4.17.05

more rural adventures with heather. this time we went to a town called fort william in inverness-shire, situated forty miles from the isle of skye and eighty from the hebrides. it's in the north-west, just at the edge of the gaeltacht, the area where gaelic is still spoken as an everyday language. pronunciation is impossible and everything is breathtaking.

the train was the best part. riding out of glasgow on two and a half hours of sleep, watching the horrible sixties architecture of the city fall away. as the buildings ran out, the hills grew taller; after an hour, they were mountains. there would be small settlements at first, maybe fifteen houses dotted along a lakeshore, mountains rearing up into the clouds at their backs. then there were no more settlements, just woods crowding in on the train as it hugged the edges of the mountains.

after the woods came what looked to me like tundra and what i later learned were moors. highland moors, desolate after the clearances. the ground different shades of brown, rocks that look older than anything i've ever seen scattered around, untouched for hundreds of years. bracken. dark, burnt looking scrub, clinging low to the ground. crags and rearing hills and glacier ravaged mountains sitting on otherwise flat landscape. red deer blending in, nosing the ground and flicking their ears at the train. once, an old, knocked down stone wall. once, a ruin of a stone cottage, a relic of the clearances. all this for two hours with no break; unprecedented for europe, especially britain, to have that kind of uninhabited space.

the north end of loch lomond at ardluì, sunset. poor, dirty trailers by the train tracks. hills and mountains blanketing, enclosing the town. sheep up in the hills higher than i thought possible.

climbing ben nevis as far as we could, taking pictures of the sun glinting off the snow at the summit in between the heavy, grey clouds. drinking water from a trickle of a waterfall in a glacial crevice, snowmelt from the top, then worrying about it. walking back to town over the hills, eating british beef in a pub and drinking ale made from heather.

the football thugs in the room next door shouting and thumping at two a.m., an old lady there with a holiday bus pounding on their door and yelling at them, 'shut up! shut up! shut up, please!'

a tub but no shower and no phone in the room, a view out over loch linnhe and a brown, glacier gullied hill nudging the clouds.

i'm glad i went; it was time alone in the highlands that i won't get on the butler trip at the end of this week. heather and i spent most of it in comfortable silence, walking and looking. when we weren't silent, we were laughing and drinking ale. she has striking eyes.

i like that scotland is small enough that you can get a handle on it. you can follow every piece of the politics, know every crag of the land. it doesn't have the intimidating, impossible sprawl of the united states; everything is concentrated here. i've never had a sense of national identity, only the identity of coming from maine. here, i can imagine what it would be like to have a true sense of national identity: it would be heady. wars would make more sense.

in the time since, i've disengaged from life in edinburgh. emily's back; i leave in less than a month, more like three weeks. kelly asked me if i wanted to go clubbing last night and i was literally struck dumb by the suggestion. it's the farthest thing from my reality as it stands now. that was something i would've made myself do back in february; now, i'm gone from here, just waiting and reading until i can get on the plane.

friday, i talked to dillon. realized i've known him since a little before the summer of 1998, making it a solid seven years. longer than i've known anyone else who's still in my life. likely closer to seven and a half, though that would be including the time before we met when i was still in eighth grade. eighth grade. was i ever in eighth grade? now i'm in scotland, further from eighth grade than i've ever been.

tomorrow it will be four years since jen died. i do not know how it's going to feel and i'm worried it's not going to feel like anything because i'm on the wrong side of the ocean.