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More from Chapter 5: Harris Dance
I never believed in love at first sight, not logical, not logical at all. Then one cold summer afternoon I stepped off a ferry onto the Scottish island of Harris in the Outer Hebrides, and all bets were off. I was in love, and I knew it immediately.
Harris has ruined me for other islands. It is absurdly beautiful. Spare and impossible, brilliant and wild and obscure. The angle of light in this extreme northern latitude creates intensely blue-green water. With every passing cloud the kaleidoscope shifts to reveal riots of wildflower colors against bright green grass. Bone white beaches give way to a jigsaw of peat bogs and purple-brown heather moors. Even in the mist, shades of gray seem richer and more varied, like an artfully developed black and white photograph, too perfect to colorize.
When my research on traditional music led me to Harris, I had no way of knowing how visually stunning it would be. Tourists–-even people from the Scottish mainland–-rarely visit here. It wasn’t until I came here myself that I realized how much Harris is like its music–-haunting and weird and beautiful.
Its landscapes are familiar in the way things are familiar to you in a strange dream. You know the kind of dream where you’re talking to someone and suddenly they’ve become a kitchen appliance, but that seems sort of normal? You’re vaguely aware that something’s odd about it, but it feels just real enough that you don’t question the moment.
That’s Harris. Okay, things don’t actually turn into kitchen appliances on the island (at least not that I’m aware of) but if they did, you wouldn’t necessarily question it at the time. I had arranged for a rental car to be waiting for me when I got off the ferry in the small village of Tarbert. This does not, on the surface, seem to be a monumental sentence. I rented a car in Tarbert.
In fact, however, there are no cars in Tarbert to rent. There are no cars for rent on the entire Isle of Harris, this one had to be imported, imported from the neighboring Isle of Lewis, and specially delivered to the ferry landing by a very confused young man who then had to take a ferry and two buses back to the place where he lived.
I would have been happy to get around Harris by bus instead of renting a car, but there are also no buses on Harris. Well, that’s not true–-you can book a tour bus that allows you to observe the native habitat from the safety of a coach window, as though you’re traveling through a giant diorama in a lunar museum, or a theme park safari on Mars. But I just needed basic transportation, not a docent tour, so I jumped through all the necessary hoops to rent a car.
The thing I hadn’t counted on was that after two weeks on the road–-on foot, by bus, in planes and ferries and small boats–-my new form of transportation would be the most bizarre driving experience of my life.
On Harris, things are almost what they seem. It looked liked an ordinary little car, the roads looked like ordinary little motorways. I had some experience with right-hand drive, decent hand-eye coordination, and a good driving record.
But like the guy at the dinner party who turns into a toaster, this little car became a surreal vehicular capsule for me as I pulled out of the ferry terminal. My brain began to feel like it was swimming against a strong current–-I was on the wrong side of the car, with the wrong hand on the gear shift, on the wrong side of the road, in a deserted village of steep hills and one way streets, on an island where all of the road signs are in Gaelic.
Everything was almost normal, but just wrong enough to make me feel nervous and excited and a little queasy. Sure signs you’re falling in love.
Less than a mile out of town, you leave behind everything you ever expected to see on a road. Twisting mountain two-lanes give way to a single-track ribbon that skitters across the top of ridge lines and plunges around turns where only certain species of athletic goats have any business exploring.
While you’re trying to breathe normally and avoid breaking the steering wheel with your grip, you happen to be passing some of the most breathtaking scenery in the world. Not that you can look.
If you were and ant, driving a tiny four speed rental car over a gravel pile at the seashore, you might get some of the same scenery. Everything is out of proportion. Boulders the size of Volkswagons are carelessly strewn around on the backs of immeasurably large slabs of pink granite. Between them, tiny skyscrapers of rock jut out from the earth in jagged configurations like a New York skyline in miniature. Below you (as the phrase ‘plunging to her death’ springs to mind at regular intervals) you catch glimpses of the spectacular Minch, the giant rushing strait that separates the Outer Hebrides from the mainland of Scotland.
Careening around sheer curves toward the west side of the island, you encounter the mighty North Atlantic, throwing herself passionately against the craggy coastline of Scotland’s final edge. Look closely, and you might also notice the odd surfer throwing himself passionately against the craggy coastline. Though it might be difficult to picture Rob Roy, William Wallace or Mary Queen of Scots hitching up their garb to hang ten, if they had only known about it they could have taken advantage of what surfers here call "supreme European hard-core conditions" on the chilly windswept coast of Harris. Duuude.
In fact, those tanned and tousled surfer dudes (and lasses) are among the few species of tourists to regularly brave these roads. The sight of little cars wearing giant surfboard hats, toddling around the rocky Scottish Highlands would have cracked me up if I hadn’t been so thoroughly occupied with my own impending death each time I met one coming around a steep mountain road.
The sight was a little cheerful, I must admit–-a small reminder that you’re not alone in this wild and empty landscape. You don’t see a car for an hour, then the first one you pass is filled with grinning surfer zombies and has a neon green wing strapped to its roof. Another pleasantly surreal moment in the Hebrides.
While we’re on the subject of driving on Harris, I would now like to say a few words about sheep. Sheep are evil. Lambs are cute and evil.
They dance and trot and cavort around the roads as though they were paid to terrify tourists. Here’s the typical scene: An evil mother and her evil wee lamb will be standing quietly on the roadside, grinning conspiratorially. You slow down to make sure they’re not going to startle and dart out in front of you. (Which of course is their plan.) They seem steady, so you proceed. When you get about 6 feet away, the evil lamb kicks up its rotten, adorable little hind feet and bounces merrily into oncoming traffic (you.)
Since there is nowhere that you can swerve, being on a ribbon of pavement roughly the width of an Olympic balance beam, you slam on the brakes, killing the engine of the car (which you forgot was a standard shift) and skidding on little bits of gravel leftover from the last time a driver encountered the fluffy little Devil’s spawn along this stretch of road.
The evil wee sheepie is now standing in the road ahead of you, and is casually being joined by Mom. You catch your breath, re-start the car, and wait for the little monster to move. He does not. Mom lies down on the road and continues chewing her grass. No amount of horn blowing, engine revving, stomping-around, arm-waving or even the eventual sheep-butt-slapping convinces her to hurry in any way.
By the way, did I mention that these are single track roads? So now your choice is to wait in your car for Mommie Dearest and lambikens to amble away at their leisure, while another car or tour bus comes inevitably hurtling toward you in a head-on fashion, or abandon your vehicle and wait in the ditch while you amuse the sheep with a variety of noisy threatening gestures.
Sheep were brought to these islands in the late 1700s during the brutal Highland Clearances, because they’re a low-maintenance animal who can graze unattended for most of the year with minimal supervision. During this horrible shift in the sociological structure of the Hebrides, wealthy land owners destroyed the homes, communities and lives of subsistence farmers (crofters) who had worked the difficult land for generations, in order to bring in more profitable and less troublesome sheep.
Left in the wake of the Clearances were people of the Highlands and Hebrides who were either forced onto emigration ships bound for Canada, or in some extreme cases even sold to America as indentured servants to pay off their debts. Over the next 150 years, family after crofting family–-hundreds of thousands in all–-would be driven out of the Highlands and Islands of Scotland, their homes burned and farms destroyed– and in their place, the sheep.
In1868 Lady Dunmore, who owned the entire island of South Harris, recognized the potential of the beautiful local cloth woven from these sheep on Harris. She began a merchandising campaign which brought international attention to the ancient craft of making woolen clothes. Now, nearly a century and a half later, the famous Harris Tweed made here must still meet three specifications: It must be woven in the Hebrides, in the home of the weaver, without the aid of any power. Harris tweed has become an internationally recognized standard for high-quality wool cloth, and an important staple of the local economy.
Today crofters have added the raising of sheep to farming and maintaining other livestock, in order to make a living on the island. The sheep are mostly Cheviot, a bare-faced variety with black muzzle and feet, which roam freely, intermingling with other flocks as they graze the hills (and confound local drivers) until shearing time. The crofters then shear the ones marked with their own blotch of paint, and turn them loose again to begin growing another crop of wool.
Although I accumulated a bag full of the famous Harris tweed to bring home to family and friends, I could never resist collecting for myself little tufts of wool found floating around the hills and beaches on Harris. There’s something so pleasing about holding a puff of fiber in your hand, freshly rubbed from its owner’s coat against a bramble or fence, and imagine it being spun, dyed, carded and woven into the same cloth that has kept people of this island warm and dry through the centuries.
The tuft of wool, more than the finished tweed, reminds me of Harris. And it reminds me of Harris’ music most of all.
The music of the Hebrides overlaps in style and function from one island to another. Songs are regional, one is from Uist, another is specific to Skye or Benbecula or Harris. But into the common tradition each island contributes a set of songs made for the same purposes–-songs for dancing, or for milking, songs that tell stories or offer charms, and songs for waulking the wool of these sheep.
Those are called oran luaidh, fulling songs. After the wool was woven into fabric, the wet cloth had to be worked for hours to open the fibers, and shrink the threads into a tight, weather-resistant unit. Waulking or fulling the wool was hard work, done traditionally by a group of women pounding the cloth in rhythmic patterns over several hours, to the haunting melodies of the oran luaidh.
And now, a few words about urine. If you’re still reading (and haven’t thrown the book down in disgust) you might be wondering how the subject of pee would find its way into a discussion about a lovely island song. A healthy curiosity that will not go unrewarded here.
It seems you can’t discuss the traditional process of preparing wool cloth without running afoul (you should pardon the expression) of a little talk about excrement. You see, the magical tuft of wool, as it issues in its original state from the speedbumps on Harris, is designed to keep sheep dry and warm, not humans. Toward that end, it is a coarse, kinky, hard fiber which repels water. Perfectly fabulous if there are 12 kilos of it growing out of your skin, and your job is to stand around in the North Atlantic rain directing traffic.
Not so perfect once it’s shorn and spun into threads which resist absorbing dye. Unless you want greasy, lanolin-filled clothing that’s a dirty gray-white sheepy sort of color, you have to find a way to break down the oils in the fibers, and coax them into accepting the dye. Once the fibers are open and the dye has entered, the colors could still bleed and fade. You need a chemical called a mordant which will fix the dye chemically to the wool.
Guess what naturally occurring product of a night at the pub is nature’s perfect dye mordant? Yup. As it gets stale, urine becomes richer in ammonia because of the decomposition of the urea. Ammonia is an excellent dye mordant– so much so that in the heyday of the British chemical industry, demand for urine outstripped the supply that locals could produce each day! For a few years urine was actually collected and shipped from Newcastle and London to the English dye factory at Ravenscar.
But that’s not all, folks. Stale urine also has the chemical advantage of being highly alkaline, which breaks down the naturally occurring oils in wool, opens the fibers, and shrinks the interwoven threads into tightly locked fabric. This makes the finished garment waterproof and wind-resistant, two excellent qualities if you live in the Hebrides.
Before you begin looking suspiciously at your Harris Tweed jacket, take heart that the process of dyeing and fulling wool today is done entirely without benefit of the chamberpot. Alum mordants and detergent alkaline takes care of the chemical part of the process, and industrial fulling machines have taken over the all-day task of pounding the cloth by hand. Still though, the beautiful, rhythmic oran luaidh are an important part of the musical heritage of the Hebrides.
Waulking songs are almost always in a modal scale that is unusual to the American ear. Most folks can easily identify the cheerful sound of a major scale, and the sadder sound of a minor scale. For much of the Western world, those are the only two modes ever heard. But Hebridean music is based on other combinations of intervals, adding Dorian, Mixolydian and others to the palette from which a tune can be painted. This is one of the key factors (sorry) that goes into making the music of the Hebrides sound a little exotic, primal, ancient to our ears.
A waulking was a social as well as a practical activity. Stories were told, gossip was swapped, young girls were teased about potential suitors. In such a barren countryside, communities were tightly linked through customs and music, handed down from one generation to the next in the oral tradition.
The group worked together for hours, and the waulking songs set a united rhythm which gained pace as the wool became dryer and could be moved around the table faster. These songs could have dozens of verses, each punctuated by a chorus.
The chorus for a waulking song is usually a series of vocables–-meaningless syllables and wordfragments from the language–-which are chanted in a repeating pattern between each verse. Once the vocable chant was established, one singer weaves the story of a song over the course of 20 or more short verses, and everyone responds with the chant. The result is both energizing and hypnotic.
To me, one of the most beautiful of these is Heman Dubh, which Christine Primrose taught me years ago while staying at my house. Around the dining table late one night, we put out a bottle of scotch and began to sing. By morning I had the song, although my Gaelic pronunciation has never felt good enough for me to trust. I love to sing the story in English, though, so people can appreciate the meaning of this song in which a man named Heman (pronounced HAY-man) dreams of a way to rescue his sweetheart from a castle. The chant calls him ‘dark Heman’, or in Gaelic Heman dubh.
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Heman dubh ‘S truagh nach tigeadh
Heman dubh Siud gham iarraidh
Heman dubh Gille ‘s litir
Hi-ri- oro Each ‘s diallaid
Heman dubh hi ri oro Ho ro huo
Heman dubh Nam biodh agam
Heman dubh Sgiath a’ghlaisein
Heman dubh Iteag nan eoin
Hi ri oro Spog na lachain
Heman dubh hi ri oro Ho ro huo
Heman dubh Sheolainn na caoil
Heman dubh Air an tarsuinn
Heman dubh An Caol Ileach
Heman dubh ‘S an Caol Arcaibh
Heman dubh hi ri oro Ho ro huo
Heman dubh Rachainn a steach
Heman dubh Chun a’ chaisteal
Heman dubh ‘S bheirinn a mach
Hi ri oro As mo leannan
Heman dubh hi ri oro Ho ro huo
The following English translation is verse by verse, but it doesn’t correspond word for word. Much of Gaelic poetry is hard to express in literal English phrases. But the thoughts are so powerful they deserve to be understood even by those of us who aren’t fortunate enough to have the gift of Gaelic.
Heman dubh If only I had
Heman dubh A horse and a saddle
Heman dubh A messenger, a letter
Hi-ri- oro Coming for me
Heman dubh hi ri oro Ho ro huo (Vocables, wordless sounds)
Heman dubh If only I had
Heman dubh Wing of the sparrow
Heman dubh Flight of birds
Hi ri oro Claw of the wild duck
Heman dubh hi ri oro Ho ro huo
Heman dubh The straits I would sail
Heman dubh Across the narrows
Heman dubh The Sound of Isla
Hi ri oro The Sound of Orkney
Heman dubh hi ri oro Ho ro huo
Heman dubh I would enter
Heman dubh Into the castle
Heman dubh I would bring out
Hi ri oro My dear sweetheart
Heman dubh hi ri oro Ho ro huo
Heman dubh hi ri oro Ho ro huo
Heman dubh hi ri oro Ho ro huo
Heman dubh hi ri oro Ho ro huo
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