Scotland As An Addiction

Neist Point Lighthouse

I first penned this ensconced in a creaking fifty-year-old chair in a pub in Dornoch, Scotland. My host was Keith, and I'd a half pint of McEwan's 80 Shilling in front of me. I had already been to the bog twice to drain off a previous pint. But that sidesteps the question: Why on God's earth was I in Scotland waiting out an opaque fog in September when I could be watching the sunburned English frolic in Majorca or be on a whale cruise out of Vancouver?

It's the Scots, ai, en'it? Since the clearances, they're thin on the ground up here in the Highlands. The Duke of Sutherland, a.k.a. the Leviathan of Money, cleared 15,000 of the gits out to the New World to make way for his sheep. And you wonder why the gits have a knee-jerk grudge against authority. But these few, these dour folk dotted sparsely across the wilds of Scotland draw me back. I simply like them better than Yanks.

Oh, sure, you can find a clinker or two, a sour old man or a crackit grandma who won't step aside in the local store to let you wiggle past—but you're more likely to encounter a shopkeeper who'll send you across the street to buy your haggis because his is “no the very best and yer on'y here for a week.” You can always count on the pub curry, and you can always depend on gloom about the weather. You can drive the wrong way up a one lane road for ten miles, and get an offer of tea at the end before they send you back down the glen. There's something that tells you these people invented the world once, and could do it again—if only they can figure out which bits to fiddle with to make a new revolution. It's the fog that makes the past stand in so close. It's the sensibility of poverty that makes the folk so friendly. It's the land and the sky that makes the arts so vibrant.

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