Strange Days: Fabulous Journeys With Gardner Dozois (14 page)

We say goodbye to Colin, who has too much work to do to be able to accompany us on this afternoon’s tourist expedition—I quote the wise ancient dictum “Writers work from sun to sun/But an editor’s work is
never
done,” but none of the others, writers all, seem terribly impressed or grateful, the swine—and Lisa drives us back into Tarbert, dropping us off in front of the Tarbert Hotel while she goes off to pick Emily up at school.

George consults with Parris, who decides to stay in and skip lunch as well, although she wants to go on the actual tourist expedition later in the afternoon. We then all wait for Lisa in front of the Tarbert Hotel. She arrives a few minutes later with her daughter Emily, a timid but sweet little girl with big owl glasses, dressed in a British schoolgirl’s costume. She stares at us apprehensively as we’re introduced, obviously not sure whether she should burst into tears or not. When asked which of us she’d rather have go with her in her car, me or Susan, she looks at me in alarm and immediately says “Her!”, pointing at Susan. So I go with George in his car, while Lisa, Emily, and Susan go in Lisa’s car, Emily keeping a wary eye on me until we pull away and out of sight, just in case I should change my mind and suddenly leap into Lisa’s car with her instead.

We all meet at Stonefield Castle, just north of Tarbert, for lunch. This isn’t really a “castle,” of course, but rather a big stone Victorian mansion, a bit rundown, but still moderately grand and baronial, with sitting-rooms paneled in dark wood and overlooked glassily by mounted deer heads (it reminds me a bit in this regard of the Viewfield House in Skye, although it is less fantastical than that strange Victorian Gormenghast had been—no tiger heads, no water-buffalo skulls, no unidentifiable stuffed creatures snarling defiance in nearly opaque glass cases), and with libraries of the sort that you see in period-piece British movies, complete with dusty old books in tall glass-fronted cases and big overstuffed armchairs. It’s clear that this place immediately appeals to George, who now seems to regret that he’s staying at the Tarbert when he could be staying here instead, getting to
practice
living in baronial splendor, to prepare him for when his own stately home is actually built. The place does look more inviting than the Tarbert, shifting the balance of opinion in our minds even more away from “quaint” toward “cramped and tiny.” (Of course, Stonefield Castle is also more expensive than the Tarbert . . . and, to be fair, the others have rooms at the Tarbert that are somewhat more comfortable than ours, rooms into which, for instance, you have space to squeeze items of furniture other than the bed.)

We have a mediocre lunch—so what else is new?—there, sitting outside at picnic tables that do at least offer a splendid overview of Loch Fyne. During lunch, Emily wanders away up the flagstone path that leads up the hill toward the swimming pool, occasionally pausing to peer owlishly back at us and say “help” in a small calm voice. When Lisa tells her that she doesn’t need any help, she seems to consider this gravely for a moment, and then accept it, continuing to hop solemnly away along the flagstone path, one flagstone per hop. We also learn, by dedicated scientific experimentation, that English robins only eat bread, not chips or crisps . . . although Emily, who has by now come hopping back, generously continues to share her chips with them long after this important scientific principle has been established. Finally, even though Emily keeps looking up at Lisa and solemnly demanding “More food!”, lunch is over, all the food either eaten or thrown to the unappreciative robins. While Lisa and Emily visit the loo (apparently Emily collects a life-list of loos she’s visited, the way birders collect a life-list of birds they’ve seen, and often makes her mother take her to one even when it turns out that she doesn’t actually have to go to the bathroom), George and I get back in the car and drive back to the hotel.

When Susan and Emily and Lisa arrive, Emily wearing the satisfied look of a connoisseur who’s just gotten to see a rare and elusive loo she’s never seen before, I get in the car with George and Parris, who has come down to join us, and we follow Lisa’s car a few miles out of Tarbert to Skipness Castle, past a beach with a stunning view of the rugged offshore island of Arran, and past a strange vertical forest of tortured upthrust rock formations, looking more like something you’d be likely to run into in New Mexico or Colorado or Arizona than here in Scotland.

Compared with all this scenic splendor, the castle itself, when we finally get there, is almost uninteresting—mostly ruined, with grass growing inside where the Grand Hall and the banquet rooms once were. We look briefly around the ruins, with George expressing disappointment that we can’t climb up onto the battlements, but they’re blocked off. In fact, the only part of the castle interior open to view is the latrine chamber, which looks like, well . . . a latrine chamber. At least it is not still full of ancient piss.

We return to the “Seafood Caravan” next to the car park, which, while we were gone, has dispensed smoked salmon sandwiches for Susan and Parris. I sit in a patch of shade and watch the rocky bulk of Arran through binoculars, tracing streams as they cut their way down from the crests of the hills to the sea, while the rest of the adults in our party sit in the broiling sun at picnic tables, and Emily is busy chasing all the chicks and ducklings in the yard to and fro, pointing to them and joyously shouting “Baby!”—chasing them eagerly but timidly, ready to flee instantly if they should turn on her.

On the way back, we drive down to the beach and stop for a moment to examine the strange rock formations, which obviously are made up of sediment laid down in horizontal layers over millions of years, then turned vertical and thrust up above the surface of the ground by some later violent movement of the earth. It’s strange, and almost frightening, to think what a huge amount of time is needed to lay down even one such layer of sediment and compress it into rock, let alone the hundreds and hundreds of such layers, one atop the other, that are clearly visible here—such a vast expanse of time that our little human lifespans are unnoticeable against it, less by far than the time it takes to blink your eye compared to all the hours and days and years of your life. Compared to the ages it took to lay down these tortured rock strata, life on earth—let alone human life—is less than a heartbeat old. Don’t even try to measure what an individual human life—yours, or mine—would be when set against that immense, alien, indifferent, inconceivable gulf of time. There’s probably no unit small enough.

After a brief stop at the Cultural Heritage Center (strange that the Vikings, who went through here raping and killing, and burning everything to the ground, are now considered to be part of Scotland’s Cultural Heritage: “Don’t mind those ten smelly Northerners gang-raping you, madam, your husband’s blood still on their hands—someday this will all be part of our rich Cultural Heritage! You’ll be able to buy the T-shirt!”), we go back to the Tarbert Hotel and sit in the bar and have tea, waiting for it to be time for our bus to leave for Glasgow. Parris says goodbye and goes up for a nap, and finally Emily begins to get fussy, and so Lisa says goodbye too, and leaves with her for home. George is going to have dinner with Lisa and Colin tonight, but he has kindly agreed to haul us and our stuff to the bus stop, so he waits with us for a while longer. We all keep a leery eye out for the huge bellowing drunk of the evening before, fearing that he might come back and tear George’s head off for a keepsake, but he’s probably in some other pub this evening, cheerfully strangling some other hapless tourist to death. We wonder how many tourists he goes through per month.

Finally, we load our huge groaning suitcases into George’s car—it sinks noticeably on its springs—and he drives us the half-mile or so up the hill to the bus-shelter across the street from the church. We wait there for the bus to Glasgow to arrive, me killing time by looking through the binoculars at what appear to be cairns on the crests of the hills on either side, wondering if they are positioned so as to allow a signal-fire lit on one to be seen from the other, the message thus being passed from cairn to cairn up the coast, or on inland. Finally, the Glasgow bus arrives. We say goodbye to George, load our stuff into the compartment under the bus (thank god we don’t have to try to jam it into the overhead racks!), and climb aboard. The bus starts with a sharp jolt and roars away unnervingly fast, before we’ve even gotten into our seats. Within seconds, Tarbert falls away behind, and is gone.

We climb into the bus at about 6:10 P.M., and it’s almost exactly a three-hour drive to Glasgow, with brief boarding stops at small villages along the way, and a somewhat longer stop at Inveraray, where I run out, fight my way through a queue of Japanese tourists, and get Susan some chewing gum and a bottle of water (a small bag of peanuts and a bottle of water for me)—this will have to do for dinner until we reach Glasgow. Susan falls asleep almost immediately after leaving Inveraray, thus missing the same scenery she missed on the way here, which is too bad, as some of it is very nice, especially the high mountain pass that the road climbs through outside of Inveraray, and the high plateau country beyond that contains Loch Long, with its surrounding fringe of huge old wooden luxury hotels. She also misses a spectacular sunset, perhaps the best one of the trip, with a thin silver crescent moon hanging over the darkening mountains, and bars of glowing pink clouds in the fading blue sky.

Later on, winding slowly through the outskirts of Glasgow, I keep getting glimpses of people walking around inside their apartments and houses, standing in a doorway, ironing a shirt, talking, sitting down to a formal dinner around a big table, drinking, sitting in front of the flickering blue eye of a TV set, cooking, waving their arms, leaning on windowsills and looking out the window at the night, or back at us as we pass, and I get a sudden perception of the sheer
mass
of humanity—there are millions of people out there, each one of them as quirky and individual, as unique and contradictory and strange, as anyone else we’ve met on this trip, or as anyone we know at home. No artist could possibly know them all. You could travel from house to house, from apartment to apartment, meeting everyone, talking to everyone, getting to know them all as individual human beings rather than strangers glimpsed in the night as you pass, learning their histories and their stories, and it would take you hundreds of years to work your way through this one suburb of Glasgow. To work your way through every neighborhood in every city in all the world would take a noticeable fraction of the time it took to lay down those rock formations back on the beach near Skipness. And, of course, as soon as you moved on from one place, new people would be being born and growing up behind you, people you didn’t know, had never met—so there would never be an ending to the process at all. I realize with a sudden swift sadness that somewhere in the back of my heart I would like to know them all, every one of them—and that, of course, I never will, that I will only ever know a tiny fraction of them, so miniscule as to be almost unnoticeable next to the sheer immense biomass of the human species, and that only a tiny fraction of them will ever know me. Instead, we will pass each other in silence, in the dark, rushing by each other with only the most fleeting of glimpses as we pass. Out there, turning from the window as the bus pulls away, falling away behind with just a glimpse of their arm swinging or their mouth opening to laugh, are people who might have been friends, lovers, enemies, teachers, colleagues. You’ll never meet them. They’ll never meet you. They fall away in the dark and are gone, along with a thousand alternate lives you could have lived but never will, a thousand roads you could have taken but did not, a thousand thousand alternate worlds dying unborn around you every second of every day, and you must say farewell constantly to people you’ll never meet. Then the bus moves on, and all is darkness and the wet echo of lights smeared across the windows of dusty rooms.

A few minutes later, we climb out of the bus at Buchanan bus station in Glasgow, and catch a cab to the Glasgow airport, catching brief glimpses of the Marriott and the Forte Crest as we pass. (The driver tells us as we go that he’s always wanted to go to America—although, on questioning, it turns out that he’s never even been to Skye, which is only a four-hour drive from here; one gets the impression that he’ll never go, either, to either place—and that he knows it.) We check into the Forte Crest at the Glasgow Airport, not the one downtown that the SFWA Suite was in, but another one. We have one of the worst meals of the trip, and one of the most expensive, in the Carvery restaurant in the hotel, dry, fatty slices of beef and browning juiceless pieces of pork and ham served buffet-style, along with all the limp, wilted vegetables you can eat, but we get in just before the restaurant closes, so I suppose we can count ourselves lucky—bad as it is, it is marginally better than chewing gum and peanuts for dinner. Sort of.

Go upstairs, and, just before I go to sleep, I look out the window at the main terminal at Glasgow Airport, which is literally right across the street, which, I hope, will make it easier to catch our flight tomorrow—our last day in Britain, and the last day of the trip.

Friday, September 1st—
Glasgow Airport, Heathrow Airport & Philadelphia

Up about 8 A.M., go down and have our last British breakfast of the trip, the traditional Trusthouse Forte breakfast, considerably better than dinner had been the night before (I’m reminded again, though, how sharply the moderately wide variety of jams and jellies we were offered in most of the English hotels fell away as soon as we crossed the border into Scotland; no hotel in Scotland has offered anything other than Strawberry Jam (except for the ubiquitous Orange Marmalade, of course, which was served in every single place we stayed), and, if you ask for another flavor of jam, not only don’t they have it, but they look offended that you asked. They have a real Attitude about this, as if to say “Strawberry jam was good enough for me father, and me
father’s
father . . . and it’s sure as hell good enough for
you,
too!”)