Getting to Grey Owl

by Kurt Caswell

  What else could I do but go a-walking? In the wake of my great friend, I took up my pack, provisioned just so with water and mint cake, and made a turn through town and out toward Lily Tarn. I followed trails I did not know, out beyond Ivy Crag and Loughrigg Fell, walking, walking, walking to shrug off my loneliness. I passed Rydal Cave and Rydal Water until I arrived at the Wordsworths’ fond old home, the house and beautiful gardens, the poet’s library and study, then through the trees and back around toward Ambleside, I wandered. Posting over those footpaths, the Lake District felt more alien to me than ever, more so even than the first day when Scott and I arrived. I hardly recognized myself or anything at all: no bird, no flower, no tree, no face looked to me familiar. Where were the birds I knew, the great falcons and hawks of my native land, the western meadowlark and mountain bluebird, the blue heron and sandhill crane? Where were the Douglas fir and rhododendron, vine and bigleaf maple, the wild blueberries, serviceberries, Oregon grape, and trillium? There were no beaver or black bear, no elk or mule deer or coyote. I was utterly lost and bereft, and the sun was falling in its arc. Like Bash, I wanted to sit down on my hat and weep to forget all time, but I steeled my constitution against it and pressed on. I wandered and wandered, lonely as a cloud through the fields and fells near Ambleside until, later, at the threshold of the dining room, a radiant Taiwanese approached me with her three friends. She said, in perfect British English, “Hello. I’m Xiaolin. Won’t you come out for a walk?”

  LES FEMMES BELLES AVEC MERCI

  Scotland, 2007

  If there is no end to Paris, there is no beginning to Edinburgh. Its ramparts reach out from the center at Edinburgh Castle as far as a man can walk in a day, as far as he can roam in a year, as far as light may course beyond the sun; you will not find a wall to separate it from the world. Edinburgh is a free and open country. Nothing can contain it—no badge or definition or family crest, no rule or government or martial law. It is a growing, folding, dividing thing, and the moment you try to pin it down, it becomes something else. Did not Werner Heisenberg develop his great principle while having a pint at a street café in Edinburgh? “Ah-ha!” he famously said, as he lifted the glass to his lips. “When I try to take the measure of Edinburgh it changes to become not Edinburgh. But that not Edinburgh is Edinburgh still. Therefore, I cannot know both Edinburgh and Edinburgh at the same time. This is why,” he reasoned, “when I measure the position of a photon of light, I cannot know its velocity. And when I measure its velocity, I cannot know its position. Beautiful. I will call this phenomenon, yes, the Edinburgh Principle.” He later swapped the city with his own name to give himself credit. Didn’t he? But no matter. Edinburgh is still and has always been Edinburgh, even as it is not Edinburgh, and light in all its velocity and positions will illuminate the stone walls of its castle forever.

  Now that I’ve got that bit of romantic exaggeration out of my system, let me tell a story about Edinburgh and an American witch who, like a black cat, happened across my path while I was traveling in Scotland with my old friend, Scott. On our way north to climb Ben Nevis, the highest mountain in Scotland, we thought it wise to stop off to see The City that so many people dither on about. I’m not much for cities. At least not in the way some women I’ve known claim to be from the city, of the city, and for the city, and that any wonderful city will do. Oh, you know, the shopping, the restaurants, the museums and galleries, the people watching. It’s all so wonderful to be in a city. Are you kidding, I protest. Cities are dirty and ugly and they smell bad. People pissing in alleyways and sleeping in doorways and eating from dumpsters. Cats and rats and pigeons eating each other and shitting on everything. Meanwhile, the people with money are locked away in little rooms on floors in high buildings afraid to go outside for the pollution and crime and high prices. What’s good about a city?

  Then as I stepped off the train in Edinburgh, the weather turned around. Edinburgh, I sighed. It’s not so bad.

  So there we were, my pal Scott and I, checking into the Edinburgh Backpackers Hostel, just a short hop from the train station, up the winding slope of Cockburn Street leading on to the Royal Mile. The cheaper prices are for larger rooms with more beds, and since this was an adventure, we took two beds in a room with eight. Who knew what we might find there, who we might meet. Aye, there’s the rub. So we shouldered our packs, the signature of the American traveler in Europe, and climbed the stairs looking for the door that fit our key.

  “Hello,” she said. “I’m Sabrina.”

  “Hello,” Scott said, reaching out his hand.

  “Nice to meet you,” I said, reaching out mine.

  She had taken the bottom bunk across from us and had most of the contents of her two bags spread out over every square inch of the mattress. Long, black hair, a little clumpy and stringy, a pleasant face, warm smile, a little plump, but a nice-looking girl all the same, and dressed in long black flowing robes, or maybe it was a dress, or maybe it was several massive silky shirts, one piled on top of the other—it was hard to tell. It was the kind of arrangement you find on larger women trying to hide what’s under it, so it seemed. She seemed a little fantastic, or just overtired, maybe a little at loose ends. And yet we both noticed something familiar about her too, something comforting, something downright homey.

  “Where are you from?” Scott asked.

  “Portland.”

  “What?” I said.

  “Oregon?” Scott said.

  “Yeah,” she said. “Oregon.”

  “We’re from Portland too,” Scott said.

  “Or at least we used to be,” I added.

  “That’s right,” Scott said. “Went to high school there.”

  “Whaddaya know,” she said. “Well, nice to meet you.”

  And after other pleasantries, she said, “So, you boys are just out on a little journey?”

  “Exactly,” Scott said. “How about you?”

  “Yep, same here. I’m married,” she offered, “and on this trip I’m traveling alone. My man is back in Portland. He’s a musician. Part of a band. And he’s always traveling with the band. We live very independently, but we’re close too. Of course.”

  “Of course,” Scott said, thinking of his own marriage.

  “But,” she said, and we all heard the drum roll in the background, “I have a license to cuddle.”

  A little space of silence forced its way into the room.

  “My husband has given me a license to cuddle,” she explained, as if a license to cuddle was an object she brought with her in her luggage, a little doll or a wooden box or a trinket of some kind. “The rules are, you know, no sex with other guys, or girls for that matter, but it’s OK to cuddle.”

  “It’s OK to cuddle,” Scott said, as if she had hypnotized him.

  “Right,” she said. “Nothing wrong with a little cuddling, so long as it doesn’t slip over the edge into sex. That’s what we’ve agreed.”

  “That’s great,” I said. “Sounds very clear between you.”

  “It is. And it’s so wonderful to be able to cuddle.”

  “And can he cuddle too?” I asked.

  “Of course he can,” she said. “Otherwise it wouldn’t be fair. But I don’t think he does, not much anyway. Me? I like to cuddle.”

  “You like to cuddle,” Scott said, and now I knew she had hypnotized him.

  “That’s right. I like to cuddle.”

  Our conversation turned to other subjects, none of them very interesting after this, until the urge to get out and walk around took over, and Scott suggested we all meet up later for a drink.

  “Great idea,” she said. “I bet we’ll see each other back here this afternoon or evening, and then we can go out and find a drink together. No problem. I’d like that.”

  “All right then,” I said. “See you around.”

  “But if we don’t meet up, boys, don’t worry about me.”

  “If we don’t meet up, we won’t worry about you,” Scott said.

&n
bsp; “All right,” I said. “Sounds good.”

  “See you around, boys.”

  Back in the world, the first order of business was to have a look at Edinburgh Castle. Not the inside—we’d make that tourist commitment in the morning—but the view of the castle from the outside, the featured image of the city. We followed Cockburn Street back the way we had come and out onto Waverly Bridge, spanning the train tracks. The castle rose up in front of us, the site where in just a few weeks the Royal Edinburgh Military Tattoo would kick off the fantastic Edinburgh Festival.

  Staring onto the strange and beautiful stone walls of the castle, visions of Braveheart flashed in my head, and Sabrina somehow appeared in there too, abracadabra. In my mind, she took on a most pleasing form. Her body and face and hair and lips morphed into my private vision of perfection: Uma Thurman as Venus rising from a bivalve in The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, or any number of gorgeous porn stars that none of us has ever seen. I heard her voice in my head, her tantalizing words wafting like a vapor in the air, like a smoke, like a cloud in the shape of a camel or a weasel, her hot, sweet breath in my ear: “I like to cuddle. I like to cuddle. I like to cuddle.” Well, I thought to myself, this isn’t so bad. In fact, maybe a license to cuddle is good. Maybe it’s for the best. Maybe a long, successful marriage is dependent on such nonthreatening freedoms like cuddling, so that neither party feels controlled or owned by the other. Maybe cuddling is a way to relieve sexual tension and whatever other kind of tension, to take a married woman or a married man to the brink of bliss without plunging over, so that the choice to remain monogamous is offered once again, willingly, not by force of law, and then accepted, a husband privately renewing his vows to his wife and a wife privately renewing her vows to her husband by cuddling with someone else. Or maybe Sabrina and her man were on the rocks, and this is how they were dealing with it.

  Not two years ago, I had met Thomas, a Cuddlemaster from Germany. He facilitated cuddle parties, wherein a group of people in their nightgowns gathered in a neutral space to cuddle. There were certain rules, of course, put forth by the originators, Reid Mihalko and Marcia Baczynski. They claim that cuddle parties are about “compassion, affection, and touch.” They claim it’s a movement, a movement that takes place in those more liberal European countries and stateside in places like California and Colorado, certainly not Texas. You can read all about it at their website: cuddleparty.com.

  “Well, look at that,” Scott said. “Jimmy Chung’s.”

  For just a few pounds, Jimmy Chung’s offered an all-you-can-eat Chinese buffet. If we planned our day right, we could catch the tail end of the lunch hour (when the price was at its lowest), stuff ourselves for an hour or so, and that was dinner. It allowed us more money for beer. We agreed to come back after we had walked around for a while.

  “You think that’s her real name?” I asked. “Sabrina?”

  “Nope,” Scott said. “I think she made it up. She’s a witch. That’s her witch name.”

  “Just what I was thinking.”

  “Yeah, she’s a witch,” he said. “For sure. Black hair. Black clothes. Black cat. Black magic. The whole thing.”

  “There are quite a few witches in Oregon,” I said. “Well, you remember that night out in the gorge.”

  “I certainly do,” Scott said.

  “Jesus,” I said. “That was nearly twenty years ago.”

  “No,” Scott said. “That was twenty years ago.”

  I meant that fall night back in high school on the eastern fringe of Portland when Scott and I joined forces with our pal Brad to buy a little beer from the local grocery. Since Brad worked at the neighborhood grocery, he went ahead and carried twelve 25-ounce cans of Foster’s Lager through the checkout stand. The checker, who knew Brad, of course, asked for his ID. Brad handed it over as a line formed behind him. The checker said, “Hmm. You must be about seventeen?” Brad nodded that this was true. “OK,” he said, and rang up the sale.

  Triumphant, we drove out the Columbia Gorge toward Crown Point in the wild abandon of our youth to find a secret location overlooking the great river to the Pacific to drink beer. Three underage dudes drinking imported beer on the rim of one of the greatest rivers in the world—it can’t get much better than that. We discovered a little dirt road off the highway that led into the darkness. We decided to park and walk it, down the side of the gorge and through the dark trees, which occluded all light. We walked and drank, drank and walked, until we came to a little clearing where the moonlight shone through.

  The TV news had been reporting for months, years really, that some weird shit was going on in our woods. Farmers had been waking up to missing cows, sheep, and goats, and sometimes they found pieces of them scattered in their fields. People were saying it was black magic, animal sacrifice, ceremonies to the underworld. Whatever.

  “Hmm,” Brad said. “What’s this?” We all felt something strange and squishy underfoot. “This might be a dead sheep,” I said. “No,” Scott said. “This is a dead sheep.” Then in the haze of that spooky light we spotted a platform in the trees, a wide table, an altar or something. “What’s that?” Brad said. “Yeah, what’s that?” I said. “That’s an altar or something,” Scott said. “You know. That’s where they killed this dead sheep we’re standing on.” And then we turned and ran like hell.

  “That was a good night,” Scott said, scanning Edinburgh, plotting our next move.

  “Yeah. A good night,” I said. “And we probably just met the chick who sacrificed that sheep.”

  “Naw,” Scott said. “You ever hear of an evil witch who likes to cuddle? She’s Sabrina, the good witch.”

  “Good point.”

  We traveled on, Scott and me, under the shield of our former youth, exploring the streets and shops and pubs of this gorgeous city.

  Tucked away in Lady Stair’s Close, we explored the Writers’ Museum, featuring Sir Walter Scott, Robert Burns, and Robert Louis Stevenson. There really wasn’t much to it: a few handwritten manuscripts, some musty books, a pair of spectacles. I was about to give up on it when I came across a few lines by Stevenson, a passage pulled from his travel writing:

  O toiling hands of mortals! O wearied feet, travelling ye know not whither! Soon, soon, it seems to you, you must come forth on some conspicuous hilltop, and but a little way further, against the setting sun, descry the spires of El Dorado. Little do ye know your own blessedness; for to travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive, and the true success is to labour.

  Those words were so gorgeous and stirring they returned me at once to my youth, to the wild energy of that dark night in the gorge, the exhilaration of running up the steep dirt road through the trees from the terror of black magic, an open can of Foster’s in my hand, my friends close beside me, and really doing it, taking it all in, straining at the edge of experience, our lungs burning and our legs growing woozy from going uphill as we reached the little brown Volkswagen Rabbit, the ship I commanded in those days, where it appeared suddenly out of the night, and we leapt in and drove back down the winding canyon road to the pizza shop where our classmates usually gathered, laughing hysterically all the way, to tell the story of our adventure.

  Stevenson’s travels determined his life, transformed the way he thought, transformed the way he wrote. In the essay that contains the passage above, “El Dorado,” he heralds a life of continuous unfolding. We live happily, he writes, on “an ascending scale,” with “one thing leading to another in an endless series.” And happily, we cannot know what that next thing is until it unfolds. We are blind to our futures. Will I reach my goal or not? Irrelevant, Stevenson asserts. It is not the attainment of the goal that makes us “spiritually rich” but having a goal to attain. What matters is not how we end but how we begin. In fact, says Stevenson, “we shall never reach the goal; it is even more than probable that there is no such place.” Thank goodness there is no such place, “no end . . . to making books or experiments, or to travel,” so that we may g
o on discovering and rediscovering all our lives. “Desire and curiosity are the two eyes through which [a man] sees the world in the most enchanted colours: it is they that make women beautiful or fossils interesting.”

  And so in the close rooms and passageways of the little museum, I claimed that same path for myself, because nothing feels better than knocking about the world in awe of the faithful, the changing, the fantastic.

  After that, we took our turn through the National Gallery of Scotland, a slow meander through the paintings. My growing love for all things pastoral alerted me to Shepherd Boys in the Roman Campagna by Martinus Rorbye (1835), The Sheepfold by Alexander Mann (1905), Pastoral by Sir James Guthrie (1885), and, finally, Wandering Shadows by Peter Graham (1878). The latter painting, oil on canvas, is a muscular landscape of the Scottish highlands, looking up a glen against the flowing water of a broad creek. The shoulders of two huge mountains, one bespeckled in sunlight where a sidestream flows into the main, the other, farther off, in the darkness, ringed by misty clouds that swirl and cradle it, an impending storm. The mountain faces are rocky and hard, and in the sunlight they appear a deep fold, like a gyrus in the brain. Below, among the quiet bones of the earth, are a few sheep, five all told. Two lie together, sheltered by a monolith, as another looks on. One grazes farther off. And the last, maybe a lamb, is lying with its front legs over the edge of a stone. You can see a figure approaching the creek where the waters tumble over a stone obstruction—the shepherd, of course. But then, perhaps the shepherd has gone home, leaving his sheep to the weather. The figure’s left arm is raised up, as if he is fishing—it’s a fisherman, perhaps, among the ewes. What will he catch in those waters? Perhaps he has fished here before, yet each time he dips a line, he cannot know what might happen.