28 August 2016
The Scottish Highlands are a playground of light and dark upon a sweeping landscape. The way the hills and mountains are outlined, rounded and shadowy, against the sky, fitted against each other right up to the horizon, the heather dappling the dusky grass and dappled itself by the patchy sunlight coming through the dark clouds. The vast stillness of the Highlands is something that is difficult to convey in words – the way the wind throws itself from peak to valley; the way that beams of sunlight sometimes stream down to a lucky patch of hillside, illuminating it as if the hills were a cathedral built by giants; the way it feels higher and emptier than the rest of the world; a single-track road weaving through all that open space & making you feel tiny driving along it. The only words that come to mind are ones like this: Magnificent. Ancient. Awe-inspiring. I felt like I could breathe deeply there, like I could breathe in and in and never run out of air.
Strangely, despite never having been there before, Scotland felt familiar to me. I experienced this feeling in New Zealand as well, the sense that I’d been there before but just couldn’t quite remember it, or that I knew what was around the next curve in the road or over the next mountain pass even though I knew logically that I didn’t. One might call this deja vu; to a certain extent, it is. For me, though, I think it is also partially the fact that Scotland simply reminds me of other places I already know and love. Two specific places, actually: the trail to Meiss Meadows on the eastern side of the Sierra Nevadas, and the drive out to Moke Lake in Queenstown, New Zealand.
A few years ago, during a summer trip to my uncle’s old Forest Service cabin near Lake Tahoe, we hiked out to Meiss Meadows to see the old homestead there. My great-great grandparents built it in the late 1800s; they kept a dairy farm in the foothills, below the snow line, and in the summers they would drive their cattle up to the mountain pasture to graze. The log cabin and its accompanying barn sit on the banks of a small stream that is deceptive in its size, since farther down the mountain it will eventually turn into the Truckee River. From there, once a week, my great grandmother Genevieve would ride on horseback through the opposite end of the valley to the nearest town to pick up the mail.
Our hike out that day started clear and sunny, and stayed that way until we reached the cabins. Soon before we started back, though, it turned dark and windy, & from our mountainside vantage point we could see the purple clouds stacking up across the valley. The storm, like any good, self-respecting storm would, waited until we were at the highest and most unprotected point on the trail to hit full force. It happened to be my favorite part of the trail – it is at the uppermost point of the climb over the pass that leads to the valley, and it is largely devoid of trees, so the hills are populated instead by low-growing sage and other brushes. Leaving the meadows, the trail climbs quickly up and drops off to the left into a deep, narrow little valley that swoops up immediately into another steep, sage-y mountainside.
That day, the wind howled as I had never felt it before; we could feel the rain starting to spit at our faces as we watched the flashes of lightning and counted the seconds until we heard the roll of thunder. The number began to shrink, and we knew the lightning was getting closer. There is nothing that I have experienced that is quite like a summer thunderstorm in the Sierra Nevadas; it is magnificent in the same way that the Scottish Highlands are magnificent, and it was in fine form that day in Meiss Meadows. The clouds, crowded against the mountains, were thick and heavy and purple, like a bruise, and they lent their dark cast to the greenness of the mountains surrounding the trail. The thunder, when it came, was the most physical sound I have ever heard. That is the only way I know to describe it – it sounded like something with weight, like something that could hit you; the billow and snap of a large piece of heavy material being shaken out and then torn. The greens and purples and greys, the sense of a slow, ancient vastness across the landscape, the feeling of exhilaration that comes when the cold wind blows; all these things I have held in my mind from that day, and many other thunderstorm days in the mountains, and I recognized them immediately when I came to the Highlands.
Moke Lake is another of these places. They are different from each other in many ways (geographic distribution included) but related in a sense that comes more from the feeling one gets when one is there than from the small specific details of the landscape itself in terms of flora and fauna. The first time I drove out to Moke Lake, I nearly cried from the beauty of it. Around one certain bend, the valley opens up – golden brown mountains on either side, and a horse-shoe shaped lake in the middle. In the mornings, it is often covered with a thick mist that dampens noise and gives everything an ethereal tinge (even the sheep). The valley is long and deep, growing narrower and steeper on the sides the further back you go. Near the lake, the pastures are wide and covered in knee-high golden-green grass; with the lake to your right, you can stare straight up at the back of the peak called Ben Lomond that overlooks Queenstown.
Walking alone through the tall brush in the valley, or up a small side canyon to clear out the water filter, I often felt very small and very, very aware of the fact that I was alone; I would also sometimes feel that particular prickling heaviness between my shoulder blades, the kind which typically alerts one to the fact that one is not alone. I never reconciled these two sensations, and I also never made sense of the fact that I was not usually very frightened when feeling them. Some places are just like that, I suppose – powerful in a way that only the oldest parts of your brain can understand and communicate.
The South Island of New Zealand, and especially the area called Otago where Queenstown lies, has a very obvious Scottish heritage: the map is covered in it, peppered with names like Glenorchy, Invercargill, Dunedin, and Ben Lomond. I once took a couple from Scotland out on a trek during the time I worked there, and they remarked on this fact.
“They even have thistles here,” said the man.
Now, having been to the Highlands myself and having my inkling of a strong similarity between the two places confirmed, these things make more sense – it is no wonder that Scottish immigrants, having traveled weeks, if not months, over rough seas and equally rough land, would arrive in Queenstown and breathe the air there, and feel the way the wind threw itself between the peaks and valleys, and see the way the sunlight streamed down through the clouds, and say to each other, “This is where our journey ends. This is home.”
That subject – home – is something that I have once again been thinking of frequently. My childhood home is in California, by the ocean; however, as I have learned this year, home is much less of a place than it is a feeling. But what about an ancestral home? Is it possible to feel something for a place you’ve never been before, simply because people whose blood you carry in fractional quantities once walked there? I am not not sure of the answers to those questions, even after actually returning to the closest thing I have to a homeland.
My heritage, like that of many Americans, consists of a long list of European countries with numbers such as “5%” and “25%” and “10%” next to them. Those thrilling questionnaires that go hand in hand with everything from doctor visits to college applications typically boil this down to “Caucasian” for convenience (and I don’t blame them). My largest percentages are this: I am German and Italian on my mother’s side, and Scottish on my father’s. What this means, realistically, is that I am capable of getting a very nice tan, but that it only lasts about a week if I am not continually exposed to the sun. It also means that I have been asked many times if I am, perhaps, related to Ronald McDonald.
Regardless, my fractional Scottish heritage is the one that has proven itself most prevalent in my life. This can be attributed, most obviously, to my family’s very Scottish surname; I think it also has to do with the fact that I have a rather large family on my father’s side (lots of grandparents, lots of aunts and uncles, lots of cousins, and now several babies since some of the older cousins have started their own families in recent years) and that we have naturally clannish tendencies – i.e., very loud, very numerous, and very proud that we are all related to each other.
Something else we are proud of is the fact that we are Scottish. How, you might ask, can one be proud of a place, a culture, and a heritage that one has never had personal contact with? To which I would answer: fantastic question. Because truly – we are all American. We were all born in America; our most recent direct ancestor to actually live in Scotland left it for Canada somewhere in the early 1800s.
The name carried on, though – across the Atlantic, through the generations in New Brunswick, over the border to the United States, and finally to us. To me. I spoke to someone last week on this subject; he asked me why so many Americans love Europe so much.
“I think a lot of us come here to find our roots,” I told him.
I was answering for myself, really, because that is exactly what I’m doing.
With the obvious exception of Native people, America is a country of immigrants. Many of those retained close ties to the cultures and traditions of their homeland; many did not. Many, like my family, have simply been so far removed in time and space from their homeland that any initial efforts to retain those ties must have just trickled down into nothing over the generations.
So what are we left with, then? Fireworks on the Fourth of July; Thanksgiving dinners; practices that are specific to particular family units, like eating tamales on Christmas Day. We are American, so we appreciate these traditions and call them our own. But what are we to do when these things begin to feel a bit empty? What do we do when those things no longer feel like enough?
I’ll tell you. We hang the family crest in the hallway; we carry the Macdonald tartan on scarves and on blankets; we go to the local Highland Games when they come around every year to listen to the bagpipes play; we dream about visiting Scotland, and when we finally do, we touch the stones of the ruined castle on the Isle of Skye where our ancestors once lived and we ache in our chests for the power of it.
So, then – what about this ancestral homeland business? I want to say yes, it is possible to feel a deep connection to a place just because your ancestors lived there once upon a time and then sailed away from it over 200 years ago. But if I’m being honest, I still don’t know. Maybe I love the Scottish Highlands because some part of me, on a molecular level, senses that it has finally returned home. Maybe I love it because I want to love it, because I am so desperate for a genuine connection to a culture and heritage beyond that which America has provided me with; maybe I love it simply because it is a beautiful, ancient landscape that holds centuries of lives and stories and mysterious, moving power in its soil. I don’t know, and I’m not sure it really matters.
All I really can say is that if nothing else, coming to Scotland has helped me decide one thing: someday, somehow, I am going to get every single member of my family to come to this country. We’re going to stand on the Isle of Skye together, and look at each other, and know that we are home; and then we’re going to return to California, where we will eat tamales on Christmas Day, and look at each other, and know that we are home.
SGBRSH 