over the sea to Skye

The first time I came to the Isle of Skye, I was nearly twenty-nine. It was Hallowe’en. Only one little girl came to trick or treat at the backpacker hostel. I think my backpacking companion and I ended up eating the whole remainder of their fun-size Mars bars.

I’d never had British chocolate before. I was smitten.

I hadn’t travelled before either, in a sense. I’d lived and taught on all three coasts of Canada at that point – and stretched outside my culture and comfort zone – but I’d never really been a tourist. I’d been jealously enchanted by friends’ stories of Europe, of South America, of Japan. And here I was, finally, in a hostel bed of my own, riddled with insomnia and still pinching myself, anxious and exhausted and as smitten with the experience as with the chocolate, in spite of myself.

I remember that the north of Skye in its stark fall carpet reminded me a little of the Arctic, lichens and mosses colouring the hills when there are no trees to speak of. I remember that it took my breath.

(I never even made it to the Fairy Glen then, and still Skye took my breath. I rectified the oversight of the fairies this past weekend. Highly recommend).

Somewhere in a box is a black-bound sketchbook from that trip long ago, filled with the tight triangular font of my own hand. I wrote in straight lines across the blank pages, in coffee shops and bus stations, jotting out small travelogues of the places my friend and I found ourselves. Impressions. Funny stories. My own internal narrative, spilled out diary-style. I was on a journey away from a marriage that would not see out the year. I was overwhelmed. The writing grounded me, helped me navigate between the strange, confronting minutiae of my own foreignness – why did everything smell of lard? – and the vast shadow of loss.

I had just completed my Masters degree, literally a week before. Somewhere in the journal, feeling deeply bardic, I toyed my way through the idea that Skye itself was a university: rich in history, geology, language, music. I believe the term “the inescapable physics of rocks” may be recorded as the end to that particular train of thought.

I was clearly more bard than physicist. 😉
***

I do not come from that bardic line: the McMhuirichs, Clan Currie. But I did not know that about then.

Nor did I know that Skye had its own Gaelic college, Sabhal Mòr Ostaig, the only entirely Gaelic medium centre of higher education in all the world. It would have been, at that time, being woven into the fabric of what would become the University of Highlands and Islands.

I did not know then any of the learned traditions of the old Gaels, or make any connections between here and the Celtic monasteries of Ireland and Iona.

But yesterday, at Sabhal Mòr Ostaig, on the green southern edge of Skye, I got to interview a medievalist who reminded me carefully of those connections and also the fractures that invisibilize them. Then the poet and scholar Meg Bateman, whose poem for UHI was sent to me back in the spring, when I’d used the term ‘constellation’ in a presentation about this sabbatical project. I interviewed a lecturer based in Belfast whose mother is from PEI, and a teacher educator who grew up in Cape Breton. The locating of self in place was a constant source of connection, almost pedagogical.

My first conversation with the Principal asked about a mutual acquaintance in PEI, a scholar of Island Studies.

Another interaction inquired about my Stewart family, or rather my Stiùbhart family…and told me that my mother’s people, the McNevins or McNivens, were once NicNevins or witches of fairy queen lore.

I remain smitten. So long as there are no burnings. 😉

From greetings to the hum of lunch conversation around me, from the Principal to the gentleman serving baked potatoes, all was Gaelic. I caught more words than I’d have imagined. I met a former UHI Vice-something or other from Inverness who has come to Sabhal Mòr Ostaig for the year and is living in residence as a student of Gaelic. I was shown a PEI-based thesis, and recognized the name of its author as one I’d seen on the introduction of a text on PEI Gaelic history that I’ve literally had open in a tab since summer. I went outside to meet my next interview, and shared that coincidence. That PEI text? May have been introduced by the thesis writer, but it had been WRITTEN BY THE FATHER OF THE WOMAN I WAS ABOUT TO INTERVIEW.

I have never felt so at home away from home.

All was webs of connection, built on fractures that run deep and old but have not fully swallowed a people or a language. And they were generous, though my very presence served as a black hole, sucking the Gaelic from the air, at least for a moment.

I will try to learn before I return, again.
***

Hard-won skills and reclamations are not simple victories. What you do not want lost must be chosen, again and again.

The journal that I scribbled in on Skye years ago was one of many in a series that I kept over a period of maybe a decade from my early twenties to my early thirties. It was neither first nor last, but it was the one in which I learned to write about travel and the day-to-day unfamiliar. The voice I brought to my blogging, later, had its roots in that writing, though I wrote for myself… a future self. To preserve something.

It was a way to record and think, yes, but also a companion. I could sit in pubs and write, and be left alone because I was clearly and actively busy. I could pass time jotting things down or reading them over.

But then I blinked and I no longer journaled. I preserved the habit of writing, if intermittently. But I succumbed to the new and dominant form, and wrote online. I thought I would keep journalling, too, now and then.

I have not journaled in nearly twenty years.

When you do not choose a thing, it morphs quickly into an artifact from the past.

The friend and I who travelled Skye this past weekend made it around the top of the island, on some staggering single track roads. We stumbled on the MacArthur cairn at Duntulm, framed against the sky, looking out to Lewis and Harris. It honours one of the old Gaelic schools of this place, and I have not been able to stop thinking about it.

It reads:
This cairn is to commemorate the MacArthurs, hereditary pipers to the MacDonalds of the Isles
During the 18th century their school of piping stood at nearby Peingown

Thig crioch air an t-saoghal
Ach mairidh gaol is ceol
The world will end, but love and music endureth