LEJOG Day 88: Tain to Golspie

Weather: Cloudy and still

Distance covered today: 25.9km (16.1mi)

Last night's B&B:Dunbius Guesthouse (£40)

Cumulative distance: 1819.3km (1130.5mi)/ % Complete: 94.1%

GPS satellite track of today's route: Day 88 (click!)

It was as I thought it would be; initially the margins on A9 were quite reasonable, but progressively, sneakily, they narrowed until they became non-existent.  I have read many reports of the trials and tribulations of cyclists and walkers on the A9 and I wasn’t looking forward to it.  I did have in my armoury though the experience of the homicidal maniacs of Devon to fall back on. There I had devised survival strategies which proved useful today and although I was irritated by it, I didn’t actually feel threatened.

The irritation is many-fold. For a start all the sounds of the country-side are drowned out by the savage roar of the traffic, which at times can be quite deafening. Secondly, for some reason the flora along the margins of the roads is much less varied than beside the minor roads. Julian has suggested that this may be because the insect population has been decimated by the traffic so that pollination can’t take place, or perhaps the wind from vehicles interferes with seed distribution. Maybe maintenance of the verges interferes with the natural cycles of the plants, or maybe exhaust fumes poison the plants. Perhaps all of these effects contribute, but there are undeniably fewer flowers next to the busiest roads. 

A more pernicious irritation is simply scale. On minor roads and paths, things change at a human dimension. After a remarkably brief interval, things are different; there are new objects to observe, new smells and sounds. The sensory environment changes kaleidoscopically. But on a major A-road, the engineers have designed the environment with a view to stasis. Things should not change faster than the reaction time of a driver moving at 60mph (100km/h). The curvature of the road, the size of signposts, the positioning of intersections; all of these things are designed so that to a walker, it appears as if the whole world is moving in slow-motion and it can become, frankly, quite boring.

I had read before setting out on my journey that many of my nutter colleagues had been frustrated by the A9. They had found the experience so exasperating that they were longing to reach John O’Groats just to end their frustration. I decided to guard against that for fear that I would find myself wanting the whole thing to be over while at the same time dreading its end! I tried to put my strategy into action today!  The idea would be to ignore the road, ignore even the mileposts inexorably counting down the distance to JOG, and use the time to THINK!  This was easier in theory than practice. I found myself leaping about like a cartoon roadrunner, trying to avoid the huge pantechnicons, articulated lumber carriers and tourist buses, whose beam fitted neatly over their half of the road. My landlord this morning compounded my misery by arguing that my assumption that distance would stem the flow was faulty. He asserted that many of these vehicles were bound for or coming from Orkney via the ferry at Wick, and so there would be no stemming of the metal tide until beyond Wick!

It was perhaps inevitable therefore that as I was staring death directly in the face every few paces, my thoughts should have turned to other life-threatening experiences in my past. One in particular stands out.   I can’t exactly remember how I got there, but it was during my year in the US as an exchange student, and I was visiting a family in Ohio. The father was an Undertaker and he offered to show me his handiwork as he was particularly happy with his latest customer.

Indeed, the coffin was ornate to the point of kitsch, but more disturbingly, the poor, dead, very much made-up, old lady in it was open to the viewer. I hadn’t seen a dead body before, so this was a shock to me, and I remember being struck by how composed and happy she looked lying there in her coffin. In that part of the world, apparently, all funerals were conducted with open coffins that were closed only after the funeral service.

That evening, a group of foreign students and I were taken by the Undertaker to his holiday cottage on a lake in the vicinity (undertaking being a profitable business in Ohio), and the Undertaker’s daughter suggested we go for a paddle in a canoe on the lake to watch the sunset. So off we set, all five of us, paddling along out towards the middle of this substantial lake. I was obviously a little disturbed at the events of the afternoon, and I remember starting a conversation on the whole subject of death.
 
It transpired that we were a religiously diverse lot. There was a Buddhist from Thailand, a Hindu from India, a Muslim from somewhere in the Middle East, a Baptist from the US (the Undertaker’s daughter), and myself, still calling myself a Catholic at that stage, but struggling with my convictions. The discussion inevitably turned from death to religion. As is so often the way in those sorts of conversations, we were celebrating our commonalities rather than our differences, as we explored the things that our religions seemed to have in common.  In time we seemed to be saying that there was more that connected us than separated us.

As the sun went down, the weather started to change. In hot summers on the endless plains of the mid-west, storms can and do spring up very suddenly.  At first we weren’t concerned, thinking the storm would soon blow over, but a vicious wind was now violently whipping the once placid surface of the lake into a cauldron of waves and spray. In those relatively shallow lakes, the effect of strong wind is dramatically to increase the height and steepness of the waves. By now we had almost no visibility, made worse as evening darkness suddenly descended.  We didn’t have a compass and although we were trying to paddle into the wind, we had no idea whether we were moving towards the shore or towards the centre of the lake.  The height of the waves increased to the point where we began to ship water. We tried desperately to bale the water out of the canoe, using shoes and paddles, but it was clear that we were fighting a losing battle. We were going down….

As the canoe started to sink, we decided to abandon ship!  We had a couple of flotation devices on board but not enough for all of us. The idea was that we should stay very close together holding on to each flotation device and hoping that collectively, they would have the buoyancy to support all of us. Just before the canoe sank, I decided to get into the water to provide a focus towards which the others could move. I put my legs over the side, and found myself standing up in waste-high water!  Within a few minutes, we had made it to the shore, and what’s more we could now just see lights through the trees. A very bedraggled and demoralised group of survivors was welcomed into a house, and while we dried off, telephone calls were made to our host for the night, who was understandably half-demented with worry!

The conversation which followed was very interesting. It seems that everyone on board, having just recently been celebrating the things that brought us together, had in that time of extreme distress, reverted to the essence of their own religion, praying for deliverance to the deity of their choice.  We had all been so arrogantly confident out there on the placid lake. An experience of real terror had reduced us to our essence in a very short period of time. I learned that evening that emotion triumphs over logic for all but the very strongest in a moment of panic, and I now think that this is a natural, instinctive reaction to extreme peril. It is the triumph of the instincts that natural selection bestowed on all of our ancestors over many millions of years, fighting against and vanquishing the power of logic that is by comparison an almost instantaneously recent human development.

The juggernauts of the A9 might well be dangerous and they may well irritate me, but they are as nothing compared to the undiluted terror of that far-off evening!

The A9 out of Tain: wide margins, no problem...

Except the pesky mileposts reminding me that I have some distance to go along this infernal road!

But then, a grass meadow down to the Dornoch Firth. What a pleasure!

The bridge over the Dornoch Firth: at 890m, one of the longest in Europe to be built by the cast-push method. So now you know!

Looking up towards the Highlands along the Dornoch Firth

Presumably these mileposts will torment me all along the way!

Self-portrait of the blogger drinking tea at a service station

This is the lace flower!

And this is its source!  Surely no more than Cow Parsley! I apologise for all the confusion!

And here is a lovely leaf! A clue for the experts. The thong is from my camera!

A gorgeous farmhouse below Cnoc Odhar and Creag an Amalaidh (how on Earth does one pronounce them!)

By now the A9 was narrow and marginless, but there was no change to the traffic density!

This hill was usefully called The Mound

No room for error!

I think I've captured this before, but it is exquisite!

The Mound from up front and personal

Getting there!

Drummuie Council Buildings.  Really!!!???

Footpath lighting!!!  Though I must admit that it will be dark up here in winter!