Digestives by Midnight: Leaving Harris

This post finds me in sad spirits. Though as I speak our ferry is pulling up to Skye, and we embark on the first leg of a whole new adventure, it’s an adventure that will ultimately be the opposite of the one we return from. Three months ago we left behind everything we knew and the passive disdain for it of which we were so well acquainted, and went on a brand new adventure to a brand new place to meet brand new people. Now, though we embark upon distractions en route, we are returning to what we already know of. This time, there’s no aura of mystery.

So anyway, I thought it was about time I got myself a personal travel blog, rather than just guest-editing on Jen's from time to time, because we do have different interests and different ways of looking at things, and expression requires room to breathe. Hence we are here, myself poised to write of the Outer Hebrides, y'all hopefully poised to read of them.

Tarbert from on high, looking towards South Harris and Skye.

The problem with goodbyes, for me at least, is that often the true impact of the departure does not hit until you've already gone, and so it’s only now that Harris is a lumpy sprawl on the horizon that I appreciate how much I enjoyed my time there. For someone who arrived sick of city life, it was a highly refreshing breath of fresh air. No longer are houses stacked up against each other like the unholy brickwork of a patchwork city; construction makes the most of the space, with towns of any size being a remarkable rarity. I am reminded somewhat of Edmonton’s natural urban sprawl, unconstrained by such things as green belts that confine and contribute to the claustrophobic nature of many English cities, but to a lesser extent. Ironically, both Alberta and Harris, for all their quite notable size differences, share the same trait of having more than enough land in comparison to the total population.

The Hebrides, and to an extent the Highlands as well, are very sparsely populated. The most notable result of this is that in a place where a (comparatively) large amount of people gather, everybody knows everybody, and a lot of the people are related as well. For good or ill this means that there’s little that goes on without everybody finding out about it, thus breeding a very small-town feel that is, well, it’s pretty understandable really given that Tarbert is indeed a small town.

Quickly moving on from that rather tragically formed sentence, I’d have to say that I much preferred this particular small-town feel to the one I got living and working in Sandiacre for many years. Maybe it’s because I was the perennial outsider, or maybe I just liked the people more. Who can tell. That’s not to say that island fever doesn’t set in from time to time, because it does and it’s driven us all mad. Island fever is what I came to call the strange, listless pressure that comes from having very little personal distance, both from the workplace (which was one of the few nearby places to hang out in our off time) and from other people, and puts everyone a bit on edge and is a terribly effective means of deftly conjuring drama from the air and throwing it about inconsequentially.

Another fuel source for this listlessness is that, as implied above, there’s not a lot to do in one’s off-time in Harris. There’s plenty of scenery to gorge oneself on, but since neither Jen nor I are currently drivers we were slaves to the rather lackadaisical island bus service, which is faulted only in its doing as every other bus service in the world does, and running only as needed. On Harris, buses aren't need that much, except for school runs, and so they run infrequently and not very late. It makes sense but it still kinda sucks. Without that we’re limited to what’s available in Tarbert, which is for the most part either a) drink at the Mote or b) drink at the Inn. Even Stornoway, the closest thing to a city that you’ll find on the islands, has very little going on when the latest you can stick around is 5:30pm.

This is probably unfair. Jen and I arrived quite late into the tourist season and only really had a solid month of summer in Tarbert. During that time there was quite a bit going on, such as bi-weekly craft fairs, frequent live music and various summer festival events. Sunday was the only exception; the people of the islands are very strict in their observance of the Sabbath, especially on Scalpay, where washing your car or leaving your laundry on the line would be met with the modern social equivalent of fire and brimstone. I'm not sure exactly who these ‘people’ are, as for the most part I only met a bunch of old dudes who escaped Scalpay every morning for a few whiskeys at the bar, or the younger generation who didn't seem to give much of a damn anyway, but well, I guess the folks who are real serious about it aren't the type to pop down the Mote and wag their fingers at everyone present.

After August, and the passing of the season, every day came to seem a lot like Sundays, as Harris folded up and went into hibernation and we all started going crazy with lost listlessness. Ironically I even had trouble focusing on one of the things I could spend my time on, my coursework, as a result of this, although alternatively that could just be me being a lazy fuck. But, well, wasn't the point of escaping to the Hebrides to avoid doing all that rushing around? Whilst occasionally frustrating, it was always pleasant to be free of responsibilities beyond ‘go to work’. The management put us up for free in their staff housing, which was pleasingly vintage, and even supplied us with free bags of money for the remarkably steampunk coin-operated electric meter in the closet. We also got free food of various qualities that ran all the way from deep-fried beef burger to home-cooked curry depending on a variety of factors from how exhausted the chefs were and how many mouths they had to feed. I mean no disrespect for those guys, who battled their way through some of the most demoralizingly overbearing working conditions I've ever seen in pursuit of that much-vaunted 4 star standard, after having done that for fourteen straight hours it’s tough to feel inventive.

So yes we lived free of the consequence and endless monthly cycle of bills and pain that modern life brings, and that was pretty neat, but after a while I came to miss civilisation, if only for the many distractions it offers. We didn't even get reliable internet at home, which made internet procrastination so much effort that it was often easier to get on with what we were supposed to be doing instead. Surely something’s up there.

Oh yes geography. So here’s the interesting thing about Harris, and Lewis. These two islands are actually one island, separated by mountains rather than water. Their geography differs, though; Harris is treacherously mountainous, whereas in Lewis crags give way to rolling hills. Presumably that’s why Lewis is the more settled, and contains the vast bulk of the population; better land for farming. It’s not without its dramatic wildernesses, though, as we discovered when we took a ride with Vanessa and Murdo to a secret beach, where massive pounding waves and a boisterous, take-no-shit sea wind were hard at work making the Hebrides that little bit smaller. Staring out over the Atlantic storm with desolation all around, it’s hard to escape the feeling that these islands really are the end of the world.

You should go.