Good Call

Unbeknownst to me, there was a place named Badcall in the area I was headed for in northwest Scotland. I hadn’t been able to resist the cheap flight between Amsterdam and Aberdeen, where I rented a car, knocking off the outer left mirror when passing through the first stone-walled village in my path. I spent a few nights in Kinlochbervie (see marker ‘A’) in a Bed & Breakfast by the sea; the door to my bedroom was too warped to close.

I walked to the end of the road at Balchrick, where a Post Office appeared as a faded wooden shack. Inside, the Post Mistress was waiting in the dark behind a barred window at the counter. She, the counter and the bars pretty much filled up the shack and quite possibly held it together. She called me ‘Dearie’ and casually sold me stamps for an envelope of photographs I was sending to Colombia. The envelope was still in my bag in Balchrick because officials at the airport Post Office in Holland had refused to send the chunky personal parcel ‘for security reasons.’

From a hilltop phone booth on this coastline I called my mother in North America. Near the empty white beach of Oldshoremore I met the fierce gaze of an elderly shepherd as he held open a gate for me when our paths crossed on high pastureland bordering the sea. He pointed across the valley, where sheep in motion traced tidal patterns on the slopes as they ran, leaping ahead of a swift, supple dog, whose name, as I deduced from the ferocious commentary emanating from a white-haired man swinging a crook in the direction of the canine, was Angus.