Chapter 2: Edinburgh, whump-whump
Where I discover that surroundings matter and I’m no longer 25.
In a crack in the stone pedestal of St. Andrew’s statue in the center of Edinburgh, a scrawny weed flowers defiantly and pigeon poop paints the stone white. No one seems to mind. Quintessentially Edinburgh.
If Edinburgh were a person, she’d be an exhausted housewife whose husband spends more time at the pub and whose kids are about to turn into truants. Edinburgh is unnoticed, unpolished, unaware of itself, resigned, gray, stark, scrappy, dour. Glum.
Enough to quickly wipe off the insufferable joie de vivre that was me in France.
We’d arrived from sun-streaked Marseille in a cold rain. Different language, different weather, different sky. Marseille had been a bust. Our decidedly two-star hotel was right next door to a four-star wonder, which just served to rub it in. While ours had a Euro-lobby with a former rental car agency vibe, the four-star’s lobby was right out of a 1920s murder mystery, all glam and noir.
Marseille overall was a lot like our lobby — the Des Moines of France, with a whiff of danger. The waiters in the uninspired tourist spots selling mussels and bouillabaisse have a hard edge to them, surly without the Frenchiness. It’s not a stretch to imagine petty drug deals by small-time wannabes in its narrow stairways leading down to the wharf.
And yet for some reason, I was possessed with the need to try the touristy bouillabaisse. It’s one of those dishes you must eat once in your lifetime, I tell Rex. Tres French. Turns out you only need to eat it once, or never.
Never would work, too.
It tasted like the afterlife of vomit.
Our restaurant was blue-kitchen kitsch. I would not have been surprised had the waiter been wearing a beret and blue-striped t-shirt. A young Chinese couple next to us tried hard to look worldly as the young man ordered a bottle of wine. It was us, thirty years ago minus a collapsing tower of eggs that our backpack had just toppled in a Paris fromagerie.
The supercilious waiter began an elaborate procession of bowls and tiny toasts and more bowls, and finally a gravy boat of broth poured with flourish — all of which was accomplished without even a wink of eye contact. I tucked in my napkin anxious to taste what the world so loves.
And then had to force myself not to spit it out.
It tasted like the afterlife of vomit. All around me people were slurping it up, and a waiter would reappear and refill their bowls with more broth. They were better men than I.
Ah Chardon, where art thou and your delicate crème fraiche cheesecake?
Alas, from the sun of Provence to the dour gray stone of Edinburgh is a shock. The Easy Jet flight was a harbinger. A cement-block waiting room in an isolated hangar, flight attendants in ill-fitting uniforms gapping at the chest, bleary-eyed partiers boarding the early morning leg home, vacation over.
The flight is a blessedly short hop given the size of the seat and the persistent dripping from the cabin door onto Rex’s lap. Ears popping on the descent, the flight attendants strapped in and gossiping, a man rushes up the aisle.
A collective gasp. A collective thought: “This is it, we’re going to die.”
The flight attendants unstrap, ready to engage like a gunslinger in an old Western. “Get back to your seat, sir. We are landing, sir.”
He keeps coming. He is pointing to the bathroom.
“Sir, the bathroom is locked for landing. Return to your seat.”
I consider whether to trip him but my timid half opts to cower in my car seat instead.
The second attendant picks up the captain’s phone. I consider whether to trip him but my timid half opts to cower in my car seat instead. He pauses, with that look of a third grade boy right after lunch recess in the heat. And then he vomits. And us with front row seats to the carnival.
Like I said, a harbinger.
Nonetheless, we arrive as always heady with the experience of new. A cab takes us to Leith and our home.
“Are you sure,” the driver asks?
“Yes,” I reassure him. “Airbnb,” I say, feeling young and hip. “We’re staying for a month.”
“A month, really? Are you going to the country then?”
“No,” I say, “Just Edinburgh. We might take a day trip,” I add, feeling suddenly as if perhaps I should have done more research.
“A month in the city, okaaaay then, as you like,” he brogued.
Definitely more research.
The cabbie drops us in front of a tall cast-iron gate rimming a parking lot in front of what looks like a school building.
“This is it, huh? Do you want to double-check that address?” he adds before putting the cab in park. He’s being extra solicitous to us gray-hairs.
“Giles Street, yep, this is it,” I say, half hoping it’s wrong.
The gate is locked, armed with a silver-keyed punch-pad like you see on psyche wards. I tap in the numbers that our Airbnb “host” had texted us as the cabbie drives away. The gate I quickly gather is not yet a decorative element like you see in posh streets in Manhattan or Chicago. Quite the opposite. The gate is an assurance created by real estate agents to lure gentrifiers like us to the neighborhood.
As Rex heaves open the heavy gate, a lanky young man in droopy jeans and a hoodie is kicking in the Amazon lockers in an empty lot near a shopping strip next door. Three teenagers egg him on.
Clearly Leith, that Edinburgh neighborhood where “Trainspotting” was filmed, has not yet matched the breathless marketing descriptions. No worries, I think as I keep an eye on the young men. I managed to survive Chicago before it was safe for suburbanites. This is a cinch.
And our apartment has all the potential to be very cool. Carved out of an old schoolhouse, its hallways have preserved the pebbled cement and worn marble steps of elementary schools the globe over, along with a few modern urban hipster talismans like iron railings and Edison bulbs. Walking down the long hallway I half expect to see a janitor sprinkling absorbent cat litter on a puddle of recess-induced vomit that was practically a daily occurrence in my elementary school.
My new first rule for choosing Airbnb: never rent from a twenty-something guy.
Ah but potential is one thing. Execution is quite another.
We open the door to what can only be called “spartan meets dorm room.” I recall the owner’s chipper bio: “Hi, I’m Philip. I’m an American PhD school student who plays bagpipes.”
I should have known better.
The living room couch is a lumpy futon. The last time I sat on a futon-as-couch was when I was 23 and a friend “found” one off the back end of a delivery truck for me. This one is from Ikea, along with the folding slat-wood chairs and spindly table for two. The kitchen cupboards have an overabundance of whiskeys and a curry spices. No wine glasses. No microwave. No coffee maker. No TV. No toaster. No hair dryer. On the window ledge a crowbar for aid in opening.
Trying to remain upbeat, I unpack and take a shower. The showerhead is at eye level and the faucet has no bearing on temperature, which at the moment is running stone cold.
And now scalding.
I lunge to the opposite end until it decides to calm down. It’s like fussing with a TV antenna. Just when you’re burrowing under the covers again having fixed it, the screen pixelates like cracking ice.
Except now you’re naked and cold.
While standing at the other end waiting for the water to cool, I scrape my fingernail over the tile, which I assumed was simply stained from decades of use. The snail trail from my fingernail told me otherwise.
Mildew would be the kindest assumption. I now need a shower from my shower.
Dried off, I find a bottle of “one cleaner, all uses” (of course) and begin to scour the tub like a frenzied demon. A car disc grinder and safety glasses wouldn’t not be called for. The rubber flange on the shower door is so beyond help that I strip it off and throw it away.
My new first rule for choosing Airbnb: never rent from a twenty-something guy.
We are still too delirious about travel to let this dorm room get to us. Out we go to explore the neighborhood. We have stopped to check our directions when a woman on her way home from work stops to help.
“Where do you want to go?” she asks in a thick lilting brogue.
“To the riverfront,” I say. “We read it had some good restaurants.”
“Indeed,” she says. “Well, you have two choices. You can take the scenic route or you can go through the ‘hood. The hood is more direct.”
“The hood is fine,” I say, knowing exactly what she is implying: Are you gentrifying scaredy-cats or do you actually want to integrate into the neighborhood? I am no scaredy-cat.
And yet.
I feel myself tense ever so slightly as we walk under a darkened passage between two public housing high-rises. Such is the work of decades of propaganda that I can identify public housing and fear it in ten seconds flat. I remember with shame the impulse to roll up the windows and lock the doors as I drove down Division Street past “the projects” of Cabrini Green on a summer day. And I write about poverty and affordable housing for a living.
The yard is empty, the park across the street empty too. No assaults. No terrorizers. We cut across it to follow the winding cobblestone streets to the riverfront.
This I also recognize: A row of restaurants, tasteful logos in brown and gold above doorways, the young and well-paid spilling onto the sidewalks, their backs to the council flats with the laundry drying on the balcony. Inside, wood tables atop subway tiled floors. Big windows, beams above. A maître de behind a podium with a complicated computer seating chart, tap, tap, tapping at the screen with his pen. He looks up as we enter.
“Reservation?”
Empty tables behind him.
“No,” I say, “just hoping for a bite to eat.”
“Of course.” Fake smile. Tap, tap, tap. Pause. Tap, tap, tap. “Follow me.”
He grabs two menus the weight of the Ten Commandments and leads us through the nearly empty restaurant to the far table. A long bar is backlit with high-end bottles, its well lined with lemons, sugar cubes, herbs, and all the other chemistry-experiment accouterments of today’s craft cocktail scene. Bearded bartenders, very serious, mix the drinks. Basil is involved. It’s both disappointing and comforting.
After dinner as the sound level ratchets up a few or ten decibels we decide to move to a pub with jazz. Old school. Intimate, a proper pub with a trio tucked in the corner by the window playing the standards. The bartender — a tall slender bald man in his fifties with eye-glasses pinned to his head — is an old-school master. Soothing brogue, unruffled manner, aproned, drying the glasses with a white towel — flick, flick, flick of the wrist — while surveying his field. No basil in sight. The patter of people talking, jazz playing, the espresso machine in full action as the night progresses and diners in the attached room finish their meals.
Next to us at the bar stands a forty-something man, shaved head, compact, the Daily Scotsman spread out on the bar in front of him and a Guinness on the side. He rolls a cigarette with deliberate care and steps outside to smoke it, leaving his tabloid, money, and Guinness on the bar. The bartender sets a shot of whiskey next to the man’s Guinness. The band plays Bewitched, a favorite. We order another. On his return, the man eyes us, nods, says something in a thick accent that I cannot discern above the din. I smile. He raises an eyebrow.
“Where you from, then?” he asks. Banter commenced. The entire island is adept at conversation. The pattern, the same everywhere, begins with a smart-aleck comment or joke to gauge a reaction, then a question, not too prying but enough to show they’ve invested.
“Americans, eh?” He nods. “So what the fuck is going on with this arse Trump?
We laugh. “Good question,” Rex says. What, after all, is there to say?
We learn he’s from London, working construction in Edinburgh. Has been for nearly a decade.
“It’s like the bloody Tories,” he says, returning to politics. “Out of touch. But, you know what? I supported Brexit. I’m not racist, but I want things the way they were.” What that means is far too explosive a topic for a nice bar room chat.
The windows have steamed up against the night chill. The espresso hisses. The piano player takes on a solo. And then, cutting through the warmth like a Lake Michigan wind is an American voice.
He excuses himself for another smoke. The windows have steamed up against the night chill. The espresso hisses. The piano player takes on a solo. And then, cutting through the warmth like a Lake Michigan wind is an American voice holding court in the corner. A woman, grating. Fran Drescher, I wonder?
She is explaining Obamacare to the table. She doesn’t like it. At. all. She has her facts wrong to boot, a preview of the “fact-free” world that is to come. I know because I use Obamacare. I turn around to put a face to this Republican. She is young — in her thirties. Why am I shocked at that? Beautiful too. Five men surround her in an adoring semi-circle They laugh, they frown on cue. Puppies. She is the representative of America in this bar, and she has it all wrong. But, I think as I turn back to the bartender polishing glasses, I do not care. I’m not even sure it is a country worth defending at this point. May my father, who fought at Guadalcanal and my two brothers-in-law who fought in Vietnam forgive me from their graves.
How often have I done that, I wonder? Represent my country. And what impressions do I leave? Do I fit “the profile”? Loud, fat, clueless? It is a peculiar bane of the traveler, to represent. We have to put our best foot forward despite the jet lag and cultural confusion. Soccer hoodlums, drunk spring-breakers, arrogant big spenders — all they want to do is have a little fun on a short vacation and they end up representing their nation in a humiliating video that sweeps the Internet.
How often have I done that, I wonder? Represent my country. And what impressions do I leave?
Such haughty ridicule was once confined to the upper classes turning their posh noses up at the hordes of newly minted middle-class travelers who didn’t yet get it that they were supposed to talk softly and not gush at things. But now it’s a sport. And we travelers are the taxidermy mounted on the wall. “She’s an American, you know,” as they click “share.” “They’re French, enough said.” “Third World,” with a knowing shrug. And yet they’re just one little person in a big country, suddenly required to be the stand-in for a national character. It’s the same as seeing one city or town in a country and claiming to have “done” Sri Lanka or Germany.
Not by a long shot, pal.
So what conceits, I wonder, have I adopted about the Scots based on a few days in Leith? Movies and books have been my touchstones mostly. “Breaking the Waves” — Oof. Dour Protestant repression. “Trainspotting” (the toilet scene!)? Ian Rankin — hard-drinking curmudgeon cop on the tough streets of Edinburgh? Perhaps I am not allowing this country to reveal itself to me because I’ve already decided who it is. The oppressive monotony of its buildings, its dingy, smooty grayness, its gloomy streets hemmed in by walls of stone. Repression, crime syndicates, grumpy people. Guilty. I promise myself to do better.
We stay for another set and then pay up. A light fog is setting, our footfalls the only sound as we walk down a cobble-stone lane in the dark back to our dorm room. Very Jack the Ripper.
The next morning, after prying open the windows with the crowbar to combat the heat steaming out from the radiator we cannot turn off, we head out for provisions. On the bus, a homely young girl with an enormous backpack gets on looking lost, panicked. A strapping Scot is standing upfront on the crowded bus. She makes a beeline to him. “I think I’m on the wrong bus,” she blurts out to this new father figure.
“Where you going?” he asks. Her lip tremors. She answers. He turns to bus and yells out to the riders, “Anyone going past Ferry Road?”
No answer.
“Really? No one?”
A man pipes up, guilty: “I’m getting off just short.”
A woman chimes in, “I’m going right there.”
“Right then,” the big strapper bellows. “You can give this young lass a lift to her stop.”
“Sure enough,” the woman yells from the back.
Edinburgh is like that, too: genuine.
Later in the week, Todd tells us his version. He’s walking home from the store near their place, far from ours. On the street, an old man is hunched over, grabbing onto the fence, breathing hard, head down. A car slows. The window rolls down. Todd speeds up in a grip of alarm. “Check on him, mate” the driver yells to Todd, pointing to the old duffer. Todd does. All is okay. Driver drives on.
Or one night, off to dinner, we decide to try the pub on the corner. It’s an old man dive, garishly lit, reeking of smoke, hardened souls. We walk in, and then promptly out. Outside, standing in the alcove avoiding the rain, a man with a purple birthmark on his face eyes us and says knowingly, “You weren’t long.”
“No food,” I say as a cover. I brace for the come-back, ”Not up for slumming it, then, are you?” Or worse.
“Aye, well let me think,” he brightens. His eyes bobble around in his head as he thinks. He thinks for quite a while. Bobble, bobble. “Baker’s Arms has a good pie, and should be still open.” This place grows on you.
After buying ourselves wine glasses and a toaster at an overly lit mall with enormous, empty stores, we opt for some culture. The history museum. There, reading an abbreviated history of the Scottish kings and queens, I gain a few insight into the Scots.
James I, dies in the sewer. Loved a good game of tennis, but hated chasing errant balls that flew over the moat. Orders the moat (aka sewer) covered. Fast forward to an assassination attempt. While the Kings guards hold the assassins at bay, the king escapes out the back door, down the get-away tunnel, and into the moat. But it’s covered… death by sewer.
James II. Dies from shrapnel from his own backfiring cannon.
James III. Falls off his horse and dies, in battle with his own teenaged son — every teenaged son’s fantasy.
James IV. Snatches defeat from the jaws of victory. Rallies the Scotts and brings 30,000 men to the border of England for a brawl. 10,000 English show up. Scotts even have the high ground. And yet, things somehow go awry, nearly all the Scots are massacred, nobility decimated. James dies from wounds — or maybe he just didn’t want to go home and face that.
James V. Dies when his wife gives birth to a girl.
Mary Queen of Scots: You know how that one ends. Elizabeth, her second cousin, beheads her.
I begin to understand them a wee bit better now.
A semblance of daily routine returns: We order a pizza and watch “The Americans” — so much for my turned leaf. We go to the bookstore to stock up. We top up our transit cards. I get a ten-punch bonus card at my declared-favorite coffee shop. Life is coming down to earth.
And yet, not.
Living in someone else’s home in someone else’s city, the trappings that create our beloved habits have disappeared: magazine subscriptions, your desk, your sense of ownership of a neighborhood, your furniture. Instead, I am trying to gain membership in a city I only know from books and movies. Is that even possible when I’m not invested enough to even have summer clothes? It’s an odd position — this in-between-ness. Not home but not on vacation. Not my city but I have a bus card, a barista recognizes me, and I have joined a gym for a month. To swim.
The pool I joined in Leith a few blocks from our apartment is from the Victorian era, all subway tile and worn wood, water’s reflection dancing on the barrel tiled ceiling. Swimmers are an identifiable type. All shapes and sizes, hardy sorts, laughing and chatting, tugging down their bras rolling up against damp skin. Not caring about their looks, just fine going home with wet hair and stopping at the store on the way, a bunch of contented introverts who are fully comfortable with silence and the thoughts in their head.
I swim the lanes with only my breathing as company. There’s a moment ten or so laps in when your body has realized that it is not actually suffocating and begins to relax. The rhythm settles in, the lungs open up and I swim and swim, lap after lap. It is one of the simple pleasures in my life, a rare thing I’m effortlessly good at and a sensation, like the taste of madeleines, that immediately evokes memory.
My mother was an avid and beautiful swimmer — I can still see the drape of her arm while doing the crawl, languid, her graceful fingertips reaching for the water ahead of her. I can still see her coming out of the pool in her floral tank suit, tanned and dripping, smiling and beautiful. She taught me and my siblings — plus a couple generations of residents in our tiny town of 1,000 people — to swim. Little St. Ansgar, Iowa, might just have the best swimmers per square mile than anywhere on the globe. She was a missionary of the underwater. She and I didn’t see eye to eye on much, but the pool was détente and would be until the end of her life.
There’s a point in all travel when you prefer not to look like a tourist. Oddly, that had been one of those moments.
Back on land, I am left to navigate this unusual locker room. Besides showers in open view to all, including swimmers in the pool, the lockers are a puzzle. Something about a coin in a slot, which is returned when you’re done. There were no instructions when I’d first opened it and stuffed my clothes in. I had slyly attempted to watch someone else do it, but couldn’t quite make it out. There’s a point in all travel when you prefer not to look like a tourist. Oddly, that had been one of those moments.
But now I’m stuck. The damn thing won’t open.
I must break down and ask. I soon have a gaggle of women all trying to unlock my locker, to no avail. It feels very comradely until, unable to figure it out, the helpers one by one get bored and drift away, leaving me with my clothes out of reach, a towel wrapped around my naked self, and the only attendant outside in the main hall. I pull on the wet diaper that is my swimsuit by now — wrap a towel around and head out into the lobby filled with old men gossiping over cups of tea and young moms bringing their children to Mom and Tots swim.
While waiting my turn and feeling like the naked person in a bad dream, I at least spy the hair dryers — in the outside hall, hung from the wall like the wands in a car wash. Interesting choice. Finally, my humiliation complete, the attendant takes pity on me and concocts a story about having trouble with the lockers because they’re switching from one-pence to euros. Yeah, that’s it, it’s not that I’m simply a dolt. She hands me a euro and instructions and I head back in to try again. I know that as soon as the locker room door shuts behind me, she’ll look at the smirking old men and explain, “she’s American, you know.” Knowing nods all around.
We’ve been here nearly three weeks and I have not yet done the one thing I had set out to do: A Rebus Tour. Ian Rankin, Rebus’s creator, lives in Edinburgh and sets his mystery series here. I discovered his books through my friend Lucy, and I was hooked. Intelligent, gruff, always in trouble, what’s not to like? I somehow must see the same streets that a fictional man inhabits. I’ve dragged poor Rex around the globe in these slightly embarrassing quests. Sometimes it’s not the fictional character I want to sense but the author. I chose Morocco because of Paul Bowles. I chose Paris because of Simone de Beauvoir. I chose Reykjavik because of Halldor Laxness (and a cheap flight). And now, Rebus.
An unrelated person has of course decided to capitalize on the hard work of an author and make a buck with a tour. But I bite.
We meet in a favorite watering hole of Rebus, The Royal Oak, eight of us sheepishly brought together by fiction. The tour guide reminds me of another fictional character — Ignatius J. Riley in “Confederacy of Dunces.” Floppy hat, big belly, baggy tartan green pants, huge flaring nostrils, and soft fleshy lips. Claims he is a vegan. I can not imagine him as a vegan.
He is also a dramatist, of course. Much of the tour consists of being corralled into a tight circle on a street corner so he can do a dramatic reading from Rankin’s books. At one point he even does the dramatic actor’s step-out, step-back-into the circle as a new character. It was all a bit like our hilarious walking tour of the Garden District in New Orleans with a guide dressed in layers of patchwork clothes and a felt top hat, arriving late in a fluster and dripping sweat but still insisting on hugging each of us strangers. Instead of a walking tour we got a standing tour in front of three homes, where he talked interminably about the significance of the blue door.
And here we were again. We circle one big block that takes in some council housing and St. Leonard’s police station, Rebus’s home turf, plus a pub. An angry older gent yells at us for taking up space on the street. I get the distinct impression our guide is well known in the neighborhood, and not in a good way.
And he didn’t even take us to the most famous spot, the Oxford Bar. The sad circle of Rebus aficionados dissipate into the Edinburgh fog, each of us disappointed in our own way. Rex and I find the Oxford on our own, later that day. Walking in, a half-dozen retired men drinking pints and talking politics in a wee bar turn to stare. We order two pints, our voices booming into the silence, and blessedly find a back room to hurriedly drink our ales.
I did snap a picture — fandom knows no shame.
On our way home, the long way, we stop at the base of Arthur’s Seat where one victim in a Rebus story had plunged to his death. This solitary hill, wrapped in a carpet of yellow rapeseed of spring and topped with craggy rock, has the feel of an exotic pet in a cage — let’s keep this mountain as we level the rest of the place as a reminder of what greenspace once looked like. It’s ringed by a highway and a lot of grass — not a park per se but it has the elements if you squint.
Some say the point of travel is to do different things. I say travel is to remind you how to do the same things differently. Same sky, different perception. Same hill as back home, different frame of mind. Not knowing also adds a small jolt of thrill. What’s at the top? No idea, let’s find out. What’s the Leith Riverwalk like? No idea, let’s go see. What’s an Irn Bru and a pie? Those two you can skip.
That sense of the unknown is enough zing to get you out the door and onto the bus. Or up the hill. We climb, climb halfway up and pause for a view of the city spread below. The wind is fast and raw. The sun can’t yet compete. My ears and fingertips are nipped in cold. I always feel like a hearty New Englander in this weather — chilled but not cold, wrangling a few errant sheep back to the barn.
We shimmy up a set of stairs carved out of the rock, up, up. Kids scamper on ahead of their parents. I take in the view, round a turn, and freeze. We have reached the part where the mountain top narrows to a goat trail on slipper shale, and no sides
I don’t have a fear of heights. I fear edges. More specifically, I fear mountain edges. More specifically yet, I fear falling off them.
An encounter on one such mountain road with a bison in winter put me off such precipices. Perhaps because I was the one in the back of the tiny tin can of a car on a narrow switchback in Yellowstone, eyeballing the approaching bison, massive head wagging from side to side as our friend Mike (a different Mike), cigarette dangling from his lip, made a twelve-point turn without power steering — perhaps that’s why I now must travel with anti-anxiety medication if we are in anything higher than rolling hills.
Or perhaps it was the Moroccan driver in the Atlas Mountains with a series of tics involving car mirrors and seven taps who somewhere near the top realized it was time to pull over and pray, never mind we were teetering on a precipice while I quivered in the back seat, trying not to sneeze lest its vibration plunge me over the edge.
Or perhaps it was the shock of hearing the news that a former housemate had plunged over a Montana mountain ledge along with a carful of friends.
That’s a strong contender.
I don’t have a fear of heights. I fear edges. More specifically, I fear mountain edges.
And suddenly I’m surrounded by nothing but mountain edges. No longer cosseted by a sturdy mountain side on my left, the wall has disappeared and I’m standing on a narrow path with drop-offs on both sides. A child of about five brushes past me on his way up and I feel myself topple. I am actually standing firmly on the ground, but my mind has me falling like Don Draper in the opening of “Mad Men.”
I promptly sit down.
Being lower to the ground is somehow less perilous. I’m now frozen in place, heart pounding in my ears. Rex waves the parents of the five-year-old past. I stare straight ahead as my stomach flip-flops at the prospect of moving. The child ahead of me is jumping up and down in glee and all I can imagine is his plunge over the ledge.
“But we’re so close to the top,” Rex gently prods.
“You go, no, don’t go, you’ll fall,” I plead. It is so patently absurd that even I know how it sounds, but to me, at this moment, it is destiny. I imagine him lying on the ground far below, me having to retrieve his body from the morgue, uncertain what to do next. Do we fly back to Chicago? How does that work? Is he in cargo? Where am I? All alone in the cabin, crying? Plus, we have no home? What will I do without him?
My mind has me falling like Don Draper in the opening of “Mad Men.” I promptly sit down.
“You can’t go,” I shout.
He thinks I’m pretending to be afraid, until he sees my eyes. He stays with me and waves people on past. We have been here many, many times before, and he knows how to handle me. Slowly, he gets me to turn in degrees toward him. Then we stand and I take tiny baby steps back down the stairs I’ve just climbed. My knees lock in protest at every step but there is only one way out of this mess, I tell myself, and it’s down.
The closer we get to ground level the giddier I get. By the time we’re back down with the ducks waddling into a thicket, I’m practically delirious with relief. As Rex said after running a marathon in the cold rain, “that’s another dumb-ass thing I can check off my list.”
We head toward home along a lovely path. But then, ahead, is a long, dark tunnel. City instincts kick in and we both hesitate, but it’s Scotland after all, there’s no crime here. We march in. Within a minute in, plunged into darkness, we realize we are not alone. Coming toward us in the murk are four mutant teenage boys. If we turn around, we’ll be marked as afraid, which is essentially asking to be mugged. If we continue on, we’ll have to pass them. Two “old” people they’ll think. Victims.
I feel Rex tense. He was a high school teacher in the Chicago Public Schools on the South Side in a neighborhood where shots rang out far too regularly. When he tenses, I tense. The boys are yelling and acting up for show. Never good.
We stand a little taller, like the time we were in the Australian rain forest searching for cassowary birds. We’d seen a picture of a cassowary in our Lonely Planet guidebook and it looked intriguing — very Dr. Seuss — so when a night hike in Daintree National Forest was on offer, their habitat, we jumped. It was only later, standing in the pitch black rainforest alive with glowing night creatures that our guide told us that should we actually see this elusive bird, we should stop and lift our hats high above our head to appear taller than the cassowary. “That way it will be less likely to attack and disembowel you with two swipes of its claws,” he offered helpfully.
I was already imagining what our “A Clockwork Orange” bodies would like in the flashbulb of the coroner’s camera.
I did not have a hat and the cassowary boys were nearly upon us. We strode on, talking that false animated chatter that extras in movies master. Rex shifted the bag to his inside shoulder oh so casually. Unfortunately, we would be meeting them exactly midway into the very long tunnel.
I was already imagining what our “A Clockwork Orange” bodies would like in the flashbulb of the coroner’s camera. Yes, I go right there, all the way. It’s a female thing. We women are conditioned to assume catastrophe. It is why we are so much less prone to Darwin awards.
I am now eyeballing the boys with laser focus, maintaining eye contact but not challenging, like encountering a grizzly bear. They fall silent as they approach. We pass. They nod, “aye mum,” the lead says as they continue on past.
“Hi mum”? Was that sarcastic?
No, it was a genuinely polite teenager meeting a stranger in a dark tunnel. I’m moving here.
Giddy with relief for the second time today, I practically scamper the rest of the way to Old Town and a bus stop for the quick trip home.
We nab the front seat, top deck on the double-decker bus — out ahead, high above, arriving at the next destination even before the driver. Outside, the gray stone of Edinburgh rushes by, flat faced facades, the windows repeating a 3–2–3 pattern from house to house all the way home.
Back to Leith.
The tourist shops of Old Town give way to middle-class bakeries and coffee shops and a wine store, which then gives way to Poundland (Dollar Store to Americans) and take-away joints. “Tikka Masala, best Indian takeaway” shares a sign with “Sinclair’s: Criminal Defense Lawyers” tagged with graffiti. Young mothers with bad dye jobs yank their children along behind. Cagey young men with acne and clothes picked up off the floor that morning sidle out of betting parlors. Friends try to rouse a woman passed out in her wheelchair outside a bar. She looks up blankly before passing out again. We disembark in front of the betting parlor to a nasty and brutish fight between two love-birds. Store owners have come out to gawk.
We dart over to the Lidl store for provisions. Walking through the Lidl store amid the curling linoleum and garish lighting, cucumbers next to plastic lawn chairs, I know why those who got the short stick in life are devoid of hope. Not only must they choose between paying the electric bill or filling the asthma inhaler, but they must trod back and forth on bleak streets, broken sidewalks, and parks with more dirt than grass. Sorry kiddos, you’re just not worth the money for sod. Meanwhile, I, a person with money and time, get a coffee shop in soothing shades of gray and black and people tapping away on glowing Apple laptops, while the strapped folks of Leith get coffee in Styrofoam cups from a overlit takeaway joint with smoke-stained drop ceilings. Transactional and bleak. Message received.
I stuff my groceries in my sack and head out, down the wheelchair ramp, around the corner past Poundland, sidestep the pile of dog shit, past the drug store with bed pans and walkers in the window, out to the busy intersection with a long-dry fountain smeared in pigeon crap.
Message received.
Enough moody moping. The day arrives in which I discover Primark, that mecca of low-low shopping!
But first, I sip a latte while sitting on a tiny chair below street level in front of an even tinier table feeling like a doll at a tea party, when there it is: three weeks into this city and I have the first fashionista spotting. A rare bird, sipping a cappuccino, scrolling through her phone, hair in a top-knot, straggles falling naturally. Black leggings, a t-shirt, sunglasses, and the most divine pair of slides — with fur! Like Zza-Zza Gabor, but cooler. Mink colored. Like spotting a rare ocelot, this sighting leaves me agape. Edinburgh is where fashion goes to die, but not here, in this spot on this sunny day.
Three weeks into this city and I have the first fashionista spotting.Like spotting a rare ocelot, this sighting leaves me agape.
Lightened by the sighting, I venture down the street to where Todd assures me is the best shop evah. Three t-shirts for $10. Never mind that those poor Vietnamese girls are going without bathroom breaks working fifteen hour shifts sewing these stitches for us fat Westerners. No, not today. I spritz on some guilt-begone and head into what marketers have rebranded as “fast fashion.”
Today I rejoice — despite the fact that shoppers are dragging mini two-wheeled grocery carts behind them stuffed with clothes instead of cat litter. Who cares! I decide on my new three t-shirts, and then, in a fit of optimism I spy a pair of gypsy/hippie pants in purple, red, and orange floralesque print. Like the funny cocktail napkin that says, “Yes, you can dance — love, vodka,” I somehow believe I can pull off these pants. Even the fluorescent lit, dinged-walled dressing rooms do not dissuade. And the pants fit! Bonus for making me feel skinny.
Like the funny cocktail napkin that says, “Yes, you can dance — love, vodka,” I somehow believe I can pull off these pants.
All in: $17.99. I am walking on dopamine. I have been in minimalist purgatory for all of two months now with the same three neutral t-shirts and black pants. I now have color in my life! And new t-shirts.
And now, off to see rhododendrons the size of a house at the Botanic Gardens. Tumbling, cascading blooms in lavender and pink. What peace a botanic garden is for the unmoored. Stretches of manicured lawns, crunchy pea gravel underfoot, sun casting soft shadows on the deep greens, birdsong. It evokes the indelible imprint of summer — late afternoons, dust particles in the sun slants, the sound of a splash in the pool, distant laughter, the voices of baseball announcers from an open window. Shorts, barefoot, a bike lying abandoned on the lawn, freedom.
Rex and I sit on a bench by a pond, drowsy with the languor of the day and the sun on our faces.
But like our neighbors at home — who still haven’t budged on their convictions — a swarm of gnats invades our tranquility and we take our leave.
Days pass as I revel in wearing my new t-shirts –so excited that I layer them just for the thrill of it — and hunker down to meet a work deadline from a cozy coffee shop across a cemetery and along a street under gentrification’s early grip. The gray spring rain makes working indoors a pleasure and as I take my seat by the steamy window and open my laptop, I feel suddenly as if I actually live here. The barista has recognized me. I am working on something familiar with a latte at my side — all normal. I know my way around. I know a good takeout joint. I pick up a local weekly paper and read the neighborhood gossip about the upcoming Fringe Festival. A woman is offering piano lessons. Another is selling water colors. The local movie theater has a killer matinee. Yes, I think, I for a split second, I live here.
And then I return to reality. This is not my home. I have no home. A strange man is renting my four walls of familiarity. He has put his stamp on the place. He has his own furniture. He has his own glassware. He is showering in my shower each morning, but it is no longer truly my shower. Instead, I see his rent payment appear in my bank account each month.
And then I smile.
Rex arrives for our scheduled walkabout, today along the aptly named, “Leith Walk.” We hop on a bus to the other end of the walk to explore a bit before taking the pathway home — there’s that word again.
The bus winds through an area we haven’t been before and we are both silent taking it all in. Google tells us it’s time to get off if we want to stroll through Stockbridge, hyped as a real charmer of a neighborhood. We descend to the path for a stroll along a rushing creek the city bustle far removed, high above us. The trees drape over the stream — given that Edinburgh streets rarely have trees, this is a treat. At a particularly pretty spot, we climb up a stairwell into Stockbridge, a neighborhood of green grocers and Georgian stone homes set back from the street.
Prim neighbors with identical outdoor furniture take tea in their front yards amid the wisteria. All conforming gardens and lawns except for one — there’s always one. Instead of wisteria and rhododendrons, this outlier boasts two scraggly French firs on a patchy lawn. Tsk-tsk. Knowing neighbors, there have no doubt been meetings held. Groups of ruddy-cheeked lads looking angst-ridden under that quiet politeness pass us, and we give them absolutely no heed.
I realize too late — we’re in, we’ve said hello — that they have, gasp, an automatic espresso machine like you see at Holiday Inn breakfast nooks.
A side street of shops beckons. A boutique selling expensive pencils and Japanese notebooks gets a browse. A cute bookstore with a soft-spoken owner in a sweeping skirt and perfect penmanship gets a stop. And not one, but two adjacent coffee shops. I opt for the tiny one, but then almost immediately regret it. I realize too late — we’re in, we’ve said hello — that they have, gasp, an automatic espresso machine like you see at Holiday Inn breakfast nooks.
Oh get over yourself, I counsel. Just order and be happy. We do.
On the stoop outside are two tiny tables. We snag one and wait for our espressos. A man takes a seat on the stoop with us. He’s the spitting image of an old boyfriend — a long-haired, sandal-wearing Cat Stevens look-alike who owned an antiques store and waited in the car while I changed a tire in minus 10 degree weather one night. Enroute back home from dinner with his ex-wife. A keeper, that one.
Needless to say I harbor a smidge of resentment for this total stranger.
Needless to say I harbor a smidge of resentment for this total stranger. But he strikes up a conversation immediately, and Rex bites. Patrick Richardson, he says by way of introduction. His friend appears and Patrick mentions his name, which I miss because he could be Kenneth Branaugh’s brother. Patrick enquires about our accent. Chicago, we say. He tells us a few ribald stories about passing through the US one summer in the 1970s. I’m mostly silent since I still resent him for the lug-nut episode.
He’s a travel writer it turns out. Wrote “Reports from Beyond: A Journey through Life in Remote Places,” and others I fail to catch. Kenneth Branaugh has not managed a word yet and I am guessing he prefers it that way. He sips and smiles occasionally, looks down when our eyes meet. He is Patrick’s perfect foil. Every couple needs one.
Patrick tells us KB is a self-taught luthier, a maker of exquisite guitars, which KB acknowledges with a shrug. Travel writer and luthier, you can’t make this stuff up. I want to hear more about being a luthier but KB thinks there’s not much to it really. I love the world’s unsung artists who do their work because they find deep satisfaction in the process. And because talking about himself makes him squirm, he makes his excuses and takes his leave. We do too.
I love the world’s unsung artists who do their work because they find deep satisfaction in the process.
Back down to the Leith Water toward home. The path wanders past turreted homes and stone walls, past an open park, under a bridge. Today I’m able to see Edinburgh in a different light down here in the cloistered green with the sound of water as a backdrop. This edited perspective happened another time in my life, on the island of Guam where we opted to live for two years. After a year of adapting and shedding preconceptions of island life that magazines distill, the cigarette butts in the sand on the beaches disappeared from my sightlines and I began to enjoy the days under a cheap umbrella with ham sandwiches and cold beers in a cooler. Granted, we floated that cooler around a cliff while wading in chest deep ocean waters to a private cove away from the tourists, but still. I was able to overlook the blemishes and scars that marred the image I was seeking.
Nearer to home, alas, the charm of the walkway fades into bare patches littered with broken whiskey bottles and groups of men drinking at water’s edge. But at least for this day, I’m looking past the cigarette butts in the sand.
The incessant rain has broken and the sun has been shining for three days in a row. We decide on an outing, a day hike.
It all started off so well. I had found a set of trails on a sufficiently old-school website that I knew was created by people who have actually worn sensible hiking shoes and know the names of water birds. After about an hour on a local bus heading northeast up the coast, Google and my cross-triangulation bus route app tells us to get off.
We are in a small town. I immediately assume there is more around the corner. But alas, there is not. Not to say what we were looking at wasn’t cute, sorta, cute in that kind of way a disappointing weekend getaway is GREAT when you retell it for friends.
I had found a set of trails on a sufficiently old-school website that I knew was created by people who have actually worn sensible hiking shoes and know the names of water birds.
We find a deli for some provisions, aka lunch. We gather our food and head to the car park where the trail, we read, starts. A trail head at a parking lot sounds potentially disappointing to me. But it turns out, the car park is magnificent. A big grassy expanse atop a hill overlooking the ocean. Yes please. I gnarf down my lunch and take in the view. The sun is warm, the sky blue. An unusual day in Scotland and the beach is already filling with Casper-white white people.
After basking for a sufficient amount of time, we take the stairs down, down, down to the beach. Dogs frolic, babies wade. I’ve seen prettier scenes. But I try not to compare, say, Easter Island or Maine, but still. The smell of sea air, however, is gorgeous each and every time. After a stretch we cut inland. And this is where I start to lose interest. We’re in open scrub grass, it’s hot, and I have no idea where this trail ends. Unlike Rex, I do not like to just amble without knowing my endpoint. An endpoint gives me a gauge for hope. “It’s only 15 minutes, and I can quit.” Not knowing makes the stretch ahead seem interminable. “Are we there yet? Are we there yet? Are we there yet?” Ahead, Rex gambols along with the stamina of a draught horse.
We cross an open field, lose the trail and scale a ravine. The directions are very Boy’s Life — “about two meters after the remains of a homestead and one meter before a fence post, turn south.” It becomes a game to guess whether the marker we’re looking at (a stand of grouse, say) is indeed the very same stand of grouse the guide looked at. I have a sinking feeling more than once that we are marveling not at the “arching silence of cedar wood” but a jumble of scrub pine.
I have a sinking feeling more than once that we are marveling not at the “arching silence of cedar wood” but a jumble of scrub pine.
After a stretch in the deep shade of moaning pine, we are guided to a narrow path that slowly dissipates to nothing as the buckthorn take over. Buckthorn is as inviting as it sounds. The air goes dead, flies buzz around my head, beetles land on my arms, the buckthorn scrape and stick. Sweat drips. The map had said a “crest” was ahead. Nothing in sight. I always try to channel our friend Dave at these moments — Dave, who finds Indianapolis charming. But I can feel my fingers swelling to the size of inflated rubber gloves.
“We may have missed a turn,” I muster. “This can’t be right.” Back we plod through the buckthorn. The sandy grit in my shoes is rubbing the skin between my toes raw.
Nope. There was no other turn. It’s just that instructions for hikers are like watching a PBS show, slow and deliberate, with never any need for a sudden decision. The instructions might say, take the right fork in the path and into the stand of trees, but they mean eventually, not now. And that faint path jutting off to the right is not a fork. There are no tricks on this path.
No one would put a trail through buckthorn without a reward at the end. Would they?
On we plod, sweating and miserable. I calm myself with the assumption that with torture like this, the reveal will at least be worth it. No one would put a trail through buckthorn without a reward at the end.
Um, the Scots would.
This trail has been an exercise in misery rescued by underwhelming landscape. I had enough of that in Iowa as a kid. It’s as if allowing too much unfiltered joy would border on excess and risk ruin to one’s soul. We’ll give you a moment in the magnificent pine forests but then it’s buckthorn for you, dolly. There’s something to be said for the unfettered hedonism of say, Malibu, at this moment.
When the path finally opens up, we’re in a grassy field with a few homes in the distance. In full sun. Rex thinks he spies the car park. We head toward it. Nope. Just a mirage. We trudge on.
A trickle of blood from a buckthorn has clotted by the time we spy, far, far in the distance, our park bench where we started, way back then when we had optimism. King James I, II, III.
We eventually, god help us, arrive back at the car park, and sprawl exhausted under a shade tree before even contemplating the trek back to town and our bus home. Hot and defeated, we even pass up ice cream from a cart because of a two-person line.
We lumber up the hill to town, ride the distance back to Edinburgh on the bus in silence, make our transfer amid a mob of tourists and disembark in Leith once again. Back to the dorm room, back to the rickety chair and the futon couch, back to the heater that never fully shuts off, back to the moody bastard of a shower.
As a reward for our toil, Rex suggests an Italian restaurant and a bottle of wine. He is a dear.
Later, revived and appearing human again, we climb up a set of stone steps to a recommended restaurant. So far so good. While waiting for our table we talk to a bubbly lady with a dachshund and her androgynous friend with creepily smooth skin and rearranged facial bones. He reminds me of Le Chiffre, the villain in James Bond’s Casino Royale who cries blood.
Dachshund owner does most of the talking while Le Chiffre hovers and sips his beer with a growing serial killer vibe, like the man in a clown outfit one Halloween in Chicago at the Get Me High Lounge, a tiny bar under train tracks that we had stopped in before a party. The bar seated twenty at the most, all at the room-length bar. Clown man had entered with a gust of wind and the sound of a train rumbling overhead. He took a seat, not at the bar, but at a bench under the window at the bar’s end. He spoke to no one, not even the bartender. Just sat and stared at us patrons. A clown stare. We drank up and left before the massacre began.
He reminds me of Le Chiffre, the villain in James Bond’s Casino Royale who cries blood.
I’m getting a similar vibe here. Thankfully, The maître de announces our table is ready and we leave Le Chiffre and the dachshund to their drinks.
“Did that guy kinda remind you of the Get Me High?” Rex whispered as we left the room.
That’s what thirty years of marriage does. Wavelengths.
The month is coming to an end and we begin our getaway day preparations. We sweep up the dorm room and set the toaster and wine glasses out next to the Amazon delivery lockers for some lucky scavenger — yes, I’m just that petty. I unload the warmer clothes in my suitcase at what I think is a charity shop but realize too late is a recycling depot for clothes. People are lining up with scavenged bags of clothes to turn into pulp for $2 as my stupidly expensive Eileen Fisher jacket is bundled into a bale and prepped for the chute. I take my last swim in my beloved pool, we make sandwiches of all the last ingredients in the fridge (burp), and pack up our clothes.
We will not be living in Scotland, that much is clear. Croatia is up next on the list of contenders. Mike is convinced I’ll love it. But people who say things like that are usually just projecting what they love. I learned that after enduring a Spandau Ballet concert in the 1980s.
