Speyside Way- Day 5 of 6 - part 3

Continued from Speyside Way -Day 5 of 6 - part 2

Another theme of today’s walk was related to feeling uncomfortable about the B&B I stayed it. My room was very cold and I had a hard time getting in chilled (I believe I wrote about that - hike it wasn’t in the deleted part). In addition, the young woman who owns it seemed cold and unwelcoming to me. I kept mulling it over in my mind. Had I done something to put her off? She seemed warmer toward two men guests at breakfast. I began to wonder what it was like for her as a young mother and herself having been raised by parents who ran a B&B. I wonder about the fundamental insight of Freud’s Oedipal complex - for Freud it is very essential that it is about the son’s envy of the father and urge to destroy him in order to become the sole or at least the most beloved of the mother. I’ve spoken how the same dynamic can play out between siblings. But why not guests too? Suppose your parents are in the hospitality industry and they have to address guests’ needs and desires when their children also need and want their attention. Then those children grow up, enter the hospitality industry too, and must put guests ahead of their own children at times. Could there be resentment and murderous rage however unconscious? How could there not?

It interested me in thinking of the parental bedroom turned pub. If the mysteries that exclude the children are less about the parents sexual life than about their constant on-call availability to their guests, then the pub (as the center of hospitality, a sort of shrine of welcome) might have a psychological energy similar to the parental bedroom. 

I decided that my self-consciousness as a guest (am I a good enough guest? Am I welcome? Did I leave the room near?) goes back to the days of my stepfather’s scotch and my feeling radically unwelcome in the family. I was like an unwanted guest. So of course that comes up as I walk this as both a whisky trail and a psychoanalytic pilgrimage. I decided the challenge I want to give myself is to relinquish the question of whether I am welcome and instead to play with the question of how can I welcome others m, including my hosts. Because we are all of us strangers in need of welcome. 

I also decided that part of this pilgrimage would be going to pubs. Late as it is with tomorrow the last day I did eat my dinner in a pub tonight. I was aware of a loud group of young men and that I would in the past have associated their loudness with alcohol and have felt fear and anger toward them. Instead, I felt the warm welcoming pub vibes - the feeling of acceptance of this as a place where one can relax and be welcome. The group spoke a language I didn’t recognize but I heard the loudness, the laughter, the slightly slurred speech, the fun. I guessed they were workers from an Eastern European country. How wrong I was. As they left several of them greeted me. They were a group of Norwegian salmon fishing enthusiasts coming to fly fish for salmon in the Spey River. The man who stayed was warm and had a twinkle in his eye. He spoke though of the disappearing salmon. “We are ruining our world,” he said with such simplicity and sadness that it moved me. I was struck that the group of men had a childlike quality - boisterous, enthusiastic, eager - and somehow trusting. That I was touched by their boyishness as I am by that quality in children. And so that is part of what whisky (alcohol in general) does. It creates an atmosphere, a welcome, for that youthful openness  and playfulness that exists inside each of us however old we may grow). 

I think that “tasting” the energy of a pub may be more important for me than whisky tasting or distillery tours. 

I enjoy walking by sheep and cows and meeting their gaze and talking with them. Just saying I wish I could know them and hoping they can enjoy their life however short or long it may be. Here is a wee and two lambs I spike with today. I love the tenderness with watch the lamb leans his head in against the body of his mother and the content look on his face. 

I also really liked these cows who gazed right into my eyes. I wonder what it would be like to know a cow or a sheep? Dogs and cats are so different - I wonder what sheep and cows are like when you get to really know them. 

Coming down toward the river I had a glimpse of the movement - the surface rippling of the water - and felt a tug to walk along beside my flow-mate and experience that sense of deep connection. 

Tonight on the way to the pub I looked up at the sky and thought that the weather here in Scotland really is a bit of what we used to call a drama queen. 

I’m starting to nod off. Ready or not, time to go. Tomorrow we walk to Buckie (on the Firth of Moray, into which the River Spey flows), completing this last walk and the whole set of three Scottish walks. I sm both elated and sad to have it send. 

We will bus and train back to Glasgow and there be houseguests of two women I barely know who Chris and I met last spring in Venice. Given the depths of my fear of being an unwelcome and unworthy guest (and their entanglement with the issue of alcohol and it’s gifts and curses), I think this will be as important a part of the pilgrimage as anything that has gone before. 

Please join me for the last day and the walk - much of it (I hope) along the sea - to Buckie. Many thanks. 

But wait! Let’s end just for fun with this photo of a convergence of bridges - the relatively new bridge on the left and in the front section on the right. I was intrigued by the way the green bridge was built in the foundations and as an extension of the old stone bridge. So it made it seem to me to be three bridges coming together. I am falling asleep as I write! Good night. Sweet dreams. Hope to see you tomorrow on the trail.