The Power Animals Of Scotland, Part One

On the bus ride across the Isle of Mull, the driver is pointing out various Sights to us. Do we see that patch of trees on the hillside to the left? Heads turn. Do we see how it is in the shape of a badger? Indeed, some of the trees form a lighter outline of some form--I am slightly upset that I can't tell whether or how much of the front part is a head.

"That's because the foreman of the logging crew that put those trees in was a Douglas. The badger is the clan animal of the Douglases," the driver informs us.

I have just arrived to Scotland from Paris--that is, from warm chocolate cake with fresh cream to leathery bus station lasagna--and find myself evidently defensive and critical. I am going to visit my mother on Iona for Easter. She is, among other things, a MacNeil. The MacNeils, as a Scottish heritage website put it, were expert sailors who made a living through exchanges with other islands--I think, a diplomatic way of saying pirates. They also claimed not to be descended from the race of Noah because "the MacNeil had his own boat."

When our mother divorced our father and we moved to an expensive, eccentric low house that sat at the edge of an artificial lake, one of the first things she did was to order a yellow plastic rowboat from the Sears catalogue, which she rowed thunkingly around and around our new lake. She said it reminded her of her childhood summers in Maine. It made her upper arms extremely strong--and baggy, I would think critically--but it made me nervous of her, too. Still I have to laugh at the aptness of the saying, even if it seems sometimes to express itself as the dementia of a human goldfish. (Nevermind commercialism, or nostalgia.)

"Where do the Celts come from," I asked her recently over the phone.

"Well, some stories say they are descended from the godess Danu, who rose out of the river Danube. I don't know..." she replied brightly.

Our mother raised us in an environ of fairies, selkies, records of Scottish folksongs like The Skyeboat Song, and Robert the Bruce. After the divorce, this morphed into Native American trancework, reincarnation therapy, crystals, and I don't know what--I yelled and sulked and hid and toyed with converting to Catholicism. While the white-bearded man on the bus to Oban leans over toward my seat to point out each castle and tell me about the past and present Dukes of Argylle--"they are Campbells; the reputation of the Campbells was that they got what they wanted. They might not have gotten it at first, but they stuck around till things went their way"--I wonder silently what value there is in a tiny, primitively armed and culturally identical group of people glowering at each other for centuries across small ridges and bodies of water. Nevertheless, when the man tells me he is a retiree from England, my mind silently, clearly and sedately ennunciates, Traitor.

Even as I take my first view of the country, out the bus window from Glasgow at a flat, green, bland landscape that could be Michigan on an overcast day, I add to my sense of peevish disgust that there is zero evidence of fairies to be seen. Then, before I can get really topsy-turvy over this, my mind further produces the comforting thought that it would not be to the fairies advantage to be too obvious.

Under absolute resistance--kicking and screaming--I seem to have zero recourse to anything but absolute naive belief. This is worrisome, to me, but not anything new. When I was 14--15?--our mother "got into" Power Animals. She was so excited about having found her own that she wanted each of her daughters to find hers, too. I protested, as usual, that it was completely stupid. But then after a few weeks, my sisters gave in, and all I heard about was their amazing visions.

"Heather saw an owl. It's a symbol of wisdom; you know Heather has a lot of owl qualities. And Elizabeth saw a squirrel; it was incredible..."

I was a little curious, and a little jealous, so finally I agreed. I lay down on the long weird built-in sofa of our weird new house--in "The Lake Room", the entrance to which my mother later had painted in huge Gothic script the first few lines of Psalm ?, "The Lord Is My Shepard I Shall Not Want..." I pretended to close my eyes. My mother sat on a low stool hunching toward me, rocking slightly, panting, and banging on a drum she had made herself. Behind her the lake, which made the flood insurance so expensive, flickered. I tried to picture crawling into a long, dark tunnel. I wished my mother wasn't so close to me; her breathing was embarassing.

Traveling down the tunnel. Traveling, traveling. "Now you are coming out. Now--what do you see?"

Nothing. Exactly nothing appeared in my mind--the blank anxiety was already there. The most I could squeeze out of my perceptions was a distant vague whistling sound. "Maybe its like the sound of wings?" I hedged. Geese and swans were both very sacred birds, my mom assured me. But I was secretly desolate. I had lost my innocence; I was too old and jaded to enter the spirit world; I was an exile forever and forever...

Years later, when Heather and I were working at the same summer camp in Maine, we started remeniscing. "Remember when mom made us find our power animals?" Heather said. "Elizabeth and I had so much fun making stuff up."

WHAT?! I was shocked. "You guys were making that up? You guys were LYING?!"

Heather was unruffled. "She wanted us to see something and we told her what she wanted. Elizabeth told her she saw a squirrel running around a tree, but on the INSIDE of the branches. She had to work really hard not to crack up as she was saying it."