My Great Britannic Adventure, Day Eight

Friday, 24 March, 1989
Iona
Day Eight, Good Friday

Funny what a creature I am of arbitrary circumstance. I felt much better this morning-- simply because I dreamed of Nigel*. I dreamed he'd adopted me as his sister and put me under his protection. It made me feel so warm and safe and cared for and secure that I could cry recalling it.

This is totally silly, I know. But not absolutely. There is precedent for this in waking life . . . oh, God, protect him!

Everyone is on a chore team here; I am assigned to the toilet-cleaning detail. I have lots of experience at that from my maiding days when I was in Architecture school. Spent much of my stint today cleaning excess grout, sealant, and sanding dust off the fixtures and tile.

10:15 was craft time. As to that, it's become obvious that when Christine MacLean told me on the phone there was a program for people staying at the MacLeod Center, she didn't just mean a special room and board rate. She meant a program-program, with a schedule and meetings and seminars and all. If the weather would behave-- like stop raining horizontally-- I'd maybe say phooey on it and go do what I came here to do. But as it is, I can't go out and there's nothing else really to do up here in the Center. Besides, it feels like since I'm getting such a cheap rate to stay here, I have to "pay" for it by going along with expectations.

Which this morning was a craft session. We were supposed to do a collage sharing the journey of our lives (vs. the life of Christ, which is what I would have expected on Good Friday) and then explain it tonight in a session. Oh, shit. Expose myself in front of all these strangers, with whom I may not even be in basic sympathy? But I decided I didn’t want to suffer another creative block like I did in January† so I made myself go to work anyway, in chalk. (Finding magazine pictures would’ve taken too long.) Depicted the truth, too, since I couldn’t begin to lie about such a thing. Wouldn’t know how.

There was tea at 11:15, then diddling around till time to go to the church for the Good Friday service at noon. It was a Stations of the Cross, thirteen or fourteen of them, with more made-up dramatic language instead of Scriptural passages.

After that there were the Seven Last Words from the Cross, followed each one by ten minutes of silent meditation. I stayed for the first two . . . Lukas* was across the choir. I wondered if he would ever think of praying for me. I’m beginning to gravely doubt it would cross his mind. I prayed for him, and for me, that I would do the right thing by him. And for Nigel*-- all blessings on Nigel*, especially with the troubles he's facing at home with his family back in S-- . . .

It had stopped raining when I left the church, so I walked into the village to see about getting some wash done. But everything was closed for lunch. I could stand on the beach and watch the tide come up, though.

It started to rain before I got back, of course. And blow.

Got myself in for lunch just in time. Soup and crackers with cheese. Soup entirely vegetable-based, very lacking in body-- and soul. I found it a bit demoralising.

Decided to try to get a little Walter Scott read, then did some handwash in the sink in the laundry room here. They don’t have a washer, which is odd, but they do have a spin dryer that takes most of the excess water out of your handwash. It got off-balance once and made the most horrible racket.

I was on the setting up and serving team for supper. Got it done somehow, despite having missed out on the description of the drill. The menu was fish, which was a nice change.

The collage-explaining thing wasn’t as bad as I’d envisioned, mostly because I do feel so out of sympathy with what’s going on here-- don’t worry, I realize it’s my own fault-- that I don’t really care what the people around here think of me. So I can tell them the truth, though of course properly dressed and packaged. One doesn’t want to be tedious, after all.

Another service in the church this evening, of Commitment. More drama, illustrating the people like Peter, Judas, and Pilate, who failed to make a proper commitment to Christ as he was going to the Cross. (Someone had asked me before dinner if I’d be willing to participate and make the noise of the cock crowing offstage as Peter denies Jesus the third time. I said No, for I was feeling too depressed to believe I’d be able to make a sound when the time came. And I couldn’t help believing the Brits were thinking, "Oh, she’s an American, she’s Loud, she’ll do fine." But whoever did it instead did such a piss poor job of it I regretted my decision. I should have gathered all my high school and college drama training about me and let that rooster rip regardless.)

It hit me how ineffective all this liturgical drama is for me when the prayers began and I suddenly realized I was hearing them as still part of the drama, something to be observed and analysed from the outside and not part of an act of worship in which I was to participate.

The burden of the prayers seemed to be towards commitment to one’s fellow man and not to Christ Himself. I suppose you can’t have true commitment to Christ without serving your neighbor. But there’s so many people who think they can achieve commitment to Christ merely by being good to others, with no focus on Jesus Himself, and I don’t think it works. Not that anybody here has said outright they were trying this method . . . One more example of my general ambivalence towards what's going on.

The only time this uncertainty was broken was when in the darkened church some actual words of Jesus from the Scripture were read out, and then the wind of the Spirit began to blow.

Tea in the refectory again. Nothing out of Mr. Renzberger* again. This fact is beginning to assume an importance it shouldn’t have. I could understand him cutting me dead if we’d been very close and quarrelled or if I’d given signs of wanting to be close when he did not, but neither of those things are true. He can't possibly think I've come to Iona just to be with him; we see each other all the time at Coverdale* and besides, I told him last month I'd always intended to come here. I certainly don’t expect him to take great blocks of time out of his fellowship with his new-found friends in the abbey program, but good grief, would it kill him to come and say, "Hi, how’s it going, how are you; well, I have to get back and talk to Whatsername or Whatsisname before they leave"? If he weren’t making me feel as if I had some sort of fatal social disease, I’d say he was being extremely rude.

I wrote a poem about this when I got back to the room, and felt better, a little.
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†In January of '89 the married students at Coverdale* College had hosted a progressive dinner. For a party game, at each stop we diners had to execute an assigned art project in a limited amount of time. At the first house, I'd tried to prove my artistic bona fides by working a Masterpiece in the tiny piece of plasticine we were given. I wasn't happy with what I'd made and in my childish frustration smashed it. To make things worse, the host said to me, "That's all right. We can't all be artists!" Crap!

My Great Britannic Adventure, Day Seven

Thursday, 23 March, 1989
Glasgow to Iona
Day Seven, Maundy Thursday

It was snowing this morning when I woke up. Lovely.

Breakfast was interesting, as the hostel seemed to have been taken over by a gang of junior high-aged boys, who made a terrible din-- and who insisted on using the women’s bathroom, despite the sign. I’m not sure the food was worth the £1.85-- it was all rather soggy from having languished too long in the bain-marie.

Only 93 miles to the Port of Oban, but I got out of town around 9:30, and good thing I did, too.

First, of course, I have to get lost trying to find the A82 out of Glasgow. But once that was located, I was fine the rest of the way. When the town was cleared you could see the snow-covered foothills of the Highlands, and it was so beautiful! It was "Wie lieblich sind deine Wohnungen" over and over, and thank goodness I had some decent top notes to sing it with!

The A82 goes along Loch Lomond and where I wasn’t crawling along the queue due to construction work I was hopping out to take pictures. Scotland doesn’t make it easy on you, though . . . No nice designated overlooks as in Nova Scotia.

Got the A85 at Tyndrum and thereafter the weather grew entertaining again. I’m afraid I was becoming thoroughly tense and white knuckled, especially as most of the other drivers were zooming along around the curves as if it were a dry, sunny day. The landscape is beautiful, though, all bathed in mist, and I began to wonder if maybe I should’ve taken the train.

Arrived in Oban a little after 12:00. The ferry to Mull left at 1:00 and I needed every bit of that time to find the ferry pier, buy my ticket, learn where to park the car and park it, assemble my bags, and stagger with them back to the gangway and onto the boat.

On the ferry, I bought a cup of tea and, establishing myself on the upper observation deck, I drank that and ate a bun and a bit of stottie bread. There was a slight swell, though nothing unpleasant. The sea was a beautiful green color under the overcast. You never get out of sight of land on that run . . . I went out on deck despite the flecks of rain and watched the islands with their lighthouses and castles drifting by.

The bus journey across Mull is about 37 miles and takes a long time, along a one-lane road. I couldn’t see much, as the windows were all fogged up. I should’ve brought something on to read. There were a couple of boys, ten or eleven years old, in the back singing popular songs in flat, tinny voices-- they nearly got a paper was bounced off their noggins. Fortunately they were not coming to Iona.

It was raining in earnest at the ferry pier in Fionnphort (pronounced more like "Finnafort"). The Iona ferry is a little thing and I elected not to try to cram into the diminuative cabin with everyone else, but remained out on deck. The sea was indulging in the most lively of leaps and arabesques and making its presence emphatically known over the sides. My umbrella had rather the worst against the wind, so pretty soon I took it down, moved my bags to where they wouldn’t get quite so soaked, and resigned myself to a total-immersion baptism by salt water and fresh.

It’s really a pity my camera isn’t waterproof. The swells were hilarious. And again, that jaw-dropping combination of sea-green and grays and muted blues . . .

The people from the MacLeod Center had brought a blue van down for us and we all piled in. They said the magic words-- "Tea" and "Fire"-- and after a blind journey along a narrow road between rock walls, they made good on the promise.

I suppose the first thing to say is that the Iona Community is not Roman Catholic. After a few questions put here and there, I learned that it’s fundamentally Church of Scotland, which is to say Presbyterian, and was started by the Duke of Argyll fifty years ago [I've since learned that the Duke of Argyll and the Rev. George MacLeod were two different people with different roles in the founding]. But it currently has an ecumenical thrust with emphasis on peace and reconciliation. The members and staff are a mixed group, men and women, singles and marrieds. I’m still not straight on how people join, what sort of commitment they make, or how the community is funded.

The second thing is that the MacLeod Center (named after the aforementioned Duke of Argyll [my misconstrual--see above]) is a brand new building, a replacement for some derelict huts of an old youth camp across the road and up the hill a bit from the abbey, all not far from the Sound of Iona. And unlike a lot of other retreat centers, the owners got an architect to design it. Christine MacLean, the woman who is the Center’s director, told me it was someone named Joe Green, but that sounds highly unlikely in Scotland . . . The detailing of doorframes, pulls, benches and other built-in furnishings, as well as the general proportions and disposition of the spaces, shows a good eye for line, space, and detail. The building isn’t quite finished, as is obvious by the lack of curtains on the windows and all the hooks that aren’t where they should be. But it’s all on order, from what I hear.

The dorm rooms have six berths apiece, with nice new mattresses on the unfinished pine bed frames. Oh, yes, the woodwork still needs to be stained.

After tea and biscuits in front of the fire in what they call the Combination Room (I’d tend to call it the Common Room or the Great Hall), the first order of business was a shower, to wash the highly-evocative but not entirely amenable smell of sea water off my person. After that, I found the drying room (the only warm room in the place) and hung up my wet things. Tempting just to stay in there-- the wind was coming in through every crack and the hardware was not keeping the doors closed at all and the central heating wasn’t working worth a poop. Nothing wrong with that building a little caulk and some revamped hardware wouldn’t solve . . .

Dinner, aka tea, was at 5:30. And I don’t know why, but it bugged me a little that it was vegetarian. Maybe because I associate that kind of thing with political and religious views I’m not entirely in accord with. In fact, I get the strong feeling the whole thrust of this place is a little--ahem--liberal . . . but I’ve learned since coming to Oxford and Coverdale* last October not to automatically brand people heretics just because they have this or that view on isolated topics that happen to be shared with frankly syncretistic or cultish groups. So I’m going to hang loose and see what happens around here. But I really don’t like the ambivalence and find it very hard to relax.

There was a recital down at the Abbey church at 7:15. Goodness, the things I’ll do for music! I have never been out in such wind and rain before in my life, especially not after nightfall. It was sheer labor to make any headway against the gale and the rain was driving so everyone was soaked even before we reached the MacLeod Center gates. And no one in this little group had brought a flashlight with them. You get out in a wild cold dark wet windy blow like that and you’re likely to forget everything except getting in out of it. And it didn’t help that the cloister door down at the abbey has no light over it.

All got in, though, and sat in the choir stalls trying to keep the teeth from chattering while the recital was going on. Various people played: pianists, flautists, a violinist, singers . . . The wind players were rather good but the violinist needs to work on his tone.

Lukas* was not there, but I’ve never known him to be a diehard music lover. There’s time enough to see him and to do that wasn’t the point of coming here, anyway.

The MacLeod Center group had a session in the library over the chapterhouse afterwards. The purpose was to catch us up with what the abbey group has been doing all week, following in Jesus’ footsteps as He moves towards the cross. The avenue to this seemed to be more that of imaginative projection than of direct Scripture-study. And I’m afraid I was rather a вопреки† and inwardly refused to do the ‘quieting’ pre-contemplation exercise, since although quieting is probably just what I need, I associate the prescribed technique with New Age idiocy.

By the time the Maundy Thursday service started in the Abbey refectory I was feeling really out of it. I couldn’t find any of the people I was sharing the room with and Lukas* didn’t come in till the very last and sat quite far from me. And I decided I was going to wait for him to greet me first. It was his prerogative, under the circumstances. He's established his turf here since last Monday and it wouldn't be right for me to push in.

The service proceeded, featuring a bit of drama that may be ok if you know the actual New Testament story but which needed to be taken with a large grain of salt anyway. And a lot of singing. They have a highly skilled a capella choir led by a woman who seems to have perfect pitch. And the acoustics enhance the voices very effectively.

For that matter, I wish I could have gotten my camera down to the abbey without drenching it. The chinks between the stones of the refectory walls were filled with little candles that made a myriad points of light all over the long room.

After the Communion bread (leavened, wheat) and the wine (real, but golden) had gone around and some more singing was done, a chant was begun and everyone proceeded through the cloister for the ceremonial stripping of the church. And behold, Lukas* was holding the door as everyone went out. I saw it would be terribly rude not to acknowledge his presence when face to face with him. So I silently saluted him as I passed . . . he gave me no response . . . and now I’m beginning to wonder if it was a misjudged thing to do. . .

He had his part in the stripping of the church, carrying out the great silver Celtic altar cross. As a recording of Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries played, one of the women danced out with a piece of the altar plate in a way that was so effectively barbaric it was almost appalling. How should that sort of thing be done? As if we were mourners ceremonially donning our black clothes, or as impersonators of the despoiling powers of darkness? I’m not sure at all.

There was tea and biscuits back in the refectory thereafter, the cold wind still howling at the windows. Lukas* made no effort to come and greet me, at which I was beginning to be a little irritated. To counteract this feeling I wanted to do something nice for him, like see that he got a cup of tea. But I couldn’t even accomplish that. When he came round to the tea table someone else had the pot and besides, he stated baldly, he was already getting tea for someone else. And that’s all he said to me.

Got wet again coming back to the Center. Stood around with some others in the Combination Room feeding the fire with bits of odd construction wood and cardboard boxes. There’s no proper firewood around here, it seems.

But the heater in the room was beginning to come on, which was encouraging.
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†"Вопреки" (vopreki), Russian preposition meaning "contrary to"; transmogrified by the characters in my high school Russian class into a noun signifying someone who willfully does the opposite of what's expected of him. It's been part of my personal vocabulary ever since.

My Great Britannic Adventure, Day One

Friday, 17 March, 1989
From Oxford to Little Chesterford, Essex
Day One

Well, my great Britannic adventure did not get off to such a brilliant start. But maybe today saw the obligatory bit of things going awry and henceforth things will settle down. I survived today, at least-- I hope.

Actually, I started out rather well. I was surprisingly on-schedule, especially for me, and by 2 PM I had presented myself at the Europcar rental agency by the Texas store (I think they sell housewares and do-it-yourself supplies; odd name for an English chain, isn’t it?) on the Botley road to pick up my car.

First hitch-- Whoever took my reservation Tuesday had neglected to enter it, and no car was waiting. Easily solved: another was available.

Second problem, but much bigger-- the credit authorization people refused to take my Commerce Visa and my Centerre card has expired. This is not nice at all, for the immediate purposes and for general implications. . . .

[I spend some time and ink cogitating on what might have gone wrong, especially given that a relative in the States was keeping my accounts and paying my Visa bills]

. . . But all this was abstract at the moment, with me standing there at the car hire office, a room booked in Cambridgeshire (or is this Essex?) for the night and me legally liable for that, and my officially having given notice I was vacating the room at Coverdale* Hall today. Not nice.

The way it was finally solved was for me to take the bus back into town and get the amount in cash, £200 or so of which I’ll get back presuming I don’t do anything untoward to the car.

So by 4:15, two hours behind schedule, I had the vehicle. Headed back to Coverdale*, loaded up the waiting bags, called the people I’d reserved with to say I’d be late, and headed up the Banbury Road and over to Marston Ferry and on east.

Here is something interesting: driving on the lefthand side was no problem at all for me, and I hope things continue that way. True, I tend to be a little afraid of getting too close to oncoming traffic (or do I fear that if I drive too far to the right I’ll forget and revert to American habits?), meaning I overcorrect and was plowing the verge a time or two. Thank God I did discover that by trespassing on a curb here and some grass there, and not by sideswiping either a parked car or a passing cyclist.

The real problem is the road signage and the car itself. What they gave me was an Austin-Rover Maestro, but it ain’t no master-- of anything. Or maybe with its name it has Italian ideas of how things mechanical should run (I take that back-- Fiats and Ferraris are reputed to be excellent automobiles). Maybe a better way to describe it is that the whole car seems constipated. The trunk lock sticks, the gear shift is horribly stiff, the bright lights switch won’t stay on, and the cassette deck has swallowed one of my tapes and refuses to give it up.

The shift is the worst. It’s obnoxiously difficult to shift into first or second, with the result that I am continually and unintentionally starting from a dead stop in third or turning corners in fourth. This is rotten on the gears but so far I can’t do anything about it. That car is driving me crazy and I’m checking with the Cambridge Europcar branch to see if I can get a replacement (I want an Escort, dammit!!). At least I’ll need them to make the player surrender my Berlioz tape.

As for signage, well. A little of it is me not being used to it and also trying to navigate at night. But when you go 130± miles on what’s supposed to be a 75 mile trip . . .

I got sidetracked on the A40 when the sign for the A418 and Aylesbury came up too suddenly for me to make the turn; I got off the A40 and was on the road that goes by Little Milton before I could turn around and make my way by an alternate route to Aylesbury.

Then I missed the connection with the A4012 at Leighton Buzzard and ended up down some road, finally turning around in a farmyard past a church.

Then I made it to Woburn (pity I wasn’t there in daylight to see the Abbey) but it took me five or six passes and all sorts of edifying nocturnal side-trips to Woburn Sands, Aspley, Guise, and once a jaunt parallel to the M1 nearly all the way to Milton Keynes before I finally found the turnoff where the A4012 continues. (It was at a very nondescript, ill-lighted corner and the signs from both directions weren’t turned so car headlights could hit them). I think I took that turn mostly because I’d tried everything else. Heaven knows the sign message wasn’t visible.

Then I got a little screwed up at Clophill, but turned round at a pub before I’d progressed too far towards Bedford.

But I pulled another brilliant navigational feat at Baldock, where I forgot which town I was aiming for when I got onto the A505 at the roundabout and ended up all the way to Luton, to the southwest, instead of passing north of Royston, to the northeast.

Once I’d got that corrected, I was all right the rest of the way. And East Anglian roads are fairly straight, more like I-70 or something, and for the first time I could comfortably do the legal 60 mph. 50 down to 45 mph, up to then.

I can see that one must memorize the towns you’re likely to encounter, because that’s the only way you’ll know you’re on the right road. Besides signs that give you no warning to turn in time and ones that are badly placed, the biggest problem is lack of road numbers along the route. If you miss the number sign at the roundabout or junction, you’re out of luck till the next roundabout or junction. Similarly, you don’t see signs saying "Milton Keynes 5 mi." outside town limits, nor are the highways called out as "A507 East" or whatever’s appropriate. It’s a shame, because the landscape’s so pretty it’s rotten to not be able to enjoy it because you’re afraid of missing an all-important, unique, and perhaps badly-located sign.

At any rate, I didn’t arrive in Little Chesterford till 10 PM. The proprietors of the B&B, Mr. and Mrs. Lewis Payne, had gone out but their 16 year old daughter Vickie was home to let me in and show me the room.

It is cute-- under the eaves of a thatched house, with the timber wallplate visible about a foot and a half above the floor. The house is thatched, but I couldn’t see that well in the dark.

There was tea making apparatus in the room; I had two cups, more for the warmth and comfort than because I need any such drink that late at night.

The weather at the moment is clear and starry, most unlike the foul rain we had yesterday. The sunset sky in Oxfordshire was beautiful-- too bad no place I had to turn around could give me a good camera shot at it!