Pain is Temporary, but the Views Go On Forever

“…and like a visitor that nobody invited, the cold came in and sat among them.”

We switched off the engine and those words hung in the air like a mist, like an omen. Poor boys. Mysteriously forgotten by the ship that was to fetch them home after trapping birds, they were now facing the winter on a barren rock in the Atlantic Ocean. How would they survive?

You know how much our family enjoys reading and listening to great literature about the places we explore. In southern England, we heard Watership Down while driving through the countryside. In Taiwan, it was Dumpling Days by Grace Lin, who graciously returned a personal message, by the way, and encouraged us to eat a dumpling for her. Pirate Boy of Sydney Town by Jackie French brought up great discussions in Australia, and Anna Karenina sang along to the Trans-Siberian Railway’s percussive rhythms.

Where the World Ends.

Our most recent read is the story of bird fellers from St. Kilda, Europe’s westernmost point, and an ever-so-remote island far off the UK’s coast. Geraldine MacCaughrean tells the poignant tale of survival beautifully in her book, Where the World Ends. And while driving through the highlands of Scotland, where clouds sidle up and whisper into the ears of craggy and stoic granite peaks like ephemeral lovers, we have been clinging to every word.

We opened the doors of the car and found the prophecy of the story to be true. Cold had arrived in Scotland! Today was the day we picked to hike Ben MacDui, the second-highest peak in the UK. We chose this mountain purposefully. (You may also remember our opinions on superlatives.) And we’d watched the weather forecasts with the interest of any good Brit worth his wellies and waterproofs, calculating that this was our best shot for a clear view of the Cairngorms National Park.

Just a couple of weeks before, we met disappointingly with the clouds on Ben Lomond. (Though that didn’t keep us from singing, “You’ll take the high road and I’ll take the low road” the whole way.) The photos from that day started out clear and shining, lovely black dollops of islands silhouetted on a sunlit Loch Lomond. But as we ascended, they began to cloud over until our backdrop and foreground was naught but white. We reached the summit and lingered with the other hikers for but a moment; there was no ceremonial taking in the view that day. And then we dripped with our fellows down the rocks like an intractable stream of water off the nose of an unimpressed sheep, grateful to enter the world of color and our mostly dry car once more.

For Ben MacDui, we had higher hopes.

We were getting an early start, we thought; the clouds will burn off like yesterday. A dapper gentleman bedecked in mossy tweed from cap to cane surveyed the scene before us and agreed, “Aye, she might clear up.” Was that a twinkle in his eye?

What we could see below the bleak and impending cloud cover was beautiful: tufts of grass burning out their last bits of summer memories in flaming oranges; peaty cascades frothing white against shining boulders of the darkest espresso black. It was enough beauty to warm the soul, if not the hands.

Leo had one glove as he misplaced the other somewhere between the house and the trail. I had my wool socks from Mongolia on my hands, having left my gloves in a shop just two days before. Other than that, we were as well-kitted as possible, given the meager stores afforded by our five backpacks. (Much better than the time we tried to summit Carrantouhill in Ireland with our 5- 6- and 8-year olds wearing ne’er but shirts wrapped around their heads for warmth.)

Then we saw the first bits of frost.

Bewitchingly reminiscent of MacCaughrean’s metaphors, they grew from the stones like impossibly delicate wings. Flightless creatures, these cold sculptures of mist and wind. The boys broke off pieces, delightedly crunching them between their teeth and rolling them around inside their mouths. (Lack of water was not going to be a problem here; did we ever tell you about the hike in New York when we accidentally flirted with the edges of dehydration? No? Another time, perhaps.)

During the last mile to the top, the wind was shoving us from behind, urging us to continue or issuing a warning if we did? I made it to the summit marker and turned to face that wind, a banshee that screamed into me, filling my hood and all my being with her might. All awhirl and in the air, I screamed back, wildly, as though to force her out of me again.

Then we all ducked behind a cairn that some wonderful soul had built there (was it on a day like this?) to breathe. We’d been trudging uphill for several hours, and though these surroundings offered no man’s idea of a picnic, we decided we ought to take in a bit of the sustenance we’d brought. Lacking whisky and oats, we made do with bread with butter and a few sips of water.

Hands. So. Cold. Leo laughed because he couldn’t move his fingers. Then he cried when Chris warned him of frostbite. I panicked when I tried to zip someone up and found my hands to be hard and foreign tools, like the beak of a bird or claw of a crab.

We have to get out of here!

The wind that had urged us on our way up now fought us, blasting every bit of remaining heat from our bodies. As Leo wrote in his journal, it was “like grapeshot pelting a charging Jacobite.” Morale was low. Someone stopped to cry. Chris offered his armpits to thaw the lad’s fingers and melt his fear. I offered my wool socks. And step by step, mile by mile, we came back.

At one point, I turned around. “Look!” I bellowed, breaking the moribund silence of the trudge as though someone had just squeezed me like a bagpipe. There, behind us, where before there had only been mist, only uncertainty devoid of color or heat, there was the world before us. The same wind that tried to blow us from the mountaintop now lifted the clouds like a curtain, showing us a spectacle of peaks and valleys and waterfalls and lofty lochs, overlapping like feathers on a wing and stretching to a misty-eyed sun.

It was there all along.

And that, dear friends, is when I composed this letter to you. I wanted to share that though we genuinely experienced pain on Ben MacDui, it was temporary. Though we were fearful, though we were anxious, those feelings thawed. And seeing the view after visiting those wild and wicked places was like receiving a gift perfectly wrapped in life’s dangerous and unexpected colors, only to be unwrapped by you and me.

Questions

Please Comment Below…

• Have you read Geraldine MacCaughrean’s book, and did you figure out the ending before we did?
• What literature accompanies you on your travels?
• Care to tell us of an experience that you wouldn’t trade for the world yet might not choose to repeat?