It is a sweltering day at the Scottish Highland Games, deep into the hottest part of July. “The cruelest joke they could have played,” I say to my Scottish blooded friend next to me. He is applying sunscreen to his pink, bald head and sweating beneath a dark black umbrella. We are sitting at the top of the bleachers to watch the opening ceremonies with the procession of pipe and drum bands. I deliver the punchline of my joke, squinting into my RayBans, “… was to gather hundreds of pale Scottish people in an open field with no shade to be found.” We laugh and I can feel the sun bleaching my arm hair blonde.
I come here every year – like some kind of pilgrimage, driving an hour and a half into the lahar fields of Mount Rainier, Washington. I never remember the drive, but I always know I’ve arrived when I see the white craftsman house with a St. Andrew’s flag waving from the bow of a maple tree in their front yard.
Home, my heart pulses.
Strewn about the field are dozens of competing pipe bands, sweating beneath vests and ties, their long-sleeved dress shirts tucked neatly into colored kilts – MacGregors and Gordons and Frasers and a whole spill of them. Bagpipes whine across the meadow as freckled, gingernut kids chase each other with foam swords and officiants scribble on their clipboards between pinched, stern glances. There are hundreds of guests constantly coming in and out of the main gates. They wear great kilts and renaissance dresses, t-shirts over sports kilts with Chuck Taylors, full leather armor with swords strapped to their backs, tank tops and Utili-kilts with grass stains on their knees, and starched pipe band uniforms. There are even, to my delight, a few dogs with family kilts velcro’d around their middle.
This is to say – the authenticity is varied. There are food trucks with tacos and lobster rolls and BBQ brisket sandwiches. There is at least one shop that sells meat pies and sausage rolls and it makes the corner of my mouth turn up in an approving smile to see that it has the longest line, snaking past the espresso stand and the lemonade cart (shaped, of course, like an actual lemon) as games-goers burn in the sun.
Home, my heart pulses.
The opening ceremonies end on a somber note. A lone bagpiper stands at the edge of the field and plays a dirge. A pleasantly plump brunette woman with a tartan sash the color of Winter holly berries crossing her shoulder is listing the names of the deceased from the year into a microphone. She does not stop after ten – the list seems to stretch on and on. I roll their names across my tongue in my mouth: Macduff, Mutton, McHale. I wonder if I were to pass, would my friends submit my name? It would make me happy to echo across the field and soak into the bones of my people. I decide to carry their names with me.
We seek solace from the sun in the covered roof Hall of Vendors. It is mercifully fifteen degrees cooler and we each become aware of the sweat soaking through cotton at our armpits. The building echoes with fiddles and women’s voices singing gaily into microphones on a stage at the far end. We coral ourselves willingly into the stream, pressing into aisles of kilts and scarves, carved swords and hand made pottery. There are sgian-dubhs and Welsh cakes with currants, and a booth to trace your ancestry – each filled with happy, smiling vendors eager to answer questions and share a story or two. Scots, no matter where you find them, are storytellers.
Near the middle, in a beam of sunlight through gaping double-doors, is a makeshift “corner shop.” I grew up riding my bike to a store like this, dimly lit by sunlight streaming in the glass door at the front, a few heavy ‘quid’ burning a hole in my acid wash jeans. I have a deep fondness I’ve carried with me into adulthood for the US version in bodegas and small-town mercantile stores.
Home, my heart trembles.
The aisles are too narrow for the crowds – folks are stacked up in a traffic jam, like a glitched game of Snake. It gives me time to pour over the wares. Flake bars and Wispas and Dairy Milks and KitKats in rare flavors. Bags of Walker’s crisps and Mackie’s and an entire section of digestive biscuits. I look for Tunnock’s tea cakes and inexplicably don’t find any. In the next aisle, jarred goods prove far harder to resist than the sweets. I only manage to evade the lemon curds and the orange marmalades because I already have some at home. I pick up a jar of homemade Ploughman’s Pickle. My mouth waters as I imagine cutting off a hunk of British cheddar and biting into a crispy cheese & pickle toastie. A bag of crisps (haggis & black pepper, to give my friend’s a taste) and an Irn-Bru straight from an ice chest, and I hop into the long line. As I approach the makeshift register, I’m enveloped in a warm, familiar feeling: that liminal space of waiting in line, the pleasant happy laughter of excited Scots filling the air around me as they banter with customers. I look to my left at the knick-knacks for sale just before the till: tea towels of Scottish recipes, Union Jack oven mitts, shallow tea bag dishes shaped like teapots and Buckingham Palace guards, toy double decker buses. And then, for some reason, my heart breaks.
The gentle thrum blooms in my chest and standing there juggling my wallet and a few snacks from the shop it hits me hard: I miss Scotland. Deeply. Achingly. In a way that would only make sense if it were my home; and yet, it isn’t. Not really. I grew up about 160 miles south of the border, but that hardly counts, does it? My little hometown in Yorkshire was vastly different than anywhere I’ve visited in Scotland, not even the smaller villages in the Highlands.
No. I seem to miss something I never had. A home that strikes deeper than this life, further down into my blood at a cell level. I feel it when I am in Scotland, standing on the soil of my ancestors. Their bodies fallen in battles and sickness, decomposed and buried miles down under the layers of worms and dirt, seem to turn their skulls upwards and call out to the marrow we share.
“Don’t leave. You belong here. Home,” they whisper.