After Being Fooled

 In the fall of 1974 in Aberdeen Scotland, after being fooled, quitting a perfectly good job, getting cheated out a hundred bucks, and losing out on a job that never existed I retreated a bit.  It’s instinct, I think.  I slowed down, slept in, withdrew from most conversations, and stayed to myself. 

The old guys at the YMCA hostel, who by their age or infirmity had been granted the privilege of not being forced to leave the premises at 9:00 a.m. and returning at 4:00, watched me warily.  I think they thought I was going to fold up somehow after my change of fortune, get terribly drunk, and act out my pain and shame publicly.  But I didn’t.  Instead, I stayed away from the fellas and found my way to the public library.

Aberdeen’s central library wasn’t far from the hostel, or the harbor, but I’d missed it entirely.  It was a big stone building funded by Andrew Carnegie, a famed railroad baron and library builder back in the States.  He was born in Dunfermline, Scotland between Edinburgh and Glasgow. 

I just wanted somewhere quiet and warm.  But they also had a good map room, and the biggest globe I’d ever seen.  Libraries are good places to get your bearings; take stock of where you are, where you’ve been, and if you’re lucky plan where you’re going. 

Feeling warmth is a rare sensation during a Scottish winter on the North Sea.  Chalk it up to drafty old buildings, bad central heating, or if you wish the trite generalization that Scots are cheap.  But truth be told the cold is mostly a function of latitude. 

Aberdeen sits on the earth at 57.15 degrees North latitude.  If you strike an arc on a globe at that latitude by holding your finger at that latitude while slowly turning it toward North America, like I did, you’ll find your finger on the southern tip of Hudson Bay in Canada.  No wonder it’s so damned cold in Aberdeen.  It’s almost a thousand miles north of our farm in Danvers.  And the Scots claim the North Sea actually tempers their climate. How that frigid body of water helps keep them warmer is beyond me, but that’s the theory.

The Aberdeen library was uncharacteristically warm.  There in the map room, I would shed my pea coat and also a wool sweater I rarely took off, then soak up both the warmth and the silence.  The library had soft leather chairs where I sometimes snuck in a nap.  A librarian woke me only once that I recall and did so kindly.  I wasn’t the only indigent person sleeping in that library, and we clearly couldn’t pass as scholars doing research.  Most of us just wanted to escape the world outside.

When I was awake, I often moved a giant world atlas from its home on the shelf to a vacant wooden table to view the world in more detail.  When I reconstructed the route I traveled that summer and looked at it on the big pages of the atlas, my trip looked crazy.  I kept crisscrossing the continent.

I landed in Amsterdam and stayed up for 36 hours straight.  Caught a train to Frankfort, Germany to see an old Danvers friend in the military and from there went straight to Rome.  I learned that with a Eurail pass, one could board the train at night, sleep in those comfy enclosed European train compartments, and save the cost of a hotel stay.  Get tired, go to the train station, sleep all night, and wake up in another country.

From Rome to Vienna.  Vienna to Pamplona, Spain to catch the festival of San Fermin and the daily running of the bulls.  Seven days of bullfights, wine, and parties.  I pitched a tent in the park there and met people from all over the world; a Moroccan man trying to find a home in Europe, teenagers from Las Vegas, a girl from Alaska who wanted to cross the Straits of Gibraltar into Morocco.

First, she had to go back to France to meet up with friends and borrow money.  In ten days, she promised to meet me in Seville at the American Express office at noon. We would go together from there to Morocco.  

I went from Pamplona to San Sebastian Spain on the Atlantic coast.  There I decided on my immediate future.  I resigned from my teaching job in Ottawa via telegram, wrote my parents a long letter, and promised myself that I would spend at least a year, maybe longer, living outside the United States. 

I left the Basque country in northern Spain and made my way to Seville in the south but the girl from Alaska didn’t show.  No cell phones you know.  And no messages for me at the American Express office. For three days I hung out at a café across from American Express watching for her before going on to Morocco alone.  I tried not to take it personally but found that impossible. 

When I got to Morocco the world shifted.  I went from an orderly and familiar Christian continent to the Muslim world.  I loved the colors, the open markets, the crush of people in the streets, the kif, the mint tea, the exotic music, and the marked difference between that world and everything I knew before.

I met a ragtag bunch of Europeans on the boat from Gibraltar.  Together, after a few days in Tetuan, we went down the coast to a small fishing village called Targa and camped on the beach.  The locals greeted us with a gift, a bucket of fresh sardines.  They showed us how to cook them over an open fire.  It was wildly beautiful.  But I knew I couldn’t stay.  I went back to Amsterdam, sold my return flight to the States, took a tour of Germany, and then made my way to Scotland where there was money to be made.

Where would I go after Scotland?  I began to form a plan.  I decided to go back to Morocco in the spring and take it from there.  I consulted the big double-page display of North Africa in the atlas.  Even just a little planning would make my trip more linear and more economical than before.

From Morocco, I could follow the Mediterranean coast east to Egypt, passing through Algeria, Tunisia, and Libya.  At Cairo, I could go down the Nile River through Sudan, and head east to the port of Mombasa, Kenya on the Indian Ocean. I’d met a Portuguese couple who were heading that way to work on a boat, called a tramp steamer, from there to India.  Their goal was Goa, a former Portuguese seaside colonial state in India.  They wanted to be there by Christmas.  They might be on Goa’s beaches now, I thought, as winter approached in Scotland.  It was a plan.  But I’d need to finance it.  Maybe work along the way. 

The other resource I made use of in the library was the newspapers.  When all else fails, there are always the employment ads.  I scanned them daily.  One day this ad appeared for a job near Aberdeen.

Dairyman wanted.  State of the art milking parlor system.  Must be experienced.  Work with a team milking, feeding, and caring for 200+ cows daily.  Room and board provided.  Every other weekend free.  Apply in writing only.

As soon as I saw that ad I sat down and wrote a response.  I described the dairy farm I grew up on in Illinois, the cows, the types of milking machines we used, etc..  I laid it on thick, but I didn’t have to stretch the truth.  When you don’t know what else to do, it is comforting to fall back on what you know.

I gave the number of the pay phone at the hostel as a contact and told the old fellas in no uncertain terms to answer the phone if it rang.  It hardly ever rang.  The dairy farm owner called early two days later during breakfast.  I answered.

They hired me over the phone.  Not the best pay, but no need to spend a nickel of it.  I would take the first bus the next day to a small town northwest of Aberdeen, and they would pick me up at the bus station in a Land Rover to take me to the farm.  My unemployment didn’t last long.   Once again, I said goodbye to the fellas and assured them this time I wouldn’t be back. 

I went to bed early that last night at the hostel.  Sometime during the night, I was awakened by yelling from the day room.  Sound traveled well inside the hostel. The room dividers didn’t go to the ceiling, “so the heat can circulate better” the hostel manager claimed.

“What heat?” was the logical follow-up question.

I buried my head under the blankets, but the yelling continued.  Finally, I got up to investigate. 

It was Hamish, one of the older and perhaps frailest of the poor bastards who found themselves alone in their last years in that bleak facility.  He was sitting in the dark at a table in the day room, a blanket wrapped around his shoulders, his back to the windows that faced the street.  The only light came from a streetlight down the block.  When I came out, he was quiet.

“Hamish, what are you doing up?”

He looked up at me with big eyes.  He looked scared.

“Who are you?”

“What do you mean?  It’s Yankee.  You know me.  What are you doing up?  And what’s all this yelling about?”

“They’re coming after us Yankee.  Here they are again! Don’t let ‘em see ya.”

With that, he hunched under the table and began yelling.  No words, just pure fear.  A light shined through the windows, fell on the wall nearest us, and then swept around the room till it was gone.

“Stop yelling Hamish.  It’s OK.  Those are headlights from a car on the street.  Nobody’s coming to get us.”

“The hell they aren’t.  Tell the others.  They’ll kill us all.”

The look on Hamish’s face made the hair stand up on my arms.  It was as if he’d lost his mind.

“Wait here.”

I went back to the sleeping rooms and banged on Archie’s door.

“Archie, wake up.  Something’s wrong with Hamish.  He’s talking crazy.  You gotta see this.”

Archie answered from inside the room. 

“Let me get my pants on.”

He stumbled out of his room rubbing his eyes.  We sat on either side of Hamish in the day room.  Archie spoke to him in his slow deep voice.

“What’s this Yankee tells me about us being in danger Hamish?  Looks safe to me.”

“They’re trying to spot us with the lights Archie.  Once they get us in their sights, they’ll start firing.”

“How long since you’ve had a drink, Hamish?”

“Canna tell ya.  Three days, maybe four.  Me check comes tomorrow.”

Like most old guys who lived there permanently, Hamish was on the government dole.  

Headlights entered the room like before.

“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph they’re back!”

Hamish grabbed us both by the arms, tried to pull us under the table, and howled.

“Yankee, go turn the lights on,” Archie said.

I ran to find the switch.  When I turned back to the table, Archie had his arm on Hamish’s shoulder and was talking to him softly in Gaelic.  As Archie talked, Hamish scratched his neck hard with both hands.  His long fingernails, the first two on his right-hand brown from nicotine in the roll-ups, had made red streaks on his skin.  Some of the streaks were bleeding.  I hadn’t seen that in the dark. 

“He has the D.T.s Yankee.”

“What’s that?”

“Delerium Tremens.  Comes from alcohol withdrawal.  He needs a drink is all.”

“Jesus, Archie shouldn’t he be in the hospital?  He’s old.  This must be so hard on him.”

‘I’m not putting him in hospital.  If he chooses to go, when his head is clear, he can go on his own but I’m not doing that to him.”

“So, what do we do?  We can’t leave him like this.”

“We give him a drink.  Do you have any whisky?”

“Yeah, I have a full flask, but that sounds crazy.  He’s out of his mind because of alcohol, and we’re giving him more?”

“He’s out of his mind because his body craves alcohol.  Once he gets it, he’ll settle down.  He probably hasn’t slept for days.  Give him a jill and have him drink it slow.  Once he gets it down, wait ten minutes or so and give him another.  Then make sure he drinks a couple glasses of water.  Get him to bed.  He’ll be all right Yankee.  Once Hamish gets a bottle tomorrow, he’ll be himself again.”

“How do you know all this Archie?”

“I went through the D.T.’s myself a long time ago.  But I was able to quit the drink.  I’m not sure Hamish ever has.  And at his age, he may never.  Though I’m afraid never may last just a short while for our friend Hamish.  Will you do this for him Yankee?”

“OK.  Yeah.  I’ll do it.”

Thank you.  I’m going back to bed.”

That was my last night in the YMCA Hostel in Aberdeen.  The last time I saw Archie or Hamish or any of the old fellas.

Travel enlightens one so.