We Have Always Been Able To See The Reservoir
Trapped in a Heather-Based Purgatory
We are retracing our steps up to the famous bench. I call it a famous bench because it was referenced in a blog post I read before we moved to Kinlochleven. It truly is a great bench, and the walk up to it takes about 50 minutes of tough uphill, so it’ll be a good one to take people on as an introduction to the area. Enough to hurt you but not enough to break you.
Today we have a coffee at the bench rather than lunch. It would have been too early for lunch. The mere fact I am having a coffee indicates that it is too early for lunch because it must be before 12 o’clock. A little tidbit of lore for you there — I don’t drink caffeine after midday because it keeps me awake. Truth be told I could probably stretch it to 2 o’clock, but having it at midday means that if I do bend the rules a little bit the latest I’ll have a coffee will be about 1.30. If the baseline rule was 2pm then I’d be having them at 3.30 on occasion and that simply would not do.
In the times before this rule I would find myself lying awake at 2 o’clock (in the am this time), tossing and turning and wondering what the heck was going on. Why did it feel like I was riding a spin cycle in the back of a bullet train? Could it possibly have been the 2 cans of coke zero I’d had that evening? Surely not. This is also the reason I only buy caffeine-free coke zero these days — one of the true triumphs of modern society. You can’t get it in every supermarket though, so its easier to buy it in bulk direct from coke, which is how I have twice ended up with >120 cans of CFCZ in my house at the same time. The good folks at coca cola also gave me a free holdall with the first batch, and a free (unbranded, bizarrely) towel with the second. The holdall has proven very useful — the towel less so. All I can remember the towel being used for was as a canary in the coal mine for the rest of my belongings when I wore it on the outside of my bag in the middle of a rainstorm. An odd move, I will admit.
As we pass by Loch Eilde, where we went for the fourth of our five October dips last week, we see two men, the only two people we will see over the six hours we are on the hills. We turn left at the microhydro, they turn right.
Our boots get dunked in bog a few times as we sidle along the loch’s perimeter, but its a clement day and this doesn’t bother us too much.
We are trying to work out which hill is Glas Bheinn when we see a family of deer atop one of the peaks. There are more deer than I have ever seen in one place (not quite as many as the CFCZ cans) and it becomes abundantly clear that we are in their home. This is their home and they are wondrously alive in it. They watch us from a distance as we try and work out if their hill is our destination (it is not) and then scamper off out of sight.
This morning L was reading about the polar bears they have in captivity in England, and how they have recently increased the area in which they have to roam. But how the new area is still about one millionth the size of the area a polar bear would have in the wild (the fact it is not suited to the environment notwithstanding). They keep the polar bear in check with electrified deer fencing. I feel sad for the polar bears, and my heart beats for these deer, free to bound wherever they see fit. The brutal hunting season is over so they have a few months of unmolested exploration ahead of them. I hope they use it well.
The path we are to follow is not a built-up path. It is not a path actually. It is just the heather, so we tramp through and up to Glas Bheinn, about a mile of bog and tangled growth. When we reach the top a mist rolls in and we shelter behind the cairn for a lunch of bread and hummus. The bread is a very flat baguette I made a few days ago with probably not enough yeast. It tastes fine though, hearty.
This mist reminds me of mist on another mountain six years ago. Ben Hope, I think.
We are halfway round the North Coast 500 in my family’s old Ford Fiesta. There is so much stuff in the car that we have to put one of the passengers in the back seat first and then chuck the stuff on top of them so that the second rear passenger is able to get in. We set off up the Munro and the fog rolls in, a lot thicker than at the top of Glas Bheinn this day. A minute or so before the mist, two of us had taken a shortcut over some scree rather than following the path. The mist means that it is impossible to find the path, and I find myself clinging to a rock in what would probably have been a terrifying position had I been able to see how steep and far a drop I was facing. Very probably the stupidest I have ever been on a hike.
On a path of sorts, I am cursing my friends to the wind, and the wind laughs back. Where are they, I fume, though of course how on earth could they have known where to wait for me? Maybe I am ahead of them, actually, who knows. So I trudge on, and I spy a few muffled shapes in the mist. Shapes which turn into my stuffed-car friends with wilderness metamorphosis. They are waiting for me at the cairn. A perfectly acceptable place to wait. As we turn back to walk down the fog rolls off the mountain as though it were being controlled by the God of the Hills and we are blessed by a stunning view of that which we have conquered.
There is no such revelatory experience on Glas Bheinn this day, but the fog does roll off and reveal a lovely loch in the distance.
Rather than returning the same way we came up the hill, I suggest that we head directly for the Blackwater Reservoir, cutting out a small section of the walk which we needn’t do, seeing as we are now such seasoned walkers over the heather.
On the way down we speak in pidgin German. L did it at uni and is very good, but lacks confidence (and the ability to remember some of the separable verbs, apparently). I did it at school and am three days into a duolingo refresh, so we aren’t exactly fluent. But it is fun (or should I say Spass) and we babble at each other for probably half an hour.
At the end of this half hour we switch back to English, because there is a minor emergency. In the half hour of attempting to speak German we do not appear to have gotten any closer to the reservoir. Is it a mirage, a mirage somewhat larger in scope than your usual oasis in terms of water volume, sure, but a mirage nonetheless? Ten minutes later we are no closer. What is going on, is this some kind of purgatory. Did I fall off Ben Hope that time and is all of this a dream?
Another fifteen minutes and the reservoir remains a gigantic speck on the horizon, bulging and pulsing but never getting any closer. We are Sisyphus without the rock, or the hill. But at least he knew he was being punished. We are none the wiser, one foot then the other over the heather, walking straight but going in circles.
Down a hillock, up a hillock, surely now? No, never.
When you are climbing a mountain you encounter this phenomenon in the false summit. You reach what you thought was the final crest but when you arrive you are treated to the view of the next (possibly, hopefully the last) summit. Sometimes it is, sometimes there are a few more pretenders. But on those occasions you understand how you have been tricked. The forced perspective of physics is explanation enough, though it does salt the soul. There is no such aspect for us in the heather, we have always been able to see the reservoir.
We will always be able to see the reservoir, just in reach, just out of reach.
We have always been able to see the reservoir.
