i wiz awa oot ta look for wid fan andy waaks through the door, and we initiate an evening of sitting by the fire, eating things and talking about things. by the bothy fire is a great venue for a rendez-vous. i ayeweez slip in'o the brogue fan im in that bothy, a fact which i alluded to in the bothy book. andy signed the book, "andy fae embra." i had never thought of it before, but that is the way some people pronounce it. particularly the youths who andy is now working with - those who have dropped out of school early and are looking for a job. "you could come and talk to them," suggested andy, after i told him that i had been back in my old high school talking to fifth year students about my activities since leaving high school. perhaps my alternative footloose path of exploration is not the most relevant to them, i muse, but i think the biggest influence on another person comes from the simple being of a person, more than information about what they do. andy says the only viable path for the youngsters he comes in contact with is to find a job - the more locally the better.
"so, would any of you consider moving up to aberdeen if there was a job there?" andy says he asked them.
"naw, they're aw sheep-shaggers up there!" he says they responded.
the next day andy and i climb up ben vrackie. a few hundred metres up and the hill is covered in snow. near the top the air becomes thick with blustery snowflakes. the top of the hill is a wild place to be. the cairn is a beatifully sculpted white winter monument, its horizontal ice flutings indicating the direction of the prevailing wind. for the descent, andy regrets not bringing his waterproof trousers, with which he could have slid down the snow. i regret not bringing boots, for my trainers are soon soaked and i feel the cold seeping up through my body.
driving along the motorway to edinburgh, the sign for glenrothes gives me the idea to visit my grandparents. i somehow manage to locate their house amid the labrinth of big roads and big roundabouts and homogenous housing schemes which constitute glenrothes. i knew they would be happy to see me. as we enter the house there is a great cry of surprise and happiness, and andy and i are soon sat on the settee with cups of tea and plates of chocolate biscuits on our knees.
the next day, my grandma doesn't want me to hitchhike, so i get the bus into edinburgh.
"the thing is, i like to hitchhike," i had said to her. "it is a pleasure for me. i don't mind waiting. i like to meet the friendly people who stop."
but my grandmother is tenacious in her insistence that i take the bus: "i know that you hitchhike everywhere, but just this once, take the bus. will you do it for me?" she implores with her tenacious loving smiling eyes, "i want to know that you'll arrive safely."
as well as money for the bus, she gives me some sturdy shoes which my grandfather no longer uses. she doesn't like the sight of me wearing those ones with holes in them.
in the national portrait gallery in edinburgh there is a tall dandy man with tinted glasses. he is standing next to the portrait of a prominent early scottish feminist and telling a group of female visitors how the word feisty is spelt so they can write it down. "this word is only used to describe women," he says.
"and it is not a positive trait."
later i ask kevin what he thinks feisty means and he immediately gives a catsnarl and swipes the air with his paw. brother kevin and sister-in-law ally have 35 acres of young woodland, for which they have received a considerable grant from the goverment because of their aim to increase biodiveristy, and to engage in social activities. they have already had children from the local school up planting many different varieties of scottish apple trees for their orchard. kevin and i whack wooden posts with a mallet into the squelchy ground to make a woodland enclosure for hens. one of us holds the wooden post with one hand and the ladder with the other, while the other one stands atop the ladder with a look of fierce concentration, emitting fierce concentrated grunts, coincident with each mallet blow. we dig over a piece of ground and wrestle out the tree stumps so it will be level for big new shed soon to arrive. on day three we are kneeling weeding the vegetable plots when the wind - coming from the east - brings flurries of fat flakes of snow. back in the house for the rest of the afternoon we watch the world becoming white outside.
it is good to engage in purposeful activities with kevin, while we perceive our beings being together. it has been a while since we caught up.
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scotland in february. in the morning the first car takes me to the motorway near falkirk. before getting out i ask him if he has hitchchiked himself. his only response is: "no. i am a humanist."
rain begins to fall and, as i am waiting, the side of the road becomes a cold uninviting place to linger. a police car pulls up and tells me that it is illegal to hitchhike on the motorway. "i know that it is illegal to hitchhike on the motorway," i bend down in the rain to speak through the window, "but i thought this slip road would be a safe place for cars to pull in before they enter the motorway."
"this is still considered the motorway," says the police officer, his voice indicating that his patience threshold is not very high, "you'll have to get into falkirk and get a bus from there."
"okay. i see the problem," i say, and walk away and walk down the sliproad which joins the motorway going in the opposite direction. i want to go to perth, and can either go via stirling to the west or via the forthroad bridge to the east. i prepare a patient response to the police if they come again: i know that it is your job to enforce the law, and i would like to assist you in the job where i see that it is sensible that the law be followed. obviously it would be dangerous to stand on the motorway next to the fast-moving cars, and expect them to stop for me, but can you not see that it is quite safe for a car to pull in here on the slip road, like you have done yourself? surely the only reason to follow the law is if the law itself is reasonable? i didn't really expect the police to follow me on this line of reasoning. i suppose that i wouldn't even have got half-way through it before they quashed me with their overweening voice of authority, but i felt that i needed to at least try and stand firm by my desire to live in a more human society where strangers can choose to trust each other and have spontaneous positive encounters, sharing their roads together - those who have wheels inviting those who have not to accompany them on their journey, to construct a society less obsessively based around the aquisition and spending of money in order for each one to live a life of self-contained self-sufficiency which requires no contact or affirmative trusting interaction with others.
i know it is a question of being rescued by someone before the police come. my rescuers are two poles who invite me in out of the rain. they are going to edinburgh. one of them says he has been living in scotland for twelve years, and has aquired so scottish an accent that i would niver hae been able tae tell that he wisna fae embra, were it not for him telling me. the voice of his companian who is driving reveals unmistakably his polish origin, although he says that he has been living in scotland for ten years. he says that he, like me, loves to travel. "last year i participated in the london to mongolia rally race. next year i want to travel to south asia, but only by foot. the car is unreliable." i say that i similarly prefer to travel by foot, although i am happy to travel in other people's cars, when they want to take me.
they are both happy people whose laughs came to them easily. they drop me off at a petrol station where i can shelter from the rain and ask the motorists who stop to fill up their cars. before long i meet bruce who says he can take me to stirling, which is, in fact, back along the road i have just come from. he says that edinburgh is a cold place, certainly compared to the isle of skye where he grew up. he explains what he means by cold by saying that he has never talked to his neighbours not even once. when i say that i don't have a job and move around a lot, he says that i will end up like him - running a restaurant. (i am still not sure what he meant by that.) he just bought a pub in callander. he is quietly scottishly pragmatic. it seems that he isn't prone to getting very excited about very much. he tells about the sites of historic interest scattered across argyl, the first part of scotland to be settled.
when he drops me off it has stopped raining, but it is still cold. there is snow at the side of the road. soon billy stops for me and tells me his name with a handshake. "yer hands are freezin', here get them under that heatin' they'll soon warm up. if i had picked you up a month ago i could ha' taken you aw the wai up ta inverness. ah work on the pylons. ah hid a job up north an wiz aawais travellin up the A9. up and doon fae dundee. we wiz workin up near wick once, and the big crane got stuck in the bog. the next day you could only see the light on its roof. it had sunk right in."
i tell him how grateful i am that there are still people like him who are happy to pick up hitchhikers. for most people it has really disappeared as a cultural practice. "aaaye, they're aw too scared o' strangers noo," he drawls in his dundonian brogue "nae me; i'll pick up onyone. i used tae dae it myself goin to the football. my mates and i wid get pished and hitch to the match."
"right the broxton roundabout is comin up," he says, "get ready to jump out. you got aw yer stuff? right there's naeone behind, GO NOW! AW THE BEST PAL!"
i jump out into the fresh cold sunny air of perth and walk along the side of the road north until i get to a layby. soon a posh cream coloured car pulls in with leather upholstery with a quirky driver with fair stubble on his chin - called malcolm i learn - and a young australian in the passanger seat, called bethan. we talk a lot about travelling. i tell her about bruce chatwin, who has written a book about the australian aborigines and about the restlessness of the human spirit.
chatwin hypothesises that nomadism is the original and the healthiest human society - perhaps to explain the ants in his own pants (he said that after a month in the same place he becomes restless, after two months it is unbearable). the story of farmer cain killing nomad abel - chatwin maintains - is a prefiguration of our human story of settled people becoming attached to their possessions their territory, but ultimately leading to violence and war.
when i say that i want to cross the atlantic ocean bethan tells me about a couchsurfing group who are building their own yacht, with a view to making the cross. bethan turns round on her seat and fixes me with her bright travellers' eyes, asking me question after question (she tells me she has worked as a journalist): what do my parents do? do i have any brothers or sisters? what do they do? where is my next travel destination? malcolm chuckles and says that he hopes i don't mind such an interrogation. he hopes i don't mind his habit of speedily overtaking the car in front. i say i felt quite safe and am happy to be in his car. malcolm says he would do a lot more travelling if it wasn't for his business pursuits - restaurants in edinburgh. he says he had a "rather solitary childhood" near lochindorb, "do you know it?"
"aye. it is a romantic place in my mind," i say.
"why so?"
"i don't know... as you say, it is a solitary place. there are very few people who go there. it is surrounded by wild open moorland. then there is loch and the island with the ruined castle and the legend of the wolf of badenoch."
he listens carefully to what i said before agreeing, "aye aye. its true."
he is more of a listener than a speaker.
i get them to drop me off at the layby near luibleathann bothy. "it is a fine place to spend the night," i tell them, "cooking over the fireplace, drinking water from the burn. i always find myself gravitating there when i am on the road. there are even armchairs, but hardly anybody goes there. there are not many people who know about it." bethan wants me to write its name on her phone.
the next day is bright and sunny but fiercely cold when i am not moving. i think i will easily make it back to my parent's place in buckie before evening, but after a lift from lois -a self-assured woman who has driven up from glasgow to oversee the repairs to her holiday home in granton - i spend a long time waiting at a layby reading the jungle book in romanian between smiling at the file of big shiny vehicles probably coming from skiing in the cairngorms. not one of them stops for me, and even though it is sunny, it gets pretty cold just standing there. sometime in the late afternoon i tell myself that walking along the speyside way will be the best way to keep moving and keep warm and make ground. it is something like fifty miles from granton to buckie, but i give myself confidence by repeating to myself the old dictum: where there's a will, there's a way. i know that the terrain is flat and easy and if people run along it in the annual race why can't i walk it?
however, after going through the big old pine woods of anagach i decide to try hitching once more, from cromdale, in the last half hour of sunlight. wow, hitchhiking has really disppeared as a social practice, i think as i watch all the cars slide past. it is a thought that runs through my head everytime i have to wait for a long time. but it only takes one receptive person . . . and, yes! a quiet couple respond to my sign saying BUCKIE and invite me into their large car containing their ski apparel. they are going to fraserbourgh and can drop me off at keith. they have never picked up a hitchhiker before. they are surprised that i would walk like that in the cold night. "walking keeps you warm," i say, "and the moon will be almost full tonight. it is only eleven miles from keith over the hill to buckie - much easier than the fifty miles i was contemplating. thank you so much for stopping for me."
along a dark country road outside keith a dog-walker tells me where i can find the fishwive's path - which the fishermen's wives used to follow to take the fish from buckie to keith to be sold. when he learns that i want to cross over that night he says,
"you're keen,"
as if it were abnormal to be enthusiastic.
coming out of the village i pass an old church and see three of the tall gothic windows are lit with a soft orange glow. "maybe there is an evening service," i think and walk across the driveway to see that it has been refurbished inside. at the first window a naked man and woman are standing, moving cautiously. they must have heard me crunching across the gravel because the woman soon looks up and i hear her muffled voice through the window, "there is someone watching us. O MY GOD!" and i quickly run away. i feel uncomfortable about my overweening curiosity, my unwitting enacting of the prying eye of society.
contrariwise, i only want people to feel safe and at ease in this world.
later the little country road plunges through a dark tunnel of tall conifers and i remember the baleful presense of the Eye which watched me from the dark corners of the countryside when i was a child. now i can reason it away, thinking: even if there may be some baleful lurking presence (a person who intends no good) i think the chances of it are slim; i will take the risk and venture forth.
bruce chatwin talks about the Beast, which was there at the conception of homo sapiens. indeed, which resulted in our conception. when the forest cover of Africa disappeared - chatwin supposes - our hominid ancestors were forced to think in order to survive, being, as they were, physically helpless against the predatory big cats of the big plains. it was the Beast who brought us together, prompting us to make fires, around whose protective arc we gathered and commnunicated the whereabouts of the Predator, giving birth to language. whether the Beast still poses us a real physical threat or not - chatwin proposes - he is still firmly embedded in our subconsious, and will always be present in our mythical wanderings.
i walk though the tall dark coniferous woodland that exists between buckie and keith, stopping to peer closely at the signposts for the fishwive's path - which bear the symbol of a white face shrouded by a dark shawl . those who conceived of the path must have wanted to mark the difficulty of the lives of the fishermen's wives; the symbols give an eerie resemblance of the grim reaper. the stars are bright and numerous. i see a shooting star in the north, then a big white moon rises in the east. i don't stop very often because i want to find a warm place and rest. before following the road down to buckie, i enter a big shed full of cows who come close to me. they want to lick my hand through the metal railings. the shed is illuminated by soft orange lights and contains about fifty cows, some of them lying down, some of them wandering about their carpet of hay and dung. i wonder if they like their life of domesticated captivity. perhaps if they don't have a good memory, they are happy to wander around and around in that soft orange glow. some big hefty specimens waddle over and regard me with their peaceful unenlightened gaze. bovine. it would be a warm place to sleep in that shed with the cows, i think, but instead i head back out to follow the cold moonlit road down to buckie.
"so, would any of you consider moving up to aberdeen if there was a job there?" andy says he asked them.
"naw, they're aw sheep-shaggers up there!" he says they responded.
the next day andy and i climb up ben vrackie. a few hundred metres up and the hill is covered in snow. near the top the air becomes thick with blustery snowflakes. the top of the hill is a wild place to be. the cairn is a beatifully sculpted white winter monument, its horizontal ice flutings indicating the direction of the prevailing wind. for the descent, andy regrets not bringing his waterproof trousers, with which he could have slid down the snow. i regret not bringing boots, for my trainers are soon soaked and i feel the cold seeping up through my body.
driving along the motorway to edinburgh, the sign for glenrothes gives me the idea to visit my grandparents. i somehow manage to locate their house amid the labrinth of big roads and big roundabouts and homogenous housing schemes which constitute glenrothes. i knew they would be happy to see me. as we enter the house there is a great cry of surprise and happiness, and andy and i are soon sat on the settee with cups of tea and plates of chocolate biscuits on our knees.
the next day, my grandma doesn't want me to hitchhike, so i get the bus into edinburgh.
"the thing is, i like to hitchhike," i had said to her. "it is a pleasure for me. i don't mind waiting. i like to meet the friendly people who stop."
but my grandmother is tenacious in her insistence that i take the bus: "i know that you hitchhike everywhere, but just this once, take the bus. will you do it for me?" she implores with her tenacious loving smiling eyes, "i want to know that you'll arrive safely."
as well as money for the bus, she gives me some sturdy shoes which my grandfather no longer uses. she doesn't like the sight of me wearing those ones with holes in them.
in the national portrait gallery in edinburgh there is a tall dandy man with tinted glasses. he is standing next to the portrait of a prominent early scottish feminist and telling a group of female visitors how the word feisty is spelt so they can write it down. "this word is only used to describe women," he says.
"and it is not a positive trait."
later i ask kevin what he thinks feisty means and he immediately gives a catsnarl and swipes the air with his paw. brother kevin and sister-in-law ally have 35 acres of young woodland, for which they have received a considerable grant from the goverment because of their aim to increase biodiveristy, and to engage in social activities. they have already had children from the local school up planting many different varieties of scottish apple trees for their orchard. kevin and i whack wooden posts with a mallet into the squelchy ground to make a woodland enclosure for hens. one of us holds the wooden post with one hand and the ladder with the other, while the other one stands atop the ladder with a look of fierce concentration, emitting fierce concentrated grunts, coincident with each mallet blow. we dig over a piece of ground and wrestle out the tree stumps so it will be level for big new shed soon to arrive. on day three we are kneeling weeding the vegetable plots when the wind - coming from the east - brings flurries of fat flakes of snow. back in the house for the rest of the afternoon we watch the world becoming white outside.
it is good to engage in purposeful activities with kevin, while we perceive our beings being together. it has been a while since we caught up.
scotland in february. in the morning the first car takes me to the motorway near falkirk. before getting out i ask him if he has hitchchiked himself. his only response is: "no. i am a humanist."
rain begins to fall and, as i am waiting, the side of the road becomes a cold uninviting place to linger. a police car pulls up and tells me that it is illegal to hitchhike on the motorway. "i know that it is illegal to hitchhike on the motorway," i bend down in the rain to speak through the window, "but i thought this slip road would be a safe place for cars to pull in before they enter the motorway."
"this is still considered the motorway," says the police officer, his voice indicating that his patience threshold is not very high, "you'll have to get into falkirk and get a bus from there."
"okay. i see the problem," i say, and walk away and walk down the sliproad which joins the motorway going in the opposite direction. i want to go to perth, and can either go via stirling to the west or via the forthroad bridge to the east. i prepare a patient response to the police if they come again: i know that it is your job to enforce the law, and i would like to assist you in the job where i see that it is sensible that the law be followed. obviously it would be dangerous to stand on the motorway next to the fast-moving cars, and expect them to stop for me, but can you not see that it is quite safe for a car to pull in here on the slip road, like you have done yourself? surely the only reason to follow the law is if the law itself is reasonable? i didn't really expect the police to follow me on this line of reasoning. i suppose that i wouldn't even have got half-way through it before they quashed me with their overweening voice of authority, but i felt that i needed to at least try and stand firm by my desire to live in a more human society where strangers can choose to trust each other and have spontaneous positive encounters, sharing their roads together - those who have wheels inviting those who have not to accompany them on their journey, to construct a society less obsessively based around the aquisition and spending of money in order for each one to live a life of self-contained self-sufficiency which requires no contact or affirmative trusting interaction with others.
i know it is a question of being rescued by someone before the police come. my rescuers are two poles who invite me in out of the rain. they are going to edinburgh. one of them says he has been living in scotland for twelve years, and has aquired so scottish an accent that i would niver hae been able tae tell that he wisna fae embra, were it not for him telling me. the voice of his companian who is driving reveals unmistakably his polish origin, although he says that he has been living in scotland for ten years. he says that he, like me, loves to travel. "last year i participated in the london to mongolia rally race. next year i want to travel to south asia, but only by foot. the car is unreliable." i say that i similarly prefer to travel by foot, although i am happy to travel in other people's cars, when they want to take me.
they are both happy people whose laughs came to them easily. they drop me off at a petrol station where i can shelter from the rain and ask the motorists who stop to fill up their cars. before long i meet bruce who says he can take me to stirling, which is, in fact, back along the road i have just come from. he says that edinburgh is a cold place, certainly compared to the isle of skye where he grew up. he explains what he means by cold by saying that he has never talked to his neighbours not even once. when i say that i don't have a job and move around a lot, he says that i will end up like him - running a restaurant. (i am still not sure what he meant by that.) he just bought a pub in callander. he is quietly scottishly pragmatic. it seems that he isn't prone to getting very excited about very much. he tells about the sites of historic interest scattered across argyl, the first part of scotland to be settled.
when he drops me off it has stopped raining, but it is still cold. there is snow at the side of the road. soon billy stops for me and tells me his name with a handshake. "yer hands are freezin', here get them under that heatin' they'll soon warm up. if i had picked you up a month ago i could ha' taken you aw the wai up ta inverness. ah work on the pylons. ah hid a job up north an wiz aawais travellin up the A9. up and doon fae dundee. we wiz workin up near wick once, and the big crane got stuck in the bog. the next day you could only see the light on its roof. it had sunk right in."
i tell him how grateful i am that there are still people like him who are happy to pick up hitchhikers. for most people it has really disappeared as a cultural practice. "aaaye, they're aw too scared o' strangers noo," he drawls in his dundonian brogue "nae me; i'll pick up onyone. i used tae dae it myself goin to the football. my mates and i wid get pished and hitch to the match."
"right the broxton roundabout is comin up," he says, "get ready to jump out. you got aw yer stuff? right there's naeone behind, GO NOW! AW THE BEST PAL!"
i jump out into the fresh cold sunny air of perth and walk along the side of the road north until i get to a layby. soon a posh cream coloured car pulls in with leather upholstery with a quirky driver with fair stubble on his chin - called malcolm i learn - and a young australian in the passanger seat, called bethan. we talk a lot about travelling. i tell her about bruce chatwin, who has written a book about the australian aborigines and about the restlessness of the human spirit.
chatwin hypothesises that nomadism is the original and the healthiest human society - perhaps to explain the ants in his own pants (he said that after a month in the same place he becomes restless, after two months it is unbearable). the story of farmer cain killing nomad abel - chatwin maintains - is a prefiguration of our human story of settled people becoming attached to their possessions their territory, but ultimately leading to violence and war.
when i say that i want to cross the atlantic ocean bethan tells me about a couchsurfing group who are building their own yacht, with a view to making the cross. bethan turns round on her seat and fixes me with her bright travellers' eyes, asking me question after question (she tells me she has worked as a journalist): what do my parents do? do i have any brothers or sisters? what do they do? where is my next travel destination? malcolm chuckles and says that he hopes i don't mind such an interrogation. he hopes i don't mind his habit of speedily overtaking the car in front. i say i felt quite safe and am happy to be in his car. malcolm says he would do a lot more travelling if it wasn't for his business pursuits - restaurants in edinburgh. he says he had a "rather solitary childhood" near lochindorb, "do you know it?"
"aye. it is a romantic place in my mind," i say.
"why so?"
"i don't know... as you say, it is a solitary place. there are very few people who go there. it is surrounded by wild open moorland. then there is loch and the island with the ruined castle and the legend of the wolf of badenoch."
he listens carefully to what i said before agreeing, "aye aye. its true."
he is more of a listener than a speaker.
i get them to drop me off at the layby near luibleathann bothy. "it is a fine place to spend the night," i tell them, "cooking over the fireplace, drinking water from the burn. i always find myself gravitating there when i am on the road. there are even armchairs, but hardly anybody goes there. there are not many people who know about it." bethan wants me to write its name on her phone.
the next day is bright and sunny but fiercely cold when i am not moving. i think i will easily make it back to my parent's place in buckie before evening, but after a lift from lois -a self-assured woman who has driven up from glasgow to oversee the repairs to her holiday home in granton - i spend a long time waiting at a layby reading the jungle book in romanian between smiling at the file of big shiny vehicles probably coming from skiing in the cairngorms. not one of them stops for me, and even though it is sunny, it gets pretty cold just standing there. sometime in the late afternoon i tell myself that walking along the speyside way will be the best way to keep moving and keep warm and make ground. it is something like fifty miles from granton to buckie, but i give myself confidence by repeating to myself the old dictum: where there's a will, there's a way. i know that the terrain is flat and easy and if people run along it in the annual race why can't i walk it?
however, after going through the big old pine woods of anagach i decide to try hitching once more, from cromdale, in the last half hour of sunlight. wow, hitchhiking has really disppeared as a social practice, i think as i watch all the cars slide past. it is a thought that runs through my head everytime i have to wait for a long time. but it only takes one receptive person . . . and, yes! a quiet couple respond to my sign saying BUCKIE and invite me into their large car containing their ski apparel. they are going to fraserbourgh and can drop me off at keith. they have never picked up a hitchhiker before. they are surprised that i would walk like that in the cold night. "walking keeps you warm," i say, "and the moon will be almost full tonight. it is only eleven miles from keith over the hill to buckie - much easier than the fifty miles i was contemplating. thank you so much for stopping for me."
along a dark country road outside keith a dog-walker tells me where i can find the fishwive's path - which the fishermen's wives used to follow to take the fish from buckie to keith to be sold. when he learns that i want to cross over that night he says,
"you're keen,"
as if it were abnormal to be enthusiastic.
coming out of the village i pass an old church and see three of the tall gothic windows are lit with a soft orange glow. "maybe there is an evening service," i think and walk across the driveway to see that it has been refurbished inside. at the first window a naked man and woman are standing, moving cautiously. they must have heard me crunching across the gravel because the woman soon looks up and i hear her muffled voice through the window, "there is someone watching us. O MY GOD!" and i quickly run away. i feel uncomfortable about my overweening curiosity, my unwitting enacting of the prying eye of society.
contrariwise, i only want people to feel safe and at ease in this world.
later the little country road plunges through a dark tunnel of tall conifers and i remember the baleful presense of the Eye which watched me from the dark corners of the countryside when i was a child. now i can reason it away, thinking: even if there may be some baleful lurking presence (a person who intends no good) i think the chances of it are slim; i will take the risk and venture forth.
bruce chatwin talks about the Beast, which was there at the conception of homo sapiens. indeed, which resulted in our conception. when the forest cover of Africa disappeared - chatwin supposes - our hominid ancestors were forced to think in order to survive, being, as they were, physically helpless against the predatory big cats of the big plains. it was the Beast who brought us together, prompting us to make fires, around whose protective arc we gathered and commnunicated the whereabouts of the Predator, giving birth to language. whether the Beast still poses us a real physical threat or not - chatwin proposes - he is still firmly embedded in our subconsious, and will always be present in our mythical wanderings.
i walk though the tall dark coniferous woodland that exists between buckie and keith, stopping to peer closely at the signposts for the fishwive's path - which bear the symbol of a white face shrouded by a dark shawl . those who conceived of the path must have wanted to mark the difficulty of the lives of the fishermen's wives; the symbols give an eerie resemblance of the grim reaper. the stars are bright and numerous. i see a shooting star in the north, then a big white moon rises in the east. i don't stop very often because i want to find a warm place and rest. before following the road down to buckie, i enter a big shed full of cows who come close to me. they want to lick my hand through the metal railings. the shed is illuminated by soft orange lights and contains about fifty cows, some of them lying down, some of them wandering about their carpet of hay and dung. i wonder if they like their life of domesticated captivity. perhaps if they don't have a good memory, they are happy to wander around and around in that soft orange glow. some big hefty specimens waddle over and regard me with their peaceful unenlightened gaze. bovine. it would be a warm place to sleep in that shed with the cows, i think, but instead i head back out to follow the cold moonlit road down to buckie.
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