Following the Sun (39 page)

It was now June 7th, I had two weeks to get over to the western coast of Lewis where the stones of Callanish stood guard, so I bid farewell to nice Mrs. McLeod and rode down the Loch Torridon coast. I had been assured that the road was passable, and it perhaps would have been in a car, but after a few miles it broke down into a gravel road that was hard going, and halfway down the coast I suffered my requisite flat tire. It was about time, I hadn't had one in three weeks. I wheeled the poor, limping Peugeot to an overlook and showed her the island of Skye, which we could see off beyond the loch. Not far now, I soothed her as I fixed the tire, hoping that this would be the last time.

That done I pedaled onward and southward, weaving in and along lochs and cutting over high hills, with splendid views out to Skye. By late afternoon I came to the Kyle of Lochalsh and caught the ferry for the short ride across the straights.

On the ferry ride I spotted a man in full regalia. He wore a Prince Charles jacket, a kilt of some greenish colored clan, a Glengarry cap with his clan badge affixed to the side, clan kilt hose, garters, and a
squian dubh
, the black knife sheath, fixed to his leg, and he had a dark otter or muskrat pelt sporran. He was first in line to debark as we approached the pier and was the first off the boat as we touched. I watched from my perch on an upper deck and saw him go striding up the hill without a break. About twenty minutes later as I rode along the high shores of the Kyle of Lochalsh and the Inner Sound, I passed him. He was mounting a hill at a vigorous pace, his kilt swinging from side to side as he strode along. He carried a small pack on his back, and wore the light shoes known as ghillie brogues, more suited for formal wear than hiking. But he was making good time, all told.

I whistled as I approached from behind to warn him, and greeted him as I pumped by, and once I crested the hill I left him far behind. I stopped at the next hill and looked back. Here he came, striding onward in an unceasing, determined march.

I hadn't eaten all day and at Broadford I put in to a place called the Claymore, and had a lobster stew with boiled potatoes and green peas. As I was ordering, I looked out the window and saw the kilted man go by, still advancing in his unbroken pace. He was making better time than I was.

I was told that there were not many places to stay along the coast road past Scalpay, and was directed to the house of a woman who would take in boarders. It turned out to be another one of those lovely little spots that one tends to find accidentally, a white-washed croft with thick stone walls and upstairs bedrooms overlooking the tidal flats on the Bay South shore, run by a pleasant woman named Mrs. MacBrayne, who fussed over my bicycle and of course gave me hot tea.

After tea I went for a walk out on the flats to watch the oystercatchers and dunlins feed. When I got back there was a man in the house named Martin, possibly the husband of Mrs. MacBrayne, although he wasn't introduced as such. Martin was familiar with the house though and offered me a snort of whiskey and sat me down at the dining room table to give me a lecture on the Common Market, the current political environment in Scotland, the role of the United States in international affairs, the Chinese situation, and other local matters. “It's a world economy,” he said, “a one-world economy, and we must face it.”

Martin was from Broadford, I learned, and rarely left town.

Everywhere I had been on this trip people in rural areas, the farmers and local tradespeople, were very wary of this approaching world economy. I told him as much. I told him they all feared homogenization of both culture and food, especially the French peasants.

“I dinna like it either,” said Martin. “Look at our poor fish trade here, look at the condition of it,” he said. “But we're stuck wi' it.”

He poured me another dram.

“Ah hell wi' it,” he said, belting down his whiskey. “Let's go look at the sunset.” We walked out again over the flats under a fiery green sky.

The next morning the wind came up again, a stiff charger out of the northwest, just the direction into which I was headed. It was a clear, bright morning, with clouds rolling in and out of the high wild peaks of the mountains of the interior, and I began a long and difficult climb, against both the wind and the hills. Of the two, the wind was far worse. Hour after hour I pushed and pedaled and pumped up the coast, past Scalpay Island, up along Loch Ainort, with the hardest slog of all at the end of the loch where the wind funneled down through a cut in the hills.

Unlike the Highlands, which had been cool and misty, with periodic showers, the weather had changed at Inverness and I had been riding under clear skies all the way west, with only an occasional shower. Here on Skye the fine weather continued, but the light had changed. The air was sterling and sharp so that even distant, cloudy mountain peaks seemed close at hand and the sunlight seemed brighter and more translucent than anywhere I had been so far. It was a clear glass landscape, like looking through new black ice, and the light held all the way to Portree, where I found a place for the night.

The light was still clear even after the late sundown, with green sheets of fire rising up in the slopes above the town, and a clean blue black sky rolling up to the east over the isles of Raasay and Rona. On a walk after dinner in this green, half-lit world, as I was passing through the town square, I heard a distinctive echoing of clipped footsteps, and into the open plaza, still at a quick-paced stride, came the full-kilted Scotsman, his plaids rising and falling with each hearty step. He made directly for me.

“Didn't I see you on the ferry?” he asked. To my surprise he had the broad flat accent of an American midwesterner.

I told him, yes, I had been on the ferry and had passed him on my bicycle. I couldn't resist asking where he was from. “Certainly not Oban?” I said.

“Racine, Wisconsin,” he answered, curtly.

He was over for a little walk, he said, and would come every year at this time. His family had come to America from Lewis in February of 1842 and Scots have long memories, as he explained. He had spent the day in the mountains, and now was hunting for a place and having no luck. I told him where I was staying but he had already been there. It was now almost midnight, and true to Presbyterian form, things had shut down everywhere.

“Thanks,” he said, and strode off purposefully.

I was bound for the small town of Uig on the northwest coast and was disappointed to find that the wind was still blowing the next day, meaning another hard plod into its teeth. It was even worse than the day before, blowing harder, with long eight-mile level stretches and no pleasant downhill grades to coast and rest. At Uig I found a sheltered bed and breakfast run by an old couple from Glasgow. I also found a benign grove of deciduous trees with a little freshwater stream running down to the sea loch, and as soon as I was settled I went out again, headed for the greenwood and began climbing a little trail under the trees. Here the air was calm, although I could hear the wind howling overhead and buffeting the upper storey of the trees. I was tired from fighting headwinds, and for the first time went to bed before darkness had completely fallen, which in these parts was not that early, eleven-thirty or so.

I took the morning ferry across Little Minch to North Uist, and landed at Lochmaddy, surrounded all the while by wheeling gulls and lines of shags. Just as the vessel was pulling away from Uig, out onto the pier, apparently hoping to catch the boat, came the American Scotsman himself, looking none the worse for all his walking, and still moving at his high-paced longstride march. When it was clear that he had missed the boat, without hesitation he turned on his heel and marched back up the pier.

That night at a small hotel in Lochmaddy I had a whiskey and enjoyed a long warming meal, followed by coffee in a warm parlor with a coal stove. Here groups of outdoorsmen and women had gathered and I fell into conversation about a wildlife sanctuary I had heard of on South Uist, where there was said to be an aerie of golden eagles with young.

A pretty, sensible woman with crinkly ginger hair cornered me and, fixing me with an unblinking stare, commanded that I must go see them, if I was interested in birds.

“You should go there,” she said. “You can na come here and not go out to see them.”

“I will,” I said, not knowing whether I actually would.

“No, but you must,” she said.

“I know, I will.”

“Yes. Go then.”

Later she brought over her gentleman friend, a florid Scot in a Prince Charles jacket.

“Tell him to go out and see the eagles, Angus,” she said.

“Go lad, you'll like it,” he said.

“I intend to.”

“It's a bitter ground, there,” he said. “Like the end of the earth.”

Suddenly it did begin to sound interesting. I got directions, including a recommendation of a bed and breakfast within striking distance.

“What church are you?” Angus asked, seemingly out of the blue.

I stumbled at this one, but before I could answer Angus explained.

“Not Free Kirk, I take it, you not being from these parts. But be sure to stay put Saturday night, or make your way down to South Uist by Sunday. They won't take you in, no matter what on Sunday up here in the north, you must get down to the Catholic island.”

Back at the bed and breakfast I had a talk with Johnny McLeod, the owner, about the wildlife sanctuary and the eagles. He too knew of it. “A desolate, glorious place,” he said. He also knew about the otters that you could see from time to time in the harbors. In fact he was partial to otters and had worked to help conserve them. He knew Gavin Maxwell, author of the otter book
Ring of Bright Water
, who had lived at Sandaig, not far from the ferry landing for Skye. Maxwell's house had burned a few years back and then Maxwell died a year later. But the otters of the Hebrides were doing well, Johnny said. “You'll see them up and down the west coast here, and over on Harris,” he said.

As luck would have it, the next day as I was crossing a causeway in the wind, I did see one out among the rocks. I also saw seals basking on the bars and sporting in the deeper coves.

At the hotel at Lochmaddy the night before, among the bird and wildlife people, I had, I'm afraid, instigated a fairly heated (for Hebrideans) discussion about seals. I had pointedly asked if people here thought seals “worshipped” the sun. This was not entirely out of context. I had been telling them about the lemurs of Madagascar, whom the local Madagascans believe are sun worshippers, and had held forth perhaps a little too long on the bears of North America. I told them how some Native American tribes there believe that bears worship the sun. Then I asked if they thought that seals worship as well.

“After all, you see them out basking, like turtles and shags,” I said.

“Seals do no' worship the sun,” Angus said. “They've no god at all. They're dumb animals, they just like to dry out from time to time.”

“No, he's got a point though,” said a small dark-haired man, who seemed to have had his share of single malt. “After a fashion, they worship. They haul out in sun, and throw back their heads like.”

“They haul in fogs and rain, too, Jimmy,” someone else chimed in.

“Na, but more i' the sun,” said Jimmy.

“Wha' they got no god—neither sun, nor moon, nor Jesus Christ hisself, Jimmy, don't be daft.”

Jimmy said something in Gaelic.

Angus said something back in Gaelic, and then someone said something else in Gaelic and then they all laughed, except for the ginger-haired companion of Angus.

“Keep civil, lads. There's ladies present.”

“And visiting dignitaries to boot,” said Angus, winking toward me.

The standard cliché is that the Scots are an unfriendly, dour, and taciturn lot, but you could not prove that by me. From Edinburgh to Kintore, from Kintore to Inverness, all across the Highlands, and now out to the last bastion of taciturnity, the Hebrides, everyone I had met was not only friendly but generous and talkative. One man in the Highlands, in a small car, seeing me pushing my loaded bicycle up one of the mountains, offered me a lift, not considering the fact that there was no room for me and my bicycle as well. He apologized for not being able to assist me and drove on.

There was a big debate raging on the islands about whether to “cull” the seal population at this time. There wasn't much argument here, however. These people in the hotel were all conservationists and against the cull, and to some degree, I noticed, against the fishermen who wanted the seals culled.

I had also asked them about Selkies. But they were a sophisticated lot and informed me that no one on these islands believed in the Selkies anymore.

The American travel writer Lawrence Millman, who passed through these parts a few years after I was there, collecting stories for a book, did report finding older people who believed in Selkies, however.

The Selkie legend takes many forms, but the basic story holds that the Selkies are seal people who occasionally take up residence on land. They are, in their human form, exceptionally beautiful, especially the females, who sometimes marry with local men and have children. In one tale from this region a man unknowingly marries a Selkie who gives him three beautiful children. The Selkie mother has a strange habit of disappearing from time to time, however. One day her husband follows her. She walks down to the coast to a hidden cove, takes out a full sealskin she has hidden, strips her human clothes, dons the sealskin, and swims off into the sea. In some versions the jealous husband hides the skin or destroys it, and the beautiful seal woman dies. In one sad ballad version, she disappears forever into the sea after she is discovered, taking all her children with her.

Although it seems unlikely (except perhaps for their purported sun worship), Selkies are by tradition celestial beings, driven out of Heaven for some minor sins that were not bad enough to land them in Hell.