HopScotch (Part I): Or, Why Anyone Who Does Not Go To the Scottish Islands Is Seriously Missing Out

Finals were four days of worry, a week and a half of hell, then OVER, thank goodness. In celebration that we had somehow not been crushed beneath the weight of fifteen reference books, hundreds of articles and the sheer stress of sitting in a room with 150 other students and writing for two hours (the results of which largely determined one's entire grade...!) Carly and I decided we would take a Scottish islands trip to celebrate. It was one of those last-minute, no-idea-how-we-got-all-of-that-together, impulse decisions that just work out brilliantly, and I am so, so glad we made it. It was one of the best choices I made all semester, and I will try to do justice to it here, in brief. Carly my darling my dear, this is for you. :)

PART ONE: LEWIS

• On Monday, May 16th, Carly and I got up early and walked to St. Andrew's bus station, our long shadows misshapen by the bulging of backpacks that dwarfed us with their bulk. Literally, I think Carly's backpack was bigger than she was.
• We bussed north though the Highlands, mountain-faces scarred with mining and clearly planted evergreen forests, birchwoods thick with bracken and more lambs than we could coo over flashing past through rainstreaked windows... We passed brilliantly yellow gorse blossoms, glaring against dark, damp leaves, illuminated by the stormlight over the Cairngorm mountains. 
• Brief stop in Inverness - we staggered, stiff-legged, into an Indian place to get curry, because what else does one eat in the UK? - then got back on the bus toward Ullapool ("Uh-lah-pool"). 
• An Australian man with ginger eyebrows and salt-and-pepper hair seated in front of us turned up his hearing aid, the better to hear the sweet-voiced, petite old lady from Nottinghamshire seated next to him. The two held one of the most courteous conversations it has ever been my pleasure to accidentally overhear  - the garrulous old Aussie made the tiny woman laugh, tinkling and clear, when he made some joke about the thousand thousand sheep we passed as we kept on, moving north and north. Carly and I began to feel that we had been on a bus forever, our muscles aching from what we were convinced was atrophy...
• Starved and tired, we clambered off the bus in Ullapool, got our ferry tickets, and decided to stretch our legs with a short walk. The town was tiny  - two streets, maybe three? - but starkly lovely and somehow charming, and it quickly became one of the most beautiful places on earth when we smelled the fish and chips shop. Ohhh fried food smells like ambrosia and nectar sometimes, if you are hungry enough, and especially when said fried food is chips with salt and tons of vinegar. It was utterly delicious.
• We stepped aside at the bottom of a narrow, steep set of stairs on the ferry to let some people down, and an elderly fellow pattered past, holding the railings tightly and calling out a breathless 'thank you!' He was closely followed by another older fellow, who caught sight of us, and our styrofoam container of chips, halfway down. His eyes lit up. "Ooo-ooh-ooh!" He exclaimed, and rattled down a little faster, stretching out an age-spotted hand for our chips. Laughing, we pulled them aside, (we were not about hand over our precious chips - we had barely tasted them yet!) and with a dramatic, disappointed sigh he left, eyes still twinkling. Ten minutes and many, many vinegar-soaked chips later, Carly and I were seated in the front of the boat on very swanky padded seats, with a dramatic view of the grey sea and green hills before us. We were just about to get under way when I heard someone calling, "Jane!" I turned around, and saw the same portly gentleman, with the pink cheeks and bright eyes, stomach straining comfortably against the buttons of his shirt. He was addressing a dignified lady with elegantly coiffed silver hair sitting just across from us. "Come my love, we are sitting on the other side now," he said, pointing to a nearby set of seats. He must have caught sight of us as well, for when she enquired why he preferred to move, he replied, "Well, a cheeky young lady wont give me any of her chips and they smell too nice..." Carly and I laughed and blushed, and as his wife gathered her things, we offered him the chips. Scanning our faces quickly, he smiled, and said, "You know, I think I will; just a little one, just a little one..." Wide old fingers deftly pulling out a greasy chip, he popped it in his mouth, hummed in pleasure, and said "Enjoy the rest of your trip girls!"  
• A loud, rowdy group of high-school-aged boys sitting just behind us had apparently come from a football (soccer) tournament, where they had won first place (or so said the voice over the speakers, crackling a congratulations). One fellow, probably no more than thirteen or so with a shock of red hair was showing off his medal to a round-faced woman in her forties, wearing a blue staff uniform. He didn't seem to want to hand it to her, though, and kept possessive hold of the ribbon. "I'm not goin' tae tak it," she laughed, as he squirmed, a bit embarrassed. Then she smiled, admiring the medal. "Well done you. Congratulations." He stood a bit straighter, grinning mischievously again. "Did you ever win a medal then?"he enquired a little impudently, and she raised her eyebrows, amused. "When I was your age I did, aye," she told him, "for dancin'. Highlan' dancin.'" Laughing at his look of surprise, she turned and made her way back down the stairs. "Cheeky!" hissed an older teammate, but the redheaded fellow only grinned carelessly and shoved his hands into the pockets of his trousers. 
• Bright sea, bright sky, lit by streaks of sun forcing its way through the clouds; dark, damp rock rising stubbornly from the waves, for hours. Even the islands gave out after a while, and still the boat kept on, out across the brilliant, wide sea. It felt like we were traveling to the ends of the earth, and when, more than three hours later we reached the isle of Lewis, it seemed as though we'd got there.
• Stornoway (or Steórnabhagh in Scottish Gaelic) with a population of about 9,000, is the 'Metropolis of the Western Isles,' apparently - meaning that there are five or six, instead of one, main streets, there is a Tesco and an old cannery, and there are cute touristy shops to be found, as well as at least five pubs; yet still, it is quite, quite small. More than the size, though, what made Stornoway feel so otherworldly, so incredibly distant from everywhere was a) the light (the sun was not fully set until 10 pm, and darkness fell still later, while sunrise was near to 3 am) and also b) the quiet. Silence lay like a comfortable blanket over the Hebrides, ruffled only by the undertones of sea and wind and the occasional gull, and even the rumble of passing cars did not seem to disturb the perpetual peaceful stillness for more than a moment. It is a beautiful place, with wooded hills to one side, clustered around an old castle, and brightly painted buildings lining the harbor. I want to come back to stay there longer - it is someplace I would want to live for a summer or two, when I become a fabulously successful writer and can do things like that... Hah. Our hostel was perfectly lovely, with heavy woodframe bunkbeds, a well stocked kitchen and dangerously comfortable couches in the living room. Our two roommates were extraordinary as well - so very much so, in fact, that they are receiving their own separate post (see part 1B). 
• With the exception of pubs, which seemed not to serve food that often, most restaurants seemed to close by about 9, which was unfortunately about when we began our hunt for dinner. Eventually we settled for Chinese take away, which was not nearly as sketchy as it could have been, and shockingly delicious. We sat and ate our egg rolls and hot-and-sour-pork by the water side, wondering how in the world the Cantonese immigrants running the restaurant had decided on the isle of Lewis when they were choosing a destination for their new life... and also pondering what on earth the Hebridean youth did with themselves in the evenings. We did not see any movie theaters, nor any real dance clubs, pubs seemed to mostly old-man pubs (not that that stopped us - we got whiskeys like proper old Scottish men, though minus the accents, alas) and we saw only one multi-purpose entertainment venue that might, we supposed, serve as the 'night-life' in Stornoway on the right evenings...  Still somewhat puzzled, we suddenly realized that the red car driving  - somewhat speedily - past had already gone by at least once. As had the blue pickup behind it. And the battered white car behind that. They honked and waved briefly at a little silver car and a heavy black SUV rushing past the other way, calling things out of opened windows, and within the next ten minutes they had all passed at least twice more, going in both directions. This, we decided, bemusedly, must be what the young hooligans of Lewis do at night - they drive. Hebridean Lowriders; word. We were amused. 
• The next day we ate breakfast in the hostel (toast and cereal and delicious jam) then headed out on our Hebridean tour – hopping on and off local busses all around northern Lewis. When we climbed onto the bus at the Stornoway station, the driver paused his conversation with the only other passenger long enough to wish us a good morning and give us our tickets, and once we had seated ourselves he continued chatting away animatedly. My goodness, I thought, I must be getting worse at deciphering the accents here – I can’t understand a word! It was then that I realized that what I was hearing was Scottish Gaelic, as were the voices on the BBC Alba Radio Nan Gaidheal crackling away as we pulled out of town and out into the moorlands. It is beautiful language - sing-song and melodic, full of soft sh-s and gh-s and all sorts of other sounds that lovely linguist Alice could categorize, but I can only admire. I was wishing desperately that I had continued my informal Gaelic lessons with my classmate, because even a simple 'good morning' and 'thank you' would have been nice... alas. As it was, I could only sit and smile as the peat bog rolled away in russet- and tan-swells on all sides, trading delighted glances with Carly, and reveling in the feeling of being somewhere foreign. Lewis had felt remote as soon as we arrived, but now it felt like a whole other world, and I loved it. 
• In the US, if something has been around for 100 years, we think it old and worth preserving. If it has been around two or three hundred years, it is typically enclosed in glass so that no one can mar its ancient surface by getting fingerprints on it, or by breathing too hard, and had we any prehistoric monuments, we would likely have them enveloped in plexiglass with a ten foot perimeter all round, or at least a set walkway like the one around Stonehenge... Therefore as American tourists, the experience of visiting the Callanish (Chalanais in Gaelic) standing stones was all the more incredible because there was none of the security that we would expect from a monument nearly 5000 years old. They are a little older than Stonehenge, and though they lack lintel stones the massive upright rocks are nearly as tall as those that stand on the Salisbury plains. What makes them truly incredible, however, is their utter isolation. There is no one around. A little winding path wends its way up from the car park, hidden by a grassy hill, and from the middle of the stones you can see, far away in the distance, a handful of small houses, but when Carly and I stood by the megalithic center stone, ringed by silent giants with the alignment stones stretching away in perfectly straight avenues to the west and east, we felt as though we were the last people on earth. The low stone fence was the only thing that prevented Lewis's many roving sheep from trotting all over the former burial ground; we trotted all over it instead, sitting in the shadow cast by the massive fifteen-foot center stone, and crouching low to the ground, trying to capture the silvery shapes of the monoliths against the pale sky. The rain and dew that coated the long grass had soaked through our shoes by the time we at cast our last awed glance at the circle and strode back down the hill to the little gift shop by the parking lot. After ringing up my post cards, the little old man working the till handed me a minute waxed paper bag that looked far smaller than the post-cards themselves, shook his head disconsolately, and told me, "If ye can get it in first try, you're hired." Somehow I did, and when I asked him quite seriously when I should start, he laughed a little, and offered me an apron. I truly wished I could have taken him up on that offer. 
• The bus that Carly and I took to the next stop on our Hebridean tour was even emptier than the previous one, and when the only other passenger, a little old lady, got off after a stop or two (on a stone bridge in the middle of now where, with nothing in sight but rolling hills and grass and peat and heather for miles... where was she going?!) we debated briefly whether we ought to feel unsafe with only ourselves and the terse grey-haired fellow who was currently taking the bus around the corners far too fast. Our concern escalated a little when we ended up pulled over on a side road, nothing visible but sheep and hills, and the driver got our and began to rummage around in the rear of the vehicle for what we were convinced was a murder weapon. No cell reception out that far, of course, and we laughed a little hysterically at how ridiculously easy it would be for a homicidal bus driver to off the silly American tourists and toss them in a boggy ditch with no one the wiser. Thankfully, our driver was no more a psychotic murderer than most bus drivers are, and we survived the trip intact. 
• The Carloway Blackhouse Village historical center is a collection of traditional island houses, made of dry stacked stone, thickly thatched and low, huddled around the rocky margin of a little bay. Although they were inhabited until the '70s, the design of such houses had not changed in centuries, and once again we had a disconcerting sense of timelessness as we walked past the low doorways and dangling rocks swaying gently on their strings (to hold the thatch down, apparently). Ducking inside one, we warmed our hands over a smoky peat fire, and were relishing the coziness of the small room after the damp chill of the out-of-doors when we heard a heavy thud-thud-thud, accompanied by a sounds similar to the noise four year olds make when gifted with a nice, bangable pot and a wooden spoon coming from the next room. We followed the noise, to find an old man with bright pink cheeks weaving smoky blue harris tweed on a loom the size of a tractor and twice as loud, and listened to him talking about the tradition of weaving on the islands and the colossal iron looms themselves ("After a while you get to know your machine, you get to respect it," he said. Nearly deafened by the racket made by the flying shuttle and slam of shifting warp strings, I believed him - I had a great deal of respect for the scary thing already). A documentary about collecting and drying peat was playing in another of the houses; the dvd player and projector seemed incongruous when mounted on a blacked, ancient beam as thick around as my waist, and the screen hung against the stone wall looked highly out of places. 
• We cooed over the adorable sheep, climbed a boggy little mountain, ruined our shoes, nearly lost my camera and phone (or I did, anyway – somehow it fell out of my purse as I was making record-breaking leaps over the aromatic muck) and were blown away when we reached the top – metaphorically by the amazing view of the cliffs and islands to the west, and almost literally by the stiff breeze. Nothing between us and the very northern tip of Newfoundland, we realized – we were only a degree or two south of Greenland, and level with Juneau, I later discovered, when I looked at the latitude on a map – and all I could think about, standing at the rocky tip of the world, was the endlessness of the grey sea crawling away forever from my feet. It was a heady feeling.  
• We might have made the 1:30 bus back to Stornoway if I hadn’t tossed my belongings out into the bog and subsequently had to retrieve them, but as it was we would have had to sprint for something like a mile through the ever increasing rain to even have a hope of making it. Instead, we happily made camp in the café, ordered tea and ate our tesco sandwiches on the sly, played cards, and made smalltalk with our waiter for what turned into almost an hour. Craig The Waiter was friendly, a former chef, new to Lewis (having lived in Harris, to the south,) and was expecting a baby, that day. When we asked aghast why on earth he was at work and not home with his wife who was due to go into labor at any moment, he shrugged a little and looked at us a bit oddly. “Bills have to be paid,” he said, as though the suggestion of leaving work was an extravagance in the extreme. He smiled a little, and tipped his hat farther back on his head as he cleared away the porcelain and napkins from one of the other tables, as outside the diminutive window beneath the thatch, the rain poured down.
• We went out again anyway after a while, and got thoroughly soaked walking down to the beach, by which point it almost didn’t matter how wet our feet got, since they clearly could not get any wetter. When we eventually caught the bus I am pretty sure I resembled nothing so much as a drowned rat, and an hour later, back in Stornoway, we were both still wet to the bone. A shower, a change of clothes, and spicy thai food helped chase the chill from our bones, and the evening turned beautiful as we left the restaurant and walked through the old Macleod castle grounds and gardens. The tumultuous sky was brilliantly illuminated by the descending sun, and the bright harbor buildings had the crisp, newly-washed look of a town after rain. We were sorry to think of leaving the next day.
• That morning, before we got on our bus, we went and saw some of the Lewis Chessmen – a set of carved Viking chess pieces from the 12^th century that were discovered on Lewis in the 19^th century. The age of them alone would make them fascinating, not to mention the romance of the Game of Kings, but what was really striking about them were the faces – each individual, and few showing the noble bravery of soldiers about to engage in battle: the King looks wide-eyed and peeved, the Queen world-weary and resigned (you can almost hear her saying, Men and their wars, at it again…), and one of the knights is shown biting his shield in suspense or fear. I was charmed. We spent quite a while examining the pieces, and wandering around the funny little museum which was a single room in the second story of what might once have been a schoolhouse. Seeing other pieces in the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh when we returned, and later some in the British Museum, was a bit like greeting old friends.
• We hauled our bags onto the bus, and bid a reluctant farewell to Stornoway and Lewis, heading south toward  the Tarbert ferry and the isle of Skye.