The Dead Marshes

Mrs. Harris’ farmhouse, our second night on the Isle of Lewis. Graham decided to play a joke on us. He thought it was a hoot. We did our best to ignore him so as not to embarrass our hostess.

Up until recently, we didn’t eat red meat. My husband and I have our reasons. They’re personal and we’ve never been preachy about it. We now eat a little meat when when we visit our daughter in Montana. She married a Montana rancher this past summer, so you know, we eat some meat. It’s not gonna kill us.

Graham told our hostess, Mrs. Harris, that while we did not eat meat she should feel free to serve us haggis. Haggis is a very traditional Scottish dish made of offal, or those parts of an animal we somewhat vegetarians avoid, like say… a sheep’s heart, lung, liver. I believe the meats are cooked in a sheep’s stomach and I’m pretty sure haggis contains oats or oatmeal. If there are any Scots reading this, feel free to enlighten me.

While everyone else enjoyed their salmon, Mrs. Harris served us chicken stuffed with something gray/brown.

I sniffed at it. “Um, this is haggis, right?” I had to ask Graham since our party was divided into two rooms. The English had grabbed the table for four out on the enclosed veranda so we were stuck in the larger dining room with Graham.

“Oh, no,” said Graham. “That’s oatmeal. She’s stuffed your chicken with oatmeal. It’s very common here in Scotland.”

I sniffed again. “Uh, it smells like liver.”

My husband, “Tastes like liver too.”

“Oh, what?” Mrs. Harris appeared in the doorway. “Do ye no eat haggis then? I was told ye do no eat red meat but ye wished for some haggis. I have none else prepared for ye.”

I caught Graham’s smirk and shot him a filthy look. Bloody slimeball.

“No, Mrs. Harris, don’t go to any trouble. It’s fine. Thank you so much for this wonderful meal, really, it’s great.”

“Are ye sure? I do no want to put ye out.”

“We’re fine, no problem.” My husband managed to eat most of his meal while I did my typical pushing food around my plate trick. Seriously, it wasn’t her fault.

“If you come to Scotland,” said Graham, “you should try haggis.”

“You’re welcome to mine.” I offered him my plate.

“No thanks.” He got a good laugh out of my discomfort.

(Truly, haggis isn’t that bad according to my husband. I think the black pudding The MacKenzie was fond of would just about do me in. And I refused to try the white pudding as well. In this I am very American.)

The next morning we were up early, headed for another climb, when an awful storm hit. Graham decided to detour. We entered a small village and parked at the end of the lane. Our destination was a lighthouse located out on a headland linked to the mainland by a narrow rock causeway. This is the view looking over the side of the causeway.

Of course, due to Graham’s aversion to trails, instead of beginning the hike at the marked trail head seven kilometers further down the road - which he of course mentioned after we headed out in the driving rain -we wandered willy nilly in search of the lighthouse.

If you read the comments from yesterday - go back and look if you haven’t - you’ll find one from my new Scottish friend, Tom, regarding finding a dead body in a peat bog… well, now that you mention it…

So we climbed a steep hill and descended just as steeply into what I’ve dubbed The Dead Marshes. If you saw The Lord of the Rings, The Return of the King, you know exactly what I mean. Treacherous beyond belief, filled with garbage from a thousand ships. Refrigerators, rusted hulks of cars and boats. I mean, I can’t even describe how awful this place was and how dangerous. This was Graham’s explanation for our presence on this freezing day in this downpour:

“I brought you here for a reason.” Yeah right. I could tell by the look on his face that he was just as surprised to find this stuff here as we were. Besides, he’d already mentioned he’d never gone this way. He said he’d always hiked to the lighthouse via the TRAIL.

“I want to show you what happens every time you…” and he looked right at me… “throw a plastic water bottle into the sea. All the garbage in all the world is driven here to this one spot by the ocean currents. This is the result.”

So me, Miss Big Mouth says, “I don’t think refrigerators float. Or cars. Or old tractors. I think they sink.”

“How dare you imply that the people who live here dumped this trash.”

I rolled my eyes. “I’m not saying they dumped this here, I’m just saying the foam and the plastic bottles from Thailand, yeah, I get that. But tractors don’t float. I don’t believe a tractor floated all the way here from California.”

“Silence American whipper snapper! This is your garbage, I tell you! Even if it’s from China it’s your mad consumerism that causes it to be washed up on these shores.”

“Well, why doesn’t the government come and clean it up? If this was America, somebody would pitch a fit and demand that this be cleaned up. It’s hazardous.” Too late. He’d already stormed off in a fit of pique, vanishing into the driving rain, leaving the rest of us to navigate The Dead Marshes. It was just like in The Return of the King, I swear it, except we had no Gollum to rescue us if we fell in.

Oh. My. God. What a bloody slog, up hill and down dale for five miles; no footing, the ground slick as ice, all of us soaked to the very skin regardless of rain gear. At last we reached a point where I could just see the lighthouse ahead in between gusts of wind when I heard a shriek behind me. One of the English women had fallen into a peat bog. She was buried up to her waist and couldn’t move an inch. Her husband, the geologist, and I hurried back to aid her. It took three of us laying full out on the ground to pull her free.

We were a black, sticky mess from head to toe, while Graham, of course, was nowhere to be found. The minute the geologist fellow and I stood up, the side of the hill crumbled beneath us and we tumbled into a creek. Fortunately neither of us was injured. I struck my head but it was on the spongy heath, not a rock.

Yes, it was an adventure, but it could have been a disaster.

When at last we reached the lighthouse, the rain slowed. I huddled beneath an overhang where I could remain out of the wind, removing whatever clothes I could to squeeze the water out of them. As we crossed the causeway back to the mainland, the rain struck again with full force. Graham suggested we take the trail back to the road, but he added we’d have an additional seven kilometers to hike back to the car. We all shook our heads and stoically set off back the way we’d come. Nobody spoke a word for the next few hours. It was lower your head, watch where you put your feet, and get your arse back to the damn van.

I’m not sayin’ the ocean wasn’t beautiful, I’m just sayin’ the hike was friggin’ nuts. And yes, with my husband and The MacKenzie helping her, Mrs. MacKenzie kept up.

We crawled into the van like a bunch of drowned rats. Mrs. Harris wouldn’t even let us in the house when we returned until we’d removed all our clothes and dried off. My God, we must have been a terrifying sight.

That night, the four of us Americans grabbed the table on the veranda, sipped our Scotch and watched a glorious sunset over the beach. Dear Mrs. Harris provided cheese and crackers and fresh fruit. I bought a hand-knit wool cap from her, which came in very handy over the next few days. Best of all, the English got to spend the evening with Graham.

Tomorrow: The Machair of Toe Head and Ceapabhal Hill.

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