HIGHLANDERS

I’m a Highlander. True, I grew up in a polluted city in the dry and dusty Inland Empire of Southern California, but I’m a Highlander all the same. I went to Highland School, passing Highland Terrace to get there. We had a Dunbar Place just around the corner, and at the local university all the dormitories had names like ‘Aberdeen,’ ‘Bannockburn,’ and ‘Inverness. Our neighborhood, further up in the hills than much of the surrounding area, was known informally as ‘the Highlands.’

Highlanders we may have been, but our town was hot. In the dead of winter, it sometimes got almost as cold as summers in the U.K., but in the summertime, temperatures could easily go as high as 105 degrees and stay there. The heat made most sensible people go indoors and turn on their air-conditioners. Quite apart from the discomfort of the heat itself, there were rattlesnakes about, and the hotter it was, the more of them there were.

Our local pipe band, however, didn’t show the slightest sign of minding the heat or worrying about snakes.  They fearlessly marched up and down the dusty sidewalks under the blistering afternoon sun, looks of great concentration on their faces. The sight of our elderly next-door neighbor, Mr MacDougall, with his hairy old-man legs and, to our silly minds, mini-skirt kilt, was too much for us kids to bear. We would run giggling and shrieking back into the house where our mother, fully aware of what we were laughing at, fiercely admonished us. Hush up! Stop that right now! Shame on you! Those men and their pipes were culture. Didn’t we know that our very own ancestors had dressed just the same?  We snickered and bit our lips at the thought and tried to avoid each other’s eyes.

The MacDougalls were as sad a blight on our lives as we must have been on theirs. They were grumpy and no-nonsense; Mrs MacDougall frequently let my mother know that her own approach to child-rearing had been Old Testament all the way. I used to catch her giving me looks that clearly said Oh my girl, if you were mine, I’d . . . For the most part we steered clear of her, but when she came over to our house to talk to our mother, our best behavior was demanded.

Mr MacDougall was fiercely proud of his Scots ancestry and his own name in particular. He had a huge, dusty book that he frequently pored over, the ‘Book of the Clans.’ My mother once timidly mentioned my father’s and her own Scottish ancestry. What were their names? Mr MacDougall asked. My mother didn’t know much about her own genealogy, but she started with my father’s side. McKaig, she ventured. Mr  MacDougall disappeared into his house and came out with his Book of Clans. McKaigs! he said scornfully. Didn’t even have their own clan!  A bunch of poets and philosophers.  My mother came home thrilled to bits with this news.

Even my mother, though,  found the MacDougalls difficult. They were both hard-line conservatives, and old-fashioned, unrepentant racists. Their lives had been crushingly bleak and hard. Mr MacDougall suffered terribly from emphysema, from a lifetime of smoking cigarettes without filters and working at a variety of ill-paid jobs where neither the quality of the air or of workers’ lives had caused anybody a moment’s concern. Our town had the distinction of being one of the most polluted cities in the U.S. (coming just after Gary, Indiana at one point, and trust me, anyone who’s ever seen Gary, Indiana would be impressed by that), and this did nothing to make Mr MacDougall’s life any easier. But the sad thing was, he was his own worst enemy. Although he openly bragged about the money he had salted away over the years – having lived through the Great Depression, he hid $1,000 notes between the pages of his U.S. News and World Report magazines rather than trust them to a bank – he refused to buy an air-conditioner with an air filter, something that was a necessity rather than a luxury in our smoggy furnace of a town. And he still smoked. We could hear Mr MacDougall’s wheezes from our bedrooms even when he was at the far side of his house. How he managed to find the lung power to play his bagpipes is something I still can’t begin to understand.

Mrs MacDougall was of German stock, and a grim, angry-looking woman. She had spent fifty years standing behind a supermarket till and had the varicose veins and the impatience with her fellow human beings to prove it.

For a long time I could not figure out why my mother was so tolerant of Mrs MacDougall. Because although my mother was kind-hearted as a general rule, she had no time for bigots, and Mrs MacDougall’s racism was awesome. Once, she and my mother were discussing road safety. My mother had just passed her driving test and had confided to Mrs MacDougall that she feared nothing more than accidentally hitting and injuring a pedestrian. Mrs MacDougall offered that her husband had once run into a pedestrian and injured him. ‘But he wasn’t hurt bad,’ she concluded offhandedly, ‘and besides, he was colored.’  On hearing this, my mother got up abruptly, went into the kitchen, and bit her own wrist. My mother was the most mentally stable woman I have ever known, but she did have this bizarre habit: under extreme provocation she would bite her wrist – hard enough to leave marks. Then she would take deep breaths, perhaps hum a hymn or two, and amazingly enough, recover.  On this occasion, she did not have time for the hymns; she just walked around the kitchen, tidying up a jar or two, pretending to check the pots on the stove, muttering under her breath. Then she went back to Mrs MacDougall and they resumed their conversation as though nothing  had happened. If Mrs MacDougall noticed the neat semi-circle of teeth marks on my mother’s wrist, she never said a thing.

When I was a teenager, I finally learned my mother’s reasons for treating Mrs MacDougall with such forbearance. Although they lived reasonably well when we knew them, the MacDougalls had been very poor when their children were young. They had had a large family – some five or six children – and they had lost a 10-year-old boy to cancer. Not having enough money to pay for decent treatment for their son, the MacDougalls had been forced to admit him to the County Hospital. The walls at the hospital were thin and their little boy had been able to hear every word his consulting doctors had said about him. He knew that he was going to die even before his parents did. One day Mrs MacDougall, who knew no one else in the town and seemed to have no friends, confided this to my mother. My mother never forgot that story. She knew as well as we did that it did not excuse Mrs MacDougall’s racism, but the idea of losing a child was so horrible to my mother that she developed a grudging respect for the woman. So much so that although she was often tempted to show Mrs MacDougall the door, she never did.

Years after I left my Highland home in the desert, I went to Scotland and saw the real thing. All my life, I had felt cheated. Growing up in the heat and dust and pollution, I had longed for cool, green, rainy country, a land of waterfalls and rushing rivers. Someone had shown me a photograph of Inverness once, and I had been stunned. So the first time I entered the Highlands, I was prepared to find a difference so staggering that my pitiful little hometown would shrink into a nothingness of overheated exhaust and decomposed granite. Instead, I was gob-smacked: I was home!  Okay, there was no sagebrush and no tumbleweed. There were no stucco ranch-style houses, no taco stands, no palm trees, no tangle of billboards, no signs in Spanish. And there were waterfalls and twisting rivers and sheep grazing in fields. But geographically, the Highlands of Scotland were the Highlands I grew up in. The shape of the mountains, the rocks, the austere beauty. I was astounded at the similarities and felt like weeping with nostalgia and homesickness.

I almost wanted to go and see if I could find some MacDougalls.