Strange Days: Fabulous Journeys With Gardner Dozois (10 page)

Leave the coral beach at last—somewhat reluctantly, for it is one of the loveliest spots of the trip—and return to the Land Rover, driving briefly to a lookout spot where we can get a somewhat closer view of Dunvegan Castle (we don’t get to go inside it, but I’ve hit that part of the trip where Castle Ennui has set in—yeah, yeah, it’s a castle, very nice—and don’t really care much), and then heading back to Portree. On the way back, Cameron, who’s a bit of a New Ager, goes on about holistic healing, crystals, how if you get cancer it’s your own fault for indulging in Negative Thinking, telepathy, astrology, the upcoming Alignment of the Planets as an omen of Cosmic Change, Nostradamus, and so forth. To distract him from discussing the Celestine Prophecies in depth, I ask him about his other tours, and end up booking with him for an early evening tour of the Trotternish Peninsula, the northernmost peninsula of Skye, which will be leaving that very night; I arrange for him to pick us up at the inn after dinner.

Back at Viewfield House, I go down for a drink while Susan naps, and convince Amy, who has returned flushed with enthusiasm from her tour of Harris, to take the tour of the Trotternish Peninsula with us tonight. At dinner, a somewhat hurried affair, since we have to be ready to leave for the tour by 8:30, I am interested to note that they have seated all of the Americans, four couples and Amy, at one long table, along with our sole working-class Scot, Angus from Glasgow, who, as far as I can tell, anyway, is still dressed in the same blue jeans, boots, and wrinkled work shirt. All the other tables in the room are taken up by quietly murmuring well-dressed English people, who work hard at ignoring our table. I think the message is clear, especially as, in spite of our having asked to be served as fast as possible so that we can catch our tour, every single English person in the room, about six other tables of them, is served before a bite of food reaches our own table. Earlier, in the Land Rover, Cameron had talked bitterly about the inequities of the British class-system, and the prejudice and the glass-walls you ran into everywhere if you were on the wrong side of the line, far worse and more blatant than even the class-barriers in the States (where such things are far from unknown, I can assure you, having, as a working-class boy, run into many such barriers myself in my life), and here is an example of such class distinctions still working in the world today. (Cameron and Our Host have an interesting relationship, by the way, obviously loathing each other deeply for reasons of class and race—Cameron is a working-class Scot; Our Host, although a Scot by birth, has been raised and educated as a rich man in England, and Cameron clearly considers him to be “really” a Sassenach—but manifesting it in the very British way of being intensely
polite
to each other. When we had asked Our Host the previous evening if Cameron’s tour was worth taking, Our Host had frowned, and then, with infinite icy scorn, said quietly “He is not a Skye man.” And, although he displays the brochures for Cameron’s tour in his inn—some of the servant staff seem to be friendly with Cameron, and urged us to book with him—I can’t help but wonder if some of the chill I feel from Our Host on our last night here has something to do with the fact that we did go on Cameron’s tour after all. When Cameron and Our Host chat briefly about the weather in front of the inn while we’re disembarking from our first tour, they are perfectly cordial—but you can
feel
the ice forming in the air between them.) So we eat, with all these class distinctions and ancient enmities swirling around us. I do think it somewhat unfair that poor Angus is forced in his own country to eat in exile at a table full of Rude and Obnoxious Colonials, but clearly the fact that he is loud and raucous and wears boots and blue jeans outweighs the fact that he is a Scot . . . so he must sit in purdah with the Yanks.

Hurry outside after the main course, before we have a chance to have dessert, and climb aboard the familiar Land Rover again, me in front, Susan and Amy crawling in back with three giggling Polish girls who, as far as I can tell, speak no English at all. Then we’re off. Although Cameron drives unnervingly fast, attempting to make it to a scenic overlook near Duntulm Castle before sunset, the light is already failing, and it’s clear that we’re not really going to see all that much on this tour—but still, it’s a pleasant way to spend a couple of hours, and no more expensive than, say, going to a play—which we certainly would have been willing to pay for—would have been, so I don’t feel that we’re being cheated; we do get to see some more of Skye this way, a part we wouldn’t have gotten a look at otherwise, even if we’re not seeing it under the best of viewing conditions. After a wild, swaying ride, during most of which Cameron is doing at least eighty on these narrow, twisting roads, we do manage to arrive at Duntulm Castle in time for the last of the sunset, which, as advertised, is spectacular, the light bleeding out of the sky in a swirl of red and purple and gold, out over the expanse of the North Sea and its freight of hump-backed islands. We stop for a second outside the now-closed Skye Cottage Museum to look at the various styles of old buildings once prevalent on Skye, and to be stared at by curious Highland cattle in the adjacent field, who look more prehistoric than ever with their shaggy, horned heads silhouetted against the darkening, blood-red evening sky. Around the end of the peninsula in the fading light. There’s just enough light left in the sky in these Northern latitudes—although it’s almost ten by now—to make out the oddly sculpted landscape of the Quiraing, rocky pinnacles and cliff faces that have been blasted by the constant howling wind into a thousand fantastic shapes. As full dark closes in, we turn up into the hills, climbing up a steep, sharply hairpinning road and across a high moor before turning down again to join the main road to Portree. Cameron is still driving very fast, in spite of the now almost total darkness, the steepness of the road and the sharpness of the turns, and the fact that there are sheep sprawled at the margin of the road, so close to the speeding Land Rover that we almost seem to graze them on a few occasions. They don’t flinch, however, gazing at us incuriously as we hurtle by; you’d think that having several tons of metal roar by a couple of inches from your nose at seventy miles an hour, especially at night with the headlights blazing, would be enough to startle any animal—it would sure as hell be enough to startle me—but the sheep seem as placid and undisturbed as ever; I suppose that this is the reason why we refer to those who blindly and unquestioningly follow a leader as “sheep” instead of calling them after some more skittish and wary animal such as coyotes or cats. When we hit the main road to Portree, Cameron, who has been driving very fast, now begins to drive
very fast,
driving like a madman, in fact, and I begin to get a bit nervous, although, as someone who once chased tanks across fields and up steep hills at high speeds in a jeep, I’m not an easy person to unnerve in these matters. Still, Cameron is going well over ninety at a few points during the trip home, in spite of the black night and the tiny twisting roads, going fast enough that we on occasion begin to hydroplane, with the rear end starting to swing a bit, fishtailing, as the wheels start to lose their grip on the road, and I think ironically that Our Host will probably feel a grim satisfaction if we’re all killed on the way back, shaking his head sadly and saying to the other guests, “I
told
them he wasn’t a Skye man.” We cruelly deprive him of this satisfaction, though, by actually making it back to Viewfield House alive.

Back at the inn, we have drinks and coffee and a belated dessert, which Our Host has been kind enough to save for us, in the sitting room, in front of the blazing fire. Among the new guests are a very young American girl, who has been studying at Oxford, and her mother, who is visiting her; they are vacationing together, touring Scotland, before the girl goes back to Oxford and the mother goes back to America. In spite of only having been at Oxford for six months, the young girl is now affecting a Teddibly Teddibly refined British upper-class accent, like a noblewoman or a high-born lady in a BBC production, and she sits solemnly by the fire discussing scholarly matters, being Very British and Very Intellectual and Very Solemn, straining to make her every gesture elegant and graceful and aristocratic, while her mother, who speaks with a broad Midwestern twang, watches her in wonder and bewilderment, obviously very proud of the rare and rarified creature that her daughter has turned herself into, while at the same time a bit uncertain as to how to relate to her now, and perhaps a bit afraid of no longer measuring up. Angus makes a half-hearted pass at the daughter, inviting her to go out dancing with him, but even he seems to realize that she’s not really for the likes of him—she’s waiting to be swept away by some wild-haired, wild-eyed, Byronic young poet who will take her on long melancholy walks on the moors in the mist and ply her with love-poems and long-stemmed roses and romantic existential angst about the blackness of the world, and with whom she can talk about Shelley and Baudelaire long into the night, between candle-lit bouts of leisurely but passionate and fevered lovemaking; no working-class, unshaven Scot with mud on his boots who merely wants to buy her a beer as the price of a quick hump in the back seat of his car need apply. I am amused by her pretensions, yes, but in a very tender way. She is so solemn and earnest and
so
pretentious, and trying so hard to be something that she is not but that she desperately wants to be, like a girl playing grown-up in her mother’s old clothes and begging you with her eyes to play along and not shatter the pretense, that it is rather sweet, actually. She reminds me of myself when I was that age, also full of callow poses and pretensions and burning with the ambition to be something other than what everybody else expected me to be, making up my role in life as I went along, made brave by the knowledge that wherever I did end up, it had to be better than where I was supposed to end up. Yes, I was that young once.

Angus gives up—no nookie for him tonight, at least not from among the guests at the Viewfield House—and goes off into Portree for another pub-crawl. The rest of us finish our drinks, and then go up to bed.

Wednesday, August 23rd—
Armsdate & Gaelic College, Crianlarich

Up about 7:45, have breakfast, check out, and then pack the car with our suitcases and Amy’s stuff; we’re giving Amy a lift to the train station at Mallaig on the mainland, since the road to our next inn goes right by there anyway.

The weather today turns out to be the exact opposite of yesterday’s weather—when we come down for breakfast, it is brilliantly clear and sunny, and looks like it’s going to be great weather for driving, but by the time we’re actually ready to leave, it’s raining, and the weather worsens from then on for most of the day, with an occasional half-clear patch here and there where the rain sinks to a sporadically spitting drizzle. Everything packed aboard, with a few mostly empty spots left so that we can peer out through the windows, we take off.

By the time we near the Red Cuillin, it is pouring, the hardest rain of the whole trip, with each lorry that passes us going the other way throwing a sheet of water across the windshield with a heavy
thwack,
blinding us for a moment. Unnerving driving conditions, particularly on these small and twisty mountain roads. The downpour has dwindled to an intermittent drizzle by the time we get to the Gaelic College, where Amy stops briefly to buy some Gaelic language audio-tapes (she is bravely attempting to teach herself Gaelic, one of the most difficult languages in the world, and talks wistfully about coming back here some day and actually staying in the college while taking a Gaelic language course in person, from live instructors; for now, she’ll settle for the tapes). We continue on to the Clan Donald Center, where we tour the Clan History Museum. Notice some Scots here who are reading the displays with actual tears glistening in their eyes, obviously deeply moved by this chance to get in touch with their roots; also hear an American woman behind us, when faced with the same wall-displays, exclaim “Oh, no! I’m
not
going to read about Bonnie Prince Charlie
again!” . . .
and must say that, to some extent, I sympathize—you tend to run into the same bits of Scottish history again and again and again as you follow the tourist routes; in Edinburgh, for instance, last trip, we had gotten tremendously tired of hearing about Mary, Queen of Scots, whom everyone talked of constantly, to the point where it seemed like they were saying things like “Mary, Queen of Scots once walked past this street-corner, on a day in July, hundreds of years ago . . . She also stopped here, next to this tree . . .” Still, the details of the Clan Donald’s history are interesting, if dismayingly bloody, and it’s clear that this is a much more profound and moving experience for the Scots themselves than it is for us Ignorant Outlanders.

Hit the inevitable Gift Shop—there are
two
of them here, in fact, both very large and extensive—and then walk down to the restaurant for lunch, passing on the way a sign on a building that reads “THIS BUILDING IS ALARMED!”, although, to our untutored eyes, it looked no more nervous than any of the other buildings in the complex; still, we steer clear of it. In the restaurant, we run into Angus from Glasgow—looking, if possible, even more massively hungover than he had the morning before—and one of the other older American couples from the Viewfield House; the tourist routes funnel everybody to the same attractions eventually, I guess. Angus sits gloomily by himself while he eats, making no attempt to join us; perhaps he’s too hungover, or perhaps he’s sulking over his failure to score with Amy. We have a quick lunch; I have a venison stew in which the meat is so tough that it can’t even be cut with a knife, let alone chewed. Perhaps Angus is having the same thing, and this is why he looks gloomy.
(No
McDonalds yet, at the Clan Donald center! Surely someone is missing a bet, here! And, actually, the food would be an improvement. (They could put up tartan arches, in the Clan Donald tartan, instead of the usual golden ones . . .))