Following the Sun (38 page)

Heather—and of course sunlight—is the principal player in this ecosystem. It shades the ground so that it is difficult for even so much as a harebell or buttercup to grow, much less a tree—although they do try. But if the heather were not pruned by fire or sheep it would lose its compact, dense form and grow toward the sun, spreading itself higher and becoming leggier, putting out three-foot-tall feathery fronds. The sun would then be able to reach the ground between the heather plants, and in these sunny open patches the bird-and wind-spread seeds of sun-loving trees such as rowan and birch would take hold. These would grow taller, offering a dappled, filtered shade where pine seedlings could grow, and in the shade of the pines the heather would disappear, the sun-loving birches would wither, oaks would move in and begin to dominate the lower slopes, and forests of beech and alder and oak would cover the lower valleys. Only at the higher elevations would the heather and the birch trees endure.

From Achnasheen west the land grew higher and rougher before dropping down to Loch Maree, which I had heard is one of the prettiest of the Scottish lochs, with many places to stay. I was planning to ride out to the town of Gairloch, where there was said to be a garden with palm trees, the farthest northern range of these decidedly subtropical plants. From here, I could get a good view of my final destination—the connected isles of Skye and Lewis and Harris.

I began to descend once more, and came into the little village of Kinlochwe, where I had a heavy lunch of cheese and bread with a glass of bitters, and then began riding out along the south shores of the loch. On the way, under a canopy of lush, deciduous trees, I spotted a long green drive and found a little white hotel on the banks of the loch with a lawn and birch trees and an un-Scottish feel, more like the Lake District, or Vermont. Here I stopped and rested and tucked into another dinner of salmon and peas. Around nine-thirty, the sun had not yet dropped over the mountain ridges to the northwest, so I wandered out along the loch.

Coming down a narrow path along the shore, dressed in a Black Watch plaid skirt, sensible shoes, and a frilled white shirt, I met a woman who could have emerged from the pages of Robbie Burns. She had all the Scot features, the wide cheekbones, fair blue eyes, a peaches and cream complexion, and curling strawberry blond hair.

“Staying at the hotel, are you,” she said with a thick Highland burr.

I explained that I was. And she asked if I was having a good stay and where had I come from and where was I bound. She worked at the hotel as a clerk in the day and was a chatty friendly sort who, for all her Scottish Highland affect, had family in the United States, not far from Boston in a town that I knew. She had been there a few times.

“It's a dreadful place, if you don't mind my saying so. I could'na' get a cup a decent tea in all of America.” Her husband was a musician, she said, who worked the tourist pubs along the western coast, and she herself could sing and sometimes accompanied him, and knew many of the old Scottish ballads, having learned them from her grandmother.

“He's here now, my husband. Stopped for a pee.”

No sooner said than her husband appeared. Out of the gloomy forest emerged a dark tall man with a Mohawk haircut and doubled silver earrings, dressed in tight dark jeans, heavy kicking boots, and a black leather jacket with silver studs on it. Had I not the protection of gentle Mary I would have turned and run.

“Come John,” she said. “Here's a man come all the way from America on his bicycle to meet you.”

In contrast to his appearance John extended his hand and smiled with crinkling blue eyes.

“Pleased to meet'cha, then. All the way from America, is it?” he said.

“Yes, just a little touring.”

“I heard about you,” he said. “Bloke at a pub I met today said he had passed a Sassenach”—he meant an Englishman—“on a bicycle in the middle of nowhere, back in the hills. Must have been you.”

“Could have been,” I said. “But I'm from the States.”

“Right, I've been there. Played Boston. Springfield. Hartford. I like America. I like your blacks. We don't get your blacks here in Scotland. That's why the music is so bloody boring.”

He loved blues music, as do many rock musicians in the British Isles, and according to Mary he played a “mean” guitar.

“But he can do your ballads too,” she said. “We knew Sandy Dennis before she died. We used to do that kind of traditional number, ‘Little Matty Groves,' ‘Tam o' Shanter,' that kind of thing. John even backed her up for a couple of gigs. But John here, he goes for blues now, and so does the pub crowd.”

“No more sad ballads then?” I asked.

“Na,” said John. “The crowd don't like it.”

“We do though,” said Mary.

“You do,” said John. “I don't.”

Mary kept her silence.

“Well I'm off,” I said, and made motion to take a walk.

“What're you doing up here anyway?” John asked. “Just having a look around?”

I explained my solar pilgrimage.

John made a grimace. “I hate the bloody sun,” he said.

Out along the lake, the light slowly began to alter. A golden yellow atmosphere crept into the sky and by ten-thirty or so the sun had dropped silently behind a saddle between two hills across the loch. I noticed that it was far up into the northwest by the time it set. The light remained above the hills though, and the whole landscape began to shift color, from bright yellow to a paler yellow, to red, and then slowly to a dark sort of haunted blue, with a shaded blue black up in the valleys of the hills. I walked on for a while and then finally turned around lest I be caught out here in the dark, where I would perhaps meet the likes of John, alone, without nice Mary to temper him.

The next morning I rode out to Gairloch, found a place to stay, and then carried on out the peninsula, toward Poolewe and the gardens of Inverewe, where the palm trees grew, a site that I had been thinking about ever since my visit to the green subtropical palm islands of the Everglades in south Florida. The road climbed and then wound down into a little valley, where there were larches and firs and deciduous trees, with a stream bubbling through. It was a pleasant little glade, so I hid my bicycle, a more or less unnecessary precaution since there was no one around and this part of Scotland was not exactly famous for thieves. I dawdled here, pointlessly putting off, I suppose, my arrival. And then I rode on and within a few miles came to the gardens.

I was almost as far north here as I would get on this journey. The latitude of the garden is the same as Labrador in North America, and Siberia in the east, and in fact not that far from the Arctic Circle itself. And yet here, in luxuriant splendor, all flourishing and green and sweet-smelling, was a wealth of subtropical plants from all over the world. There were plants from the east, from Australia and Tasmania, New Zealand, China, and Japan. There were rhododendrons from the Himalayas, and many species from temperate zones of South America and North America, including the palm trees. Because of the long light, the plants in this garden achieve a luxuriance that seemed to me more lush and larger and seemingly greener than plants of the same species that I had seen in Central America and Florida.

Inverewe Gardens was started in 1862 by Osgood Mackenzie, who was the son of Sir Francis Mackenzie, the laird of Gairloch. The garden is located on a barren and rocky promontory on Loch Ewe, which is about the same latitude as Hudson Bay in Canada. The subtropical plants are able to flourish here because of the warm Atlantic currents of the Gulf Stream that sweeps up from the Caribbean and swings near the coast at this point. The site is far warmer in winter than any of the surrounding areas and, because of its latitude, rarely very hot in summer; the highest temperature ever recorded was 84° Fahrenheit, the lowest 14°.

The problem Mackenzie had to face was wind. The west coast of Scotland is famous for wintry blasts, out of the southwest especially, and this carries with it salt spray from the loch. Osgood solved the problem by planting a sheltering belt of native pines and constructing walled gardens that he improved upon by importing rich topsoil—a great rarity in this part of the world. He set about creating woodland walks among which he planted a variety of species collected from around the world. By the end of the century he had established one of the finest plant collections in the Northern Hemisphere.

I spent the rest of the afternoon wandering the little garden paths, smelling the tropics, sheltering myself from a little downpour, and then venturing out again to smell plants. Sitting on a bench, under the spell of this mythic subtropical site, I was suddenly seized with a desire to eat an orange. Andalusia came flooding back, the rich blossom-scented air of the streets of Seville, the smell of the grove-strewn roads on the way to Córdoba, the hot light, and the bull-haunted, Catholic landscape. How good it would be, I thought, to eat an orange.

On my way back to Gairloch I stopped at a turnout above the Loch Gairloch and the Sound of Raasay, found a place in the evening sun, and sat there for awhile, watching the wheeling flocks of seabirds and the illuminated cloud-scape. It was seven o'clock and the sun was riding above billowing rows of white and gray clouds with black rims and yellow blue streaks above the bank. In front of the clouds, over the waters of North Minch, I could see the jagged, misty peaks of the Isle of Skye, and west, far beyond the Minch, the mountains of Harris.

These were the storied Western Isles, my final destination.

Fifteen

The Longest Day

I was still hungering for an orange when I got back to the bed and breakfast but Mrs. McLeod, the blue-eyed hostess, could not think where, in all of Gairloch, I could find such a thing. If ever I was to find an orange in western Scotland, I would think it would be here. Gairloch, because of its location, is one of the more visited towns on this barren coast. There are fine views out to Skye and the Torridon Mountains; there is angling and sea-angling, and golf, and there are even sandy beaches. The best of these is a great dune-backed sweep of beach called, not with a great deal of imagination, Big Sand. In a pub after dinner, I met an older gent with a white moustache and a plaid waistcoat who told me, in horror, about the Germans who come to the beach at Big Sand.

“And d'you know what they do?” the gentleman said.

“I do not,” I said.

“D'you know that on summer days, when it's sunny, they ha' been known ta strip aff their clothes and go stark naked upon the strand.”

“Oh my,” I said.

“But that's na' the worst of it,” he said, taking hold of my sweater with a shaky hand. “And I ha' seen this myself.”

“What?”

“They SWIM.”

In the middle of June in Gairloch, as the summer solstice approaches, the light begins to show across the east around three-thirty in the morning. At noon the sun stands directly above your head, and then as the earth rolls slowly eastward it begins a long raking descent and sets in the evening at about eleven-thirty. Just north of here, above the Arctic Circle, after the twenty-first of June, it never dips below the western horizon, but rolls across the sea and slowly rises again.

All this is most excellent for creatures who love light. But it is not good for sleeping. Birds begin to sing at three in the morning, and by midsummer night in circumpolar regions the world around, parties can go on all night long. There's plenty of time to sleep. You can say good night in November and sleep in near darkness until February 2nd, when the sun reappears and the days begin to lengthen.

The darkest of the various solar-based holidays, and yet in some ways the most hopeful, is the ominous winter solstice, the longest night of the year. All year long in ancient cultures the magicians, wizards, and astrologers would have watched the slow decline of the light that begins on the day of the summer solstice. In their world, living as they did within the bounds of their own culture and understanding, there was no absolute guarantee that on the day after the winter solstice, the sun would not continue in its disappearance, never to return. It was only by the hard work of propitiation, of sacrifice and appeasement that the sun's return could be assured. The end of autumn was a dangerous time of year.

After the winter solstice, there followed a series of pagan holidays that are, somewhat ironically, best preserved in the celebrations of the Christian church, which subsumed so many local festivals as it spread around the globe. Twelve days after the winter solstice, there was a festival known as twelfth night, which involved, among other rituals, a “blessing” of fruit trees. In the north this was carried out by songs and music and the spilling of strong drink around the trees. Following this, on February 2nd, was the old Roman festival of Floralia, when the birds traditionally returned from migration, and then, at the end of February, the ancient festival of Saturnalia, which was celebrated on the Christian calendar as Mardis Gras and carnival. Next to arrive was the beginning of Lent and the progress toward the spring equinox, which is marked by Easter in the Christian calendar and Passover in the Jewish year. This was traditionally followed by Lady Day in Britain, when the sun enters Aries, and in pre-Islamic Afghanistan by a festival known as Nauroz, in which celebratory kites were flown and livestock was auctioned. Then Pentecost, in the Christian calendar, then Rogation Days, which marked the traditional blessing of the fields in ancient Rome, and then May Day, when the maypoles were once set up all across Europe and strewn with flowers, and on and on, one festival after another at each of the sun's stations, until finally, at the opposite end of the year from winter, the happiest, universally brightest, and best celebration of all, midsummer night, the summer solstice.

In parts of Italy, no one would go to bed on this night. In Sweden, maypoles were set up, no one would sleep; there was dancing and singing and coupling. In France, and in fact all over Europe, bonfires were lit, the so-called fires of Saint John; in Spain these fires were allowed to burn low and people celebrated by firewalking. Midsummer night is, as we know from Shakespeare, a night of mixed identities, song, and sex, and mystery, when fairies walk abroad and the two kingdoms, the seen and the unseen, can intermix. But by dawn it is over; the masque ends, normalcy returns, and day by day, as the earth sweeps around the sun, night gains ground.