Fort William
Where does everything start? In the morning as I packed sandwiches to eat later in the day? On the bus ride in the morning? - as the quiet blue of a Scottish overcast guides us up north to the mountainous highlands? The last whispers of a green summer devoured by the orange of fall?
Of the glassy-still lochs as we stand on their shores, adoring the lack of the bustling city? Of the hotel, on the side of a cobblestone-clad hill, as it looks over the small city of Fort Williams? Or the green expanse of Glencoe as it wraps us in a bucolic island far away from our problems. No assignments, no essays, no worries, no need to experience anything but the moment.
And on these islands of a moment, where to address the focus?
All in all, it’s hard to write about a time that was really described by it’s lack of everything. I can’t write about the ecstaticism because I didn’t have any. A general sense of excitement, mostly recreated because there was a ‘should’ in the back of my mind that said: “Ross, you should be excited for this weekend trip with a bunch of people you enjoy being around.” But that isn’t all of it either.
It’s in the moment of pauses, in the breaths before the steps, that I really enjoyed the most. Taking a break to eat lunch beside one of those glass-like lochs was serene. We threw a stick for a few dogs that ran to us, surely smelling the food we packed earlier in the day. There was something delightfully malevolent about interrupting the mirror finish of the loch as we skipped stones atop the water. Ripples in concentric patterns were, in their own way, serene. A perfect knowingness of excitement and calmness, a knowing pattern of where and when that contained in itself a certain excitement.
That was a moment of envy, to say the least. To know when and where to do something. To know exactly when those moments of impulse should happen. Just as the students in the classroom of my previous post knew when to spring into life, these ripples knew when to be excited. It still feels like in those moments of impulse and action, there’s a language I have yet to understand.
Sometimes the ripples would interfere with each other, causing these beautiful patches of checkerboard ripples, the ‘wave interference’ intrigued me and Gorge, the Physics-studying Spaniard of the group. It was almost as if the combining waves were weaving together a certain ‘over-under’ pattern that gave this wool like fabric to the water.
As an extension of the trip, we also took the train to Glenfinnan. One of Glenfinnan’s most exciting excursions is the ‘Harry Potter’ train; where the last functioning steam train (I believe in all of the UK) still rides over a viaduct that was built around the turn of the century.
We climbed up a hill, one that was absolutely shlocked with mud. By the end my socks were brown, with each step I took had that trademarked ‘squish’ of absolutely inundated shoes. But we got amazing pictures, an amazing video. I won’t share that here unfortunately, because I didn’t want to share too much of my co-adventurers’ faces. Chances are they wouldn’t care, but I’d rather be safe than sorry.
If you want to get an idea what this looked like, here’s a picture.
But also, you could just watch the scene from Harry Potter where the two almost get smashed by the train in their flying car, because the shot in the film lined up pretty perfectly actually.
I mean - look at those colors! Such a beautiful myriad, the juicy orange of fall broken up by the verdant and dark greens of grass and tree. It was gorgeous. That cluster of people in the right side of the frame is the ‘usual’ spot to take the picture. We decided, for some reason, to go the extra mile.
After a night in a hotel, after exploring Glencoe, Fort Williams, and Glenfinnan, the bus ride back got us back into Dundee around 1 AM on Monday - approximately 10 hours before my first class for the week.
In the perfect black of midnight, in the perfect reflection of the bus’s window, I stare and sonder. It got me thinking about alternate realities, about the life that reflection had and how it would be exactly, or not, my own. The reflection was so perfect that there were several times when cars from the other side of the street drove by, it legitimately scared me because (for some silly reason) I thought they were about to crash into my side of the bus. I guess the imagined threat is truly the same as the physical one, especially in our cacophonous, modern, world.
My real desire, though, was to reach through that crystalline border, my hand wrapped in a void-black inkiness, and feel if everything was the same. Pick up my backpack, maybe flick myself to see if ‘I’ would feel it.
Sometimes, as we drove through little towns and bigger cities, constellations of human-sourced light interrupted that perfect blackness, that perfect reflection. Every star in those constellations comprises some number of infinite human reality. Whether that be the story of a sleeping child tucked in their bed, their nightlight that star, or maybe of a lit dining room where friends play card games all night long.
And from this journey of rubberbanding between senses of grand vision and still moments of macro-lensed focus, I return.
