The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot (12 page)

Those first hours were a time of quick learning for me, dredging back skills part-remembered from earlier weeks of sailing, suppressing my ineptitudes as best I could.

‘Our deadline is the evening turn of the tide,’ said Ian. ‘I’d guess that we have a few hours of worthwhile struggle now against the tide, then six hours of good running, then an hour of slack, and then …’ He clicked his fingers and jerked his thumb over his shoulder, back towards Stornoway, with a smile. ‘… then we’ll be back in the Hoil before we know it.’

So every yard of way over ground counted. Ian had put me on the helm, traditional location for the landlubber, and I quickly learnt to steal from the wind, to pilfer a few yards here and a few there, by sailing as tight to the southerly as possible. If you turn too close to the wind, the sail empties, momentum is lost and the boat takes minutes to recover: a severe punishment on such a time-tight voyage.

We pursued our long and lonely tacks, like cross-stitches made over the direct line of the sea road, zigzagging south through the Minch towards the Shiants. Inland was the grey-green Lewis coastline, with its sumping sea lochs and high headlands. Eastwards, on the mainland, sun fell full on the Torridon Hills, gilding them such that I could discern peaks I’d known underfoot – Beinn Eighe, Beinn Alligin, Liathach – and whose paths I could remember well. Shifts in light changed the sea’s substance. Clouds pulling over and the sea a sheeny steel; sunshine falling and the sea a clean malachite green.

The day before embarking, I’d been over on the west side of Lewis and had collected sixteen white pebbles of gneiss from an Atlantic beach – small ballast for our long journey – and as we sailed I slipped one over the stern for every mile over ground we made. The stones rocked down to the bed of the Minch, where about 1.2 billion years ago the biggest meteor ever to hit the land area now known as the British Isles struck. Iridium blast, liquefied rock, shock metamorphism, a vapour cloud dozens of miles wide, palling over the land, and rock cast by the slam up to fifteen miles from the impact site.

When Ian was at the helm and no rope-work was needed, I rested, lying in the stern along the line of the keel, my arms out, staring up the mast and sail to the sky, as if I were wearing the boat on my back as a beetle’s shell. I could feel the sea thumping alarmingly at the wood, the fists of the Blue Men pounding at the hull, only an inch or two of larch away.

Otherwise I watched and tried to learn from Ian. He relished the challenge of making our destination. He was on high-alert: monitoring wind direction, checking our
trim
, watching our wake, fussing with the sails, refining our route. Only now and then, when satisfied we were making the best possible speed, would he tuck his hands back into his salopettes and settle briefly on a thwart. Then a shift in the wind or my helming would have him on his feet again, plucking and testing and changing.

This pursuit of the optimal way-speed was, I came to realize, in keeping with all that Ian does. In action and in speech, he is formidably exact. He exemplifies what Robert Lowell once called ‘
the grace of accuracy
’, and his poetry, too, is distinguished by its precision. Minimalist but not gnomic, it extends his commitments both to exactitude and communication. There is no surfeit to it. His poems are short and as taut as well-set sails. Poetry represents to him not a form of suggestive vagueness, but a medium which permits him to speak in ways otherwise unavailable. I had noticed how unquestioningly poetry was accepted as his work by the people with whom Ian lived – it was regarded a skill as vulnerable to failure or success as setting lobster pots, or navigating a passage along a lee shore. I had noticed, too, how often in his talk and poetry Ian represented himself to himself in the language of seafaring and wayfaring. When he had lost his way in life, it was to the sea that he had returned for clarification and reorientation. ‘Leeway’, ‘mooring’, ‘making way’, ‘shifts of wind’, ‘casting off’, ‘being adrift’: the language of the sea and its ways was also the language of Ian’s self-understanding, his personal poetics of memory-making and wayfaring. In this respect, as in others, he reminded me strongly of Thomas: the same reciprocities between loved landscape and self-perception, the same sense of poetry as a means to express what exists at the cusp of consciousness.

Mostly, as a sailor, I did all right that day. Oh, admittedly, there was the moment during a tack when I dropped the yard – a twelve-foot pole of
laminated
pine – from ten feet up onto Ian’s shoulders. Some disagreement still remains between us over the nature of the incident. I was adamant that the spar’s descent had been controlled, if, undeniably, over-accelerated. Ian was adamant, once he’d stopped swearing, that it had been ‘purely dropped’.

On a long tack, Ian told me the story of the Blue Men of the Minch. ‘In poor weather or big seas,’ he said, ‘the Blue Men would come for your boat.’ They would haul themselves – embodiments of storm and high water, malicious mermen – dripping onto the deck, ready to pull you down. ‘But then,’ he said, ‘they give you a single chance. The leader of the Blue Men will cast you a rope. What he’ll do is he’ll throw you a line of verse and one by one, everyone on board, from the skipper down, needs to offer a reply in like rhythm and metre. If one man fails, well, then you’ve had your chance, and the vessel is pulled down to the seabed with all its men drowned. If by some chance all can answer poetically, well, then the ship is freed and the Blue Men, those slimy bastards, slide away to find another victim.’ He grinned. ‘So you see, it’s eloquence that gets you out of trouble.’

Stories, like paths, relate in two senses: they recount and they connect.
In Siberia, the Khanty word
usually translated as ‘story’ also means ‘way’. A disputed etymology suggests that our word ‘book’ derives from the High German
bok
, meaning ‘beech’ – the tree on whose smooth bark marks and signs were often incised in order to indicate routes and paths. Our verb ‘to write’ at one point in its history referred specifically to track-making:
the Old English
writan
meant ‘to incise runic letters in stone’; thus one would ‘write’ a line by drawing a sharp point over and into a surface – by harrowing a track.

As the pen rises
from the page between words, so the walker’s feet rise and fall between paces, and as the deer continues to run as it bounds from the earth, and the dolphin continues to swim even as it leaps again and again from the sea, so writing and wayfaring are continuous activities, a running stitch, a persistence of the same seam or stream.

Early afternoon: the Shiants at last starting to show as dark shapes glimpsed. Outline and texture slowly firming up: the islands and their guardian skerries seen as nibs, teeth, tables, gable ends, chapels. Geese coming over in lettersets.

When we were perhaps three miles distant, a band of rain swept in from the east, bringing with it a mist that occluded both coastlines and caused the illusion that the Shiants were receding in proportion to our approach. For half an hour or so we passed over the grey water and through that grey mist, and it felt as if we might be sailing towards a mythic archipelago, a scatter of Hy-Brazils: out of the real world and into a realm beyond verification. I recalled the clouds that so often enable the transition in the
immrama
from the known to the imagined, and I thought of the disorientations of the Broomway, and the sense of frontier crossing that the mist had brought that day. Then we sailed out of the southerly edge of the rain band, and there were the islands, sharp and true to the eye.

‘Oh, you can see the shapes standing clear now!’ Ian said, gazing ahead. Then, quietly to himself, ‘What a life, what a life.’ The tide fell slack just as we reached the outstretched arm of Eilean Mhuire, the most easterly of the Shiants, the wind fell light, and
Broad Bay
trembled almost to a halt.

All that paused water, unsure of its obligations, simmering, waiting for command. The lateral drive of the ebb tide canted to the vertical play of the slack tide. Gouts of water bulging up from deep down, polishing areas of ocean. Currents billowing and knotting.

The light flimsy, filmy. The earth open on its hinges, unsure of its swing. The day fathomable and still.

Suddenly the glossy black fin and back of a minke whale rose a hundred yards astern, two yellow-striped dolphins broke water and plunged cheerily down again, and then the flow of the turned tide could be seen as a chop on the water, small standing waves that indicated the whole Minch was reversing its direction – trillions of tons of brine, a mountain range of water turning in obedience to the invisible force of the moon, starting the long slop back north and carrying our little boat with it.

We almost made it under sail and oar, despite the tide, but at last Norman – the gentle and generous skipper of the safety yacht – motored his boat over and towed us the final half-mile to the anchorage. Relieved of the need to row, exhausted by the day-long sail, I could sit and enjoy entering the arena of the Shiants. The space braced by the island group is intensely dramatic. To the north and east was Eilean Mhuire, low-slung and grass-topped. To the west the massive shattered cliffs of Garbh Eilean, falling several hundred feet almost sheer to the sea. And joined to Garbh Eilean by a slender storm beach was the long and slender Eilean an Taighe.

We neared our anchorage under Garbh Eilean in dusk light. A cliff of dolerite columns rearing above the water, and shattered columns at its foot. Even in the twilight the rock was visibly glowing with orange lichen, like a low-burnt fire.

A sound came from above, an amplified riffle: banknotes being whirred through a telling machine. It was the compound wing-noise of puffins, thousands of puffins, criss-crossing the sky with their busy roosting flights. More distantly, I could make out the sound of sociable puffin chirrups: evening gossip from the birds in their nest-spots on the cliff. I watched them fly, their flight-paths so dense, and yet none of them colliding or even seeming to adjust their routes to avoid each other, living at busy cross-purposes but convivially. I thought of each towing a thread behind it and the weft they would make with their looming.

Anchored over the sand were
An Sùlaire
, who had flown there in two-thirds of the time we had, and two other yachts, both out of Stornoway. Ian knew everyone; of course he did. We moored up among that loose flotilla, and boat-hopped by dinghy. Down in the warm cabin fug of one of the yachts, we crowded round a table; hot food was served and whisky was passed about in a tin mug. Stories were told of the day, congratulations were extended to
Broad Bay
on her passage. ‘We never thought you’d make it!’ ‘Only two of you, and Ian a raw novice!’ Voices were raised in song, welcoming, happy. And a dog – no, two dogs – skittering about on the decks. After the long hours at sea, it all felt wonderfully hospitable: the sheltering arm of the island, the tittle-tattle of the birds, the good cheer in the cabin. I grinned and couldn’t stop grinning. Outside, dark fell, and the forms of the islands shifted. Slope became undetectable, fall-lines sheered, the islands turned to silhouettes, then vanished altogether.

Around midnight, Ian rowed me to land in a dinghy. The black water seemed oily as paraffin, and gleamed with a green-gold phosphorescence. Each dip of the oars set loose a storm of light: a swarm of fireflies, a wind-curl of fire-leaves outlighting the vortices. Bright particles in ignition; apprehension taking form. Ian glided in to the storm beach. I stepped on shore, globes of dolerite rolling under my feet and knocking together with the hollow clicks of billiard balls. He pushed off with a hushed goodbye. I felt my way up the cliffs to the south until I found a patch of
machair
a few yards long and a few wide, where I pitched my tent and settled to sleep. The stars stood sharp above. It felt odd to be on rock again, not sea, to think of the ground on which I lay extending down to the floor of the Minch. Lying there, I could still feel the day at sea, blood and water slopping about in my bag of skin, the tidal churn of my liquid body, a roll and
sway
in the skull. My mind beat back north against the current, thinking of the puffins’ flight, the lines we leave behind us, the spacious weave, our wake, then sleep.

The next day, my birthday, was one of the most charmed of my life. Blue-resin sky, coppery sun, a white wind. It passed with the deep, easy happiness of a castaway day; I had no imperative other than to spend it in the most enjoyable manner possible. All but one of the other boats sailed early, leaving the Shiants in a spray of routes. Ian and I, along with a kind couple called Rob and Karen on whose boat we had been made welcome the night before, decided to stay for at least another night. The winds were changing, and we wouldn’t be able to push on south to Harris, so we wanted to make the most of the islands we had reached.

Walking, exploring, beachcombing, up and over the tops of the hills and along the shores, our small group drifting along together and then pulling apart. I scrambled down to a westerly headland and fished from rock slabs – grippy with barnacles, slippery with kelp – that slanted down into the water. I caught a big pollock, five or six pounds – bronze-on-silver flanks, coal-shovel tail – lured from the weed forests with a spinner. Where it was still, the water was jelly-clear. Between the rocks it chopped and sneezed. Under arches and overhangs, it was dark as
mafic
glass.

I climbed to the top of Eilean an Taighe and followed its south-eastern cliff-edges. Below me were wave-smashed theatres of rock: echoey sea caves, and bird-filled
zawn
s. Here and there I flopped onto my belly and peered over the brink, looking down to where the sea shampooed the rocks, and listening to the yabber of the seabirds. Tiers of birds were in flight, dividing the air into strata: kittiwakes and fulmars, then puffins, then gannets. I felt a sensation of candour and amplitude, of the body and mind opened up, of thought diffusing at the body’s edges rather than ending at the skin.
The light as a weir pouring over the edge of Europe.