May 23, 2015

The weather today was as pitiless as the landscape. When Tom and I walked around the lighthouse at the Butt of Lewis, the northern tip of the island, the wind could have tossed us off the cliffs and into the cold, heaving North Atlantic. We saw windmill blades spinning so fast, they were almost a blur.

We found the beach where the small airplane would touch down during low tide so the drug dealers could make their transactions. That was part of the story line of Peter May's Chessmen. But we didn't see any airplanes or drug dealers. Or was that sweet old couple, also trudging around in the sand, more sinister than they appeared??

Is it wrong that I get more excited about sites where fictional events occurred than about sites where real

things happened?

The remains of Carloway Broch, about 2,000 years old, share space with the sheep, as so much on this island does. There's some story about cattle rustlers holing up there and getting smoked out by their foes. Seems like a lot of people stole cattle in those days.

The Black Village showed a way of life I would have hated. It's a tiny hamlet of a few stone houses with thatched roofs. Isolation, relentless wind, presumably an outhouse (no bathroom that I could see). Ah yes--the good old days. -- The last people moved out in the 1970s.

Bagpipe players and drummers--in full Scottish-kilt regalia--played in the middle of town tonight. Despite the rain, a cluster of people gathered to listen.

At another fish and chips shop, Tom asked a woman there if she spoke Gaelic. "Oh, yes! It's my mother tongue," she said. She explained that it's ancient language, influenced by the Norwegian Vikings who came to

the Isle of Lewis a thousand or more years ago.

My mother's father's family came to the U.S. through Ellis Island in 1880 or so. My grandfather, William McHale, born in 1883, was said to be the first of his parents' children to be born in Minnesota. I heard he spoke "Irish" until he was five years old and went to school. If this story is true, I wonder how much Gaelic he remembered later in his life.

Former Madonna student Liam Morgan, an Irishman, once told me that Irish Gaelic and Scottish Gaelic are quite similar, but the Irish and the Scots may phrase things somewhat differently. He likened it to the differences between British English and American English.