Midstokke: Finding meaning amongst the gale

The first time my granny went to Scotland, she went by way of London Heathrow, rented an RV, knocked a mirror off before leaving the airport, and spent a month seeking out her roots.

She came home with a shag tapestry of a bagpiper that hangs in the foyer like a coat of arms, and no less than a thousand stories or the same story told a thousand times.

I grew up spending summers at her home in Oregon, where she spooled threads of a family history that would be woven into my understanding of what we belonged to. Her maiden name had been Spurlock, but perhaps as a penance for her decision to divorce my grandfather in the early 1960s, she never reclaimed it. Instead, she reminded me constantly that I am not just Norwegian.

“You know you are Scotch-Irish, too,” she said with a stern look.

Her family had immigrated to Canada and then later to America, then California like everyone else during the Dust Bowl. Being Scottish was the important part of that, but in the photographs of her long and lean father and her stout mother Lovie, one can only detect how bothered they are by the obligation of holding still.

Granny belonged to whatever clan had her favorite colors. The plaid fabric, still in its original wrapping in the hallway closet decades after that trip, was green and purple over muted darks. Others were red and black. More than the bagpipes and the kilts, Granny loved the Border Collies and their trainers. She taught herself how to whistle in the crisp commands of the herdsmen, though her penchant for wayward rescue dogs of questionable brainpower never allowed her to use them.

The second time Granny went to Scotland, it was in an old amoxicillin bottle, her faded name and a decades-old prescription date barely legible from years of wear. Like a treasured stuffed animal or blanket, the bottle has been dragged along on any adventure of merit. She’s been in glove boxes, rafting dry bags, ziplocks, old film containers, on the top of Kilimanjaro, across the Strait of Magellan, over the Cascades, through the Grand Canyon. But Scotland was always where she wanted to return.

Our desire to belong to somewhere or someone seems an integral part of our social fabric and our identity. In the case of a fourth-generation American, it is a placebo distilled from haphazard family trees, prejudice and a scapegoat for obstinance. It is an ancestral home we seek, something we feel we may always return to, should this place lose its welcome. It is the forever-longing song of the immigrant.

I came to Scotland to find a different kind of ancestral home. I came to breathe the same air as my grandmother had breathed, feel its earth beneath me, familiar to my spirit somehow. I needed to understand why she wanted to belong here. Because there is not a drop of Scottish blood in our DNA.

In her defense, our English-Irish parts are almost equal to our Norwegian parts. And for some time in America, it was far easier to be Scottish than Irish and no one in California could differentiate between the brogues anyway. This is the story I make up because there is no one left to tell me otherwise. When our people pass, they take all the answers to all the questions we never took the time to ask. These are among my few regrets in life.

If being Scottish was a state of mind, I wanted to find that state. I did not know if I would find it in the moors or the highlands or deep in the Loch Ness with the other myths. Or perhaps in the people, who are bothered neither by wind nor rain nor anything else I could identify.

We drove across the country from east to west, which only takes so long because the roads are narrow and my husband had to pull over occasionally to let his blood pressure recover. We crossed the bridge to the Isle of Skye and made our way to a small stone house on the shores of Loch Snizort. It is not a lake, but rather a bay that faces the wide horizon of the Atlantic Ocean.

The stone house has a place in the history books. Bonnie Prince Charles dressed as a handmaid and was rowed across the water to hide from the English in the boathouse in the 1700s. In the nearly 300 years since then, the place lost a few stones but had been so expertly built, it was recently restored in one of those renovation projects that ages even the most dedicated optimist. I couldn’t help but stare at the stones and wonder about the hands that first placed them here. What or who did we have in common?

Hundreds of years before the house was built, my Nordic ancestors rowed their way through the Hebrides Islands. They dropped sheep anywhere grass was growing so that upon their return journey they would have an abundance of food. Some stayed. Maybe we were that kind of Scottish. I stared out the windows at the hillside where white sheep never seem to be moving but are always in a different place. Like their shepherds, they are not bothered by the weather.

“The neighbor’s herd lost over 60 sheep to the eagles last year,” Trevor said.

Trevor owns a croft (the Scottish word for farm) on the shores of another loch (the Scottish word for lake). He is a squat man with bowed legs and the kind of wide stride one gets from years at sea. Before he settled here to raise sheep and give wildlife tours and be a fishing guide, he was a captain on a herring boat. So the sheep may be bothered by the eagles at least.

“They were hatched in Norway and raised on fish and lamb,” Trevor said. “So they got a taste for it.”

The released eagles now stun the full-grown sheep by hitting them in the back of the head on a fly-by, then swooping down and helping themselves to a fresh meal. The eagles are protected, so nothing can be done about the matter. Soon, they’ll hatch chicks and teach them how to kill sheep, too.

We visited this croft because it is one of the few places that raises sheep for wool. Most of them are for eating. I approve of both, but today I want to learn about the Islanders’ patterns. Being a fisherman, Trevor pulled out his sweater and showed us the details. There is a painting of a magnificent horned ram on the wall. The wool for this sweater was from that ram.

“My wife knit this for me,” he said. “So you see the cable has two strands, not one. This is so when the gentlemen come to port, the ladies know who is taken.”

Mothers will knit their sons sweaters with a single stranded pattern to let the women know he’s looking for a wife.

The sweaters are made with wool that has not been washed of its lanolin (a type of wax secreted by wool-bearing animals) and knit in a tight stitch so as to repel water. Every sweater tells a story: If not from which exact village the sailor comes, then at least the island. Trevor’s sweater has a bar for his island and an anchor because he’s a captain.

“There’s only one captain on my island, so if I wash ashore, they know who it is.”

There is purpose to the minutiae here. It is as though sentimentality and meaning are put into all tasks. The seed stitch pattern of the sweater, the colors and pleats of a kilt. They are the love letters one wears so they do not forget to where or whom they belong. I pledged to finish the sweater I have been knitting my husband for several years. And to learn that double-strand cable.

I ask my husband to leave me on the north cliffs of the island on a blustery day so I may make my way home. Wanderers are allowed to trespass through the farms so long as gates are left as they are found. In the distance, I saw a ridge that calls to my compulsion to see the world from the top of places. I have an unspoken belief I will see the answers from the right vantage point.

I packed Granny in with my snacks and gave her a pat as I trotted up the trail and into another world. I am sure a dragon will fly overhead or a Viking ship will sail by. This is a land of primordial history. There are dinosaur footprints on the shore. What part of this was in my grandmother’s blood and bones? She didn’t even like lamb.

As I wound my way upward through the cliffs, the views opened to a landscape of grays and greens, vertical faces topped with iridescent grass. The sea spread before me, washed into the blue of the sky with a muddled line of mist. The sun was my only defense against the ceaseless wind. It blew through my hood, my hat, my hair, and into my ears with a constant rumble.

When the trail ended, I kept going. I cannot explain what I am looking for, that I struggle to belong to a family that denies my memories, and cannot understand where to belong if even the ancestors my grandmother promised are not mine. If they asked, I would tell them I am looking for my story, even as I write it.

The ground beneath my feet was a spongy soil that absorbs every step with a forgiving bounce. My tracks and those before mine are no match for this wind-battered, water-soaked bushland. I cannot see where I have come from or where I am going.

It doesn’t matter, really, because where I am in that moment is where I ought to be. Far in the distance there is a dark wall of clouds rolling in from the southwest. They are bringing rain by the afternoon, but for now they just grow taller, not closer. The ridge sweeps softly to the west in an innocent grade, toward hills spotted with sheep and white houses that look like they could be toys from a train set. To the east, the grassy edge dropped in cliffs that tumble downward then spread like spilled paint in a flat, green puddle toward the sea.

For hours I battle the gusts and climbed, but the only thing that hurt was my face. For as long as I have been running (or staggering) against the gale, I have been grinning. I belong to the mountains, this much I know.

When I came crashing through the front door in a mess of mud, banana peels, and wind-chap, the first drops hit the house from a horizontal angle. It was blowing over 40 miles per hour. And it rained sideways into the stones for the next 24 hours. We watched the water rise and fall with the tide and how the waves crashed in dramatic white explosions on the rocks across the loch. The birds rode the air with wings spread, hovering motionless outside the window. The house does not so much as tremble.

The light in Scotland is like no where I have been. The sky moves by so fast that time on land seems to slow down. Only the colors changed. Like the sheep and the people, the landscape is also not bothered by the weather, the news, war, progress, disease, or apocalypse. Stone walls move for nothing, not even millennia. Mangled trees shudder imperceptibly, but they hold their windswept tilt regardless of the incessant breeze.

And then I understood.

Maybe it wasn’t the people Granny found kinship with. Maybe it was the country. It was the stoic soils of a sea-bruised shore that patiently waited for the tide to recede. It was the trees that bend to the storms, but remain steadfast in the ground. It was the storm clouds that bring far-off promises and carry them to the north. Scotland was the temporary home of dynasties and dinosaurs, migrations and myths, a station at which history rested from time to time to leave its mark. It was the sense that we belong to all this.

For a moment, I felt closer to her than I ever did when she was alive.

My husband bought me a sweater made from Trevor’s wool. I wore it as I picked my way across the black rocks exposed by the low tide. Strange sea creatures clung to them. They seemed as old as the rocks. The dismembered skeletons of boats caught between them. The sky turned a churning gray and the howling the Scots called “fine weather” was dying down to a breeze that only threatened to peel your jacket off if you forgot to zip it.

I held Granny in my hand. Every goodbye feels like the first and the last one. The craggy, snowcapped ridges of the Cuillin Mountains blazed white in the distance. Their sun would be our sun in a moment, but for now the clouds parted only enough to let thick beams of light shine on the water, as though a lighthouse were perched in the heavens.

When it came, I opened my palm. A million white grains shivered as I uncurled my fingers. It is possible to love more even after someone has gone, possible to grieve them even as we come to know them. And it’s possible to belong to somewhere by choice or understanding.

We just have to listen to our heart as it calls us home. Sometimes it is hard to hear over everything else.

Suddenly, in a spray of dust that disappeared over the water, she was gone. Maybe Granny wasn’t Scottish, but she could become part of Scotland. And now part of me would belong here, too.

Ammi Midstokke can be contacted at ammimarie@gmail.com.