Seasons on Harris (45 page)

“It's best I do…for all our sakes,” he explained. “I'm the world's loudest snorer.”

“Ah—a true flubberblaster!” I said as he began to unravel the blue nylon. “That looks brand-new.”

“It
is
brand-new!” he grunted. “Can you believe it…they lost all my luggage somewhere on the flight up from London via Glasgow to Stornoway! I had to buy everything new in town…”

“Do I sense more jinxes on this little adventure: your lost luggage, my lousy ankle, a drowned cottage, a decimated beach…and Harry…you had any jinxes so far?!”

Harry chuckled. “Not yet, but I'm sure I'll think of something, especially if you ask me to cook.”

Actually, Harry was a fine cook, as we found out much later that day. But first there was some serious exploring to be done.

“Dave, y'sure you'll be okay with that ankle?” asked Adam.

“I didn't come all this way just to houseclean,” I said, and hoped my wonky appendage would survive cliff clambering and the like. Shades of Yeats floating about: “Things fall apart: the center does not hold…”

But, all in all, things went pretty well. Adam was a remarkable guide to his own island and its boundless layered complexities of botany, history, ornithology, etymology, and archaeology all wrapped eloquently in his own very personal insights and interpretations.

I was hoping, initially at least, for a pleasant stroll up what Adam called the “Central Valley” of the island, teeming with lumpy remnants of ancient occupancies—possibly encompassing Neolithic, Bronze Age, and Iron Age people; the Vikings; the Clan crofters; and nowadays only the occasional visiting shepherd—a span of almost five thousand years from 3000
BC
to the mid-eighteenth century. “There are,” he told us, “armies of ghosts here.”

But my newfound friend had other plans and set off instead up the near-vertical rock face behind the cottage. “You get more of a general view of things up here,” he said, back to his cheerfully energetic self. “Oh—and be careful of loose rocks and whatnot. A young boy was killed just about here a few years back when he dislodged a huge boulder near the top. He was crushed in the fall. Horrible…”

Great! I thought. What's he trying to do? Tempt even more jinxes upon us?

But we clambered up anyway, without dislodging anything, onto the breezy top and edged our way across the thick grasses to the precipitous fringe of sea cliffs, more than four hundred feet high and teeming with birds. Chaplinesque puffins were the star comedic attractions at first, flapping their odd little stunted wings frantically but somehow maintaining an ordered formation of flight over the frisky wave tops.

“The Lewismen used to sail over and catch puffins here by the
score,” said Adam. “They were a popular delicacy, boiled up into a lovely rich stew. Or roasted. That's the way I like them best…”

“You've eaten puffin here?!” Harry gasped.

“Of course. From time to time. Boiled, roasted, smoked, salted, and stuffed!”

“And are you planning to add these to our menu tonight?” he asked anxiously.

“No, no—worry not, Harry. It's illegal now.”

“I'm glad to hear that. I think our frozen supermarket lamb will do just fine.”

“Chicken,” grunted Adam.

“No, lamb,” said Harry.

“I was referring to your mental attitude!”

“Well—puffins to you too!”

Strolling slowly southward along the cliff edge, we spotted just about all of the primary species of seabirds on the Shiants—razorbills and guillemots (close cousins of the puffin), skinny, black shags (small versions of cormorants), fulmars (we watched them nervously, all too aware of their notorious habit of spitting out vile, reeking vomit at unwanted intruders), gannets, kittiwakes, and various other species of gulls. We'd heard from Angus that sea eagles, with their condorlike, eight-foot wingspans, had also been seen here recently, but we were never lucky enough to spot one.

“My favorites are still the geese,” said Adam. “The only occupants really during the colder months. The barnacles, sort of a more delicate version of the Canada goose—and the graylags. I call them my winter spirits. Very sociable in nature. They seem to hate being separate from each other and the flock. Sometimes there are hundreds all collected together in one place—white chests and heads, black neck and back, and beautifully subtle tones of gray and white in the wing feathers. And they're always eating, tugging at the grass, and leaving extremely generous deposits behind them. ‘Loose as a goose' is a very appropriate expression! And a little ungainly too—wobbly—on the ground. But when they take off en masse—now, that's a truly wondrous sight—so effortlessly, so easily forming into those V shapes, as cohesive as…as a single wing…
There's a real emptiness here when they leave and before the other birds start to float in…a spooky silence…otherworldly—which ironically is one of the various translations of the word ‘
shiant
.'”

Adam's deep knowledge of and love for these islands allowed him to free-associate gleefully in his commentaries. A brief summation of Viking history here in the ninth century and the observation that these islands possess a microcosm of the whole flow and horror of Highland history would lead to a discussion of the Neolithic world, and a description of the discovery here of a golden Bronze Age necklace, or
torc
, possibly dating from around 1200
BC
. Then would follow a digression about a week spent in the cottage as a schoolboy with his father, Nigel, a few tongue-very-much-in-cheek warnings about island ghosts and
sithean
, and an outspoken diatribe against the “lordism” and “lairdic antics” of some of the “new money” landowners who had recently purchased clan estates on Harris and Lewis.

He seemed particularly intrigued with Compton Mackenzie's occupation of the islands after 1925, and it was indeed fascinating to realize we were staying in the house he had drastically renovated himself and which was featured, stylistically at least, in his two-volume novel
The North Wind of Love
.

“Not one of his best works by a long way,” said Adam. “But his affection for what he calls the ‘Shiel Islands' comes through so strongly through his main character—a playwright—modeled on himself, of course! As with the primary theme of the book—the creation of an independent Scotland—which was behind much of Mackenzie's political activities.”

“Wasn't he also very involved in protecting the fishing grounds for Scottish trawlers?” I asked.

“Definitely. Very aggressively. He seemed to thrive on the allure of islands and their spirit of strong independence. And he lived on so many—Barra, Skye, Herm, and Jethou in the Channel Islands, Capri, and others. But D. H. Lawrence, for some reason, took offense at all this—what he calls ‘I-island' self-importance. In fact he even wrote a parody of Mackenzie,
The Man Who Loved Islands
, showing how the neurotic need to ‘make a world of his own' ultimately ends up with ‘a beautiful private landscape dead and sterile under drifts of egotistical snow'!”

“So—no love lost between those two famous writers.”

“No—Mackenzie never forgave him…although ironically, he did a similar thing to Alasdair Alpin MacGregor.”

“Yeah, I remember that story. A cruel obliteration of that master of the purple prose! But maybe living on islands can do that to you. You get back to basics—no hyperbole, no pseudo anything…you see things more clearly…all the pretenses and all our petty self-glorifying arrogances…”

“Interesting idea,” mumbled Adam. “Maybe that's why I was so nervous writing
Sea Room
…everyone seemed to feel they knew the place better than me—despite the fact I've been coming here for decades and my Viking family ancestors possibly once owned the whole region…I'm still seen as an outsider by many…and maybe I am…”

But as we talked, I remembered something toward the end of his book, when the writing was complete, that seemed to suggest a reconciliation with his apparent modesty. Later that evening I found the passage:

Slowly we made our way along the cliff tops for an hour or two and then began to curl down off the high ground and into the long indentation of the “Central Valley.”

“This is really a strange place,” said Adam as we negotiated our way between nefarious marshy bits by attempting to leap, gazellelike, from tussock to tussock (my ankle required wet elephantine ploddishness instead). “There's something definitely uneasy about it—it's not a confident occupation of place.”

“Well, it certainly looks as though it's been fully occupied for a long
time,” I said. There were grassy humps galore, remnants of black-house walls and sheep enclosures, ancient shell middens, and abundant evidence of archaeological excavations, something that Adam has been encouraging and participating in for years.

“The problem with archaeology is that you discover the story back to front…upside down. We know there was a huge house here, almost forty feet long and ten feet wide with double-skinned stone walls three feet thick. And there were storage buildings nearby and a stockyard. Much of these seem to be postmedieval structures. But there's a way to go yet before we trace it all back to prehistory…so in the meantime I decided to add my own little twenty-first-century addition.”

Adam pointed to a rather dilapidated little rectangle of land nearby surrounded by a sheep-resistant wire fence.

“My garden,” he said in a wary tone, casting sidelong glances to gauge my and Harry's reactions.

“Ah,” I think I said. “And you're growing what precisely?”

“Er…precisely nothing at the moment. I tried potatoes, neeps, and cabbages last year but they were…a bit of a flop.”

“A little small, were they?” asked Harry sympathetically.

“Small to the point of nonexistence!”

“Ah,” said Harry.

“Tough luck,” I said.

“Bollocks!” said Adam, with a hearty guffaw and one of his disarmingly cheerful toothy grins.

The sun was beginning its slow, bronzing fade behind Clisham when we finally returned to the tiny cottage. Harry immediately set about preparing dinner. We carried in a couple of buckets of clear, cold water from the spring behind the cottage to help him in his labors. And then, as there seemed little else to do, Adam and I sprawled outside together on the warm turf and sipped the velvety Glenfiddich malt to toast the easing down of the first day.

Conversation roamed widely as we lay back on the grass and ruminated about the future of Harris, his upcoming book,
Seize the Fire
, on Lord Nelson to mark the two hundredth anniversary of the battle of Trafalgar, my search for an ideal Greek island of
Seasons in…
authentic
ity and charm, the recent death of his father (“I still haven't gone through all his things yet—it's harder than I thought it would be”), his occasional frustrations with the rat-infested cottage here and the absence of electricity, a toilet, or running water, and my increasing irritation with an ankle that was complaining loudly about its overuse on the tussocks of the Central Valley.

“Easy solution for that,” said Adam.

“Really—what is it?”

“Fill your glass again!”

“Best idea of the day,” I said.

Harry's dinner was a masterful blending of barbecued leg of lamb, crackle-crisp on the outside and delicately pink at its center, a mix of fire-roasted potatoes and carrots, and a large green salad. It was dark outside by this time. Stars sparkled like diamond dust on black ebony. We dined in a medieval setting of roaring fire and flickering candles and Harry decided that, as no one else had claimed it, he'd gorge himself on the meat shreds hanging off the lamb bone. So, leg bone in hand and chin dripping with juices, he played his Henry V role to the hilt and, as our conversation meandered on into the night, his demeanor became so distinctly regal and animated that I expected him to launch into his St. Crispin's Day speech at any moment.

And he may well have done so for all I remember. But, alas, due to a surfeit of fine food, wine, and laughter, I don't remember much at all really. I don't even remember the scrabbling of rats among the roof rafters that poor Harry claimed kept him awake for much of the night. His frustration with their antics was not eased by Adam's insistence that these creatures were a very rare species of “black” rat, considered by many environmentalists to be “more important than the puffin colonies here!”

The following morning I realized that my walking and climbing capacities had now become severely limited by a distinctly errant ankle. So, as my two friends planned a rigorous clamber over Garbh Eilean island to parade along the bird-encrusted cliff tops and visit the site of an Iron Age house and other prehistoric site discoveries on the central, wind-torn heights of the island, I decided to limit my explorations to the Central Valley.