Couchsurfing Scotland, or How to Drown in a Bog

One evening during my European jaunt I went out with an Irish friend. Forgive the stereotyping – yes, Hibernia, you have given the world great things like Yeats, Joyce, The Pogues, Hurling, the turf spade, Ginger Ale and the word ‘quiz‘ – but he got drunk in the way only an Irishman can (again, not trying to reinforce the reputation, but google ‘Things Invented in Ireland’ and the top result is a collegehumor.com list of drinking games). The night progressed from shots to confessions of emotional states to a street fight (between us) to a series of bro-hugs and oaths of eternal friendship (again, between us).

Earlier in the night, somewhere between fight and I-love-you-sho-mush-man, I commented to Paddy, “The English are good to drink with, but you people take it to another level. Every Irish night out seems to go batshit.”

He snorted. “That’s because they’re fucking English. We’re human beings. We’re Celts.” Then he took another shot.

I nodded. There is something about the Celts that has always appealed to me, and I hasten to add I don’t have a drop of Irish, Scottish, Manx or Welsh blood, so please don’t think of me as the sort of American with a great-aunt’s roommate named Conroy who feels the need to go to Muckanaghederdauhaulia and bleat about my ‘heritage’ to anyone who’ll listen in County Galway.

But that mix of melodramatic fatalism, passion, dry humor and sustained substance abuse does hold a place in my heart. It has ever since my first trip into the Celt-o-sphere, undertaken seven years ago as a college student on summer break. It’s a story worth a couchsurfing post, although the terminology may be more accurately expressed as ‘bogsurfing.’

Here’s what happened.

Step 1: “I love zee North”

I met David in Ullapool after taking an 18-hour bus from London to Aberdeen to Middle-earth. No, not really, but…well, really. Have you ever been to the Northwest highlands of Scotland? Ullapool is a lonely point of reference stabbed into a coastline shredded by a sea monster.

You are not in Norway, but these, friends, are fjords: great, brown and gray valleys carpeted in soft moss and fairy groves of damp red lichen, buttered at sunset – and night comes slow this far north – by clots of dark, purple heather. There are sunny days, but I never experienced them. I was here in deep summer, but the sky was steel gray and the ocean was steel gray and all the light and color had been leached from the land. Hobbits trek this  way on the road to Mt Doom.

David was another American student. He had been studying in Edinburgh; I had finished a semester in Prague. School was out and, in the American tradition, we were backpacking across Europe.

At home, my friends were entering journalism internships, complaining about being paid $600 a week in those heady days of non-newspaper collapse. I was broke, living off of a budgeted thirteen British pounds a day, which was to include lodging, which was usually the chairs of train stations. Food was a bottle of water, peanut butter, a Snickers if I could afford it. The rest went to lodging. If that element of financial management went out the window, I could double my caloric intake.

This was 2002, before the days of official Couchsurfing, although I couchsurfed in spirit, and sometimes, reality. If no one was offering a couch or room and there weren’t public transportation terminals to doss in, I’d snatch naps on park benches. Or else I’d sneak into the dormitories of youth hostels, paying for one night and shifting my stuff around in the mornings. It was distasteful and dishonest; I hope being 21 was something of an excuse.

I got my comeuppance every now and then. Never caught, but sometimes my dorm mates were weirder than the beer-breaths at the bus stop. One morning I woke up, or more accurately, was woken up, in northern Scotland at 5am by the sort of hardcore trekkers Scotland attracts. They were, of course, Germanic – from Deutschland proper and neighboring Austria, rustling plastic bags about, spreading nutella on toast, gobbling on like farm animals in Bavarian German.

One of them must have noticed the stink eye I was directing towards them.

“Must be up early. Vee need to make zee summit by noon, ja?”

I grunted ‘ja,’ then went back to bed, comforting myself with D-Day fantasies.

David was also a trekker, but he was cool: a  pony-tailed Coloradan, the sort of laidback granola eating, gaiter-wearing hippie who I imagine will be  reunited with some distant day in Telluride. We were both seeking the same thing: distance from the hot, bustling summer swelter of urban Europe in July in favor of windswept isolation and a palpable sense of loneliness.

One day we managed to convince a lovely, elderly Scottish woman to rent us two spare cots in her boarding house. It was inhabited by a rogues’ gallery: a Scottish pensioner with a Sean Connery brogue and Hemingway beard named Jim, who was exploring his homeland in his retirement; a crew of gentleman-ly fishermen, mostly swarthy, quiet Portuguese with small dark eyes and navy beanies who dragged on cigarettes that smelled like rotten sweat and ate frittatas and cod in the communal kitchen.

A member of their crew wasn’t Portuguese, though, didn’t speak in that odd muddle of Iberian lisp and chewy, Slavonic-sounding accents. He was French; chestnut skin, thinning silver hair, pale blue eyes as wild as a seagull. He wasn’t a permanent member of the crew, and only fished when he wanted to.

I walked in on David speaking to him one evening.

“Je vis à Bayonne, mais je viens ici chaque année.”

“He says he comes here every year,” David said, noting the question on my face.

“Why?”

He turned, staring at the empty docks outside, and blew his cigarette  out the window. “I love zee North. I love zee winters. Ze emptiness. It’s always winter here, non?”

(Next time: getting lost on the Islands at the End of the Earth)