them again for their kindness. The wife says, “One day you’ll do the same for someone else.”

As G and I head back up the hill to the house, we’re both thinking of that absorbed Scottishness, of what it is to be kind, and of all the good things that people do. At one point, G says, “She was right. We will do something for someone else one day.”

And, I think, you already have. You’ve absorbed Scottishness yourself. At the top of the hill as we turn down the gravel lane, I think on that as it turns out, no matter where I am the people are nice. No matter where they are from, the farther north I go or not, people are kind.

My Summer Reading List

The novel is done. Now I must rediscover what it means to be me without the driving force of work to define my every waking moment. Sometimes this is pleasant and other times not so much. This time, The End brings a mixed bag of relief and distress. I beat my deadline (Good job!), but how do I now fill the hours of the days without walking myself into the ground or spending all my money?

Riding off the momentum of consistent work, the easiest thing to do would be to jump into a new project. I have many things I need to edit, many things I could write, many things I could do. But, instead of that, as a reward for finishing my book, I give myself permission to have a little holiday. Which really means that I have more hours than ever to gaze off into space, thinking, thinking, always thinking. I have time to read for hours on end without the nagging feeling that I should be working instead (yet still that nagging finds me). I have the time to wander along the coastal path without trying to rush back to work for a handful of hours more at the computer (I should have packed more snacks). I have the time to sort through maps, site seeing ideas, and plans in preparation for my parents’ and older sister’s upcoming visit.

One day, on this holiday of mine, I walk the coastal path to Pittenweem. I’ve been told of an art gallery there that is worth visiting. So off I go. As I walk, gazing out at the sea, smiling at the sight of ducklings, watching the gulls swoop, saying “hiya” to other passing walkers, I’m still mulling over ideas of identity which ended up being one of the themes in the book I wrote and is showing up for me in other places as well.

As I walk, I think about the book I’ve picked up from my host’s bookshelves. It’s The Maytrees by Annie Dillard and it’s a strange and poetic novel about relationships, love, and about how people adapt to each other. As the story unfolds—a man wins over the attention and love of a woman, they marry, he leaves her for another woman, and then he comes back—the words convey the sense of the New England coast, waves, lighthouses, sand, the incoming and outgoing tides. It gives me a sense of this place too, with this sea, these waves, those gulls, this sand. 

Still, walking along, I find myself tensed against the story, against the man, against the woman who so easily forgave the man as he came and went like the tide. For the woman had had to shift her identity to include the man’s (in a way, against her own wishes for her life), shifted again to live well without him, and then had to shift one last time to reinclude him. I find myself resentful and holding an anger against the man that the woman hadn’t held. And I laugh at myself. There is never any use in holding resentment whether my own, someone else’s, or some fictional person’s. Nevertheless, even knowing that, I find myself resentful of the people who take for granted their right to have what they want at the cost of another’s peace, as the man did in the book. I guess what it comes down to is that I don’t want my own peace disturbed.

In no particular hurry to reach the gallery, on my way through Pittenweem I collect the key from the coffee shop on the high street and walk back down to St. Fillan’s Cave. I let myself in through the door and lock it behind me. It’s a nice little cave, formed by erosion from the flowing of an old river, and used in the past by monks, saints, hermits, fishermen, and smugglers. For a wee bit of time, I sit on the bench provided with the lights on listening to the drip drip drip of water against stone. Then I get up and turn off the lights and go to sit again. To listen, to be, to feel the dripping quiet in the semi darkness. I’m still learning how to relax, to let myself be free of plot entanglements and character development, to not think about all the things there are to be done.

Having sat, having listened, having been, I let myself out of the cave, lock it up behind me, return the key to the café, and go in search of the gallery.

Though I wander up and down the street it’s said to be on, I never find it. And really, that’s okay. However, not quite ready to find my way back homeward, I go into a little café and order lunch and a coffee. I sit there listening to the background voices and observing the people who walk by outside. I read a little. When I’m finished recharging, I head back toward Anstruther. At one point, I sit (there are park benches at various intervals along the path) and watch seals hold their heads up out of the water, watch them float along on their backs. Down the path, some time later, I sit again, and see some minke whales off in the distance.   

On a different morning of my holiday, my housemate G (as opposed to my host G) takes me with her down to the boatyard where she is doing work on the restoration of old boats for her doctorate. She introduces me to the other boatyards workers, an Australian who has lived in the U.K. for twenty-one years, the Italian who is in charge of the yard and the work, and a few locals.

One of the locals is a ninety-two-year-old man with a gleam in his eye, perfect teeth (are they real or are they not?), and a slight deficit of hearing. One of his first questions is whether I’ve been to Italy. I admit (loudly) that I have and he asks me where.

“Padua,” I say, trying to remember my exact itinerary. Not sure that he really wants to know every place or all that I saw. Padua is enough. Padua was one of the first places I visited while there.

“Leo,” he says, pointing to the boatyard leader, “is from Padua. G is from Genoa. Genova.” I nod. This I’ve already been told by G.

As we stand there, each of us thinking of Italy, he unzips the breast pocket of his coverall and with some effort pulls out a wallet.

“It’s picture time,” G says in an undertone to me. G and I stand and wait as he laboriously searches the wallet’s folds to find what he wants to find. He brings out one photo. It’s a faded picture, yellowed around the edges, carefully handled over the years, of him as a young man wearing a seaman’s uniform. I think he says it’s from 1946, after the war was over. He’d served during the war in Italy. He’d also been in Greece. Checking each tiny slitted pocket of his wallet, he finally finds a second photo, also of him, and shows it to me as well.

“Were those the glory days?” I ask.

“They were awful,” he says.

G takes me along for coffee time (usually every day at 10:00) at the Fisheries Museum Café and I listen to the men tell stories of place and time, the old fishing days, the modern fishing days, how the communities have faded because of commercial fishing, overfishing. How time has changed the lives of all these little fishing villages.

Thinking of the shifting nature of time, I go away wondering about the man’s photos. For he shares them with everyone he meets (or so it seems). Does sharing the photos of himself at the age of twenty take him back to his youth? He who can, I am told by one of the other locals, still climb ladders as if he were twenty while those younger than him struggle with hurt knees and hips and backs. Why was that time the defining point of his life? Was it because he survived (as so many others didn’t) the war? Was it the only time he went away from home? By going away and coming back did he establish his sense of self, place, and identity?

G goes on to do her work as do the men. I leave the café and head outside. Everyone has their stories. Maybe at the end of a long life all the memories have to boil down to one point, one story, one moment in time. In some manner of speaking, the novel I just wrote deals with the idea of memories, of that boiling down of all one’s memories to a photo album of collected memories, and the idea of how a person shifts to fit their identity to others’ expectations or lives.

On a whim, needing to do something other than read, walk, and think, I stop in at the boat trips booking kiosk to ask if they, by any chance, have an opening for the day’s trip to the Isle of May. My host G had said, “You must go to the Isle of May. You must! Ask G, she went with her parents.” G, my housemate, confirmed it had been a great excursion and showed me some photos from the trip. After that, I’d checked online but the calendar had been booked solid through the next week. Even so, today, I feel there’s no harm in checking. Bad weather is on the forecast for the rest of the week and the next day’s sailing has already been cancelled, but today has a sense of adventure to it. Something will happen.

In an astounding bit of good luck, I get the seat of someone who doesn’t show up. As I sit in the boat, the waves tossing around it, the crew going from row to row to check with people that they don’t feel unwell and helping those who do to go stand in the fresh air, I gaze out the window and wonder if at 92 I will be carrying around photos of myself. I wonder what stories will define me as I go. What will be the point I return to over and over again? What instance will I recall to any who cross my path? What point of my life will my identity ride upon? If I make it as far as 92, will I be able to pull my experiences along with me while still being in the present moment of my living? At that age is the past all I’ll have?

On the Isle of May, I push away all these thoughts, I admire the puffins, the lighthouses, the foghorns, see some fluffy gull babies, take loads of pictures, marvel at the things I get to see in this life of mine, walk and walk and walk, and make it to the boat at the set time to get back home with the tide. The sea is calmer going home.

Meanwhile, back at the house, I finish The Maytrees and move on to another bookshelf book. For my next guilt-free read I select the heartbreaking and beautiful All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque. This book follows a regiment of German soldiers through the first World War. These boys are only eighteen years old when they join the army but ancient by the time it’s over, or dead. As my book was, as The Maytrees was, this book is also a story about identity, a man’s reflections on the human identity, on the soldier’s identity and how those two things are often not reconcilable. It’s about the horrifying ways that humans treat each other and how in those frontline moments the men become animals—only trying to survive from moment to moment. It’s about the hope and poetry of life. It’s a soul wrenching story about the horror of war. It’s a beautiful and heartbreaking book which everyone should read.

Holding the weight of it in my head and in my heart, I go for a walk. The sun has peeked out briefly from the shield of clouds, calling me out, cheering me up. I head toward the golf course for I know that just below it is a small beach and a few benches that look out at the sea. I will sit there and watch the tide come in.

The sun hides away now. I sit there until the chill of air turns me cold even after I’ve zipped my jacket all the way up. I sit and watch the birds float on top of the rocking water. I watch the waves crest and fall.

In the evening of another day of my holiday, I go with my host to the Crail Folk & Acoustic Music Club. The night’s headliner is the Gold Heart Sisters. A family from the states who sings and plays bluegrass music. My book is about musical siblings and I watch these singing and playing women, their unsmiling, banjo playing brother, and their bass playing dad and wonder if their experience has any similarities to what I’ve written (let’s hope only the good similarities).

As I sit in the room with the fifty or so other people who’ve come to the concert, I feel a strange blur of identity; I am of this place, but I’m not. These days, my home is where I am. These days, for just a wee bit longer, that means my home is Scotland. Even so, as the sisters sing of love and loss and longing, of a savior and the angels in heaven, of the battle at the OK Corral, of the Blue Ridge Mountains, of the call of the train whistle, I feel that sense of place, of familiarity, that melting pot, land of opportunity American nostalgia and I wonder if those around me feel it too.

Does the music let them cross the ocean, the years, and know another place as if it were home?

Are we, at this point in the music, all from the Appalachian Mountains?

Or, is it that now, here, we’re all back home?

For it is true that the Appalachian Mountain music is the music that the immigrants from Ulster, Ireland (a people who were originally English or Scottish) made as they settled in the mountains, far away from home, remembering the good times, creating a new sense of place, a new identity, a new wilder music, a melding of the old with the new. [Of course, here I’m making a very broad claim that hasn’t been backed up with any great intensity of historical research.]

I’m not from the Blue Mountains, but I do have Scots and Irish ancestry, and while I’m not on a path to find myself or discover my roots, I still feel it, the past, the music, as if it were my own.

In the midst of this holiday is my identity, a yellowed around the edges snapshot of me, a moving from place to place, a story, a telling of a story.