Excerpt from Findings

From “Sabbath”

On the headland, as though looking out to sea, were many cairns built of stones. They came into view as you walked up through the wicket gate toward the clifftop, and you’d think them the recent work of tourists with time on their hands, but when you got close you could see they were whiskery with green lichen. You might fancy them the petrified remains of people who’d spent too long sitting in contemplation. Or built by people who’d known they had to head back to their lives, but wanted something of themselves to remain here, forever gazing at the sea. The headland was covered with them, some shaped like old-fashioned beehives, others like houses of cards, with uprights and horizontals. With these ones, you could bend and look at the sea as though through a letterbox.

I found a place well back from the cliff edge, out of the wind, and sat down. To the south a cliffy headland jutted out into the sea, and round its end gannets kept coming in threes or fours, heading north, all but invisible until they tilted into the sunlight and then their white wings gleamed. The horizon was interrupted only by the Flannan Isles, where according to the ballad the lighthouse keepers had so simply, so mysteriously, disappeared.

It was early. I sat on a damp rock, took my notebook from my inner pocket, made earnest notes:

“South – sky thin line of rosy pink, straightened blue-pink, blue-greys. Flannan Isles, horizon fine slate-grey line. [unreadable] 3 gannets.”

I made notes, but the reason I’d come to the end of the road to walk along the cliffs is because language fails me there. If we work always in words, sometimes we need to recuperate in a place where language doesn’t join up, where we’re thrown back on a few elementary nouns. Sea. Bird. Sky.

Besides, it was the Sabbath, the day of rest. A sign at the wicket gate that gave onto the coastal walk read: “Please, keep dogs on leads,” and “Please, avoid disturbing the Sabbath.”

***

It was summer’s end – I had a few days to clear my head. The summer had been hard going, with one greater or minor family crisis after another. There was our grandmother, whom we call Nana, slipping into dependency, and my mother who was adjusting to life at home having been paralysed by a major stroke, and my scared heroic dad doing his best; there were the needs of our small children to be met, and then my daughter had missed her first ever day at school because she was in hospital having a head wound closed. But the summer had passed, and already, like migrant birds, my university students were arriving, waiting for the teaching term to begin, expecting to be taught how to engage with the world in language.

Keeping the sea to my left hand I walked northwards, the way the gannets had indicated. The clifftop land dipped into damp troughs and then rose onto promontories where bedrock broke through the thin earth. There were pools of peaty water between rocks, and foraging parties of golden plover. You might call it a wild place, what with the Atlantic to one hand and peat bog to the other, but in each saddle between the headlands was evidence f some human intervention, an enclosure or a wall. In one I saw the undulations of old lazy beds. Cruel misnomer: looking down from above, they resembled beds right enough, like sleepers blanketed in peat, but they spoke of hard graft, of carting creels of kelp from the shore to fertilise the thin soil, to extract a hard living from the land.

I walked up onto the next headland, and there in the next bay was a sea-stack, a hundred foot or so high. It didn’t stand out proud, commanding the ocean, but shrank almost shyly at the back of a dark forbidding concavity of cliff. I dared forward to look down at the water and could see it wasn’t a true stack, not truly free-standing but joined to the cliff behind it by and untidy rocky causeway. Nonetheless, the fulmars loved it. They rested in its ledges, or tipped off the rough pinnacle to glide effortlessly about.

There seemed to be something on its summit. Not a person, surely, but perhaps another of those odd cairns. I lifted the binoculars, turned the focus wheel with my thumb until I had in view an impossible little building, no more than a cell. There was a doorway of sorts, but the lintel had long slewed sideways, the whole edifice was leaning at a crazy angle. Whatever it was, hermitage or lookout post, it had the aura of something very old, possibly prehistoric, and it was falling into the sea. A saint or sentry creeping out of that tiny doorway, eyes full of light and ears full of surf, would have to be careful; one false step and he’d pitch clean over the edge and plummet down through the indifferent fulmars into the water below.

But there was something appealing about it. To live alone in a stone cell on a sea-stack, the fulmars for neighbours, the Atlantic breakers and the crying wind; so what if it was slewing to one side? To reach it, you would have to climb. You’d need ropes and harnesses, and you’d have to carry your provisions in a creel on your back. With the glasses, I tried to pick out a route. Perhaps as second, following a trusted leader on a very tight rope, I could try to feel my way up. It would smell of guano and mineral, and at that moment I could almost remember, from my youth, the intimate feel of rock.

Twenty years ago I had a boyfriend called Peter who was a rock climber thrilled with the stretch and fluidity of the body. He’s a senior physiotherapist now, charged with restoring broken bodies to function, if not to grace. I called him when my mother was in rehab learning to walk again after her stroke, for an honest opinion of her prospects, and I thought about him again now as I looked through the glasses at this stack. I recall him shouting down at me once, when I was struck with fear halfway up some rockface: “Remember! It’s your skeleton that holds the position, not the muscles. You can let the muscles relax.”

“I can’t do this!” I’d wailed.

“You are doing it,” he’d replied.

I put the binoculars away to move on. I’d find out what it was, this strange inaccessible cell. The mood I was in, it would suit me just fine. I’d look it up in Stornoway Library. I’d look it up in one of the estate agents’ windows.

***

The week before I’d come to Lewis, I’d spent a day with my sister in our parents’ home town in the west. We’d come to see our grandmother. Every other weekend, someone drives over to see our grandmother. She is either in her own tiny flat, with its gas fire and armchair and plaster dolphins leaping on the mantelpiece, or, as today, in the ward of the hospital she’s frequently admitted to. There had been a phone call; someone telling me they were even now breaking the door down, lifting Nana from the floor where she’d lain all night, carrying her to the ambulance, taking her again into hospital.

None of the family lives in that town these days. Our parents left when they were young and first married, and now that our mother is herself suddenly disabled and our father charged with her care, and we children already approaching middle age with infants and bread-winning responsibilities of our own, Nana’s situation is a constant anxiety.

We had come together, my sister and me, with appointments to see social workers and doctors. In windowless offices we’d signed long forms and discussed doctors’ opinions and money. Nana had been a cleaner much of her life, and a single parent: not wealthy. We’d been given a list of care homes for the elderly in that town, and then we went to have a difficult conversation with Nana herself.

She was sitting in a green high-backed chair in a hospital day room, one old lady among the rest, dressed like the others in a blouse and cardigan and loose trousers. With great attention to detail, she told us what had been served for lunch. We, her two granddaughters, sat before her. My sister held her hand and at last we put the case that had been building over the preceding few years.

Around us were other old women, and old men sitting on chairs identical to our nana’s. There were tables with magazines, a TV which was always switched on. Sunlight glinted off the cars parked outside. Now and then snatches of our conversations reached us, cheery banter pitched loud enough for the hard of hearing. I longed to be back outdoors. As we entered my sister had said, “When she sees us both together, she’ll think something’s wrong. She’ll think Mum’s had another stroke or something,” and I, never skilled at small talk, thought of news to tell her, tried to dredge up incidents from family life. I rehearsed the story of my daughter’s gashed head, and the stitches.

We were surrounded by the very old. The woman in the next chair was asleep, her chin reaching her chest. Next along was a woman who was awake. She wore a blue knitted cardigan – or rather, because her shoulders and breasts sloped at odd, tilting angles, a blue cardigan had been arranged round her. Though we were talking to our own grandmother, too loudly for such a delicate conversation, I could see out of the corner of my eye a tiny persistent movement, as you might see a spider in a corner of a window. A little table was pulled up in front of the woman in blue, and on it stood a carton of orange juice. The old woman was struggling to get the end of the straw into the tiny foil-covered hole. The bony hand, the feeble, stabbing straw, the carton, which at any moment would go skiting off the table onto the floor, all became intolerable, so I went and asked if I could help. “Thank you, my dear,” she said. “Thank you.”

***

The gannets had come to Dalmore, which is a surfers’ bay, but no surfers were out this Lord’s day. White waves surged in between twin headlands, and the gannets, not feeding, not breeding, not going any place, were turning and lifting on the winds. Among the dunes at the top of Dalmore Bay is the cemetery. It is enclosed in stone walls and defences had been built to prevent the sea from disturbing the graves. Of course, you’d be more likely to approach the cemetery from the landwards side: there is a thin island road that ends at its gate. The headstones stand in neat rows; plots yet to be occupied were marked with numbered metal labels. Presumably there are people who have wandered from this parish all over the world, but who know their number, who carry in their heads an image of this burial ground at the end of the thin road, at the bay.

From the cemetery, I followed the road inland. The township’s houses were shut up for the Sabbath. Even the dogs were quiet; one watched me pass from a doorstep, his head on his paws, only his brown eyes moving. Only one house betrayed life, and that by condensation on its windows. I walked self-consciously, noting wire fences, disused cars, peat stacks, wondering if to be moving at all, making a display of oneself through the stillness of the afternoon, was to disturb the Sabbath. Sheep were bleating, though. Penned in the infields, ewes with fat lambs bleated and bleated. Perhaps they knew it would soon be time for the lambs to be taken away.

A friend said to me – we were talking about our stage in life, when we suddenly discover that we are the grown-ups, with children and parents, and even grandparents to tend to, not to mention our pupils, patients or clients or employers – that we spend so much time dealing with it all, there is scarcely time to feel. I walked up the silent road, wondering if I couldn’t reconcile myself again to the idea of the Sabbath, to the day of dreary silence and mutton broth I’d known as a child, if we couldn’t close the shops and still the traffic and institute a modern, churchless day of contemplation and rest; and if it would help at all.

From Findings: Essays on the Natural and Unnatural World. Copyright 2007 by Kathleen Jamie. All rights reserved.