May Day Eve 2001
The Door
I remember the drive up to
Scotland from
London with Nick at the wheel. We were such good philosophical friends; we could make a five hour drive seem like a ten minute trip as we segued from one subject seamlessly into another more abstract one, leaving behind the previous topic’s pragmatic but improbable non-tangential conclusions. We shared a deep and probing intelligence. (A year later and two days on we would be making the journey in reverse Nick at the wheel but this time I would be doing all the talking).
It was the early evening of the eve of May Day, the eve before that years’ adventure in the lowlands of
Scotland. Several months prior to the journey I now recount we had been in the Mumbles area of
Wales, and had found ourselves at a small live music venue or café. There, Nick befriended a man who wrote down the address of a community living in Kidcudrightshire, Dumfries and Galloway; a low-impact self-sustaining community. Nick took down the address and I remember being keen not to let that paper trail escape; it somehow fired my imagination. Usually a passive observer, I booked my seat, as it were, and we drove to this destination to rendezvous with someone with whom we had spent no more than a few hours of an evening in conversation, Nick that is. Nick was like that, far more spontaneous than I, though I am considered pretty spontaneous, even impulsive, Nick Chow has his boot permanently packed, his car a musical chairs of passengers, his mileage clocked up with festivals, visitors to far-flung friends, his mother in Majorca, Skiing holidays and now the May Day festival the small community holds for friends and sundry outsiders at the appropriately name The Doon of May.
We arrived under cover of night in a crunch of gravel along a track at the end of which the opaque blackness of forest rose up out of the summit of a slight incline. We halted before two large rectangular static caravans facing a desolate and ragged waste-land of clear-fell and shadows. The headlights of the car must have penetrated deep in to the forest, momentarily lighting up a sky customarily devoid of artificial light. On the eve of May the inhabitants must have been expecting a few arrival, but at this hour. Nick and I walked up the stony and winding path toward a natural dark entrance to the forest. In the darkness we passed allotments and patches of herb gardens among the rocks, bordered by improvised trellises against which grew fruit trees.
Observing the gardens we heard a faint noise ahead and looking up we saw, less than a hundred yards away, at the dark entrance to forest, two filthy men of about five foot 10, but they looked taller. Their hair was straight but dusty and wild, their clothes covered in the grime of the earth and the forest, of wood fires and ash, of leaf and branch, nails of harvest, feet of woodland tracks and dirt and rock, hands of dry stone walls, muscle sinews of axe-wielders, log carriers, water- carriers, wrists of foot-lathe-carpenters, legs of climbers, and long distance walkers, feet splayed by rock and ledge, caked by weather; the look of low-impact living nature children. They stood staring, white eyed in the dark, like ancient tribal gate-keepers at the edge of their territory, and my ancient memory placed a long spear cradled in each of their arms parallel with their proud and savage stance and held somewhere at the level of the thigh.
In comparison we were civilized men meeting savages. Public school had over-prepared nick whose sense of entitlement would have seen him walk through a Zulu army.
“We’re up for the Festival, friends of Moogey” Announced Nick, disregarding their filth.
Wordlessly, they turned and imperceptibly beckoned as they lead us into the forest at a rapid pace, periodically attentive to our stumbling footfall; they guided us along barely traceable paths through low- hanging branches, over tar-black streams with the dexterity and expertise of aborigines along ancient and sacred tracks.
Later, after we had taken magic mushrooms marinated in wild honey in the ger, or yurt, a circular canvass covered structure used by the nomadic peoples of
Mongolia, our two hosts served with tea from a caste iron kettle on a central wood-burning stove. Nick was getting on with one of the fellows in some strange public school language and code I didn’t care to understand. In fact, I remember, once the hallucinogen took effect, pairing us off at one point, wilfully saying. “Who will look after who?” And happy that I got the one to which I felt intuitively mutually attuned and who I felt could sense my insecurity; I needed safety.
Alone with my guide he accompanied me at dawn back up toward the
Doon. On the way I tried to contain and control the effects of the mushrooms as waves of vulnerability washed over me. Through the tides of sadness and sorrow everywhere I saw monsters, in the formation of the trees. Lichen and mosses covering fallen trees presented huge monstrous frogs. My guide said I was full of negativity in seeing those things in nature and I was surprised and saddened by this and apologised. It was the culmination and result of tension, of conservatism, urban and urbane. Cynicism, of a thousand years of establishment; I couldn’t easily let go. Besides there were rules; under the increasing waves of the mushroom, much my soul ached reigning in propriety.
The
Doon was a vitrified mound some ninety feet high, used as far as time out of mind for ritual and lighting of the beacon fires to warn of the approach of the enemy. After the initial sloping thirty foot climb, we reach a winding path which spiralled around the circumference of the mound gently leading to the summit. There, on its flat surface were the traces of past fires.
Covering around two hundred feet by two hundred and fifty the area was bordered by thirteen giant standing stones. These were magnificently set against a backdrop of the most brilliant constellation. My guide bid me lie down.
I was aware I was being left alone at the summit of the
Doon. I lay on the bed of fresh grass gurning under the hallucinogen, beneath the violently twinkling heavens, breathlessly framed by a hall of pointing craggy fingers. It presented the optical illusion of being inside the skeletal carcass of a giant whale, or at the bottom of a huge ribbed goblet or cauldron, its’ rim, in reality a mere twenty or so feet above me, but seeming, against the unfathomable distance of the stars, to extend both upward and simultaneously outward. At one moment I felt an imperceptible movement but was uncertain if it were the shifting stars or whether the
Doon itself had jolted, minutely, on some axis, like a millstone, its’ seam hidden by grasses at its’ base.
Then I closed my eyes and the absurdity of that first encounter with the forest gatekeepers became a series of framed cartoon comical caricatures. We, Nick and myself, had been absurdly clean, almost as though we had asked to go down a working mine in white flannels and blazer. They, mud-caked wild men mirrored our scrubbed selves back to us, pristine and prissy, from a synthetic materialistic city and over-heated car, contrasted by they of the earth, forest, spring and a wild tribal past. We were absurd, not them, our pretensions, aims, everything we stood for. And now, locked in myself, bathed in hallucinogenic clarity, I laughed. Then, with the wisp of a tangy breeze from the stones singing around me, just before I went to sleep I felt a feeling one gets when a trains, travelling in the opposite directions, suddenly pass, at great speed, and a whole row of carriages flash by, thunder clap, in an illusion of seven windows, this was not so much seen with open eyes, but perceived through the whole body, in rapid succession, seven consecutive thunderous bursts of light, then the sound of a calm sea.
