Appalachia has the look of the Highlands, she says, but the New World has more trees. And the people have the same look about them in bone structure, the same fiddle tunes, but even she concedes that the conscious memories of Scotland are generations gone.
"I wonder why we never see the fairy folk in Scotland these days," I said once, in an effort to humor her.
She answered me in Gaelic. I've no idea what she said.
TRAVELER'S DIARY
I'm beginning to understand why my pioneer ancestors stopped their journey in the hills of western North Carolina, rather than pushing on for the plains of the Midwest. They must have thought they were back home. On our drive from Glasgow to Mallaig there were long stretches of landscape that could have been Carolina, if they'd thrown in a few trees. What trees there were turned out to be evergreen; no hardwoods to speak of. I asked Cameron if previous generations had cut down all the good trees for firewood (I can almost sympathize with that; it is July, and I have been so cold at times, I might have burned the Book of Kells to take the chill out of the room), or if hardwood trees have never grown there at all, because of climate, or altitude, or whatever. Of course, he didn't know. To Cameron, Glenfinnan is a brand of Scotch, and Caithness is glass paperweights, not Pictish ruins. How can you get a sense of the past out of someone who cannot even remember the name of his first-grade teacher?
Even in summer the sky has been a misty gray most of the time, giving a brooding quality to the landscape. You can see for miles on the ribbon of highway through the hills: slippery-looking green mountains dotted with sheep and stone fences, and almost never a sign of human habitation. I would want to live out here in the wilderness, where there'd be nobody else for miles, but the British seem to want to cluster together in cities. I wonder if this is because of land prices, or if it's that the matey ones stayed in Britain, and those who loved solitude (like my kinfolk) left for the New World, where the wilderness went on forever.
Cameron is definitely one of the matey ones. He just loves his apartment back at the university. I told him, "You put me in a box up off the ground, where I can hear folks on three sides through the walls, and I'd be dead in a month." I feel the spell of the mountains and the past very strongly in the north of Scotland, but all of that is lost on Cameron, the seal-man.
On the drive up, I asked him the name of the mountain in the distance. I was looking for Ben Nevis, or perhaps the first of the Five Sisters of Kintail. Cameron glanced at the stark bluish peak across the valley and quipped, "The locals call it Benny Hill." He seemed to find this wonderfully amusing. He was still chuckling over it miles later and didn't seem to notice that I wasn't speaking to him. Then he assumed that I had missed the joke, so lie carefully explained to me that ben is Gaelic for mountain, and that Benny Hill is a television comedian. I replied that he got full marks for bilingual punning and no credit at all for sensitivity. In fact, he owes points in that category. Cameron's heart is not in the Highlands; it is probably not attached to his brain; it may even be in a jar of formaldehyde in an Edinburgh University biology lab.
He looks the part, though. When he isn't being so gratingly modern, he could pose for cover art for practically any of those silly romance novels with titles like Tartan Rapture. It's the kind of handsomeness that won't change with age. (As a forensic anthropologist, I can tell about things like that.) His looks are in the bone structure, not in what covers them. He'll probably still have those looks at sixty. And despite it all, I hope I will be around to verify that hypothesis. It will probably take till then to break through all that British reserve anyway.
We have until tomorrow morning to reach Mallaig, from which the Calmac ferry departs for the islands beyond, and after that we'll be taken to Banrigh in Cameron's small boat. It will be so fitting, I think, to be crossing the Scottish sea in the same sort of craft my ancestors must have used—a boat like the one Flora McDonald used to take Bonnie Prince Charlie to Skye.
Cameron says that a visit to Culloden Moor would be out of our way, so I will probably have to cry before he will agree to take me. Men can be so difficult at times.
Elizabeth found Mallaig to be a picture postcard sort of fishing village perched between mountain and blue sea. She spent much of the wait for the ferry buying postcards and running around taking photographs, explaining to Cameron, "I must have something to remember this by!" It never seemed to occur to her that she had nothing to remember the village for, since she had spent her entire time there storing up memories rather than making them.
The other members of the Banrigh expedition arrived by train, and the group reassembled at a cafe near the dock, waiting for the Calmac ferry that would take them to the islands beyond.
"Want another meat pie?" Cameron asked Elizabeth. "This is the best meal you'll get for a while."
"I'm not hungry just now," said Elizabeth. "Perhaps I could get one to go."
Cameron and Denny burst out laughing. "It's obvious that you've never had one of these things cold," Denny told her. "Congealed grease! I think I'll have another beer to wash mine down, though I probably shouldn't, as it's pill time."
"Oh, do you have a cold?" Cameron asked.
Denny grinned. "No, just a bit of an infection. My doctor told me to take this antibiotic—ampicillin, I think he said— and to cultivate better taste in women!"
Cameron sighed. "You haven't changed a bit since university. '
"And has Cameron changed?" asked Elizabeth.
"Seal-men never change," said Denny. "Except into seals and back."
At a nearby table Owen Gilchrist and Callum Farthing, who had driven over from Inverness, were holding a desultory conversation about American Indian mound builders, because their table-mates, Alasdair and his Danish girlfriend, were talking in urgent whispers and pretending that they were alone at the table.
Gitte, as always, looked nervously obsequious. Like a whipped hound, Callum thought to himself. He had sized up the med student as a pompous asshole early on and was prepared to have as little to do with him as possible, easier said than done on a tiny island. The girl was a mousy type, rather shaky in her English; he dismissed her at once, thinking that it would be nice to have someone doing the scut work. Cooking detail and washing up—that would be the extent of her usefulness. He wasn't sure about the American one: she looked more capable, but she might be one of those artistic loonies that archaeology seemed to attract. (Callum had once been on a dig with a grandmotherly woman who clanked of turquoise jewelry and wanted to dance naked among the ruins by moonlight.) He smiled to himself: that might be all right; anything to liven up Banrigh.
"Of course, I haven't heard any evidence that the eastern mound builders actually practiced human sacrifice or ritual cannibalism," Owen was saying wistfully.