Scaling Storr
Gaslit (by the weather) Feasted (from the hills) And Danced (myself clean)
I haven’t forgotten for a minute about grief and trauma, the difference between the two or the shimmerings that help bring us back from the edge. While I work diligently on the related letters for you, though, I offer this month a quick story about my trip to London last spring to visit my sister, Jenny, as well as a side trip to the Highlands of Scotland “for some hiking” which my niece Neala assiduously planned for the three of us. Turned out Scotland had life lessons for me under every moss-covered rock.
Here’s that story:
On our first morning in Skye, Neala’s itinerary called for a big breakfast at break of day for the sustenance needed to ascend Old Man Storr, a 55 meter-high pinnacle of basalt rock not far from the hotel.
The ride to the trailhead was gorgeous – that rugged, muscular landscape, clear cut and rocky and a shape-shifting green, as far as the eye could see. It doesn’t get old.
When we arrived at the trailhead, I noticed that the rain had grown a bit more pelt-y and looked around to try to get a sense from what direction the storm was tracking. But I couldn’t quite tell. It seemed to be almost loitering —— like teenagers at a gas station. This was my first inkling that the weather there was just different, both as empirical fact but later I would realize it’s also in how it’s conceived of --- in the public imagination and in the public square.
We passed through an old gate at Storr’s base and the landscape changed; everywhere we looked the earth was punctuated by clumped green grass and deep purple ground cover. The beauty of it for some reason reminded the three of us of Maeve, Neala’s older sister, who was back in the States. We shared our observations lightly but it got colder fast as we bent ourselves uphill and into the gathering wind.
It turned out Neala had the explicit intent of scaling the Trottemish Ridge, created 60 million years ago by a massive landslip. Ok, I thought. I was a little jet-lagged but a vigorous walk would likely help, I assured myself. The problem was that the higher we went, the greater the wind and the fiercer the rain. We trudged on, soon socked in by heavy fog. A few evergreens lay around felled.
I’m frankly not sure how to describe the next part or the overall experience except by telling you what it was not --- it was not a walk, it was not a hike, it wasn’t even ‘trekking’ as it were. It wasn’t long before it lost the pleasure of the voluntary and took on the drive of compulsion. It felt like we three were all marching under orders from some outside authority. Solzhenitsyn popped to mind. Then my mind went back further; it was closer to World War I in feel. Eventually, all three of us did look like cold, wet Russian soldiers. Chaingangers.
Next my mind wandered to movies I’d seen of plane crashes at high elevations, stranding a few survivors.
After about an hour, the wind took on Master and Commander strength. We were near capsizing, each of us our own dingy. A few times we had to stop and get low to the ground for fear of being picked up and thrown down or just swept away. Right off that mountain.
At some point I must have considered suggesting we turn back. But deep inside I really needed to be the cool aunt. Even if I had to die trying. And I didn’t want to lose to Jenny either.
Has anyone ever done the math on this? Like how many people a year die trying to save face?
I believe we did end up reaching that Tottering Ridge, whatever it was, but the fog was so thick, and we were so haggard that we just sat down on the far side of a volcanic rock and had a few sips of water. By the grace of God (or whatever god He lets run that mountain…), getting back down was far faster and easier.
When we returned to the parking lot though I was gob smacked to discover that it was just exactly as we had left it. I saw no hikers laid out on stretchers; no emergency vehicles ready to organize search parties. I spotted a few young people in the gift shop browsing scarves. Strangely too, the gusts had died down so dramatically that it seemed like a Hollywood wind machine had just been shut off.
When we returned to our rooms back in Portree it took me seventeen minutes to regain feeling in my feet. Also, back at hotel-twilight-zone, not one single person was trading stories at lunch about the extraordinarily inclement situation going on outside, even when I tried to talk about what happened to us in a stage voice so that people would overhear. Everyone was just sitting in their afternoon slacks sipping scotch with their spouse of forty years. Our storm had not made news.
I forced the subject a final time with our waiter that night at dinner, but he just smiled with jolly condescension about our tale and said that he’d also got ‘caught’ a few weeks earlier on that very ‘walk’ in ‘a little hail’.
Wha?? The idea of Storr as a ‘walk’ was an insane misnomer. Did his neck warmer not get so sopping wet and gale-force blown that it hung down his chest like a necklace? I’m telling the truth --- Storr was an emergency. But “windy day” was all I ever heard anyone say about that morning.
That evening as I lay awake in bed, I became convinced that all the locals had signed an NDA about what happens outdoors. But who had them cornered? The clouds?
I’d strained my hamstring during the hike, so I had a decent excuse to chill out the next morning in my room. While hanging out there with my leg up on a pillow, I became obsessed with watching repeated weather reports, something BBC in Scotland, and then staring out the window to see if it matched.
This is when I realized I might have stumbled onto a hard news story. The reporters are IN on this whole weather hoax! I decided. Their part was pretending the weather is like a metaphorical experience, poetry basically, instead of science, and they spin their reports Yates-style so you have no idea what’s really going.
The weather guy would say things like ‘we’ll likely see more general rain’. General rain? Tell us about the specific rain, you crazy cult leader! He also talked about high pressure ‘retreating’, ‘starting to ‘slip away…’, which sounded plaintiff to me. What is this? The Romantic weather period?
Oh yeah, and I almost forgot, half the maps look like abstract art.
But really the central thing is that they perseverate non-stop about the rain --- offering meteorological concepts like tropes, that refer back to themselves or else relate in time to a prior but also ill-defined event:
‘the best of the day’s sunshine’
‘sporadic spells of rain might burst out’
‘a bit less misty into evening’
What is less? What is best?
And the alliteration: misty, murky, close and clammy! Do they think the weather is a rap?
Case closed. Right? I was being gaslit and called bollocks on their metaphor-weather.
Well, not so fast, my dearest reader-friends.
Months later, July 4th to be exact, I’m at a picnic at my beach club and I’m seated at a table next to this kindly man, mid-seventies I’d day. He’s from a small, coal mining village in the very north of England right over the border from…hmmm…Scotland. We chat about his family and children, his businesses, past and present. I try to airlift him quickly over my twenty-two years of flipping something in a fry pan and running laundry. A successful man I gathered and a great storyteller too – especially about the gritty, working-class village he was from with the miners and the long, dark tunnels under the North Sea where all manner of things could go wrong and did.
I like the guy. I decide to tell him – everything: Scaling Storr, the storm, the blank looks at the hotel, the condescending waiter, BBC-man who appeared to be part of the, well, conspiracy. What do you think? I asked him straight. Is that weather normal? I mean I felt totally gaslit by the whole thing, I say.
Well, he sipped his cocktail in the plastic cup with stars and stripes as his lips slid toward a smile – decorous but thick with pluck. He was an American like me but dang if he hadn’t left his heart in those Isles.
First, he confirmed that we’d traveled to ‘Northern Europe’ in ‘Early Spring’ and then a pregnant pause came which I should have heeded as warning.
Then --- Then he launched into the most air-tight, polite and withering take-down of me and my ‘impressions’ as might have been humanly possible. His meticulous explication mentioned constant chatter about the weather not being necessary there because they don’t suffer an obsession with meteorology, as do Americans --- as if every plan need depend on advanced detailed warning of precipitation totals.
We tend toward the day, not slavish anxiety about it, which words he loaded like drill bits into the jaws of a chuck.
I sat perfectly dumb with a half a blue cupcake in my mouth. Only later would I realize that it was kind of the summa, black belt version of the waiter’s Jolly Condescension. Sir British Isles blew out his final bit of scorched earth like birthday candles exactly as our shared American fireworks hit the sky.
Well, friends, I know when I’m beat, and I was beat. It was such a rout I can’t even remember all of it. I believe my nerve system collapsed. I tried my best to remember how he formed his elegant argument but like any great performance, you had to be there. He was the master. And if ever there was a rap, it was his.
Mr. UK was right, people. One must contend with the weather as one contends with, well, everything. Life.
To contend --- from the Latin root contendere: to stretch, to strive, with or against.
Ahh. With or Against. We’ll need wisdom for that part.
Instead, when I wake up in the morning, I do a body scan and begin my list of complaints in order of interest and feigned urgency. There was a lesson in this for me; deeper than UK knew. But lessons sometimes come in threes and can be wrapped in very different packages.
My second lesson, another meditation on the nature of nature, arrived our final night in Skye when Jenny treated us to the meal of a lifetime -- my birthday dinner, in fact. It was an incredible, indelible meal. Not farm to table, dears --- this was Foraged and Found. Gorgeous --- fish, fungi, flowers, bushes, seeds, gelatin that had been squeezed from untamed leaves.
It was the flip side of Storr’s School of Hard Knocks. The beauty and abundance blew my anxious little mind. There’s So Much we can eat that we might actually step on by mistake! And sometimes it extends to us exactly like a miracle --- so, so far beyond need.
Why does God do it? I wondered that night as we walked the cold cobblestone back up the hill —- this intermittent pouring forth. This Givenness. Is it for pleasure? His or ours? To hold our hand across the fierce divide? To say to us, I love you this much, without breaking the fourth wall? So that we can agree with Him and practice agreeing? For our souls, to hold up on this wrecking, sinking ship?
Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes and yes. And especially that last one:
For our souls to hold up on this sinking, wrecking ship.
My perennial mistake is being so surprised all the darn-damn time, so taken off-guard by the same exact stuff. The stuff I must Go with. Or against.
On my honor, I promise to do like the Brits in the Blitz:
Keep Calm and Carry On.
Oh, the lessons you taught me, dear Scotland! I love you! I do. Despite our big misunderstanding. And the NDA I’m convinced y’all signed. And the agony of defeat at my beach club. Despite it all, I’d come again in a heartbeat. (With a stiffer upper lip and some very decent gear…)
TIP –No on Northern Europe in Early Spring.
TOTE – But if we do go, I can almost hear UK leaning over to me to whisper sound counsel --- Go to eBay, lass, and get a good price on one of those foot-thick Canadian parkas.
TRUTH - This is a 1.5 minute snippet of our Ride to the North Sea. Link to film. One note on this little gem: the magic here is that Neala was DJ-ing. She DJ-ed throughout the trip, in fact. I’m sorry to brag but I must say here that she has a serious preternatural gift for getting the song exactly right for the mood…sometimes with, sometimes against. I’ve realized recently that this a very great skill, indeed. In some ways it’s related to a similar ability outlined by the venerable Welsh theologian D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones in his essay on Spiritual Depression -- he aptly calls this ‘preaching to your own soul’. I need to practice this and learn it! We must DJ ourselves through this crazy life (and not let the world do it for us). This is because, according to Lloyd-Jones, there is usually a negative rambling voice already there (!), slighted, selfish and afraid, that we must speak up and back to — truth, hope, life and beauty. We must come to that nuisance. Or it wins the day.
In closing and until next time, I love every one of you. For real. And especially you two, Jenny and Neala. This one’s for you!
Could hear your voice so special. And I loved reading about Neala, Jenny and Maeve
you give bill bryson a dramatic run for his money. i adore you.