Early November always reminds me of Scotland, the best memories of our UK winter tour there 10 years ago. Going for breakfast on All Saint’s Day, Celtic New Year, at some barren stone cottage on the shores of Loch Ness. The very edge-of-things feeling that is Inverness, “mouth of the Ness,” so far north. But we were headed further north to Orkney, that archipelago of islands off the northeastern coast, leaving the mainland from a desolate place called John O’Groats, the North Sea sloshing over the causeways and rising right up to our car.

It was thrilling to land in Scotland toward the end of October not knowing a thing about Guy Fawkes night or how dark things would get so early in the day. Or how long it would take for the sun to come up. And once it did how sad it looked for its brief cameo, knowing it was about to go.

I loved the vibe of everything in Inverness, the UK’s northernmost city, smack dab where the River Ness meets the Moray Firth and with its own filter it seemed, a deep blue-gray to all the urban scenes. Must have been the light when we arrived. Bagpipes and wood fires, always the dark about to come.

Landing in Orkney at Stromness with plans to see all the Neolithic sites, and how we got away with that with two young kids who could give a crap about castles and geology.

This also kicked off my season of Scotch, which I framed as more of a culinary project but was mostly just about me getting drunk. It lagged on through mid December, following me from Arbroath through the Highlands and west coast, zig-zagging from Edinburgh to the southwest, exiting for Belfast.

We had a map of the UK about the size of a small car we hung from mom’s hulk-like Schrank in Germany, dissecting it like a piece of meat. I took just two pairs of jeans for all 90 days. Nothing was too big for us to consume, surely no islands.

Trying to sleep in an old hotel above a restaurant and pub where a traveling men’s rugby team is staying. Always the wind and rain, walking between the Neolithic sites with two complainy kids. It was the very best of times and I’m sad for how little I can remember. The chambered tomb at Maeshowe, picturing the sunrise on the shortest day of the year coming through a small crack between the rocks to illuminate the cold chamber. How they positioned the rocks in such a manner they knew right where the sun would be that day. Imagining the people who were our forebears huddled there by the scant light, hanging on. Burial mounds and why it was important for them to save the bones of the dead.

Curling around the west coast through Oban as the month wore on and we spent the last of it in the chauffeur’s flat off Lochinch Castle, the middle of nowhere and truly wild feeling after dark with the winds and full moon.

What went through my head there on a late night walk looking back at our flat and the small windows where my family was, happily playing games and talking inside. Thinking how alone and removed I felt with my drinking but I couldn’t do anything about it then, it wasn’t time.

Samhain marks the official end of summer and a passageway to winter when the boundary between the living and the dead is blurred and spirits return to earth. All this was lost on us then picking about the stones as tourists, taking our pictures.

I light a candle in the dark of morning to remember and honor the living and the dead in all of us, they know no boundaries: all that is made up, we are mixed.

Categories: Addiction, Creative Nonfiction, travel, Travelogues

Tags: prose, Memoir, travel