Читать книгу Visiting the Eastern Uplands - S. Dorman - Страница 8

The Piper stands playing beneath a tree by an entrance to the grounds. He plays a Gaelic air, leaving no doubt that we have arrived at the place and time: Highland Games downeast by the sea, presented by St. Andrew Society of Maine. The Society’s purpose, to preserve and promote Scottish heritage, has brought folk from dozens of clans in New England and Nova Scotia to participate in the pipe and dance competitions.

Allen and I have no Scots ancestry that we are aware of (although some of my forebears were Celtic); nevertheless we’re interested enough in this culture to come and experience the Maine Highland Games. I’m hungry for an authentic taste of scones, famous Scottish quick bread.

We walk down toward the lawn where a Border Collie demonstration is in progress. A haunting skirl of bagpipes floats to us on the breeze. The song will inform our awareness—now quiet and distant, now strong and near—throughout the day of these competitions. We join spectators ringing the fence where a small black dog with white markings chases shorthaired sheep. In the midst stands a tiny slat pen where the shepherdess stands, long bright ribbon from her hand tethering a gate of this pen. Shrilling, her small silver whistle pipes out a song of degrees—signals for the dog. The Border Collie runs this way and that as the shepherdess peeps and shrills, funneling sheep in the manner commanded by these high-pitched sounds.

The Collie drives them close against the fence under our noses. Furious breathing of these small cloven-hoofed woolly creatures fans our knees in passing. Now the song (with its various peeping) sounds again, the dog comes round driving them off the fence.

The Collie’s ears are pricked; its long-haired coat sleek and glossy-looking as though brushed with care, but its stance reveals sentience, and intent of the rangiest predator. Agile, it scurries with head low and poised, alert to the whistle or words of the shepherdess who often commands the dog to “lie down!” At this command the dog drops to its belly, crouched, ready to scramble at the next signal. Then, tearing the ground, it comes round and we feel the predatory power as its nails grip the turf. The dog pivots. Its breath is quick, excited. It spins away, cutting out two sheep, herding them into the slat pen. At once the handler closes the gate and loops the pink tether over its posts.

This green stifling lawn beneath shore pines is a far cry from the rugged and rolling distances of the Scottish Highlands where such sheep roam. There the dogs are signaled over vast distances, handily moving the wool-bearers while a shepherd stands his or her ground. In this heat today I sense the discomfort of these beautiful sheep in the hurly of being so gathered, so harassed.

“Why do sheep run from the dog?” Someone has asked from the sidelines. Answer: It is a primordial response from an age when predators roamed the hills in packs. The quick would run the sheep silly then head them back toward slower pack members. There jaws would powerfully tear them to shreds, sustenance for hungry wolves. Sheep are still highly sensitive to the born predator who, through breeding and training, has become their guard and now serves for their good. Through the healthy instinct of fear.

Wandering away we follow the path past a competition ground. Here strong muscular men toss the camber. Shotput and tossing-the-sheaf are also powerfully executed. It’s a contrast to the adjacent domestic camp of six or eight white canvas tents with canopy and fire pit. Smoke billows up on the breeze: smoke of buckwheat scorching on the griddle. Women are clustered in homespun gowns, petticoats, and linen headdresses—preparing food. Allen and I wander on, looking about at curiously attired folk, including children, who are dressed in the tartan of another time and an older culture not our own.

We come up toward the parade ground, neatly compassed by a ring of pavilions and concessions. There’s a big old double-decker bus (blazoned with a Union Jack) that has been converted to a fish-n-chips stand. (We note its enclosed top deck with curtains, hints of homey furnishings in the windows—converted living quarters?) There are concessions for meat pies and bridies, for shish kebabs and sausages and buns, for rich and unScottish-looking desserts. A sign promises scones, but, when I receive one from Allen where I sit in the shade, it turns out to be strawberry shortcake with whipped cream, thawed syrupy strawberries, and costing four dollars!

Other concessionaires sell faces carved in walking sticks. Some sticks are long and peeled, cedar sticks still covered in ragged bark. A face is carved in each, complete with crows feet round the eyes, representing ancient mythological protectors of the forest. Booths sell true woolens, tartans, weaving, glengarries, and cotton runners with homespun mottoes. Here’s a plastic-covered carryall decorated with thistles: petaled purple heads with great prickly ovaries. At the bottom of the bag is a warning—and a welcome. I had been trying to recall the significance of the thistle and now it’s written here in purple before my eyes. Complete with ugly coating of petroleum-based plastic, one of the wonders-run-amuck of our age.

I read somewhere recently that the molecular structure of plastic, a polymer, has been reproduced organically. A good thing, that? Saves petroleum for energy? Ordinary potatoes can be made to yield plastic grains in place of starch grains. The resultant tuber would contain polymers but still look like a potato. It wouldn’t taste or nourish like one but provide a renewable source of plastic plates. Before the organic polymer-potato is commercially sown, some of the bugs will have to be worked out. Things like the inadvertent assimilation of the world’s potato crop, evoking the cataclysm of Kurt Vonnegut’s Ice-9 in Cat’s Cradle. Bees are disinclined to distinguish between polymer potato blooms and starch potato blooms, thus potentially converting whole fields of food into fields of tubular plastic. Who knows what we’ll have at our disposal with more tweaking of our scientific genius? Soon we’ll be growing wax fruit to fill bowls on our coffee tables.

The words on this plastic-coated bag tell of the thistle tradition and its motto. Gardeners, bird-lovers and landscapers may admire the rich coloring of this flower but thistles are elsewhere considered a nuisance and covering of waste places, fit to be yanked and discarded. The motto before me in Latin reads: “Nemo me impune laccessit”. That is, “No one provokes me with impunity.” Or, more fittingly, “Wha duar meddle wi me.” A not inappropriate motto for this prickly plant which is honored for its aid in defeating eighth century Danish raiders. The barefoot invaders’ stealthy nighttime approach was thwarted when thistles growing about the camp brought forth such cries of pain that the sleeping Scots were alerted. It has since been an emblem of guardianship.

Nemo me impune laccessit is a warning whose power to convince is contingent upon the power of the speaker. It’s what renders the motto believable. Today with our glib high-tech weaponry we might find threats of sword and broadaxe borne on bare feet ridiculous or romantic. They belong to an age when every man was a warrior that he might protect his family, community, land. But given the might of our contemporary weaponry we must go beyond the wielding of known armaments to find a speaker worthy enough to fear. We must think big, really big—of prodigiously polluted earth, of mighty yet intricate ecosystems unbalanced, of the once-kindly atmosphere now filled with mountains of carbon, of ultraviolet radiation pouring down on flesh. Think of great Nature when Nature is wronged.

Out of a blue and white pavilion comes the melancholy song of the folk singer. He sings of a berm beside a loch where a young woman stood, long ago . . . bereft but sensing the loving presence of her lost young man. Now the music changes. The singer yields up a rousing song of the Shakers who danced and quaked—to the glory of God. “I am the Lord of the Dance, sang he—dance, dance, whatever ye may be.”

Allen and I move on for our own dance of sorts: a walk along the pitched row where each clan presents its genealogy: names like Kincaid MacBean MacPherson MacThomas Moffat, Hannah and Scot. Names moving with substance inside the mouth. Names to stick a bit in the throat and curl the tongue as they pass out to the listening ear. A roll call of clans, sons of the ancients, whose system dominated Scotland for nearly 700 years. According to The Clans and Tartans of Scotland by Robert Bain, chiefs of these clans took their oaths standing, with both feet upon a stone, promising to preserve the ancient ways. Chanting the noble exploits of their forebears, bards exhorted clan members to “emulate” the example of its past.

Hot asphalt curves round the parade ground and we follow beyond genealogical booths, feeling the heat of this fiery path through the soles of our 20th-century shoes. Here are booths for the handiwork of a bygone age. I can’t help but stop to stare. On the table before me is a fabric of chains. Heavy fabric of metal-work, pieced together a ring at a time. This, then, is chain mail. I slip out a hand, touching it.

A man in ancient garb stands by, ready to instruct us. He takes two tiny rings and spreads one open with pliers, hooks it to another, pinches it closed and picks up a third. This mesh of three is in turn hooked to a fourth. Dimension develops, thickness, like that of the mail lying before me. He knits protection, a quarter-inch ring at a time. I am absorbed, watching his hands.

Also receiving instruction is a sweating and heavily bearded man struggling into some thigh-length chain mail, weighing about thirty pounds. Its maker guides him through a method of donning and doffing. He then tells of the hardy primitive Highlanders who fought naked because they felt forged protection slowed a fighter, robbing him of agility. He offers me chain mail to try on. Grinning I decline.

Now he shows us weaponry. Great two-handed claymores, capable of cleaving plate armor. Round wooden shields were covered in hide and held in place by a pattern of stud-works strapped to the arm; and hidden beneath, a dirk, tightly clenched in the hand of the warrior. Our guide slides a wide double-edged sword from its sheath—crossed-shaped forged steel with blood-gutter running to its hilt.

Allen and I are turned about by the song of approaching pipers. Here come marchers in kilts with staves, standards flapping. Near the head of the parade march our friends, Blaine and Margaret (MacBean), our town historian and his wife. The men wear swinging kilts, sporrans, and glengarries, followed by a multitude of young women pipers in swaying red tartan skirts. Their fingers fly upon chanters, their bright cheeks expel breath into the reed. Elbows pump hard against the bag at their ribs. Sweat soaks them. The skirling and droning pours upon me with the day’s heat like ravishing ointment, setting up a quiver along my sensory pathways toward the person within.

As the bands pass in color and sound, I look over my shoulder to see bearded men at the chain mail booths donning their barbaric gear: helms, battle-axes, arm shields, spears, swords. Some are mantled in animal skin, some skirted and draped in nine yards of tartan. They step off cool turf onto scorching asphalt in bare feet, nothing flinching, and join the parade.

“Look at that!”

But Allen laughs: “They’re warriors, aren’t they?”

It’s a searing summer day. Sun fires down, burning the top of my bare head as we wait in the gathering. Watching and still, crowds compass the parade ground where Highland bands assemble for the opening ceremony of The Games. I done my floppy white hat, stuff my hair under it, relieved at once by cessation of burning. Standing here in the penetrating fire, I can’t help but think of the hole in the high ozone layer . . . especially its dissipation in these higher latitudes where the crown of Maine juts into Canada.

Inert gases produced by the wonders of our age—refrigeration, the space shuttle, aerosols and Styrofoam—ascend to the stratosphere, gobbling up protective ozone by molecular conversion. The great bright hole in the sky pours out radiation, that mighty mutagen, off-cast of our sun’s fusion. Mutagens transform genetic material of skin tissue by changing the sequence of nucleotides in its DNA. Instructions for healthy cell formation are changed into instructions for disease. For every 2% reduction of protective ozone, there is an estimated 10% increase in skin cancers.

Standing here, listening but seeing little of the pipers because of the press in this sweaty gathering, I notice a young man in front of me wearing a faded T-shirt with motto: the cure/the prayer, in black letters on a pattern of faded foliage. I continue to stare at it as the pipes drone, sensing some metaphoric significance . . . but then the moment passes, its meaning gone with it. Signs and symbols strike upon the intellect, engaging it briefly and darting away. Or they live on breathless, bemused. Did I really see something in my anxiety—or is it just an old shirt?

But I can take this burning no longer. Agreeing, Allen and I break from the crowd and plunge toward the shade of the pines. Here we find ongoing dance competitions in progress and sit down to watch from an out-of-the-way bench. It’s harder to see the dancers from our oblique position but we must stay out of the sun. I am relieved by the cool grace of the offshore breeze.

Three little ones dance on the sheltering wooden stage, leaping like sprites. One-legged, toes pointed, each wee dancer reaches a poised hand on high as though in refined praise. The skirling and droning of a lone piper helps them, and they are light and finely formed in their pleats, argyles and laced up slippers. White puffy sleeves, lacy ascots and velvet vests complete the lassies’ outfits. The little legs kick back, the arms akimbo. They pivot, they leap, they dance dance dance. The piper, who pipes obscurely in a rear corner of the stage, is also a marvel. I recall Blaine telling me about the piper who played incessantly from nine in the morning till six at night for the competitions last year. He emphasized the quality of this feat in saying that the bag must continue full of breath.

I look now toward the open field before the stage where a lone judge sits. She is raised to an elevated position by a canvas chair set high on a picnic table. On her lap rests a clipboard. She watches and writes as dancers in groups of three perform the hornpipe before her critical gaze. The diminutive dancers begin and end each dance with a bow to her. Grace. The music beats faster and faster but the judge, wearing a yellow sun dress with spaghetti straps, sits still in the burning sun as they leap.

I begin to marvel more at the judge than the dancers who are shaded and sheltered. Later, as I roam the grounds while the day wears, I will marvel still more. For whenever I look in the direction of the dancers there will be the judge . . . watching and writing, seated, as though for eternity, in the fiery sun.

Rested, we stand and make our way past dancers down toward the white tents of domestic encampment which we passed on our way to the parade ground earlier. Approaching, I hear a young woman telling a few listeners about historical roles. They are camp followers, respected young women chosen by lottery to follow the Highland soldiers. They prepare foods such as scones on the griddle. They wash linens and care for the children they bring.

I sense movement at my feet and look down. There is a sweet babe, in a long white gown, sitting in a wooden tub draped in wool. She looks up at me with direct trusting blue eyes and a wet smile. The babe sucks on a smooth wooden orb held in her dimpled hand. And as she sucks, she hums. Her humming is dulcet and dreamy although she smiles at me with true awareness in her heaven’s eyes. It is long before I look away.

Beside her is another tub toward which she leans, dropping her orb. The tub holds a few inches of water afloat with smooth wood-turnings of various shapes. The babe reaches down and splashes the water, watching the turnings bob in its ripples. Then she picks out a spindle and begins gumming it. The young woman working at the table notices my interest and tells me the baby’s name is Kelsey.

I step over to watch the women’s preparation of food, and to ask questions about their attire. Now I see genuine scones heaped in a steaming plateful. Some are scorched from the iron griddle. Scones look like triangular buckwheat biscuits, homely, not high or light. Does the word derive from the place called Scone, where the Stone of Destiny became the coronation stone in 843 A.D.? Or is it the other way around? Websters says that the word comes from the Dutch schoonbrood, meaning pure clean bread.

On the women’s table are crockery, stone jugs and pewter tankards. On their heads are long white scarves with folds binding their crowns. The linen is held in place with a neat gold pin in the midst of the head. Historically, the scarves indicated that the women were married. The cloths were treasured for this, says the baby’s mother. Beneath the gowns and petticoats they wore linen shifts in which they slept. Linen was considered precious, probably because being homespun and woven of homegrown flax it was difficult to make. The top of one bodice is held in place by a three-inch black thorn. She tells me this is a hawthorn, from a hawthorn tree. It is authentic as part of the camp follower’s dress: fierce, like the spirit of a camp follower. As with the thistle, this three-inch black thorn epitomizes this life in the Highlands, where pipers call. “Wha duar meddle wi me?”

Down the facing rows of white tents are highland soldiers from the time of bonnie Prince Charlie: their garb is not ancient—no chain mail here. They wear tartans, carry flintlock muskets and swords with basket hilts. One soldier gives us a demonstration on the proper loading and firing of the flintlock using shot, powder, ramrod and pan. Wearing maybe six yards of tartan, he shows how the clansmen pleated their long tartans on belts—belted long or short, depending on the terrain and weather. The leftover length was used as a cloak during cold weather, as hooded cloak when it rained, or it could be slung over a shoulder out of the way and fastened with a brooch. The whole thing could be used as a blanket when sleeping on the ground. Six yards of wool was the rule, and the saying, “the whole nine yards” originated with that particular length.

In The Clans and Tartans of Scotland, Robert Bain writes that the original tartans were dyed with indigenous plants of the various regions of the Highlands and Western Islands. They were woven in simple check patterns. Folk, and the regions of their birth, were identified by indigenous colors and patterns of the tartan they wore. These patterns were carefully preserved by town weavers, who kept wooden sticks with numbered threads for each tartan they wove.

So strong was the meaning of each pattern to its wearer that these became patriotic emblems, eventually provoking their English overlords to outlaw the wearing of tartan by an Act of Parliament. The tactic to defeat this tradition worked because forty years later, when the Act was repealed, there was little interest on the part of the new generation. Knowledge of the correct identifying patterns was lost in the intervening years. It took the interest of Britain’s George IV to reawaken tartan joy in Highlanders. In 1822, nearly 80 years after the prohibition of patterns, the King’s visit to lowland Edinburgh brought a revival of traditional dress. Patterns used were largely recent creations, however.

Allen hefts the musket held out to him. The soldier talks on about fighting methods of the Regiment. A glimmer of reflected light from nearby shadows captures my eye. In the shade of nestling pines I spy baby Kelsey at her mother’s breast: a picture of nurturing grace, yielding forth a quiet spirit.

Allen and I walk to the shore. The tide comes rippling in. We watch spartina grass, bent in the breeze. The view here opens out between long arms of shore, hinting of open sea beyond. An offshore breeze blows upon us, as though a base drone, with smaller fitful gusts as of tenor pipes. The mighty concert of Nature, sun, sea, and shore, all consort to orchestrate these convection currents. I think of the breath of the Piper, whose playing coaxes the Dance. Somewhere behind us, distantly, haunting skirls of the bag, chanter and drone, drift back to us. Through this sounding wind.