The Attack of the Killer Rhododendrons (3 page)

U
NLIKE MOSQUITOES,
which are mainly nocturnal, midges are perfectly happy to rise early and have a little nibble. Therefore, Klarinka and I had our breakfast of muesli, powdered milk, and hot water while walking briskly up and down the beach. We returned to the campsite periodically to have sips of sweet, black coffee. Western Scotland would be an unbearable place in summer if it weren’t that midges are comparatively wimpy. They don’t seem to like bright sunshine, and they don’t seem able to cope with even a
modest breeze, rain, loud noises, or an unfavourable stock market report. Unfortunately, what they lack in tenaciousness they make up for in number, and I discovered just how painful tickling could be when a midge flew up my nose.

Then it was time for a paddle. The water was mirror-calm, and all of the Sunday boaters had gone back to their weekday lives. By paddling three times to the left for every two strokes to the right, I managed to keep my kayak in nearly a straight line. Klarinka was clearly disappointed in me.

First we coasted by a “floating island” in the channel south of Inchconnachan. When the loch’s water levels are low, I gather there is an exposed gravel bank on this spot, but when the waters rise, the vegetation is left to float eerily. Even though it isn’t much of an island, written references to it date back more than 400 years, and legends claim that the island literally floated about the loch. On we paddled, past the sandy beaches of Inchmoan, which, like Inchconnachan, has been owned for centuries by the Colquhoun clan. The island is almost a kilometre and a half long, but low-lying and boggy, and it is said that the inhabitants of Luss had visited it for centuries to harvest and dry peat in summer for use as fuel in winter.

Loch Lomond must have 10,000 stories waiting to be investigated more thoroughly. The story behind Inchgalbraith Castle must be one of the better ones. As an islet, Inchgalbraith is likely a crannog, a forty-metre-long artificial island built as a defensive retreat in the Iron Age or earlier. Above a pile of boulders, brought from the mainland on rafts, and wooden poles driven deep into the loch’s bed, a wooden roundhouse would have been constructed. A secret, submerged, and twisting causeway would have led to the nearest island, defeating potential invaders who didn’t know the route. In medieval times, the Galbraith family found the crannog sufficiently robust to construct a castle that covered all of the tiny islet. Although the castle has been in ruins for at least 300 years, the walls still rise up from the loch, hidden by trees and shrubs, and serve as home to a family of Canada Geese.

As we curled back past Inchmoan, it became clear that whoever
had been using the kayak before me had much longer legs. The foot rests were nowhere useful to me. As a result, my back and upper legs were growing tired quickly. We beached on Inchcruin to allow me to adjust my foot rests. It is hard to believe that the name Inchcruin is taken from the Gaelic word for “round island,” since its outline looks more like a missing jigsaw puzzle piece. Some attribute the name to a Gaelic expression for “he is not sane” on the basis of an eighteenth-century insane asylum on it.

On we travelled to Bucinch, whose name may be, but probably isn’t, based on feral goats that may have, but probably didn’t, roam the island in centuries past. Rising more sharply from the loch than its neighbours, Bucinch is a beautifully domed and wooded island. A short dash brought us to the tiny islet of Ceardach, or Tinkers Island, named for the remains of an Iron Age smelting furnace. The islet is sometimes called Gerbil Island because of the release of two gerbils in the 1960s. It must have been just the two gerbils, because there isn’t room on the islet for any more. Klarinka got out for a quick tramp around; I stayed in my kayak, since I could see every inch of Ceardach from where I sat. I saw no gerbils.

After a lunch of coffee, tomatoes, cheese, and rice cakes at camp, Klarinka set off for more paddling as training for her upcoming expedition, while I went off in search of more wallabies. I took along my camera and a small bag of carrots, having read that these are the all-time favoured food of red-necked wallabies. At several likely looking spots, I left behind ten slices of carrot. Then, if some of the slices were missing on a subsequent trip, I could tell if any had been taken. Unless they had all been taken, or I couldn’t find the spot again.

I headed uphill toward the highest point on the island. I spotted a wallaby, but it was clear that he had long since spotted me. As soon as I raised my camera, he was away. He was much smaller than the one I had seen the day before, but his feet still made a tremendous thumping noise as he jumped. I followed him uphill, but he darted every time I got close. Wallabies have no difficulty moving uphill.

Toward the top, I spied one resting between a pair of trees. There was no point in sneaking up, as she had obviously seen me. Sitting upright, she posed in a three-quarter profile. I raised my camera and started playing with the shutter speed and F-stop. As I speculated about whether I could compose the shot a little better, it occurred to me that my time was probably short. I snapped off a shot, and as I stepped out from cover to try for a better one, she bounded a short distance away to hide by standing in front of a wallaby-coloured tree, which is all of them.

I returned to camp to find that Klarinka was still paddling, and so I rediscovered the sublime joy of dozing on an air mattress on a quiet, shady beach. Drifting in and out of sleep, I pondered who would be crazy enough to want to be responsible for Loch Lomond & The Trossachs National Park. Even though it was Scotland’s first national park, it was only three years old. For the folks at—to pick an example—Death Valley National Park in California and Nevada, life is a doddle. Two hours away from the nearest big city, Las Vegas, the park has fully 13,650 square kilometres to accommodate visitors. In contrast, visitors to Loch Lomond & The Trossachs have just 1,865 square kilometres at their disposal. To make things worse, 70 percent of all the people in Scotland live less than an hour from the park, and 15,600 people live within the park itself. Management is particularly tricky because portions of the park are privately owned. Folks at Loch Lomond & The Trossachs National Park are justifiably proud of their huge red deer and roe deer populations, but it probably gets up their noses that they sometimes have to cull animals to keep the population down.

In most nations, national parks make it easy on themselves by making conservation issues the first priority and prohibiting the extraction or exploitation of natural resources. You can hike around Death Valley National Park, but you had better not be carrying a fishing rod. The planners of the park at Loch Lomond & The Trossachs made their lives much more complex by establishing two of its four statutory aims to “promote sustainable use of natural resources of the area” and to “promote sustainable economic
and social development of the area’s communities.” Farming? Why not? Forestry? Let’s talk about it. Fishing? Go ahead. Indeed, Loch Lomond is home to nineteen types of fish, making it one of the most important sites for freshwater fish in Britain. Regrettably, four of those species are introduced.

When Klarinka got back from her sojourn, I told her about my limited luck in finding wallabies. She responded by saying “Oh, yes. I saw five drinking from the water’s edge just around the corner.” Some folks are just luckier than others, I suppose. We managed a fire, but it required a lot of blowing to keep it lit. Our supper was garlic with pasta. A bottle of whisky that I had brought along was a big hit.

As night began to fall, we went for another paddle, this time a circuit of Inchconnachan. Klarinka spotted a wallaby on the beach of the first embayment. She has good night vision, resolving shadows and shapes that I couldn’t. A little further north, she spotted a second wallaby. At the top end of the island, in the last of the day’s light, we came across a wonderful assemblage of small bats foraging for insects. I leaned as far back in the boat as I could, and watched them zoom overhead, skimming down to the water, a metre or two from my head. Back at our campsite, we found three more wallabies rooting around, and I suspect that they were eating campfire ashes.

In the middle of the night, I woke to the loud, harsh cries of birds, and managed to convince myself that they were Capercaillie, the world’s largest game bird, native to Scotland but very rare. They had been hunted to extirpation in Scotland in 1785 and reintroduced from Sweden in 1837; they were now in peril of becoming extinct again. The name Capercaillie is derived from Gaelic for “horse of the woods.” In all likelihood the calls came from insomniac shorebirds, not Capercaillie.

F
OR OUR LAST DAY
on Loch Lomond, Klarinka and I had planned a paddle to Inchmurrin. It was an obvious destination. The largest inland island in Britain at two and a half kilometres long, it has
a lovely walkway running from the northern peninsula through oak and birch woodlands and along a grassy ridge, and down to the pier at the south end. If I squinted, I could probably ignore the vast thickets of introduced rhododendrons. Inchmurrin was named after St. Mirren, a sixth-century Irish-born priest. Mirren is patron saint of the Scottish town of Paisley, and of football clubs with three or fewer premiership cup titles. The island has reportedly been visited by Robert the Bruce (after an inglorious defeat in battle); King James VI of Scotland (a.k.a. James I of England); Mary, Queen of Scots; and Isabella, Countess of Albany, exiled after witnessing the execution of her father, husband, and two sons. Sir John Colquhoun was probably even less impressed with the island than Isabella, having been murdered there in 1440. Klarinka and I could take the opportunity to see the ruins of Lennox Castle, where the Earl of Lennox brought his family to escape the plague in the fourteenth century. If we weren’t careful, we might stumble across the Scottish Outdoor Club, a naturist group entrenched on Inchmurrin since the late 1940s. The winds had come up overnight and the waves looked a bit tricky, but I was game for anything.

We squeaked between Inchconnachan and Inchmoan, then between Inchmoan and Inchfad. The winds grew stronger, and I had increasing difficulty paddling in a straight line. I got a lot of suggestions from Klarinka. These were along the lines of “lengthen your stroke,” “hold your paddle higher,” and “paddle harder,” any of which, I felt, would have tipped me into the drink. I was tenser than I generally like to be, particularly on water.

Using what were, apparently, my inconsiderable paddling skills, I did my best to follow Klarinka as we zipped across to a landing on the western shore of Inchcailloch to consider our options. While resting, I hauled out my guide to the islands of Loch Lomond and discovered that Inchcailloch (Gaelic for “Isle of the Old Woman”) was named after St. Kentigerna, a Christian missionary, possibly Irish, who set up shop on the island with her brother and her son early in the eighth century. For 500 years, the church built on the island and dedicated to St. Kentigerna’s memory was the site of
worship for the faithful on the mainland, who finally twigged in 1670 that rowing out to the island was an unpleasant way to spend every Sunday morning.

I could stall by reading a book for only so long. We gave up on the planned longer paddle to Inchmurrin and aimed for lunch at the village of Balmaha on the loch’s eastern shore instead. If the weather was cooperative, the winds would die down over lunch, and we could paddle back to Inchconnachan. I tied down my hat with its idiot straps and settled into the task of paddling against the wind to Balmaha.

The Oak Tree Inn, named after the 500-year-old specimen on its grounds, has a fine restaurant complete with linen tablecloths and cloth napkins. The staff were pleased to serve us lasagna and cheese macaroni despite our rather grubby appearance. As we sat on the deck, I resisted the temptation to get plastered. Klarinka had no objection to me paying for lunch.

We walked back to the water’s edge to judge the wind and waves. They were worse. With uncustomary civility, Klarinka waited for me to state the obvious. Rather than push on, it would be far more prudent for me to stay behind and leave Klarinka to paddle back to Luss, get the vehicle, and drive around the south end of Loch Lomond to pick me up. To this point, it would have been comforting to hear a diplomatic expression like “The waves might be a little too much for you.” Instead I got the rather more hurtful expression: “You aren’t a strong enough paddler for these conditions.”

Off went Klarinka, leaving me sitting on a beach, feeling like hell, like a quitter, like an inferior being. As I sat beside my beached kayak, I thought back and was sure that I had never said that I had done more than “a bit” of kayaking.

A couple of hours later, Klarinka drove up. After tying the spare kayak to the roof rack, we proceeded around the south shore of Loch Lomond to offload at Aldochlay. In the calmer, protected waters of the loch’s west side, we had no difficulty paddling out to Inchconnachan to pick up our gear; no wallabies saw us off. Back across to Aldochlay, we stowed everything, and Klarinka’s body
language told me that everything I had stowed would have to be repacked as soon as I was out of sight.

Klarinka pulled her vehicle into a parking lot a couple of blocks from the Balloch train station. She didn’t get out to give me a hug. She didn’t even turn the engine off. In fact, she left her car in gear as I unloaded my belongings. Her “Goodbye” was simultaneously perfunctory and definitive. She roared off.

I stood on the train platform and pondered the nature of probability. Red-necked wallabies had beaten the odds by persisting on Inchconnachan. Nine out of ten introductions fail to produce a self-sustaining population. Wallabies had, however, joined the ranks of the majority of introduced species by failing to become a pest. They hopped around the island, browsed on vegetation, and looked cute. Perhaps it was time for me to examine something more horrid. I needed a creature whose introduction had resulted in the gnashing of teeth. It had to be something ugly and gooey and wet. Something like an oyster.