It will very readily occur that this uniformity of barrenness can afford very little amusement to the traveller, that it is easy to sit at home and conceive rocks and heath and waterfalls; and that these journeys are useless labours which neither impregnate the imagination, nor enlarge the understanding.
Johnson, a Scot will point out, was not only English, but also a city fellow hardly attuned to comprehend the massive and rugged terrain of the old northern kingdom. Still, to walk to a far edge of one of the sea-cuffed and rocky Shetland hills is to sense and to witness living things losing heart and dwindling down ever more steadily until life ceases altogether and yields to the inert: scrub trees, rarely the height of a tall horse, giving way to shrubs yielding to ferns, they to mosses, and those to black peat, the decomposition of what they once were, and it surrendering to broken rock without moisture or warmth except what weather gives it.
London is almost three times farther away than Bergen, Norway, and even Iceland is closer than the British throne that has somewhat uneasily ruled the islands for only a few centuries. In spite of years of royal direction and two fast decades of international influence that arrived with the North Sea oil-platforms, the Shetlands are still islets where natives cherish more the ancient Norwegian lines of a seagoing yoal hauled up on a shingled beach than a framed visage of the Queen Mother. Their sentences fill with Viking place-names and Old Norse words like voe, rost, gloup, and haaf—a sea inlet, a dangerous tidal stream, a wave-cut grotto, the ocean itself—and with names of seabirds: bonxies, liri, and skorys, which a mainland Scot will call skuas, shearwaters, and young gulls.
To celebrate the promise of a new year and the approaching end of winters that are not so snowbound as gale-ridden, the residents sing and roll through the streets of the largest town, Lerwick, during the ancient Norse-inspired Up-Helly-Aa celebration culminating with a torching of a replica Viking longship. A visitor wanting to make friends in a hotel bar will do well to comment on the fine Norwegian lilt in a native’s speech, remembering never to take him for being merely Scottish. Ask not whether he descends from Robert the Bruce but rather from Sigurd the Stout. Those people were not plaid to the heart-blood as they were in, say, Inverness or Aberdeen; nor did their eyes fog up at the distant drone of bagpipes; although Shetlanders may live under the blue flag with the white cross of St. Andrew, it was tales of St. Magnus or Leif Eriksson that animate them. While a new economic order of big petroleum came in and remade their isles as fundamentally as the Vikings recast life for the endemic Iron Age people, a local fervor for things Norse increased and created a vigor of nostalgia that helped carry the islanders past the disruptions and dislocations of a long era ending.
I don’t believe many of the Shelties—as they sometimes call themselves, after the intelligent and hardworking sheepdogs of these islands—consider that they live at the end of either a realm or an era, but it’s difficult not to see it: brand-new shopping centers, supermarkets, two-lane highways, five-storey hotels, Indian and Chinese restaurants, and many faces with pigmentation whispering subtly if frankly that their ancestors never set foot in a Viking longship.
There was something else in a place redolent of the end of a thousand-year-long way of life which only haltingly turned medieval before slowly approaching our time: All across the sheep-eaten and wind-sundered slopes were dark and derelict crofters’ cottages collapsing everywhere, stone ruins as abundant as boulders on the shore, and under each fallen, thatched roof and behind every broken chimney was the morose memory of what had gone by.
Yet those cots, clearly descended from Viking longhouses, permitted little nostalgia because they were cramped, dim, dank, and so primitive that the inhabitants—many of whom were still around to recite the story—shared the interior with their pissing, defecating farm animals. In exchange for fresh air, the people got strong vapors tinged with ammonia thought to create immunity to tuberculosis. With newer, less odiferous means of controlling TB, people abandoned the cottages for gray stucco dwellings that would look better in some derelict Levittown than against the sea hills of those handsome islands. Mainland Scottish visitors who remembered the Shetlands from just a quarter-century ago delighted in the new highways while they lamented the loss of a quaint beauty that the cottages—perhaps because they were of native stone and sat low on the slopes and thereby blended with the terrain—gave to the landscape. The only aspect remaining from the old crofts was the willy-nilly way they fell across the slopes here and there, unlike the new, two-storey suburban replacements which were mere sprawl. If there was inspiration in the harmonious lines of a longship or a yoal for a people wanting to rescue and reestablish a distinctive history before big oil mutated their heritage into something they could scarcely link with or pass on to a child, then the quiet and fitting way the ancient cottages, even yet according with the land, may serve to inspire the islanders.
Nevertheless, the old dwellings moldered earthward, while their owners went off to dig in public records for genealogical evidence to prove up their belief in Viking forebears was more than a wish, a longing that thinned with each generation like the terrain itself wasting down from scraggly trees to barren rock, a once vibrant urge coming to termination up there close to the end of the world.
III.
As my tour of the far Scottish Islands neared its end, and I’d gone on westward to a remote sea loch in the Outer Hebrides on the isle of South Uist, I found a small lodge on a slope above the water and facing the low coastal mountains. It looked to be a sweet little place to recover from my miles over land and sea, to return some spunk to my gait. In his Life of Johnson, Boswell quotes the Doctor: “There is nothing which has yet been contrived by man by which so much happiness is produced as by a good tavern or inn.”
At breakfast on my next-to-last morning I realized I no longer could put off the decision. The time was near to order it. After all, even curmudgeonly Johnson believed, “If an epicure could remove by a wish, in quest of sensual gratifications, wherever he had supped he would breakfast in Scotland.” The next morning would have to be the meal for it.
The kitchen of the little lodge was a capable one under the direction of Peadir, and he was fully equal to serving up not just the real thing but a worthy rendition of it. I am, if not an utterly intrepid eater, at least an adventuresome one, although inclined toward vegetarian fare; but when I’m with boon companions who believe a nonesuch red wine makes anything edible, friends who pore over exotic menu offerings to challenge me to answer, “I will if you will,” I can then cross the chasm between simple risk and flagrant audacity. One night at a meal in northern China, I distinctly heard our translator say “boiled anteater.” Thinking he was jesting, I announced I would if he would. And he did, so I did. Cowardice be damned, a man is his word.
In the morning, a foggy Hebridean thing, I was alone with nothing to challenge me other than professional duty, yet I still ordered it, figuring I was making too much of something called black pudding, a dish of no kin to, say, tapioca or black bread or even brown Betty. In this usage, pudding is a euphemism referring to tripe, and its blackness derives from a beast’s cooked blood. What that flat sausage is to a Scottish breakfast so an American hot dog is to a baseball game. I’d been on the islands long enough to know that the Scots like to put names on food to mislead foreigners so they won’t really consider leaving Des Moines to move to this beautiful, uncongested, boreal country. To mention a common one, the Scottish Gaelic word for egg is ugh (rhymes with goo). My first supper in the islands was quintessential national fare, something called cullen skink; I figured if an islander could eat little lizards so could any Yank good and true. It was delicious, ever more so when I spooned into it and found it to be not reptilian but cream-of-smoked-haddock soup.
I do confess, however, to passing up certain flavored crisps—potato chips—but it wasn’t for want of culinary nerve; rather, I prefer to avoid silly foods imported from England—say, crisps with descriptive flavorings of prawn-cocktail,
or chicken-and-dumpling, or bacon-and-baked-beans. I also admit to being satisfied with merely reading certain proprietary labels on canned goods in a Scottish grocery: Lunch Tongue in Jelly; Scotch Haggis (the second ingredient of this national dish was lamb offal, also termed “pluck and paunch”). I left them on the shelf near a tin of All Day Breakfast whose contents made me think a more accurate name might be All Thru the Night: beans, sausage, bacon, chopped egg nuggets, and mushrooms in tomato sauce.
No, indeed, the clever Scots would not drive me off their lovely wind-staggered islands by tricky names and unexpected ingredients more appropriate to zoo feed. I’ve tried soup of wild nettles—those nasty banes of path and field—and found it toothsome, not to mention my glee in chomping into a plant that has stung me from the cliffs of Dover to the northern Orkneys. After all, in eras past, in certain far places of the world, it has been an honored practice to eat one’s enemy. Somewhere in America there must be a recipe for broth of poison ivy.
Still, on that morning, why did I linger over taking the first bite of my black pudding placed so harmlessly next to the poached ughs and grilled mushrooms? It started the night before. As I lay in bed and looked through my handbook to the Outer Hebrides, I came across this: “The nature of the land, the use of the sea as a food source, and the isolation of the islands are the main factors deciding the diet of the Hebridean.” Recipes followed for fish heads and livers in oatmeal, boiled cormorant in stout, young gannet in ale. Then this one for sheep’s-head broth: “Prepare the head the day before cooking. Using a red hot poker, rub over the sheep’s head until a nice brown colour, remove ears, horns. Split the head longwise with an axe or saw.”
A wise traveler waiting for Morpheus would have stopped there and taken up the phone book or the small print on the automobile rental-agreement. Oh no, none of that for me. I had to continue until I happened across a ne plus ultra, the very recipe for what would be on my plate the following morning: “Clean and wash one sheep’s stomach inside and out. Mix in a bowl 8 oz. suet, 2 chopped onions, 8 oz. oatmeal, 1 pint sheep’s or pig’s blood. Place in stomach bag, sew ends, and boil gently for 2½ hours. Prick bags to prevent bursting.”
As the thick muff of fog lifted to let a little sun into the breakfast room, I stared at my “pudding” and considered which of a sheep’s four stomachs the cook used. I could, of course, have deferred to my semi-resolute vegetarian gospel by skipping breakfast to wait for a lunch of cock-a-leekie soup or a plate of clapshot. But, come, man! Isn’t it a writer’s task to enter realms of risk in hopes his report may serve others?
Finally, inescapably, I took up the exigent duty, reminding myself, If they can, I can. After all, at my request, Chef Peadir had specially made it. And so I took it. For three bites. Then the question arose: Wearied traveler I was, how could a reenergized step be worth this? At that moment I remembered Samuel Johnson’s blessed sentence—“He that shall complain of his fare in the Hebrides has improved his delicacy more than his manhood.” And I enjoyed the rest—that is, the other parts of my breakfast.
Once finished, and before Peadir could discover any loss of manhood, I wrapped the remnant of sausage in a paper napkin and went outside to look for Bob, the resident sheepdog. It took several minutes to find him because he was too deaf to come when called. At last there he was, dozing in the thin sunlight. Old Bob had that appearance aged sheepdogs get when their fur for some reason will no longer lie in place, giving them a perpetual dishevelment. I said he wouldn’t believe what I’d brought him, and he didn’t. Never raising his head, he had only enough interest to open one eye as I set the pudding before him; I waited, then pushed the black morsel enticingly close to his nose, although his sense of smell had gone years ago. He opened the other eye and with the slowness of arthritic age worked himself onto all fours, licked the pudding without passion, regarded the approaching cat, then me, and, with some fumbling, got the sausage into his chops and limped off I know not where.
I went up to my room, made some notes, loaded my camera, studied the map, got ready for a little expedition, and on my way out gave a thanks to Peadir for fulfilling my request. That’s when something bounded past the kitchen door only to almost whip back the other way in full frolic. “Gad!” said Peadir. “What’s gotten into Bobby? He’s born again!” Perhaps I knew the answer, and perhaps I didn’t. Quietly I went off up the brae, my step still listless as I tried to reevaluate potential secrets in black pudding. The Chinese believe in elixirs of rhinoceros horn and tonics of tiger-bone wine, and, damn it all, the Scots have blood sausage. No wonder the Gaelic word for “food” is meat.
As I made a slow trek over the heathered hills I knew I would have to face up to the cowardice of improving delicacy over manhood, and I also knew one of the rewards of travel is discovery of uncoventional fare, especially when it leads to renewed physical fitness, even should it entail actually having to get down peculiar—that is to say, vile—provender. It was no longer a question of could; it was one of must.
That evening, as I sat at the tiny bar in the lodge and took a pint of fine ale in preparation for morning, something decrepit, disheveled, and dispirited limped past the open door. It was old Bob, as ancient and foot-weary as ever. The logic of his brief transformation came to me slowly, and when it did, I raised a toast to his health, “Sláinte mhath!” And then I did one to myself, and these were the whispered words: This fellow, manfully, admits his delicacy.
SOUNDED BY TRUMPETS SILENT
In San Francisco in 1987, I gave “Writing PrairyErth” as a talk before college English teachers, a group I’d been exiled from a few years earlier—not by them but by an anemic job-market. That turn of events was for the best, since my thoughts on restructuring the widely accepted canon of great American letters seemed, to the academy, misinformed if not radical. With “Writing PrairyErth,” I hoped to provoke reevaluation, but my call to arms apparently was sounded largely by silent trumpets.
The urge toward otherness in this piece didn’t seem to catch on, as suggested by the staggering rise of the memoir. Perhaps, in an age of pandemic self-absorption, a hushed response to opening outward was natural; but if autobiography doesn’t ascend beyond the person portrayed, then its reach will probably forever be curtailed. Michel de Montaigne, in his attempts to get beyond the limitations of egoism in his Essais, employs self-deflating frankness of himself. Yet still, one can question the genuineness of his assertion “Thus, reader, I am myself the matter of my book; you would be unreasonable to spend your leisure on so frivolous and vain a subject.”
Writing PrairyErth
Writing about America—if not American writing itself—begins with the reports of European travelers: the journals of Christopher Columbus, the account of Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, the narratives of Pedro Castañeda (Coronado’s lieutenant), Thomas Harriot, John Smith. Things may have changed now, but my university education managed to keep those men—as writers anyway—hidden from me. Our native literature, according to my textbooks and professors of the late fifties and early sixties, begins with works written by colonial citizens. While I understand this approach, I find it a needlessly chauvinistic one that misdirects us. After all, America was a literary subject almost before it was a known territory. Were I teaching the literature of our land, I’d rather take my chances of catching an inert sophomore’s initial interest with the work of John Smith or Thomas Harriot or Cabeza de Vaca than with something from Michael Wigglesworth or Increase Mather or Charles Brockden Brown, those worthies who were supposed to draw me in.
I attribute the slights to early American travel writing not to Anglo prejudice so much as to the huge and overwhelming national literary bias in favor of so-called imaginative literature (fiction, poetry, drama) as though the clear and evocative recording of fact requires no imagination. Try to think of Thoreau or James Agee as unimaginative writers.
The Harvard Guide to American History gives a selective list of about five-hundred accounts written by travelers in the
United States. These are books selected for their historical importance as well as their capable expression. To that list I can readily add another fifteen-hundred. A field containing two-thousand significant or at least worthwhile books, a genre that has come to shape even more than the novel our notions of who we are, where we are, and what we can accomplish, deserves the attention not just of our teachers but even more of young writers who are seeking new forms in which to represent their times. It’s creatively destructive for so many of our future writers, regardless of genre, to work in ignorance of this long list of evocatively recorded journeys. (Let me add here that males on that Harvard list outnumber females by more than fifty to one. Such imbalance demands redressing.)
It may be, in part, that I’m attracted to the literature of travel and its relative, the literature of place, because for so long they also have been academic pariahs, and that’s unjustifiable since no genre of our literature is so typically American. After all, seen in the light of human development, every American is a traveler or a descendant of travelers. And surely no nation has ever believed quite so completely in the necessity and curative power of moving hither and yon. From the time of the first crossings over the Bering land-bridge, mobility has been an elemental quality of our national experience. No wonder we’ve produced in just four-hundred years a literature of travel the equal of nations twice our age. I’m also drawn to nonfiction in its peregrinative mode because of opportunities it presents a writer in search of new structures. I see a sameness to much of our recent nonfiction, which I read as an alert to push further into the imagination as one would through a canebrake or dismal swamp.
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