Like a Standing Stone

I am sitting in a crowded cafe outside Dunvegan Castle on Skye, where it is raining like hell. I am waiting for Pokey. We are supposed to be going to Three Chimneys, a fine restaurant somewhere around here. Roger was going to join us but he bailed b/c he has too much work to do. Hmf. I come halfway around the world to meet one of Mick's oldest friends, and he is just as bad about choosing work over fun. I suppose that's why they are successful, but still. I don't like being stood up.

Anyway, I have had Earl Grey tea and a roll, so ... here is the story of the Standing Stones.

Yesterday morning (it seems like ages ago), I found the annoying one up on the obs deck and rejoined this sisterly party of two. There were not too many people in this wide, open space with great low couches and tables fixed to the deck. The decor was sort of '70s RV-ish. But the view was pretty fantastic as we headed toward the pier at Harris.

Off the boat, we walked up the main street to a little cafe. The tiniest place yet that we've eaten; it was like a cottage. It literally filled up at one point. I was over being pissed at Deb by then, having had the time to myself to think and write and listen to Tori Amos. I had been feeling very far away from home and missing Don a lot. Thinking that if we were here together, we wouldn't be keeping such a hectic and insane pace. Not to mention that I would have someone around to keep me warm ... .

Anyway. So, at the cafe it was the always reliable Earl Grey tea and a soft, warm scone. That made me hungrier, so I had an egg salad sandwich (here called "egg mayo," b/c it's just egg and mayo -- awesome) on brown bread, which was soooo good. The U.K. is the land of sandwiches, which is fab.

After lunch our guide, the mighty Les McInulty, showed up in his silver taxi (more like a passenger van). He was a few minutes late (and of course Fussy had to phone him). He'd had to get his kilt on, he said. Apparently these things take time. He was around my age, probably younger. Soft-spoken but very knowledgeable. Deb sat in front so she could ask her billion questions. He drove very fast on the winding, mostly single-lane roads. We stopped to take pictures along the way, and went to yet another old ruin of a church. It had some interesting features, including male and female fertility symbols carved onto its tower, on different, adjacent sides. The female one (shown here) is called a Sheela-Na-Gig, which of course is the title of a PJ Harvey song.



So we drove all around Harris, then went to Lewis. It's not really a separate land mass. They are actually joined, but for some reason called two names. Like Laurel Canyon and Crescent Heights boulevards. It was a long jaunt, and the swaying of the taxi, combined with the soothing island music Les was playing, was kind of lulling me to sleep. I nodded off a few times. We stopped to look at a golf course by the sea:



There is just a little metal box for you to put your greens fee in. The honor system.

And also we saw some white beaches and places where Les says international surfers come to surf. It looked pretty cowabunga to me, but I'm no surfer:



There were sheep everywhere, and -- along with all the roads being single-lane with the dreaded turn-out system -- that was another reason I was glad we hadn't driven ourselves. Those little fuckers just cluster by the road. Sometimes we would round a bend, and there'd be one in the road. A honk of the horn usually moved 'em, but it was fairly hilarious, if slightly alarming. They like the tarmac b/c it gets warmer than the ground. The sheep are like the heather, but mobile. They are ubiquitous. They just wander around and chew the scenery, and try to stay out of the fairly relentless wind ... anywhere they can:



Everybody Must Get ...

So at last we arrived at the Standing Stones at Callanish. Which was the reason I'd wanted to take this trip to the outskirts of nowhere. Well, it was worth it. Are they not glorious?



Les noted they are arranged in the shape of a Celtic cross -- rather long before Christianity existed. Nobody knows for sure what they were for -- could be a calendar, probably had some religious/spiritual function, no doubt was a great way to intimidate people. Excellent for parties, too. There are standing stones all over these islands, but this is a fairly impressive cluster. They are prehistoric (hence, the not knowing what they're for exactly).

They are exactly what they sound like: giant slabs of stone stuck end-up in the earth. Some are around person-height, others very very tall. In the middle of the arrangement is a cairn, where maybe they did animal sacrifice (no evidence of human) or perhaps burned the dead. The cairn came later, howev. Not sure how much later, but you can see it here:



The stones are supposedly aligned to certain moon and sun cycles. There are nearby geological features the stones line up with, like the Old Woman of the Mountain, which is just the outline of a ridge on a mountain (again with the dauntingly complex naming rituals), that looks like a woman lying on her back. It really does resemble that. And Les said that every 19 years during a certain time of year, from a certain vantage point it looks like she's giving birth to the moon. Kewl.

So I took tons of pictures and then took off my gloves and put my hands on the stones. They are considered by some to be built ... erected, perhaps ... along the energy lines known as leys. Les is an avid believer in this force, and he said he'd been a skeptic until someone gave him a dowsing rod and told him to try it. And it worked, and now he's all into it. Dunno if that's really true, but it makes a good story.

I touched a lot of the the stones and ran my hands all over. They were surprisingly not cold. I can't say they were warm, exactly, but it was an overcast day, with intermittent rain, and very windy. I thought they would be like ice, especially given my low tolerance for cold on my hands, but they weren't uncomfortable to touch, even to linger on. I leaned against the big one with the black knot in the rock that looks like an eye. And I leaned against others as well. They were dry as a bone and very comforting. Solid and strong, and they felt ancient. The wind whistled past and all around me, but I wasn't cold. I could have fallen asleep in the embrace of these relics from some far-off eon.

It is strange that I could feel peaceful in the presence of things that were probably raised in a far more nasty, short, and brutish world. How did they put them up? I know whoever did must have chosen them so carefully, for how they looked and even how they felt. If they could conduct the earth energy well. Each one was unique and subtley beautiful. Of course I was built up to feel something, but it was undeniably a magical place. Les said he has felt the energy more when there are fewer people around, and there were only a couple other folks about.

One of them tried to help me with a problem I'd been having for several hours. After talking about music with Les, I had begun obsessing over which '60s band it was in which Jeff Beck, Eric Clapton, and Jimmy Page all played, and could not remember. Les is a Rory Gallagher fan and played me some of his music; I had heard of RG but not to my knowledge heard the music. So I told Les I thought he might like Jeff Beck. And Peter Green, and blah blah, brilliant '60s guitarists. But I had a mental block with that bit of rock trivia re the holy trinity of axedom. And hanging around the Standing Stones, I was fussing over it out loud to Deb, and this woman nearby looked over and said, "Cream?" And I was like, "No," quite certainly. I knew what it wasn't. (Edit -- It took me days to remember it was the Yardbirds (d'oh!). So the Stones may be magical, but they ain't necessarily memory-enhancing.)

Anyway. The stones have stood in that ground for so long, silent sentinels, mute witnesses to some perhaps savage, yet strangely wise, age gone by. People who saw themselves as part of the season cycles ... or who at least navigated their lives that way. The sun and the moon, most basic things, were essential to their ways. Not to get too romantic about it -- there was plenty of superstitious hooey back then, as now. And I wouldn't want to be a prehistoric human. But the earth's energy does exist -- look at the magnetic fields, for example -- and to me it makes sense that ancient people who lived so much closer to the earth's bones and body than we do would be more acutely aware of its life.