Celebrating Themeless Discontinuity

I should first apologize for the rushed essence of these entries. It’s difficult to be eloquent when you have pages upon pages of events to discuss, and I plan to be such when I actually sit down to write my ever-on-the-horizon travel novel. But in a blog, it’s always easier to make a small event into a poem, and leave the large happenings for a brisk ramble down the main highway of the English language.

Thus, I begin.

We made it through the night, me, barely so. I have never camped in the rain nestled within a blood-thirsty hoard of vampirous gnats tucked next to a creek prone to flash-flooding, so I spent the whole night with wide eyes and my blanket pulled to my chin in anticipation. When morning came, do did the sun, which the proceeded to boil the water around the tent, making a very passable sauna. So, we get up. Turns out, mornings in Glen Rosa are gorgeous, sunny and breezy and virtually midge-free because of this auspicious combination.

So after a brisk morning of face washing, chomping on Irish brown soda bread, and marveling at the stark contrasts between this moment and all of last night, we pack up some stuff for the day and make our way to the bus stop a mile or so down the road. As we hiked out of the campsite, a delightful lady who lived in one of the picturesque farmhouses on the road stopped to offer us a ride, which is totally fabulous. Something great about small towns and small islands with populations less than 5000… free rides! So we dropped us at the bus, and we hopped aboard for a journey west to find 6000-year-old standing stones in Machrie Moor.

After as much traveling as I’ve done, I’ve come to learn that the best way to get somewhere on a bus: ask the bus driver. The jolly gentleman informs us that we actually missed the best bus to get to the stones, but that he’ll drop us off at the entrance to Bridge Farm, where we could just cross the fields to get there. “It’s a bit marshy, though, so you better have good footwear.” And then he scoffed at Jonmikel’s Tivas, which, ironically, would prove to be the better choice for marshy crossings. Then he asked, almost as an afterthought, “Where ya from?” “The US.” Standard response. “Well, what part?” “Montana?” “Ahhh Cowboy country! This should be no problem!” From then on, we were emphatically known as “Montana Folk” by bus drivers. I guess they don’t get too many of us out this way.

After a cheery and scenic 20 minutes on the bus, the driver pulls to the side, calls out, “Hey Montana Folk!” We grab our stuff and head up front, where he proceeds to tell us that this is where we could get off, but that his bus turns north after his half-hour break in Blackwaterfoot (the end of the road for this service) and that he’d be more than happy to drop us off at the easy way, if we’d like. We reply that we’re looking for a morning adventure, to which he shakes his head in disbelief. “Well, here you are. You just head straight out that way,” a wave and a point in a general direction, “and you should see them soon. Just walk straight there.” We thank him and hop off.

One thing I’ll give the British: the UK Right of Way laws are pretty neat, if a bit freaky for my American-trained, Do Not Enter mind. You can pretty much walk anywhere as long as you don’t bother livestock or destroy structures. So we walk across somebody’s farm. Literally. I bah at the sheep and moo at the cows and think to myself, “I bet they hate tourists.” We stop and have a photoshoot of some old, rusty farm equipment in what little sun we can muster. We tramp over barbed-wire fences and through marshy ground and through what can honestly be called a swamp. (Insert clever Fire Swamp allusion here: No, we didn’t see any ROUSes, though I did almost have to be rescued from a pit of quicksand….) I get SOAKING wet, in my fancy hiking boots, and Jonmikel frolicked free in his Teva sandals… We even found a fabulous spot of bog that had formed a fairly solid layer of moss on top of a slimy layer of water. So what do we do? Oh yeah, we stand on the moss about 10 feet apart and I would jump up and down, and watch Jonmikel bounce up and down as I jumped, and then we’d switch. I kept thinking of my dad, and how much he would love the science of it all… ☺ It was pretty wild.

Then, after much trial and tribulation, we find ancient standing stones! Acres of them, surrounded by acres of stone circles and hut circles and postholes. The archaeologist in me quivered with excitement. As per usual, the interpretation of the site left much to be interpreted, especially for someone with archaeological training. I wanted to know exactly what evidence they had that people did or did not live here or if it was just a worship site; I wanted to see an actual excavation of a posthole, because I have no idea what a postmold would look like in a bog; I wanted to see what kind of tool kit they used here; I wanted to dig up the thousands of years of history that they predicted is buried under peat and marsh. But alas, I had to survive on just simple, layman’s explanations. But the site was pretty cool. It was HUGE, stretched from ocean to mountain, and contained an uncountable amount of stone henges and circles and the remains of wooden structures. I guess standing stones in Scotland are like castles in Ireland… everyone’s got one. We imagine them to be where Celts conducted sacrifices to the ancient gods of midgies.

Incidentally, the path we were supposed to take coming in was WAY easier than the path we actually took. Go figure. We head out and walk to Machrie, which is nothing more than a seaside golf course and a café. We have a while to go before the next bus shuffles by, so we stop for lunch and then lay out in the sun to air out my socks. When the bus comes, we flag it down (how cool and country-bumpkin is that??) and hope on, and (it being 12 minutes late) we miss our next connection to the South Island, so we putz around Blackwaterfoot for two hours. We stride along the beach, taking in the coy Scottish sunlight and poking at seaweed and beached jellyfish and playing in ruined sandcastles. There was a definite air of Holiday in this town, with things moving slowly and parents only half watching their children play in the sand and the ocean and the wind breezing through the beachside fields of grasses and grains and little yellow and purple flowers. There’s only one hotel in town, and only one real bar, and a slew of B&Bs and guest houses and self-catering places, creating a quaint, country atmosphere, a relaxing seaside getaway where al you do is nothing.

We catch the next and last bus that goes around the north of the island, and we pass through mountains and valleys and around waterfalls and harbors. It’s a beautiful ride, made queasy by the twists and turns and the suicidal driving style of the native bus driver. It’s made slightly worse, also, when we hit Lochranza, a popular destination as well as the home of the local Distillery, when hoards of people pile on the bus in order to reach the last ferry back to the mainland. They packed us on like slime eels in a barrel (OK, I saw that on Dirty Jobs once; it’s a pretty accurate description when you think of all the hiking and sweating people do in the island), and I was pretty sure the brakes on the bus were going to give out on the way down the hill, or at the very least we would bottom out and our numbers would be thinned by a gaping hole in the floor of the bus. But we all made it, and on time, too, and our numbers piled out and mish-moshed onto the ferry. As for Jonmikel and I, we headed to the local co-op to buy some meat-type items and a single-use grill (for only 5 pounds!); we planned to brave the midgies and cook outside. If nothing else, the grill proved to be worth its weight in gold for its ability to drive away the flying jaws with its woodsy smoke. A number of 20-something Eastern Europeans look ready to cry as they desperately try to sit outside and enjoy the nice weather. They, however, have a large, living-room sized tent, into which they can retreat and still have room to breath. We coat ourselves in smoke, burn a few wet branches to maintain a smoky film around our tent, and then snuggle into bed as the sun sets.

With the exception of the one of me, these are all some shots I took on that first full day... we had so many good ones....