by David Yeadon
If Morag is in charge, such critical issues will be dealt with efficiently (if not finally—nothing seems to be final here) and fairly. But if Morag is not around, as at one particular meeting Anne and I attended, things can become a little more unfocused, almost to the point of blindness—or certainly severe blandness.
It seemed a simple enough agenda according to the handwritten signs on the local shop windows: “How we should organize the arts—and the artists—on the island into a coordinated, new fund-supported program for progress and enhanced expression.” A straightforward, even inspiring initiative, one would have thought, particularly in the light of these new funds apparently being offered by external grant sources.
However, that was not to be the case, and we, as relatively impartial observers, only wished Morag had been with us.
Maybe someone had closed the doors to the small meeting room at the Harris Hotel a little too early on in the proceedings. Maybe the resultant fog and misty condensation on the large windows overlooking the harbor and the shaggy-grass hills across the road introduced a somnolent note into the presentations and discussions. Or maybe the free coffee and shortcake biscuits did not inject enough caffeine and sugar-laced energy and enthusiasm into the two-hour-long gathering.
Certainly, that flyer had been enticing, suggesting new strategies for stimulating the arts on the island. Well, Anne and I thought, there are certainly enough artists and craftspeople working in homes and studios all around Harris to warrant a lively evening’s debate on future possibilities and potentials.
But it soon became clear that the dozen or so artists and craftspeople who attended quickly became a little blurry-eyed and fuzzy-headed, as the charming young lady who had recently been appointed to spearhead these “new initiatives” here seemed determined to emphasize the intangibles rather than the pragmatics of her project.
She first tried to explain about the “cultural rights and entitlements” for artists: the need to “level the playing field” for artistic opportunities; the amalgamation of notoriously territorial arts councils and cultural institutions; the need for radical redefinition and “infrastructural enhancements”; and the challenging role the arts had to play on Harris in education, health, cultural development, and macro/microeconomics; and so forth. It all began to sound a bit like a university tutorial with an avid student trying to impress her peers with sweeping generalizations punctuated by key buzzwords of the month.
Eventually she realized that her hesitant delivery and academic phraseology were not exactly sparking the ardor and involvement of the participants who had gathered so expectantly in that little room, now distinctly overheated and moist with trapped air.
“Best o’ luck,” mumbled a young man, who I later learned had once played a similar kind of coordinator role to the newly appointed presenter. He told me that despite fine aspirations and intents, he had actually spent most of his time ensuring that funds were available to cover his own salary for the next fiscal year. “It really takes it out o’ ye,” he half whispered. “There was so much crap flyin’ around…no one seemed to know what I was doing…and no one wanted to know…”
Finally, there was an outburst of frustration: “C’mon now—let’s get down to nuts and bolts,” said Willie Fulton, one of our favorite island artists, and obviously in a puckish mood that night. “What exactly d’y’think you’ll be able to do to help us all?”
The young lady seemed a little disconcerted by such a direct line of questioning and turned to a second presenter from the “High Arts” element of the Scottish Executive at the national level (or something like that). “Well—maybe you could follow up on that, Robert…,” she said pleadingly, and then escaped to get herself a cup of urgently needed coffee.
Willie Fulton—Artist
And, bless him, Robert certainly tried. He had a pleasant, laid-back manner, but he still seemed to feel that a description of the “larger picture of opportunities” was essential “to establish a content and context for localized initiatives.” And so he told us that the arts included all the arts—music, drama, dance, visual arts, crafts, and so on; that meetings and “dialogues” would be set up at all levels to develop “integrative analyses and responses” and “route maps” that reflected a “redefined infrastructure” that in turn would “permeate in a most dynamic fashion down to the local and individual levels.”
We all soon realized that this was actually a meeting to discuss the mechanism for creating more meetings and reports and studies, while the local artists, craftspeople, and other embryonic cultural entities waited to see what could and would be done. If anything.
Willie was on his feet again, a little more dark-browed and impatient this time with all this limousine-liberal vacuousness: “So I ask again—what d’ye think are the local benefits—the real nuts and bolts that could help us out here? In Harris.”
Robert still didn’t get it. He launched on again with his clammy fog of rhetorical references to “coordinated funding” (not new funding, he emphasized—a bit of a letdown there—but primarily a more effective use of existing funds), his role as a “catalyst for change and cooperation,” the potentials for “far more integrated action here in Harris,” and the creation of workshops for policy formulation, blah-blah-blah…
“Och! Forget it! We’ll do it ourselves!” mumbled Willie. And that finally hit the right note with the small audience. They started to talk among themselves, leaving the two presenters to leaf furiously through papers and booklets and notes to see if they could find anything a little more tangible and pragmatic to suggest in a frantic effort to regain their stature as truly useful “catalysts.”
But it was too late. With mumbles about “buckets of hogwash,” “gushy gobbledegook,” and the “bland leading the bland,” the locals were off discussing their own priorities and concerns in a spirit of collegiate conspiracy, and the ideas poured out—subsidized local visits by theater, dance, operatic, and other national institutions; subsidies for creating more artists’ studios; help to promote artists’ works in the major cities and “getting the goods to market”; and the need for a local community arts cooperative center and gallery to display the remarkable range of on-island talent.
“Maybe that’s what we should build on all the land they’ve spent millions on filling down by the harbor for the Harris Tweed Center,” mumbled Willie again. He was certainly enjoying his own role as “catalyst.” Other ideas included the distribution of “art and craft trail maps” for visitors, indicating the location of island studios and workshops; funds to support evening classes in the arts for everyone; funds to create new annual local arts events; new types of employment in arts-related activities for the young to stem the tide of their out-migration; more use of Web sites and online gallery guides; the creation of interactive arts journals; and on and on.
In the end, life, energy, and ideas filled the tiny room. The doors were opened to remove the fog and condensation, discussions eased out into the hotel bar, and the island artists in their little groups were fast becoming a splendid example of do-it-yourself local initiatives and innovations.
Even the two presenters looked pleased—and relieved. They climbed off their high horses of hyperbole and joined in the fray of discussion and debate. I heard Robert at one point waxing eloquent about the island being “one of the richest cultural hot spots in Britain,” and Willie responding with an uncharacteristically enthusiastic “Aye, y’damn right there—we jus’ need to use it more!” Nods of agreement all around.
Well, Anne and I thought as we left the hotel in a rather bubbly mood, it’s definitely a start. So many plans and projects for Harris and the other outer islands have vanished into the great maw of bureaucratic territorialism, half-baked concepts, outrageously inept implementations, and even occasional gaudy scandals of greed, graft, and corruption. But this time, if the artists themselves keep priming the fires of initiative and action, who knows—things might actually begin to change…
But we couldn’t f
orget the skeptical words of the ex–arts director: “Best o’ luck!”
A COUPLE OF NIGHTS LATER I was discussing this meeting with two old fishermen in the Clisham Keel. They shook their heads and chuckled and said they’d heard so much about these kinds of “improvements” over the years that they couldn’t be bothered to listen anymore. A third man overheard our conversation and muttered something in Gaelic. The two fishermen laughed and one told me, “Och—it’s an old proverb: ‘Cha thainig gaoth riamh nach robh an seol feareigin’—‘Whatever wind is blowing will fill someone’s sail.’”
22
Seals, Silkies, Shape-Shifters, and Other Mysteries
OUR FLIRTATION WITH ISLAND FOLKLORE and other strangenesses was revived at the tail end of another rather limp ceilidh at the Clisham Keel. Apparently we’d missed one of the star attractions of the evening, a young man once connected with the famous New Age folk-rock group Runrig. After he left, the solo accordionist in the corner of the room dabbled with a reel or two, but without the crisp clip of a snare drum, a prancing fiddle, and a set of pipes, his rendition was irregularly rhythmed and lacked the normal toe-tapping bounce and briskness.
Then a young girl with a plain, rather sad face, long brown hair unstyled and badly cut, and a distinctly hunched way of moving stood up and mooched over to the microphone. No one seemed to pay much attention. The accordionist started packing up his instrument and we assumed it was all pretty much over. Until she began to sing. A cappella.
Her voice was electric. Galvanizing. Even the beer swillers at the bar quieted and turned to listen. The room was silent in seconds as her song flowed out among the surprised onlookers. Anne nudged me. We both recognized the words and the tune immediately. In an instant I was back to my late teenage years when I’d fancied myself as something of a folk singer–guitarist, until I realized that it was actually my sister, Lynne, that pub audiences in Yorkshire came to see and hear. And one of the songs they requested, more than any other, was a strange, magically melancholy series of minor-chord verses. Lynne would explain to the audience that it was an ancient Gaelic ballad describing the strange transformation of a seal (silkie) into a man who falls in love with a beautiful island girl who bears his child. Eventually the man returns to his seal life, singing his strange lament:
I am a man upon the land
I am a silkie in the sea
And when I’m far from land
My home it is in Sule Skerrie.
Later he returns briefly to be with his earthbound love and tells her that eventually their son will join him in his aquatic home. And here’s the stanza that’s guaranteed to silence sensitive audiences—as he predicts:
And thou shalt marry a proud gunner
And a fine proud gunner he shall be
But the very first shot that e’er he shoots
Will shoot both my young son and me.
If it’s done right, this odd little fragment of a folk ditty will water the eyes of the most ardent resister of sentimental songs. As this young girl did that night. There were definitely tears in beers around the bar and the scattered tables. And what was as transforming as the song itself was the beguiling way that that hunched, plain-faced, skinny shard of womanhood stood straighter and taller as her song progressed, threw back her head, and let her voice—pure tonal silver—flow out into that silent room and mesmerize everyone in it.
And, as seems to happen so often in our lives, synchronicity slipped in a few days after our evening at the Keel when we met a man who not only knew about silkies and the like, but had spent years researching the strange legends surrounding these shape-shifting sealmen. He’d even written a book on the subject: Seal-Folk and Ocean Paddlers.
His name was John MacAulay, famous as one of the last island boat builders and the man who had custom-built Adam Nicolson’s boat, The Freyja, in 1999. Adam’s intention was to use the craft primarily for journeys across the treacherous waters of The Minch to the Shiants—his cluster of high, seabird-encrusted islets rising dramatically from the ocean about eighteen miles due east of Tarbert. They were first purchased by Adam’s father, Nigel, in the 1940s and had passed down to Adam himself and recently to his own son. The outcome of all these sea crossings in John’s sturdy creation emerged finally in Adam’s finely crafted masterwork, Sea Room, a book much respected by islanders for its scope, accuracy, and enticing “sense of place.”
“I learned an awful lot from that book,” Roddy MacAskill had told me. “M’family’s been on Harris for generations…so I should have known much more than I did. Adam’s book opened a lot of eyes and hearts here. It made you realize just how rich everything is on our islands.”
That was a lesson I also learned prior to our meeting with John when we were trying to understand more about Harris folklore. I mean, I’d heard brief references to silkies, kelpies, glaistigs, gigelorums, sidheans, and mercurial “wee folk,” but the Hearaich are a canny Calvinistic lot, reluctant to admit any real knowledge of such “sillinesses.” Even discussions of “wise women” and those with “second sight” tend to be cursory and dismissive, although there are many tales floating about of individuals with strange powers and seers with prophetic insights.
Some of the legends stretch credulity to the snapping point, especially stories of Loch Lann’s Flath Innis (Rich Pastures of Lost Heroes), the Celtic paradise of Tir-nan-og, or Atlantis-like lands sunken beneath the ocean waves. There’s even one tale that tells of people “from under the waves” emerging to teach the Hearaich how to dye and weave their world-famous tweed and to sing the weaving songs that reflected the pattern thread sequences of the warp and weft:
Ten of blue to two of red
That’s the way to lay the thread
Ten of green to two of white
Thus we have the pattern right
Another bizarre folktale claims that Noah’s Ark came to rest in the hills of North Harris as the Great Flood receded, leaving “a goodly supply of small birds and animals” before being refloated and sailing on to Mount Ararat in Turkey. The fact that an ancient carved stone on Canna contains a depiction of something closely resembling a camel is considered evidence that species far more exotic than small birds may also have been left behind here!
After such hyperbole, it’s almost a relief to listen to lesser tales of the pernicious fridach—“small, minute, miserable creatures, full of spite, venom, and hostility” that brought disease and distress to the crofters—along with the gigelorum, equally evil, and “an animal so small that it makes its nest in a mite’s ear.” There were wormy creatures too—fiollan—that could cause great pain and swelling. They became useful threats to lazy children who were warned that “idle worms” would plague their fingers if not occupied in useful labor. Fuath, or evil spirits that popped up in a number of guises, were also a particular threat to poachers, particularly fishermen. Poltergeists too were a real nuisance around the croft, uprooting fence poles, pushing over cruach peat piles, and stealing hens’ eggs.
Ghosts, as might be expected, came in various forms and contexts. There were your everyday wraiths floating around cemeteries, abandoned crofts, and the dark corners of black houses. But others were involved in more complex things like “teleportations”—a spiriting away and return (sometimes) of the living on long, mysterious journeys known as falbh air an t-Sluagh. There were also tales of phantom sailing ships, and even on occasion kind spirits and creatures that helped sailors in perilous seas find safe harbors. Wizards, or fiosache, were also said to use ghosts and other supernatural creatures in their spells. Seers, however, did not. They relied primarily on “second sight” and other prophetic abilities to warn of coming events and catastrophes.
And then, of course, come all the odd superstitions, such as sailors welcoming the sight of teal ducks or swans flying over their boats as a blessing and guarantee of good fortune on the voyage. However, the presence of a raven or a cormorant nearby was always considered an ill omen:
When she sailed out to
the deep
Never a teal-duck greeted her
But a raven on her track
Oh, pity those at sea tonight!
The snipe was also considered an eerie bird, particularly at night, and even the mention of its name was thought to engender misfortune. The same went for the cuckoo. So numerous synonyms had to be invented to avoid saying their dread names.
Windows on the west side of houses (actually, many houses tend to avoid windows on that side to reduce the impact of furious Atlantic storms and gales) should always be closed at dusk to deter those ghostly Sluagh teleportations.
One of the most interesting superstitions is related to salt, once an extremely valuable commodity despite the abundance of seawater everywhere. It was the expensive option and preferred to the ash of kelp, the traditional ingredient for meat preservation. Stealing someone’s salt was tantamount to stealing a wife and equally fraught with terrible consequences. However, because salt was considered “blessed,” giving some to a neighbor was “most meritous” so long as its repayment was never expected or accepted (“The eye shall not follow it”).
And thus Anne and I did our homework, piecing together the complex jigsaw of island superstitions and supernaturals, prior to our meeting with John MacAulay. Which finally came one “mizzley” late afternoon as we wriggled our way along the narrow Bays road, always wary of reckless sheep or cocky drivers assuming the road was all theirs, and down into the rocky hollow of Flodabay.
The Bays landscape was at its lunar best—or worst, depending on your climatic preferences. Under sodden gray skies, ponderously thick and spitting irritating drizzle that required a constant, slow sweep of windshield wipers, the broken rocks reared up like primordial life-forms emerging from the boggy soup of creation. Their ragged profiles and lumpen tumbles were glossed with rain. Black lochans lay still and peat-black between the mires of marsh grass and mounded tussocks.