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The other Scotland | page 1, 2
"Do ya knaw tha story of Robert tha Bruce?" I pleaded ignorance. "Savage. Pillag'r. Destroy'r," he retorted with pride. "I assume he had a cause." "Tha nobles' of all; he fought agains' tha bloody English!" A young man named Roger with an Elvis coif and two days' stubble leaned an elbow on the bar and shared a seemingly often-told story about his travel outside the islands. The men told me jokes I barely got and the others laughed as if hearing it for the first time. I took my cues and smiled along, buzzed and stunned from sensory overload. My glass never made it a quarter empty before I was given another, and single malts were given with slurred instructions. In Napa I was not. I eventually fought my way back to Maggie, who was talking with the few women in the pub. They had ditched any signs of wedding wear, and their mascara was blurred below their eyes. Cigarettes hung lazily in their hands and their words seeped out like smoke. I'm not sure if they considered us a threat or if they were simply wiped out from working the wedding while the men celebrated it, but they took our arrival with considerably less enthusiasm. Once we had initiated introductions and adopted submissive body language, they returned the gesture by offering cigarette drags and thickly accented grumbles regarding the opposite sex. The night continued at a slurred pace and Maggie and I followed suit. Like balls in a slow-motion pinball machine, we bounced where others willed us. We eventually settled among the two brothers of the bride, Donny and Angus Macleod. Both sported the fair Scottish complexion and had beaming eyes with grins to match. Donny was younger with a leaner build, Angus looked more weathered. His temples were prematurely graying, his laugh lines were well marked and Maggie and I both struggled to suppress our attraction. The brothers took our company with neither the energy of the older men nor the skepticism of the women. Instead they treated us as if our presence was expected. They told us about themselves: the house Angus was building from scratch, the two brothers' plans to hitchhike the globe in kilts to search out the world's Macleods' descendents. ("Ya see, cars stop fa blokes in kilts.") We shared music and movies, and when they couldn't bother with making trivial conversation, they took slow drags or chatted among themselves in Gaelic. Pronounced like a Brooklynite saying "garlic," Scottish Gaelic is the almost-extinct Scot version of the more-familiar Irish language. I had only read about it in history books, but it was Donny's and Angus's mother tongue. This was almost too much for a decidedly non-naive girl like myself. As I peered down at the ashen knees that hung below the collection of kilts, tuning in the salubrious guitar and whole-hearted singing, my head spun. America may be everywhere, but everywhere was not America. Contrary to my constantly upgrading urban environs back home, this place did have a past, and that past was not just graffiti in a school textbook. I don't pretend that the men of Tarbert always walked around in kilts, but they did know why their tartan had the colors it did, and where those colors came from.
(All my clothing claimed to be made in a country I could not place on a map.) When the Tarberters sang songs, they knew the words that their ancestors two generations back did. (Most of my friends could not even sing a full Beatles refrain.) I was in the here-and-now of a real Scottish event where the Gaelic, kilts, scotch and songs had concrete significance. I had found the real Scotland, and it just happened to look a lot like the postcard. If Scotland felt incredibly singular, this only intensified with what happened next. Abruptly, the crowd thinned, the music halted and the lights went off. Donny and Angus quickly ushered us into a back room where the newlyweds' immediate family huddled and whispered. Between my altered body chemistry and my foreign ignorance, I was slow to realize what every other partygoer knew. The clock had struck midnight, the day had crossed from Saturday night to Sunday morning. We were in the Outer Hebrides, a place where people were scorned for doing laundry on Sunday, let alone partaking in God's less-sanctioned pastimes. Angus's remark that the last two Sundays "have not been too Hebridean" suddenly made sense. Our presence -- as witnesses, I suppose -- pointed up the party's transgression. It took us 10 minutes before Maggie and I realized this, and by then we were the topic of the terse whispers between the women and men. Once this became clear, we apologized profusely, acknowledged the generosity we'd been afforded and rushed out into the early morn. Rain pelting our backs and the wind pushing us towards the brightness of our hotel, Maggie and I walked easily. Like kids after a Disney ride, we recounted moments and stories and before we knew it, we were back at the hotel. Peering out our room's window, I considered all the surprises the evening had brought; perhaps, I thought, it is not such a small world after all.
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