Heaven is Home
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Just then it felt like night. The western sky burned the sun’s last embers, and as it died beneath the ocean’s edge I stared out from the cottage window, over the waves, toward Inch Kenneth.
I am home again.
It felt strange, living in California most of the year, and unlikely to move back here to Scotland. At its heart, the island of Mull can be a dark, satanic place, full of witches, dragons, and castles. A place of Vikings and warriors, of lochs, and legend.
I was eight years old the first time I set foot on the Isle of Mull, an adopted child. The sea quickly became part of my everyday existence. Monday to Friday, along with other children, I caught the bus from the rainbow curve of Tobermory Harbor down to Craignure, where we boarded the ferry to Oban. While the 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, my first real teacher, would shake her head, grab my hand and pull me down the corridor to the school’s boiler room. ‘Away wi yer, an be reading this,’ she’d say, thrusting a book into my hand, ‘come ye back to class when you’ve thawed out, laddie.’ I was a ridiculous kid. She said that, too. Ten minutes later she would return, shove a chocolate bar into my hand, ruffle my hair, put a finger to her lips and leave again. I never forgot Mrs. Braebrooke. No one forgets a kind teacher.
Scotland spits on the poet’s poetry. It dares the writer to write, to gobble up the next syllable, sneering dissatisfaction until the author’s forehead becomes flushed with embarrassment. To really know and love Scotland, to get the best from it, you have to understand that it is a cruel place. If that’s so, I hear you ask, why do you return? I return, mostly in the winter, to hear the snow fall, to feel protected from the storms of life, hear the screech of the gulls, smell the lobster pots, and taste the salt air cleaning my throat. It’s a strange thing to return these days as an old man, boarding the car ferry, hearing the noises I thought forgotten come hurtling back: the yells of the ferry workers calling out, the piston-powered doors, the dragging chains, and the pungent smell of exhaust fumes. Such sounds speak to me like old friends.
There’s no Scotland where legendary monsters are said to lurk in deep waters. Scotland, you must believe me, is between the hills, over the tors, and pressed into the crags. Scotland is best felt within village communities, like garrisons, where tradition and heritage are kept safe. Life could not be better, I soon learned, than when damned by the rainbow. Scotland, if you’re open to its calling, will cast its spell on your heart and on your soul. Scotland is not simply an image found on the lid of a chocolate box, snow in its streets on Christmas Eve. It’s an experience where one’s life must be large enough to cope with its strength and beauty.
Tobermory, with its historic townscape, the post office, the library, the school, and the grocery store, sit alongside the antique and the art shops. None of which detract from the town’s sorrowful length of history. Trust of that history is left to men like my father, and his father before, born of Viking history. He would talk to me about the pathways, the tors, the bluffs that don’t bluff, or boast, but stimulate and inspire when treading along the winding road of adventure. It’s bouquet of scenery quite as stunning, aromatic, as fragile and rugged as nature designed it to be.
