Well, If it ain’t Harry, da ferry-louper.
I’ll be havin’ a pint, laddy.
Some girls, most girls, can steal your heart, but not in the same way the Isle of Mull can. I’ve long forgotten the girls who, for an hour, or a hurtful Wednesday, stole my heart. Girls found in roadside inns, those waiting for trains, Scottish girls looking for boys, urgent and blooming, their stories uncompromising, cold-shouldering polite boys willing to share monotonous conversation about city living and work while living amid featureless rectangles near petrol stations and walking through other homogenous and featureless landscapes.
I learned something different growing up in paucity-revealing landscapes on the Isle of Mull, a place that felt so distant nothing dangerous would ever come on its shores, never tread its pathways, tors, the magnificent bluffs that don’t bluff, or boast, but stimulate and inspire, winding ways of adventure. The islands bouquet of scenery quite as stunning, aromatic, as fragile and rugged as nature designed it to be.
Beware though, Mull spits on the poet’s poetry. It dares the writer to write, gobbling up the next syllable, sneering dissatisfaction until the author’s forehead is flushed with embarrassment. Mull invites you to stretch out your arms, have you fold them around the erudite, the water tanks, cemeteries, dirt paths, overgrown vegetation, and the colourful gardens set amidst the rocks, the shores set against the Sound. It’s just one small corner of Scotland.
By ten years old I was no longer a broken English orphan, a child still, sighing harmonica notes…with an endless desire to cry for the island’s welcome.
Adventure was everywhere, but the greatest of those adventures was running to catch the school bus and taking the ride alongside the Sound of Mull. It was a half hour bus ride to Craignure, and the car ferry across to Oban. So, you see, it was natural that the sea was to become part of my every day existence. While other kids sat in the warmth of the ferry’s canteen during those blustery winter morning crossings, with threatening rain clouds hanging low over the waters, I stood at the bow, letting the sharp wind crisp my ears until they felt like ice packs on the side of my head. Hurting so much I entered the classroom crying with pain, tears streaming down my face. Mrs. Braebrook would shake her head, grab my hand and pull me down the corridor to the school’s boiler room. ‘Read this,’ she’d say, thrusting a book into my hand, ‘come back to class when you’ve thawed out.’ I was a ridiculous kid. She said that, too.
Weekends on the island meant every minute of daylight was spent at the harbour. I was going to be a fisherman, and I told my father so. He’d smile. ‘Your head’s too much in the clouds, son,’ he’d say. I didn’t properly understand what he meant, so at ten years of age I’d scrape barnacles off trawler hulls, make huge mugs of tea to earn a few pennies. The men would ruffle my hair, poke fun at my tent-sized jumpers, those knitted by my mother, and threaten to hoist my long baggy shorts aloft. Whenever the trawlers were in, I was there. To a man, each of the crewmen contributed to my education. It might have been learning a certain kind of knot, perhaps how to sew a lobster pot, how to sort crabs, fillet a fish, but also, to a man, not one of them taught me about love. Life on the island was about beer and bread and hard times.
I had a compliment paid to me today by someone I consider a writing force on Medium. Terrific Writing, it read. There are those kinds of women who can steal your heart with words, and for a minute long.
I have faith in my ability to write. I’m neither scared of that ability or frustrated by it, I simply accept it, sit down and write. It’s not difficult. My life has been a journey of fruitful collision, sometimes with weighty matters, troubled human interactions, disconsolation, powerplays, alcohol, and all of it sewed together by romance and unpindownably funny detachments.
All of it has left me not as sad as some have imagined. It’s just life. It could be yours told a different way. A life completed by journeying home, crossing from Oban to Craignure, a swirling sea mist lifting from the fells, licking its way up the rugged, rose-pink granite face of Ben More, or these days taking the Marin ferry from Sausalito to San Francisco.
I grew into my teens on the Isle of Mull, not necessarily erect, I bent sometimes, restricted in my youth, punished to live on one side of the island while the rest of human life, it seemed, lived on the other.
Ours was the only farm on the western shores, while on the east side were the white cottages with their chocolate box thatched roofs littering the fells, crossed as they were by dry stone walls.
I climbed the mountain most days to free myself from its capture and to feel the elation of seeing clear across the island, toward the mainland, sometimes catching sight of a yacht tacking hard, fighting the wind ‘mid-Sound’ and waving like a city kid might wave at a passing train. It’s hard for me to talk about the mountain and make people understand that it was a living thing, a protector, a guardian, a constant, like a parent. It had good days and bad days, like a parent might one day be gentle and the next day severe. So it was with the mountain.
I return to its shadow in winter to hear the snow fall, to feel protected from storms of life, hear the screech of the gulls, smell the lobster pots, and taste the salt air cleaning my throat. Somewhere to sit where sweetness is not sickly; people’s lives are entwined with history.
After a year’s absence, the same men greet me sat at the bar in the inn.
Fuck, if it ain’t Harry, da ferry-louper. I’ll be havin’ a pint, laddy.
In the next hour I managed to forget everything I ever learned about America during the year gone. Soon the place was bouncing, truly, I mean it was spectacular. The womenfolk dancing, still dressed in the pinafores, the fisherman stamping their feet on the wooden floor, thumping fists on tables, and everything Dad ever told me about husky voices needing to sing was true. I mean, how is it possible on the blank page to make you understand it was joy like you never heard; music flying up into the rafters, escaping out the windows, bringing people shoulder-to-shoulder, cheek-to-cheek, heart-to-heart.
Nothing about the landscape of the island can escape its connection with the psychological, both are vitally connected. What tight little cliques can be formed in suburbs the landscape on Mull is going to separate you from that comfort so that you might understand yourself a little better.
