Читать книгу Here on the Coast - Howard White - Страница 21

A Coaster Discovers Scotland

When my niece Kathleen announced she was getting married and not only that, she was going to do it in Scotland, Mary and I surprised everybody by going along. We would have been forgiven for begging off because of the distance, but Kathleen is our favourite niece, and not just because she’s the only one in a batch of five boys. She used to be such a shy little violet I cringed at the thought of her ever facing the cold, cruel world on her own. Now here she was a confident, accomplished young beauty with enough moxie to marry a guy from a country where the men talk funny and wear skirts, and we wanted to show our support.

Besides, we had never been to Scotland. Like many Canadian families, ours is top-heavy with Scotch ancestors. Carmichaels, Cummings, Morrisons, McLeods—even old “Portuguese Joe” Silvey was rumoured to be half-Scotch, courtesy of a provisioning stop in the Azores by a sea captain named Simmons. The most direct link in our family was through my maternal grandmother, who grew up on the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides, and she wasn’t my favourite relative. She was grim and formidable and used to pray in Gaelic at the top of her lungs, a very scary spectacle for a young kid. One of her favourite stories was about the time she chased the tax collector off her farm with a naily 2 X 4, and nobody doubted it. When I first heard the term battleaxe, I couldn’t help but picture Gramma out there on the blasted moor whaling away with her naily 2 X 4. Later on when it came to allocating our few precious vacation days, going to a whole country full of Grammas didn’t exert much pull. We’d been to a lot of other places like Italy and France and Cuba with fewer ancestral ties and better weather, but Scotland had never topped the list of places to go for a good time.

But thanks to our adventurous niece, we finally made it, and are glad we did. Scotland isn’t formidable at all. It has a well-developed inferiority complex, thanks to its domineering southern neighbour, which makes a Canadian feel right at home. There is something familiar about the way they make much of local athletes who place an honourable fourth at Wimbledon and writers who are shortlisted for the Booker Prize but don’t actually win it. There is much grumbling in Edinburgh’s countless pubs about the revenue from Scotland’s oil fields flowing south and never coming back that also strikes a sympathetic chord in the Canadian breast.

I admit to having felt a bit of Scottish overexposure at times with all our pipe bands, highland flings, caber tossing and haggis-laden Robbie Burns nights, but the good news is that Scots have a reciprocal interest in things Canadian. This is possibly the one foreign country you can go to where Canada is not thought of as a pimple on the US backside. When a Scot asks you where you’re from and you say Canada, you might be surprised by the reply, “Aye, a ken tha, but wha province like?” More than once when the conversation drilled down as far as actually mentioning the Sunshine Coast, I was amazed to hear something like, “Aye, a bonnie place. Me brrrother lives in Sechelt and we go therrre often.” (They do still talk like that.) Wherever we went, we found the general knowledge of things Canadian excellent, certainly far better than in the US.

The Scotch were great travellers historically and that seems to hold true today, partly because the North Sea petroleum industry has spawned a generation of experts who are in high demand wherever there’s oil. That might explain why a favourite Canadian destination seems to be Calgary. At the same time, we had the damnedest time getting Scots to tell us anything useful about their own country. They’re intensely proud of it, yes, but in a theoretical way that apparently doesn’t require them to move around in it much. We grew accustomed to hearing Glaswegians say, “Off ta Edinburgh are ye? Haven’t ben therrre since a’ was a wee bairn.” (It’s just under an hour’s drive.)

When we mentioned we planned to take a drive through the Highlands, our host said, “Why?” Inverness, the pretty Highland hub closer to Edinburgh than Kelowna is to Vancouver, might be the dark side of the moon for all the Lowlanders who’ve gone there. It put me in mind of the Sunshine Coast’s own one-way migration pattern where northerners make regular trips south to shop and travel but southerners can grow up and grow old without visiting their neighbours an hour’s drive north. Too bad, the homebound Lowlanders miss vast vistas of Elphinstone-sized mountains covered in nothing but a solid pink blanket of heather. Just like the pricey little nursery-bought sprigs that keep dying out in my rockery back home, but thousands of acres of it growing wild, making the whole landscape seem like a vast shrub garden. I don’t know how a Scotch mountain decides whether to grow heather or trees, because some are forested (and checkered with BC-style cutblocks) but intermixed with these will be other mountains carpeted with nothing but a lavender frizz of heather. One seems to exclude the other.

And of course, lots of broom everywhere. My first impulse upon driving through miles of the stuff was to think, “They should do something about this before it takes over.” Then I remembered: “Oh yeah, there’s a reason it’s called Scotch broom. It’s native here.” For a moment I found myself wondering why we have programs to eradicate it back on the Sunshine Coast. If you just accept it like the Scots do, it begins to look kind of nice. Same with thistles. The weed has the run of the place, like cattle in India. When one with a head the size of a small cabbage spiked me near the Highland shrine on Culloden Moor, I forgot for a moment that it is Scotland’s sacred national symbol and stomped it flat. From the glares I got, you’d think I’d peed on the Stone of Scone.

After careening around the country on the wrong side of the road for a week I was left to wonder why I’d never realized that Scotland is a carbon copy of BC, at least the Highland part. I guess it was the language barrier. When I read all that Walter Scott and Robbie Burns palaver about bens, firths, glens and lochs, I somehow missed that they were just talking about plain old BC-style mountains, inlets, valleys and lakes. There was a lot of flora along the highway that looked familiar, with only slight differences from our versions when studied up close. There were great hillside patches of something that by any other name was still fireweed. So much for claiming that clearcut colonizer as a unique New World emblem.

It’s no wonder Scots pioneers found this country such a good fit and came here in such numbers. Not only were they used to year-round rain, they were expert loggers and fishermen. In fact, when we were there in 2011, their forest industry was still employing forty thousand workers (more than in BC) and their fishing industry was still supplying 60 per cent of Britain’s seafood, though I understand there has been some slippage since. Remote communities like Ullapool, Oban, Lerwick and Anstruther were not only postcard-pretty, they had thriving commercial trawl fleets. You couldn’t help but marvel at these industries still chugging along after untold centuries when we in BC have basically mismanaged ours to near ruin in a fragment of the time. It was enough to make you wish those old Scots pioneers had brought a little more of their Old World planning smarts with them when they set up over here.

We thought two weeks would be more than enough to do such a small country, but it just whetted our appetite. Thanks to Kathleen and our renewed Scottish ties, we can’t wait to go back.