Seasons on Harris (25 page)

I
MAKE NO APOLOGIES HERE FOR
this diversion into impressionistic and semiabstract mood. What else can you expect from time spent a-dreamin' during our “dawdle days in the dunes,” on this magnificent beach of Seilibost—although to call it a beach hardly does justice to our golden strand of infinitudes.

This is one of those faces of Harris that makes this island iconic. This is also one of the reasons outsiders undertake rather arduous—and expensive—pilgrimages here. Returnees are certainly aware of its validity. Yes, of course, there's the history and the tweed and the crofters, and the fishermen, and the Gaelic, and all those rich images of an ancient and resonant culture. But there's something more too. Something in the wild land, the ocean, and these great sand spaces that resonates deeply in the bass chords of human awareness and evolution. Touchstones of magic and mystery that ease off the clunky carapace of everyday mundanities and wait patiently here to be nurtured and absorbed.

 

A
T LAST
. A
FTER DAYS OF
early autumnal rain, the sun emerges from dark dawn clouds and, for once, appears resolute. Determined to endure and bring warmth. Determined to melt the early clouds into wispy submission and bathe the soggy, beaten land in a sheen of gold as it rises. Then, gathering strength, a strong and burnished silver turns the
machair
into fairy fields of brilliance, almost antipodean in mood and spirit.

It is definitely a day for the beach. We have waited a long time—far too long through these dreary, dripping days of Celtic melancholia—for a day like this. So—it's cancel all plans. Forget Stornoway and all our multitudinous must-dos and must-buys. They can wait. A day like this is not for shopping or a few hours in the library on Cromwell Street or a beer in the smoky Criterion or McNeill's or a platter of Cameron's battered fish (deliciously tempura-crisp when fresh-fried, ghastly if allowed to wilt under the heat lamps), or mooching along the harbor in the evening, waiting for the prawn boats to ease in and hoping to grab a bargain bag of little langoustines, too small to send off to Spain that night with the bigger ones, neatly slotted in their boxed crates.

All that can wait. It is time to sit, as we are sitting now, on the curved sandy crest of a blown dune, with the brittle marram grass chattering in breezes soft as sighs. It is time to listen and look and learn. It is time to watch the tide slowly recede and then return in frilled eddies across the long horizontal swaths of gilded, syllabub-smooth sand. The day is all ours and the spill of days beyond. We need to be nowhere. We need to be nothing at all. Except here. Letting the layers peel back; letting all the mental fripperies go; quieting the incessant yammer of overactive psyches; and arriving at…nothing, except that deep stillness of restful spirits and mellowed souls.

A friend of ours once remarked that “my problem with doing nothing is that I don't know when it's time to do something.” But “doing nothing” is rarely what it seems to be. More often it's about rediscovering the obvious—those simple, uncomplicated feelings and perceptions all too easily overlooked in the search for the new and novel—and the constant grappling with impulses, choices, “must dos,” and surfeits of sensory overload: The eternal juxtaposition and balancing of inner and outer journeys.

Alec Guinness once wrote: “Paying attention to anything is a window into the universe,” and in our case we started off by paying attention just to the clouds. They alone are enough to occupy hours of observation as their profiles and moods change. Bold, bulging cumuli, massing across the horizon, tumescent, pearlescent, some cut by canyons, others puffy as soufflés or cuddly as plump cherubs under feathery
brushstrokes of cirrus; a thunderhead growing over a sun-shafted summit and purpling under a flattening head—glowing with power as if barely containing its furies within.

Gulls fly close (I'm always surprised by their impressive size) and glide to smooth landings alongside one last tidal stream meandering its diminishing way across the beach to where the surf breaks gently on a distant strand. Two hours ago the surf was clearly visible in white-maned lines of waves, but with the tide receding, they barely exist now. It looks as if you could set off and walk straight across the three miles of sand to Taransay Island. It's a tempting proposition, just to head off in a straight line across those infinitudes of soft shell dust and see how far you could get before the tide decides it's time to turn again.

So we walk together slowly out in a wide arc across the sand and a great calm settles over us.

“We are
so
lucky,” Anne said softly as if to avoid disturbing the silence and the gentle rhythm of our steps.

I nod and smile and know exactly what she means. Back in our small beach cottage, perched on a rocky buckle of land, we have everything. We need for nothing at all. We have our favorite music on a handful of CDs, a dozen or so “important” books we've been meaning to read for eons, a well-stocked refrigerator, a change of clothes, a guitar, notebooks and journals, a comfortable double bed, a couple of elephantine armchairs, and a small but idyllic glass-enclosed sunroom overlooking the whole glorious vista of sand, dunes, mountains, and ocean. And then, of course, we have time itself—time for thinking, daydreaming, looking, focusing, and letting free-floating feelings roll—a month's sensation and thoughts in a single day. And we have as well a sense of that “wild, roving, vagabond life” so celebrated by Sir Richard Burton, the famous Victorian explorer.

And rhythms. We have the slow, regular rhythms of the day, each and every day. Sometimes placid and predictable as the tides. Sometimes typically Hebridean, when, in the course of a single hour, we might watch the following sequence: first, a furious little rainstorm whirling in off the Atlantic on air currents that have crossed over those three thousand miles of untrammeled ocean; then angry little black clouds appearing over
Taransay as if to express frustration at this unexpected island obstacle; and the rain coming at us across the sand, flailing like a horse's tail, hitting the large windows of our sunroom hard as hail. Taransay vanishes, lost in a sudden white mist-sheen. Then the whole bay vanishes and all we can see, through the rain-streaked glass, are small clusters of
machair
wildflowers a few feet away from the cottage, flailing about like placard-hoisting protesters at an anti-something-or-other rally.

I remember a comment Roddy had made a few days previous as one autumn storm too many had disturbed his normally calm demeanor: “Did y'know, David, that it's estimated there's more'n ninety billion gallons of rain falling on Scotland in an average year. An' I reckon most of it came down in the last two weeks…directly on top of our wee island.”

This time the petulant storm barely lasts three minutes. And then it's all over. The misty strands evaporate like wraiths suddenly exposed to daylight. And light comes. A watery sun at first, limpidly silver, then turning more and more sauterne-gold as the land appears once again. The long dune-strand of Corran Seilibost, the great concave profiles of the Luskentyre dunes, the languorous green profile of Taransay, and, still a little hazy, the bold bulk of the North Harris hills. They're all back in barely a minute with only our rain-dappled windows as evidence of that fickle storm fury.

And then comes the rainbow. Actually, this time it's one of those magnificent double rainbows—two perfect concentric arcs with each spectrum color distinct and separate. And it's now warm again, with the sun beaming in brazenly through the large sunroom windows. The sands gleam like burnished bronze, but down farther to the south, over the straggled croft community of Northton, another dark little storm suddenly appears atop Chaipaval and we watch the rain fall in silky white strands like long man-of-war tentacles.

As we turn eastward, looking through the living room windows, across the peaty wastes of the island's central spine, huge cumuli float like bulbous galleons toward the soaring cliffs of Skye. And to the north, over Clisham, shafts of sun burst through the mountains' semipermanent cloud cover and dapple the dun green-brown slopes with patches of emerald and polished copper hues. And finally, looking straight out at
Taransay again, the rainbow is fading and—would you believe—another little petulant flurry of gale and rain looks to be forming once more as the Atlantic air decries the arrogant intrusion of land…

And so it goes. A cycle of five or more entirely different but simultaneous bouts of weather, each one transforming into something else even as it is created. A ceaseless round of restless, almost playful, climatology that makes us happy just to sit, watch, and wonder how an impressionistic icon like Monet would have relished such a mélange of mood shifts.

Anne is right. We are very lucky. What more could we possibly need of our little beachside home? The place murmurs its enticements quietly, invites gentle introspection and natural meditation, and reflects the haunting mood of William Wordsworth's words:

That same spirit that “scrolls through all things” was with us as we wandered slowly together once again across those golden sands. We'd been warned, of course, by at least one trepidatious local, of “quicksands” (“Y'll never spot 'em 'til y're in 'em!”), rapid tidal reversals (“Aye—it comes in faster'n y'can run in places”), and the perniciously strong currents of the “sand rivers.” But by now we were used to occasional island doomsayers and walked on across the firm flats with not a care in the world.

First came the rock pools of Corran Seilibost. Dozens of them, nestled among brittle ledges of exposed gneiss. Some were still and empty. The larger ones teemed with small-scale life—minnow-sized fish, tiny hermit crabs, limpets, anemones, and purple-shelled whelks. And interlaced among the pools were rocks graced with thick, bright green, hairlike sea
moss twirled into curls and slack knots by the tide. The moss was soft to the touch, almost like the downy peach fuzz on a baby's head. And tiny interwoven fragments of sand and powdered seashells made the “hair” sparkle and flash as we moved slowly across this little world of pools.

Intrigued as we both were by these miniature worlds, we were all too aware of our limited observation and descriptive skills. This was relatively new territory for us. We were merely neophyte pool-ponderers compared to people like Alison Johnson and her beautiful and learned portraits of similar territory in her book
Islands in the Sound
. This was Alison's third book on Harris, and it is her combination of detailed knowledge and love of the seashore environment that makes her writing so intriguing—as in this description of rock pools on the islands in the Sound of Harris:

A few weeks back we'd spent a gloriously sunny afternoon with Alison and Andrew at their “always expanding” house at Leverburgh, and I asked them if they missed the old Scarista House days. Andrew smiled his pleasantly mellow, noncommittal smile, but Alison, rather more stern and direct, refused to be sentimental: “I'm just not that person anymore…I can't even read my own book nowadays. In fact, I don't think I have a single copy in the house. It all became a bit too much. Andrew's much better with people than I am—by the time I'd done the dinners there, I wasn't good company—for anybody! I'm pleased it's still going, though. The new owners, the Martins, are very good friends but…well, now we're happily and deeply into publishing academic and research materials. A new career. Environmental issues mainly. Only small runs. Looking back, I suppose I should have toned my book down a bit. I'm sure it caused mortal offense to some on the island. I was a little too blunt, I think. I still am!”

Andrew continued to smile and nodded vague agreement before wandering off “to feed the neighbor's hens.”

“I don't know how he puts up with me sometimes.” Alison laughed when he'd left and then launched into tirades over some of the latest “developmental” issues plaguing Harris, including the finally rejected Lingarabay Superquarry, those proposed four-hundred-foot-high wind turbines on Lewis, rumors of “toxic” salmon farms, “pseudo” summer festivals, the decline of the Gaelic language, and—of course—the future fortunes of poor old Harris Tweed.