James' Journey: From the Scottish Highlands Via New York and Texas to Mars and Beyond

By James Hutchison

James is down on his luck and he's only twenty-something. To set his life on a better course, he travels to Scotland where he was born and spent the first six years of his life. If he can find his roots, he reckons on making a new beginning. From the moment he encounters his cousin, whose existence is unknown to almost everyone, James realizes adventures beyond even his imagination. He travels back to the United States and on to outer space and the land of spirits. Along the way, strangers met apparently by chance metamorphose into teachers who initiate James into the worldy mysteries of sex, career, marriage, parenthood, and death of a loved one. James, who narrates this fictional autobiography, divulges intimate material. His subjective and personal account of his journey includes much psychological material, such as dreams, fantasy, poetry, and visions.
This is a modern account of a young man's coming-of-age, told with the inside knowledge of a psychologist.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Sep 24, 2001
• ISBN: 9781469748511

James Hutchison

James Hutchison was born in Scotland in 1947. After graduate work in Journalism at Columbia University, he emigrated to the USA in 1971. In 1987, he was graduated with the Ed.D. in Counseling Psychology from the University of Houston. Today, Dr. Hutchison conducts a solo private practice in Houston.

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JAMES’ JOURNEY

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From the Scottish Highlands via New York and Texas to Mars and Beyond

James Hutchison

Writers Club Press

San Jose New York Lincoln Shanghai

James’ Journey

From the Scottish Highlands via New York and Texas to Mars and Beyond

All Rights Reserved © 2001 by James Hutchison

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping, or by any information storage retrieval system, without the permission in writing from the publisher.

Writers Club Press an imprint of iUniverse.com, Inc.

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ISBN: 0-595-19964-X

ISBN: 978-1-4697-4851-1 (ebook)

Printed in the United States of America

Contents

EPIGRAPH

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

INTRODUCTION

BOOK ONE

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

BOOK TWO

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

BOOK THREE

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

BOOK FOUR

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

BOOK FIVE

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

BOOK SIX

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

BOOK SEVEN

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

BOOK EIGHT

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT  

EPILOGUE

EPIGRAPH

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"It is the story of an unhappy love-affair. Such a recollection, which is composed of a large number of component ideas, is called a complex of ideas. The cement that holds the complex together is the feeling tone common to all the individual ideas, in this case unhappiness…..the complex has the effect that the subject does not react by arbitrary or random (responses) but derives most of his reactions from the complex.

……By no means everyone will disclose his secrets so openly and without embarrassment as this young man did."

Jung, C.G. The Psychological Diagnosis of Evidence, in The Collected Works of C.G. Jung, Volume 2, pp 321-322. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1973.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

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The author is grateful for the special assistance of four women. Lindy, Kate, and Sandi read the initial draft of each section as it came off the printer. They offered invaluable advice and comments. They encouraged the author to keep writing, even when he felt sure there was no more to say. Lindy also edited the manuscript in finer detail. The fourth person probably does not know the book exists. Irene lives in Scotland. The author has not seen or heard from her in over 30 years. It was a dream about Irene that germinated the entire project. Many other people have impressed the author with their distinctive personalities or unforgettable styles. They may or may not find aspects of themselves in some of the characters in the story. Irrespective of these several influences, final responsibility for what follows lies with the author alone.

INTRODUCTION

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James’ Journey is a fictional autobiography. The young man James recounts his travels and adventures, which include sex, mystery, and even some science fiction thrown in for good measure. After a few chapters, the discerning reader may notice that something more than an action-adventure is going on here. James is searching. Though it is far from apparent what James is looking for, he usually finds clues which direct him further in his odyssey. He is particularly fortunate to encounter unusual individuals who teach him valuable lessons. Consequently, James’ Journey contains elements of a quest. His explorations, both of the external world and also of his own personality, provide a rite of passage from adolescence to manhood.

Psychological raw material appears throughout the story. James has no reluctance to share with the reader his innermost thoughts, fears, fantasies, and dreams. At times, James’ Journey reads like a dream journal. In other places, myths and folk tales are recounted. Poetry is offered. Sometimes James loses sight of reality as he wanders through fantasies and visions. Eventually he leaves the planet altogether. The real, the surreal, and the unreal all have their places in what follows.

Writing on James’ Journey was begun during a Christmas vacation. The year 2000 was at hand and the whole world seemed to be celebrating the arrival of the new millennium. A bad case of flu kept the author at home, bored. To while away the hours, an essay was crafted about an imaginary friend with the name Cousin Hugh. Intended to be a character sketch, the piece soon expanded into a lengthy short story. Friends who read the manuscript thought more was yet to come. It was suggested that Cousin Hugh might be the first episode in a novel. This prediction was realized when Cousin Hugh was adapted to become Book One of the current, much longer work.

An extraordinary number of powerful dreams shaped James’ Journey. The characters of Mira, Tiki, Monica, Bea, and Zed were all inspired directly from dreams. Other dreams which the author experienced during this period were consigned to the fictional James. The narrative was fitted to dream images, rather than vice-versa. When one section of the story was completed, the author waited for another dream. And voila! The story was advanced by incorporating the details of this next dream. A writer new to this technique might find it a very strange approach to composition. It requires that the writer suspend his or her own need for structure and conscious intention. The trick is to weave the unconscious material into a narrative that retains coherence and dramatic structure. One has to trust that the unconscious knows what it’s doing. The process was further enriched when one of the author’s friends who read the first draft began to have dreams about the story. These also found their way into the text. The character of Monica, especially, was amplified by this second source of dream material. One might say the entire story is a series of dreams threaded to a narrative, like beads on a string.

Since James, the hero of the story, and the author have much in common, it may be asked if they are one and the same person. The answer is, Yes and no! They have the same first name, of course, and both were born in Scotland. James and the author spent some time in New York City before finally settling in Houston, Texas. They are both interested in writing and literature. Both benefited from psychotherapy. And they devoted spare time hours to dreams, poetry, writing, drawing, and other expressions of the inner life. But there are just as many differences. James-thenarrator emigrated to America at age six with his newly widowed mother. The author, however, came over as a graduate student, by himself, with both parents very much alive and very much staying put in Scotland.

James eventually found his career in publishing, whereas the author consults in private practice as a psychologist. The people James meets in his adventures are not to be identified with real life people the author may have known. You could not have a conversation with them today at Starbucks over coffee and a cheese Danish. These are fictional characters who originated in dreams or in the imagination.

Though fictional, the story of James resonates with the author’s own life experiences. It’s as if it were a retelling of the author’s life on an imaginal plane, so to speak. James-the-narrator is what psychologists would call a part-self of the author. He stands in relation to the author much as a son would to a father. He is a child of the author’s imagination. As with most children, James is a pleasure to be with, and a source of much embarrassment at times. By working through the child motif in such an extensive and personal way, the author may have engaged in some self-therapy. However, the author was blind to therapeutic implications while writing was in progress.

But enough about the author! Let him get out of the way now. It’s time to give over these pages to the imaginary James. This is his adventure, and you are invited along. Come, if you will, on James’ Journey.

BOOK ONE

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COUSIN HUGH

CHAPTER ONE

For as long as I live, I will remember the night I stood at Hugh’s door. The barren Scottish mountains in late November, bleak and gray, surrounded a small stone cottage like a clamshell. Overhead, the sky glowered in ominous shades of black, streaked by occasional stars. And there I stood, a stranger from America (though I had spent my first six years in Scotland,) unable to remember quite what I was doing there. It was so dark I could hardly see two feet in front of me. I had followed a single track lane for four miles over hilly terrain, stumbling often like a drunk man through bogs that spewed over the track like porridge, falling down repeatedly as I tripped over unseen stones or the roots of scraggly trees. And now, as I reached my destination, this miserable little abode apparently abandoned by all other life forms, it seemed as if I was on the face of the moon. A chill wind gave a low soughing sound as it swept across the small clearing. I tried to imagine the scene in winter. It made me shudder.

Why had I come? What was this quixotic journey all about? Suddenly it seemed more ridiculous than Don Juan’s tilt against windmills. Find my roots, indeed! If my roots lay in this God-forsaken dump, then I was in even bigger trouble than I imagined.

I must be losing it, I told myself. It’s all a mistake. I’ve gotten it all wrong……youthful folly…..bad idea. I’ll just forget the whole thing and go back to Glasgow. Then fly back to America. Yeah! At least I’ll be warmer. But my legs had a will of their own that night. Or maybe I was just too tired from slogging over the moors. Instead of retreating, I stood there immobile facing a rough-hewn door. What made my predicament even worse was that I had no idea what kind of person lived in the cottage. He was supposedly my first cousin. I say supposedly because even a few days before, I had not known he existed. Inquiries in the nearest village on my way here had produced nothing but curious stares.

My cousin Hugh was rare in these times: his existence went almost totally unnoticed and unrecorded. He was a very well kept secret. A few relatives were in on it. Some local people must have recognized his doughty face on sight. But no one except Old Alex knew where he lived. Hugh lived so far from anywhere that he had neither address nor post office box. No mailman came by with letters or bills. No repairman journeyed over the mountain pass, for Hugh kept no appliances. And there were never visitors, except me that night. If anyone in the closest village some eight miles to the east had ever followed the lone shopper home from his infrequent forays to the village store, gossip was none the wiser.

Hugh owned the mountain where he lived. The lairds and small freeholders of the area roundabout were not insensible to the vast bulk of granite and limestone rising up in their midst. But they did not think much about it. None coveted it. The land was so rocky it was not even suitable for grazing sheep. The idea that a human soul might actually live year-round in that wilderness, and had done so for nearly two generations, would have seemed quite absurd. Hugh had slipped out of sight even of the local historians. The graybeards who kept track of genealogies in the district could tell you who begat whom and to which family line so-andso was connected. But not one recalled my cousin Hugh.

Hugh liked it that way. He was more retiring than an Egyptian mummy, harder to find than Macbeth’s witches. You might think from my description that Hugh was just a Highland Scrooge, that he had bah humbug written all over him. But it was more complex than that. Hugh did not wish to play any role whatsoever in society, and to be a skinflint is to adopt a distinct posture. On the other hand, if he were to be known as Hugh the landowner, then people would respond to him with whatever needs or prejudices the fact of landowning triggered in them. In the old country way, some of the plain folk might doff their hats in a display of respect. Youngsters with prickly social consciences might sneer at him for being a part of the capitalist elite. There might be no end to the number of favors asked: rights of way for hikers, contributions to the annual village fair and charity, even calls from London for permission to route the national mountain bike championship past his cottage. Only by living in total anonymity could Hugh avoid taking on a partial identity, a social role. He wanted to be wholly himself, without any adaptation or compromise. So he had dropped out of sight. There was simply no record of his existence.

He had little need for the things Americans (and most Scots today) consider essentials. Lack of social amenities did not strike him as a negative, since he could see nothing positive in them. No electricity, telephone, plumbing. He lived alone, with one dog, a collie naturally. The dog had no name. In Hugh’s way of seeing things, it was unnecessary to give a dog a name, just tell it what to do. Names are never neutral. Every name brings along its own parcel of associations. Just try on Bob versus Rupert if you don’t believe me. Why lumber an animal with a personality by giving it a human name? Hugh didn’t even talk to the dog, he whistled: Come!, Go!, Fetch!, Stay!, Lie down! Each had their own whistled command. I really believe Hugh would have dispensed with his own name if his memory had not served him well. He could not avoid the knowledge that he had been christened Hugh. I happen to know his surname also, but torture would not induce me to reveal it. Suffice it to say that it was a plain, garden-variety sort of family name common in Scotland: like McGregor, Robertson, Brown, etc., but not necessarily one of those just mentioned. Hugh was the type of man for whom a given name really made no difference. He projected so little personality that names did not fit him well. They were extraneous, even frivolous.

As I stood on his doorstep that dark November night, I did not know any of this yet. I had no idea what kind of man to get ready to meet. Would he be tall or short, merry or grim? Not one story or anecdote about him had ever come to my attention. He was a complete mystery to me at that moment. I must have stopped there for about ten minutes, wondering what to say. As the minutes slipped past, the haplessness of my situation bore in on me. Who was I to disturb this man’s solitude? How could I explain what I wanted, since I hardly knew myself? Without having notified him I was coming……there was no way to get a message to him….I would disturb his peace late on a Friday. What if he shot me on the spot?

But wait, this was Scotland, not America. Guns were tightly controlled here. Maybe he would set a ferocious dog on me? Or he might just stare in disbelief at such a foolish boy.

Under that huge sky, beneath a craggy mountain peak, with wind shifting around restlessly and the night closing in, I felt smaller and smaller until my subjective age must have regressed to single digits. Perhaps when I reached all the way back to the terrible twos, something inside me got up the resolve to knock firmly on the door. The knocking seemed to echo off a thousand surfaces. You would have thought a beggar thumped on the mighty double doors of a royal palace. No response. One part of me said, Oh good, no one’s home. I can leave now. But he had to be home. Where else could he be this late? Anyway, I thought I could detect light through one of the low windows. My heart started to beat faster. Someone was coming.

When the American journalist Stanley was dispatched to darkest Africa to find the Scottish missionary David Livingstone, his first words on encountering the famous Scot went into the history books as the epitome of redundancy. He opened with: Dr. Livingstone, I presume. I scarcely did any better. All I managed to produce, with a voice noticeably higher in pitch than usual, was a single word. It came out sounding like a plaintive whine. As a giant of a man stood in the shadows of the doorway, I said, Hugh?

Into the silence, I then added, I know you don’t know who I am. I’m your cousin James.

Nothing. The wind blew louder. Despite the cold, I started to sweat.

James, you know, Sadie’s boy, Sadie from Pollockshaws who moved away to America when my father died, I explained, wondering if he would notice my damp, clammy hands if we shook hands.

Still nothing. It sure was quiet out there below the mountain. You could almost hear your own mind think desperately for something meaningful to say. Then I hit on what would have been a good opening line.

Old Alex from Springburn sent me, I said. He’s dead, died last week. He said I should go and see you, and you’d tell me what to do.

Old Alex on his deathbed had indeed grasped my forearm tightly in his skinny fingers and intoned with grand drama and finality, You should go and see your cousin Hugh. He’ll tell you what to do. These two lines of unintended rhyme made a strong impression on me. It seemed very strange. Who was this Hugh? I didn’t know I had a cousin Hugh. Where did he live? And what did it mean that he would tell me what to do? Was I to go for profound instruction like a supplicant to an oracle? Or was Hugh some kind of middleman in a secret network, like a spy ring? What was this all about? After Old Alex’s last will and testament were read out to us and the estate divided, a sealed envelope containing Hugh’s full name and a map of the way to his cottage was passed on to me, my one inheritance from the estate of Old Alex.

When Hugh heard that Old Alex had sent me, he took a step back and nodded for me to enter. You’d best come in, he said with typical economy of words. It wasn’t much, but it was a beginning.

CHAPTER TWO

I stayed all winter and into the spring too. Hugh asked no more justification for my presence than my original statement that Old Alex sent me. He did not inquire about the circumstances of Old Alex’s death, did not set a time for my departure, said nothing about my purposes. He practically left me to my own devices. Hugh spoke at most five or six sentences on an average day. Although we cooked and did farm work together, dialogue was kept to a minimum. I might as well have taken a vow of silence. For months, my usual chatty ways were reduced to the barest and most essential utterances.

I thoroughly disliked Hugh at first. What right had anyone to be as inaccessible as Hugh? I had never lived a rural life, so I needed directions and instructions. None were forthcoming.

He is either the most arrogant or the most unfriendly jerk I have ever met, I concluded.

I tried rapid-fire badgering. He paid no attention. Detailed, reasoned questions. He walked off in the middle of them. I occasionally shouted, Help! but he seemed unperturbed. He simply ignored me! And if lack of communication wasn’t bad enough, the absence of everything an American would consider essential for domestic comfort was galling. There was no television, radio, or stereo, no refrigerator, stove, water heater, or washer and drier. We managed without curtains in the window, tablecloth, flowers, a fitted carpet, or pictures on the wall. An old sheepskin rug was the only compromise to the stone floor throughout. Hugh hung his double-barreled, vintage shotgun on the wall. A clan crest was on display above the fireplace. He allowed rough, long enduring towels. His bedding must have come in from Inverness. Otherwise, living with Hugh was much like camping with a roof over one’s head. We rose and retired with the sun. The outhouse consisted of a wooden seat above a cavernous pit slaked with lime. Water was carried in from the burn, two buckets at a time. Without electricity or gas, we burned a very few candles, enough to go blind by if we had attempted serious reading. Mostly we mended clothes or nets in the evening. I hated wet weather, for then the weary evenings lengthened out into full days spent inside trying to occupy oneself with simple chores. If winter had not set in already, I would surely have left. Even if I did not know why Old Alex had sent me, Hugh’s cottage and its curious inhabitant were just too morose for my taste.

One particularly stormy day, when all prospect of outdoor work was abandoned, I found myself sitting wondering who this strange man, my first cousin, was, and how he had come to be this way. Now began a slow but remarkable process of getting to know Hugh. Instead of disliking his treatment of me, I decided then to make a change. I would try to get to know this person. If you are going to live with someone for a while, you might as well get to know him. Right? With most people, you would start up a conversation and ask some useful questions. But not with Hugh. I had to learn about him through careful observation. I put my journalism degree to work. At other times, I felt a bit like Margaret Mead on Samoa doing anthropological research. At first his way of life seemed hopelessly antiquated, and Hugh himself was little more than a silent, exasperating anachronism. I quickly got over my initial apprehension of the man, and as the days lengthened into months a grudging appreciation of Hugh began to take over.

Although he tried not to show it, Hugh had an inquiring mind. His intelligence felt like a cool X ray when turned to focus on me. The Scots call it penetration. He had an uncanny way of knowing what I was thinking. He seemed always to be ahead of me in a conversation so that he had the answer before I verbalized the question. Sometimes he would even give me the answer without waiting to hear my question, as when he offered directions to the village or the way to the top of the mountain, lifting the question right off my lips unasked. It’s not easy to be around someone like that. You can never think an ungenerous thought about him but you immediately start wondering if the thought may already be announced to him. It’s a naughty boy’s nightmare: to live with an omniscient parent!

If a dozen words were addressed directly to me in the course of a day, I considered myself lucky. Gestures were sufficient for Hugh. He nodded Good morning, for example. He did not converse as most people do. His silence may have been due to his accustomed habit of living alone. Not for him the posturing that often passes for verbal exchange between two people. He was not at all interested in impressing me, or in showing off his knowledge, or being charming. He could not have cared less. And he saw no reason to explain, justify, or defend his actions. This was his place, and he was going to live in it as he saw fit.

Work played a very big role in Hugh’s life. Six days a week, he rarely slacked from morning till dusk. And there was much to be done. He kept a vegetable patch, grazed a cow on small pickings by a stream, drew milk, made butter, kept hens, fished for salmon, chopped wood and hauled it from a considerable distance, cut peat, and mended and repaired almost everything including his clothes. He lived the endlessly busy life of a farmer/crofter who tried to be largely self-sufficient. Naturally, I joined in. It was the least I could do to repay his hospitality. Since I had never done much physical labor, I was easily tired at first. Hugh pretended not to notice. He had a way of looking far beyond me into the distance as if focusing his eyes on the horizon. I appreciated his forbearance. Had he been a football coach, I would have been yelled off the practice field for my incompetence.

At first I mistook Hugh’s deliberate and methodical pace as a sign of oafishness. I could have done the chores in half the time, I mused smugly. But there was a remorseless quality to his effort. By nightfall, he would have completed a commendable quantity of work, by week’s end a prodigious amount, and all with the same assurance of error-free accomplishment. He knew he could botch the removal of an old tree stump or cut the peat slabs at odd angles. But that very possibility was already taken into account ahead of time, so that only correct methods were employed.

Unless a mishap was due to an act of God, such as striking a buried rock with his spade, Hugh attributed all human error to lack of foresight, which he held in silent disdain.

Know what you are doing, he admonished in a rare fit of eloquence.

I know what I’m doing. I’m trying to cut these stupid strips out of a soggy peat bog, I replied in complaint.

Both of us knew what he really meant, which was: Be aware of your goal, the best method to achieve it, and all that can go wrong……then proceed with energy and care. He might also have added: And don’t waste too much time thinking about it.

It struck me after a while that Hugh was a good example of living, as the anthropologists say, in close relationship with the land. He was so serious about his work, and respected Nature so highly, that his approach contained a certain spirit of devotion. For Hugh, working the land seemed equivalent to worship. I began to watch Hugh carefully for signs of secret rituals. Maybe he sacrificed to his deities as in the Old Testament. What if he did a rain dance (in Scotland?) or observed fertility rites? But all I saw was a skillful handling of the chores of a rural way of life. If Hugh performed any ritual practice, it escaped my notice. The only religious observance I saw was saying grace at meals. Since this was Hugh and not the farmer of Burn’s imagination in The Cotter’s Saturday Night, devotionals were simple, brief, and to the point.

Our Father, we thank Ye for this food. God bless us as we use it. Amen, Hugh intoned.

I had scarcely closed my eyes the first time he said grace before it was over. I felt embarrassed.

You can say ‘Amen’ too if you like, he said, sensing my discomfort. I made a point of it from then on.

Hugh directed his prayers to Our Father. During grace, Hugh occasionally gave some matter over to God’s care, such as a shortage of victuals. He did not ask for God’s help as much as he put the matter in God’s hands, with the implication that God would dispose of it as He saw fit. I never heard him say Jesus or Christ. What Hugh felt about sin and salvation, issues that had riled the Christian churches for hundreds of years, was given a wide berth, as if enough water had flowed under that bloody bridge. Hugh would as soon sit in the pew of a church as have his nails manicured. Yet among the several congregations he entertained a preference that he exhibited rather coyly. He would make it a habit to pick up newsletters and tracts issued by the local congregations during his trips to the village. The publications of the Presbyterian Church were often to be found lying in places near to hand in the cottage, as if they might be perused on a wet day. Eventually they would find their way to a more practical use in the shed or storage bin. The Free Church of Scotland publications had a shorter duration before going to work. The Catholic missives invariably went straight to the outdoors. Hugh complimented the strength of the Roman Catholic paper, but I could detect little difference. Reading between the lines, so to speak, I concluded that Hugh preferred something in the established Church of Scotland. There was no way to tell what that might be. I wondered sometimes if Hugh had engaged in the Mother of all doctrinal debates inside his brain before settling to be an undeclared Presbyterian. Or perhaps he just liked the style of the writer of the village church’s newsletter. With Hugh you were never sure if he was motivated by profound inner truth or some personal preference culled from long experience.

After being with him for a while, I began to doubt that there was much difference between The Truth and preference based on experience. If we take our experience seriously, we alter our behavior to fit better the lessons life has taught us. We learn, in other words. Perhaps Hugh did live in communion with The Truth after all. If so, he showed his appreciation of Truth not in a dogma or the observance of a set of religious actions but in the way he went about his daily living. For Hugh, the performing of a day’s tasks, conscientiously and skillfully, was its own form of ceremony, the sign of a life lived well and in accordance with life’s necessities. He was a man of set ways. They fit him admirably. He was at home within himself and in his environment. Only a fool would live otherwise, he seemed to say.

As a moralist, Hugh was probably traditional as far as the Ten Commandments were concerned, but quite radical on questions of personal liberty. Hugh considered any kind of forced obligation, such as a child being made to work long hours on a farm, as anathema. Yet he recognized the harsh terms of our contract with life and could never be accused of maudlin sentimentality or bleeding-heart liberalism. He championed the gentler sex, children, orphans, animals, and any weaker body subjected to cruel treatment. He would not abide bullying. He could look a harsh taskmaster in the eye and tell him in a marvelous economy of words the error of his ways. The outcome was usually to goad the tyrant into an outburst of How-dare-you? This only underscored Hugh’s point. Once or twice, though, the other backed down. Perhaps he heard the echo of his own long-repressed kinder self stirring inside him. Amazing grace, how can it be?

Hugh apparently valued the lives of animals almost as highly as human life. It was obviously a burden to him to have to net and kill the salmon that was the staple of our diet. Although he did not go so far as to ask the salmon’s permission to kill it, he clearly went about his harvesting with regret. Like a good cowboy faced by the wild Indians, Hugh saw it as you or me….only one of us can live. Pragmatist that he was, he knew he was not going to be the one to die. Whenever a wild animal moved in front of him, Hugh observed closely, often offering a terse compliment about the beauty, strength, or grace of the creature. He especially admired the playful sea otter. He carefully ensured his nets were never left out at night when they might ensnare the otters. Hugh praised the wild animal’s skill at surviving in untamed nature. He seemed to envy animals their total freedom from civilization. The eagle did not have to buy bread at the village store, or make the still further trip to Inverness to see a doctor or dentist. Eagles owned no clothes, owed no debts, were obliged to nothing and no one. Sometimes I imagined Hugh soaring skyward some fine morning and never returning to his cottage aerie. The image of his hulking, six-foot frame, clothed in brown tweed completed by size twelve boots, as he went sky diving on wind currents never failed to bring a smile to my face.

Missing in all this was a sense of the playful. Whimsy was not in Hugh’s makeup. He could never be accused of wasting his life away in the pursuit of idle pleasure. Whether or not he had tasted the forbidden fruit as a younger man I couldn’t tell. Naturally he gave as much thought to having a woman in his life as he did to the latest fashions, which is to say none whatsoever. I noticed a courtesy to women, a politeness in everyday dealings in the village. And as I mentioned before, he had a strong sympathy for women trapped in bondage to their husbands or their lot in life. But the bows and ribbons a woman might have introduced to his bothy were not to be found. His reading tastes were just as basic. He contented himself with perusing The Bible, and, of all things, a well-worn copy of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, Volume H. Unlikely scenarios as to how Hugh came to possess just this one volume amused me. Perhaps he found it floating in the burn one day, sent by God, letter H for Hugh. Or Her Majesty the Queen, straying over from Balmoral, awarded him this fine present when he threw his coat down over a puddle for her, she happening to have advanced as far as H at the time in her pursuit of global knowledge. Or perhaps when Hugh was a silent wee boy, the dominie sarcastically awarded him first prize for least likely to be published in the English language (a teacher had to make his prizes go around in those spare days, one volume per winner.) Like many Scottish country people, Hugh was largely self-educated. A few years of formal schooling mostly at the elementary level had been supplemented by extensive, unsystematic reading. Musty volumes leaned at odd angles like off-duty soldiers on shelves in the cottage. They bore titles by Yeats, Shelley and Shakespeare. There were histories by Gibbon and others, and innumerable biographies of the famous and almost famous.

This was an austere life. It was not as uncomfortable as trench warfare. He did better than penitent monks with their self-inflicted punishments.

But comforts were sparse, and there was scant pleasure as most people would see it. Hugh relented from this Spartan regimen only once. A few weeks after my trip up the mountain, Hugh astonished me so greatly I still wonder if I dreamed it. From behind a slab of seemingly solid rock in the fireplace, I saw him remove a fifth of malt whisky and two tumblers. The two of us proceeded to get drunk. Drink loosened Hugh’s tongue until he was as facile of speech as a politician……but I’m getting ahead of myself, which I promised myself not to do.

How Hugh came to afford his way of life was of much interest to me. Like a tax inspector, I pondered his limited sources of income and his frugal expenses. No matter how I added it up, his expenses had to exceed the little he earned off the land. Mostly he sold salmon to far-flung country hotels. Also, some wood carvings and other likenesses of the Loch Ness Monster which he unloaded at Inverness on a wee shop well frequented by credulous tourists. But that earned him a pittance compared to the food he must buy to augment his diet, and such necessities as clothes and implements, though they were made to last an unseemly length of time. Hugh had to have a hidden source of wealth. I was sure he came back from the village after buying necessities with more money than he carried to it. You can imagine how my imagination went into overdrive. There was a rich widow to whom he paid his respects (Hugh as gigolo!) Hugh really was a contact man in a secret society (Hugh as spy.) Hugh had inherited vast wealth or at least enough to get along with (Hugh as Carnegie.) Or perhaps Hugh had achieved great fame in his day and was now hiding out incognito to preserve his privacy (Hugh as Howard