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The Old Country Sunday morning, Tobermory, Isle of Mull, exactly one week after my arrival in Scotland. Coming out of my room, the morning sun, brilliant and clear, cut through the lounge windows and flooded the hallway with light. The bathroom didn't have a shower, so I just stuck my head under the cold water faucet (there were separate faucets for hot and cold water, a strange British feature) and washed my hair. I headed down to breakfast and found the dining room cheery and bright, set with blue china and gingham tablecloths. Iain's wife, a pretty but tired-looking brunette, served a big country breakfast to their eight guests. Unlike the Arden, the Carnaberg was clearly the McLeans' home, with knicknaks and family pictures and the effluvia of everyday life all around. I liked the place and the McLeans. Stepping out into the street, the morning sun blinded me as it glittered on the tourquoise surface of Tobermory Bay. The town was so quiet in the early morning that I could hear the blood rushing in my ears. Just outside the Carnaberg, a lone phone box stood in isolation on the edge of the water. It looked straight out of Local Hero. I wandered along the curve of the harbor, relishing the silence and the beauty of Tobermory. A family of swans swam peacefully along the harbor wall, big and white and beautiful. The bright buildings looked scrubbed and sparkling in the low light -- the McDonald Arms Hotel, the grocery store, the ironmonger (the great British word for a hardware store), the diving shop, the gift shop. There were no houses per se on the street, because everybody lived above their stores or in the houses scattered on the flat field at the top of the cliff. In the center of the town's crescent was a large stone church, abandoned and crumbling. High on the bell tower, a tree grew from between the church's stones. It was the largest and most striking building in town, and it was a shame that it was in such bad shape. At the north end of town was a newsvendor, and I picked up copies of the Sunday Times and the Sunday Mail. Their presence in Tobermory posed an interesting question. It was 8.00. London was almost 500 miles away, across some of the most impassible landscape I'd ever seen. Even Glasgow was six hours away, if the trains and ferries meshed right. How the hell did these papers get here? The thought of somebody crossing the Strait of Mull at 3.00 every morning with a load of newspapers was almost surreal, and Mull, as far as I knew, had no airports or landing strips. I started to ask the kindly old lady behind the counter, but it sounded like such a touristy question that it stuck in my throat. On my way back to the Carnaberg, I found a cat sitting on the steps of the Clydesdale Bank, a small shop with a sign in the second-story window which noted that a lawyer was available for consultation every second Thursday. (A town that only has a lawyer one day a month -- what a nice change from Washington!) The cat was a goofy-looking tortiseshell, and he chirruped and rubbed against my leg as I sat down to pet him. He didn't have a name tag, so I called him McTavish for convenience, McTavish being the most Scottish name I could think of. We talked for a while, and I left him cleaning himself in the silence. Next to the bank was a bed and breakfast with a FOR SALE sign in the window, with an asking price of œ28,000, or about $36,000. Hmmm . . . . I took the papers up to the lounge and settled in for a standard Sunday morning three- hour wallow in the newsprint. Page 6 of the Times carried a photograph of Vice-President Bush announcing the winner of the Teacher-in-Space competition, a Sharon Christa McAuliffe of Concord, New Hampshire, and I was overcome with envy. The cover story in the magazine section was about the 80th birthday of Elizabeth, the Queen Mother (or the Queen Mum, as everyone called her), a story so nice and respectful (compared to the standard Washington Post story) that it sounded as if it had been written by the Palace. The big sports story was the Silverstone auto race to be run later in the day. I found hundreds of things in the papers, ads and features and real estate listings, which could have come from the Washington Post or the Alexandria Gazette, items that are the same everywhere. But there were an equal number of items that mystified me, stories about the Irish government, affairs in former British colonies with names too new to be in the atlases, local issues which, cut off from any history or perspective, seemed petty or self-indulgent or simply bizarre. A big debate was going on about public housing (not enough of it, apparently), but I got the impression that that particular debate had been going full force since the end of the war. The other constants were discussions of "the Troubles" in Northern Ireland and the increasing interdependence of Great Britain and the rest of Europe, a necessary expedient, according to the columnists, but still scary to the isolationist British people. The main thing I noticed, however, was that there was almost no mention of Scotland anywhere in the London papers. Being of Scottish ancestry, I had been angered at how often Americans lump Scotland together with England, as if it was simply an English annex, "North Britain," rather than a separate country -- a country, admittedly, with no parliament or government of its own, by order of the Crown. The Scottish nationalism question was pretty much dead in Scotland -- everyone I spoke to about it thought the idea of a separate Scotland was ludicrous -- but I hated to see the place, with its long proud history of individualism and self-reliance, so readily absorbed into the cradle-to-grave intrusiveness of the British government. As I was finishing up the papers, I got into a discussion with the people in Room 1, who were also ensconsed in the lounge with the Sunday paper. The husband was a big beefy guy, sort of blue-collar but with clean, smooth hands that made me think he was a manager or a computer programmer. His wife was a slim redhead, very jumpy and intense in a aristocratic kind of way. They were traveling with their eleven-year-old daughter, whose arm was trussed up in a sling after a fall from her pony, and a big black Labrador retriever, who seldom raised his head from a deep nap. They were from London and were spending his five weeks of annual leave traveling through the Inner Hebredes, just taking their time and spending a week here, a week there. The previous year they had spent the five weeks in Australia, and five weeks in Los Angeles the year before that, the dog in tow each time. "We love Tobermory," the husband said. "It's so nice and quiet here. Nothing to disturb you at all." I agreed, and mentioned that I would be heading on to Portree later in the week. What was that like? His face contorted. "Oh, Christ, Portree. Don't go to Portree!" He spent ten minutes detailing all that was wrong with Portree, from the filthy streets to the rowdy pubs to the churlish innkeepers. "Worst place I ever visited, Portree was," he said. He nudged his wife. "Innat right, dear?" "Oh, yes, worst place," she parroted. Worse that East LA?, I asked with a smile. "Different," he smiled back. Feeling hungry, I headed out and was shocked to find that while I had been reading, the water had disappeared from Tobermory Bay. The sun still glinted on the Strait beyond the harbor entrance, but for a hundred or more yards out from the shore, the harbor was a plain of mud and weeds, dotted with the beached hulls of Tobermory's fleet. The sailing ships, with their long keels, were almost on their beam-ends, the rigging and flags hanging limply from the horizontal masts. I had never seen such a dramatic tidal shift before. It looked as if the boats of Tobermory had just laid down and died. The stone jetty now towered over the mud, and I saw the reason for the heavy bumpers on the prawn boats as they lay against the rough-hewn granite blocks. Wandering to the edge, I saw a old wreck, maybe 20 feet long, laying smashed and flat on the bottom, its sides peeled out like an orange rind and its engine and shaft rusty and rotting in the noon sun. Turning my attention from the bay, I noticed that Tobermory was no longer as quiet as it had been in the morning. The street was thronged with cars and people were marching everywhere with the studied casualness of tourists. The vast majority were German, for some reason, crew-cut blonde men with khaki hiking shorts and healthy women without the characteristic Scottish pallor. At noon I called my parents on Iain's phone, giving him œ10 for the privlege (voluntarily; Iain was the most laid-back person I had met in Scotland and didn't want to charge me for the call at all.) We chatted for a while, and as I was describing my torturous journey to Tobermory, I decided to skip Portree -- not as a result of the nasty things the gentlemen in Room 1 had told me, but because traveling to the Isle of Skye involved a trip at least as convoluted and time-consuming as the trip to Mull. I would have to catch a bus to Craignure; the ferry to Oban; a train for the long, circuitous trip to Ft William, an outpost in the even more untamed land north of Oban; wait for another train to the end of the line (literally) at Mallaig; a 50-mile bus ride (though land that looked on my topographical map like the backside of the moon) to Kyle of Lochalsh; a ferry to Kyleakin; and a final 30-mile bus ride to Portree. When I was sitting back home in Alexandria planning the trip, it sounded exciting. Now the thought just made my bones hurt. After I hung up, I asked Iain if he could put me up until Saturday. "Sure! Yeah! No problem!" he bubbled. A week in Tobermory sounded wonderful and quiet. Ellen would have gotten a good laugh out of it -- except for the fact that everyone spoke English, there probably wasn't a hell of a lot of difference between Tobermory and Torshavn, the capital of the Faeroe Islands. I wandered into the lounge and looked out the window on the street. A VW beetle roared past me, a left-hand-drive 1966 convertible in mint condition, and I was suddenly homesick for my Ghia, sitting in my parent's driveway back in Alexandria. I was getting homesick about a lot of things, actually. I had taken to subtracting five hours from whatever time it was and imagining what was going on back in Alexandria, mooning away like some eight-year-old at camp. I had also become unaccountably lovesick over my Francophile friend who drove me to the airport, a woman I had been friends with for eight years (she'd been my first boss when I started with the Navy Department) and with whom I had recently become romantically involved, in a half-assed kind of way. I had waited years for something to give in the sexual tension between us, and now that it had, I had visions of our relationship proceeding into something a little more permanent. But, as my luck would have it, she had chosen this time to succumb to the blandishments of a Department of Energy lawyer and was spending a lot of time at his place in Arlington. They had just returned from two weeks in France, and I was not unaware of the fact that Ellen and I had only started planning this trip after I had heard of my friend's European plans. I sat in my room for a good deal of Sunday, imagining how nice it would have been to have her with me in Tobermory, sharing the quiet and the calm and my double bed. Her absence depressed me no end. She would have been greatly amused, I think, to learn that I was sitting in the middle of some of the most beautiful scenery on earth and pining away over her. Trying to shake the feeling, I wandered to the lounge and watched a bit of the Silverstone race on the color TV, a sure sign of enuii. It was the first time I'd seen TV in Britian (except in pubs), and I was impressed by the sharpness of the 625-line picture compared to the 525- line system we use in the US. I flipped around the dial to find something more interesting. There were four channels I could find, BBC 1; BBC 2; ITV, the independent station with commercials (I never thought I would have missed commercials, but I did); and BBC Scotland. This was the sum total of British television, and the channels seemed to be mostly occupied by reruns of American shows. The big TV news in the newspaper was the British premiere of Hill Street Blues that night. Unbelievably, ITV was trumpeting its "Classics of the '60s" series, which was showing Bewitched that night and I Dream of Jeannie later in the week. To hear the papers talk about it, this was a major cultural event, lost classics on the order of Eliot or Hemmingway being resurrected before our eyes. Eesh. I read in my room the rest of the afternoon, the clock tower tolling each hour as the sun passed high over the harbor and slipped behind the cliff. I had dinner at the Gannett restaurant, which along with the Back Brae and the Captain's Table comprised the entire restaurant population of Tobermory. The Gannett had pretentions of being a French restaurant, but served the same undistinguished food I encountered everywhere in Scotland except for Jackson's. On my way back to my room (a distance of about 200 feet), I stopped and looked at the sky over the now-refilled bay, a pale teal over the dark shadows cast by the cliff. The air was still and clean and salty, and I felt like an integral cog in Nature's machine. I took a bath and watched some of Hill Street Blues with the rest of the guests before returning to my room and finishing up Mary, Queen of Scots (they killed her!). I wrote a bit in my journal:
Around midnight I felt restless, still homesick and jealous, and I wandering into the dark deserted lounge. Out the front windows the only things visible were anchor lights swaying slowly with the tide. Across the dark waters, the black, looming mountains of the mainland were barely visible in the starlight, but I could feel them. If the Scottish scenery looked foreboding in the day, it was positively horrifying at night. Keeping the lights off, I flipped around the four TV channels and found ITV was showing The Birds. As the thick Hebredean night pressed against the windows, I watched Suzanne Pleshette get her eyes pecked out and Bodega Bay being reduced to rubble. It was kind of comforting, the room dancing in the flickering light from the set and the Henrietta Amelia Bird tower chiming the short, lonely hours of Monday morning, July 22.
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