An Unexpected Outdoorsman

Finding myself craving walks in the country.

I have spent the day in the back of a car along winding roads, jumping out gleefully to get snatches of walking in the rain between high hedges and along windy beaches, taking the chance to sprawl out on the moors with sun and clouds moving quickly overhead, alternately warming my cheek and cooling it. A storm has blown across this tiny island, and I’m feeling Marianne Dashwood-like impulses to go out in my pajamas into the driving rain and blustering winds—winds that threaten to carry off my petite great aunt and my will-o’-the-wisp sister. Being sturdier, I rather like facing the tempest.

I’m reminded of a favorite Dutch phrase, newly learned: Wij zijn niet van suiker! (We’re not made of sugar!) If you let rain get in the way of your life on this Scottish isle, you’ll never do anything. I feel such a strong compulsion to hop over every barbed-wire fence and go striding through the dewy fields, chasing and embracing sheep. I had a staring contest with some horses on the top of a dale this morning. No ditch is so wide that I can’t reach across it for some wild blackberries (“brambles,” here). The water is buggering cold, but I can’t wait to swim as soon as the whitecaps are gone.

I’ve realized in these past few days how much weather matters to me. Every summer day in the Eastern Sierras is the same—an unobstructed sun lights the valley front to back and doesn’t cease its obligatory shining until late evening. It’s reliable. Stiflingly cheerful. I’ve always loved rain, and mist, and cold rocky beaches. Deep green wet spongy hilly sheepy moorish tumbledown places. (This last sentence, I’ll point out, is a Saul Bellow-inspired adjective chain. One favorite, “he was large heavy strong tanned sullen fatigued,” trails deliciously ungrammatical across a page of Humboldt’s Gift, an incongruous choice for the Scottish countryside, being a mob novel set in Chicago and all.) The soggy but ever-changing weather fits my nature and reminds me just how out of place I usually feel in California.

I’ve found I can’t be inside for long periods anymore (rather like Tom Hanks taking his pillow outside in Castaway or the boy in The Black Stallion not tolerating the indoors after years on their desert islands). I’ve spent a lot of my life avoiding outdoorsy things, so this is an odd feeling for me to have. I realize now I just need the right kind of outdoors, which for me is somewhere you can only get to by ferry and where you’re always within spitting distance of a good bakeshop and some warm custard.