Peter Handke - My Year in No Man's Bay

Not for the first time the singer noted that people who did not get along well with the place they came from did not really long to be off in distant cities; they longed instead for something they had known early in their lives, only a few hills and rivers away, which with the years had become legendary.

And he felt the urge to get to that Kyle of Lochalsh, if possible entirely on foot, even if it would take him until spring, until fall; he wanted to set out at once, told the two of them that, bowed to the child, kissed the woman’s hand, received from her a rain hat to put on over his cap, laid a banknote on the doorstep, and that same afternoon was standing somewhere in the interior, between the two oceans, on a southeastern slope sheltered from the wind, facing the banana palm that he had been sure grew even here in the north of Scotland, hidden in the tangle of wild rhododendron.

The singer continued his westward journey into the spring and summer.

He went astray at least once a day, in spite of maps and compass, often willingly, and when he no longer knew where he was he became all the more sharp of eye and ear.

For an hour he would move along as if on wings, the next hour would draw him, head down, toward the mud, impossible to get past on the high moors, and not only in winter. Sometimes in the evening his head would be bursting from the roar of the brooks all around, and the next morning the racket would draw him anew. Again and again he almost fell, or he slipped and tipped over, and each time the twitching that went through his body was followed by redoubled alertness and mental acuity. He recognized that the apparent obstacles in his path were nothing of the kind, at least nothing significant.

He took an ownerless boat lying by a lake in the moor, seemingly since prehistoric times, with as little hesitation as he headed over a pass that appeared on no map. In the morning, with his sleeping bag rolled up, he struck out from the tumbledown hut, stinking of sheep droppings, set in a wasteland of heather, wiped his behind in the morning with a fan-sized bog leaf, damp from the rain, sat in the brief midday sun with his bread and apple on the throne formed by a stray boulder, stumbled in late afternoon into a hailstorm with stones so hard they pounded down his outstretched fingers, and in the evening lurched like a vagabond, impossible, with that hat over his cap, to identify as a man or a woman, along an illuminated avenue leading through a park toward a highland castle-hotel, called, for instance, Ceddar Castle, where, without his having a reservation, the double doors swung open for him at a distance, showing the torchlit, fireplace-warmed great hall, and then, combed, parted, in necktie and custom-tailored suit, he took his evening meal with the family of the Japanese crown prince on his left, the stars of the Glasgow Rangers on his right, at the head table the great-great-grandson of Sir Walter Scott and the heirs of Robert Louis Stevenson, but he belonged there a bit more than all of them, and the next day continued his game of — what? — of getting lost. And at the same time he never felt alone. “I am with my song.”

And just as he presented a different image from hour to hour, the seasons kept jumping around, winter appearing in the middle of summer, spring leading back into fall. In the last night of January a cuckoo called, then none again until sometime in June. In May on the heath out of a clear blue sky a great many leaves fell, but from where? And in a cold dusk a snake crept toward him on a patch of snow.

Altogether, just as in dreams, at one moment almost nothing was impossible, and then again everything seemed to be over and done with. The torrents, which, seen from a distance, gushed from the crests of the mountains, a host of them, in white, long waterfalls, reminded him today of a medieval, no, of a prehistoric time, which, however, still lay ahead for humanity, and on the following morning the entrails from the nocturnal slaughter of a small animal by a bird of prey at the foot of a lonely church tower were enough, and the only things that seemed valid were the bestial and barbarous, even if only until he caught sight of almost the only reliable thing, the red-and-yellow van marked “Royal Mail.”

Ireceived my most recent picture of my friend after the beginning of summer, when he had finally put the watershed between Scotland’s two oceans and then also Kyle of Lochalsh behind him and, having taken the ferry over to the Inner Hebrides, within calling distance, at least for his voice of thunder, was now crossing the island of Skye, mainly on foot.

This picture again had to do with the Royal Mail, on a day after a day of heavy rain, since his walking until then had been almost entirely a slipping and sliding, initially down in a fjord amid the knee-high shore seaweed, now high above along a treeless alpine slope on a crisscross pattern of sheep terraces, churned into deep mire; he had willingly strayed up there, believing from afar that it was a multitude of mountain paths, all coming together in a single broad path leading up to the peak of Ben So-and-so.

But the network of paths beaten into the mountainside by the sheep hoofs turned out to be even more impassable than that peculiarly Scottish tracklessness, which, with the rounded, disappearing mountain shapes, at first seems as if it can be crossed effortlessly and then turns out to be a highland moor, its steep slopes, where the ground should be firm, as deceptive as the flat areas; the sheep slopes, too, were moor, and before each step he had to test the ground ahead. And furthermore, the animals whose terrain it had been, had, because of their jumpiness, unlike cows, dug or stamped out an extremely uneven, nervous zigzag. Time and again, at the places where the sheep had leaped, the apparent tissue of paths tore, and the singer had to become a moor mountain climber, which, by the bye, gave him a certain satisfaction.

When he reached the top, bareheaded, his cap and hat long since tucked away, suddenly the path led, instead of toward the peak, over flat surfaces, as if into infinity, and on firm, dry, even ground, high above the tree line, with a few pines huddled together.

From them, too, came the unanimous roar that he had previously, when he stuck his head over the crest, taken for a personal greeting from the spirit of the mountains. Winds from different directions met there. One minute it turned cold and dark, the next summery warm. The tooting of the second ferry, the one from the island town of Uig to the Outer Hebrides, was the only sound that wafted up from the foggy depths and seemed at the same time to come from the clouds above. The dots of foam in the grass, which was delicate as only grass under alpine firs can be, puzzled the singer: had they dropped from the mouth of a rabid fox?

Now the clouds took on two different shapes: some, formless, drizzly, drifted in from the west and were rain clouds, and the others, from the east, formed windrows, brighter, with space in between, and carried snow. And at the moment when the two types of clouds encountered each other, they merged into a great uniform glowing haze. And now the western clouds also carried snow, and from both sides a curtain drew slowly and steadily across the entire sky, reaching down to the earth.

The hidden highland birds cackled, barked, neighed. The snowing created a sphere in which colors emerged, the brown of the pines, the green of the heather, the black of the rubber boots. The flakes, clumped together but still with individual crystalline parts, melted on the mountain climber’s nail bed, hot with exhaustion.

And now in the tracklessness way up there, the red-and-yellow vehicle with the postal horn comes rolling out of the curtain of snow, this time a jeep. On every weekday during his journey he had been able to rely on it; out of affection he had even counted the patches on the mailbags; and one time, when the storm over Kyle of Lochalsh had ripped a card addressed to me out of his hand as he made his way to the mailbox, and he thought it would never be seen again, the card actually reached me, though with a few puddle stains.