Dispatches from the Sporting Life (4 page)

Finally we reach our hotel, the Shetland, overlooking the harbour but within walking distance of the city centre, especially given favourable tailwinds. Considering the hotel’s grim, fortresslike exterior, I wonder whether we’re expected to register or if we’ll simply be fingerprinted and led to our cell. Inside, it is dark and reeks of damp and of cleaning fluid. Once out for a stroll, however, leaning into the wind, we are overwhelmed by the natural friendliness of the islanders, strangers greeting us warmly everywhere.

Dinner at the Shetland hotel proves inedible. Slabs of fish cemented inside artificially coloured bread crumbs. Potatoes rock-hard and raw through the middle. Slushy green peas. Our host, the hotel manager or warden, tells us that Russian and other Eastern bloc freighters regularly put in at the harbour and that the crews are allowed to wander freely through the port town. Me, I put this down to a clever KGB plot. Once the commie seamen have had
a taste of beautiful downtown Lerwick, perhaps their first and only glimpse of the freedom-loving West, they can’t wait to sail home to the fleshpots of Leningrad or Gdansk.

Mind you, Shetland (population twenty-three thousand) is well worth a visit. First settled by Neolithic farmers some five thousand years ago, it is uncommonly rich in both fascinating archaeological sites and, for once, truly breathtaking views from the top of jagged cliffs that soar hundreds of feet above the pelting sea. At one point—Mavis Grind—the highway crosses a chicken neck of land, the Atlantic visible on one side and the North Sea on the other.

The prime archaeological site is Jarlshof, hard by Sumburgh airport. Jarlshof, which takes its name from Sir Walter Scott’s novel
The Pirate,
leads the amazed visitor from Stone Age settlement, through Bronze, to Iron Age. “Some eighty years ago,” Eric Linklater wrote in
Orkney & Shetland,
first published in 1965 and deservedly reprinted many times since, “the ruin of a medieval house stood on a grassy mound beside a small shallow bay. Great gales eroded the mound, and revealed stone walls. The proprietor, John Bruce of Sumburgh, began to excavate, and excavation was continued, at intervals, until quite recently. Oldest of the buildings uncovered was the remains of a Stone Age hut….”

It is possible, at Jarlshof, to walk through Bronze Age shelter and smithy, circa 2000
B.C.
, into an overlapping Iron Age village, its shelters connected by winding stone-walled passages, right into a broch. A broch, I should point out, is a prehistoric structure peculiar to Shetland and Orkney and the adjacent
Scottish mainland. It is a round stone tower, a considerable engineering feat, with small chambers for human habitation inside.

Jarlshof, once but two days’ fair sail from Norway, was settled by the Norse (charmingly described as “recent occupiers” on a plaque I saw in Lerwick) in the ninth century, their rule lasting until 1471, when Scotland annexed the islands.

My gillie, actually a young baker, arrives shortly before noon, having been up most of the night baking scones, which, in my experience of the islands, serve better as projectiles than pastries. A cheerful lad, he has a wool cap pierced by innumerable badges, testimony to his prowess as a trout fisherman. He’s a champ, actually, winner of many a competition on Orkney and on Shetland. We set out through lashing wind and rain for Loch Benston, a half-hour drive. En route we pass a couple of bays where salmon is farmed. These tame salmon, he tells me, are a menace. Idiot fish. Breaking free of their restraining pens by the thousands from time to time, without the redeeming memory of a river that spawned them, they have no notion of which way to swim. The fear is that infiltrating a school of wild salmon, the farm fish could contaminate the wild ones. Something else. “The pellets they’re fed,” the gillie tells me, “contain a pink dye; otherwise the flesh of the farmed salmon would be a sickly white and not fit for market.”

Sooner or later, salar, the leaper, will have to be
declared an endangered species. With the benefit of sonar, commercial fishermen have solved the mystery of where the salmon gather in the winter, under the Arctic ice, and now net them by the thousands of tons, heedless of the fact that if the fish don’t return in sufficient numbers to the rivers that spawned them there will soon be hardly any left. Another threat to the Atlantic salmon is that wrongheaded environmentalists, demonstrating in Europe, have seen to it that there is no more hunting of the cutesy-poo seal cubs on the Newfoundland ice. Consequently, the seal herd, its appetite for salmon prodigious, has increased beyond reason, and fewer and fewer of the fish return to spawn in Canada’s once-rich network of maritime rivers.

I find casting into the wind of Loch Benston all but impossible, my leader knotting again and again, my fly shooting back to nick me in the face more than once. After an embarrassing two hours of shivering out there on the loch (during which time—ho, ho, ho—my champion gillie also fails to get a trout to rise), I say I’ve had quite enough and suggest we row to shore.

“Och,” the gillie says, “it’s a dour loch, but bonny.”

Once dried out back in the Shetland hotel, I hire a car and my wife and I drive to the Booth, the island’s oldest pub, established in 1698 in St. Magnus Bay and by the look of it not renovated once since then. Following my third large single malt, I tell Florence that if our friends call from London tonight to say I was out.

“What if you don’t catch anything tomorrow?”

“There’s still Orkney.”

We agree to cut our stay in Shetland by a day and leave for Orkney the next morning.

Out over the North Sea again, I turn once again to the spellbinding
Orkneyinga Saga,
totally absorbed in the hijinks of Oddi the Little, Thorkel Hook-Eye, and Havard the Fecund.

Orkney is only a twenty-five-minute flight, albeit bouncy enough, but also a world away from gaunt Shetland. Even as our plane skitters into the airport, we can see trees, grassy meadows, cultivated fields, cattle. Our taxi driver, once he has heard where we’ve been, says, “Och, but they’re a thieving lot.” Then he asks, “Have you come for the fishing?”

“Yes, indeed.”

“The water’s too high.”

We drive through Kirkwall, a refreshingly cheerful-looking town, handsome as well, dominated by the St. Magnus Cathedral, and then on to the Merkister Hotel, a proper fishing lodge, on Harray Loch.

“You’re a day early,” Angus MacDonald, our ebullient host, says.

“We got time off for good behaviour.”

Following a couple of heart attacks seven years ago, the portly Angus MacDonald, an accomplished fisherman himself, chucked his Aberdeen heating business and bought the foundering Merkister, which he and his wife, Elma, have revived with such flair that it is now considered one of the finest
angling hotels in Scotland. Incidentally, $325 is the weekly rate for room and board.

Angus points out the fish scale in the entrance hall, underneath which rests a full basket of trout caught earlier in the day, and then leads me into the bar. Now that I’m down to my last fishing hole, salmon is out. Our London friends would have to settle for a bonny basket of trout.

Affable fishermen, still flushed from their day on the wind-whipped loch, make me instantly welcome: Walter, Sandy, John. “Do you abide in New York?” Sandy asks.

“No, Montreal.”

“Then you wouldn’t be familiar with the Loch Harray roll cast.”

“Sorry, no.”

“Or the double roll cast.”

“He’ll catch on soon enough tomorrow morning,” Angus says.

Out again in a boat in the punishing wind and rain, with Angus and a young gillie, I manage the Loch Harray roll cast one try out of the three. Once, I actually get a trout to rise but fail to set the hook quickly enough and lose it, and that is that.

Like Shetland, Orkney is rich in archaeological sites, the most famous being Skara Brae, the ruins of prehistoric dwellings, and Maes Howe, a prime example of the Neolithic chambered tomb. Also not to be missed is the Ring of Brodgar, a circle of standing stones reminiscent of Stonehenge. In fact,
Orkney, first settled in the fourth millennium
B.C.
, boasts so many archaeological sites that farmers, striking one, commonly plow it over before the hordes from Historic Buildings and Monuments descend on them, roping off valuable arable land.

Skara Brae, settled for some six hundred years, from 3100
B.C.
to 2500
B.C.
, is made up of a compelling cluster of six self-contained dwellings, complete with hearth and stone beds, joined by passages. The dwellings were once buried under a heap of ash and midden, which preserved them. The tomb of Maes Howe, probably dating from before 2700 B.C., is an astonishing feat of construction, its largest stones weighing some thirty tons. We were preceded to the site by early souvenir hunters, medieval yuppies, Crusaders, or Vikings, who wintered in Orkney in 1150 and pilfered whatever treasures were to be found in the tomb.

Chilled to the bone on our return to the Merkister, Florence and I repair to the bar.

“There’s a nasty storm coming in,” Angus says. “I hope you weren’t counting on fishing tomorrow morning.”

“Naw,” I say. “Water’s too high anyway.”

The windowpanes are rattling again. Gale-force winds. Heavy rain. Florence and I decide to cut our stay short and escape to London this afternoon, if possible. I linger in the hall as she consults the manager’s wife, asking for the airline’s phone number.

“Did you mean the office in Kirkwall?”

“Yes, please.”

“Did you forget it was Sunday?”

“Oh.”

“But everything’s closed. There’s nobody at the airport. There are no flights on Sunday.”

Happily, as it turns out, this enables us to visit both Stromness and Kirkwall.

Stromness, which once supplied three-quarters of the Hudson’s Bay Company employees in Canada, was of particular interest to me. It was here, in 1845, that Sir John Franklin put in for fresh water at Login’s Well before setting out again with a complement of 134 officers and men on two stout three-masted ships, the
Erebus
and the
Terror,
bound for the Polar Seas in quest of the northwest village of substantial stone houses squished together on narrow, twisting cobblestone streets.

Kirkwall is worth a visit if only because of the incredibly beautiful St. Magnus Cathedral, with its red-and-yellow sandstone-brick exterior. St. Magnus, surely one of the most imposing medieval cathedrals in Scotland, is dedicated to the martyred Magnus Erlendsson. Founded in 1137, it took all of three centuries to complete, which accounts for its mélange of styles—Romanesque, Transitional, and Gothic.

Back at the Merkister, we are joined for a farewell dinner by Josh Gournley, director of tourism for Orkney, and it is from him that I learn the probable origin of the Super Bowl. I speak of the Men’s Ba’, a game played twice annually in Kirkwall, on Christmas and on New Year’s Day, between the “Uppies” and the “Doonies.” The two sides, made up of most of the able-bodied young men in town, confront each
other on Kirk Green, where the Ba’ is thrown up in the air. In a contest that has been known to last seven hours, it is then up to the Doonies, pushing and shoving, to deliver the Ba’ to the top of the town or to the Uppies to manoeuvre the ball into a harbour splashdown. According to Gournley, who used to compete, many a private score is settled with the elbows during the struggle. “Then,” he said, “when you’ve reached your early thirties like me, and believe you’re too old for the contest, you put on your best suit and join the spectators on the sidelines, but before you know it you’re back in there, pushing and shoving with all your might, emerging bruised, with your suit torn, most likely.”

The airport. Aberdeen. Making sure that I’m not being observed, I purchase two sides of smoked salmon in a shop, comforting myself with some wise words from Mascall’s
Booke of Fishing with Hook and Line,
published in 1590: “The Salmon is a gentle fish, but he is cumbrous to take; for commonly he is in deep places of great rivers, and commonly in the middlest of the rivers.” Yes, but not in mid-September, damn it.

August 1991

G
ood news. The bar mitzvah gift book has come of age. In my time, we had to make do with Paul de Kruif’s inspirational medical books or a year’s subscription to the
National Geographic
magazine. Since then, but too late for me, a spill of treasuries has become available: of Jewish Thought, of Jewish Wisdom, of Jewish Humour. Now, after many years of research, filling “a glaring void in the long record of Jewish achievement,” comes
The Encyclopedia of Jews in Sports
by Bernard Postal, Jesse Silver, and Roy Silver, “the first all-inclusive volume to tell the complete story of Jews in professional and amateur sports all over the world, from Biblical times to Sandy Koufax’s no-hitter in September.”

The compendium comes lavishly recommended. “It is,” Mel Allen writes on the jacket flap, “a noteworthy contribution to mankind’s ever-growing quest for knowledge”; while Senator Abraham Ribicoff, former secretary of health, education and
welfare, writes in a foreword, “Interest in sports among Jews—as among all Americans—has intensified as opportunities for leisure activities have increased.” Continuing in the same thoughtful, controversial vein, he adds, “For sports are a healthy part of American life, and Jews are involving themselves fully in all aspects of American life.”