Wounded Creature, Reaching
A forced marriage, I suppose it was. Me and Scotland. Me and peatlands. Me and law.
I didn’t see any of this coming, I keep repeating in my head as I sit on this train. As this train leaves Glasgow, heads south towards the English border. As I look west and there she is (are thou a she?): stretching out, sloping. She’s got a blue sky today — she’s been blue for many days, sunny in a way that is hard to explain. Sunny in a way perhaps she shouldn’t be, I think. I wonder.
I try to trace the lines of my life that got me here. The first line: I am 19, Yellowstone National Park, I meet Mary while we both work at a preschool in Mammoth, Wyoming, We walk up Electric Peak on a classic western summer day, we plan the next year to walk the Colorado Trail together before she goes to St. Andrews the following fall for her masters. She is 21 — that seemed so old to me then.
I didn’t know anything about St. Andrews back then, either. Never even heard of it, never really cared.
Two years later, I am 21 and it is August in Michigan. I have just finished my first summer of social research, which has made me realize this is what I want to do: ethnography and qualitative research and nonfiction writing. It is an unseasonably cold summer day in late August — it was August 13th, actually. I remember (2 years before the date I turned in my masters thesis — although I wouldn’t know that then). Outside the weather was distinctly…. Scottish (although I also didn’t know it then). Stormy in a cold sort of way. Cozy inside my heart. I was sitting in the 3rd floor of an apartment on the campus of Aquinas College in Grand Rapids, Michigan. I had just moved in a few days earlier and it was a week before my ex-boyfriend and I were about to break up (I didn’t know that, either). I look up, “Social Anthropology masters programs”. I think maybe France, maybe Spain. Maybe St. Andrews, as a backup. I text Steffano, “if I move to Europe, would you want to go?”
He doesn’t respond.
And then, it is August 13th, 2023. Two years, again. I am on the beach in St. Andrews and I’ve turned in my thesis on human-earth relationship in Scotland, and I don’t know if I love or hate Scotland. I don’t know if I’ll ever live here again. I don’t know what my own relationship is with this place that I’ve lived for the last year: a place that saw “the fall” as we called it (a profound breakdown, perhaps spiritual).
Not enough trees, too far from home, too cold. Too violent, too (the storms, the men). But it is August and I sit on the beach at east sands and I picture the way the land rises and falls all the way to the West Coast. I look up to where I can see the Cairngorms and I run — almost every day that summer — along the coast and over the small hills in the Kingdom of Fife and I find that I don’t actually hate it at all.
A few weeks later in Manchester, I am having a going away party (I am moving back to the USA) and Jenny is there (she is from Glasgow), and even though I have declared I will never live in Scotland again, she speaks in her Glaswegian accent and I feel my heart squeeze and I wonder what that was about. Do I already miss Scotland like that?
I move home and I am happy with that. Until one day, in Pilates class, my mom’s clients talk about how they are going to Glasgow this summer — how they are going to St. Andrews. The first pang of reverse homesickness, I think of the way a Scottish cloud looks on a cold winter frosty morning.
Heart squeeze.
Then: the email from Glasgow. The PhD in law. The peatlands.
They all arrive on my front door, and 2.5 months after leaving, I pack up everything I own and I move back.
And now, today, I am on a train and I am looking out over this landscape and I still don’t know how I feel. Mostly I feel whiplash: a back and forth that’s hard to shake. But I also feel something else growing: a sense of place, maybe? Or at least a sense of loyalty.
I am married to it now: to the peatlands and to the cold and to the way you’d die out on the highlands if you aren’t careful — the way drunk crowds walk down Dumbarton St on Friday at 5 pm in broad daylight (this is Scotland too).
This winter, when I first arrived in Scotland, I couldn’t stop listening to this song by Lily Talmers:
Wounded Creature, Reaching.
Dawn is just a crack, you're just a wrinkle in the fabric of my thinking
I see sparkling images far out at sea, I wave to them
And I salute you my old friend; i recognize the why's of it
But because still confuses me, there is no valid reasoning
You know I know you never meant to hurt me
You know I know you never meant to hurt me
And I know you know that love is not a word, it's a bird
It's a wounded creature reaching, it's a universe
But there is no sand, there is no beach; the pavement is not listening
Your meaning is beyond my reach; we'll call it well now each to each
I wondered why I couldn’t stop listening. But the other day, I fly into Edinburgh back from my first week away since I got back here and I realize I can’t stop listening because this song is about Scotland.
So, she’s a forced marriage. An old friend. A strange sort of slow love.
There is no valid reasoning for why I am here… the meaning is beyond my reach.
Ate