Paul Theroux - The Kingdom by the Sea - A Journey Around the Coast of Great Britain

He hugged his heavy coat around himself and frowned. When he did this, he looked shaggy and bearish. He was thinking.

"But there's nae debt for the Third World War. There'll be naebody left. Naebody can pay naebody! I blame" — he was erupting again—"I blame the poultices in the House of Commons! They'll start the next war and then there'll be naebody!"

We came to Oban. The railway station was white with a blue trim and had a clock tower showing the right time. There were seals in the harbor. On a hill above town was a full-sized replica of the Roman Colosseum, started in 1897 by a banker who thought something so ambitious would solve the unemployment problem. It was never finished; it was lovely and skeletal, symmetrical, purposeless. McCaig's Folly, they called it.

Even in Oban Mr. Davidson stayed by my side as he had in the empty railway car. He said the folly had a window for every day of the year.

"I'm a bachelor," he then explained. "I never married."

"No woman at all in eighty-seven years?"

"Nothing. And no drinking."

"Never had a drink?"

"Maybe a toddy or two," he said. "And I never smoked."

"A blameless life," I said.

"I've been sick, though," he said. "But nothing as far as sexual, drinking, or smoking."

Oban was made of stone. It was Scottish and solid, no honky-tonk, no spivs. It was a town of cold bright rooms, with rosy-cheeked people in sweaters sitting inside and rubbing their hands; it had fresh air and freezing water. If you were cold, you went for a walk and swung your arms to get the circulation up — no hearth fires until October. In Oban it struck me that most Scottish buildings looked as durable as banks. Here the dull clean town was on a coast of wild water and islands.

Some of these Scottish coastal towns looked as if they had been thrown out of the ground. They were fine polished versions of the same rocks they were on, but cut square and higher — not brought and built there by bricklayers, but carved out of these granite cliffs.

I saw Mr. Davidson my second day in Oban. He looked dead on a George Street bench, facing the harbor. His big hands were folded across his stomach, his mouth hung open. He had no suitcase — nothing but a rail ticket. Where had he slept? But I resisted asking questions, because I feared his answers.

He opened his yellow eyes on me.

I said, "I'm thinking of going to Fort William."

"There's a train in an hour," he said. "Where's your knapsack, Jimmy?"

He called everyone Jimmy.

I said, "At the bus shelter. I'm taking a bus up the coast."

He said, "I wasn't planning to do that."

"I'm sticking to the coast."

"Aye, Jimmy, stick to the coast." And he closed his eyes.

But there was a wild-eyed man on the bus. His name was White-law, he chewed a pipestem, he watched the window and shouted.

There were cages in the sea.

He cried, "Fish farm!"

There was dark and frothy water under the Connel Bridge.

He cried, "Falls of Lora!"

I saw boggy fields.

He cried, "That's where they cut peat!"

He was animated by the landscape. I wondered whether it was a Scottish trait. I had never seen an English person behave like this.

He cried, "The tide's out!"

It was. Eventually he got off the bus, at Portnacroish, on the Sound of Shuna.

It was a complicated coastline of hills and bays, lochs and rushing burns. It could not have been anything but the Scottish coast — so much water, so much steepness, such rocks. Ballachulish was like an alpine valley that had been scoured of all its softness — the feathery trees and chalets and brown cows whirled off its slopes, and all the gentle angles scraped away, until it lay bare and rugged, a naked landscape awaiting turf and forest.

Most of this western coastline in Scotland looked elemental in that way — as if it had been whipped clean and was waiting completion. It was hard and plain, most of it. It was very cold. I imagined sheep dying on it. Fort William was powerfully craggy. I began to think that this was the most spectacular coastline I had seen so far in Britain — huger than Cornwall, darker than Wales, wilder than Antrim. I stared at it and decided that it was ferocious rather than pretty, with a size and a texture that was surprisingly unfinished. It changed with the light, as coastal cliffs always did; it was always massive, but in a certain pale light it seemed murderous.

***

I was anonymous in Fort William. The other visitors had knapsacks, too, and oily shoes and binoculars. With Ben Nevis above it, and all the campsites of the Highlands just behind it, Fort William was full of hikers and fresh-air fiends all frantically interrogating each other about footpaths. The town was crowded and unpleasant-looking, heaving with campers, so after lunch I wiped my mouth and walked north and west along the railway line to the coast. Once again I thought: Some travel is a fantasy of running away.

Three miles away I came to the lower end of the Caledonian Canal. I wanted to see a boat passing through, but there was nothing on it except ducks. It was a sunny day and I was glad to be alone in the empty glen.

Then a wheezing voice said, "Hae ye got a match?" and I almost jumped out of my skin.

It was Jock MacDougal, with red eyes and a filthy face, trembling next to a tree. He had a scabby wound on his forehead, and his clothes were rags.

"I just want a match," he said. "I'm nae being cheeky."

He was trying to reassure me: he knew he was filthy and dangerous-looking. I gave him my matches and he slowly lit an inch-long cigarette butt that was flat, as if it had been stepped on. What an odd person to meet in a green glen.

He said, "I was never had up for assault or bodily harm or a breach of the peace in me whole life."

I stared at him. I did not know what to say.

"Only for being drunk and incapable," he said.

He had a little camp nearby — a nest of rags, some bottles, a smoky fire, and two comrades. There was a frightened woman named Alice and a man named Crawfurd, who was even filthier than MacDougal. Crawfurd called himself Tex. He was from Aberdeen.

"But I'm a Glasgow man," Jock said. "A Glasgow man will stick by you."

Alice looked wildly at him, but said nothing. She looked injured and was very silent.

Jock sang a song,

"Coom doon the stairs.

Tie up your bonny hairs!"

This seemed to frighten Alice even more.

He sang a song about a place called Fyvie. He there's a statue of a cow!"

"What's your trade?" Crawfurd said. He had a end of his nose and smelled of dead leaves.

I told them I was in publishing.

"Ha!" Jock said. "I'm a tramp! I'm a man of the road!"

Crawfurd said, "Do much traveling?"

"A certain amount," I said.

Crawfurd said, "I've been everywhere in the world."

"New Jersey? Argentina? Fiji?" I asked.

"Everywhere," he said.

I asked him to describe for me some of the more colorful spots he had seen.

"That would be too hard. There were so many."

Five feet away, Jock was crouching with his arm around Alice. Then he thrust his hand under her green sweater and she squawked.

"I have three passports," Crawfurd said. "A woman in Perth once said to me, 'I'd like to have twenty-four hours with you.'"

This amazed me. He stank, his teeth were black, he had blades of grass in his beard.

"She said, 'Know what you should do? You should write a travel book.'"

"Why don't you?" I asked. Now I was sorry I had told him I was in publishing. But what would he write, under this tree?

"There's too many bloody travel books," he said, and faced me, as if challenging me to deny it.

I did not deny it.

"Why are you here in Scotland?" Jock shouted to me. "People in Scotland are rubbish!"