A Story of Scotland

I wrote this for an assignment, to tell our own "Story of Scotland" having completed the trip.  It highlights the most important parts of the trip, so I thought I’d just post it in here.

            I did not feel anything when we landed in

Edinburgh .  The idea of Scotland, so close for so long, brought up nothing in me upon our arrival.  The landscape, greens and grays, did not seem beautiful; the air didn’t smell any different from

London ; I had no sense of wonder, no feeling of homecoming.  Home has always been a strange concept for me.  I’ve spent almost my whole life either as an Englishman in America or an American in England – everywhere I go, the natives view me as an outsider.  Everywhere I go, I have the wrong accent, the wrong manners, the wrong expectations – if you are built from two cultures, you must always stand slightly to the side of both.  The blessing in this is that anyplace where I find myself in the stones can be home.  I expected that, when I landed in

Edinburgh , never having seen the city before but already in love with the country, I would feel that I had found home.  But when we landed, I felt nothing.

 

 

            I touch the stones of the

Nelson

Monument, looking for that sense of something special.  I love to touch things in passing, especially old things, especially stone things – they hold their history inside.  I am back in Scotland and I am desperate to find something familiar, something to confirm my soul’s certainty that this is a place I belong.  But the Monument gives me nothing, and the stones are just stone.

            I can see the whole city below us.  It doesn’t even seem beautiful.  Maybe it’s the clouds, maybe it’s the twenty-seven hours I’ve spent in transit, maybe it’s my nervousness that I will not make a single friend in our whole ten days.  Maybe it’s not Scotland, maybe I’m just not ready, the soul-searing beauty that I’m looking for is here, it’s me that’s not.

All the way to the sea is dark and cloudy

Edinburgh, giving me nothing.

 

            The stone rests behind glass, almost at eye-level to me.  The room is dark, and crowded.  The voices around me speak in languages I don’t understand and accents I don’t recognize.  The display is impressive, in a we’ve-been-anticipating-this sort of way, in a way that says this-is-something-important.  In no way does it live up to expectations.  After all the stories, the exhibitions, the taking of notes and the sudden understanding of references, it is only some jewels and a rock.

            The rest of the castle is beautiful, in the way of castles.  The view, too, is impressive.  Now that I have had more sleep, the city doesn’t seem so dull – it begins to look like a maze of age and modernity, juxtaposed awkwardly and mixed at random.  Not a comfortable place, but certainly not dull.  I wish I could erase the 20th century from this ancient place and see how it was when the men pictured in the statues knew it.  I wonder if it would then be familiar to me as well.

 

We all file down the narrow passage into the close.  Everyone has been eyeing the tiny alleys nervously for the last two days – in the States, you’d be a fool to go anywhere near such places.  But today, we are led down one after another, and shown the little islets at their ends, little circles of homes that draw sunlight toward themselves and all look out on one another and on the clean, empty pavements below.  I want to touch the ground, but I am afraid to look foolish.  I look at the flats around me, the decorations hung by each, the stairs up to the doors; I look at the windows, and wonder who lives inside.  The realization goes through me like electricity – I could live in such a place.  I could spend my life in a place like this, this gray city of stone and steep streets and small passages that will not admit cars.  I could come home every night to a little sphere that belonged just to my neighbors and me, a little enclosure that was clean and safe and with lights in the windows to greet me, and never want to leave.<span style="mso-spacerun:

yes”>  The discovery is sudden.  Abruptly, I find what I am looking for.

            I want to touch the ground.

 

            It is beginning to get dark and I am lost.  I recognize nothing and I cannot even find the

Clyde .  I feel sure that I knew the area by the Green, that I could wander those streets and find the bridge I have seen, that I could find the bookstore I visited with my father and the old station and never lose my sense of where the river is.  But this part of the city, this newer part, torn down and rebuilt, I do not know.  The last time I was in Glasgow, the feeling that I had come home was overwhelming; the streets knew my feet and the

Clyde knew my name.  It was raining that day, and the city was beautiful, and I never wanted to leave.  Today it is raining as well, but it is not beautiful, and I am searching and searching for something that just isn’t there.  I remember the people as the friendliest I had met, and now people see me turning my map over and over and do not pause to ask if I need help.  It is not the same city I visited three years ago, and I don’t belong here.  Later, I will ask my father if the bridge was in the same area as the school, and he will tell me no, it was nowhere near, and I will feel much better, and my confidence in my soul’s self-knowledge will return.  But for tonight, all I know is that I thought I knew my way around

Glasgow, and I was wrong.

 

            The hills rise around us, up and out and up some more, and the wind supports our backs.  Each new height reveals different contours of the land, and with each step I feel more and more free.  It’s as though the wind is blowing all the troubles off my shoulders and all the needs off my back, I have everything in the world that is worth anything and I am complete.  We climb a little closer to the sky and a view of the city opens up before us, and every cell in my body begins to hum. 

Edinburgh spreads out below, and I feel that I am looking at my city.  I am inexplicably proud of how beautiful it is.

            We stop to rest and I throw myself into the springy grasses, sighing into the ground.  The wind sweeps over me and cools my face.  I turn my head to the side and look across the hill at the purple-brown shrubs all around – my first view of Scottish heather.  I feel real, and simple.  I feel alive.

            There is something about Scotland that brings me to life.

 

            There is laughter and conversation, but not as much as I have come to expect in pubs.  I sit, surrounded by strangers who all know each other, and I wonder if I ought to buy a drink for the privilege of sitting in this room and listening to the music.  I am as near as I can get to the musicians, a table of them, playing fiddles, drums, guitars, bagpipes.  They come and go and are replaced by new musicians.  It is not a performance so much as a jam session, and the music they are making is dancing through the air and setting feet to tapping the floor, hands to tapping knees, glasses to tapping the bar.  Most people seem to be ignoring it, but their bodies don’t lie, and I can see the drums shaking them alive and the fiddles lifting them.  This is music with power.  It raises an old, palsied woman to her feet and sets her bouncing; it draws businessmen in off the street.  It has been around for a long, long time, and it has the momentum of all its years behind it.

            I look over my shoulder and there are four men standing there whom I did not see come in – three in suits and one in a kilt and full

Highland regalia.  They stand and self-consciously ignore the pulse in the room for as long as they can, and then, abruptly, the man in the kilt hands off his drink, clasps his wrists behind his back, and begins to dance.  He is in perfect step with the beat, a practiced set of motions, toe-touches and hops and small turns.  It is the complete image of Scottish tradition, the image we have all come to discount over the last week, stirring and bittersweet.

The bagpiper, about my age, keeps catching my eyes and smiling. 

I smile back, and sit for hours and love his music, the melodies and the rhythms, the jigs and the ballads and the reels.  This music was the first thing I discovered of Scotland

, years ago, and I find in it a home for my soul.

 

I watched the landscape go by as we drove south for England with hungry eyes.  I didn’t want to miss a minute of

, I didn’t want to miss a mile.  It was actually sunny, at least in patches, and the sun just made the glory of the country shine brighter.  I pulled out a postcard I had bought at the castle, an aerial view of the city of

Edinburgh , and I could not believe that the first time I looked on this city I did not think it was beautiful.

We drove through a lovely little town, picturesque, like something out of a painting.  I wondered what town it was, what people lived there, what they did with their lives in a pretty, quiet place like that.  About five minutes after we passed the town, for no reason at all, I began to cry.  Another ten minutes later, we were told that, fifteen minutes earlier, we had crossed the border out of Scotland and into England.

I watched the English countryside roll by and wondered whether I would feel in England the way I had felt in Scotland.  I remembered how I had belonged in

Edinburgh, how I had fallen in love with the city and the country and how natural it all felt.  I remembered how the Scots talked about the English, and how I could never tell a Scot that I was born in

London.  Another place that, no matter how deep my love, I will always stand on the outside.  Another place that I can always go back to.  A place I want to be part of forever.  Maybe someday I will follow my every instinct and drop everything to live in Scotland.

I watched England out the window as it gradually shifted from foreign territory to another place I call home.