Keith Savage

Three months have passed since my last post here. It is an unusual time both personally and globally. We in the United States remain in the grip of a pandemic that threatens all our lives and renders travel a laughable afterthought. At this time, even if I wanted to travel, I can’t visit Scotland. The pandemic has made my social world nonexistent, a function that by the same degree opens the inner world.

Finally, when at last Cowal’s knotted roads gave up the thread to Ostel Bay, father and daughter stood in a new year’s bright unfolding. On the beach where the sea had receded toward distant peaks and fleeting masterpieces, where light and shadow swooped and swallowed like swifts on summer wings, staring at a trawler bridging nesses of untruths. The body is a lie.

Scotland is the kind of place where it’s just as easy to travel geographically across the map as it is to find those doorways leading down corridors of times long past. On countless occasions I’ve tramped along coasts and over hills to find the mouldering stones and camouflaged earthworks of ancient monuments (according to the classically understated signage).