Today is Earth Day 2021 - and in Her honour, I'm reprinting as close as I've ever gotten to nature writing. Even I'm enjoying my hubris at the end. (Many thanks to Charlotte Ross, who commissioned this piece).
By Pat Kane
Sunday Herald, 18th July, 1999
Wild, sea-pummelled Scottish shorelines are for bellowing into the ether, remembering who you are and healing
Here is my own ritual for standing on an Atlantic beach in Scotland, developed meticulously over the last ten years. You walk up to the first line of wet sand, the waves booming away in the near distance. You let your arms and legs go star-shaped, spread outwards by the ridiculous thundering noise, the massive push of the wind, the overall wildness of everything.
And, when you're completely alone, you take a very deep breath, fill your insides with spray and salt and ozone, and just scream your head off. About anything that has to come out: sex, work, money, John Coltrane, your brother, your daughter, A&R men, who you love, who you really love.
I think it's something to do with the Atlantic, and with Scotland, and where I am between the two. I first came to my favourite beach, the Strand on the west coast of Islay, at a very fraught time. One half of my head was conversing with jazz musicians in Manhattan; the other half was trying to second-guess Scottish political history.
The crack in the middle was occupied by two family faces: one sweet, blank and just arrived, the other gradually getting moodier and angrier. The Solution: holiday on a Scottish island. No phones, no media-breaks, no "commissions". Sand, rocks, rockpools. For 14 days. Uh-huh.
I remember being dragged grumpily to a beach, just up from London on the shuttle, thrumming with Eighties' impatience. And I never saw the wave come up the Big Strand on my blindside, submerging my designer legware right up to the lower shin. As it sucked back to the sea, I looked at my lower regions: damp, destroyed, ridiculous as a sit-com stooge - and I began to laugh. Said good-bye to my good shoes.
Which began my general salvation. I now know that Scottish beaches are for healing yourself, remembering who you are, and - most of all - getting seaweedy sand in your exquisitely-rendered turn-ups. Remember: you're on your whole-days.
But it's the Atlanticism too, as well as the comforts of the homeland, that keeps bringing me back to these places. I can never get over the very idea that here - between the broken croft at one end of the bay, and the automatic lighthouse at the other - is where an entire ocean is simply compelled to stop. And it's not pleased at the fact: not at all.
One crazy Hogmanay, we all trailed down to Machir Bay on Islay. Weather-wise, it was like being in a sadist's wind-tunnel; children were literally tumbled away, complexions grew visibly coarse. But the waves! They were as big as buses falling over, and they wouldn't stop: a huge greyness smashing down and spreading out, as far as the eye could see.
Depending on your mood, you can go metaphor-crazy in moments like this. Waves As American Imperial Power, hammering at the front door of Europe. Or: Waves As Nature's Rage Expressed, a cautionary pummelling of the humanised coastline. Or - well, sometimes just the most violent stuff you've ever seen. A trip on sheer force. Matter gone mad.
The other joy of the Atlantic beach is the search for Atlantic stuff. I don't know whether the old beachcomber in Bill Forsyth's Local Hero was facing an ocean - but for all the magical variety of stuff Fulton Mackay had to hand, he could reasonably have been. Talk to the Ileach (their own, Gaelic term for Islay's islanders) and they'll give you a list of strange objects washed in by the Gulf stream, sweeping up from South America: Argentinian corned beef tins, Mexican oil drums, the occasional sperm whale ...
We picked up something on the Big Strand once, a large, round, very dark seed, pitted gently all over. The nature encyclopedias were duly consulted and the nearest thing that came to it was a mahogany seed, all the way up from the Amazon. Or was it the middle bit of a 1985 picnic avocado, weathered in the fitful Hebridean sun? Don't disillusion us: we have our beach mythologies to maintain.
My other oceanic fix in Scotland takes place on the islands of Barra. First time, on honeymoon, we wandered along an operatic beach in our underwear: a local farmer nearly arrested us for indecent exposure. A few years ago, we all bolted up there in some haste, and found ourselves in the spare room of a crab-fishing family on Vatersay. The father went out with his boat on the eastern side of the island, pulling up creels from glassy, royal-blue bays that never seemed to get agitated. Like the man himself.
As we ate, with extreme pleasure, his wife's just-caught crab salads, my daughter and I talked about running over the hill to see the Atlantic beach. "Aye you can do that, if you want," he said - not rudely, but not with a great degree of enthusiasm. "Very big waves over there". That is, not much leeway for the assiduous harvesting of crabs.
My girl and I scampered over the machair that evening, with an Oban gift-shop kite tentatively rigged up and ready to fly. Over the dunes, and there we were: big Walt Disney red-gray sunset, battalions of waves marching towards us like the Marine Corps, and a slanting wind that seemed - by the angle of the grasses all around - as if it had never stopped blowing.
You could turn your head, though, and hear the relative silence from the other side, like a natural schizophrenia. All the houses were bunched away, towards that bay, in calmer air. And who would want to live too close to these ancient fists hammering on your doorstep, reminding you of how contingent all your bricks and mortar and bills and mortgage are, how incessantly things will go on without you?
Nice buzz for the urban tourists, though. The kite flew from our fingers, and was literally kicked up into the sky, its wee plastic spars bowed like a gull's wings: we held on very tightly, very wordlessly, very happily. And when it went as high as a microdot, and the nylon line was hanging on to the plastic wheel by a preposterous- looking knot, we decided to bring it back down - expecting every second for the stupid thing to snap and flee deliriously into the ocean.
It didn't; turn by turn, we reigned in its pink, flappy rebellion, and my girl grabbed it in her hands. "Victory!" she laughed, her cheekiness on full-watt, her cagoule too big for her, an indelible memory for a father.
So rage on, Atlantic: bellow the truth that we're nothing, no one, no good, not long for this earth, of no lasting significance. But the girl and I beat you that night. And as long as I take breath, we always will.