Nessie and the Hoff.
The title of this post is misleading, as I saw neither Nessie nor the Hoff (who was apparently filming) on my brief weekend jaunt to Fort Augustus. The closest thing I’ve seen to Nessie is from that one episode of The X-Files where the monster turns out to be a giant crocodile that eats Queequeg (or is it?!), and the closest thing I’ve seen to the Hoff is, well… hrm. The most recent thing I’ve seen is some awful Lifetime Network Movie he was in, where he plays a firefighter about to get married when he knows he’s in love with a mysterious woman whose life he saved, and they’re brought together by a cute little rascal. Or some bullshit like that. Anyway, the point is, I didn’t see Nessie and I didn’t see the Hoff, but had I seen the Hoff, I would have made him put on his blinking jacket and sing something for me, a la the fall of the Berlin Wall.
On Sunday afternoon, Lucy and Chris fed me a giant breakfast of mini-quiches, Scotch pancakes (which are, by the way, delicious), Earl Grey tea, and coffee and then we tumbled into the car with Ochain, who is a wolfhound mixed with something else, I forget. All I know is that he is a giant of a dog who is so sweet and who is also terrified of car rides. We took off for Fort Augustus, which I believe is on the south shore of Loch Ness. “It’s really, really big, Loch Ness,” is what Lucy and Chris and Peter and Therese told me, and I smiled and nodded, not understanding. I mean, I’ve seen lakes before.
Loch Ness is huge. It is mind blowing-ly, life altering-ly, taking my breath away-ly huge. It was like seeing a giant ocean, but the color of black tea where it is shallow and the color of oil where it is deep (close to 1,000 feet, I believe). The statistic is something like if you took all the water in Loch Ness, you could cover England and Scotland and Wales with it. I mean it’s just fucking enormous, and surrounded on all sides by huge mountains bristling with trees, and it boggles the mind to think that the bottom of the loch probably looks like these mountains, but inverted, with God knows what kind of fish swimming around in it. It makes me want to be Jules Verne.
When the four of us got there, I met Rory, Chris and Lucy’s friend who works on the Cruise Inverness line, as well as other members of the crew, including Ron, who is the owner. They very generously let all of us on board the big cruise boat and we took an hour or so’s journey, and we sat outside and I grinned like an idiot, trying to take in everything I was seeing — the trees, Urquhart Castle, clouds drifting by, the geological landscape that I could not make heads nor tails of. It was magnificent, and had that been the only thing I’d done, the only way I’d seen the loch, I would have been content.
But then. But then.
Ron told us that a couple of his friends were already at Dores Inn on the other end of the loch, and that he and a few of the crew were going to take the speedboat and go. Would we be interested in coming? Before I knew what was happening I was pulling on an insulated jumpsuit and one of the crew members was pulling a lifejacket on me, telling me not to pull the red tab unless I fell in the water. “If you fall in the water, you’re fucked,” he said jokingly, and I nodded eagerly, I didn’t care, I just wanted to get on that damn boat and fly.
There is nothing, nothing, like barrelling down the length of Loch Ness at 50, 55, 60, 65 m.p.h. on a speed boat surrounded by people who love their jobs and keep you entertained with anecdotes about the loch, the history of the region, and general bawdy good humor while you’re laughing and screaming at the turns as whoever was driving the boat swerves to catch the waves and make us bump around so hard that at several points my ass was not touching my seat. We followed an osprey and saw wild mountain goats and drifted close to them; they live on uninhabitable, untouched parts of the shore. I was taking little sips here and there of beer and whisky and wine and eventually we were told to get to the bow of the boat and throw our arms in the air, push half our bodies off the front of the boat. I took about five seconds to wonder what would happen if I fell off and then did it anyway, and it was, to use the vernacular, magic. Because the bow of the boat comes to a point, it really feels like there is nothing around you, that you’ve got your arms open to the wind that is blowing on your face and into your suit and that you’re flying, really really flying, and there is nothing except you and the sky and the water and the wind. God that was amazing. Amazing. I looked back; whoever was driving gave me a thumbs up, and I smiled the biggest smile ever and gave one back before turning back to the wind, wanting to catch it. I stood there for a few more minutes before staggering carefully back to my seat and letting someone else have a turn.
About an hour and a half later we came in sight of shore, and that’s where I saw that Ron’s friends weren’t just hanging out at the beach; they were up in some flying contraption, a tiny two-seater airplane looking thing, zooming around and taking aerial shots, and for a while the speed boat and the aircraft just circled and circled, them coming in close and us going right underneath them to the point where I could have stood up and probably touched it. I don’t think I’ve cheered that loudly in the past year; I’m actually surprised I didn’t lose my voice. Somewhere out there there are photos of me waving like crazy and looking insane.
Dores Inn was an enchanting little pub with roses growing everywhere. The whole lot of us sat outside, half-pints in hand, and Ron brought out the food menus and urged us to order. I had forgotten this, Scottish hospitality (boat rides and drinks and foodstuff and accommodations, all taken care of with good cheer and insulted faces when I pull out money and try to pay my way), but it all came rushing back as fantastic food kept coming and my drinks never ran out. There was beer and more whisky and the tastiest White Russians I have ever had (“These are dangerous,” I said after taking a sip. “The best word to describe a White Russian!” Ron agreed) and every time I protested, said I could not drink any more, could not eat any more, my protests were dismissed with a wave of a hand.
Afterwards, as it started to get dark (although it just never gets dark here, I’ve decided), when the water was reflecting black and grey and silver and blue, the moon high in the sky, we were getting ready to go back when one of the girls who had come with us got pushed into the water by one of the guys. We laughed, we cheered, we were horrified…
…And then Lucy turned to me and said, “I really feel like we should get in.”
“No, Lucy, it’s going to be freezing!” I said, but even as my mouth was saying this my hands were already pulling off my sweatshirt, combing my hair back into a ponytail, unlacing my shoes, removing my socks, checking pockets for my mobile phone and lip balm and five pound note.
“We just need to run in, we can’t do the thing where we go in and wait to get used to it,” she said, getting undressed herself.
“Jesus fuck, how do I let you talk me into this shit? No!” I said, unzipping my pants, tossed them on the ground, hoped I wasn’t wearing scandalous underpants (I wasn’t).
“God, they’re really going in,” someone else said, and before I knew what I was doing, aided no doubt by generous servings of alcohol but more by the thought that I was in Scotland, I was at Loch Ness and when was this opportunity going to come around again, right?, I was running pell-mell into the water, Lucy right next to me, not stopping to think about it, not stopping to think about the fact that the minute I’d stepped in, just my feet, that my ankles had gone numb, calves, thighs, not thinking, running into Loch Ness.
Fuck. Fuck fuck fuck.
“Oh fuck!” I yelled. It was ungodly cold. It was bone marrow numbing cold. It was so cold that I could feel my heartbeat lurch as I stood up on unsteady legs and wrapped my arms around myself, as if that would help the fact that I was essentially drenched in ice-water in the Highlands of Scotland with no sun to dry me, as the wind hit my body and locked my knees and my skin tried to crawl into itself, to get away from itself. “Fuck! Oh fuck!” Next to me Lucy shrieked and we both stumbled back to shore, narrowly avoiding Ron who was running toward us with his hands outstretched to push us in, as people clapped and cheered and probably thought we were nuts.
That was brilliant. I will never, ever forget doing that. Cheers to Lucy for talking me into it.
With my back to the group and Lucy holding up clothes to shield me, I yanked off my t-shirt and bra and shrugged back into my sweatshirt, pulled my pants back on and then poured myself as quickly as possible into one of the dry jumpsuits. Once all of us were dressed we got back in the speedboat and took off for Fort Augustus. The trip back was unremarkable except for three things (well, as unremarkable as a night-time excursion on Loch Ness can be for a California girl… or for anyone in general, really).
First, right before we hit the canal, we got back on the bow of the boat, but this time four or five of us did it together, all piled on top of each other like a pyramid, and as we did the boat took a sharp turn, and I whooped and cheered as one side of my body listed all the way to one side and the boat seemed to skid along the waves, rattling my teeth. It was like having turbulence but without the plane and it felt fantastic, like I could just keep going on this adrenaline rush forever.
Second, I have decided that someday I am going to buy a boat. And I am going to live on it. Those of you who know me know that I love the idea of impermanence, that the idea of house and home and fences and “settling down” fills me with absolute boredom and horror. The thought of being able to live in a home that is mobile, that comes with you, is so poignant that I wonder that I never gave it serious consideration before. I get this wanderlust from my appa, who has spoken for years of wanting to get a trailer and just travel the States, just live anywhere and everywhere. My sister doesn’t want this, nor does my brother; my umma would faint if I told her about this wish of mine. But I want it. Gloria Anzaldua wrote that she was a turtle, that wherever she went she carried home on her back. I remember reading that quote and aching with the pain and feeling a bittersweet recognition; “home is where the han is,” said Elaine Kim, and that’s how I perceived it, how I thought of home. But I realized, on that boat ride home, that that’s not the only way to read Anzaldua and Kim (and yes, I know, wherever I go I bring academia with me), that “home” involves a transformation of burden to sanctuary. “Sometimes I think I should grow up and get a real job,” one of the crew members, either Troy or Marcus, said to Lucy and me, and we hastened to assure him that if we had this job, if we loved our jobs like he did, we, too, would never want to stop, and that if we had homes like these, we would never want to stop, either.
This also, on a sidenote, solidifies a tattoo idea that I’ve had floating around for a while now… I’ll let you know if I actually get this one done.
Finally, and more importantly, in the middle of the loch, whoever was driving cut the engine, and we just drifted for ten, fifteen minutes. It was quiet; except the chatter coming from the rear of the boat, all I could hear was the lapping of the water on the sides. The wind crept into the sleeves of my suit, and I blew on my hands in an attempt to warm them. The water was inky black in the dimness, the trees dark outlines on craggy mountains. We drifted like this for a while, the boat going in, one, two, three directions depending on which way the water was going, and I was struck, again, by the grandeur of the loch, the immensity of it, the knowledge that millions of years ago, the water we were drifting along in was frozen in the form of a glacier. Time is unforgiving, is what I thought, time unfolds and unfurls and can never be put back together, never be taken back. The magnitude of where I was struck me, and I thought of a simple, brilliant line from The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao:
“We’re clocks, Abelard. Nothing more./ Abelard shook his head. We’re more than that. We’re marvels, mi amor” (Junot Diaz 236).
Clocks and marvels, clocks and marvels. This is what I thought of as we were unmoored, without a thrumming engine guiding us home, without a direction, as we simply sat on a boat on a body of water that was, a time ago, a mass of ice. I felt strangely at peace, as though if I had been the only one on that boat, adrift in the middle of this loch that was so unfamiliar to me, a place of bewilderment and an elusive pull, that I would have simply lain down, shut my eyes, and gone to sleep, with no thought of where I would end up, and no worries about anything at all.
Clocks and marvels. Clocks and marvels.
This thought process broke when the engine started up again, as we headed back to shore and peeled ourselves out of the suits, piled up the life jackets and boarded the Royal Scot for more merriment before calling it a night, everyone bone-tired and cold. Rory, Chris, Lucy and I headed back to his caravan where, after a cup of tea, a devouring of cake and a conversation about nothing and everything (the kind of conversation that can be had between 20 and 30 somethings where at one minute everything is serious and the next everything is absurd, how I love them), I got eaten alive by midges before drifting off to sleep in the spare bed, tucked underneath layers of blankets.
The next day was uneventful; more splashing in the Loch (this time in my swimsuit), albeit in warmer, muggy weather, eating Magnum mint chocolate ice cream while drinking Earl Grey tea with a splash of milk (a strange combination of hot and cold, but so soothing and wonderful) and sitting on the stoop, conversations with Lucy about everything and anything at all, dozing in the caravan while Ochain dozed near me, forkfuls of cold pasta and tomatoes while lounging about on the banks of Loch Ness, admiring boats (and picking out which ones that I would want to buy, someday — I want a pirate ship, for reals) and Highland cows, and then the drive home, watching the fog creeping in from the sea over the fields, wanting to go wading in the mist, just to see my calves disappear underneath it, and having Peter and Therese and Lexie greet us when we arrived.
What a wonderful two days it was. Truly.
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