Speyside Way - Day 4 of 6 - part 1

April 24, Monday. From ballindalloch to Craigellachie. Official estimate 13 miles. My iPhone guessed 15 and this time I did not get lost, though I may not have made my way to my B&B in the most efficient way. 

Right now it is Monday evening here and I am sitting in front of a fire in a small pub that is part of a B&B. I am the only person here and I love listening to music and watching the fire. Funny - I take in how much I love it when I write these words and imagine you reading them, and I sigh and more fully arrive. 

The beauty of the fire (a real wood fire, not gas) - it’s movement and the ever changing shapes and brightness of the flames - evokes the moving experience I had walking beside the Spey River today. It was the first time on this walk called the Speyside walk that I have actually spent time beside the River Spey. I wondered if I could walk in time with it. Sometimes it was too fast for me, other times I felt I was walking at its pace exactly. I began to feel as if I had a physical connection with the river and it’s flow. The kind of connection I might feel with a dog or a cat or a tree. It was a new experience for me. It was as if the flow of water in the river and the flow of blood in me were in synch or related or aspects of the same flow. Not an idea, a feeling. A deep calm and a feeling of not being alone in some deep and fundamental way. And when the trail would go away from the river for awhile and then return I could feel the flow in me as if snuggling up to the flow in the river like an old trusted friend. It felt like a new kind of experience for me, fresh and good. It made me think I would like to walk along rivers more , all over the world. 

What a funny day! It was cold as promised and there was sleet (or snow or hail or freezing rain). But the surprise began when I looked out my hotel window in the morning and saw blue sky. That was not promised!

Thank 

I had a lovely “full Scottish breakfast” - in this case I had porridge and yogurt and fresh fruit, scrambled egg, mushrooms, roast tomatoes, bacon (which here as in Canada is the name of what we Americans call ham), and blood pudding, and along with it, enjoyable conversation with a solo hiker heading in the opposite direction who recommended this pub to me. When I had told him Sunday night about my miserable experience on the trail that day,  he referred to the section I had walked as “wiggly.”

As I began my walk this morning I was struck by how much lovelier and shorter it seemed than when I walked it the evening before - exhausted from my time on that damned trail (sneaky, I’d call it, slithering - designed by that imaginary band of devilishly prankish whisky drinking jokers who delight in surprising and frustrating their innocent victims.) it was beautiful and the air felt so clear and clean after all the rain. Just as I was thinking that, the sun came shining through an opening in the clouds and I decided that those same jokers who designed the wiggly trail were in charge of the weather. I could imagine them sitting there saying - okay now they are expecting gray and snow, so let’s just pop out the sun for a moment and see how they respond. 

The day went on and on like that. The sun would pop out and disappear. Then hail/sleet would briefly fall. Then sun with all its warmth and sparkle, and then gone. Again and again and again. At least a dozen times, really quite a few more. It was the strangest weather I have ever experienced and I loved thinking of those drink pranksters laughing and slapping each others knees and pouring another drink. 

There was a lovely little building beside a bridge that I hadn’t even noticed yesterday (on the mile walk between the hotel and the trail). 

Once I was back on the trail I was very aware of the presence of distilleries. Most of them looked very high tech and industrial and even a little military (fences, forbidding signs, people who appeared to be guards) but one was in a relatively new building that made the whole process seem more like art. 

I’m going to include another version of this photo where you can see in the window better  - because that’s where the art is. 

If I am not going to taste whisky on this walk, I hope that I still learn from and about whisky (including from about those jokers who twisted yesterday’s trail into a Gordian knot, and did something similar with today’s weather) because whisky and psychoanalysis are what this pilgrimage is all about. I think maybe for me the psychoanalytic part is just receiving whatever comes in the trail and seeing if I can make a story of it. 

To be continued in

Speyside Way - Day 4 of 6 - part 2