Loch of Our Lives

In normal circumstances I might be alarmed if the bus driver launched into a denunciation of hate-speech laws, but we were in Scotland. They’ve passed a ridiculous set of codes, and the driver would have none of it. He suggested that if you intended to be offended, or even had the capacity for it, there was the door. Whereupon he laid into Edinburgh for being the English idea of a capital and dared any Edinburgh supporters to report him to the police.

The Enlightenment having been defended in the nation of its birth, we began the journey to see the Big Eel. Along the way the driver informed us that nae, a man dunna wear underwear beneath his kilts—something that no doubt would reappear in the minds of many an hour later as we watched an elderly man blow the bag in an extremely windy location; one strong gust and we’d see if he was a True Scots-man. If a man wore underwear, the driver continued, then the kilt was a skart, and the man was therefor a lass, because only garls wear skarts.

Somehow this felt like a fresh but familiar take on gender theory.

En route to the lake we heard about the endless feud between the Campbells and the MacDonalds, and it made me think of home, where the words stand not for eternal feuds but for soup and hamburgers. They seem at peace in the New World. Outside the broad windows of the bus, astonishing scenery—steep mountains smothered with firs, suitable only for hiding with rifles to pick off the people who want to take over and use the woods to hide and shoot other people. The roads were narrow and twisty, and the driver handled the enormous bus with casual ease, steering with one hand while the other gestured at a site where there’d been a massacre 276 years ago. Now a cow lay in the field, deaf to the resonance of history.

Of course we had to go to Loch Ness. We had already spent a few days in Glasgow. The big art museum is eclectic and can be absorbed completely in two hours. The modern-art museum is full of nonsense and can be dismissed with a merry sneer in 15 minutes. The city felt careworn and smothered with soot, or mold, or both; it rains for 15 minutes, then gives you a ration of sun like a dram of Scotch to revive a drowned man, and then rains again. The people are lovely and the food’s grand. But after two days we had to see the countryside, and look for Nessie.

There is no Loch Ness Monster in the sense of the elegant serpent seen in the famous grainy photo. We all know that. But the lure of the lore fills up a big boat every hour, and people head into the narrow loch just to say they’ve done it. You get a science lecture on the way: the depth of the lake (very, very deep), the amount of light that penetrates below a certain depth (none), the number of people who could be placed in the lake bed if it were emptied—three times the Earth’s population, and with my luck I’d be under the guy in the row behind who had that permanent baked-in BO. You could tie him to a line and drop him in the loch and Nessie would rise to the surface, limp and unconscious.

The captain gave a speech about Old Nessie. The history of sightings (unproven), the scientific expeditions (inconclusive), and his general take—there’s much down in the dark depths we don’t know about. We’ve put twelve men on the moon, but we don’t know everything that’s down there. Probably not a monster, though.

He was of the opinion that it was an eel.

It might be frightening to consider what horrors the inky domain contains, but it’s also a comfort. There are still unknowns around us. We don’t have everything figured out. The loch of our lives teems with surprises and discoveries. You never think much about Scotland except to scroll past Braveheart on the streaming-service pane and tsk-tsk at the news when they pass this law or that. Then you go there, and while you don’t see the eel, you see so much more, and the place that’s been a faraway story all your life is now a place you know a bit, and love a lot.

P.S. Bus driver’s wrong. Edinburgh’s better.