A walking tour of Edinburgh, we instantly learned, required proper clothing—sensible shoes, of course, but sweater, cloth cap, scarf, raincoat, and umbrella as well. Even in summer. If, for some bizarre reason, it turned sunny and warm, we could always peel layers off, but a minute later we’d find ourselves pushing against a cold wind, and then a biting rain would start to fall, and if Chase or I didn’t have a sweater, we’d duck into one of the shops on Princes Street and buy one.
Our first full day’s walk was probably the walk most tourists take—the Royal Mile, starting at the Castle and ending at the Palace of Holyrood. We made the usual stop at the Esplanade for the famous Military Tattoo, which I know thrills just about everyone who sees it, but the beauty of military march and drill has always been lost on me, even when the soldiers wear kilts and step to the squeal of bagpipes. We visited Outlook Tower and were properly impressed by its Camera Obscura and wandered between the high old houses of Lawnmarket. It’s along this stretch of road that the city proper first emerged, with narrow “wynds” and “closes” (alleys, actually) snaking between six- and seven-story wood-framed houses and shops. Marshes to the south, beyond Flodden Wall, and the North Loch, where Waverley Railroad Station and Princes Street Gardens are now, kept the city long and narrow and high, which meant crowded and smelly and dark, until the eighteenth century, when the marshes were drained and the New Town was built.
From the Castle to Holyrood was only a mile, but we made it last the day. We toured Parliament Square and the High Kirk of St. Giles and made our way down High Street past the John Knox House to Canongate all the way to the palace and Holyrood Park, with the bald moorland heights of Salisbury Craigs and Arthur’s Seat sprawled beyond. The people we passed on the streets, those we decided were not tourists (which is to say, those we took not to be German, Japanese, or North American), looked strangely like us, like my fiancée and me. Which is not that odd, since she’s a Campbell on her mother’s side and I’m a Gordon on my father’s, and neither of our New England families had done much mucking about with the gene pool. The Edinburghers who looked like Chase were the dark Scots, slender with pale eyes and light skin and straight dark brown hair. Those who resembled me were the thick-bodied red Scots with florid complexions and round wide faces and sandy or red curly hair. The dark Scots looked Norwegian to us, and the red Scots looked Celtic, and probably were, at least on their mother’s side or their father’s. It was strangely familial, almost ghostly, seeing so many faces and bodies that resembled our own, and at times we felt we had wandered into a dream of family. I thought I saw my father and mother and their parents everywhere, and my aunts and cousins, too. And Chase saw her grandmother’s face on the woman who served us tea one day, her uncle’s on the man who sold us a silver pin. Were they here to help us marry, the afterimages of the families we had left behind? Without knowing it, was this why we had chosen to elope in Edinburgh?
We spent the second day in the city without leaving the New Town district, which is where most of the best museums are located. We lingered over the Reynoldses and Gainsboroughs at the National Portrait Gallery and admired the Titians, Goyas, Rubenses, and El Grecos at the National Gallery and the neolithic axes and bowls, Roman statuary, and medieval weaponry at the National Museum of Antiquities. Late in the day we visited the Scott Monument, which is indeed monumental, the largest memorial to a writer I have ever seen. A piece of High Victorian kitsch, it’s a neo-Gothic spire and canopy over a neoclassical statue of Sir Walter and his loyal dog. How the Scots love their dogs. Taking the long way back to the hotel, we stopped for a reflective moment at David Hume’s grave in Calton Old Burial Ground and honored Robert Burns at his memorial farther up on the hill. It was a day spent with the spirits of painters and writers.
We were taking in the sights like typical American tourists, cruising the abundant historical buildings and monuments, museums, parks, and public gardens, following our maps and guidebooks with energy and a single-minded determination not to miss anything worth seeing. But we were also lovers who had eloped to a foreign city, gone to a place that neither of us had ever visited before, a deliberate step out of time, a shared, lyrical solitude. And so we lingered in parks and dawdled along the avenues and squares, shopping in a leisurely fashion and trying out restaurants and pubs, strolling hand in hand in and out of galleries and bookshops and antique shops as if we had all the time in the world.
One day, our third, we wandered south of the Royal Mile and prowled the narrow streets and lanes around the Old College of the University of Edinburgh, toured the Royal Scottish Museum, Candlemaker Row, and Greyfriars Church, where we came upon the grave and statue of Greyfriars Bobby, a Skye terrier who in 1858 began a fourteen-year-long vigil over his master’s grave, until the dog himself died. The Scots memorialize not just their writers. Earlier in the week we had spent a sweetly cheering hour inside the Castle grounds reading the names and dates of the pooches buried in the cemetery established there solely for the soldiers’ dogs. A year before we had done the same thing in Aruba, in the Caribbean, where we discovered a large, well-kept pet cemetery near the old Exxon refinery.
We timed our walks so that in every neighborhood we were able to sample another recommended restaurant—after London, Edinburgh probably has the best restaurants in the British Isles—or one of the fine old brass-and-oak-paneled pubs that seemed to appear on every block. A favorite lunch stop on the Royal Mile, which we returned to several times, was L’Auberge on St. Mary’s Street, a charming, bistro-style restaurant on a narrow side street where we practiced our French. Chase’s excellent pronunciation and my eccentric vocabulary made us a single speaker of pidgin French. Alone, neither of us would have dared to speak; together we talked on many subjects, which pleased us and seemed to amuse the waiters.
A fourth day was spent north of New Town, at the Leith waterfront among the medieval warehouses, with an extraordinary morning walking in a silvery mist through the Royal Botanic Garden, which is among the largest, greenest, and best maintained in the world. Founded in 1670 by the first professor of medicine at Edinburgh University, it is the second-oldest botanic garden in Britain, after that at Oxford, covering seventy-two acres, with eleven exhibition halls and a one-hundred-thousand-volume library and a woodland garden with four hundred species of rhododendron and even a heath garden, where we strolled among some thirty varieties of heather, while the mist walled out the world that surrounded us.
A ways beyond the garden, up in Leith and in sight of the Firth of Forth, we stopped for a late lunch at the Vintners Rooms on Giles Street, a wine bar and restaurant located in the refurbished cellars of a stone warehouse built in the twelfth century by the Holyrood monks for storing their claret. There, under vaulted stone ceilings, we lingered over a three-course French Provincial meal and drank an exquisite ’85 Chassagne Montrachet and talked of how in years to come we would return here on our anniversary, to this very restaurant, this very table. And why not? During those few days and nights of wandering through the city of Edinburgh, in that brief interlude before we actually got married, we were transported magically out of all our familiar, crowded times and places, replacing them with a time and city that we shared only with each other. Over the years our memory of those few days and the city would become as much a part of our marriage as the wedding ceremony itself.
Then, at last, but just as planned, our friends the Jarmans arrived from Leeds and checked into the Howard in a pair of rooms adjacent to ours. Perhaps it was a conversation in the hotel lounge between Mark and me and overheard by the waiter, or maybe it was something said by one of the girls, who couldn’t contain their pleasure—in the lobby Zoë, aged six, had announced to all, “I’ve been to many public weddings before, but never to a private one!”—or maybe it was because of the cables and calls that had started coming in from the States, as family and friends one by one figured out what we were up to, but suddenly the entire staff of the Howard seemed to be in on the secret, acknowledging it wit
h winks and smiles and whispered congratulations.
That night, with the four Jarmans, we had a long, late prenuptial supper at Martins on Rose Street, which had become our favorite restaurant. It was a tiny, hard-to-find place tucked away in an alley off a lane off Hanover Street between Princes and George, where chef David Macrae specialized in exquisitely prepared Scottish fish and game and wildfowl, with cheerful, knowledgeable service and advice from the proprietors themselves, Martin and Gay Irons. The wines were fine, especially the ’83 Rolly Gassman Auxerrois Moenchreben, and the crayfish nage and poached escalope of salmon perfect. After a round of desserts, the Jarmans, who were weary from their long drive, took their slumbering daughters back to the hotel, while Chase and I enjoyed a final glass of port and another wedge of cheese. Then we, too, took our leave and walked arm in arm back along George Street toward the hotel.
At Number 60A, a modest Georgian building that houses the Yorkshire Building Society Regional Executive Office, we stopped for a moment and read a plaque bolted to the wall. Here in 1811 the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley and his bride, Harriet, spent their honeymoon. Perfect. That Shelley had chosen Edinburgh for his honeymoon seemed wonderfully appropriate—never mind that Shelley’s and poor Harriet’s marriage ended badly. On that August night the whole world was an emblem for our love, and a bronze plaque honoring an adolescent poet’s marriage nearly two centuries earlier posted on the stone face of a shut building was an omen, a blissful promise, and we walked joyously back through the starry nighttime to our hotel.
The sun shone brightly on the appointed day and continued shining all morning long. The deed was quickly and sweetly done. We were married in a pleasant, parlorlike room at the General Register’s Office on Queen Street, next door to the house where in 1847 Sir James Young Simpson discovered the anesthetic capacity of chloroform. The nuptials were performed by Registrar Katrina Hoy, an intelligent, cheerful, red-haired woman who proudly informed us that she was the only woman in all of Scotland empowered to conduct a civil marriage. Zoë and Claire held the rings, while Chase and I held hands, and Amy held the flowers and Mark the camera, and when the vows were exchanged it’s possible that we all wept a little. I saw no one’s eyes but my bride’s, so cannot say who else wept and who else did not.
LAST DAYS FEEDING FRENZY
Five minutes out of Anchorage, past the karaoke joints and stripper bars, the fast-food outlets and flag-flapping car dealers, suddenly there was scree, glacial ice, and endless sky above, serrated cliffs and crashing waves below, and I was in the Alaskan wilderness. Snow-crested mountains tumbled through fir trees and sedimented rock into the cold zinc-gray sea, and the sight of it took my breath away, literally—my chest tightened as I drove—and I thought, I’m not worthy of this much beauty, no human is. But I’ll sure as hell take it. And I did—I drank it in, ate it up, gobbled it down while I could, because I knew that it was not going to last. I was on the Seward Highway headed south through the Chugach State Park and National Forest, looping along the sawtooth edge of a long, narrow fjord off Cook Inlet called Turnagain Arm. It was the summer solstice, June 21, 1993, the longest day of the year, and a good thing, too: I was driving the length of the Kenai Peninsula today, from Anchorage to Homer, 225 miles, and had left Anchorage around 4 P.M., so wouldn’t make Homer till nine or later and didn’t want to arrive in the dark at the backwoods cabin I’d borrowed but not yet seen, where there would be no electricity, no running water, no company.
The only other vehicles on the highway this afternoon were elephantine RVs, pickups, and SUVs, all of which appeared to be registered in the Lower 48, most of them driven by late-blooming baby boomers taking early retirement. As they lumbered toward me or when, on the occasional straight stretch of road, I overtook and passed them, the drivers and passengers grinned and pumped fists or cheerfully flashed Vs-for-victory and two thumbs up, like we were all pals up here in Alaska. Their easy bonding bugged me. Then I remembered what kind of car I was driving along this long, lonesome, wilderness highway. I was at the helm of a brand-new, bright red (“sunset orange metallic”) Hummer, test-driving for a slick New York–based men’s magazine the about-to-be-released H2 model with the full-bore luxury package. It had all the bells and whistles: Bose six-disc CD changer and heated slate-gray leather seats and sunroof and OnStar system—all that and, as they say, more, more, more. It had wraparound brush guards and running lights and off-road lights and seventeen-inch off-road tires on cast aluminum wheels and the same Vortec 6000 6.0-liter, fuel-injected V-8 engine that powered the 1993 Corvette. It had a self-leveling rear air suspension system with an onboard air compressor. It had a thirty-two-gallon fuel tank. And needed it, especially out here in the wilderness, where filling stations were separated from one another by very long walks.
This was a vehicle that for sheer bulk and brawn couldn’t be equaled by any other so-called passenger car on the highway. It might have been a guzzler, but there wasn’t an RV or an SUV anywhere that the Hummer couldn’t knock from the sidewalk into the gutter with a simple dip and shrug of one broad shoulder. It was six-foot-six in height, close to seven feet wide, and just under sixteen feet long. It was built like a bank vault on wheels, thick all over and squared. Cut. Not an ounce of body fat. Driving it was like riding on the shoulders of Mike Tyson in his prime. It wasn’t sexy, however, unless you think Mike Tyson is sexy. People, especially guys, grinned, flashed the victory sign, and stepped aside. “Hey, champ, how’s it goin’?”
I knew I wasn’t supposed to like this car. It was the most politically incorrect automobile in America. Maybe in the world. I considered who had purchased the cruder, more forthrightly militaristic H1 model that preceded it, and who therefore would likely be first in line for the H2: Arnold Schwarzenegger, yes, I knew that, and Bruce Willis; but also Don King, Coolio, Karl Malone, Dennis Rodman, Al Unser Sr. and Jr. Ted Turner owned an H1, not surprisingly. And Roseanne Barr. And, of course, Mike Tyson, who’d bought a brace of Hummer H1s for himself and a few more for his friends. As party favors, I guessed. By and large, except for Ted Turner, maybe, this was not the green crowd.
I considered its heritage, its DNA. Its closest modern-day relative was the scruffy, friendly-looking Jeep, which had evolved out of the original, mud-spattered World War II jeep and still summoned the spirits of Ernie Pyle, Bill Mauldin, and a generation of unshaven, exhausted foot soldiers bumming a ride back to the base. The Hummer, however, was the direct descendant of the post–Vietnam War era’s Humvee, which was to the old WWII jeep as Sly Stallone was to Audie Murphy. The Humvee was a jeep on steroids, built to handle anything from Afghan road rage to a good Gulf War. Its newest, civilian incarnation, the H2, was dressed out with enough leather and polished walnut dashboard trim and high-tech add-ons to pass for chic in the Hamptons or fly on Rodeo Drive, and enough tinted glass, CD speakers, and sheer size to become the official hip-hoppers’ posse car. It was a gigantic steel jock strap. The vehicle went straight to the testosterone-drenched fantasy life of the adolescent American male, no matter how old he was, and butch-slapped it into shape. Driving down the Kenai Peninsula in my Hummer, I kept remembering how I felt when I was a kid in New Hampshire cruising around town in winter in a dump truck loaded with sand and a snowplow attached to the front, feeling larger and stronger and taller and wider and harder than anyone else on the road. It was a good feeling then, and, I had to confess, it was a good feeling now.
Along the Russian River, a short ways south of Resurrection Pass, I saw where all those RVs, pickups, and SUVs from the Lower 48 had been headed. The salmon were running, and the people in those vehicles were like hungry bears trundling to the riverbank to pack their bellies with fish and roe. The glacial river was cold and wide and fast and mineral rich, a strange, almost tropical shade of aqua, and thousands of fishermen and -women, but mostly -men, were lined up shoulder to shoulder for miles along both banks, mindlessly, recklessly, hurling their hooks into the rushing water and one after the other yanking them immediately
back with a glittering, twisting salmon snagged at the end. It was the warm-up to an annual potlatch, an ancient midsummer harvest rite, and the native people had followed the example of the bears for thousands of years. But somehow, as I drove slowly past them, these people—in their greed and desperation to take from the river as many of the salmon that survived last year’s rite as they could—seemed oddly postmodern. Postapocalyptic, actually. For soon there would be no more salmon returning here to spawn. We all knew that. Never mind the catastrophic effect of dams and oil spills and nuclear leakage, we knew that the millions of adult salmon being hooked, bagged, and tossed into coolers and freezers from California’s Klamath River north to Alaska were likely to be the last of these magnificent creatures we’d ever see. And none of these folks flipping fish into tubs and coolers looked especially hungry. They were mostly on the overfed side of fitness. So why were they pigging out like this? I wondered. This was more like a feeding frenzy than a ritual, and it sure was not a sport, I decided, and drove on in my Hummer.