Strange Days: Fabulous Journeys With Gardner Dozois

by Gardner R. Dozois

  Back at the dock, the harbor-cruise ship has arrived, and we file on board. Swans have formed a queue in the water alongside the ship, and are begging the tourists for food, and I regret not bringing the largely-uneaten remnants of my “battery” back for them; perhaps, as Scottish birds, they would appreciate it more than I did. One little girl is teasing a swan by pretending to be about to feed it a potato chip (sorry, crisp!), getting it to arch its neck up excitedly, and then snatching the chip away from it at the last moment—after a few minutes of this, the swan gives up and swims away in disgust. The drizzle has largely stopped by the time we set out, which makes the trip more pleasant, but I don’t expect that we’re going to see much except for the scenery of the Firth itself (a not-inconsiderable attraction in its own right, of course), and that turns out to be true (I become suspicious when they offer us the tour tickets at a considerable discount; whenever they offer something to tourists during tourist season for less money than it says they’re going to charge you for it, something’s wrong—in this case, I suspect, they know that we’re too late in the year to really have a good chance of seeing a lot of wildlife). During our hour-long cruise, we see exactly one—count ‘em, one—dolphin, which we dutifully watch for the minute or so that it’s visible above the surface of the water. Still, it’s a pleasant cruise on Moray Firth, enjoyable for its own sake, just for the pleasure of being out on the water in the open air in a small boat. By the time we get back to Inverness, the skies have cleared, and the sun is out.

  Drive down the A82 to Drumnadrochit, along the shores of Loch Ness. It’s a bright day by now, the narrow waters of Loch Ness sparkling with sunlight and whitecaps, and I’m amused to see that the road alongside the loch is lined with people hopefully watching the loch with binoculars, waiting for the Monster to show up. I do exactly the same thing for a few minutes (without success, alas!), then we continue to Drumnadrochit—which consists mostly of a couple of hotels and gift shops and The Official Loch Ness Monster Center, which has a big plaster statue of Nessie outside—and on out the other side of town to Polmaily House, our next inn. This turns out to be a nicely rambling old wooden house, not as pretty or imposing as Fallowfields; the room is nice, although a bit smaller and not quite as elegant as our room at Fallowfields; the bathroom is considerably larger and more conveniently arranged than at Fallowfields, though, where we had a toilet and shower set in one tiny closet-sized cubicle and the sink all the way on the other side of the room, tucked away in a cabinet. And the grounds are about as extensive, or perhaps even more extensive, with tables set out under a nice expanse of tree-shaded lawn that leads over to the swimming pool, and grazing horses visible in the field below, before the ground climbs up to the hill on the other side of the road.

  We drop our luggage in our room (which is hot, so we open all the windows . . . which turns out to be a fateful decision) and drive back through Drumnadrochit to the ruins of Urquhart Castle on the shores of Loch Ness, the castle they always show in movies that have a Loch Ness locale. We’re both so tired by this point that we end up driving on the wrong side of the road for more than a mile before either of us notices! Fortunately, the road that leads to the inn is not a heavily trafficked road, so we manage to get away with it. Perhaps we’re a bit too tired to really enjoy the castle, either, probably we should have just stayed at the inn, but we buy our tickets and dutifully trudge down the hill to tour it, with only a few groans about how steep the hill is going to be coming back up. There’s not really a lot of Urquhart Castle left to tour, actually, it being mostly ruined, but the views out over the loch are splendid, especially with the broken castle walls in the foreground, and there’s a kilted piper playing continuously near the gate, for atmosphere (they have a tip jar set up for him, so, on the way out, we literally pay the piper). Looking out over Loch Ness, it’s easy to see how the Monster legends got started—there are lots of odd currents running through the loch, producing lines of ripples that could easily look like serpentine humps in a row from a distance. In fact, the problem is not in seeing the Monster, but that at any given moment you can see six or seven of them—every movement of the currents, every wake, every boat moving far enough away in the distance to have dwindled to a black dot, every wind-generated pattern of ripples: all of them could be a Monster, and most of these phenomena would look no less convincing than the classic Monster photos if you took a picture of them. Actually seeing Loch Ness, though, makes it even plainer how absurd the idea is that there’s a herd of plesiosaurs swimming around in it—the loch may be very deep, true, but it’s also extremely narrow. If there were plesiosaurs swimming around in it, people would be seeing them all the time, not just every once in a rare while.

  Drive back to the inn, take a swim in the pool (which is much less eccentric than the one at Fallowfields, with the deep end where it usually is), take a nap, and then have dinner; roast duck, one of the best meals of the entire trip. Back to the room, and try to sleep . . . but the midges are pestering us, so that the choice becomes leave the covers pulled up to your chin and swelter, or throw them off and be annoyed by midges. Eventually, it either gets cold enough for them to stop flying around, or I get tired enough not to care, because I fall asleep.

  Sunday, August 20th—Cowdor Castle, Glen Cannich

  Get a late start, leaving about 10:30 A.M. driving back to Inverness on the A82, and then drive east toward Nairn on the A96, past fields full of round bales of hay like circular yellow cows. Turn off on a smaller road to visit Cawdor Castle, the home of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, the Thane of Cawdor.

  Tour the castle, which is not all that spectacular as a castle, but which is interestingly furnished and decorated, and has a nice lived-in feel—not surprising, since the family apparently does still live here part of the year, from November to May. In spite of the antique furniture and the richness of the tapestries and the decorations, the place manages to look comfortable somehow, as though it would be pleasant to live there, and I find myself able to imagine actually living there and enjoying doing so, unlike most of these lordly piles of stone, which tend to look cold and unfriendly and uncomfortable, and which usually seem as though they would not be particularly welcoming to live in. Lord Cawdor’s posted descriptions of each room are pleasantly amusing in a dry, ironic way, and contain the phrase “And now for something completely different”—the Lord is a Monty Python fan! Have lunch at the castle (I am amused by the “wholewheat hoagie” they offer—which looks awful; I have scones, but, while I eat them, muse about how far the term “hoagie” has spread from its Philadelphia/New Jersey origins . . . it seems to be slowly winning over “submarine sandwich,” which was what we called hoagies back in New England when I was a boy, and also over other variants such as “torpedo”), then check out the castle gardens, which are the healthiest-looking we’ve seen in Britain so far (I suspect that the drought has not been as severe or as prolonged in Scotland), then visit the castle woolens shop, the castle book shop (where we notice that no copies of Shakespeare’s Macbeth are on sale), and the immense castle gift shop, where I buy the bloody history of the Clan Gunn as a gift for Eileen Gunn. (Later, I look into Macbeth again and am surprised to see that the play contains no mention at all of the castle gift shop; you’d think, being such an extensive and important part of the castle, that it would certainly have been used for the setting of at least a scene or two, wouldn’t you?)

  Drive back to Inverness, then take the A862 back west to its junction with the A831 just south of Beauly. Follow the A831 south through Glen Cannich, a narrow, tree-choked valley following the course of the Beauly River, and one that seems just barely wide enough for the river it contains, with a wee bit of space left on the side for the road, which is not much wider than the car. Had originally intended to drive on through Glen Affric, but get tired and turn off at the road that leads back to the inn.

  Back at Polmaily House, we go for a swim, sharing the pool with a group of splashing and shouting German children who keep thr
owing things at each other (swim fins, diving masks, plastic swords) and exploding shrill language-bombs full of harsh-sounding gutturals as they chase each other from the deep end to the shallow end and back again, but we manage to ignore all this primate territoriality practice and blob lazily around the pool anyway for a half-hour or so.

  Later, go upstairs and change, come down and have a drink at a table just outside the bar, and then go sit at the round plastic tables on the lawn, under the trees. Visited by Honey, the big yellow inn dog, who sniffs at us for a moment, but who really isn’t very interested in us, and soon wanders away. This seems typical of Polmaily House, where the host is polite but rather remote and chilly—we spend less time interacting with the host here than we do almost anywhere else, and only get one glimpse of the hostess; mostly, they keep themselves to themselves, spending much of the day sitting around a plastic table of their own way across the lawn, and keeping interaction with the customers to a minimum. It is tempting to attribute this to “typical Highland reserve,” except that, it turns out, the host and his family are from England! There are lots of children—of several different nationalities—here, far more than at anyplace else we’ve stayed so far this trip, and it’s clear that, unlike, say, Fallowfields or Trebrea Lodge, this inn gets lots of its business by deliberately catering to the family trade. You can see why families with lots of children would find it attractive, too: people can bring their kids here and find lots of things to keep them entertained: the pool, the hutch/petting zoo full of fat rabbits and the occasional guinea pig, the playground area, an indoor “playroom,” the “nature walk” trail up the hill, all the plastic toys scattered over the lawn, the availability of horseback-riding, and so on. While we sit out under the trees in the gathering dusk, we see two hawks hunting overhead, one patrolling low, to flush prey out of cover, while the second one patrols high, to swoop down on them when they move (a similar pattern was used by fighter pilots in World War II). Until the hawks appear, the lawn has been full of small birds, mostly sparrows, hopping and squawking and squabbling, but as soon as the hawks swim into the sky above, they all flee to the bushes and the eaves of the outbuildings and hide, shrilly complaining about having to do so. They continue to gripe about it from the bushes for some time, but they don’t come back out, even after the hawks have left.

  Dinner is (for me, anyway) venison in a berry sauce—quite good, although not as good as the previous night’s roast duck, which may have been my favorite meal of the trip, or close to it; at least the food here is good, even if the host is somewhat distant.

  To bed, again having to cope with the midges. Dream of being in a building which is rapidly filling up with bugs, billions of them, from the bottom up, so that we have to keep running upstairs, and then up another level, and then up another, to get away from them.

  Monday, August 21”—Drumnadrochit, Eilean Donan Castle, Kyle of Lochalsh & Viewfield House, Portree

  Wake up covered with itchy bug bites, which may explain the dream. Susan is covered with bites from head to toe; they’ve even bitten her on her scalp. Most of my bites are concentrated on my arms, but it’s unusual that bugs will bother to bite me at all (Susan is the mosquito magnet—usually they’ll swarm right past me to get at her, ignoring me altogether), so these must have been particularly hungry little devils. We later learn that “the secret” to leaving your windows open (which you pretty much have to do, in this heat) without getting bitten to pieces by the midges is not to open your windows until after you’ve turned out all the lights in the room—although, as our informants admit, even this doesn’t mean that you won’t get bitten: just that you’ll get bitten less often than you will if you turn the lights on while the windows are open. (I grumpily wonder why, in a country where it is customary to leave the windows open all summer—because of the lack of air-conditioning—and where they have swarms of midges and other biting bugs, nobody has yet thought of inventing or importing such a simple technology as a window-screen. But we don’t see a single window-screen in all of Britain, even though, as the dozens of joke postcards about midges testify, we can hardly be the first people to have had a problem with them, and they bedevil the natives too, by the natives’ own testimony. Both the English and the Scots seem to feel that there’s something effete, unmanly, about window-screens, just as they disdain air-conditioning, and you get the feeling that they consider it a testimony to their hardiness that they can walk around covered with itchy festering midge bites all summer and survive it uncomplainingly—we hear an anecdote later about an English woman who insists on continuing with a lawn party as scheduled in spite of a torrential downpour and swarms of midges, standing at her barbecue grill in the pouring rain—as her American guests run for cover—and announcing with proud disdain, “You’ve got to be tough to be British.” Still don’t think it would unman them all that much to put in a couple of window-screens, though.)

  Check out, scratching, and drive into Drumnadrochit, where we stop at the Monster Center, taking pictures of each other posing next to the plaster Nessie, and spend lots of money at the Monster Gift Shop (where you can buy just about anything with Nessie on it, from ties to coffeemugs to underwear) and the nearby craft shop, buying, among other things, a leather Celtic pocketbook for Susan. Drive south on the A82, and then slowly west and a bit north on the A887 and the A87, stopping three times along the way to look at the marvelous mountain scenery, once along the A82, overlooking a rushing forest stream and a little waterfall, once behind the dam near Loch Moriston, looking out over the bleak pale shore of the loch, and once in a high mountain pass overlooked by the Five Sisters, somewhere east of Sheil Bridge. The mountains are especially bleak and rocky here—there’s not even heather on the sides of the Five Sisters, just bracken, so that the hills are the nappy green of a pool table, with the bones of the hill breaking through in knobs of granite where the felt is stretched too tight. Frowning dark-grey clouds rush by overhead, and you can feel the wetness in the wind, although it never does quite rain. So bleak that the bleakness itself is beautiful. This stretch of road, from where we turn away west from Loch Ness all the way to the Kyle of Lochalsh, is one of the most imposing and scenically splendid parts of the whole trip.

  Coming down from the high mountain pass, we stop to tour Eilean Donan Castle, a strikingly beautiful castle on an islet in Loch Duitch, just east of Dornie. The castle, which is connected to the mainland only by a narrow causeway, and which is so picturesque that it’s pictured on the cover of a good number of Scottish guide-books and travel brochures, is such a dramatically perfect symbol of the Wild Romance and Savage Beauty of the Old Highlands that it comes as something of a disappointment to find that the castle was actually built in 1937. (Although, to be fair, they made an attempt to follow old pictures and drawings in the reconstruction of the castle, which had been destroyed in its original form hundreds of years before.) After touring the castle, have lunch in the bar at the Loch Duitch Hotel. While we’re sitting in the bar, Susan drinking Diet Coke®, The Rockford Files comes on on the bar TV. Diet Coke® and The Rockford Files—gee, all the comforts of home in a tiny village in a remote part of Scotland. Next will come the Loch Duitch McDonalds, no doubt, perhaps set on another islet, next to the castle.

  Pressed on to the Kyle of Lochalsh, from which a dramatic view of the Isle of Skye is visible across a surprisingly narrow tongue of water (which is why they’re building the bridge connecting Skye and the mainland here, I suppose, although it’s not quite finished yet—the Skye natives are already up in arms about it, fearing that the bridge will make it enough easier for tourists to get across to Skye that their cultural identity will be washed away by ever-increasing hordes of outlanders; they may have a point). From here, Skye looks like it consists of nothing but big, saw-toothed peaks, packed-in shoulder-to-shoulder, so that it seems they’re almost touching each other; no wonder the phrase “a tight little island” has been used to describe Skye. We board the car ferry to Skye, and, before we even qui
te realize that we’re moving, we’re there—can hardly take more than five minutes, if that, one of the shortest ferry rides I’ve ever taken.

  On Skye, we drive up the A850 to Portree, with the weather becoming more misty and clouding over more the further north and the higher up in elevation we go, until, at last, we drive through a brief rain-squall. By the time we are on the road that climbs up from Sconser, the rain has stopped, and there is a beautifully clear rainbow stretching from the mountainside down to the sea below, the colors seeming to be etched into the sky in raised, vibrant bands. The weather continues to worsen as we climb higher into the hills, though, until by the time we get to Portree, it is raining, our first sustained rain of the trip—a fine rain at first, growing slowly heavier and more soaking throughout the afternoon and into the evening.

  We reach the Viewfield House in Portree, at about 4:20 that afternoon, driving up a long, steep driveway to the inn, rabbits dashing suicidally across the road in front of us, as though suddenly seized with some mad rodent ennui; there are chickens strutting around in front of the house, and they also pay no attention to the car, so that we have to drive slowly and gingerly to avoid running them over. Park in front of the house, drag Susan’s bag inside and up a steep winding staircase; decide I’m not up to dragging my own even heavier bag up the stairs, and leave it in the trunk after fishing out some toilet articles and a change of clothes. The Viewfield House turns out to be an imposing old wooden building, both more eccentric and more distinguished-looking than Polmaily House, very eccentrically decorated in Late Victorian Gormenghast . . . or perhaps it is Late Victorian Charles Addams or Gahan Wilson. Everything looks like an Edward Gorey drawing. There are skulls and skeletons and dead stuffed animals of one sort or another in dusty glass cases wherever you look, and the wall in the entrance hall is decorated with stuffed tiger heads and water-buffalo skulls. Skulls, in fact, seem to be a motif here—skulls are everywhere, most of them with huge curling horns. This is the most stereotypical “English” PBS Mystery/Masterpiece Theater overstuffed-chairs-in-the library-sherry-in-the-drawing-room-elephant’s-foot-umbrella-stand-in-the-hall-looking place we’ve seen yet—so, of course, it’s in Scotland.