Vagabonding in Europe: To Scotland & Homeward Bound[1]
Liz and me and my backpack in an Edinburgh cafe
The summer of 1981, after three months of hitching and hiking around Europe, my version of the Grand Tour was beginning to wind down. But not before visiting the British Isles and reconnecting with my friend Liz Coleridge, with whom I’d spent three wonderful days the previous year in a little town on Guatemala’s Caribbean coast.
I stopped at the American Express office in Brussels, only to find out the letter I’d been expecting from Pat in Iowa City hadn’t arrived. The next day I started hitchhiking for the coast – a quick ride to Ghent, passing through the flat Flemish farmland, and another to Zeebrugge, where a Townsend Thoreson ferry could take me across the channel to Dover.[2] I tried hitching a ride onto the ferry to avoid paying the fare, but abandoned that plan, wanting to make sure I caught the 4:00 p.m. boat.
The sun was setting as the white chalk cliffs of Dover appeared out of the haze. After disembarking and answering the customary customs questions, I joined a queue of hitchhikers headed to London. I slipped out of the line and walked over to the gas pumps, where I chatted up a ride from two leather craftsmen returning from Paris to Northampton. Around midnight, they dropped me off at an M1 motorway service area, where I found a quiet spot to lay out my sleeping bag for the rest of that pleasantly cool night.
The next morning I met Uhle, a young traveler from Hamburg, and after making a connection through our shared admiration for The Clash and The Ramones, we hitched together that day, slowly making our way north to Birmingham, then picking up the M6, which took us to Liverpool (Uhle’s destination) and then past (but not through) the Yorkshire Dales and the Lake District. Eventually I crossed the remnants of Hadrian’s Wall into Scotland. Passing through the rolling landscape of the Scottish Lowlands in early September, I began to notice the change of seasons – fields of tall wildflowers sprouting wispy tufts of seeds, grass drying to straw, the beige tones of those meadows outlined by dry-laid stone walls.
Perhaps it was the first signs of autumn that stirred up a recurring apprehension – one which seemed incongruous for someone my age (27) – about getting older, less handsome, less robust, closer to death. I was nearly overtaken by a sense of panic until I steered myself toward a reminder of the advantages of aging – perspective, maturity, wisdom. Still, my narcissism resisted that reasoning, whispering in my ear, “This youthful body that’s served you well, that’s accepted bumps and bruises and swallowed impurities and rebuffed them all, will begin to break down, take on wrinkles and gray hair, succumb to illnesses more easily.” From the vantage point of forty-three years later, it seems laughable, and I wish I could tell younger me to find something more meaningful to worry about.
Late that day, I arrived in Edinburgh,[3] the political and cultural heart of Scotland, and found my way to Liz’s flat on Warriston Road, just north of historical New Town. It was good to see her again, to rediscover her sincerity and wholesome beauty, how caring she was, and recall why I’d been so taken with her. She welcomed me into her circle of friends – her flatmate Donald and his girlfriend Janet, her ex-beau Sam, who had just moved out of the upstairs apartment, and his new girlfriend Vivian. Liz and I went out the next morning to a nearby breakfast cafe tucked below street level for coffee and scones before she went off to her hospital social work job counseling pregnant women. I wandered up and down the city’s medieval Old Town, and visited Inverleith House on the grounds of the Royal Botanic Garden to see the German artist Joseph Beuys’ fiercely political installations.
The next day I went shopping for groceries to make a dinner of eggplant (aubergine) parmesan, garlic bread, purple cabbage salad, with a bottle of red wine. After Liz and I parted nearly a year and a half before, I headed north to Belize and the States, and she traveled south to Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia. She sent me a letter that began “I have spent all my time since leaving this morning thinking about you, so here I am telling you about it so as to feel a little less ‘triste’” and concluded “I want to think that we will meet again one day, but it’s impossible to know.” On her journey, she met and fell in love with Willem, a fellow-traveler from Amsterdam, and their relationship was still going strong, limited only by the expanse of the North Sea. But caught up in the moment, we rekindled the feelings we’d held for each other, and she invited me to share her bed.
On Saturday, Liz left for a trip with her mother to the Isle of Arran and I headed north, with plans to meet back in Edinburgh in a week. I caught a ride that took me across the Firth of Forth and within ten miles of Perth. I could see a distant castle, and in the last hour of daylight, hiked across fields to the ruins of the sixteenth-century Balvaird Castle. The structure was being restored, the area marked as off-limits and hard-hats-only, but no one was around except quail and rabbits and a few far-flung farmhouses. I camped that night in a courtyard next to the red and gray sandstone walls of the castle tower.
Balvaird Castle
Sunshine awoke me and put me back on the road. A lift into Perth and then two more quick rides took me to Inverness, where the Loch Ness feeds into the Firth of Moray, where I enjoyed a lunch of split pea soup and tea, where I turned west toward the Isle of Skye. Back on the road, I was foraging a dessert of blackberries and concocting plans to promote my literary magazine back in Iowa City when I was suddenly transported by the smell of hot road tar to a sunny fall day in the Pennsylvania mountains, nearly a decade earlier, the tar paper underfoot heating up as Jon, Michael, and I ripped shingles off a roof.
I was now in the Scottish Highlands. Three more rides took me to a road junction near the village of Achnasheen, that road having narrowed to a single lane running through a landscape of mountain ranges tinged purple by flowering heather, all that intersected by fleet rivers and deep lochs, and interspersed with mossy fens, sheep meadows, and here and there, a stone cottage. The panorama was stunning. I pitched my tent in a stand of firs and slept soundly, snug in my sleeping bag, until the sun broke through and burned off the chill.
By Scottish Roads
Slow-eyed Cheviot graze the fells
of the Southern Uplands.
Wind-rushed clouds laden with rain
brush across the hilltops.
And alongside the road
old weather-beaten sheepcotes –
circles of granite stone laid
by the sons of Duncan and MacLeod,
now covered with lichen –
evoke another way of living.
But the Highlands
are the end of the world.
Beyond Achnasheen
the starkness enthralls.
A one-track road cuts through
boggy fens otherwise impassable.
The distant hills, swathed in purple,
loom like an eventuality,
a land slow to heal.
A crofter’s hut of stone and sod
lies ruined by the road
that leads to Skye.
I was now hiking as much as hitching, enjoying the meditations of my morning stroll, just me and the elements, but a car stopped sooner than I hoped, and a lovely Welsh couple took me within five miles of Kyle of Lochalsh, where the ferry to Skye departed. I hoofed it to the ferry landing, boarded, and soon found myself in Kyleakin on the Isle of Skye.[4] I proceeded to walk out of town and up the road, reveling in this wonderful confusion of land and water – islands, inlets, sounds, bays, peninsulas – made even more confounding by the tides.
The first vehicle to stop was a Ford van filled with six young Italians, three couples from Venezia on vacation. I eavesdropped on their conversation for a while and then surprised and pleased them by joining in, parlando un italiano adeguato. They’re good folks, reminding me of my Roman friend Sergio and his compatriots – passionate about radical politics, lively conversation, and good food and music. They were on their way to Portree to spend the night at a bed-and-breakfast. I decided to accept their invitation to come along, offering to help as a translator, since my English was a bit better than theirs.
The seven of us caroused around the Isle of Skye – Matteo and Gabi, Enzo and Valeria, Gianni and Isabella, and me. They weren’t into roughing it, but understood I was on a tighter budget than they were. After that first night, they let me sleep in the back of the van while they paid for the comfort of beds. On the way to Dunvegan, we put our van in a ditch and had to get towed out. We bought groceries for a picnic relocated to a pub’s roofed terrace because of the intermittent rain. We visited Dunvegan Castle, ancestral home of the MacLeod clan, learning about Highland clan history, and took a boat excursion to see the Loch Dunvegan seal colony. Our last night together, we stopped at a bed-and-breakfast in Broadford, the goodman of the establishment coming out to the van in the morning to invite me to join the others for porridge, eggs, sausage, toast, and coffee.
My Italian friends got me off the isle and as far as Fort William, where we parted ways. I was hoping to quickly hitch the last 150 miles back to Edinburgh, but no such luck. After a ten-mile hike along a road skirting an ocean inlet and one short ride, I camped for the night, waking before dawn to more drizzling rain. I returned to my home away from home on Warriston Road that afternoon, dried out my gear, warmed a bowl of soup, and took a hot bath. Wiping away the steam on the mirror, I barely recognized myself – scraggly reddish beard and sun-bleached hair, ten years of hitchhiking off and on, counting my last year of high school. On this trip, I had begun to introduce myself as a writer, uno scrittore, un écrivain, no longer drawing a distinction between vocation or profession. But I’d always be a student, a learner.
The next morning I bought comfrey, lemon verbena, and peppermint at a natural foods shop to make tea for my Skye cold. I later visited the Scottish National Gallery, lingering in front of the Turner and Constable oils and Blake etchings. After dinner that evening with Liz and her mother, who had just returned home, Liz and I made plans for a weekend bike trip.
We set off the next morning, me on a five-speed bicycle rental, our sleeping bags, tent, and food strapped on back. We biked south thirty miles into the Moorfoot Hills and camped beside the Leithen Water, a stream in a sheep pasture, as indeed all that country really was. That night we survived a storm that buffeted our little tent and filled the stream to the limits of its banks. On the morning of the autumn equinox, we lounged in our tent till nearly noon, sharing stories of our lives, making porridge and Dutch-style koffie over Liz’s campstove.
We biked south to the town of Innerleithen and visited nearby Traquair House, a fifty-room mansion and the oldest continually inhabited residence in Scotland, where Liz gave me history lessons on the fractious kinship between Scotland and England. We enjoyed our picnic lunch in their teahouse, afterward biking east along the south bank of the River Tweed. As we biked back to our camp, low gray clouds whooshed overhead, while wispy cirrus clouds high above us surveyed the scene. That night, beside the gray waters of the Leithen, in the yellow womb of our tent, we got lost in each other, a timeless drifting. Liz was a sweet, kind, warm woman, and I was fortunate to get the chance to know her better.
Jacob sheep, a British breed unusual for their piebald coloring and, frequently, double sets of horns
The last day of our trip, we biked to Fountainhall, an arts-and-crafts colony twenty miles northeast of our camp, sighting along the way a herd of Jacob sheep, uniquely beautiful with their four horns and splotchy black-and-white fleece. We stopped to visit Liz’s delightfully crazy Quebecois ex-lover Michel as well as her poet friend Hillary. We had to book it back to Edinburgh, covering twenty miles in an hour to return my bike before the rental shop closed.
My Europe trip ended in a blur – goodbye hug from Liz, hitchhike to London, stay the night with Liz’s friend Barbara, catch a flight from Heathrow to New York City. Midway over the Atlantic, I felt caught, torn between a desire to continue my unfettered vagabonding and a desire to wrap my arms around Pat and three-year-old Sierra. But hitching back to Iowa City, I sensed, as I never had before, that I’d finally satisfied my wanderlust. Waking up next to Pat a month later, I turned to her and asked her to marry me. She said no, just to make sure I’d fully realized the commitment I was about to make. When I asked her again a week later, she gave a different answer.
Footnotes
[1] Simon & Garfunkel - Homeward Bound (Live Canadian TV, 1966) (youtube.com)
[2] Less than six years later, that ferry capsized shortly after leaving the port of Zeebrugge, killing193 passengers.
[3] A couple weeks too late for that year’s Edinburgh Fringe, the world’s largest arts festival.
[4] The ferry was shut down in 1995 when the Skye Bridge was completed, spanning the one-kilometer crossing.