West Highland Way - Day 6 of 7

April 12, Tuesday. Kingshouse to Kinlochleven. 

Today was my shortest walk so far, only 9 miles. I woke up feeling lousy - a hangover from my one shot of whisky? Or cumulative tiredness from the walking (given that due to my injury I did no training for two months before)? Or fighting an incipient infection (I do feel swollen lymph nodes under my jaw)? Or all of the above? 

In any case my ability to be fully present and feel the beauty around me was a bit diminished. A pity because I think todays beauty is the kind that most touches my soul. In fact as I walked I recalled my pull in my 20s to return to San Diego - and most of all to the mountains around San Diego. I used to sing a song to myself “You’ve got to listen to the music of the mountains, they’re calling and you know they’re calling you, calling River, River, River, how we miss you. We have your heart but we miss the rest of you. It occurred to me as I walked that maybe part of my passion for mountains is an ancestral longing and nostalgia for these Scottish highlands. (Is there such a thing as ancestral longing? My intellect says of course not but as usual my heart says if you feel it then it is real). 

I can only imagine what it would be like to be severed from a landscape that one’s self and one’s ancestors had grown up on, worked on, cared for, and loved  “from time immemorial” (as Quakers say when honoring indigenous peoples’ connection with the land we now call America, which white settlers appropriated). I wonder if there is a kind of traumatic grief at the heart of America, that somehow underlies our culture of violence and cruelty. 

My favorite photo from today helps me to feel the music of the mountains along with the robust, boisterous energy of many of the highland streams and rivers. 

It also for me catches the sense of a constantly changing sky and weather - the sun coming in and out from behind clouds. Yes the sky and weather here feel as dynamic as the streams and rivers. This photo was taken while climbing the Devil’s Staircase, which did not turn out to be a very challenging climb.  I was now imagining this to be the staircase of the descent from heaven - the fall into hell that I have associated with alcohol - and so also a staircase up out of hell and ascent up into heaven that might, I speculated, be the other side of alcohol. (The way for instance it facilitates celebration, hospitality, congeniality, connection, humor, storytelling, relaxation, joy. In Catholic ritual wine is the blood of the savior, the unifying communion between people and God.) 

So maybe I expected some drama climbing my metaphor, some epiphany at the top? All that there was at the top was a small cairn and the mountains I kept turning back toward and gazing at during the ascent. 

And one more thing, a sudden dramatic weather change. Just as I crested the devil’s staircase the sun went behind clouds, the wind whipped up, the temperature seemed to drop, and freezing ice pellets pummeled my hat and face. At first I thought it was hail because it sounded so loud. So, River, welcome to heaven. It’s not quite what I expected, like so many things in life. I was actually laughing out loud as I walked through the swirl if wind and ice. (Okay, it isn’t he’ll fire, but it isn’t my idea of eternal bliss either.) 

But the real disappointment was when I came back down on the other side, arriving at my destination early (11am) because of the shorter walk. The hostel not only did not open up rooms until 3pm, but it did not allow one indoors to wait. I had four hours to spend without shelter in Kinlochleven. I still had a packed lunch but would have happily gone to a cafe and ordered tea but nothing was open. I walked around the food coop for an hour and spent long periods in the public toilet. The nearby pub had a sign that said no backpacks. I was feeling slightly sick and emotionally not so great and it didn’t occur to me there were more pubs across the river (which was not a river as it turned out but another long loch, this one called loch leven). I really think whisky May have strange effects in me. I looked it up and read the congeners in whisky cause bad hangovers in most people and are very hard on people who are sensitive to them. I’ve noticed that I have had more difficulty with emotional self- regulation each time I have drunk a shit of whisky (a tiny amount). I had a major meltdown last thanksgiving when my brother offered me a taste of a lovely whisky he had brought back from his trip to Scotland. I noticed at the time how the meltdown seemed to revisit feelings from my adolescent period of feeling so isolated and ridiculed in my adolescent family. This time I had a similar experience. I forgot the key to my hostel room and knocked from our in the cold rain forcing my roommate (who was on the top bunk rubbing cream into sore feet) to dry her feet,, put on socks, climb down and let me in. Then I went back out to check my things in the dry room and repeated the episode. Embarrassing though it was, my Shane was disproportionate and off the charts and gave me a glimpse of the clumsy adolescent I was and the shame of my inability to fit into my stepfamily. I do think there is a quality of descending the devil’s staircase in traumatic memory. 

Speaking of which, I have been struck by the theme of falling in this walk. I mentioned how Padraig O Tuama emphasizes Jesus’s repeated falling in the stations of the cross. His prayers reflect on how human it is to fall and imply that Jesus knows and understands how it feels to fall. This of course resonates with the devil’s fall from heaven and Eve and Adam’s fall from paradise. Even though my imaginary Jesus and I talk about God not being infallible, that I only need take a look at this beautiful mess of a species He created to know that, I hadn’t noticed that fallible included the word fall. Nor had I noticed that the same word is part of the word “waterfall.” All those boisterous crashing plunging falling water ways around these very wet highlands - are they part of what this whisky pilgrimage is about? I think it is trying to help me get on a deeper level than I have yet gotten it, that the horrors and beauties - whether if whisky or of the world - are inseparable. Alright enough rumination. Time for a little more if the beauty. Here’s a water way seen from a bridge during today’s hike down to Kinlochleven. 

And here are mountains glimpsed between trees. 

And the time waiting in the rain and seeking shelter was not all bad - the rain stopped intermittently and the sun snuck out just long enough so I really really missed it when it was gone. And I found a local walk along what I first took to be a river and later realized was loch leven. It was a beautiful walk and I loved the reflections of mountains in water. 

Oh I forgot to tell you - about devil’s staircase. It was built as a military road by English armies tasked with dominating the unruly rebellious Scots. It may not have been a very difficult hike for me but for soldiers hauling canons it may have seemed devilish and that is one speculation as to where the name came from. But more recently in the early twentieth century when the big dam here was being built, exhausted workers would hike over that hill to the one place where they could buy whisky - and a group of them died presumably trying to hike back up drunk. So my metaphor actually has a bit of historical basis. 

Okay. Enough for now except maybe to show you a couple more lively view of the Munro mountains from the devils staircase. 

You can see how the sun comes in and out and how dark it can be when it’s gone. 

Okay. It’s the middle of the night here. I was too exhausted to blog and fell asleep at 7 but woke up feeling much better. And I’m glad to have written this and shared with you. Even if I did go on and on about trauma. That’s the nature of trauma isn’t it that it goes on and on? Who doesn’t experience that - fallibility, it’s an intrinsic part of the beauty of this world. And this blogger! You see you are a crucial part of this healing journey because I’m wrestling with a traumatic loss of family and belonging, of feeling juman and gut to belong. When I write this blog and you read so that we are walking the devil’s staircase together - and I remind myself in your presence that falling (including falling out of belonging and feeling “good enough” to belong) is part of being human. Part of our shared experience. 

Because the reason i fear human interaction is because I find these traumatic feelings of exile and exclusion triggered and I find them unbearable. Easier to walk alone through a beautiful landscape and belong. Only among humans ti I feel the painful sense of not being good enough to contribute and belong. The mountains, the sky, the trees, the waterfalls - I never imagine them judging me. And somehow through the blog I can imagine that you weary of some passages or yawn or skip them, but not that you find me untouchable and unworthy to be human. (Which is how I felt in that stepfamily, as these whisky induced emotional flashbacks have allowed me to understand and actually feel compassion for my younger self). Anyway on and on again - River doing one of her clown prat falls or maybe a beautiful waterfall?

See you tomorrow for the last day of this walk. Then a day of rest and on to the Great Glen Way.