09 11 07

SHIPPING NEWS

A maritime seasonal gauge at Ardtoe Jetty is the number of boats at moorings. In the summer there's a dozen or more small boats, a couple of which are working boats, bringing home in an infrequent way, lobsters & crabs. These boats, mostly pleasure craft, are brought ashore, one at a time, as the oak & aspen leaves fall around them. Today, there’s only three boats & two RIBs. The RIBs act as tenders to the two small fishing boats, OB 108 being one, & will ride the winter here. The only boat I've seen there with a name, Tarbaby, has gone.

Caledonian MacBrayne ferries from Mallaig to Eigg, Rum, Muck & Canna did not operate yesterday in the storms & squally winds.

Among the boats from Fraserburgh & Peterhead that put out: Valhalla, Tranquility, Ocean Pioneer, Contest, Courage, Accord, Achieve, Celestial Dawn, Arcane, Fear Not, Opportunus, Harvest Hope, Challenge, Fruitful Bough. One boat put out from Scrabster: Seagull.

Monks & witches landed everywhere.

08 11 07

A gale here & stronger wet squalls coming with northwesterlies. Rain’s dashed down against the slates but the strength of wind curling round Gobsheallach hill contrariwise pushes it upwards again to sing over the roof ridges. Rain takes turns with bouncing hail. The hound is unnerved by the squalls; facing them the air is forced into her long nose & sets her sneezing, behind & she’s forever looking over her shoulder to see what the noise back there is bringing. In a sheltery dip she puts up a sudden snipe from the bracken where neither of us saw it until it flew a few feet. It slid sideways in the wind & curved up slightly, in that deceptive way of snipe, before, blown, clipping a small birch trunk & then running into the heather & over the rock; more pheasant than snipe. She may be sheltering or may have been pushed down by the gale & injured a wing. If that’s the case, it’s the fox who’ll benefit tonight.
It won’t be the same fox, but the story is told of the fox trotting down the hillside here & along the road past the house over by. The man of the house sees the fox, bold as brass, & fearing for the hens, runs inside for maybe a gun, but comes out with only a hearth brush, which he lobs anyway at the fox. The fox, nonchalant, turns, throws a look, grabs the brush in his smirking teeth & trots on his way. When the farm is having a new shed built, two-three years later, a fallen trunk needs to be moved; in a den underneath, dry & in good condition is the red hearth brush. I think it’s in use to this day.

07 11 07

The wind’s blowing up from the west again & from the point above the ants that looks out over Eilean Dubh I can see ocean spume. Although the ants are in full hibernation, beside their small dwelling I find a pair of Scarlet Hoods. These mushrooms are blood red with a waxy feel & shine among dead bracken & deepsea green moss. They’re also edible, so into my hat they go for safe passage home. Then, with the easy optimism of an early find, the hound & I set off mushrooming in the woods.
The woods, like me, are not sure if autumn is coming or going. The oaks are browning & crisping their leaves, one tree at a time. It’s not age, nor yet exposure that causes this patchwork undressing, but perhaps an expression of health or of individuality, with here a mature tree in green leaf, there a partially clad elder & here a stripped fifty year old youngster. The taller hollies are vibrant with berries, a signifier of a bad winter, it’s said. Other hollies here seem close cropped, perhaps by deer; certainly they’re very low & appear to be layering into small groves, but no taller than mid calf. They have no berries, so maybe they are too young , or simply all male trees. The willows are still leaved. The Scots pines are direct from a Chinese mountains & waters landscape scroll, with their backdrop of soft-toothed hills. A signature is the final spindly foxglove, with its single purple bell.
It’s a joy to walk in these damp, duff-smelling moss clad woods; I think of Sweeny, exiled, mad, & his naked wanderings in the woods of Ireland & Britain: “Dense wood is my security, / the ivy has no edge.” in Trevor Joyce’s perfect translation. & “I occupy in alien woods / an old retreat; / in my familiar square of trees / shrewd centre of such intimate quincunx am I”. Quincunx, where he counts himself a tree. Indeed, it’s so silent here, that the slight sibilance of our exhalation is equal to the fall of sap in these oaks.
Of mushrooms, though, not a smell; save for a single psilocybe. I stravaig north & west; past the trunk where once was frosted chicken-of-the-woods, a dim memory in the skillet now, past the small stand of beech & deeper into the oaks, where, still serving my stomach, I take the consolation of a bite of wood sorrel (Sweeny: “Though you relish salted hams / and the fresh meat of ale-houses, / I would rather taste a spray of cress / in some zone exempt from grief.”) But the truth is, the sorrel’s tough & at the uttermost end of its season.
Once, I would have been pleased by the psilocybe, but with deep woods & scarlet hoods singing bloodred in my brain, now they stay unplucked. Hinds & stags have no such scruples, browsing through the woods. Nor the slugs. What does a slug experience, nibbling on Russula emetica: the Sickener? Hard to imagine a slug with vertigo, or seeing flashing lights, or even vomiting. These are the toxic effects on humans of this little cherry coloured mushroom. Fly agaric seems to be eaten with impunity by deer. It has, of course been taken for its psychotropic qualities over the ages in northern woods. I’ve eaten it raw and any psychotropic experience – the flashing lights, organic curlicues of Green-Mannishness & an overwhelming certitude (of what, is never asked) - is second only to uncontrollable shivering & prodigious, endless vomiting. Americans also assert, helpfully, “it fries the liver”. It has also been taken when passed through another’s liver. Some stories have it the liver of a deer, others the livers of the rich, (poor people being unable to afford the mushroom: but this doesn’t stand scrutiny, much; poor people need only go to the woods. But again, parenthetically, we might ask what else have the rich ever done for the piss-poor). Mrs Beeton might say: first catch your deer. & what would the rooted & branched stags experience in the way of apparition & delusion from psychotropic agarics? Safely through a liver, then, the urine may be drunk: result – intoxication without toxicity. I’ve met men who’ve drunk turps & even brasso & achieved a kind of Sweeny-state; they’d maybe drink urine too, if they were half the believers that our current ranks of neo-shamans & Latter Day Druids are. Sweeny was never half so deluded.
The hound looks at me – I’ve sat still long enough. All day, we’ve seen nothing moving but a wren; heard nothing but the running water of burns among boulders thick with moss, & now the lowing of cattle over the hill towards Polloch. It’s just two Scarlet Hoods then, with my supper eggs & potato. At the kitchen table, I’m eating & leafing through Dogen’s “Instructions to the Cook”: (“When you prepare food, never view the ingredients from some commonly held perspective, nor think about them only with your emotions.”) & out flutters a small clipping. It’s dated by me in pencil 12 11 05, almost precisely two years old. It’s from the Guardian, & in entirety reads: “Swedish papers reported the tale of the rampaging, drunken elks that threatened to attack an old people’s home. The old people were saved, but the elks were following well-documented behaviour that included attacks on joggers and cyclists after feasting on fermented apples.”

06 11 07

Smoke’s curling out from the top of the chimney; the day is grey, a shade somewhere between the meditating heron’s back & the negative-blackness of the cormorants barely skimming the salt water. The light begins to fail at four o’ clock on November days like this & a prolonged dusk adds to the sombreness of the day. Sea in the bay reflects nothing. There’s no break in cloud cover, only layerings of darker & dark. I’m taken by surprise, then, by the vivid yellow of the furze bushes to the west of the bay. As I warm my eyes with their glow, I’m distracted by the dartings of a wren, brown in her cave of spikes. Sheep graze furze in hard winters; I’m thinking it would need to be hard indeed to get past those inch long spines, which are in fact its leaves. It was once ground as cattle fodder & is still fed to horses who apparently delight in it. I’m lost in the quick jinking of the wren & the hardiness of this plant, when the rich almond smell of the flowers reaches my nose; it’s zesty & sends me straight back to childhood kitchens & marzipan. Warmed by memory, scent & sight, I stroll on, nonchalant in the cold wind.

05 11 07

In Scandinavia, the burning of birch has led to whole technologies of the wood-burning stove. Although it gives off a good heat, it’s no sooner lit than burned through. There’s plenty of it here, as in Scandinavia, but here also we have oak, the quintessential firewood, lasting long & burning hot. Firewood has been taken from these woods as long as people & woods have co-existed here, with folk still taking logs & brushwood, though nowadays most wood, if felled & if removed (rather than left for the slow energy burn of beetles, wasps & spiders & their kin) goes for other purposes. In other times, holly was said to burn like wax; plenty of ash was laid to a fire, burning as it does green or seasoned. I still start fires when I can with knuckles of ash, from faggots collected under the trees when storms crack off limbs & shower down twigs. Likewise the whitethorn, which burns hot & is said to bake the best bread. Rowan also burns hot, but though I’ve saved the trunk & arms of a storm-felled rowan for three seasons, I’m too superstitious to burn it; rowans guard a house, & although I sometimes believe this & sometimes don’t, it’s just not polite to burn your guardians.
The bonfire to celebrate Guy Fawkes (though there was no effigy of himself or the Pope) was a huge wigwam of scrap wood on the foreshore at Salen. I’ve no idea what types of wood it was made up of; though it’s a fair bet that most of it came from elsewhere. As far as I could tell, it was salvaged from demolitions & renovations of local houses; though there appeared to be the sides of an old shed, entire. It felt mean at a fine public festivity, of which there are too few left, to be thinking of the use all that wood could be put to. When the man from Salen said, almost in a whisper, that it was a shame to see all that heat wasted, I couldn’t but agree. But; & but, the anarchist, the peasant at the tumbrel, the child in me, was overjoyed to see the fire catch & take in the offshore wind, flames neither dancing nor licking, but drinking the wood. It was the sparks that danced in that elemental dance, retaining the shape of the hot updraughts, pushed this way & that like stars at the beginnings of time; that same dance of purest elation, driven by the same force, to be seen in shoaling fish & swarming bees & the swoop of starlings at dusk as they prepare to roost & pour into a tree or ivied wall.
It all made a fitting spree for the passing into winter, although it was past All Saints & All Souls Days. The flames, if you believe such things may have helped souls of the faithful attain their places elsewhere. Saints needed no such help, having probably already been roasted to ensure their sojourn in the clouds. With harps. (or is that angels?) Myths are fun. & the month is called samhain in Gaelic anyway, meaning harvest & surely a time to remember the dead & that we’re alive & with a fine crop.
The commemoration of a man who didn’t succeed in blowing a parliament to hell & which led to excesses of anti-Catholicism (why do I think of the Revd. Paisley & his refined sense of smell: “No pot-pourri here!”); the celebration of Halloween, itself a kind of Christian theft of the harvest hullabaloo of Samhain, at which cattle bones were thrown in fires to ensure prosperity for the coming year (indeed the word bonfire or bonefire is said by some to be a direct translation of the Gaelic tine cnamh), all makes for a mix where, like at the edges of the fire, at this fringe of the Sunart oakwoods, distinctions become blurred. Perhaps the more so because it’s damned cold & we’re outside the pub clutching our whisky glasses, but within sight of the still crackling blaze on the shore & its sense of redemption for those damned in the myths. Though I note that over the road the big house was once a Temperance Hotel, so maybe the whisky will lead us all to perdition. Or to laughter: the same place for an unbeliever.
The children, tumbling in the wet, leaping from the walls, clattering into shins & yelling, are there already.

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My prevailing sense of anarchy, the child in me at this bonfire, has echoes in an unpublished chronicle I’m privileged to read - A Highland Boyhood in Ardnamurchan, written by Angus Cameron, who grew up here & like most of his generation in the peninsula, had no English before he went to school. It was loaned to me by my neighbour, a cousin of his, but even though she & one of her sisters & another relative try to unravel the knot of kinship, it remains tied & unresolved as to what degree of cousin.He writes of Kentra in the years of the First World War: “As the year rolled round, Hallowe’en was looked forward to with great fervour, as a crowd of us would dress up to go out “guising” and get involved in a host of pranks and tricks. Boats and carts would be removed and replaced in somebody else’s croft or patch. The shoemaker (Allan) guarded his boat carefully, but as soon as he left for a cup of tea, we would have it shifted. One year we put it beside John George’s potato pit, exchanging it with John George’s cart, which we left on the shore.”

03 11 07

It’s the old way, still the way of most of the world, but it’s become remote & we try to banish it: to walk unaided by light in darkness. How apart & rare. Now ten days after full moon, four until a new moon. No houselights east or west. A little dim starlight as the west wind frays the lumbering mass of greyed cloud. To slowly feel the way with cautious feet. To feel alone in silence. To feel cold in dim mountain bulk, the absence of complication, world reduced to the slow & slowing unseen but present; like the presence of the liver & spleen in the body – unfelt but known of. Stags in the dark. Birds roosted. One step. & another

31 10 07

Five days after full moon & still there’s light through torn clouds greater than the starlight, looming Ben Resipole at the end of the road I’m walking. No lights but for these. All the steading lights are out across the bay; the stags are no longer moaning in Moidart or Laga. Late curlews waver their calls across the leaden sea at Eilean Dubh. The cold bites the bridge of my nose & I’m suddenly & unassailably happy & singing: the sign painted on the road bend is SLOW & oh I don’t hurry; I step slowly into the night’s mysteries & out across the turf under which a million infinitesimally small creatures lead their lives in the forever dark, through which owls & bats swoop thick & noiselessly & the slugs slowly curve their way. Fresh rain drops on my hatless head; my neighbours the mountains dream on.