A Fit of Peaks

Down from the Mountain.....

Halò (Hello)!  Doctor Colville took the Pullman train to Fort William.  

He was met, welcomed and transported to his room overlooking the Sunday papers.  It was a very nice.  Although the ginger cake exuded crumbs, it was sweet and potent..... 

Restlessly hopeful young Don Paul was considerably less at ease with himself, or, for that matter, the world.  His craquelure piqued him.  The Scottish air would be beneficial, perhaps? 

Don Paul took lodging in a remote cabin, more in keeping with his appreciation of Lyme disease and the general pleasure of enough-of-these mesquites than for comfort....

Madainn mhat (Good Morning).

Oh Ho! Oh Ho! Oh Ho! Laughed the rident chorus in Scottish vapours.

Mountains of good fellows' hip ached through the cloud, eyes closed to avoid recognition and of general appearance not unlike a walrus.

This was where we were..... A neatly timed protuberance against the shy line. Trudgedy trudgedy trudge.  The grim peeper on the hedge of thyme....

See the little thing against the sky! Dr Colville stolid stepping upwards and on words.... Brudderkin, fellow, how the difference affects? Look up!  This guy's the Limax.  

Troubles is the will within Don Paul to clamber skywards has dwindleminished.

But that is not to say.  Fàilte (Welcome)! The pleasure of company has not evaporated in its complexity. A bubble or more of light water still glints behind the dam. Looking down is still uplifting....

When the shadows of this life have gone,

I'll fly away;

Like a bird from these prison walls I'll fly,

I'll fly away.

[I'll Fly Away]

Slàinte mhor a h-uile là a chi's nach fhaic.... (Great health to you every day I see you and every day I don't).....

And so here we up high are. High are and high are. Top of the world to ye. Slàinte mhor (Great Health)!

Don Paul has come to some epifania. The upward slogging most definitely rewards those who more than just manage. The views and overarching privilege of the higher up are not for the faint.  

Kiss me mother kiss your darlin'

Lay my head upon your breast

Throw your loving arms around me

I am weary let me rest

I am weary let me rest

[I am weary]

Despite appearances, it is the differentials that appeal, or, rather, we find we are more alike through our dissonances - the love of other is our bond -

But I fail in substance.  I fall behind, I taste the stale air.  Then I become myself in drifting with the wind.  I rest my aching knees and forgo the ultimate heights to watch the (common spotted) orchids:

Or admire the sundews:

To hear the cotton grass:

In different lights,

Through different ways of seeing,

To scent the bell-heather:

To startle at the British Soldier lichen in flower:

To feel the yellowness of the tormentil (whose vertue is to part/All deadly killing poison from the heart):

And the maiden hair-dying bog-asphodel:

To stroke the passive frog:

And to savour the patient distances:

After days of rain, our ultimate sortie is to the height of Gulvain (Gaor Bheinn, 987m), a remote Munro (whose name means Great Rough Hill), where the Trig point on the first summit is reached by 730 metres of unrelenting uphill climb, squelching in the stream bed that is at times the path.  

I better the worst, and picnic high on the shoulder, but, having watched the nether portions of Dr Colville disappearing into cloud almost vertically above me in a stone field of scree and tussock, a Joycean light fills me with epifania and I decide that descent is the butter path of gory.  

And from down I then scan the up, Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?  In the meantime, without the comfort of telephotosynthesis, I watch a family of wrens learning the wropes, and enjoy the flipping flights of a pair of spotted flycatchers.  So engrossed that even the midges believe me marble.

Then, saving a golden-ringed dragonfly from drowning in a peat puddle, 

And, reconciled to our independences, we fraternally drift toward a sunset of elementary colour....

So, the Dr achieves his goals, tips his cap to another Munro, 

and I discover my limitations, finding enjoyment in the observation of other views, endeavouring to improve my photographic delivery.  

The glens and hills are stunning.  The natural world is undisturbed. A fleeting glimpse of a female hen harrier; a couple of deer scurrying over the ridge; the bruising flare of fox gloves in contrast to the silver bark of birches.  A river skirls down to the loch.  

And in all there is the joy of interpretative sight, the imagination drawing colours from the atmosphere. 

My latest sun is sinking fast, my race is nearly run

My strongest trials now are past, my triumph has begun

Oh, come angel band, come and around me, stand

Oh, bear me away on your snow white wings

To my immortal home

Oh, bear me away on your snow white wings

To my immortal home

[Angel Band]

In retrospect I love my excursions, through the soaking aches.  I think of Hokusai's sense of something being alive other than the crude rock and brute massif.  It is lovely to be out in the light, painting imaginations from the ever expanded present....

Ooh death

Whooooah death

Won't you spare me over 'til a another year?

[Ralph Stanley (1927 - 2016)]

Oh brothers let's go down, let's go down, come on down
Come on brothers let's go down, down in the river to pray....

Bidh mi 'gad fhaicinn....
(I'll be seeing you....)

Independence in Scotland

Scotch Mist

I am filled with metaphor.  

We are staring into an abyss.... Or, at least, we think it is an abyss, though there is no way of telling. Mist, Scotch mist, obscures all (except that there is nothing there....)

Apart from this sign.....

My brother is a mountain goat (though you might not think so to look at him).  He has 'conquered' 219 of 282 Munros (Scottish peaks over 3,000 feet), so has 63 to go to become a compleater.   

I am more a lame duck. I may, perhaps, have got to the top of some half dozen or so in my lifetime, but I wouldn't call it conquering.... 

But it's not about achievement.  It's about compleation.... Or it's about the road to compleation. You start something. You don't just walk away. At nearly 68 my bro' has managed to clamber the sides of 219 peaks. Why quit now?  I have absolutely no doubt he will top the lot before he pops his clogs, but if not, so what?  At least he will die trying.  To walk away now, saying he had to regain control, would reduce the whole experience to a petri dish of Nigel Farage's sperm....

I have just spent a weekend with said Bro' in Scotland. I have been gaining my independence. Writing as I am on the eve of the UK referendum in which the question is whether to remain in partnership with blood brothers or to perform a caesarian on ourselves without an anesthetic, I am filled with metaphor.  

My Bro' and I (and not to forget L'il Bro') are blood. We don't live together. We circulate in different spheres.  But we are blood and need each other when times are up or down.  

Like the orchids on the hillside we are not complete in ourselves. We cannot exist in a vacuum.

Or, like the cotton grass, we don't flourish singly. Symbiosis, with a little independence, seems to be a suitable way of life.....

The first day of our trip we climbed Creag Mhòr, which reaches a height of 1047 metres (3435 ft). Creag Mhòr (Big Rock) is one of the remotest of the southern highlands being situated about eight kilometres from the nearest public road and being surrounded by other high ground (thanks, Wiki). We probably covered about fifteen miles in the eight hours or so it took us to get up and back. For a weed from the south this was testing, and the frequency and content of messages from my knees, thighs and hips to my brain put antisocial networking to shame as I began to yearn for some end to the pain....

But, when the exhilaration was over, and we were back on the flat, I was glad I had done it.  

Later, at the Luib Hotel, James and Jenny provided us with sustenance and liquid refreshment, and humanity no longer seemed a remote ideal....

The bigger test - the real caber tosser - came the next morning after breakfast, when, overlooking Rannoch Moor, with distant views of Ben Nevis, Bro' parked near Achallader Farm and we set off, in fine weather, for Beinn Mhanach (954 metres) via Coire Achaladair.  

It should have been a walk in the park.  The breezes were Zephyrus at his kindest, with clouds dappling the hills and nary a spot of sleet nor snow.  But I wandered with cloud-like loneliness in my heart, thinking, I am slowing him down,  and I can't go on.....

Truth is, I had become as useless as Nigel Farage in a finishing school, and as self-centred as Boris Johnson on the wall of death.  Or, perhaps, as welcome as Iain Duncan Smith at one of William Hague's drinking bouts....

Somehow there was a mismatch.....

We stopped for lunch.  The views were wonderful.  The map, however, said to me that there was no way I should proceed.  It was time for me and Bro' to part company.

And so it was. He was to scamper across, fly up the crags and bag another Munro, with his personal goal ever nearer. And I was to turn my attention to the closer study of the world immediately round me.

I love being in the open, with air in what's left of my hair, and that ringing silence you can only get when a skylark is deafening.  No buildings.  No cars. No TV.  No football.  No worries.....

I love to explore the pictures that all of a sudden, without the need to slog up to yet another thousand metre cairn, reveal themselves to me.  Here is the delicate-looking Common Butterwort (pinguicula vulgaris)

It's barely ten centimetres tall, if that, but it is a killer, being one of the United Kingdom's few carnivorous plants.  The sticky leaves being disposed to curl around unsuspecting flies, who are then ingested through the pores...  And these are all around me!

Quietly working out their existence, like the lichens on the rocks:

I nearly step on this beautiful ground beetle....

And narrowly miss slipping over this little frog, one of many:

On close examination, the world about me is alive.  Without the slightest difference with my brother, I come to the realisation that our differences are compatible.  He can leg it and I can limp.  He can soar like an eagle, while I flit like a wagtail.  And there's room for us both....

And so an afternoon passes, my eye tracing waterfalls:

Catching reflections:

Enjoying the rich colours:

The lighter shades:

Discovering some strange creatures away from the public eye:

And eventually being reunited with Bro' amongst the bobbing of the exploding cotton grass.

The Hills are Alive.....

Yes.  I achieved something approaching independence in the Scottish Hills, and was the better for it.  But that independence couldn't have happened without my Bro', without the planning and the travelling together, and the shared love of challenge and outdoors and all that.  I wouldn't have been there etc etc.  

It's late and my metaphors have begun to muddle.  I have a drop of Aberlour within reach, but the memory of James's cask strength 20 year old GlenDronach in my head. 

This is no time to leave.....  The party is just beginning!  

I can be independent.  But not on my own......

That's just Scotch mist.  

The abyss.....

http://www.luibhotel.co.uk/

To recap last year's sortie, please see....

http://www.richardpgibbs.org/2015/06/munros-three-steps-to-heaven.html

I remain, 
yours faithfully....