Reflections on Climbing and the Ridiculous Hour of Sunrise

Written 30 June 2009

Highlands: Day Three

Bed at almost 1 a.m. as the sun finally set all the way. Awake again at 4 a.m. lying next to the window not understanding why it was sunset when I went to bed, sunrise now, and only three hours between. Stood up and snapped six pictures out the window as the sun came up next to the Skye Bridge.

After breakfast, dolphins in the narrow strait between Skye and the Scottish mainland. Teehee! Gill tells us about a hill named Pap and I laugh because Shakespeare taught me how to be classily crass (at least to today’s audience). The queen named a hill a loch and this is nonsense.

Yesterday a hike through the woods up the face of the most photographed rock formation on Skye; a reminder of the wholesomeness of exhaustion and the pleasure of entering a clearing, not previously aware of your elevation or the water falling away behind you or the clouds casting shadows on the lochs or the islands scattered among the water, having forgotten that once you exited the woods you’d find the cliffs and want to keep climbing but unable to do so, and so you climb with your camera and swear you’ll come back to Skye.

9 miles from the Talisker whiskey distillery and you think, “Why would I need Scotch in a world of this much transcendence?” and you wish you could be a Scottish Emerson or Thoreau or even just Scottish.

Notes:

Paps = Breasts

On the hill called a loch:  When Queen Victoria visited the Highlands, she asked about the name of a certain hill.  She was told the name, which was in Gaelic at the time, and then asked what it meant.  It translated roughly to “pile of shit.”  Being Victorian, she was quite scandalized and so declared that it must be renamed.  She named it Loch…. something, it eludes me now, but the long and the short of it is, Loch means lake.  God save the queen.