Come on along

“No one’s ever got lost on this hike,” said Steve, our Dalrachney Lodge host in Carrbridge, as he picked us up on the lightly traveled A938 a couple of kilometers south of town.

Cairngorms National Park covers 10% of Scotland, and when Rebecca and I had reached the end of the path, with a river on the left, instead of on the right, and no bridge, I said, unhelpfully, “We’re screwed.” She, in character, turned around to retrace our steps. My only goal now was to keep her in sight.

It took us another hour to find a bridge and then, finally, the clearing where Steve had dropped us off six hours earlier.

My dying phone showed 31,722 steps and 14 miles, which broke our ten-mile record set in Malta eight years ago, when we were sexuagenarians. Debriefing with our rain-soaked maps two hours later over fish and chips for salt to help us retain water — recommended by a Canadian doctor also training around Scotland — we concluded that after we passed through the chicken coop property, allowed in Scotland, we took the least trampled path, and that made all the difference.

This was the 12th of a 15-day Grand Tour of Scotland by Train planned by McKinlay Kidd. We began in Glasgow and finished in Edinburgh, with two- and three-night stays in Oban, Spean Bridge, Portree (Isle of Skye), Inverness, Thurso, Carrbridge and Pitlochry.

In one sentence, the itinerary offered us the traditional Scotland of small villages and the Highlands, and the modern urban, with trains that ran on time.

I’ve picked a few highlights and promise to be short-winded; it’s the Scottish way.

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Our first overnight, in Oban, set the Highlands’ tone. I now understood how this part of the world captured the hearts and imaginations of Robert Burns and Bob Dylan.

Throughout Scotland, we stayed in large mansions turned into B&Bs. This is Viewfield House in Portree on the Isle of Skye. Our room was in the renovated stables in the back, up a flight of stairs, with slanted ceilings; very cozy.

During a tour of Skye, David, the physician I mentioned above, asked our guide for the name of this waterfall.

Stewart (Stu ART), who rebuilds guitars when he isn’t steering a van on the twisty, shoulder-free, one-lane roads of this large island and captivating a multinational group of twenty, and who seemed to know everyone and everything about the Inner Hebrides, said, “I have no idea, as we have so many waterfalls no one has felt the need to name them.”

Even I can’t mess up this picture.

It rained every day, usually a smirr (light), never a slotin (hard). We came prepared.

Scotland is a literary country. We found bookstores everywhere, including Leakey’s in Inverness, with no chairs and a delightfully laconic owner who responded to my churlish “Do you use the wood-burning stove in winter?” with “Do you heat your house in January?”

Even in a train station.

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Years ago, in Morocco, with a group of college students, our guide, Mohammed Oujrid, turned to us after he got in the van on the first day and said, “Repeat after me: we’re travelers, not tourists.”

By that he meant we weren’t going to move around his country in a bubble. We were going to connect with Moroccans.

That’s what we did on the trains. As you can see with Rebecca and her seatmate below.

Those are the precious connections we found at the end of the Scottish rainbows.

This pub in Nottingham, England, that Rebecca is fronting, opened in 1067, 1189, 1751, or 1799. 

Maybe it’s the oldest in England; maybe not. But it got me thinking about why we honor persistence in pubs and Cathedrals but not necessarily in humans. 

Yesterday, on Turquoise Line 79, an older woman with a large handbag looped over the corner of her walker got on at Bobbers Bridge and off at Ascott Street, two stops later, where there is a Tesco Express. As she inched her way down the coach aisle, I thought of the two bottles of wine in my backpack that, a few moments earlier, had weighed heavily on my shoulders.

I know nothing about that woman other than what I observed. She seemed a decade older than my 77 years, and she is not alone, as we’ve observed over the past month riding British trains and buses. 

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My brother Peter got the name, but I got the forever-young syndrome. After all, I’m writing this story in Nottingham, England, two hours north of where J.M. Barrie wrote Peter Pan: The Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up in 1902.

On Friday, from our 10-day perch in this Midlands city, Rebecca and I will visit Cambridge because, well, it’s got a famous school. 

By my count, I’ve spent 73 years in classrooms, starting with Kindergarten at four. Thus, as a child, I went to school and sat in the back row. As an adult, I went to school and stood behind a podium. And as a senior, with my head held high and shoulders back, I’m still going to school, with a pack on my back.  

Next January, in San Miguel, Mexico, I’ll teach a Lifelong Learning course titled “Growing Old with Bob Dylan.” Bob’s seven years older than me and still writing and singing songs, itches he needed to scratch.

School is the same for me.

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My childhood yearnings were never about school unless they were nightmares. Like yours if you were an American boy in the 1950s — I wanted to be Mickey Mantle, the center fielder of the World Champion New York Yankees.

And I was a pretty good baseball player until high school, when I stopped growing and, worse, couldn’t hit the curveball. So I switched to golf, a ball that sat on a tee, and the heroic Arnold Palmer, who visited my hometown in 1965.

But youthful fantasies are just that. They come and go. But school stuck around, even when I didn’t want it to. For example, Sister Robert Cecile kept me after the bell rang in 6th grade on the last day before summer vacation for reasons I still don’t understand. She had me clean the erasers. 

And 10 years later, in the spring of 1970, after Nixon invaded Cambodia and colleges, afraid of rioting on campus, were giving students the choice to leave early with our current grades or stay to the end of the semester, I opted to stay because my grades were so poor.

Regarding school and me, I could never quite extricate myself until I stopped trying and gave in.

Perhaps it is a form of not growing up. Or, to put a bit of a positive spin on it, of nurturing the part of me that wants to stay forever young. After all, I’ve mostly succeeded at the important adult responsibilities: mowing the lawn, caring for children, holding a job, and saving money. That’s part of me, too. 

At the end of the day and term, school has become a way of being in the world. It’s a state of mind I carry with me, outside its walls, even during the hot months. There’s always something new to learn and to teach. 

Including that Mickey Mantle, until the day he died, had nightmares about never being good enough, despite his Hall of Fame career.  And Arnold Palmer always wanted more major championships than his seven, woefully short of his good friend Jack Nicklaus’ 18. And Jack, another hero of mine, wanted the adoration of Arnold’s crowds.

My boyhood heroes, too, had complicated adult lives beyond a child’s understanding and multiple parts to their personalities.

Just like me and, I’m guessing, you.

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As I wrote this story, Emmy Lou reminded me it was time for her walk. “I don’t walk you until I feed you,” I said.

“You fed me 20 minutes ago,” she replied, a little hurt.

“Surely I didn’t,” I barked, a little offended. But it turns out I had, the evidence in the slobber in her dishwashed bowl.

Two years ago, I had an MRI that came back with good news about a heart issue, and this, from my doctor.

“Your brain is shrinking. Let’s do another in a year to monitor,” he offered. “Have you had memory issues?”

“Not really,” I lied, leaving out the proper nouns that arrive four minutes after I need them. “I forget you are 75,” he noted. “Let’s see what things look like next year.”

When next year arrived, I declined. Everything on me is shrinking, except my prostate.

“Emmy, walk???”

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How do you view the future? I mean beyond the practicalities of life: birthdays, bills, and whether you have signed up for lunch at Tuesday’s Rotary meeting.

Yesterday, I turned 77. It’s been a long time coming, but still unexpected. For ten days, Rebecca and I will be living in a house my former college employer owns in Nottingham, England.

It has a staircase, not unlike the stairwell in our home 4000 miles to the west, where we’ve decided to add another railing and handles at the bottom corner.

This morning, as I rounded the downward bend, my MAC was in my right hand, a toilet roll core snug in the right front pocket of my stretch travel pants, with my phone in the left pocket, freeing my other hand to grasp the railing as I intently observed each Morrell Hiking boot footstep.

When did this happen?

What comes next?

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The photo is dated February 29, 2020. It was the first meeting with Romanian students at the University of the West in Timisoara, Romania. They were graduate students in the Department of American Studies. It was a Saturday morning, since they all had full-time jobs; their university classes were on Friday night or Saturday. Many were elementary or secondary teachers. All spoke English.

I was part of America’s Fulbright Program, which sends scholars worldwide to do research and teach. My job was to teach about American politics.

My biggest concern that morning was walking to the Iulius Town Shopping Center after class to find an HDMI port like the one below that would work for my PowerPoint slides.

I also told my students that I would be gone the next Saturday for the Fulbright orientation meetings in Bucharest, where everything under the sun was discussed about living in this beautiful Eastern European country, except what was right around the corner: COVID.

So before our next class, all courses moved online. When the announcement came, I told Rebecca I had no idea how to teach two classes, each with 30 students, through a computer screen. I had never taught or taken an online course. In fact, it was worse.

For about a decade, until retirement in 2018, I had revised my college teaching pedagogy to remove any device, such as PowerPoint slides, between my students and me. This story explains why.

Good Teachers Are Made, Not Born

That’s me doing what I do best: talking with students.

medium.com

When I was awarded the Fulbright gig, that put me back in the saddle again. I thought I would use Powerpoint only until the Romanian students were comfortable with a more conversational American approach, thus the need for the correct port connection.

If you recall, in those first days of the virus, no one knew how long the COVID lockdowns would last. When the NBA shutdown on March 11, 2020, I knew it was serious and sure enough word came from the American state department that ran the Fulbright program that Rebecca and I should skedaddle back to the USA. When we left a Bucharest Hotel close to the airport two days later, they closed their doors, for the next year!

Ironically, the mass movement to online courses meant I could teach my students from Decorah, Iowa, my home. In the fall of 2021, with another Fulbright, and, we thought, Covid behind us, we gladly went back to Timisora and a new group of students.

Except, the day after we arrived in September 2021, a new wave of the virus spread through Romania, so the faculty at the University of West voted to go back online. Here I am, with one of my classes, in our Romanian apartment, from 11 am to 2 pm every Saturday from September through January 2022.

So, two Fulbright Awards, Spring 2020 and Fall 2021, and no personal contact with students. Fortunately, in 2021, Rebecca and I enjoyed four months in this phenomenal Eastern European country.

In 2023, I applied for a third Fulbright, to Romania, to Timisoara, to the University of the West. This one was for two weeks and a series of lectures on the American Presidential election of 2024.

Here’s the crowd at one of the talks. Gratifyingly, it included many former students I had only met online.

And you might recognize, this fellow, Ede Szabo, from the first photo of my very first class in 2020.

This was, finally, a chance to talk in person about one of Ede’s passions, American Presidents.

That’s real teaching!

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Vera-Marie Landi asks about projects, and her excellent question has gotten me pondering about a big one on the horizon.

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Last night, dead tired after a day of touring the Orkney Islands, each with a tumbler of Talisker Scottish whiskey in our room at Pentland House in Thurso, on the northernmost tip of the Scottish mainland, Rebecca and I talked about Ireland.

It was early, around 7 pm, and we were trying to stay awake to watch episode six of the Netflix series, The Vikings, about younger people pillaging both European nations starting in the 8th century. 

This was day nine of our two-week train trip around Scotland. Instead of the peaceful modern Norwegians, we’re trying to stay ahead of Donald Trump, who occupied western Ireland over the weekend.

Our conversation wandered to 2019 and a trip we co-led to Ireland and Northern Ireland. In the first photo, that’s our group of 24 standing in front of the Northern Ireland Parliament Building, Stormont.

And here we’re bunched next to a Peace Wall between Catholic and Protestant neighborhoods in Belfast.

I’m showing you and me two group pictures as a reminder of the double edge of the Viking travel sword. On the one hand, we loved our group of 24 in Ireland. No one was high-maintenance except me, and even then, it was just the occasional glitch in the itinerary.

But that was 2019, when Rebecca and I were in our upper sixties, spring chickens. Now, closer to 80, and asking: do we have a Scotland Luther College (my former employer) Alumni and Friends trip in us?

We wanted to do one in 2021, but COVID nixed it. Again in 2023, this time throttled by a college President who questioned its utility. Thankfully, the current president reinstated them, and that’s where our dilemma lies.

It’s likely our tour won’t happen until 2028, when we’ll be…older, though not the approximately 5000 years of the Stones of Stenness on Orkney.

No one, not even the greatest American baseball player, Willie Mays, can do something forever. I remember watching Willie stumble in the outfield playing center field for the New York Mets in the World Series at 42 in 1973. His iconic hat flew off as it had a million times before, this time showing a bald spot. The extraordinary Mays had aged out of baseball.

This also happens to ordinary men and women. 

The trick is to know when. 

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“Do you actually use the stove during the winter?” I asked.

“It depends on what you mean by actually,” gently rebuffed the owner of Leakey’s Bookshop in Inverness, Scotland, as he handed me my purchase, a bookbag with the store name, the only thing we could fit in our suitcases. He followed up with, “How long have you been using your house furnace?”

Knowing when to fold, I asked about his store’s history. The less colorful version you can read about here.

When Rebecca and I visited Paris for three days in 2018, we still joke that we never saw the Eiffel Tower. Once you walk into the arrondisements, it’s easy to get lost.

Yesterday, at breakfast, we talked over the itinerary for our last day in Inverness and asked,

Would we take a wander around the city or hunt the loch for Nessie?

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Do you remember where you were on September 11, 2001?

I was a professor in this college classroom. Where were you? And what did that day mean to you?

Decorah, Iowa (All times are Central Standard Time)

I got to my office about 6 a.m. to prepare for an 8 a.m. class. I was teaching a new course, Struggle for Freedom, that compared freedom struggles in three countries: Northern Ireland, South Africa, and America.

I finished my work in Koren Hall around 7:30 AM and strolled the 200 yards to Main and my classroom. The sun was on my back on a clear day in the American Midwest.

Always restless before class, I wanted to check whether there were enough whiteboard markers for student reports and enough chairs for the 16 of us.

I also wondered where to put the portable lectern to signal to students where I would be sitting. I put it at the end of the table facing the door. I didn’t check whether the TV would work because I didn’t plan to use it.

Tuesday, September 11, would be our 5th class meeting. We started with Northern Ireland, and that day’s topic was the role of terrorism in the conflict between Protestant and Catholic Communities.

It was an ordinary Tuesday morning on the Luther College campus in Decorah, Iowa.

Boston & New York

At 6:59 AM, American Airlines Flight 11, which carried 92 people, took off from Boston International Airport and was bound for Los Angeles.

Around the time I got to my office:

Captain John Ogonowski and First Officer Thomas McGuiness Jr. were going through their pre-flight routines.

Chief Flight Attendant Karen Martin and Flight Attendants Barbara Arestegui, Jeffrey Collman, Sara Low, Kathleen Nicosia, Betty Ann Ong, Jean Roger, Dianne Snyder, and Amy Sweeney were overseeing the boarding of passengers.

Mohamed Atta, Abdulaziz al-Omari, Wail al-Shehri, Waleed al-Sheri, and Stam al-Sugami were among the 81 passengers who found seats.

At 7:19 AM, Flight Attendant Betty Ann Ong notified the American Airlines ground crew that Flight 11 had been hijacked. Ong provided information for 25 minutes.

Two minutes after Ong’s last transmission, at 7:46 AM, Mohamed Atta guided American Flight 11 into the North Tower of the World Trade Center.

Decorah (8 AM)

As the 15 students traipsed into Main 211, one mentioned he had heard on the news that a plane had crashed into the World Trade Center.

And then, just after we started class, at 8:03 AM, Marwan al-Shehhi steered United Flight 75 into the South Tower. In 2001, no one in the class had a laptop or handheld device to see the news as it happened.

Just as Hani Hanjour maneuvered American Airlines 175 into the Pentagon at 8:37 AM, a student poked her head into our classroom and told us another plane had hit the World Trade Center.

I went to the TV in the classroom and discovered it was not working. But the world had impinged upon our orderly classroom, and we needed to see what was happening. I remembered a TV in my department’s administrative assistant’s office and told the class to follow me.

It was about 8:50 AM.

We hurried across campus into Chelle Meyer’s third-floor office just in time to see the south tower collapse at 8:59.

Seven minutes later, the passengers of Flight 93 forced Ziad to fly the plane into a Pennsylvania field instead of the US Capitol or White House.

At 9:28 AM, two minutes before my class on Northern Ireland terrorism would have ended, the North Tower of the World Trade Center collapsed.

Nineteen terrorists, four planes, 265 passengers and crew, 2712 killed, and 6000 injured on that beautiful Tuesday morning.

What did that day mean to me?

On November 22, 1963, I was in a freshman high school English class when President John Kennedy was assassinated. I remember an announcement over the intercom and a classmate joking about “who Jackie would sleep with that night.” Nothing else until the following day when I went to pay my paper route bill at the newspaper office. Everything seemed normal. No one was talking about Kennedy’s murder.

Why not? I thought. Don’t they know something terrible has happened? And then the next day, a Sunday, when we came home after Mass, my dad told us Jack Ruby had shot Lee Harvey Oswald.

How does a 14-year-old process these events?

Five years later, in the summer of 1968, after the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy, my dad came home from his work as an engineer and asked, “What was happening in our country?”

I started my sophomore year in college the following fall, and college helped me filter, distill, extract, and clarify what was happening in the world.

I was no longer that overwhelmed paperboy. I didn’t know it then, but a college professor was born from the crucible of the 1960s.

College, through its courses, professors, speakers, and midnight dorm sessions, provides context for events. Knowing something is always so much better than knowing nothing.

It’s always made me less anxious.

In the spring of 2000, I took students to Northern Ireland to study the conflict between the Catholic and Protestant communities. That pricked my interest in terrorism, a topic I never explored in graduate school.

When politics, religion, and terrorism all came together on that terrible, beautiful Tuesday, I needed to know more about what was going on in the world that would produce these horrors.

So, in the summer of 2002, I developed a new course, Terrorism and Democracy.

It was a one-off, I thought.

Instead, I taught Terrorism and Democracy every year until I retired in 2018. It became one of Luther College’s most popular courses.

What about you? What did America’s 9/11 mean to you?

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Bob Dylan’s heart was in the Scottish Highlands; Robert Burns’ was too. There’s something magical about this place that a million people visit every year. Words flow as easily as the rain.

Yesterday, stuffed into our Ghostbuster’s rain gear disguise, Rebecca and I climbed into Stuart’s coach in Portree for an 11-hour mosy around the most popular of Scotland’s 900 islands.

Stu-ART was one of those inestimable guides who knew precisely the line between talking too much and talking too little, with a perfect blend of history and humor. Our 15 van mates ranged from 30 to 77, with a mixture of Americans, Canadians, English and Japanese.

At our lunch stop at a busy cafe, with a cheese scone itself worthy of a Dylan song and Burns poem, our guide helped serve the meal and seemed to know everyone in the cafe.

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