Jessica: Reading from the novel My Dear Fiona - Charon’s Boat

”You shouldn’t leave Stromness before you visit Hoy,” the lady at the front desk suggested with a motherly demeanor which tried to restore my sunny outlook on life, now sunk by the sudden circumstance through which I found myself alone again.

She smiled encouragingly, and pointed towards the pier, to the approaching ferry.

“Hurry up, now. If you rush, you can get there before it leaves.”

She nodded approvingly in response to my befuddled expression, and I obeyed her suggestion without too much mental struggle.

There were only a few people on the ferry, braving a fog so thick the contours of Graemsay Island, which we almost brushed on our way to Hoy, were barely visible.

As I entered the mist, the world as I knew it stayed behind: its joys and its pains, the music and the laughter, the plans and dreams. A different place awaited at the end of the fog, and the other travelers, veiled in the mist, looked like shadows, sharing a ride with me in Charon’s boat to the island of the dead.

This realm beyond the mists you approach in silence.

Nobody talked.

We walked quietly, a distance from each other, to respect our solitary retreat, instinctively following in each other’s footsteps along the wooden path snaking through the eerie wilderness towards the giant monolith of Dwarfie Stane.

The legends say the place was built by giants, and it sure looks that way, the enormous monolith housing a tomb, painstakingly carved in the dense soapstone, with a smaller boulder beside it, the door to its entrance.

Who could build such a thing? Who other than giants? Or dwarfs, says the lore.

Here, under the deep sky, with nothing but wilderness and silence, one is inclined not to doubt those stories. Nothing seems matched to human scale, and the sparse vegetation growing between the red rocks makes it look like it belongs to a different realm.

There is a grave not too far from Dwarfie Stane, that of Betty Corrigall. There are a lot of Corrigalls around these lands, Fiona, but this blood of yours got to enjoy her final resting place alone on an island all to herself, in a romantic valley filled with flowers. Not a cheerful story, I’m afraid.

It was a rough hike, through the waterlogged dirt to Rackwick Beach, and one I walked in silence, so transformed by the strange alien landscape and the whispers of the fog, I instinctively retreated inside myself, leaving all my expectations and reasons behind.

I walked for an hour, maybe, noticing the shift in the landscape and feeling, rather than assessing, that we were approaching the shore.

The beach revealed itself suddenly, past a bend in the rough path, and at its sight I had no doubt I had left my world behind.

A mass of round boulders, polished and glimmering in the wet fog, lay between me and the sea, like giant empty snail shells of several species. Among them the black ones stood out, glossier than the rest from the sea spray, and half buried in the shifting sand churned by the tide.

We live our lives with expectations of what they should look like, and those expectations are rarely challenged, except for moments like this. I wasn’t hungry. I wasn’t tired. I felt like my body wasn’t even there, just my consciousness, unencumbered by physical constraints, standing tall on the natural sea wall at Saint John’s Head, with the tall pillar of the Old Man of Hoy standing guard in the distance, my arms stretched out to embrace as much of reality as I could reach, and one with it all.

The island of the dead. I can’t make heads and tails of this thought, and I can’t shake it either: there’s barely any trace of human habitation, of the living variety anyway.

I followed the others back the way we came, without asking why, like birds orienting ourselves by the magnetic field of the earth and the movements of the sun, to catch the ferry back to Stromness before we found ourselves stranded on the island overnight.

The fog lifted, and the sun came out, just in time for sunset, as we passed the flat green of Graemsay on our way back.

“You must be tired,” the lady at the front desk welcomed me, smiling. “It’s a long hike.”

“Hungry,” I realized suddenly, as if my return to the land of the living brought back with it all the needs and frailness of the latter, and I felt inexplicable relief.

“Nothing a hearty broth can’t cure,” she replied.

The music was building up to a peak in the busy streets, and as I walked among the festival participants, sharing in their exuberance, I felt like my whole day had been a dream, too far removed from normal life to ponder.

There are experiences you talk about, photograph and share, and then there are those that change your vantage point. They don’t belong anywhere in this world.

Thank you for reading.

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