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freedformwriter · 5 months ago

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Diary of a Baggage Train: Day 10

Having learned from my disgrace of yesterday, I make it down to breakfast on time this morning. The dining room is set with placards with table names on them and the diners are North American or German. The two American tables are busy exchanging details of their medical histories with hitherto strangers, because of course. (I’m so glad I refrained from jumping in when they mention last night’s Portugal match, because then I would have to forgo the pleasure of pure eavesdropping.) One woman commiserates with a man at the other table who’s fallen ill while walking. Almost apologetically, she hypotheses it’s because she walked up Devil’s Staircase yesterday, getting all sweaty, and then got hit with rain and wind at the top. ‘I don’t think that’s an entirely medical explanation.’ As if the admonition you’ll catch your death is some grandmotherly hocus. Her scepticism of old wives’ wisdom does not extend to her father-in-law and his patented cold remedy of gargling a shot of tequila before bed. She followed his advice, but all it’s done is give her a pounding headache. The man confesses his illness might be alcohol related as he’s been sampling the local whiskies for the last eight days. I scrape the entirety of my mother’s full English into a takeaway container and make my escape.

This is my last leg as a baggage train. I will struggle to share my little fiefdom of a Fiat with my mother; everything is just the way I like. She feels somewhat guilty that we don’t spend the days together. But long covid is shaping my personality towards introversion. I wander another gift shop with the same natural soaps and a selection of eco-friendly travel accessories made from recycled water bottles. (I buy the shea butter bar but resist the lunch bag in Highland Cattle print.) I sit and watch the Corran ferry load and unload, load and unload. I finish an audiobook about a happy queer family of eighteenth-century highwaymen. I follow the trail up towards a waterfall and find a picturesque bench looking out over a plantation of seedling trees. Loch Linnhe sparkles in the distance, courtesy of a coy hint of sunshine.

It is absolutely gorgeous here, it really is, but could I survive the Highlands long term? I don’t think we’ve experienced anything over 15° or 16° and it’s summer. What about the dark months? There’s a rawness that makes me feel insubstantial in a way that has nothing to do with my weight. I am, as ever, an unrevealing ‘average’ on any measuring metric. My mother has always been the tougher one, with her athletic build and strong hands. My smaller bones and wider hips must come from the genetic wildcard that is my paternal gene pool. So it is a fresh surprise every time I notice how small she is now thanks to a diabetic diet and advancing age. I guess she notices it too. She’s remarked that everyone on the trail has meat on their bones. I observe the same of the locals, who radiate a certain ruddy robustness. Obviously, the imported walkers are a self-selected group of people who are more or less sure of their bodies. But the red-cheeked local open up the fantasy that one could become hardy simply by living in a hard climate in a remote location. Maybe, if I moved here, I’d start swimming in the loch every day and develop fantastic blood circulation and stride around bare legged within a year. That’s the fantasy.

Having set out at 5.30am, my mother fetches up at the Weatherspoon’s in Fort William – the new finish to the West Highland Way – at 8.30pm. She’s walked the last mile with a young Argentine woman who now stares at the city centre with tired, unfocussed eyes, struggling to formulate a plan beyond putting one foot in front of the other. We take the obligatory finishing bench photos with the bronze statue of a bald man ruefully rubbing his foot. ‘Where’s the car, dear?’ asks my ever-composed mother.