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2002.05.19 : 2002.05.25
My Life in Scotland
Part Eight: I Am Awash in Contradiction
Single-track roads, as untraveled and far away from anything
as you can get by car in Scotland, stretch alongside stacked stone walls
of uncertain age grown soft with splatters of white lichen and great green
loaves of hungry moss, so hungry that you think, if you leave this place
alone for a month, two at the outside, it'll all be grown over, all of
it, and there'll be no more trace that anyone was ever here.
Yet a six inch gully cut beside the road neatly contains the run-off
from the sideways rains earlier in the day, the tiny road lacks even a
single pothole, and you just now notice that the grasses at the sides of
the road were recently edged back, and that the underside of the canopy
of trees, beneath which ferns grow as tall as saplings even in the sunny
patches, has been neatly trimmed, for miles and miles, to allow the rare
lorry to pass.
My Life in Scotland
Part Seven: I Tromp the Muck of Two Worlds
Civilization here is older than anyone can remember. Literally.
Out the window of our B&B is Dunadd, fort on the river Add,
where a civilization about which we now know very little may have crowned
its king atop a bare outcropping of rock in the midst of a peat bog. Earlier
today, we tromped through the muck to a couple of neolithic sites, perhaps
5000 years old, where a civilization of farmers and hunters carved shallow
circular indentations and concentric circles in the rock to denote ...
well, nobody knows. But they're all over Scotland, these cup-and-ring formations.
Some have "gutters" that cut through the circles from the central cup,
generally running downhill along the rock. Gutters often meet in a Y and
continue downhill in a single gutter.
Cup-and-ring formations are found in burial places, in Stonehenge-like
places of apparent religious significance, and in places like we were today,
hilltops with no other apparent purpose. Maybe they were associated with
religious rituals. Maybe they were maps of some kind. Nobody knows. The
information is simply lost, along with the people who made them.
(I have a wee theory of my own about their origin and significance.
Maybe I'll tell you later, if it holds up.)
It is so green here, and so wet. It probably gets off being a rain forest
only on a technicality. The fiddlehead ferns are just unrolling. The young
heather is not yet purple and there are bluebells in the shady spots. Lichen
and moss cover everything that isn't already layered in thick grasses,
and the spongy ground sinks beneath you as you walk. Doubtless those lost
people saw these same flowers, felt these same mists, and sank forever
into this same ground.
In my other world, I can now fairly routinely get all the way through
the Nightmare mode of Clive Barker's Undying, at least the demo
version of it. It is set in 1920s Ireland in a haunted mansion, a bog with
Celtic standing stones, and various other mysterious places. The last puzzles
to be solved were how to defeat the giant floating creature in the very
last scene (Hint: Huddle beneath the rock outcropping, fire magic skulls
like your life depends on it, and hope for the best) and what to do with
the maze at the very end that forms and breaks apart beneath you as you
walk (Hint: Jump). I'm on the lookout for the full version now, which I
am as unlikely to locate as Internet access now that we're in the bog-and-stones
part of the world.
My Life in Scotland
Part Six: I Learn Things
Things I learned today:
-
Glasgow is a center of Mackintosh design,
there being several museums and a number of buildings here (including a
wonderful art school) that he designed.
-
 Charles
Mackintosh and his wife Margaret designed lots of things: Buildings, furniture,
art, silverware, rugs, windows and lighting fixtures. While he is now revered
as the premiere Art Deco architect, he died virtually unknown.
-
I'm virtually unknown. That
means I'm making progress.
-
The long stretches of Glasgow between
the interesting bits are occupied by run-down warehouse districts.
-
The correct answer to the question, Would
you like to walk or take a taxi? is: Take a taxi.
-
The people in Glasgow are fun-loving,
friendly people who are proud of their Glaswegian heritage.
-
No one in Glasgow (as far as I can tell)
has ever been to New York. Most have never been out of Glasgow.
-
Glaswegian taxi drivers have even less
plausible conspiracy theories than their New York counterparts. Ours was
convinced that Bush approved the Lockerbie plane bombing as payback for
the U.S. downing of a passenger plane in Iran.
-
At the end of May in Glasgow, the sun
sets around 10:30 PM and rises around 3:30 AM. Imagine what December must
be like.
My Life in Scotland
Part Five: My Time Machine Malfunctions
We walk west from our hotel in search of a cyber-cafe, my attempt
to hook up to the Internet through the quirky hotel phone system having
failed utterly, despite several encouraging grunts from the man behind
the bar. Everyone we ask knows where to find a cyber-cafe, but their directions
are as oblique as the hotel phone system.
It takes us two cyber-cafes, spaced ten blocks apart, and three pounds
for fifteen minutes on a PC that (a) can get to the Internet and (b) has
a diskette drive, which I need in order to copy the mail that I need to
send, including part of a paper on which I am co-author. We are unlikely
to get further Internet access for some time to come.
Then we go south, along Robertson Lane, where Donald McDonald was born.
22 Robertson Lane is now a large Holiday Inn. So we cross the Clyde to
the south into Gorbals, the tenement section of the city where my mother
was born. Florence Street, where she lived, is now divided by a large public
building. As we wander around it, I think to ask about the neighborhood
of a gray-haired woman walking towards us. But at the last moment I see
that her mouth is my mother's and I am stunned. My bravery fails me and
I let her pass.
Helen inquires of another older couple that we encounter, and they spend
several minutes reminiscing about the old tenements that were all torn
down to make way for new housing developments and various government agencies.
An old factory nearby is now the Department of Family Services. The shipyards
where Donald McDonald learned shipbuilding have given way to the Glasgow
College of Nautical Studies, a nine story building in the universal 1960s
institutional style.
There is nothing left of the old neighborhood. Even the old graveyard
has been made into a park, except for its lichen-covered stone walls, into
which are set the few remaining gravestones - Ferguson, MacIntyre, McDonald.
All of old Gorbals has been replaced by modern buildings, modern apartments,
a college or two. The cobblestone streets that I remember being here thirty
years ago, when I visited with my mother, are now asphalt. Only the old
people remember them now. Soon, they too will be gone.
But the spaces are not gone, the space in which my mother was born,
the ones in which she slept, went to school, skinned her knees, was nearly
struck deaf by whooping cough, juggled the expensive milk bottles on the
way back from the store. They are not gone. It's merely that the walls
are different. And I find myself caught in time, unable quite to stretch
back into that world, or to go forward just enough to reach my own.
My Life in Scotland
Part Four: I Devise a Time Machine
Little Donald McDonald was four years old and his parents had
just reached their forties when, in 1880, the grand City Chambers were
erected in the prosperous trading city of Glasgow. No expense was spared
in their construction.  The
finest Scottish and Italian marble lined their floors and walls, and formed
great high columns and staircases that ascended four stories. Embossed
leather lined the walls and intricate gold leaf designs decorated the ornately
plastered ceilings. There was stained leaded glass in every window and
a million mosaic tiles made specially for the building formed intricate
designs throughout its great halls. A steam-powered electric generator
in the basement powered electric lights throughout the building - the first
electric lights in all of Glasgow. Varnished mahogany, and yellow wood
imported from Tasmania, lined the Council Chambers, where men in velvet
robes and powdered wigs presided over the governance of the city.
Donald, the son of a clothing salesman, grew up in the grime of central
Glasgow, its buildings black with coal soot, in a building whose rooms
were lit only by the dull orange flame of oil lamps.
It is a good bet that no one in Donald's family ever saw the inside
of the City Chambers, just a half dozen blocks away.
My Life in Scotland
Part Three: I Discover My Noble Heritage
The early 1800s were mean times in Scotland. The English Crown,
intent on transforming Scotland into a economic appendage of its growing
empire, was in the midst of the Highland Clearances, in which people who
were farmers since before anyone remembers were dispossessed, their lands
taken, their homes burned, and they were forced into the newly industrial
cities of the north. A huge fraction of people died in infancy, of disease
or of childbirth itself. The most common age at death was zero.
It was in this dismal climate that James White Knox, the son of a Glaswegian
clockmaker, found his calling as a lemonade salesman. Although he modestly
lists his occupation as "salesman" on his certificate of marriage to lovely
Grace McDonald, the daughter of a cotton spinner, later records clarify
his lemonade specialty.
James and Grace gave birth to Elizabeth Knox in 1840. Elizabeth, a weaver,
married Alexander McDonald, a clothing salesman, and gave birth to Donald
McDonald (not much Donald in that, now, is there?). Donald, a shipwright,
married Agnes-Ann Ferguson, the illegitimate daughter of Elizabeth Hendry,
who was probably banished from Greenford, England after she started showing.
Donald and Annie gave birth to several kids and emigrated to the New World
right around the time of the Great Depression. The youngest of their kids
was Elizabeth McDonald, who fell in love during WWII with Lewis White,
the son of a self-taught electrician from a tiny town in Indiana. Lewis
was the first person in his family ever to attend college, albeit after
his own children were all grown. No one in Elizabeth's family ever attended
college, as far as can be told.
Lewis and Elizabeth gave birth to, well, me.
The above is the result of a day at Edinburgh's General Register Office
for Scotland, typing furiously on a terminal of an IBM mainframe which
allows you to find birth, death and marriage records only if you know the
relevant year, forcing you to become a human While
loop. Success with this gives you indices into vast trays of microfiche,
a technology I had not even seen in thirty years, these being photographic
copies of records written by people with neat penmanship but sloppy interpretations.
(Jean Williamson, another relative, was sometimes recorded as Jeanie and
sometimes as Jane.) The General Register Office is stuffed with people
doing just what we are doing, walking intently between their computer terminals
and a thirty foot high domed room lined with aging record books and drawers
of microfiche, a room last seen in Myst. And all the while wondering
who those curious people might have been, and why they lived their lives
as they did.
A lemonade salesman. Imagine that.
My Life in Scotland
Part Two: I Avoid Becoming King
I narrowly avoided becoming King today, which has both bad
points and good. On the bad side, it means that I am unlikely to murder
my brothers or imprison my sister. I won't be extorting vast sums of money
from people I've never met. I won't be consumed with sending young men
off to die so I can have more land, or reinforcing my many estates against
those who wish to do the same to me. I won't be burning hundreds of women
in the square because they are witches or torturing people of other lands
or other religions just for the fun of it. My time will not be taken up
in planning extravagant monuments to myself and my achievements (see above).
It turns out, however, that I am not the offspring of another King,
nor have I recently murdered one, so that pretty much counts me out. That,
and the job seems to have been taken over, in recent centuries, by a larger
and more inbred group to the south. People of Scottish extraction don't
seem to be on the short list for the job these days.
On the good side, having to spend all that time in murder and vanity
wouldn't have left much time to get real work done. So maybe it's best.
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