by Raynor Winn
‘This is going to take all day and I just want to get there. Shall we hitch?’
‘Okay, why not.’ I put my thumb out in hopeful expectancy.
We climbed out of a camper van driven by a Swedish family, with three children, a dog and a clattering cowbell suspended from the roof, and stood at the foot of the mountain. The heat was already rising as we began the walk up through heather and jumbled rock. The heat became intense, turning the warm morning into a baking-hot afternoon of clambering over sharp steep sandstone. I’d had no idea how hard it would be to climb a mountain with a full rucksack on my back. I seemed to be dragging a boulder of weight with me, turning every step into a gym-style weightlifting exercise. It was as if there had been a shift in gravity and some unknown force was now bearing down on me, requiring a huge concentrated effort to overcome. I gritted my teeth and followed Moth’s heels as he bounded up the hill with a monstrous rucksack stuffed with a tent and big clanking billy cans. I couldn’t give in, couldn’t be that whingeing, whimpering girlfriend and ruin his longed-for trip. Finally, gasping and sweating in the hot air, I dropped the pack down on the ridge and tentatively touched my shoulders, red raw from the straps. The very first time I’d stood on the top of a mountain in Scotland, and it took my breath away. The wild remoteness of Assynt stretched beneath us and away to the sea and the Summer Isles. A vision like nothing I’d ever seen before, a green and blue shimmering heat-haze of glory.
‘You did really well. Didn’t know if you’d make it up there.’
I was pulsating with pride, glowing in his praise as I peeled my green T-shirt out of my puckered skin. But as my eyes moved away from the view to the west, there it was, in the south: the dark heart of Ben Mor Coigach.
‘There it is. I can’t wait to head up the valley towards it; I’ve been thinking about this for weeks.’
I looked at him, blond hair blowing in the wind of a mountain top, excitement filling his face with light. Where he belonged. But down there in the south was a trail of miles over peat bog and rock to a dark imposing jutting blade of mountain, hidden deep in the black wilderness. A tiny tinge of fear crept across the sun.
We caught a lift with a group of Spanish twenty-somethings to a campsite in Achiltibuie, miles away to the west. A night on a campsite before the planned two nights of wild camping on the trek to and from the ben. We pitched the tent and I rushed to the toilet block in hope of a cool shower to soak my raw, bleeding shoulders. There were no showers, but the Spanish girls were stripped and washing at the sinks. I was shocked. I’d lived my life under Mum’s Victorian values, where baring anything more than my arms in public was seen as just not nice. I desperately needed to wash, so took my T-shirt off and dabbed water on my shoulders, feeling oddly exposed in a wooden shed at the edge of the world.
‘What sort of boyfriend is he? Making you drag a weight like that about.’ The Spanish girls were crowding round looking at my dismal shoulders.
‘I wanted to come.’
‘Ha, really.’ They took the sponge off me and slowly and carefully bathed the raw skin, picking out the threads of green shirt.
‘It’s not my rucksack – I borrowed it. It doesn’t really fit me.’
‘Never borrow kit for the hills, it always causes pain.’ They smoothed the skin down with antiseptic cream. ‘Keep your shirt off; you need to let it see the air.’
With the damp T-shirt in my hand I walked back to the tent, through a strange new world of liberation. It was the first time I’d camped since a school trip to the Peak District, but to be zipped inside a tiny enclosed green space with Moth was no hardship. The next morning the Spanish van dropped us back on the side of the road. They disappeared, waving until they were out of sight, and silence fell. A dark green-grey silence. The stillness of the peat bogs in the heat of summer, after the nesting birds have fledged and gone, when the heat sits on the heather in an airless blanket.
The air didn’t move; rather we pushed through it as we began the long slow incline towards the foot of the mountain. The light had an intense reflective clarity, highlighting the rocky outcrops in strange 3D exaggeration, brightening the greens and blacks of the hillside, as if we were viewing a screen with the colour wrongly adjusted. I stopped repeatedly to readjust the spare T-shirts I’d folded over my shoulders to protect the damaged skin, and the morning wore into afternoon. The peat was dust dry, cracked and shaped into small ridges and valleys around every rock and heather outcrop. We filled our water bottles in a small trickle of stream in late afternoon and then, over a final crest of heather, it appeared. The dark, wild tsunami of rock and heather rising ahead of us, filling the sky in every direction: Ben Mor Coigach and the vast near vertical walls of the blade of rock, Sgurr an Fhidhleir. I couldn’t breathe. This was the mountain in my dream on the train.
‘Moth, I dreamt of this place; it was awful, the rain …’
‘But it’s not raining and the forecast’s good. Let’s get up to the lochan and put the tent up, come on.’
Lochan Tuath sat flat calm and black at the foot of the Fiddler, the oppressive slab of rock now towering into the sky. I turned my back to it and focused on peeling the T-shirt off and washing my shoulders in the ice-cold water of the small lake. We sat at the edge, grateful for a growing breeze that carried the midges away. I was in paradise; we were completely alone in this vast wilderness, no one to see, no one to judge, no need to hide or pretend. The light almost faded, leaving just enough moon to pick out the Fiddler, flanked by steep sides of tough grasses that seemed to slide towards the peat bogs below. A surreal noise drifted on the wind from the side of the mountain. At first it sounded like a faint wind through a broad wind chime, a hollow deep sound that came and went on the breeze. Then louder, a choir of voices in another language, somewhere far in the distance.
‘What is that?’
‘It’s the voice of the mountain. It’s calling.’
We were about to get in the tent, silhouetted in the moonlight on a raised dry patch of ground beneath the black wall of rock behind. We were almost in, we could so easily have missed them. A herd of red deer passing by, heading away downhill with a purpose, calling to each other with a deep, wild song all of their own. We watched them disappear over the brow into the valley below, then crawled into Moth’s tiny green tent, barely more than a one-man, with a single wooden pole to support the door end and hardly enough room for your head at the other. I was living a magical, unsurpassable moment of life. Tomorrow we would climb the ben and the Fiddler, suck in the spectacular wonder of the landscape, then back to the tent for another night before heading away. I drifted into sleep, lulled by the ripple of the flysheet in a gentle night wind.
I woke in complete blackness, unsure where I was, and fumbled around for my watch. Two a.m. I put my head back against Moth’s chest, warm, rising and falling rhythmically, and caught the sound of a distant rumble. Not his breathing, something outside, distant but growing louder by the second. Moth was awake now.
‘What the hell is that?’
Louder now, the noise had grown to the volume of a train, a pounding roar that grew and expanded and encompassed. Then it came. A pushing, pulsing wind that sucked the air from the tent, forcing the side in until we were wrapped in stretched cold green nylon that seemed to be scooping us from the hillside.
‘What the fuck?’ Moth was out of his sleeping bag, trying to hold up the wooden pole, but without enough room to sit upright he couldn’t grip it. ‘Get your clothes on, get your clothes on …’ He threw himself flat out in the tent, pressing his huge size twelve feet against the pole, his legs taking the full force of the wind. I panicked my way into clothes and boots, shoving what I could get my hands on into the rucksacks, trying to get clothes on to Moth while he braced the pole and held the wet suffocating tent from his face.
The pole snapped, split in two between his feet, and the tent became a swirling nylon bag, barely held down by our weight. Moth tried to lace his boots in the blackness of the vorte
x.
‘Feel for the plastic bag at the bottom of my pack.’
‘What? Why? Everything’s wet anyway.’
‘It’s a survival bag. We’ll get out of the tent and get into that.’
‘What? I’m not going out there …’
The zip of the tent doorway ripped apart and the wind was in: there was no choice. Peeling ourselves from the wetness we fell out into the dark night, and as the weight of the second rucksack left the nylon the tent cycloned into the air, ripping out the steel pegs, taking insulating mats and torches, spare clothes and bags of wet food in a wild missile that disappeared into the night. Moth desperately tried to unfold the bright orange survival bag without letting it go.
‘Get in, but throw the rucksack in first or I’m going to lose it.’
I slid into the bag, only opening my eyes in short snatches as the spears of rain cut blindingly into my eyelids. We were in, in a bundle of rucksacks and wet sleeping bags and running water, lying on an exposed mountainside miles from a road, even further from habitation. In a plastic bag.
We lay on our stomachs, holding a tiny gap of bag open as lightning ripped the sky apart and for split seconds the Fiddler appeared in huge, terrifying glory. A roaring, growling anger of wind pushed furiously at our orange capsule, but we were low in the heather and hard as it tried we didn’t move. The rain battered the plastic sheeting, spearing the back of our heads as water ran past our hands and into the bag through the tightly gripped opening. We couldn’t close it completely, couldn’t take our eyes away from the wild chaos, so kept a crack open, peering out, transfixed. Moments of blinding lightning lit sheets of water as they were lifted from the ground by the wind and thrown upward to meet the deluge from above in rolling balls of water that reflected the terrifying black monster of a mountain a thousand times, until we became the mountain. Wrapped in the howling black anger, we were engulfed by the unstoppable power of the storm and the sense of nature as one horrifying, beautiful whole. We gazed out between our hands, speechless. As fear began to subside we were overwhelmed by the swirling maelstrom of elements, until we felt as if we were part of it. Lost and dispersed in the unending cycle of water, earth and air.
A faint light began to creep through the water-filled world and we returned to being two people lying in a plastic bag half full of water, hands clasped together in defiance of the rapidly growing possibility of hypothermia. And yet still there was no sense of panic. Something had happened in the darkness. I felt the heat slipping from his hand, a hand I now knew as if it were my own. In the wild grip of nature we had formed a bond that didn’t need words, a bond as palpably real and completely untouchable as the song of the deer in the quiet stillness before the storm.
‘We’ve got to go. We could die if we lie here any longer.’
We struggled stiffly out into a wind so strong we could barely stand and had to kneel to roll the water out of the plastic bag and crush it into a rucksack. The world had changed. Not just between us, but around us too. Dry parched peat bogs had become a sea of water. Rivers, streams, waterfalls and heavy falling rain. The calm flat lake that had been clouded with gnats and midges the night before now had waves three feet high and our tiny mound had become an island.
‘We have to try to find a way down. Take our time and look out for rocks – we’ll be stuffed if we fall and injure ourselves.’
I followed him blindly, trusting without question that he would find a way through, barely able to see through the rain. Picking our way around boulders hidden in water, wading through torrents where there hadn’t been a drop the day before, lashed by rain, in a wind that gusted strongly enough to blow us over, I put my foot to the ground and it didn’t stop. My right foot disappeared and in a split second my left knee buckled and I was up to my thigh in a sinkhole, stopped only by my rucksack wedging me at ground level.
Moth hauled me out by the rucksack straps and we lay in the water, exhausted.
‘We’ll be lucky if we get out of this.’ This had been my dream on the train. In the growing light the mountain took on the strange shape of the form in my nightmare and a fatalistic acceptance began to lull me to sleep.
‘No, get up. We’re going to be fine – we’re nearly there.’
I staggered back to my feet and followed him down from the mountain, finally dipping below the cloud line as the road appeared ahead. But between us and that was the final hillside, no longer a dry dusty path over mountain grass and heather, but now a broad, unavoidable waterfall of rushing foam.
‘We can’t climb down through that – we won’t be able to keep our feet.’
‘No, you’re right.’ Moth took his rucksack off and with a strange smirking look back at me, clutched it to his chest and sat on the ground. ‘But we can slide.’
He was gone; in a gush of spray he was through the forty metres of water and standing at the bottom. I knew I had to follow, even though it was against every instinct to throw myself down a hillside, but I was shivering and beginning to feel a malevolent sleep tugging me into submission. I skimmed through the icy water and we crawled the final few feet up to the road. We were stamping on the tarmac trying to keep our circulation moving, rivers of water running from our clothes, when the postbus pulled to a stop beside us.
‘Need a lift?’
The café in Ullapool had just opened. In disbelief that we had survived we squelched in and sat on the plastic benches of an alcove and waited for a breakfast to appear. The warm stillness of the café seemed completely unreal; we stared at each other across the Formica table, unable to formulate words for what had happened as water ran from our packs in streams across the floor and a haze of steam rose between us. The waitress came and put the breakfasts down.
‘Where on earth have you two been? I’ll get a mop.’ The food sat in front of me and my focus narrowed to the sausage and beans and the thought of how they would feel in my mouth. I was desperately hungry, but the need for sleep overtook hunger and my face slid on to the plate, warm egg spreading up my cheek as I closed my eyes and gave in to exhaustion.
We returned to our separate homes, finding it intolerably hard to be apart. Something had changed. No longer just young people bound up in a passionate obsession, we had formed a bond that had a power neither of us really understood. We’d become one in the madness of that night in the plastic bag. Not just with each other, but with the uncontrollable elements that had nearly been our downfall. A wild unity had crept into our veins and our future was defined by it.
6. Burning
I’d begged Mum to explain exactly what it was that they hated so much about Moth, but it was like trying to catch a frog in a bucketful of tadpoles. Each answer almost formed the real reason, but none did so fully: ‘His hair’s too long’, ‘His jeans are ripped’, ‘He’s going to turn into a dirty smelly old man’, ‘He’s lazy’, ‘He doesn’t drive’ – ridiculous answers. But eventually something came close: ‘He’s not like us, he’s a townie.’ There it was, but not quite, a tadpole with legs but still hanging on to its tail.
I was angry, I felt betrayed, but however valid their argument seemed to them I stayed with him anyway. The moment he’d entered my life he’d filled it to the brim; there couldn’t be anyone else. It finally came to a head when we bought a cottage on the outskirts of the village, a tiny house with a long garden: my happiness was uncontainable.
‘Moving in without getting married, that’s disgusting; you’re an embarrassment.’
We worked on the house, drying out the damp, repairing the broken windows and putting in running water and a bathroom, but we didn’t move in. I couldn’t take the final step of defiance. I needed them to love what I loved; I needed them to understand. But there was no stopping it now: the volcano was always going to erupt. It came on a polite Sunday afternoon over a plate of salmon sandwiches and Victoria sponge cake.
‘I’m ashamed of you. You had so many opportunities to marry a farmer. What use is he to you anyway? He has no land. You’ll ne
ver be happy without land.’
There it was, croaking, wet, slimy, blinking into the light. A fully formed frog that could never hop back into the bucket of vague suggestion. I was too bound up in the moment to hear what they were really saying, and they didn’t have the words to express themselves. All I heard was, he wasn’t a farmer, so he wasn’t good enough.
We didn’t move into the cottage; instead we got on a train to the Isle of Skye. The registry office on the island was closed for renovations, but had temporarily set up in a spare room at the back of the builders’ merchant in Portree, the capital of the island. For some oddly superstitious reason we spent the night before our wedding in separate bed and breakfasts, meeting in the morning in the car park among the builders’ vans. We were a spectacle, an unexpected source of amusement for the people hanging out of the builders’ merchant’s window, laughing and clapping on a Monday morning. We shone out against the grey tarmac, Moth glowing in a bright cream suit he’d had made by a local tailor, and me in a white dress I’d bought in a Laura Ashley sale. Clothes smuggled north in our rucksacks, hidden from each other on the train. In the dark dusty room we held hands and said yes, absolutely we do, without fear, or doubt, or hesitation, behind a curtain made from hessian sacking that separated us from the shop, while a builder was buying ‘half a pound of lost-head nails’.
The next day we stood on the summit ridge of Bruach na Frìthe in the Black Cuillin. The first day of thousands of days. Clouds rose from the valley behind. Appearing from nowhere to pour over the ridge top in a river of running moisture, clinging to the rocky precipitous side of the hill and sweeping away to dissipate in the warmth below. Our lives stretched ahead, a running river of days as the sun shone overhead in a clear blue sky.
Then we returned to our tiny house, with no plaster on the walls or bed to sleep on, but overflowing with hope and enthusiasm.