To the Ends of the Earth

I had been asked the question in England and Wales. “I’m in publishing,” I always said. Publishing was respectable, harmless, and undiscussable. The conversation moved on to other matters, “I’m a writer” was a fatal admission, and certainly one of the great conversation stoppers. Anyway, with me in wet shoes and scratched leather jacket and bruised knapsack, would anyone have believed I was a writer? But no one knew what publishers looked like.

On my last night in Belfast, I was asked. I was at Mooney’s talking to Mr. Doran, and I had asked too many questions about his upbringing, his mother, his ambitions, the crime rate, his job—

“And what do you do?” Doran asked, risking the question no one else had dared.

Obviously I did something. I was an alien.

“I’m in publishing,” I said.

Doran’s face lit up. Not once in seven weeks of my saying this had anyone responded so brightly. But this was Ireland.

“I’m working on a wee novel,” Doran said, and ordered me another pint. “I’ve got about four hundred pages done—it’s right in me room upstairs. Let’s meet tomorrow and have another jar. I’ll bring me novel with me. You’ll love it. It’s all about the troubles.”

The next day I tiptoed past Doran’s room. I heard the flutterblast of his snoring. I slipped out of Mooney’s and shut the door on Ulster.

Cape Wrath

SOME FANTASIES PREPARE US FOR REALITY. THE SHARP STEEP Cuillins were like mountains from a storybook—they had a dramatic, fairy-tale strangeness. But Cape Wrath on the northwest coast of Scotland was unimaginable. It was one of those places where, I guessed, every traveler felt like a discoverer who was seeing it for the first time. There are not many such places in the world. I felt I had penetrated a fastness of mountains and moors, after two months of searching, and I had found something new. So even this old, overscrutinized kingdom had a secret patch of coast! I was very happy at Cape Wrath. I even liked its ambiguous name. I did not want to leave.

There were other people in the area: a hard-pressed set-dement of sheep farmers and fishermen, and a community of dropouts making pots and jewelry and quilts at the edge of Balnakeil. There were anglers and campers, too, and every so often a brown plane flew overhead and dropped bombs on one of the Cape Wrath beaches, where the army had a firing range. But the size of the place easily absorbed these people. They were lost in it, and as with all people in a special place, they were secretive and a little suspicious of strangers.

Only the real natives were friendly. They were the toughest Highlanders and they did not match any Scottish stereotype I knew. They did not even have a recognizably Scottish accent. They were like white crows. They were courteous, hospitable, hard-working, and funny. They epitomized what was best in Scotland, the strong cultural pride that was separate from political nationalism. That took confidence. They were independent, too—thrawn was the Lowlands word for their stubborn character. I admired their sense of equality, their disregard for class, and the gentle way they treated their children and animals. They were tolerant and reliable, and none of this was related to the flummery of bagpipes and sporrans and tribalistic blood-and-thunder that Sir Walter Scott had turned into the Highland cult. What I liked most about them was that they were self-sufficient. They were the only people I had seen on the whole coast who were looking after themselves.

It was a shire full of mountains, with spaces between—some valleys and some moors—and each mountain was separate. To describe the landscape it was necessary to describe each mountain, because each one was unique. But the soil was not very good, the sheep were small, the grass thin, and I never walked very far without finding a corpse—loose wool blowing around bones, and the bared teeth of a skull.

“Look,” a shepherd named Stephen said to me on one of these hillsides.

A buzzard-sized bird was circling.

“It’s a hooded crow,” Stephen said. “They’re desperate creatures. In a place like this—no shelter, no one around for miles—they find a lamb and peck its eyes out. It’s lost, it can’t get to its mother, it gets weak. Then the hooded crows—so patient up there—dive low and peck it to pieces. They’re a terrible bird.”

He said that it was the predatory crows, not the weather, that killed the lambs. It was a cold place, but not excessively so. In winter there was little snow, though the winds were strong and the easterlies were usually freezing gales. There were always birds in the wind—crows and hawks and comic squawking oystercatchers with long orange bills and singing larks and long-necked shags and stuttering stonechats.