Have Pen and Camera, Will Travel: January 2022

Sorry! In the last post I said this post would be about a real trip. Well, that one was cancelled and the next one as well. We’ve decided there are two ways people are tackling the pandemic: either they become risk takers and hope for the best or they are trying to avoid risks and hope for the best. We’ve decided we are the latter—we plan big and then cancel when we think better of it. Anne’s sister makes big trips safely in her motor home, but we’re not set up for that. So, the gist is we are changing our travel planning to smaller trips we can do safely and not playing the plan-then-cancel game and being continually disappointed. How are you traveling in these tumultuous times?

Now to this post which has two stories and some black and white photos. The first story is from my sleddog days. The second story reminds me not to feel so bad about the way things are, they could be much worse. The idea of highlighting some black and white photos comes from a good friend, Nick, who is using his down time doing more black and white and street photography. The captioned photos come between the stories and after the second story—in no particular order.

Pistol River Start

When we lived in Brookings, Oregon (1980-84), the local newspaper wanted to do a story about my sleddog team. We invited the editor/photographer Don Rogers to watch one of my training runs on the beach at Pistol River. We met Don at the Pistol River view point off Hwy 101 where we could hook the team to the back of the truck and take off over the dunes and down onto the beach where I could run the team for two miles north and turn back for another two miles.

At the hook up point we talked to Don for a while about racing, dogs, equipment, and more. We introduced him to our nine dogs—eight Siberian huskies and one Alaskan husky. He took pictures and asked questions about the dogs. Then it was time to harness the dogs and take a run. We harnessed all the dogs while they were hooked to the truck. We then tethered the training cart (a large go cart type rig with four piper cub airplane wheels) to the truck via a large eyebolt. I next strung out the gangline and attached it to the cart. First, I hooked in the leader, Waveet, whose job it was to keep the gangline taut between himself and the cart. I next hooked up the swing dogs behind the leader, and then the next set, and the next. By this time all the dogs were excited to run. Finally, I put the first wheel dog on the line (Myko on the right) next to the cart. It was at this point things went wrong.

A normal start at Pistol River. (Photo by Don Rogers)

I went back to the truck to get the last dog, Amorak, the left wheel dog. I had just unhooked Amorak from the truck when I heard the loud snap. The team had bolted, straightening the heavy eyebolt and were off toward the beach. Amorak, now loose, was chasing the team. I was too. I hollered as loudly as I could, “Waveet, Whoa!” About 50 yards in front of me the whole team stopped and stayed while I caught up. I hooked Amorak into the team—he had run straight to his position and waited while I hooked him into the gangline. I said, “Good dogs,” then “Hike!” the go command. We were now off on our training run.

Back at the truck Don was quite surprised by what he had witnessed and asked Anne, “Does Bob always start that way?” Anne replied, “Only for special company.”

The joys of pub life in Scotland.

The Birks of Aberfeldy

Pipe Major at Dornoch in the north of Scotland.

Stirling Castle

Callanais Standing Stones and Stone Circle, Isle of Lewis in Outer Hebrides.

Traffic in the Scottish Highlands

St Mangus Cathedral in Kirkwall, Orkney Islands

Molalla River and Mt Hood

Badbea Clearance Village

Our tee time at Wick was one o’clock which gave Anne and I plenty of time to visit the clearance village of Badbea (BAD-bay) on Scotland’s east Caithness coast five miles north of Helmsdale. I’d seen the village listed on our map, but had no idea what we’d find there. In the lay-by on the A9 near Ousdale an informative sign told us a little about the history of the village and gave a few insights into the lives of the families brought here.

The footpath is now more of a sheep trail; for about 100 yards we literally followed a sheep until she bolted off the path. We could be the only visitors this day or this week; the three-quarter mile trail was little used. As we approached the precipitous Berriedale cliffs above the North Sea, the monument, built in 1939 by David Sutherland in memory of his father and the people of Badbea, signaled we had reached the village site.

At first the monument was all we noticed; that and the quiet. Even the gulls seemed to sense the sadness in this site as they slid by in respectful silence. Then we noticed a few drystone walls and the outlines of stone longhouses and byres of crofters from the straths of Ousdale, Langwell, Auchencraig, and Kildonan had built when they were evicted from their land and moved to the cliffside Badbea village. Sheep and politics had instigated the Highland Clearances and created places like Badbea, which started in 1792. Landowners like Sir John Sinclair of Ulbster evicted the crofters in preference to more profitable sheep. At its largest the village was home to 35 inhabitants, with the last leaving in 1911.

As we wandered about the site under dramatically darkening skies, we could hear in the wind the stories of families forced onto these windswept cliffs as they were uprooted from ancestral lands--lands cleared and farmed by hand, lands which for generations had given a meager, but adequate life. Stories about men of the land forced to seek livelihood on the herring or salmon boats. Stories of many, who not knowing the ways of the ocean, did not return from the sea. Stories of children and livestock having to be tethered to rocks or posts so they would not be swept over the cliffs to the sea below by the fierce winds. Stories of a people who for more than a hundred years adapted, lived, and at times even flourished, under horrendous conditions. It didn’t take long before we too were hushed like the gulls by the stories that hung heavy on the wind.

It was a quiet walk back to the car and drive on to the Wick golf course. As we played that afternoon on the lovely Wick links, every breeze brought back the stark scene and stories of the Highland Clearance village of Badbea.