Crossing The Border
A quiet descends with the snowflakes
Snow stills, doesn’t it.
A muffled quiet descends with the snowflakes and blankets all and everything. Hush. Quiet. Slow down. All that remains is the sound of the individual flakes hitting the windscreen and, now and then, the laboured crumple of a car’s tyres carefully making its way along the disappeared road.
The mountains on the south-west horizon are dusted with snow, the peaks backlit by pink clouds and the descending sun. Far below, lumps of snow and ice float down the river between its white banks. The black water holds the blurred reflection of tall pine trees. All is cold and still. Cold fingers, cold toes.
We crossed the border last Thursday, near Foulden, Clappers and Low Cocklaw on a chilly damp day. One of the first things Scotland offered up was a man in shorts walking towards us on the road. He ploughed onward with a determined look on his red face. Needless to say, we gave way.
I’m standing on the River Garry Bridge in the Scottish council region of Perth and Kinross. I’ve seen foraging robins today, and spotted one or two birds of prey at the tops of trees, buzzards I think, hunting by the roadside. With their keen eyesight they can probably see the Highlands from up there. It’s getting close now.
An older woman steps on to the bridge and walks toward me in the snow: crunch, crunch, crunch. She stops and asks to borrow my phone to call her son as she has no signal and is anxious about going up the slippery covered roads. She wants him to come down to collect her in his more robust vehicle.
I dial the number and to my surprise he answers quickly, so I put her on. We stand in the centre of the bridge in the white reflected night light under the crescent moon like two Cold War agents negotiating the exchange of political prisoners on the border between East and West Germany.
Afterwards, she waits in the small car park where we ourselves have taken refuge to watch the weather.
Civilisation is within striking distance, there’s plenty of food and water, the wood supply is brimming and dry. We’ll sleep here tonight and see what we wake up to in the morning.
Inside the warm van we laugh together about sending our four-year-old North out through the skylight armed with the shit-shovel and instructions to dig us out should we get buried overnight. Although more snow is coming, this misadventure has little chance of happening. More’s the pity: from the look of excitement and enthusiasm on his wide-eyed face I think he’d relish the chance.
A few hours earlier, in the Kingdom of Fife, where I’m told the people consider themselves part of a sovereign state, separate not only from England but also Scotland, I ask a local man walking his three labradors by Loch Leven whether he thinks we’ll see the snow that’s been forecast.
“No I think it’s gonna miss us,” he replies, before releasing a stream of Scottishness, of which I could not grasp an inch. Nevertheless I thank him for stopping before going on my way.
The night before, Tara and I walked down to the loch side and stood together in silence. Three dabbling ducks, possibly widgeons, chuckled together on the still surface, flapping up and away, teasing each other, making ripples of the mirrored moon shimmering on the water below.
It was nearly dark when we walked back to the van a little while later and owl came out to introduce herself and discuss the incoming cold front. We went to bed with her still hooting in anticipation. All of us waiting for the snow.
The day before that, we fairly flew from Edinburgh to Fife over the Queensferry Crossing bridge, with the Forth Road Bridge and the Forth Rail Bridge racing alongside us on the righthand side, driving against the cold plunge of biting arctic air, coming down hard in between the isobars from the frozen frigid north, bringing with it its wintry gifts of sleet, ice and snow.
Tara’s father Brian sent us a message to alert us to what was coming. We picked up two pallets for extra firewood and crammed them in to the van on the way through Queensferry before crossing the Firth of Forth.
True north is calling, and we’ll keep responding magnetically. I have duties in Forres at the end of January: passing on a gift of service to lost and lonely men that I myself received more than a decade ago.
After that, mountains, burns, dun laws and braes, silent lochs, eagles white tailed and golden and perhaps a moment or two to greet and weep in helpless lamentation as the cruel wonder and raw beauty of these northern lands cuts a deep firth in the seacoast of my soul.
Let’s see.
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