Please Allow Overtaking

If I'd written this at the beginning, it would have been a very whiney dispatch about rain and discontent. I would have told you about taking shelter in a doorway that smelled strongly of pee while waiting for a bus in London, then a long sit in a chilly railway station with a mouse running by our feet, and me thinking about places where lemons grow and how much I prefer them.

Then there was the overnight train trip to Edinburgh, which I'd romanticized into something like the Orient Express and instead meant being tightly sealed into a cupboard for the night, with a shared toilet, should the need arise, located about a mile away at the end of a long narrow corridor.

I would have kvetched about a hike on our first day in Scotland to a highland peak called Creag Bheag along a trail whose main characteristics were mud and slippery rocks, and all for a view of the mist, with wet feet.

But at some point you shift your framework, recalibrate, something like that. You go into the restaurant of a slightly tattered hotel and appreciate the gust of warmth you feel upon entering, and you order the parsnip and ginger soup and notice how shy and sweet the local boy who serves you is despite the many disconcerting ways that he is pierced, and you watch two elderly ladies having tea together fully engaged in conversation, and you look out the window at the village with its butcher shop and newspaper office and trees with yellow leaves, and you think about how different life could be. Everything gets better if you let it.

Especially if you go to the Isle of Skye, which is as beautiful as its name. I'm told that many people come here and never actually see the Isle of Skye, only rain and cloud, but we had genuine sunshine. Oh, several brief showers passed through, it's true, but all they did was leave rainbow and sparkle in their wake. At every turn there was a picturesque vista, and the air seemed to have a stunning kind of clarity.

We drove along the coast, walked along creeks and lochs and waterfalls, saw a castle, an ancient burial ground, the remnants of an early church. We trudged up to high places and marveled about the cloudscapes and the quality of light. Skye seemed all about the sky sometimes.

Later, in the Scottish highlands, we saw rain infused with sunlight, looked down onto a lake filled with clouds, as though viewing a sky beneath us, passed through towns all storybook green with grazing sheep and whitewashed houses. There were so many rainbows we grew choosy about them; the partial or pale ones were pretty enough but nothing to stop and exclaim about.

Sometimes we listened to the BBC news but it all seemed faraway. If vacation is distilling one's concerns down to the immediate tangibles like navigating and where to spend the night, this was vacation indeed.

We detoured to look at the lower falls of Ben Niven and watched as a big transit bus pulled up, empty. The driver stepped out to have a cigarette by a rustic bridge."Is this your regular route?" I asked him. It was.

"Do you actually get passengers here?" I wondered.

"Very few," he said. "That's how I like it."

The next day we hiked up to Ben Donich. "One wee up, one wee down," said a woman we encountered who had an accent that sounded like song. She was right; it would be hard to get lost, but it's a walk that demands concentration and stamina in both directions. At this point I seemed to lack both.

But speaking of up and down, I liked these lines I saw from a poem by Patrick MacGill:

Though up may be up and down be down, time will make everything even.
And the man who starves at Greenoch town will fatten at Kinlochleven.

Time was indeed making everything even, and though seemingly slowed for the week, it was wearing us down, sure enough, and away. I wondered sometimes what I was doing here.

And in strange rooms at night, I still felt the old sadness that never leaves.

But I opened my eyes to window panes beaded with raindrops, and places awaiting that I've never seen. It's been a long hiatus, I thought, and we're still in it. I am fattening and lucky for now.

My favorite road sign: "Frustration causes accidents. Please allow overtaking."

It's a reasonable statement, a polite request, and a good approach in general. Let those in the race hurry on ahead of you.

And so I yield, long since overtaken, which is far, far better than being overwhelmed.