Seasons on Harris (4 page)

N
OW ALL THAT, ALL THOSE LONG-REMEMBERED
experiences, speak of an era when crofting and fishing, while diminished, still provided a viable way of life here, and tweed weaving was a vital part of both the island economy and its proud heritage.

Today, as Anne and I quickly learned, things are rather different. Harris hangs ever more precariously on the cusp of a dying culture. Despite the islanders' determination to keep their Gaelic heritage and traditions, the strict Calvinistic underpinnings of their faith and their tiny shards of rock-rough land, their predicament is perilous. True crofting has virtually vanished now, the once teeming shoals of herring have long gone, and fishing is limited mainly to shellfish, occasional runs of cod and ling, and salmon farming. Added threats to the old ways encompass the increasingly rapid and usually lifelong out-migration of the younger generation to the job-rich mainland cities of Edinburgh, Aberdeen, Glasgow, and Inverness: the burgeoning arrival of “incomers” (also derisively labeled “white settlers”), particularly from the affluent fleshpots of London and England's southern counties, which has driven up real estate prices here far beyond local affordability, and of course—most sadly of all—the slow, ongoing decline of that once great, handwoven tweed cottage industry.

Despite a plethora of investments, some more insightful than others, by the Western Isles Council in a wide range of community and commercial projects, and recent initiatives for the creation of a huge rock quarry (defeated) and vast wind turbine “farms” on the Lewis moors (pending), the supportive pillars of the once-unique Harris lifeways are still being eaten away by the voracious termites of twenty-first-century realities.

And yet…and yet…

God is still definitely in the details here. Some say the Devil, but I'll accept Mies van der Rohe's interpretation relating to fine architecture.
Because the architecture—the whole physical spirit of Harris—still manifests itself in its infinite microscopic details.

The main inhabited part of the “island” (actually a southern “almost-island” appendage of the far larger island of Lewis, sixty miles long and up to twenty-eight miles wide) lies south of the mountainous wall of North Harris and is barely twelve miles long by six miles wide. Even as islands go in Scotland, that's small. Very small—with fewer than two thousand inhabitants (Lewis is far larger, with around 17,500, and the Outer Hebridean chain as a whole claims a total of around 25,000 islanders). But when I try to define the fascination—the seduction—of this island, it is in its multitude of “places” and experiences, each one unique and entire in itself. From the tiny black lochans in the high moors, the vast creamy swathes of the west coast beaches, the chiseled intricacy of The Bays, and the wind-racked summits of Clisham and Bleaval, to the secret fishing lochs of Amhuinnsuidhe, the tight intimacy of Tarbert town, the proud isolation of Rodel and the southern islets, and the wild glens and corries of the North Harris hills—each place resounds with its own distinct individuality and presence. Each one says to me: I am unique, intact, and proudly distinct from all other places on the island. Even each hidden, peat-bound lochan—and there are hundreds of these tiny freshwater lochs—possesses its own special aura; some are high and broad on the cusp of the watershed between The Bays and the west coast beaches; others are so hidden by crags and shadows that you barely see them at all until you reach their boggy blackwater edges.

Harris is an island that never bores. And how can it? It would take half a lifetime to truly explore the wealth and variety of sensory and aesthetic experiences here. Whatever you discover on a long, hard hike is merely prelude to the next day's discoveries and the next and the next. Deeper and deeper. Mood upon mood. Detail upon detail.

If the creator does indeed express itself in such details, here it has done so with encyclopedic subtlety and scope. There is no end to Harris. Only new beginnings. Every single day you are here.

And despite all the charges since our first visit here, all is not quite lost, as will be revealed in these tales of “an island on the cusp” of major choices and changes. Out here, on “the edge of the world,” not every
one, despite the gloom-and-doom-sayers and local media, has given up on an authentic and optimistic future for Harris. Recent events, miraculous to some—particularly with regard to the great
Clo Mor
tweed industry here—suggest that new possibilities, new initiatives and synchronicities, may still revitalize the looms and lives of the weavers and restore balance and harmony to the future of this “little island that could.”

And so tweed may yet be the key, once again, to island survival…and what a fine, uplifting, heartwarming story that would make…

Postscript on the Seasons in the Outer Hebrides

The weather here, however, is not exactly what you would call by any stretch of the imagination a “heartwarming story.” But if you possess an agile sense of humor, the seasons here are indeed rather amusing. Without humor and a degree of stoical tolerance, they can be irritating to the point of mild apoplexy. Rarely during our year on Harris did we find the predictability of more pliant climes, shaped and formed by larger global influences, although admittedly, with all of today's complex cause-and-effect and often contradictory warming/cooling trends, predictability even on a global scale is becoming increasingly muddled and topsy-turvy.

The islands of the Outer Hebrides hold sway over their own climatic quirks. These are the first bastions of land that surging Atlantic air masses face head-on. Muscling in mostly from the west and south, they are abruptly confronted by such wall-like impediments as the mountains of Barra and the Uists, and—more dramatically—the great bulwark of Clisham and the North Harris monoliths. While all these upsurges tend to protect the Scottish mainland from climatic excesses, anything can happen in any season here, and invariably does. The only steady, mitigating element in this chaotic confusion is the North Atlantic Drift, or Gulf Stream, which at least, and with an admirable degree of constancy, soothes the more outrageous excesses of climatic exhibitionism. Thanks to its benign benevolence and despite our latitudinal location equivalent
to the middle of Canada's Hudson Bay or Russia's northern Siberian wastes, rarely did Anne and I experience significant winter snowfalls or ice storms on the lower portions of Harris. The mountain crests, of course, were often pristinely snowcapped during the winter months, but the passes usually remained open and ice-free. What our northern latitude did guarantee, however, were long, dark days through those chilly months when a weak, liquidy sun barely rises above the horizon for a few half-light hours and then slips away again around 4:00
P.M.
These were the cocooning times when domestic “nesting” became the social norm and cozy peat fires were kept well stocked throughout the days and nights.

Spring invariably slips in slowly with feathery “mizzle” (mist and drizzle) and glorious double rainbows, as lambs appear on the
machair
and moors—bright white dots of new, frisky life among a slow greening of the land. Of course, one must expect the unexpected during this season—particularly in the form of near-hurricane force winds. As a friend told us, “It's impossible for those who have never lived here to recognize the impact of our winds on the lives and moods of the
Hearaich
.” And the residents long for summer. But summer seems to take forever to arrive. Sometimes it never does, at least not in terms of tan-quality heat and sear. At other times, warm, blue days float sublimely through much of July and August. And the days certainly lengthen—that's a guaranteed, and very welcome, norm. We're not quite in the “land of the everlasting sun” here as we would be farther to the north in Norway or the remote Faeroe Islands. But it's certainly close, with dawn arriving around 5:00
A.M.
and sunset (barely setting) around midnight. Energy returns too (despite the incessant dawn and evening flotillas of tiny blackfly-like “midges,” of which more later). You feel refreshed, invigorated, and reluctant to accept the normal rhythms of rest and sleep. You stay up into the early hours, reading, listening to fine music, or the welcome certitude of the BBC World Service and occasional Gaelic radio (
Radio nan Gaidheal
) and TV (
Telebhisean Grampian
), richly strange in their mellifluous, musical language.

Then, as the year begins to slip away and the days start their darkening decline through autumn (to the accompaniment of the hormone-
crazed cries of mating red stags on the brittle-air moors) and back into the doomy-gloom, bruised-cloud days of winter, your body once again responds to climatic realities and sleep becomes longer and deeper. Of course, inevitably, in the thin winter sun—more like a watery gruel at times—colors fade in the land with only the heather and broom providing some solace against the dunning down of summer's spectral glories.

But, within these broad rhythms of seasonal shift come all those other amusing/frustrating (depending upon your demeanor) and zany idiosyncrasies of Hebridean weather—roaring rooftile-ripping, branch-snapping gales; sudden snowfalls and hailstorms in mid-May; torrential cumulonimbus downpours in the midst of summer beach barbecues; gloriously warm and blue days deep in the fall; and strange, stickily humid afternoons in the winter half-light. And once in a rare while, we might even enjoy one of those amazing displays of the Aurora Borealis, or northern lights.

That old cliché “If you don't like the weather, wait five minutes” is all too true here. In fact, there were many days when, if we perched ourselves high enough on a North Harris peak, we could watch a whole simultaneous panoply of climatic displays, from furious thunderstorms to blue Caribbean-calm and just about every variation of mood in between. Such bizarre occurrences are described perfectly in an old Gaelic proverb:
Latha na Seachd Sian—gaoth is uisge, cuir is cathadh, tarnanaich is dealanaich is clachan meallainn
(the typical day of Seven Storms—wind and rain, snowfall and blizzard, thunder, lightning, and hailstorms).

However, when the winds shift and air masses move in from the east, rather than the Atlantic west, a more consistently benign pattern of clear skies and fresh invigorating breezes often prevails—to the relief of all the
Hearaich
folk.

As Anne and I were both born and bred in Yorkshire, England, we were all too well aware of what we used to call “porridge” weather. Our dreaded forecast in Yorkshire was invariably the “dull and mild with scattered showers” type, as that would often become the daily norm for weeks on end. That pall of clammy gray cloud, hundreds of feet thick, would move in and just sit virtually motionless and seemingly forever,
blocking out the sun and turning otherwise perfectly normal neighbors into stooped, morose, and muddy-minded strangers.

In Harris, this was a relatively rare event due to rapid fickleness of climatic eccentricities, a fickleness that also makes Harris one of the windiest places in Europe. And while this can be a little traumatic for the populace in general—and hardy shepherds in particular out alone on the high, treeless moors—such rampant energy makes wind-power enthusiasts and “venture investors” salivate at the prospect of those proposed vast wind-turbine “farms” scattered across the bleakly flat moor and peat plateau of central Lewis. They see billions of dollars' profit in such wind (and ocean-tidal) harnessing and harvesting. The locals are not yet quite so starry-eyed by such prospects—but the potential infusion of “new money” into these economically beleaguered islands is a rather tempting proposition nevertheless.

“Anything that'll make things a bit easier out here would be a godsend,” one crofter told us as he mentally calculated the bonus of “rental rights” on his otherwise unused land.

“Tip end of the wedge,” grumbled one particularly outspoken “Green.” “There'll be no birds or wildlife—or beauty—left!”

“When wind is just about all we've got nowadays out here,” said one ex-member of the West Isles Council, in a particularly dour mood, “I say—use it! Today!”