Copyright © 2020 Maddy Hamey-Thomas World-weariness. Wanting to unstick yourself from the world. A kind of necessary pessimism, that is not desperate, tragic or sorrowful. But reassuring and practical. That means you can let go when you need to, that life is enough, this life is enough – I’m not sad, I’m grateful and grateful that there is an end.
The bone-white stones are wet from the tide and the rain, piled high, reaching our dangling feet over the wall. The crimson, fleshy tops of strawberries hurtle periodically towards the rocks, affixing their decorative green stalks to the canvas. It’s not only wet, but rusty here in Buckie, Scotland. Grime collects at the bottom of steps to the coastline. A fish factory sits monumental next to a crumbling lighthouse. Gulls are the town’s primary inhabitants. My mum and I have just arrived and we eat our picnic ponderously, looking out at the soft, powder-grey oceanscape.
She’s not listening to me as I think through the melancholy of German untranslatable words, or of the positive aspects of negative thinking. She apologises but she is watching the starlings collect on the telegraph poles, starkly black against the sky like someone’s sketch in biro. I can’t see their faces or recognise their habits.
This is a town where German spies were discovered during the Second World War. Why did they come here? How long could they possibly last, strangers in a circle of familiars, before their capture? It’s so quiet here you could surely recognise the accent from a sneeze. Squat, painted houses watch the waves behind tidy, bright flower-boxes. We begin here, my mother pointing out the antique clothing-line poles the community perhaps use on the odd dry day, as we walk down towards the Cairngorms on a five-day trek.
Every five steps, we stop for mum to marvel at tiny, monochromatic British birds which prompts me again to interrogate my own disinterest. Is this an acquired taste? What’s wrong with our native birds? (I’m pretty sure they had no hand in the Brexit result.) She can identify species from their calls and the shape of their wings held aloft. She delights in the corroboration of knowledge with encounter.
I’m far more taken with the hefty lumps of blubber that float in crescent boat shapes just past the sand. These Scottish seals with marbled faces and clownish expressions look towards us and are curious about the two walking anoraks, pelted by rain.
Gradually, I begin to develop mental habits, systematic like car-journey games. I think of all the characters who might inhabit a forest such as this, so submerged in shadow it seems underwater. Tumnus the Faun… A mermaid on vacation seeking pine-scented seclusion. We pass an elderly gentleman with an overgrown beard I, very unfairly, label ‘the Unabomber.’ I feel terrible, I think.
I bring these childish thoughts along with me for the hike: I have always been the daughter to her mother after all. But this route is new to us. It will take in the ocean, farmland, forested inclines, the trailing Spey and other-worldly, dense plantations whose patterned regularity becomes hypnotic as a barely understood art installation. Mum’s knees swell and my hips hurt for our exertions. Two feminists discuss out loud if women were made for walking.
The sky will shine blue against vibrant foxgloves but my mother’s experience will differ radically from mine, which takes on a hue of unrealness. There aren’t frequent walkers on this route. I suspect we’ve taken the road less travelled although Germans are the clear loyalists to the Speyside Way, and whisky drinkers book up the many distilleries for miles.
Walking this route is far from wild, but it can be remote. It has the subtle, but no less transfixing qualities of nature at its point of concession to the human. Lichen spreads over a grid of acquiescent pines, livestock trip over old earth and stone, and streams push on through terrain vibrating to the sound of metallic gates clanging shut. Peer from under mature tree branches at the manicured gardens of millionaires who ‘love it here, so long as you don’t mention politics.’
Enterprise and activity surround us. We walk for long hours, sometimes 13 miles a day, but with short attention spans.