LEARNING THE ROPES

‘The best thing for being sad,’ [said] Merlyn, ‘is to learn something. That is the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies… you may see the world around you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honor trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then – to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the thing for you.’ T.H. White (from The Once and Future King)

Six or seven years ago I was wandering round a second-hand bookstore, when I stumbled on a book called Scottish Island Hopping. I was living in Massachusetts at the time, money was tight, and the chance that I might be able to get back to Scotland (let alone go ‘island hopping’) was extremely slim. And yet I felt compelled to buy that book. Like so many emigrants, I was hungry for a second chance, the impossible promise of return.

I had grown up on the east coast of Scotland , in the Border country south of Edinburgh . But the islands I dreamed of were the windswept islands of the Hebrides , two ragged archipelagoes which stretch for 240 miles along the western coast. As a child, I’d stayed on Isle Ornsay , a tidal peninsula off the coast of Skye . This was the place where I first began to write and draw, not just for school, but for myself. I picked wildflowers and stuck them in my scrapbook, carefully labelling each one in heavy pencil: Ragged Robin, English Stonecrop, Tormentil. I knelt by the rock-pools and watched the hermit crabs. I was entranced by everything I saw, from the big lumbering sheep with their dung-encrusted tails to the sea-gulls crying their high glittering cries far above my head.

Years passed, and I moved to the United States . Scotland disappeared into the mists of long ago. But little by little, I began to invent opportunities to come back. I taught a couple of workshops at the Scottish Poetry Library and the University of Edinburgh . I did a presentation at the Scottish Arts Council. And then, in the summer of 2002, I received an email from Joyce Gilbert, of the non-profit organization, SpeyGrian. She wanted me to teach journal-writing to a group of teachers, on a 100 year old sailing boat going round the western isles. The plan was to visit Iona, Staffa , Rum and Eigg, stopping for a while on each. Scottish island hopping, this time for real! I rang her up long distance, giddy with excitement. Of course, I told her. I’d be delighted to come.

Scotland has always valued education; more, some would argue, than its powerful neighbour to the south. Colleges are free, and almost 50% of Scottish students go on to some form of higher education. Meanwhile, devolution and the establishment of a Scottish Parliament has led to increasingly lively debates on such issues as identity and values, accountability and freedom. There is a sense of change in the air, of expansion and opportunity. Joyce’s emails reflected this. She hoped, she said, that by the end of the course, everyone would have experienced for themselves what a ‘creative education’ might look like, bringing together the best of the arts, philosophy and science.

Early in August, I arrived at the little harbour of Craobh Haven , in the company of Joyce herself, Robbie Nicol from the University of Edinburgh , and artist-naturalist Uwe Stoneman. We four were to be the docents, providing the academic underpinnings for the trip, which had been modelled on a seminar developed by Dr Bob Jickling at Yukon College , Canada . The idea was to combine experiential learning in the outdoors with critical conversations on sustainability, biodiversity and citizenship. Joyce had come supplied with a thick batch of reading material, and (weather permitting) she had also organized various encounters for us along the way. We were to meet with Cheryl Jones of the Hebridean Whale and Dolphin Trust, with traditional storyteller, Ian Stephen, and with local activist, Maggie Fyffe.

It was a sunny day, and the harbour was crowded with brilliant white yachts and pleasure-craft. Our boat stood out among the rest: black, with scarlet trim and tall brown masts, the name Leader lettered on her side. We heaved our bags on board, and Joyce introduced us to our crew: skipper, Ewan Hind; first mate, Andy Murray; and Sue Alsop, long time sailor and professional chef. Several of the teachers had already arrived, and more were still to come, among them two geographers and a biology teacher, an art teacher and a librarian, as well as the head of Dunkeld Primary, one of Scotland ’s experimental eco-schools. There were ten participants altogether, plus the four of us and the three crew members: a total of seventeen. Lunch was spread on deck, and we milled around, helping ourselves to quiche and salad and fresh fruit, and, rather shyly, beginning to explore the boat.

She’d been built in Devon in 1892, and had started life as a fishing-trawler, working out of Lowestoft in Suffolk . After a chequered career, which included almost eighty years in Sweden , she had been sold to Ewan’s parents, Don and Gillie Hind, who ran her as a holiday charter boat up and down the western isles.  Now, in her old age, she was back at home in Devon , under the auspices of the Trinity Sailing Foundation, which used her both as a holiday charter boat and as a training vessel for young people.

The deck was scrubbed, the paintwork gleaming, and it was a pleasure to walk about, the soft blue of the more distant islands just visible behind the green and tawny hills. But below decks was something else again. The galley was located there, and the engine room; there were two shower-stalls and two toilets (known as ‘heads’), as well as bunks for everyone on board. Some of these were very cramped indeed. You slid yourself in sideways like a sheet of paper into a drawer, and it was impossible to sit up without bumping your head. There was, however, one large room, with benches set around a wooden table. This was to be our dining-room and sitting-room, and our classroom too, on rainy days.

I stood in that room, and stared at the empty table, wondering what to expect. I wanted to believe that Joyce’s optimism would be justified. But I had not grown up in Scotland for nothing. Like most people my age and older, I had a stern Scots dominie in my head, a gaunt, old-fashioned schoolmaster, with bony wrists and trailing chalk-smeared gown. He leaned over my shoulder now, pointing with his tawse at an invisible horizon. A trip like this, he said, was nothing but a piece of self-indulgence. Didn’t I know that one needed at least a modicum of misery to prove something of value, pedagogically?  He swung around, grazing me with one sharply pointed elbow. ‘You lot will be enjoying yourselves altogether too much!’ he said.

I climbed back up on deck, wondering who else was still in private battle with the dominie.  But there was no time to ask. As soon as lunch was over, all other considerations gave way before the first priority: how to run the boat. Leader was equipped with a perfectly serviceable engine, but if the sails were to be used, the crew could not manage them alone. Ignorant and out of shape as we mostly were, a disparate group ranging in age from twenty-five to sixty, our help was needed in everything from ‘stowing the anchor’ (coiling the heavy metal chain deep in the wooden hold) to ‘sweating and tailing on the sheets.’

‘What does that mean?’ someone asked. Certainly the phrase seemed drenched in sexual innuendo.

‘What will my husband say when I tell him that I spent this week sweating and tailing on the sheets with another man?’ someone else threw in.

But as Andy, our first mate, explained, this unlikely phrase in fact possessed an ordinary workaday meaning. The ‘sheets’ in question had nothing to do with bed-linen. They were, in fact, the ropes used to control the sails. ‘Sweating and tailing’ described the system used to draw down on a rope, where one person pulled at it and fed it into a belaying pin (‘sweating’) and the other came behind, and took up the slack (‘tailing’). These were no light tasks. ‘Sweating,’ in particular, meant exactly what it said.

Over the course of the six days we had together, our nautical vocabulary grew, from a passing acquaintance with ‘port’ and ‘starboard’ to words like ‘mizzen’ and ‘mainsail,’ ‘gaff’ and ‘boom.’

Lynnette Borradaille, one of our geographers, put together a poem entitled ‘Leader Alphabet,’ listing words like ‘bowsprit’ and ‘bollard,’ ‘cleat’ and ‘compass,’ ‘foc’stle’ and ‘thumbcleat’ ‘windlass,’ ‘winch’ and ‘yawl.’ When Andy told us repeatedly ‘There are no ropes on this boat!’ (the preferred word being ‘halyard’),  the art teacher, Alistair Thomson, invented a fictional skipper called ‘Captain Jib Halyard,’ who later appeared on deck in full regalia: a strange colourful figure pieced together from two boot-shaped rocks and bright yellow oilskins, with a round plastic fender for a head and a perky sailor’s cap.

But the lessons we learned from the boat went far beyond a handful of new jokes and an improved vocabulary. We were, as Alistair said later, ‘totally out of our depths – and not only metaphorically.’ The work could be gruelling, and it was imperative we learn to pull together as a team. Awkwardness fell away as everyone did their best simply to add energy and muscle to the task at hand. The larger lesson was that however hard we worked, sweating and tailing and (another luscious phrase) ‘scandalizing the sails’, nature itself was always going to have the last word.*

We had a couple of sunny days on board, and some brilliantly clear nights, where the Perseids sprang across the sky like celestial fireworks. But we had some dreich days too, grey and damp and melancholy, when the wind blew at thirty-five mph and visibility was a hundred yards at best. We could not land on Staffa or Iona as originally hoped. The weather was just too unpredictable. For some of us this was a genuine disappointment. But there was an exhilaration too, a heightened sense of physical engagement. Back on land, it would have been easy to hole up by the fire and ignore what was happening outside. On board Leader, though at all times warm and protected and well-fed, we were also forced to meet the elements head-on. One teacher named this afterwards as among the highlights of the trip. ‘The excitement of direct contact [… ] with nature in the raw. Being in the environment in a very vivid way.’

It helped, of course, that (rain or shine) the islands themselves were so entirely beautiful.  I think of waking up one morning, anchored off Tobermory, on the coast of Mull . The sun was bright on the painted fronts of the houses (scarlet and lemon-yellow and deep blue), and across the water we could see the velvety yellow-green of Ardnamurchan. By midday, the clouds had rolled in, and it was considerably colder. But even then, the land and sea continued to yield up their own delicate surprises, from the Sgurr of Eigg cutting against the milky sky to the chip of golden moon caught in the rigging. When we did disembark, first at Eigg, and then much later at Tobernochty, on the island of Luing , the ground lurched under us heavy and swaying, and we stumbled up the narrow roads, edged with fuchsia and mombretia, newly astonished by the dazzling white of the sheep against the emerald green fields. I remember feeling (after four or five days at sea) as if the earth itself had been given back to us, potent and renewed.

For many of the participants, this beauty came as something of a revelation. One teacher wrote later of how much it had meant to him to see the Scottish landscape ‘from such a completely different angle.’ Another spoke of the many moments of awe she had experienced. It was clear she saw their value, and would have liked to share that ‘sense of wonder’ with her students too. Apart from the thick diagonal of the Central Belt, Scotland is predominantly rural. Nonetheless, there are many children for whom ordinary country life still seems as far away as Mars.

Our chef, Sue Alsop, described a group from the inner city who had spent time on Leader. She had offered them fresh strawberries as a treat, but the children wouldn’t eat them. They recognised strawberry jam and strawberry yoghurt, but strawberries themselves were completely unfamiliar. ‘Why don’t you try a few?’ asked Sue, and in the end some of the children did manage to enjoy them. But others turned their noses up. One child even said they were too bitter.

Robbie Nicol, who worked in the Outdoor Program at the University of Edinburgh , had a similar story. He told of taking a group of Glasgow children to the hills, and literally having to teach them how to walk. ‘They didn’t know how to deal with an incline – they didn’t know how to climb up the hill, far less climb down.’  One little girl (‘a hard wee nut’) gazed at the long slope stretching ahead of her and asked why she couldn’t see the top. ‘It’s up in the clouds,’ said Robbie. ‘Will we go up into the clouds?’ she asked him, suddenly excited at the thought.  ‘Will we touch them?’ ‘Aye, you will,’ he told her. They climbed the hill together, and did, finally, reach the summit. ‘Do you feel the clouds?’ asked Robbie. The child put out her hands and felt the moisture that surrounded them. Indeed she did, she said. A lovely tale of ignorance and revelation.

It was one of the great pleasures of the boat that everyone had the chance to tell such stories. They emerged casually, without fanfare, as we helped with the dishes in the tiny galley, or talked across the narrow passageway between our bunks. In an ordinary conference setting, we might have been tempted to leave the building, to take off on our own or in small groups. But on board there was simply nowhere else to go. We were together in solitary, musing mode, as well as at more gregarious times.  Roles and expectations fell away, as, almost without noticing it, we began to share our stories and to turn to each other for information and advice. I remember, for example, asking Lynnette about geology as we passed the cockscomb Sgurr of Eigg.

Most of the island was limestone, she told me, overlaid by sheets of volcanic lava, known as basalt. Because basalt is igneous, it contains air bubbles. But here you might also come across ‘vesicular basalt,’ where the air holes were filled up with semi precious stones. As for the Sgurr itself, it was made of black pitchstone, which had cooled to form hexagonal columns similar to those at Fingal’s Cave .

Next morning, anchored off Rum, Joyce happened to mention that most of the peaks had mellifluous Norse names. I asked her to tell me some, and at once she started listing them: Askival, Hallival, Barkeval, Trollaval, Ainshval, Ruinsival – magical sounds, like something out of Tolkein.

In similar fashion, the resident artist, Uwe Stoneman, helped us to distinguish the various birds we saw. Gannets, guillemots, razorbills, shearwaters were all immediately recognisable to his trained and discriminating eye. I especially remember how he singled out the adult guillemot, upright and at home upon the water, in comparison to its hunched uneasy offspring.

Such things perhaps sound obvious – too simple, too straightforward even to name. But having spent a lot of time travelling alone, in a happy blur of self absorption, I know just how precious it is to have such details pointed out, and how powerfully such teaching cuts through one’s own habitual patterns. To learn such things ‘in the round’ as it were, is to go back to childhood, where you point at the white flower emerging from the slush, and your mother smiles and tells you it’s a snowdrop. It is to ask and to be answered in the here and now, when the question is alive on your lips and in your eyes, and to be satisfied at once, in present time. It’s the kind of learning that human beings have done from the beginning, the kind that is so natural to us that it is now almost invisible, when so much reaches us at second hand, via the book or the computer or the television screen.

Indeed, such a high proportion of our information is now ‘virtual’ that experiential learning has come to look like a luxury – and at the same time, paradoxically, like nothing much at all. It is as if such basic experiences as musing, wondering, and cloud-gazing had shrunk to empty space on the curriculum, to be filled by other, worthier activities: more practising commands on the computer, more units of pre-digested information.  Many teachers recognize the loss in this. But at the same time, they are not sure what best to do. They are happy to pay lip-service to ‘hands-on’ education. But again and again, they find themselves unable to follow through in terms of actual programming. It is ‘too expensive’ for them to organize, ‘too unwieldy’ for them to write up. They don’t know how to test it or define it. And it is true that the incremental gains can seem minute. But they are none the less valuable for that. As in the case of Robbie’s ‘hard wee nut,’ they can help shape and revitalize an entire world view.

The group on Leader understood this very well. They did not need to be persuaded. It was as if the literal voyage had become the catalyst for a whole series of inward journeys, with each person exploring the landscape (and seascape too) of his or her own mind. ‘Moving through the landscape on a physical and mental journey is a really moving way of learning!’ wrote one participant, only half in jest. And just as the external world was studded with interesting topographical features (the bulky headland of Ardnamurchan, the Edwardian extravaganza of Kinloch Castle on Rum), so that internal landscape was marked with stories.  When Joyce asked, in the final evaluation, what was the most useful thing the teachers had come away with, they wrote again and again of the pleasure of  listening to each other’s stories, and of how that had led them to question their own entrenched assumptions. Fervently, they praised the power of casual conversation. ‘Stimulating discussion with other professionals,’ someone wrote. ‘Much more open to the views, knowledge and enthusiasm of others.’

Meanwhile, Joyce made sure that our easy, serendipitous exchanges were buttressed by more familiar kinds of learning. She provided each of us with a thick packet of articles for discussion. My own favourites were excerpts from three full length books: Elliot Eisner’s The Educational Imagination, James Hunter’s The Other Side of Sorrow: Nature and People in the Scottish Highlands, and Alastair McIntosh’s Soil and Soul: People Versus Corporate Power. All three were new to me, and I found myself reading them greedily, Soil and Soul especially. It included a detailed account of the 1997 Eigg buy-out, when the islanders literally bought back their land from the absentee landowner: a crucial event in recent Scottish history.

It was a joy to read in this way, moving back and forth between landscape and current events, landscape and history. Joyce and I had both brought books on board, enough to constitute a small reference library. One of my own contributions was, inevitably, Scottish Island Hopping. The pages were old and foxed, and most of the practical details were wildly out of date. But it was here I learned the answer to a question that had been nagging me. Rum and Muck and Eigg all have obvious English homonyms. But ‘Rum’ in Gaelic has nothing to do with drink, just as ‘Muck’ has nothing to do with dirt, and ‘Eigg’ has nothing to do with hens. What did their names actually mean? At last I was able to find out. ‘Rum,’ it turned out, means ‘the isle of the ridge,’ ‘Muck’ means ‘sea-pig’ or ‘porpoise,’ and ‘Eigg’ means ‘notched,’ which is how it looks from the sea, as though a giant had bludgeoned a great hole across the middle of the island, leaving the two hills, Ben Buie and the Sgurr.

Learning such things, small as they were, helped me understand more clearly what an ‘integrated curriculum’ might actually feel like from inside. Suddenly a ‘creative education’ did not seem so impossibly out of reach. Robbie Nicol pointed out (as a Buddhist might) that all things are in fact interconnected or entwined. We don’t see geography or biology, history or geology as we move through a landscape. John Muir had remarked on this long ago: ‘When we try to pick out anything in Nature, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.’ We look around, we wonder, we begin to ask questions. Answers may come from books or videos or casual conversation. They may also come, as Joyce understood, from more formal, organized encounters.

Along with the readings (and of course the boat trip itself), Joyce had set up several meetings for us all. These were meant to be both informative and inspirational. But the lessons we drew were not always the obvious ones. For example, when we met with Cheryl Jones, education officer of the Hebridean Whale and Dolphin Trust, we were expecting a lively tale of local initiative. A sixty-five foot boat had just been purchased, and we crowded cheerfully aboard, and listened as Cheryl played us whale and dolphin calls on her computer. An impromptu poem emerged, with everyone comparing the calls to familiar sounds:  a didgeridoo, a squeaky door etc. But once we started to ask questions, it became clear that CD question kits and the computer simulations were really all that Cheryl was free to offer local children. She had hoped to take them on field-trips, using the boat as a floating classroom. But because of insurance issues, it seemed likely that this would be forbidden.

Not surprisingly, our session together turned into a problem-solving one, as we ourselves, newly exhilarated by our experience on Leader, did our best to provide Cheryl with names and email addresses of possible resources: a rather different outcome than Joyce had perhaps imagined.

The following day, we stopped to meet with Maggie Fyffe, one of the leaders of the Eigg buy-out. A small, sturdy woman, with long grey hair and bright blue eyes, she told us the story in lavish detail. What struck me most, apart from the gradual empowerment of the islanders themselves, was a throwaway remark by the millionaire philanthropist who came up with the bulk of the money. She had read about the buy-out in the Guardian newspaper, and was struck by the integrity of the islanders. ‘I would like to help,’ she told Maggie. ‘I would like to make a substantial donation.’ Maggie had expected five hundred pounds, or maybe a thousand. In fact the woman offered half a million pounds, which she later doubled. She needed no further persuasion. The story called to her, she said.

Later that day, when the Hebridean storyteller Ian Stephen came on board, he spoke to us of ‘way points’: the key words or images which hold a tale together. He explained that when he works with children in the schools, he begins by telling them a story, and then asks if they can name the way points. The children do their best to answer him. Ian writes each word or image up on the board, and together they set them in the right order. ‘Put the bones in the right order, and the spirit will come into them,’ says a character in Pinkola-Estes’ book, Women Who Run With the Wolves. Often, in real life, we don’t recognise the way points until we’ve reached our destination, and sometimes not even then. It’s only long afterwards, looking back over the landscape we’ve traversed, that the pattern suddenly reveals itself.

We felt this as a group, I think, when John Cairney, the journalist from the Times Educational Supplement, came on board the last night of our trip. He wanted to interview us and to write an article. He was a kindly figure, affable and robust, but possessed of a slightly ironical attitude towards our endeavour: the dominie again, that very familiar Scots distrust of pleasure. His camera-man moved among us, setting up photo ops, while Cairney started in with his interrogations. He wanted to know what we’d been up to for the past 5 days, what we thought we’d learned, and what we hoped to take away from it all. Everyone gathered round, struggling to summarize what was still then so amorphous: all the different things we’d garnered from our time together.

Uwe, our resident artist, and a natural rebel, was one of the most articulate. In normal circumstances, he said, you learn in spite of the environment, here you learned because of it, and what you learned had weight because it was combined with real experience, in the body and the bones, the muscles and the sweat. Alistair agreed, speaking up for what it had meant to be a student again, ignorant and needy.  ‘We were totally disoriented at first,’ he said. ‘We had to follow instructions and trust people who knew what they were doing, and we had to trust each other. We were captive to the elements. We had to negotiate with the weather.’ None of this had come especially easy. ‘But I feel a little more in tune with my pupils now,’ he said. ‘Having to learn the ropes.’

‘There are no ropes on this boat,’ Andy always said, mocking our landlubberly vocabulary. But we had learned them nonetheless. They ranged from a handful of practical skills like sweating and tailing, to tiny, almost invisible additions to our private knowledge banks: the name of a flower or a rock formation, the title of a book we planned to read. But there were other things too, harder to explain: crucial ineffables like humour and vulnerability and community. I think, for example, of one night on Loch Drumnabuidhe, bellowing songs into the starry sky. I think of Captain Jib Halyard, and of the games we played: four or five of us bouncing like children on the bright red inflatable fenders, racing each other back and forth across the deck.

There were quieter, more domestic moments too, like the one I noted late one rainy morning, close to the end of our trip. I looked up from my journal to see Robbie playing his flageolet at the big table, while Sue stood in the galley, cooking, and Ewan sat hunched over his charts. One of the teachers was fast asleep, her cheek pressed against the knobby wool of an old sweater, while another stared off into the distance, lost in thought, and yet another read a book of Ian’s poems. At least three separate conversations were also taking place. The noise of the engine was audible, the chirpy sound of Robbie’s whistle, and the murmur of all those different voices. This is what it looks like, I thought. This is the joy and fellowship to which we have won through.

You can plan a trip around the western isles, you can set up the readings and the educational encounters, but the most precious moments will still be serendipitous. One of my favourites was the night we were moored in Tobermory harbor, when Cheryl’s friend Petrea heaved her heavy wooden clarsach (the traditional Irish harp) across two of the adjacent boats, and dragged it below-decks so she could play for us. It was a magical evening: Robbie on the pipes; our skipper, Ewan, bent over his guitar;  and Petrea’s long fingers dipping in and out of the strings, her little finger crooked, as she played O’Carolan tunes, and sang, in a rich and throaty voice, ‘Down by the Sally Gardens.’

Then, on the last evening of all, as we entertained the journalist, John Cairney, a young man emerged in a bright yellow sea kayak from across the sunlit sea. This was Richard Parkinson of the Whale and Dolphin Conservation Society, on the last lap of his solo voyage round the British coast. We hauled him up on board to join us for a feast of salmon and shrimp and fresh fruit salad, and later watched as he paddled off into the sunset.

‘I love this,’ Joyce said. ‘His journey, our journey, and the way they intersect.’

It seemed to me afterwards that the same was true of all of us. It was as if we had been drawn together in a gigantic fishing-net, all our stories crossing and re-crossing, with Ian’s ‘way points’ gleaming in the mesh.  There were times, looking down at the bright weave of light upon the water, or up into the rigging, when they were almost visible: all the memories and hopes and stories, all the moments of delight and inspiration. I felt as if I could see them, shining in the sunlight: Uwe’s razorbills and guillemots, Cheryl’s computer-simulated dolphin call, the plankton glittering in the sea at night, a chip of golden moon.  

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