16. A Last Hoorah (Aug '04)

I showed up at Justin and Laura's at 10am on Saturday morning with two huge trays of chocolate chip cookies in my hands.

They were my contribution to the Tolstachaolais Village Outing. The first motion that had been proposed and agreed upon by the recently-formed Tolstachaolais Village Association (after passionate debates on more street lighting, less street lighting, installation of a sewer system and more road signs) was "Let's party!" It was agreed that there would be two village-wide parties per year: one winter dinner and one summer picnic. This was the (optimistic) picnic.

Skeptical as I was about it, the weather was promising: sunny and not too cold, considering the rain and chill we'd had earlier in the week. Still, when Laura asked, "have you got your swimming costume?" I laughed and said, "there's no way you're getting me to go in the sea!" I was thinking back to my experience with dipping my toes in the ocean back in March and getting an ice cream headache in my knees. Gulf Stream effect or no Gulf Stream effect, that water ain't warm. In fact, I was wearing jeans (they were in shorts) and although I was in a t-shirt, I had brought a sweater, fleece, rainjacket and St. Bernard dog with whisky keg. Just in case.

The destination of the picnic was Bostadh beach on the island of Little Bernera. If you climb to the top of Beannan, the hill in the middle of Tolstachaolais, and look to the north and the west, you can see a little fingernail sliver of a beach on the other side of the wide bay that leads out to the Atlantic ocean. That's Bostadh. Unfortunately, none of us has learned the tricky technique of walking on water (and it would have been a long wait for the bay to freeze) so we had to go around the long way, via the mainland. Down and around and up again, across to the island of Bernera (via a small bridge) and then ferried over to the island of Little Bernera in a washtub with a motor. Well, I suppose it was a boat, really. But it was a flat-bottomed thing made out of heavily-bashed aluminium, with a front "cabin" which was just a few panes of grub-caked glass that I couldn't see through, even standing right next to them (I suppose that's why the thing was so heavily-bashed).

The boat ferried us over, about twenty at a time, plus all of the picnic paraphernalia, including a barbecue made out of an oil drum cut in half with heavy-duty chicken wire for the grill. The first order of business when we got everything unloaded was to set up the bar! They dug a hole in the sand for the keg and set up a palate vertically to hold the pump-thingee-that-I'm-sure-has-a-proper-name-if-you're-a-beer-fanatic (see picture). Then the kids all ran into the water (crazy kids) and the men set up the barbecue while the women laid out towels and sandwiches and drinks (apparently the hunter/gatherer division of the sexes has evolved into charcoal-poking and egg-salad-sandwich-assembling respectively in all corners of the world. There was a gender overlap, however, when it came to the tea [can't have a British meal without tea!] which was organized by the women, but set to stew on the barbecue).

The beach itself was only a tiny crescent, just big enough for 57 people who know each other (luckily that's how many were in attendance; about half the population of Tolstachaolais). It was unlike the New Jersey beach experiences of my childhood, where the city gives way to the boardwalk gives way to a strip of sand stretching for miles in either direction gives way to an ocean stretching for miles until it hits the matte painting at the far end. Bostadh beach is a little dollop of sand nestled into the typical Scottish landscape which is crinkly rocks, wildflowers and a sharp pointy grass that I want to call "sedge," though I have no idea if that's what it actually is. I called it "sedge" and it didn't respond. But then it didn't respond to "bulrush," "alfalfa," or "george," either. The rocks not only come down to the waters edge, they protrude into it, like the body and outstretched arm of a man who has crossed the desert looking for water, and falls to his knees at the oceans edge, only to find it's salt water, so he collapses and there he's remained ever since. That's the north edge. The south edge is more like a sleeping elephant, with a petite churchyard cemetery draped across its back (the soil in Scotland in notoriously thin and peat-boggy, so the bodies from the local communities were brought over to Little Bernera to be buried in the sandy soil there).

Justin and Laura arrived a little later, since they eschewed the buzzing bathtub in favor of their tandem kayak. They pulled up on the beach, and immediately upon their getting out, two of the kids jumped in and started paddling around the bay. The kayak was the hit of the picnic, never seeing dry land the whole time, since as soon as one pair got out, another was waiting to take their place.

The food was normal picnic food: burgers, hot dogs, fresh-caught wild salmon wrapped in foil and burnt to juicy perfection. The activities were normal picnic activities: sand castles, kite-flying, frisbee, bocci ball, turning bright red because you're too cool to put sunscreen on and you normally never see the sun (this was not me. This was the crofters who had heavily leathered faces and necks, and fine-porcelain torsos. I was covered up with jeans and a hat and 30+ sunblock on any protruding patch of epidermis). I spent the time gradually being warmed by the by-now-quite-powerful sun, and warming up to all of the villagers whom I finally, after seven months, began to meet. There were a few people there whom I already knew, but mostly it was folks whom I didn't recognize until they said, "I live in the house with all the psychotic geese on the lawn" or "I'm the brother of Alisdair Fraser's sister's half-cousin's uncle."

I have to admit, with the sun on my face, and wild fish in my belly, and the children (and adults!) splashing about in the beautiful torquoise water, I began to regret not having brought a "swimming costume." (Of course, I haven't been swimming in so long, I don't think I even own one). So when Laura said, "let's go for a walk and I'll show you the beach on the other side of this island. It's even more beautiful than this one, and there won't be anyone else on it" I started to get ideas. After all, these are people I barely know and will never see again, so why not risk swimming in my altogether? The idea fizzled when we got to the other beach and found that there were not one, but *two* beach gatherings gathered. One at either end of the very long beach (not New Jersey long, but at least six times the width of the picnicking beach). We walked up and back and bit, and then when we arrived at the precise center I said, "oh hell, if they look like tiny smurfs to me, I look like a tiny smurf to them" and I shucked off all my clothes and we dashed naked into the sea.

My body felt like it was being squeezed into a cold, wet stocking two sizes smaller than fits comfortably. My breath came out in "hoo, hee haaaah"s. And I paddled furiously to beat back the cold and the wet. But then the hot sun and exertional-heating-up and my skin's adjustment all kicked in, and it was delicious to be in that clear, buoyant, salty, warm, 3-dimensional space, naked as a fish. We swam about for what seemed like quite a long time, nobody paying us the slightest heed. Finally we got raisin-y and decided to get out. I eyed my clothes-pile on the beach and thought about having no towel, and recalled my joyous, no-heed-for-the-future dash into the sea, and thought "hrmm." But the ever-resourceful-Laura had brought along a sarong, so she held it up to shield me from the nobody-looking, and I used my t-shirt to towel off most of the water, and then wedged myself back into my jeans (not easy). But I was still floating from my excursion into the Atlantic, and I didn't mind a bit.

We made our way back to the other side of the island, and Justin and Laura set off in the kayak while I packed up some stuff to take home. They decided to go back around the island the long way, and then Justin was going to drop Laura at the car and come pick me up in the kayak, since we didn't know when everyone else was planning on departing. Well, a medium-long time after they left, the midges arrived, deciding that they wanted to picnic, too, and that got the whole group up and the belongings stowed in record time. The washtub was about to leave on its first ferrying-across trip, and I couldn't decide whether to hop on and escape the midge barrage -- and risk meeting Justin halfway across the bay on his way to pick me up -- or stay on the beach and get covered with itchy red bumps. I hopped into the tub.

We met Justin halfway across the bay on his way to pick me up.

It turned out okay, though. He pulled up alongside the tub, and I made a daring leap into the kayak. Okay, I gingerly put one leg in, and then half-slumped into the kayak with my other leg sticking straight up into the air, and then had to do a reverse-Houdini to get the straight-up leg to go into the small space. But I got sorted, and we paddled back (almost beating the washtub to the jetty).

We loaded the kayak onto the trailer and headed home, the sun making a golden syrup glow on the hillsides. It didn't start raining until after dark, and then rained hard and cold and non-stop for three days. I don't know to which deity the Tolstachaolais Village Association sacrificed the sheep, but it can't be coincidence that the one day of the year in which the ocean was swimmable (to my gentle constitution) was the Saturday of the Tolstachaolais Village Outing. Actually, I don't really want to know how they did it. I'm just grateful that I got to be there.

Love,
Andrea

Andrea Blumberg

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