by David Yeadon
Andrew continued to smile and nodded vague agreement before wandering off “to feed the neighbor’s hens.”
“I don’t know how he puts up with me sometimes.” Alison laughed when he’d left and then launched into tirades over some of the latest “developmental” issues plaguing Harris, including the finally rejected Lingarabay Superquarry, those proposed four-hundred-foot-high wind turbines on Lewis, rumors of “toxic” salmon farms, “pseudo” summer festivals, the decline of the Gaelic language, and—of course—the future fortunes of poor old Harris Tweed.
This stridently assertive Alison seemed very different from the gentle, sensitive author of Islands in the Sound, but as we shared slices of her amazingly pungent fruitcake over tea, a softer side emerged and we left, hours later, glad that the island still had people like the Johnsons to protect and celebrate it.
ANNE AND I AMBLED ON, splashing through the sinuous, chuckling sand streams and leaving a looping trail of footprints in the sand (I looked back and was surprised to see that I apparently walk with my right foot slightly askew; I’d never been aware of that before). Then we found the cockleshells. A vast graveyard of millions upon millions of them in linear tide-wrack formation strewn along the base of the rabbit burrow–pocked and marram grass–topped dunes of Corran. The broken habitats of so many succulent, brine-laced creatures that, when fresh-dug and after being steamed and doused in warm seasoned butter, offer the perfect opening act of a fine island dinner.
“Isn’t that…somebody out there?” asked Anne, pointing into a soft sea haze across Taransay Sound.
“I guess…unless it’s a piece of driftwood stuck in the sand.”
“No, no…look! He’s moving…very slowly.”
And so he was. A little black, bent stick figure edging his way across the sand with a small spade or something. Looking rather forlorn and lonely.
“Must be a cockleman,” I said. “Who else would be daft enough to go so far out? He’ll have a long run back here when the tide turns.”
“Shall we go over?”
“No. Leave him alone. We might catch him later when he’s finished…”
And so we wandered on, discovering more details and delights. And I thought back to a beautifully crafted passage in Gavin Maxwell’s Ring of Bright Water, which seemed to capture all the nuances of our dawdling day:
There is a perpetual mystery and excitement in living on the seashore, which is in part a return to childhood and in part because for all of us the sea’s edge remains the edge of the unknown; the child sees bright shells, and vivid weeds and red sea-anemones of the rock pools with wonder and with the child’s eye for minutiae; the adult who retains wonder brings to his gaze some partial knowledge which can but increase it and he brings too, the eye of association and of symbolism, so that at the edges of the ocean he stands at the brink of his own unconsciousness.
We were both certainly recapturing the child in our explorations. That’s what made the tiny rock pools so evocative and tantalizing. I used to dig around for hours in such places as a boy, gleefully celebrating yet another summer holiday at the seashore with my family. “Don’t you want to go out and play football with those other children?” my mother would ask in her constant concern for my somewhat atrophied socialization skills at that age. And sometimes I did. But mostly I didn’t. The pools, with their myriad aquatic mysteries, were far more enticing. And still are.
I was reminded too of a passage from John Lister-Kaye’s superb book Song of the Rolling Earth: A Highland Odyssey:
Joy and delight are nature’s gift to those who seek it and strive to reveal its truths. Nature comes free and in full Technicolor…It is utterly original, constantly recreating itself anew dazzling and inspirational…For those who are fortunate enough to be able to know it well, it reveals the triumph of creation.
And at least for Anne and me, dawdling our way across those sands under the great blue dome of sky, the “triumph of creation” indeed revealed itself as “nature’s gift”—a gift we carried with us gently and gratefully as we made our way slowly homeward to the little cottage on the bluff above the beach.
But not alone.
“Hey!” came a voice a long way behind us. We turned and there was our cockleman, silhouetted against the green contours of Taransay. He carried—actually, dragged—two enormous sacks and seemed stooped and weary. We waited for his slow approach and his greeting of “Well, now, y’two look like you’re enjoyin’ y’selves.”
“Actually, we are. It’s a do-nothing day and we’re doing nothing. But you look like you could do with some help!”
The man—actually more of a lean, gangly youth with an open face, blue eyes, the shadow of a mustache, and dimpled cheeks—laughed as we all introduced ourselves. “Alan MacLeod,” he said, with a cheeky grin. “Cockleman supremo!” He hefted up his two sacks.” Not bad for an afternoon’s work, eh?”
“Looks very impressive,” I said, admiring the hundreds of white cockles peering through the tight orange mesh of his nylon sacks.
“’S’bout thirty kilos—at least,” he said, “an’ all caught wi’ this wee thing.” Alan indicated a two-foot-long rake stuck in his belt.
“That’s all you need?” asked Anne.
“Aye, well, some have bigger rakes, but that means you’re always bobbin’ up and down. I like to keep close to the sand. You can spot ’em an’ hear ’em faster.”
“Hear them? Cockles make noises?” That was news to me.
“Oh aye, indeed. They’re usually only a coupla inches down and when y’walk in these waders y’ll hear ’em swishin’ and closin’ up when you’re nearby. Then you’ve got to move fast. They can shift through that wet sand faster’n clams. Clever little buggers, they are…but, as y’can see—once y’get the hang of it, y’get half a day’s catch like this. An’ at over a pound a kilo, it’s not a bad life, really.”
“I guess…” I said, only half convinced by the allure of being alone, permanently bent, and chasing after “clever buggers” with a kid’s rake for hour after hour. “Maybe when the sun’s out. But the weather across the sound here seems so…”
“Bloody awful!” Alan completed my sentence.
“Well—yes. It can be. Typical ‘if y’don’t like the weather, just wait five minutes’ stuff. You never know what’s coming next.”
“Aye,” said Alan, with a grin. “But I know what I’d like next!”
“What?” asked Anne, laughing.
“A big mug o’ strong tea!”
“Done!” I said. “That’s exactly what you’ll have!”
“How’s that?” asked Alan.
“Well—that’s our cottage over there,” I said. “At least for a while. So come on in and join us for tea and maybe a glass of something a bit stronger.”
Alan hoisted up his sacks of cockles with fresh vigor. “You, sir, and you, madam—are both lifesavers!”
“C’mon,” I said. “Let me carry one of those sacks.”
Alan couldn’t seem to take it all in. “Y’know, I’ve been doin’ this on and off for five years in all kinds of weather and you’re the first people ever to offer me…anything!”
And in the end it turned out well for all of us. Alan glugged his way through two large mugs of tea, three drams of malt, and a plateful of cookies, all the while regaling us with tales and local gossip. And then, just as he was about to leave, he said nonchalantly, “Y’got a bucket or something?”
“Sure,” I said, wondering if he was about to start washing his cockles in the kitchen. And he did indeed fill our plastic bucket with cockles, but then he said, “And these are yours. Just let ’em rest for a day or so in cold water to get rid of t’sand. Then boil ’em up ’til they open and mix ’em with some hot butter and—well, y’got y’selves a real nice snack.”
Alan left with a standing invitation to join us for refreshments anytime he was back on the sands. And he did on a couple of occasions, each time leaving us a bucketload of those delectable litt
le delicacies.
All in all, a fine conclusion to yet one more of our dawdle days.
BUT OF COURSE, IN THE NATURE of things, there has to be a downside to all these enticing romps.
And there indeed was—a week or so later when Anne had gone into Tarbert to do the shopping and I told her I’d take another stroll across the sands on what looked like a perfect blue-sky day.
She thought it was a great idea.
Only it wasn’t.
Oh—as these things go—everything started out just fine. I strolled across our cottage lawn, through the iron swing gate, down the ten-foot-high bluff of gneiss strata, across the dappled rock pools, and out onto those glorious shell sands once more.
A soft autumn breeze was still full of the scent of resilient machair flowers. Away across the bay rose the high, bold dunes of the Luskentyre Banks—the highest dunes in the Hebrides, and my destination for the day. It was a long but relatively easy walk requiring only a little barefooted fording of sand rivers where the remnants of the last high tide still skittered and chittered across the dimpled shallows to join the ocean in the Sound of Taransay.
Once Taransay, that languorous isle of green hills and golden beaches visible each day from our cottage, was a flourishing crofting community of three villages and a wealth of ancient remnants, including a standing stone, teampalls, a prehistoric shell midden, and a sixteen-foot-high Iron Age dun-fort still largely intact in the late nineteenth century. Then gradually, like so many of the small islands around Harris and Lewis, Taransay lost its population and slumbered on, relatively unmolested, until that odd fiasco in 2000 of Castaway—one of the first prototypes of the now ubiquitous TV reality Survivor-type programs that plague today’s viewing options ad nauseam.
Viewers may have hoped for a real beachcombing, Robinson Crusoe kind of experience but ended up watching a watered-down, semistaged pseudodrama of thirty or so adults left “to fend for themselves on a deserted isle.” Alas, for multitudinous reasons and mishaps, many of them spent more time living the highlife at the Harris Hotel in Tarbert than “surviving” on Taransay, and the whole fiasco ended up resembling, according to the gossipy headlines of national tabloid newspapers (and the comments of locals), a typical Brit-TV soap.
In my case I’ve often been fascinated by the idea of a beachcombing life. Once very early on in our “earth gypsy” ramblings, Anne and I tried a spot of living “off the beach.” Actually, “try” is possibly a misleading verb. We had little option at the time—what with only a couple of hundred dollars to our names, a recalcitrant VW camper that exhibited a remarkable capacity for incapacity, and a couple of honor-bound fiscal debts to settle with kind friends whose initial generosity in the “travel for us” spirit had turned a little maudlin after months of silence on our part.
So—beach living seemed to be our only option for a while. But, looking back, I still think it was fun—gathering mussels and fishing for sunfish on hidden northern California beaches, devouring wild fruit, mushrooms, and “borrowed” corn (we decided that ripe but broken corncob-heavy stalks were free game)—all seemed to be part of the authentic essence of our “randoming” lives at that time.
However, when I read Alasdair Maclean’s Night Falls on Ardnamurchan, I realized that our “fun” was often a serious beachcombing way of life in the islands here:
The use made by crofters of the gifts of the sea merits a book in itself: seaweed for fertilizer and if need be for food; sea birds for their flesh and their eggs; driftwood for fuel and for building; sand for fertilizer, for cement mixing and infilling, and to provide a layer of insulation under bedding in byres; and of course fish. There is always a chance, too, of finding something really interesting or valuable. For instance, there is the semi-mythical ambergris [from a gland near a whale’s brain] reportedly worth a king’s ransom a lump, which all beachcombers hoped for but none ever seems to find. And there is the beauty, mystery and terror of the great ocean to love and to make a lifetime study of.
When I was a boy beachcombing-protocol was strict and competition fierce…Two or three days of northwest wind would bring the driftwood in and you would have to rise at the peep of day if you wanted to be first on the scene…As for the rules of the game, if you took your beachcombing finds well clear of the high water mark, so eliminating any possible ambiguity about their status, they were yours till you chose to fetch them…Generations might pass and no one would touch them…How changed things are now! You scarcely dare leave your shadow unattended for a moment…The more advanced the culture, the less civilized the people…But I still adore beachcombing and it still gives me joy to discover—for example—a really fine piece of timber…
Ironically, as I reached the far side of the bay, I found meager scatterings of beachcombing items above the tide line, but the “fine timber” described by Alasdair Maclean was more like fragmented bits of trees with jagged branch stumps and sea-eroded trunks devoid of bark and smoothed to a worn-silver texture by the churnings of the tides. Beautiful in a wild kind of way, but hardly true beachcombing bonanzas.
Just ahead the soaring Luskentyre dunes rose up like a golden fortress over two hundred feet high to tufted marram grass summits. They seemed unassailable. And they were unassailable, as five minutes of scrambling up their fragile flanks, followed by a roly-poly return to the base when the sand finally gave way, made very evident. But I was determined to find a way onto their tops and finally, after easing my way around the less eroded northern edge of the dunes, I found I could climb a semivertical slope well covered with marram. Ideal for handholds, I thought. Grab clumps of the deep-rooted stuff and haul myself up in no time. Only I’d forgotten one of the less appealing attributes of this spikey grass. The blades are like knives—sharp and slightly serrated—and when they didn’t actually cut my hands, they left enough scratches so that when I finally reached the summit, puffing like one of those overweight gray seals that colonize these islands, my fingers looked as if they’d been caught in a remorseless shredding machine.
Gray Seal
No matter, I consoled myself. I’d made it. Only I hadn’t quite got the lay of the land up there and didn’t realize that the slope I’d climbed was actually the leading edge of a sandy arête, and as soon as I stepped on the ridge, the sand gave way and I went tumbling down the backside of the dune, with no marram grass to slow my rapidly accelerating rate of descent.
I ended up in a hundred-foot-deep bowl of talcum-textured sand, almost as far down as I’d been when I started the climb from the other side. And it was a bowl with no discernible exit. All around me rose those soaring walls of wind-smooth sand offering no footholds and no chance of immediate escape.
“Crazy!” I mumbled—or maybe something a little bit more epithet-laced. “There must be a way out—try traversing, zigzagging back up to the top…”
But this was very pernicious material. It looked beautiful and golden in the afternoon light and it felt so benign—even warm. However, in terms of ascending footholds, it was utterly useless. Like trying to climb up through powder snow. Every few tentative steps up eventually led to a slide back down to the level at which I started. An interesting predicament.
And it was then I spotted the skeleton. At first it was just the hint of a rib cage a few feet to my right at the very bottom of the sand bowl. I edged over and nudged the sand away with my feet. More ribs and part of a backbone. Whatever it was, it had obviously been there a long time. The bones were ghost-white, picked clean of all skin, flesh, and tendons. I had a dramatic vision—courtesy of my inner demons, doubtless—of some poor lonely hiker who had made the same mistake as me and ended up his days trying to claw his way out of this malevolent bowl before finally dying of exhaustion, thirst, and a horrible slow starvation.
It, of course, turned out to be a sheep. When I kicked off enough sand, out came the skull with prominent curved horns and a menacing toothy grin. For a moment I was relieved. But then I realized that if a nimble-footed sheep couldn’t
escape from this place, what chance did I have?
That maudlin sense of hopelessness was eventually replaced by determination. No way was I going to let a few dunes—admittedly the largest dunes I’d ever seen outside the Sahara—do me in. I had things to accomplish and places to go. Most important, I had dinner to cook back at the cottage and I knew how disappointed Anne would be if I failed to turn up for cocktails at the allotted time on our lawn overlooking the sound.
So eventually I figured it out. As I watched how the wind would spiral into the bowl, whipping sand off the lee slopes and depositing it in great swirls on the opposite side, I realized that the lee must consist of harder, more compact sand. So that’s where I started to climb and, despite occasional slip-backs, I finally traversed my way up to the grass-tufted ridge and edged very cautiously onto something resembling a flattish plateau.
I always feel humbled and intimidated by the almost-tangible energy and mystery of wild places. But, believing that true discoveries and revelations only come through letting go of such emotions, I celebrated the sense that I was obviously safe now. All I had to do was find my way out through this dune labyrinth to the safety of the cemetery, which I knew from my map existed at the northern tip, and the narrow track that would eventually lead me back to Seilibost.