With his hands in his pockets and cap askew the wee fella wanders up the village street. If street it could be called. A single thread of narrow potholed tar stretches from crossroads to arched bridge, passing two wee shops and the green hut of Annabel the post mistress. A walk only to peer over the old humpbacked bridge to see if a Salmon had made it over the falls this tide to rest under the big rock where a worm could be dangled before its neb. Nothing resting there today.
Life
was free, simple and uncomplicated, and all that was on the wee fellas mind was
these leapers of waterfalls and figuring out how he might catch one. If not the
silver traveller Salmon, then the elusive ancient trout in the lake of the old
Strathcona estate. Big Loch Leven trout and Rainbows from a stocking seventy
years past. Peaty black and huge, these monsters were hard to tempt. If an
Islay malt gets its flavour from peaty phenols then these trout were marinated
in them. Lay them on a bed of grass and the darkness came away from their skin and
beautiful silver trout revealed underneath, with the pink slash along the side of
the rainbows seeming exotic. They say there is only one lake in Scotland. There
was one here too, until the locals passed away or left, and incomers called it
a lochan.
He
walked up to the old boat shed, a voyager canoe decaying in its midst, the paths
around the lake covered by thick rhododendron almost impassable. A lake where
he imagined the young Métis Isabella, paddled away her unhappiness with the
Scottish weather. No matter that Donald
her husband had tried so hard to bring Canada to her with his creation.
He
wandered back by Invercoe and onto the loch shore common grazing. Looking out
onto the sea loch and its Islands feeling belonging, and sense of wonder to
life. A life of potential outcomes and what
he might become when released from the torpor of a classroom. Not knowing then that childhood was mostly all
gains, and to come adulthood and loss.
He picked up a pebble
and threw it into the
sea.
And another, and
another.
He couldn’t stop.
He wasn’t trying to
fill the sea.
He wasn’t trying to
empty the beach.
He was just throwing
away,
nothing else but.
Like a kitten playing
he was practicing for
the future
when there’ll be so
many things
he’ll want to throw
away
if only his fingers
will unclench
and let them go.
“Small Boy” by Norman
MacCaig
