TM #152: Road trip
You can fly in nowadays; take the plane from London to Inverness, and from there straight to Kirkwall in no time at all. But that's no way for a man my age to come home.
And I was feeling it.
So I came up overland, through the soft heart of England and on into the mountains. Crossed the Border in a howling thunderstorm that blotted out the road. Came northward across the highlands, now glorious, now bleak, in clear bright weather to break your heart. In places the roads are exactly the same, when everything around them has changed. Nothing's familiar but the journey itself.
But it goes fast on four wheels, and the journey was all I wanted. To know where I was going.
Left the car, then, and took the ferry, with my heart racing like the tides. Silly great lumbering modern thing, tricked out like a three-star hotel, but I wasn't about to complain. It got me there. I went out on deck with the smokers and the romantics, and watched the coast draw near.
Cars again: a cantankerous rental picked up in Stromness (all so changed, so changed; there was barely a village here, once) and argued it out onto the roads. There was a scrap of paper in my pocket, C. Morgan, and an address. Probably I could have walked so far, but the need was still on me, drove me ahead, would not let me wait.
All so changed. Not so very much, not unrecognizably. But irrevocably. I rolled down the windows and let the wind sting my eyes.
And when I pulled up outside the house of C. Morgan, far off the main road, almost lost amid the fields, she was there in the door with the same wind blowing her hair, billowing her skirts. She had not changed a day. She never does, no more than I do. "Took you long enough, brother," she said, in the old soft island Norse of our childhood, dead for two hundred years.
I almost broke then. No longer driven, with no wind at my back to brace against, and my heart shaking in me. I thought I might let go of whatever had held me together, all this time, and just fly apart like thistledown.
But she had mercy on me. "Get in here," she said in English, unsmiling, and opened the door behind her. "I don't have all day."
So I did what she told me.
Mordred
Arthurian legend
415 words
And I was feeling it.
So I came up overland, through the soft heart of England and on into the mountains. Crossed the Border in a howling thunderstorm that blotted out the road. Came northward across the highlands, now glorious, now bleak, in clear bright weather to break your heart. In places the roads are exactly the same, when everything around them has changed. Nothing's familiar but the journey itself.
But it goes fast on four wheels, and the journey was all I wanted. To know where I was going.
Left the car, then, and took the ferry, with my heart racing like the tides. Silly great lumbering modern thing, tricked out like a three-star hotel, but I wasn't about to complain. It got me there. I went out on deck with the smokers and the romantics, and watched the coast draw near.
Cars again: a cantankerous rental picked up in Stromness (all so changed, so changed; there was barely a village here, once) and argued it out onto the roads. There was a scrap of paper in my pocket, C. Morgan, and an address. Probably I could have walked so far, but the need was still on me, drove me ahead, would not let me wait.
All so changed. Not so very much, not unrecognizably. But irrevocably. I rolled down the windows and let the wind sting my eyes.
And when I pulled up outside the house of C. Morgan, far off the main road, almost lost amid the fields, she was there in the door with the same wind blowing her hair, billowing her skirts. She had not changed a day. She never does, no more than I do. "Took you long enough, brother," she said, in the old soft island Norse of our childhood, dead for two hundred years.
I almost broke then. No longer driven, with no wind at my back to brace against, and my heart shaking in me. I thought I might let go of whatever had held me together, all this time, and just fly apart like thistledown.
But she had mercy on me. "Get in here," she said in English, unsmiling, and opened the door behind her. "I don't have all day."
So I did what she told me.
Mordred
Arthurian legend
415 words