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The Old Country I awoke on Wednesday morning with a sick, quesy feeling, a feeling I'd had for a few days. Maybe it was the water, or maybe the idea of trekking back to Glasgow was getting me down. Either way, I slowly sipped a cup of coffee in the McLean's dining room while Mrs. McLean tried to get me to eat something for the trip ahead. My bus would be leaving at 9:00. Before then, I had to pack up my shippable things and get them down to the post office. Outside, the fog hung heavy around me, the cold cutting to the bone. The ironmonger was about the size of a 7-Eleven and the banks of flourescent lights made it look cozy against the grey mist crowding the windows. A few locals lounged around the counter as I picked out some twine and brown paper. Back at my room, I stuffed a bunch of stuff -- clothes I hadn't worn, my brass rubbings from Edinburgh in a cardboard tube, a bottle of Tobermory malt, a lot of magazines and newspapers -- that I couldn't drag around Scotland with me any more. With my quesy stomach and headache, I struggled for a long time with the paper and string, and finally got the package molded into a brown lump. The package cost œ17.85 *********************************** Craignure was bathed in sunshine, but a hard, sharp bank of Hebrides fog cut off the hillside above the town, looking like a photograph torn in half. A large dredging ship was tied up on one side of the pier amid a cloud of screaming seagulls. In the distance, the Caledonia could be seen churning towards us. The young lady I'd been eying on the bus stood looking down the strait, her dufflebag at her side and a green daytripper knapsack slung across one shoulder. I sauntered over as casually as I could and gazed out to sea alongside her. The knapsack was covered with city patches from Edinburgh, Glasgow, Amsterdam and a number of more obscure locations. The largest was an apparently Dutch city, it's symbol a six-sided rose surrounded by black. I asked her where it was. She turned towards me, puzzled. "Pardon me?," she said in a soft European accent. I repeated the question, and she repeated her response. After the third go-round, we stared dumbly at each other until she made the adjustment to my non-Scottish accent. "Oh!," she said, comprehension flooding her face like a bright light. "It's my town. Where I live." Her name was Lisa, from Holland, and she was on a month-long tour of Scotland, her "favorite place in all the world," as she put it. She'd been on Mull for five days, hiking through the unworldy mountains and visiting Calgary, Salen, and the other Mullian metropoli. Now she was on her way to Fort William, up in the Highlands just south of Loch Ness, for a few days of camping. She wasn't sure where to go from there. We continued our conversation on the Caledonia, pulling into Oban in a sudden cloudburst. Heading down the ramp, I was suprised to see the family from London I'd spoken to at the Carnaberg a few nights earlier, complete with dog, debarking and getting into a cab. How we'd gotten on the ship together at Craignure without noticing each other is beyond me. Lisa and I spent about 40 minutes in the station's coffee shop, waiting for the train east. Lisa's home town in Holland (I regret that I can't remember the name) was known, she told me, as the garden capital of Europe (hence the rose on the city's crest.) I told her my only story concerning her country: a few years earlier, I had negotiated a Navy contract for some guided missile launchers for the Dutch Navy, and was assisted in this by a Dutch navy captain, the most charming and cosmopolitan man I'd ever met, who regaled us with stories of the sea and his childhood and celebrated the conclusion of the negotiations by plying all of us with expensive Dutch cigars. Lisa spoke in a sweet, demure voice, her large brown eyes looking puppy-like under her short bangs. She was no timid flower, however; she had hiked over most of Europe, camping alone under the stars with an assurance a suburban kid like me found intimidating. As we sipped coffee from thick, chipped cups and listened to the rain pounding on the cavernous roof of the train station, I felt with Lisa the kind of instant rapport which only seems to occur when there is no possibility of seeing the other person again. The train out of Oban was almost empty, and I breathed a sigh remembering my tortourous trip into Oban four days earlier. Lisa and I shared a compartment. It was the first time I'd been on a train with actual compartments, with a sliding glass door insulating us from the hoi polloi. We lapsed into a comfortable silence as we rattled our way into the hills above Oban. I started to read a copy of Time magazine I had picked up in Tobermory, but the cover story - the 40th anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing - gave me a massive case of American guilt, and I shoved the magazine into my suitcase face down. Outside our compartment, a group of - well, a cross between a motorcycle gang and a punk band - hooted and hollered and threw wadded up bit of paper at each other down the length of the companionway. I kept glancing surreptitiously at Lisa, her head down reading some Dutch book. She was very attractive in a Louise Brooks kind of way, and her short skirt displayed very nice legs above her hiking boots. I am remarkable unadept at handling women, and most of my life seemed to have been taken up with a Hamlet-like argument in my head over what to do about women. Do I throw myself on her? Do I offer to travel to Fort William with her? Do I get her address and promise to write later? Do I just count myself lucky to have spent some time with her in this highland fastness? I was still having the argument in my head when the screeching of the air brakes announced our arrival in Crianlarich. The platform was built high on stilts, and a solid carpet of treetops hid the town from view. It was like we were floating over a rain forest, with no one or nothing in sight. "Well, I must be going." Lisa gathered her things and let me open the train door. "It's been wonderful talking to you, Scott." I told her it had been equally wonderful for me. She stepped out onto the platform and slammed the thin metal door. I undid the catches and lowered the window. We were standing face to face. "Well," she said. It was the perfect Casablanca moment for the train to leave. But we just sat there, the train humming to itself. It was painfully obvious that Lisa was waiting for a farewell kiss, as was I. We were both so terrified by the thought that we dumbly stared at each other for a good two minutes until the train jerked forward and we said our wan goodbyes amid another downpour. My last sight of Lisa was as she scurried to the station house, her knapsack over her head, her glasses glinting in the pearly light. An odd yellow light permiatted the sky as the train eased into Glasgow, past the idle factories and the grim Victorian brickpiles of warehouses. Crossing the Clyde, I could see some abandoned shipyard facilites, and remembered that for a hundred years, "Clydeside" was the birthplace of the world's greatest ships, from the Turbina, the first turbine powered ship, to legendary giants like the Lusitania, Queen Mary, Queen Elizabeth, The Empress of Ireland, and finally the QE2. It always seemed incongrous to me that the most famous of the transatlantic liners, the Titanic, was built in Belfast rather than Glasgow. Just a few miles short of the station, there was a delay, and we sat staring at trash along the rail line for a while. The gang of toughs were still whooping it up in the corridor, but getting bored with themselves. When we finally pulled into Queen Street, I had to wait in a long queue for a cab, a new experience in Scotland. My cabbie was a brilliant talker, who regaled me with stories of his trip to Denver as we eased through wide, deserted street to the Holiday Inn on Argyle Street. This was no ordinary Holiday Inn. As I entered the huge marble lobby, with a four- storey ceiling, I was greeted by a huge Lord Snowden photo of Princess Margaret, arguably the ugliest of the royals, the patron of the hotel and the woman who, in 1982, cut the ribbon opening the place for business, accordingly to the ornate brass plaque under the photo. The fact that the royal family is reduced in these times to presiding over hotel openings is, I guess, a victory for democracy, but a diminishendo nevertheless. I checked in and was given a magnetic card for a room key
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