Seasons on Harris Read online

  In the same way that I admire the intense hermitlike dedication and faith of the early Christian saints (despite the cynicism of those historians who suggest that their primary purpose was not so much the promulgation of the gospels to a Christ-less world but rather the salvation of their own souls), I sensed a similar clarity of original vision and belief here. With one difference: this was an immense communal creation reflecting a well-established continuum of perception and action that possibly linked ancient civilizations throughout Britain, France (Carnac in Brittany possesses an equally amazing series of creations), and many other coastal fringes of Europe. The only problem is that I, in common with most other commentators, have no real idea what that collective visionary perception once was. Obviously, the recognition of higher powers and energy potentials was the binding bond, as it has been for almost all sects, religions, and cults from time immemorial. But after that…what else? How were their gods—their higher powers—depicted? Was fear the driving force for communal action—fear of mortality; fear of crop failure, starvation, and social decimation; fear of ever-present invaders with more powerful forces at their own disposal; fear of internal anarchy if the human species were not disciplined and restrained by durable power structures? Or just the oh-so-common fear and/or respect of the masses subjected to the dominance of strong clan leaders or dictators? Or…

  IN THE CASE OF STORNOWAY (yes, I finally left Callanish, a little reluctantly, and drove back across Barvas moor to my destination of the day), you immediately perceive the visionary impact of more benign leaders in the form of affluent “social reformers” who gallantly tried to transform this modest crofting and fishing community, set around a deep, safe harbor, into something far grander, gracious, and affluent.

  These utopian visions began as far back as 1599 when Stornoway was a base for the “Fife adventurers,” who had been instructed by King James VI (later King James I of England—more convoluted British history here) to tame “a barbarous, uncivilized, and pagan people.”

  Various skirmishes and devious dealings around that time between the clans led to the ouster of the powerful MacLeods (a family of Norse origin) by the MacKenzies in 1610. Then another power shuffle during the Jacobite “rebellions” of 1719 and 1745 brought a brief occupation by Oliver Cromwell’s forces, and finally, in the next century, the “gentleman visionaries” began to appear. It’s a long story, but eighty-three-and-a-half-year-old Hector Campbell (he was very precise about his age, and his incandescently red face, which could have easily doubled as a traffic light, glowed with geriatric pride), who I met on a bench overlooking the harbor, seemed to have his own unique perception of the town’s history from that point onward: “Well, Lord Seaforth—the MacKenzie chief had himself renamed in English fashion—built himself a fancy mansion for himself across there from the harbor. And then along comes the big ‘opium king,’ James Matheson, in 1844, buys up Stornoway and the whole blinkin’ island, tears down Seaforth’s place, and puts up—that thing—and planted all those woods too.”

  “That thing” is Lews Castle, one of the first features you notice as you drive into this tight-knit little town of 8,600 or so residents. It sits on a hillside overlooking the harbor and the town, in glorious Victorian-Gothic pomposity, with turrets, towers, battlements, and elegantly carved stonework surrounded by one of the oddest sights on this storm-torn, bog-strewn, and largely desolate island: a gorgeously lush swath of woodlands stretching for a mile or so along the inlet, and way back to the Harris road. You just don’t expect to see trees anywhere on Lewis. But here they are in their thousands, including an encyclopedic array of “exotic” species, and looking more like the country estate of some landed gentry family in the lush, sumptuous greenery of Sussex.

  “Is it open to the public?” I asked Hector.

  “Oh—aye, ’course it is. All kinds of walks and streams and nice cozy places for a bit of…well, y’know. It’s nice to have some trees, ’specially after that ninth-century Viking raider, Magnus Barelegs, burnt down all the forest on Lewis an’ left the whole flippin’ moor bare as his own legs!” Hector chuckled at his own ribald imagery, revealing a battered Stone-hengelike set of nicotine-stained teeth.

  “The castle’s closed, though—they say it’s fallin’ down. But there’s a technical college behind it. We’re proud of that. A college on Lewis. Makes us Leodhasaich feel a bit more important d’y’ken. Means the young kids might stay a wee bit longer…Anyhow so—like I was tellin’ ye, Matheson moved in and started makin’ changes to the town. Did some good things. Helped us out during the terrible days of the potato famines and whatnot around 1845. Brought in food and supplies for us an’ got to be a baron too for ‘his great exertions and munificence’ an’ all that. Good man gen’rally speakin’, even though they said he made most of his money in the opium trade. But then again, so did Queen Victoria, I’ve heard…But when he died in comes our ‘Wee Soapman,’ Lord Leverhulme, in 1918 and buys up the island again and—boy—was that an eye-opener! He had all kinds of ideas and projects—plantin’ great forests of willows for basket makin’ all over the Lewis moors; a new iodine industry from all the seaweed we’ve got; peat-fired power stations can y’believe; building up the herring fleet after World War I to make Stornoway the ‘fishin’ capital of the world’ and gettin’ work for all those hundreds of ‘herring girls’ and dozens of kipperin’ smokehouses, an’ tryin’ to get the crofters off the land and into canning factories here. Oh—an’ he built that bloody great tower over there too.” (Hector pointed to the west, where an impressive eighty-five-foot-high tower rose on the horizon—a memorial to the 1,159 Lewismen lost in World War I.)

  Lews Castle, Stornoway

  “Amazin’man, really. He’d so many ideas. He even tried to revive the old whaling yard at Bunevoneadar in North Harris. Strange old place that. Just a chimney left—and the old flensing platform where they used to cut ’em up. Leverhulme was amazed how much meat was wasted. All they used was the blubber for oil. So he invented a process for making sausages for workers on his huge plantations out in Africa.”

  “Africa!?”

  “Yeah—can y’believe. He said, ‘The African native is not an epicure, so long as it is good wholesome food—and it will also improve the possibility of mastication!’”

  “And what happened?”

  “His natives were more fussy than he thought. It flopped. Like so much of what he tried to do here. He ran into a lot of problems y’see when our lads—the few that were left—came back from the war and all they wanted really was just their own crofts with its own wee communion of crofters—all equal, all helping each other. They’d been promised land—‘land fit for heroes’—by the government and didn’a want to work for someone else in factories and whatnot. So the poor old Soapman finally gave up and donated most of the island to the people and the Stornoway Trust in 1923 and went off down into Harris and tried to get the Hearaich people organized instead! And he never came back to Stornoway ever again. When he sailed across he came from Uig on Skye to Tarbert on Harris like the ferries do nowadays, not from Ullapool. Turned his back on us completely!”

  “And did his ideas work in Harris?”

  “Could’ve done—if he didn’t go and die in 1925 jus’ as he was tryin’ to get Leverburgh goin’ as a big fishin’ harbor…”

  “I remember reading about that. His board of directors stopped everything!”

  “Aye that they did. In a flash!” Hector’s granite-black eyes suddenly sparkled with a fierce quartzite glint. “Bunch a’ tiddlypissers—no gumption, no imagination—but a’ suppose y’canna blame them really. He’d spent—and lost—fortunes on our islands. Sad story really…”

  We sat quietly for a while watching the fishing boats wallow and nudge one another against the docks as the noon tide crept into the harbor. Scores of seagulls poked and pecked the wave-worn hulls and decks for fishy scraps, and two gray seals, apparently a familiar sight in the harbor, frolicked in the shallows. Behind us, the
tightly packed stores, restaurants, and pubs along the waterfront drew their jostling lunchtime crowds.

  “So was that it for the ‘utopian benefactors’ here?”

  Hector gave a chuckle. “Well—a’ suppose so. The really big ones. But there were many others who helped make this a real proud little town…Y’heard of Alexander Nicolson? Fine man. Left money in his will for a school, the Nicolson Institute. Built in 1873 and—my, that place has turned out some pretty famous people…”

  “Is it still here today?”

  “Oh my—yes, indeed. Much bigger now. Jus’ y’wait while around twelve-thirty. Streets’ll be full of its students. Flippin’ madhouse it gets for an hour or two…you’ll see…”

  And just as Hector had predicted, at lunchtime the kids emerge from the Nicolson and meander in snakey lines down the long hill of Frances Street, past Lloyds Bank, the County Hotel, McNeill’s Bar, and groupings of turreted and towered civic buildings, proud emblems of Victorian gentility, when the little harbor town glowed with mercantile affluence. When they reach Cromwell Street they have a choice to make. Turn right to the confectionery shop, the library coffee bar, or the Golden Sea Chinese Restaurant for aromatic take-outs of chips with gravy, chips with curry sauce, chips with mushy peas, or chips with everything for 20p more. Or carry straight on down Point Street, supposedly closed to vehicles but invariably littered with parked cars, past the Criterion pub, a tiny smoky hangout of old salts and storytellers where a luxuriantly sculpted and frothed Guinness stout traditionally takes a good five salivating minutes to pour, down to the two fish ’n’ chips shops, Cameron’s and Paddy’s. And here they emerge, gorging on limp, oil-glistening chips piled high on square polystyrene plates. Some use the little wooden forks provided free along with salt and malt vinegar (anything else, like ketchup, usually costs extra, in typical thrifty Scottish manner); others, particularly the boys, plow in with greasy fingers and huddle together, faces and eyes blank, collectively and contentedly munching like cud-chewing cattle.

  Once the food is devoured, energy returns to the pubescent throng. The girls gossip and giggle in intimate swarmings or walk four abreast, arm in arm, up and down the cobbles of Point Street, seeing themselves reflected in the store windows or in the eyes of their friends. And preening. Gently but precociously.

  The boys, as boys do, mulishly chase one another, play street football, and once in a rare while insinuate themselves briefly into the girly-groups, where they whisper a few gossipy bits and pieces, or drop a few ribald remarks in baying voices, and leave the gum-chewing, jittery-fingered girls blushing and giggling with even more dizzy gusto than before.

  There is a nudge-nudge, wink-wink eroticism in the hormonal force field here, albeit slightly muted and sanitized by that strict Presbyterian ethos that pervades Stornoway. Despite its claim to eight different religious denominations here—“including the Baha’is too,” one lady insisted, “we even have a few o’ them…”—it’s the Calvinistic spirit of the Church of Scotland and its breakaway rebel brothers, the Free Church of Scotland and the Free Church (Continuing), that sets the tone for social mores and behavior here. But kids will be kids. Thankfully, I guess.

  Eventually the streets empty again as the students move back uphill to the Nicolson, dousing their little wildfires of schizoid emotions and suppressed fantasies, at least until the evening, until the dark…

  Which looses a far larger panoply of antics and aspirations. After the shops are closed. After the sun has set, red and furious, behind the woodlands and turreted Victorian towers of Lews Castle. After all this, the night prowlers emerge: the pub-primed philosophers (but few latte lappers—apparently this is not really a town for café cognoscenti), the disco dancers (yes indeed, the town has one—the Hebridean), the black-clad boys and the black-micro-skirt-clad girls all swirling, in little effervescences, out into the dark streets.

  Late evening into early night is also the time when the fishing boats return to the harbor just across the street from the Chinese restaurant. They are brightly adorned with trims of bright yellow, red, and Caribbean blue, looking like a floating carnival, circus-gay and quaint in traditional manner.

  But if you look closer, you can see that the wood and iron of the boats, the bright paint, the glass windows of the cabins, and the curved superstructure of the hulls are chipped and scarred and cracked and buckled as if by pirate skirmishes or errant shrapnel. Or more precisely, the elements—the bleffarts and the gurly seas. Thousands of days at sea are etched in their fabric. The scars and gashes gained from battling outrageous waves, storms, hurricanes, blizzards—and balancing, time and time again, on that heart-stopping cusp between survival and the sudden affluence of a rich catch, or abrupt, agonizing annihilation. A summons to the depths of the ocean with barely time to remember that old adage fishermen are taught—or certainly learn—early in their seafaring lives: The sea will claim its own.

  Maybe they also remember the wisdom of that other popular adage:

  Hunting is hell

  Fishing is fickle

  Put your faith in the land—it’ll

  Fill y’ pot an’ y’ kittle.

  And then you look at the fishermen themselves, mooring their boats to the dock with thick wet ropes wrapped around rusty capstans. And you see their faces—sweaty, still crusted with salt spray, some as barnacled and buckled as their boats, eyes averted from the people gathered in the small groups along the dock. The old salts, old men who wish they were old salts, wives hoping to scoop a bargain or two in just-docked fish, a few incomers—curious, buoyed by romantic dreams of Robert Louis Stevenson’s adventures—and boys. Always boys, watching, wondering if this might be their own future and their fortune.

  But the fishermen seemed to notice none of this. Their eyes, their muscles, their whole bodies are focused on the one last task of their endless odysseys out into The Minch and the Atlantic: unloading the catch.

  And tonight it’s a good catch, by the look of the boxes, brimming with cod and ling, being winched up from the hold and onto the dock. The seagulls go crazy, screeching and diving like eagles, fighting for scraps that fall among the rolled nets and brightly colored buoys. And so they go, heaving up the boxes, ignoring the onlookers, the screech of the gulls and their white droppings dumped with enthusiastic regularity, the stink of diesel oil and brine and fish guts. One captain remains in his wheelhouse, stoic and steady, peering out like the ancient mariner, ghostly through the salt-smeared windows, counting his boxes, calculating the returns, wondering what the next trip might bring…and maybe also remembering why he went to sea here in the first place, as expressed by one anonymous bard: “Perhaps other seas have voices for other folk, but the western sea alone can speak in the Gaelic tongue and reach the Gaelic heart.”

  And maybe in moments of introspection, when he has cause to question the meanness and guile of the middlemen, buying his hard-won fish by the ton, not even seeing them, just counting boxes and cash and nickel-and-diming…maybe that was when he wanted to remind them of Sir Walter Scott’s fine line from his novel The Antiquary: “It’s no fish ye’re buying; it’s men’s lives.”

  Eventually I left the clamoring harbor. The salty damp that hangs around the old battered boats had made me thirsty—a thirst that only a good tall pint or two of Scottish beer could quench. And I had two choices—one of the local pubs (actually over twenty choices here), or call the Hebridean Brewery here and see if the owner was still around. I’d heard he often worked late at his small establishment, tucked away in the industrial part of town around Rigs Road. And I’d also been told he welcomed visitors. Anytime.

  Fortunately my informant was correct. Andrew Ribbens’s greeting could not have been warmer. He was a stocky young man, slightly balding, with a round, friendly face and enticing grin and chuckle.

  “Well, come on in! I was wondering who might be around for a taste today. I’m thirsty—how ’bout you?”

  “Oh, definitely. I’ve been down at the harbor with t
he fishing boats. I can’t get that salt spray taste out of my mouth.”

  “Soon settle that f’ye…,” Andy said, and immediately started to prepare for slow, leisurely samplings of his three primary creations—The Islander, a strong premium ale, deep ruby in color with a robust malt and hops flavor; the Celtic Black Ale, Guinnesslike in its caramel aftertaste and dark porter hue, and the Clansman, a lighter concoction both in color and flavor—something you could enjoy anytime.

  “Congratulations,” I said, “you’ve got three fine brews here.”

  “Ah, but now there’s a fourth! You’ve got to try our latest masterpiece: The Berserker.”

  “The what?!”

  “Berserker. It’s what the Vikings used to call their top warriors. The really wild ones. The ones with the big horned helmets and the double-edged axes—they were said to be invulnerable…oh, and it’s seven and a half percent too—makes y’feel pretty invulnerable too—I based it on a seventeenth-century recipe…”

  “Seven and a half percent! That’s well over halfway to wine strength!”

  “Yes, yes, you’re right…now you mention it.”

  “Okay. Open one up. Let’s try it.”

  It had all one would want from a fine strong ale—a creamy head, smooth, velvety texture, a fruity “nose,” a deeply pungent and very hoppy flavor, and that special glow in the pit of your stomach that only something with a seven-and-a-half-percent punch can produce.

  “Beautiful,” I said, and smiled benignly at Brewmaster Andy.

  His compact, redolent establishment, full of gleaming stainless steel fermenters and conditioning vats and complex labyrinths of piping, had been rather hard to find in this drab sector of Stornoway, and first impressions had been distinctly underwhelming. I was possibly hoping for a rather pubby tasting room with hand-carved Hebridean Brewery signs and maybe a flurry of hop plants over the door and dark beams and cozy chairs inside. Something like that. But Andy’s brewery was not at all like your typical village pub. In fact, it could have doubled as a maintenance garage for local buses or a storage facility for packing crates, with its thirty-foot-high ceilings rising from the concrete floor to a steel beam roof. The sampling bar admittedly had a few colorful posters around it and a couple of beer pulls to suggest a local watering hole atmosphere, but it was obvious from the start that this was a workman-like production shed, not a place to meet and mingle with the locals.