Kildonan (Arran, Scotland, 2012)

We made the trip to Kildonan on a couple of occasions. A portion of my brother-in-law Robert’s father rests at the beach there for eternity, buried under an unmarked cairn, overlooking an ocean horizon containing the teardrop-shaped island of Pladda and its ever-vigilant lighthouse beacon, and the near-mythic, mound-shaped Ailsa Craig, rising out of the sea like a green crown.

The place held special memories for Robert’s family, and now, whenever one of them visits, they add a stone to Stephen’s cairn, carefully selecting it for shape, heft and color before placing it atop the pile, now about knee-height. The walk to his ashes is maybe a quarter-mile from roadside parking, skirting a small community of coastal houses and an active farm, where cows meander from the fields to the beach, urged by habit to lumber in a staggering line, dropping patties and licking salt from the wrack lines of scattered seaweeds.

Seals haul out on boulders, eyeballing visitors, but otherwise occupied by lounging, sunning and napping. Sheep lay intermittently on the green turf, gazing at the waves. The sandy beach, which runs the length of Kildonan, is a rarity for these parts, where the coastal geology is primarily rocky – one reason, perhaps, why the cows enjoy making the trek.

Each of us engages the scene differently, finding our own paths, resting on separate boulders, entertaining private thoughts. In silence, we listen to the gurgling water and look into the green-gray distance. Pladda Light winks a bright, knowing eye. Ailsa Craig, an Anglicized twist on Gaelic, meaning “fairy rock,” appears ethereal and otherworldly, shrouded in a halo of sunlight-suffused fog.

Technically, the island is a volcanic plug, representing all that remains visible from the volcanic activity that formed the Atlantic Ocean. Locals call it “Paddy’s Milestone,” heralding its role as the approximate halfway point between Belfast and Glasgow, a signature landmark for generations of Irish laborers seeking work in Scotland. Most of the world’s curling stones are quarried there. (It is rich in Blue Hone and Ailsa Craig Common Green granite, both of which are used to make stones for curling.) The island is also a sanctuary for many oceanic birds, including gannets and puffins.

Place names are both Gaelic and English, serving as explanations for various island features. Among the Gaelic: Craig Na’an (cliff of birds), Trammis (place of elders…as in trees, not people), Garrylou (rough hill), Balvar (big, round cliff) and Ashydoo (black hill). Among the English: Swine Cave, thought to be named for the hogs that once were stocked there as part of the rent due to the Earl of Cassilis (pronounced “Castles”).

Wikipedia notes that the island, dominated by steep pitches and crags, has seen its share of calamities: “…a young lady once fell over the cliff near Craig Na’an; however, her Victorian-style garment caught the wind like a parachute and she escaped with her life and some broken bones that soon knit back together.”

Here, one tends to believe in the misty veil that separates this world from the next, since it shows up as a fine rain curtain almost daily. On the beach, you can rub against the infinite, even as the white sand slips through your fingers. On the horizon, that green rock emerges out of the water from Celtic legend. Some call it Ailsa Craig. But for a few of us, it will always be known by another name: Stephen’s View.

 

 

Canadian Drunk (Ottawa, Toronto, Quebec City, 1989)

Ottawa is the coldest capital in the world, a fact reinforced during my visit in the late 1980s, when nightly temperatures dipped to -30 degrees and the days never climbed as high as zero. The place was enchanting nevertheless, a crowded city of snow piles that surrounded museums, restaurants and walkways like little white hills, looming over iced-over cobblestones that forced most visitors to shuffle-step their way along the streets. People dangled skates over one shoulder, tying them together by the laces, as they ping-ponged from shop to pub. The skates would come in handy throughout the day, while traveling the Rideau Canal – the world’s longest public skating rink, measuring more than 5 miles, and a popular shortcut for crisscrossing the city during the frozen months.

Canadians embrace winter in a way that most North Americans hailing from below the border will never understand. Even in New England, where the three northern states and the city of Boston have established their winter bonafides, the passion for sledding, skating, snowshoeing, skiing, snowman-making, snowball-throwing and fireplace-gathering doesn’t hold a candle to our neighbors from the Great White North. The same holds for drinking. Beer, wine and spirits are essential ingredients in the overall Canadian winter experience. During this season, the lungs of the locals burn with cold air and cocktails.

After a quick warm-up pint in The Laff (The Chateau Lafayette), an Ottawa pub that is older than Ottawa itself, I carried my skates to the canal, shoved my walking shoes into my backpack, and began to tentatively glide along the route of the Rideau, stopping at food vendors and heated huts for foot cramp breaks. While waiting in line at a portable canal café for a cup of hot chocolate, the man in front of me opened his coat and pulled out a couple of miniature bottles of Canadian-made De la Tierre Maple Tequila. “You’ll be needing one of these,” he said, handing me a bottle. “They don’t serve alcohol here.”

“How much,” I asked.

“I ask only that you say kind words about Ottawa when you leave,” he said.

The truth of Canada’s love of winter, the man told me, is that it’s a great excuse to combine healthy, fresh air with the warming sensation and feel-good, heady buzz of liquor. “Most of the year, drinking’s a guilty pleasure,” he explained. “In winter, it’s considered necessary for survival. So, no guilt.”

Two of the more famous Canadian drinks are Moose Milk and Caribou. I first tasted Moose Milk in Toronto, while waiting at a hotel for the arrival of my sister and brother-in-law, who were coming to celebrate New Year’s Eve. People were staggering out of a large ballroom, the men in sloppy tuxedoes, the women in dresses that couldn’t contain their cleavage. I sat on a nearby bench and read, looking up occasionally to watch drunken couples grope each other, and every once in a while fall on their asses. When the party had thinned out to almost nothing, I asked a servant walking by, “What are they drinking?”

“Moose milk,” she said. “There’s still plenty left. Help yourself.”

I nodded OK, and resumed my chapter. She returned with an empty punch bowl and a ladle, and a glass filled with white liquid.

“There’s more inside,” she said. “Help yourself.”

It was delicious. I would find out later that Moose Milk is essentially made from some combination of five basic ingredients: hard liquor (Canadian whisky, dark rum, or sometimes vodka); coffee (in liqueur form, like Kahlua, and also prepared coffee); dairy (which could be whole milk, cream, condensed milk, eggnog and/or vanilla ice cream); sweetener (usually maple syrup or sugar); and spice (traditionally nutmeg, sometimes with cinnamon).

Over the years, I have experimented with my own combination (using Rhode Island’s Thomas Tew Single Barrel Rum, Old New England Egg Nog, Sortilege – Quebec-made, derived from an old French word meaning “Magic Spell,” blending Canadian rye whiskey and pure male syrup – Newport Creamery or Haagen Dazs vanilla ice cream and locally roasted coffee in the mix). Every taste brings me back to Toronto and the memory of frigid winter nights, horny rich tourists, friendly hotel workers and bonfires burning around public skating rinks at midnight.

All Canadian military know Moose Milk, a hotel concierge told me later that week. The Army, Navy and Air Force all claim to have invented it, and each have their own secret recipe. The Royal Canadian Air Force even states that the original drink was made with milk from lactating Alces alces (the North American moose or elk), explaining the name’s origin. Moose Milk is also the drink of choice served free at Canadian Legion Halls during the New Year, a holiday tradition that emphasizes the drink’s importance to warriors of ground, sea and sky.

No drink, however, is as closely associated with Canada is Caribou. Every February, during Quebec City’s Winter Carnival, people walk around in the bitter cold, watching artists carve ice sculptures, eating and drinking at outdoor bars made of ice, lining streets for costumed parade marchers, all the while drinking a strange liquid from a plastic red hollow stick capped with a screwed-on snowman’s head. The snowman is Bonhomme, the official mascot of Carnaval, whose face decorates every part of the city for two weeks.

According to legend, Caribou is derived from a drink made by mixing whisky with caribou blood and used by early pioneers and Colonial-era hunters, trappers and loggers to fortify themselves. (They claim to have inherited the drink from indigenous Canadians, who would ritualistically drink hot reindeer blood after a hunt.) Now, it’s officially only sold by Quebec’s Liquor Board, which keeps its recipe secret. Most of the 60,000 bottles sold annually are consumed during the two weeks of Winter Carnival.

Essentially, Caribou is made by combining red wine with hard liquor (usually Canadian whiskey, but also sherry, vodka, spiced rum or brandy, or a combination of any or all) and maple syrup (or sugar). The proportions are essentially 75 percent wine to 25 percent spirits. The wine can be mulled, with cinnamon sticks or anise or allspice or orange rind or anything that mulls your fancy. Since Caribou is a trademarked name, like Champagne, homemade versions are often called Reindeer’s Blood or Caribou Blood.

Whatever the particulars of flavor or name, the drink is one of the lasting impressions of any visit to Old Quebec during carnival season. As one of the Canadian sculptors taking a break from working on a giant snow clock said to me, “Without coffee and Caribou, we wouldn’t get through the night.” As he spoke, words came out in frozen bursts that condensed and formed icicles, lengthening his beard.

“What we’re celebrating here is the impossibility of our survival,” he said, making that Reverend Jim Ignatowski “blecchh” face every time he took another sip of Caribou. “We’re crazy for being out here in this cold. But we’re trying to prove that the cold can’t beat us. It can’t make us miserable. We’ll still enjoy ourselves. And that’s all true. But if they took our drink away, then we’re screwed.”

Games (Arran, Scotland, 2012)

Golfing at Lochranza

Set on the north-facing glen of a Scottish island that attracts abnormally high amounts of rainfall, the village of Lochranza is perhaps best known for having the least sunshine of any community in the United Kingdom. But on the day my brother-and-law and I decided to golf there, we played in shine and shadow on squishy green grass, tackling a Par 34, 9-hole course bisected by a river and surrounded by a horseshoe of mountains. The starting holes aimed at a ruined gray castle on a peninsula extending into the loch that gives its name to the village. Red squirrels chased each other at the edge of a deer forest. Red stags rested, ate and lumbered among divots at various fairways, the slow-moving creatures obviously used to the hackers that chewed up the course before they did. A golden eagle soared in lazy ovals over the blue-green northern mountains (it was the closest I would get to an eagle all day). Gray seals basked on rocks, soaking in the sunlight that glittered off Lochranza Bay. All that was missing was a double-rainbow and some fairy gold.

Armed with a few battered, rented clubs and dented putter, I played the best nine holes of my life – one birdie, four pars, two bogies and a double-bogey, putting me only 3 over for the 9 holes. I’m not sure what deserves credit for my temporary competence – stag magic, elf charm, the healing sleep of the Scottish sea air – but it felt as if I had conjured the spirit of the first golfers, who played back in the day when this country was overrun with trolls and giants. For it is generally accepted, especially in these parts, that golf was invented in Scotland by wayward shepherds who – when they weren’t herding sheep, sketching landscapes, whittling wood, carving bone, strumming the lyre, playing the flute, composing pastoral poetry, counting cloud animals or daydreaming about nothing in particular – picked up a curved stick and whacked a pebble among the green hills, sand dunes and rabbit runs of their villages, marking haphazard progress until the stone disappeared down a mole hole.

One of the holes on the rather unimaginatively named Lochranza Golf Course had a standing stone, a remnant from the Bronze Age, but merely an ancient hazard if, as a right-hander, you sliced your drive. Dozens of sheep grazed in the rough and the fairways, even occasionally out of bounds. The golf course shares its lease with the village’s lone sheep farmer, so the woolen ruminants lamb and eat the grass in spring before heading up into the hills as the year progresses. The sheep served the purpose of mowers and groomers, although their appetite and the wet weather conspired to give the course a somewhat beat-up appearance.

“What do the rules of golf say about striking a red deer,” asked one visitor to the course. But even amateur golfers like Robert and I know that natural hazards are part of the game, in which case, whether you make contact with flank or antlers, you play the ball where it lies. I once had a muskrat move one of my stray shots from the muddy fringe of a water hazard to a playable lie closer to the hole, and I’ve had several varieties of deciduous trees turn slices and hooks into middle-of-the-fairway drives. So, in golf, as with most human pursuits, the ability to have a healthy respect and love for nature seems to improve your karma with the wild things.

Lawn Bowls at Lamlash

It’s hard to imagine a more beautiful setting for a game of bowls. Poised on the eastern edge of the Arran coast, overlooking the Firth of Clyde, with Holy Isle providing a dramatic background, the Lamlash Bowling Club is shaped like a polished emerald, where games of flat-green bowls are played on well-groomed rinks to the sound of waves and the scent of the sea air.

Robert and I spent an entire afternoon in the green box, bowling from one end to another, in a prolonged game to 21, comforted by salty sea breezes, interrupted only by the sharp punctuation of herring gulls fighting over the same cracked shells. I had an advantage, having the genetic benefit of a South African great-grandfather, who either bowled for or managed the national team (the historical records are unclear; he was a bowler, but whether he was a bowler of note is still open to speculation). We had the club to ourselves for the duration. The locker rooms, open to the public, provided shoes in all sizes and several collections of biased balls, along with the jack (or kitty) that serves as a target.

Like the sport of golf, lawn bowls has a distinctly Scottish pedigree. A Glasgow cotton merchant named William Wallace Mitchell is credited with clarifying the rules of the modern game in his “Manual of Bowl Playing” in 1864. Also like golf (and football), lawn bowls was banned by various kings of England for interfering with the greater military need for more competent archers.

Our match seemed to last forever, and that was fine with us. It was a timeless sort of day. A scenic illustration from 1903 from a book titled “The Victorians and Edwardians at Play” depicts starched suit-clad doppelgangers of Robert and me from more than a century ago – just two men on a glorious summer’s day, bowling at Lamlash. The only difference, other than the period fashion (contrasting with our Hawaiian shirts and baseball caps), was the site of a Clyde steamer tied up at the pier and several of the Royal Navy’s battleships lying at anchor just offshore.

 

 

 

 

Stone Language (Machrie Moor, Arran, 2012)

In Celtic lands it is possible to encounter standing stones in many odd places, near motorways, in car parks, or thrusting up like solitary watchmen in hayfields or family farms. Stone Age and Bronze Age farmers left remnants behind in hut circles, burial cairns, monoliths and stone circles, and succeeding generations of settlers and invaders merely worked and fought around them (after, of course, removing any useful treasure from the underground tombs), leaving them to the ravages of nature rather than impose their own architecture on the sites.

Scotland is particularly abundant in upright stones, and Machrie Moor, on the isle of Arran, has one of the most impressive collections of monoliths and circles in the entire country. Six Bronze Age stone circles, estimated to be nearly 4,000 years old, can be found here, just shy of a mile off the main coastal road, comprising the most significant archaeological site on Arran. Made of red sandstone or granite, they occupy several fields, no longer cultivated, and are easily discovered by following a well-worn footpath. From this vantage, the divide of Machrie Glen into two steeply pitched valleys is obvious in the northeast, and on the summer solstice, the sun splits the gap and beams its light through the notch into this flattened moorland, which may explain why the circles were placed here. It’s also probably no coincidence that the Bronze Age engineers located them in an area to offer the widest possible visibility to visitors entering the valley from any direction.

The track winds in a southeasterly direction across boggy plains, overrun with heather and sphagnum moss, making a dogleg before reaching the first series of monuments, the Moss Farm Road Stone Circle. (The name refers to a derelict farm.) The walk then climbs a bit, revealing scattered burial mounds and stones, before ending at the larger collection of monuments, identified by a Historic Scotland interpretation board.

Many of the stones are popular in local folklore. One prominent flat-topped stone is known as Suidh Coire Fhionn in Gaelic, or “Fingal’s Cauldron Seat,” an example of how the landscape remains linked to Celtic folklore.

Two of the circles stand on the sites of previous Neolithic timber circles, which were built half-a-millennium before the stone structures. But, of course, wood doesn’t last as long as stone, just as flesh doesn’t last as long as wood, and the thought that people lived for thousands of years before these very stones – standing now for 40 centuries – altered their forms to suit their revised function is impossible to ignore on this windswept moor where sheep still graze and buzzards and golden eagles soar overhead, hunting for carrion.

Some here believe that the stones speak in whispers. They are keepers of lost stories in a world where languages die and tongues are suddenly silenced. To the Bronze Age farmer, they were sacred places, serving as cemetery and calendar and compass. To today’s wandering traveler, just passing through a bumpy timeline marked by sundials, sand through the hourglass, Rolex watches or the beeping digital iPhone, they remain a source of wonder and enchantment. The stones aren’t timeless, but they are the closest things to such a concept that we encounter in this world. They endure, positioned in their isolated poses amid bleak but beautiful surroundings, painted by wild rains, howling sea winds, dancing mists, shape-shifting clouds, ghostly moons, golden suns, mischievous rainbows and stars that pierce and probe like the eyes of ancient gods. They keep our flesh-and-blood transience alive and connected to Earth time, the only place we know as the selves that we think we know.

 

 

Gluggavedur (London, 1996)

Gluggavedur (Icelandic): “Window-weather,” the type of weather that is best appreciated indoors.

In the summer of 1996, over a stretch of late June and early July, it rained in England every day during my stay. I had camped out at my sister and brother-in-law’s place in Stoke Newington, in the north of London, for a fortnight. It was a vacation of museums and art galleries, pubs and bookstores, and late-afternoon visits to the National Film Theatre, where ushers handed out program notes to accompany movies. (My big-screen binge included “Touch of Evil,” “The Icicle Thief,” “Blow Up,” “The Naked City,” “La Femme Nikita” and “La Dolce Vita.”)

The persistent rain of the season took the pressure off in a way. I seemed to be in a perpetual state of drying out, so every day, after venturing into downpours, I found a limbo between the raindrops. Mornings were spent at the Café Vortex, a short walk away from the flat. The door opened to a narrow hallway and a dark, slinking staircase with creaking steps. The upstairs room had a hung-over feel, with its unpretentious but cluttered mix of wooden tables, stools and chairs on raised platforms, some of the seating tossed to and fro like furniture on a ship’s deck after a crossing through heaving swells. The nightly jazz concerts and gallery exhibitions took their toll on the mornings, as bleary-eyed servers with husky voices cleaned up whatever damage was done the previous night, fortified by endless cups of coffee. I always took a seat by the window, where I would eat breakfast, read the daily Guardian newspaper and watch the comings and goings of North Londoners doing business on Church Street. The Vortex cat, whose name I forget, was big enough for three, a mewing blob of fur and fat, but friendly and eager for contact. At some point every morning, the cat would wander over and spend some time in my lap, or rest against my leg and the chair-leg, purring peacefully as rain slapped against the window like a Keith Moon drum solo.

The passersby below were blurry and colorful, anonymous strangers mostly hidden under umbrella domes, some moving frantically, others slowly, as if succumbing to the will of the weather. Between window gazes, news articles that caught my eye, and forkfuls of omelet, I stroked the cat and pondered my career, then busy and profitable but unfulfilled as a public relations director for a New England college, and wondered whether I might be happier among the masses of rain-soaked London commuters. I came to no conclusions, but the rain against the window had a lulling effect. A couple of hours passed in trance or dream, unconscious poetry or cosmic thought, until I refocused on the news or the Time Out guide, circling my options for the day.

The slanting rain continued its uneven but meditative rhythm, even as I said goodbye to the cat and embraced the liquid chill outdoors, waiting for the next 73 double-decker bus to take me into central London, where the Tube or a Waterstones or the Crypt at St. Martin-in-the-Fields or a Turner painting at the National Gallery or Bog Man at the London Museum would provide safe haven from the relentless drenching. London is no less alive when wet, I noticed, peering out from the front seat windows on the top deck of the red buses that carried me over ground. Umbrellas, in the hands of Londoners, are both shield and weapon, and watching the commuting throngs from windows seemed a kind of choreography, waves of bobbing black canopies, moving with a hypnotic synchronicity.

From wherever I had been, I made my afternoon movie date at the NFT, the sound of percussive precipitation still thundering on the roof of the lobby, before vanishing into the amplified escape world of movie reality. On one occasion, I went to the theater to watch the director’s cut of “Blade Runner.” The rain was heavy that day, and I arrived at the cinema fairly soaked, remaining chilled throughout in the cold confines of the theater. I had the London rain inside me now, coursing through flesh and bone, before I entered the dystopian world of the film, set in a futuristic Los Angeles in which it is always raining.

About a week into my stay, my brother-in-law Robert apologized for the weather and its effect on my trip. “Sorry, it’s been a bit of a squib,” he said. But I didn’t mind. The rain had its own presence, putting a stamp of authenticity on my England visit. It made gray London a little greener, polishing the public parks and gardens to suggest an Oz-like Emerald City. It required me to linger enough in places to appreciate lazy cats and the obituary pages. It gave me a chance to journal and doodle and eavesdrop. Mostly, though, as the rain splattered and streaked against the window of a lonely café or a crowded bus, it painted the day outside, in all of its routine progress and random color, voyeuristic surprise and intricate design. It taught me that observing London can be just as satisfying as engaging it, especially when you are on the dry side of the looking glass.