|
The Old Country When I woke up, the sky was a dark, ominous grey, and the rain was pouring down in sheets, dimpling the waters of the bay. Eating my breakfast and looking out the front windows, I could barely see past the end of the jetty, and it looked as if Tobermory was lost in some kind of pearly void. It's a good life, Anthony . . . . Putting on my waterproofed windbreaker and brandishing my umbrella, I headed out to find a new clock radio. One of the reasons I had been so restless the night before was the terrifying quiet of Tobermory in the night, and now more than ever I needed the comforting noise of late-night programs. I wandered all the way to the north end of town, trying to find a shop that would carry clock radios, and came up empty. Discouraged, I trudged back to the Carnaberg and asked Iain. He pointed two doors down the other way, to the Hydroelectric shop. Jeez. I picked out a Philips radio, with AM, FM and SW bands that didn't correspond to the bands I was familiar with. The old lady behind the counter was not particularly helpful, and when I tried to pay for it, she refused to accept my American Express traveller's checks. Leaving the radio, I stomped down to the Clydesdale Bank, my feet and hands wet and shivering, and got more money. The Clydesdale was the living room of a rowhouse, the counters and inkstands looking ludicrous. Despite its small size, it was the only bank on the entire island of Mull. On the Public Notice board, I saw a zoning board notice saying that the Strathclyde counsel was planning to join the big crumbling church in the center of town with the town hall next door to it to provide a bigger hall. The drawings showed that the spire of the church would be knocked off in the conversion. What a stupid idea! The tower block mentality extended even to the Western Isles. I went back to the Hydroelectric, threw the money on the counter and left in a huff. Getting back, I unpacked the radio and discovered that it came without a plug. I had forgotten that most appliances in Britain were sold plugless due to the staggering variety of outlet styles used over the last 100 years. Most of the plugs I'd run across in Scotland were 3-pronged, with each prong a huge, chisel-like steel spike. The only other plug type I'd seen were the "shaver points," two small holes above each bathroom mirror especially designed for the toothpick-like prongs of the British electric razors. Not wanting to head back to the nasty lady in the nasty rain, I whipped out my little pocketknife (a gratuity from a defense contractor in Minneapolis which makes guided missile launchers) and transferred the plug on the room's reading light to the radio. I tuned around, listening to faint broadcasts in various languages from the European mainland. I headed again for the lounge, at a loss to figure out anything else to do on a rainy Tobermory morning. I lost myself in a book until noon, then headed out again. It had stopped raining, but it still looked pretty awful. Two doors down the street was the Tobermory Guest House, a small B&B with a placard out front advertising a hot lunch. What the hell. The Guest House dining room was again a former living room, furnished with long tables and a buffet. I paid my œ2 to a pretty waitress who looked like Katrina Leskavitch of Katrina and the Waves and loaded my plate with cream of mushroom soup and lasagna and grabbed a can of Tennant's with a pretty girl printed on the side. Further down the street, the doomed church was holding a crafts sale. Hoping to find some gifts, I stopped in and found the sad ruins of the pew and choir loft, rickety and decaying. Some local service group was selling tacky stuff -- pine cones with toy limbs, clam shells with little rattling eyes -- and I could find nothing suitable for gifts. When I left, I stared in surprise. The weather had flipped again, and the sky was clear and blue and cloudless. How the hell did it do that? I immediately got happier. My moods have always been tied to the weather to an annoying extent, and the Hebridean weather was making me into a manic-depressive. While I was in a manic mood, however, I figured I'd get something useful accomplished. So I skipped back to the Carnaberg, whistling a jig, and gathered up my laundry for a visit to the Tobermory laundromat. It was located at the far nothern end of town, a small cinderblock structure between a dive shop and a souvenier shop. The early afternoon sunshine had taken on a bright, crisp aspect, the cobblestones under my feet as sharp and as clear as the small houses fifteen miles away on the Scottish mainland. The crowds were picking up, a lot of them in bathing suits in the balmy air. I got in line at the laundromat -- or what I assumed was the line, since the small area not occupied by washers and dryers was packed with equal numbers of day trippers and Tobermory residents standing around impatiently or sitting on their bundles of clothing, warily eying the other customers and the machine they were waitng for. I hadn't been in a laudromat in years and had forgotten how territorial the patrons can get. While I was waiting, I struck up a conversation with a young lady. She was eighteen years old, with an angelic face and a fine tanned body set off by a green bikini. She and her family were from Gourock (which I praised, to her delight) and were sailing around the Hebrides for a few months in their 25-foot sailboat. They had just tied up, and she had drawn the laundry duty this time. I told her I envied her family and wished I could cruise around like they did. She looked at me as if I was insane. "I miss my mates, it's cold and damp most of the time, and the boat is all over the place," she said, weaving her hand in imitation of a boat in a rough sea. "I'm not havin' a lot of fun." She smiled. "Nice day today, though." I finally got a machine, and managed to squeeze all my clothes into one load. The washers were standard industrial models which looked very similar to those back in the US: in fact, the heavy stamped metal label on the bottom showed that they had been made in "Cincinnati, 6, O." about 30 years ago. What a weird place for them to end up. Lugging my laundry back to the Carnaberg, the town looked bright and festive, the people milling about in a party mood and the whole place buzzing like a street fair. Outside the McDonald Arms Hotel, which housed the only real bar in town, a line of preppily-dressed boaters waited to gain admittance. The bay was at high tide, and the water glistened in endless variations of torquiose. Dumping my clothes (after a short conversation with McTavish the cat, still lurking outside the bank), I grabbed my camera and headed out to look at the rest of Tobermory outside of the main street. Heading south, I ended up at the gates of the Tobermory Distillery, the single building with the tall smokestack looking timeless. A little further on, I passed an auto garage, and knew from my reading that the garage building, in earlier times, had sheltered Boswell and Johnson on their trek among the Hebrides in the 1820s. At the north end of town, another jetty, smaller and in bad repair, ran out into the bay. I danced to the end over broken stones and took a lot of pictures of the town, glistening in primary colors. Back at the head of the jetty, I found the Iona/Mull Museum, a small stucco building with the sign done in woodwork, like signs in a national park. I paid the 30p admission and found myself in a big room stuffed, floor to ceiling, with such a variety of weird objects that for a moment I felt I had stumbled into the junk crawler from Star Wars. Nothing was in any kind of order, which only added to the charm of the place. Scattered here and there were ornately framed photographs -- the Mull Veterans Committee of 1923, the touring company of players who presented MacBeth at the Aros Church in 1897, the social committee from a community party/dance (known as a ceilidh) in 1953. In one corner was an exhibit concerning the fabled Tobermory shipwreck. In 1595, a Spanish galleon, the Duque de Florenzia, was blown up in Tobermory harbor by Scottish guerillas, sending tons of Spanish silver to the bottom. Countless expeditions over the years had attempted to locate the wreck. My Berlitz guidebook said that none of the attempts had found anything, and that the location of the wreck had been hopelessly lost in the shifting silt. But here in the Iona/Mull Museum were exhibited dozens of silver coins and a rusted piece of the ship's tackle, raised from the harbor near Calve Island in 1934. I made a note to tell Berlitz. Wandering with the wind, I took the road south out of town, which headed up towards the plateau above the town and followed the rushing stream which provided the water for the distillery. Turning around at the top, I was stunned at the view of Tobermory, looking toy- like with its bright buildings and little fleet of boats. The part of Tobermory on top of the cliff was more conventional, little white houses and narrow streets glistening in the sunlight. A big shaggy dog snoozed in the middle of the main street, looking as if he hadn't seen a car in years. I did a little trespassing in someone's garden to get a better view over the edge of the cliff and into the harbor. The tide was heading out and even as I watched, some of the bigger sailboats started leaning drunkenly as their keels hit bottom. Upper Tobermory was just as small as the portion below, and in a few minutes I found myself on a farm lane, headed into the vast hilly highlands of Mull. Alongside the road, I inspected a post box, red and cylindrical, stamped with the arms of George V, meaning that the box dated from somewhere between 1910 and 1936. Off on the other side of the road, a small fenced-in yard held two goats, who eyed me warily as I took their picture. Further along, I found a field full of what looked like tumbled Roman columns, nicely worked granite strewn everywhere as if in the aftermath of an earthquake. Puzzling over what it represented, I was startled by some movement behind me and found myself face-to- face with a Shetland pony, wandering around as if he owned the place (which, indeed, he may have). He was about four feet high, and looked at me with the same frank, baleful eye all Scots seem to have. Being terrified of horses, I quickly backed away and retraced my steps back to town. This place is too wild for me. Taking a slighly different route back to the cliff, I passed a magnificent house, all white stucco and mahogony, obviously the home of the local rich people. High on the windswept cliffs of Mull, it looked like a perfect place to spend one's life. Heading north along the cliff, I came to the Western Isles Hotel, a giant, Victorian/Gothic building perched at the point where the cliff afforded a view of Ben More, one of the larger mountains on the mainland, and off to the side the flat horizon of the Irish Sea. The Western Isles had its own golf course, which looked pretty beat-up and not at all attractive in the high wind. I wandered into the hotel and found threadbare carpets, cracked cut-glass doors and a musty odor that spoke of a century of rainstorms. Old gentlemen dozed in the lounge, dogs dozed on the porch, the entire hotel seemed to be in a daze. I crept back out, having disturbed no one with my presence. (A year and a half later, I moved into an 1860-vintage rowhouse in Old Town Alexandria. It turned out that my next door neighbor, a public defender in Baltimore, had been married at the Western Isles Hotel, having flown the entire wedding party over at the request of his bride, who had been raised in Scotland and now ran a freedom of the press lobbying group in Washington. To add coincidence to coincidence, when I sold the house a few years later, the couple who bought it had stayed at the Western Isles on a tour of the Hebrides. This world gets smaller every time I turn around.) An ornate wrought-iron gate behind the hotel led to a steep stairway back to Tobermory Bay. At the bottom, I stopped to look at the ferry terminal, a big, new concrete dock which, according to my Caledonia MacBraye guidebook, only saw a ship once a week, which took a small number of hardy folk out to Jura and Islay, home of Laphroiag whisky. While Tobermory was the biggest town on Mull, most of the tourist traffic was funneled through Craignure and out to Iona at the southwest tip of the island. In the newsvendor's shop, I bought some more books -- In The Wake of Drake, about a group of students who sailed around the world, The Day of the Jackel by Frederick Forsythe, and two more Tome Sharp books about the misadventures of an unhappy literature instructor with the apt name of Henry Wilt. About 16.00 I made it back to the Carnaburg and read for a while in the lounge while the German hoards milled about noisely. I flipped through the TV channels and found a fairly interesting soap opera cum how-to show about how to start up a business. (Being a fifth-generation bureaucrat, I find the whole idea of owning a business about the most terrifying thing imaginable.) About 18.00 I had dinner at the Captain's Table, struggling through their version of Chicken Supreme, a prawn cocktail (again) and, as a result of some bizzare craving, a banana split. I realized with a start that I had been in Tobermory for over two days and had not yet tried the local whisky. The Tobermory single-malt was smooth and numbing and absolutely perfect. Heading back to my room, I passed the lounge and found the family from Room One watching a chapter of David Attenborough's Living Planet. I watched a little of it, feeling strange watching TV with other people. After the show, I got out my guidebooks to work out a trip tomorrow to Iona. With growing disbelief, I finally concluded that it was impossible to get from Tobermory to Iona and back in one day. The daily bus from Tobermory to Craignure ran too late to catch the only bus from Craignure to Iona, and as far as I could tell there was no other transportation available save a cab, and taking a cab over the narrow roads of Mull was a daunting prospect. I decided to check with the travel office the next morning and find some way around this idiocy. My parents were supposed to call at 21.00, but it came and went with no word from Iain. I found out later that getting phone calls to Mull after 18.00 was a near impossibility, since the island's telephone operator went off duty at that time. The idea of an actual human being working the phone system was kind of charming, though. Falling into another deep dreamless sleep, I listened to an Amsterdam radio station, beaming the Beatles and the Rolling Stones across the dark and chill North Sea.
|
