(no subject)

[winterbadger]

I was writing a reply to an email I got from redactrice and thought I liked part of it enough I'd post it here as well. We were talking about travel, and she'd mentioned seeing a number of places we'd sung about in folks songs many times around the camp fire.

I do find it entertaining to have traveled to places that before were only known to me in song or story, like the Isle of Skye, Glen Coe, Nova Scotia (with its "sea-bound coast" and its "dark and dreary mountains") or when places that are familiar to me crop up as "foreign" (like a reference in a Newfoundland folk song to how a sailor is going far away--to Boston!).

Sometimes it makes those places a tiny bit less magical to me when I read about them later. The Isle of Skye doesn't seem so impossibly far off and mystical to me now that I know I can drive there in a day from Glasgow or Inverness.

But it also gives me wonderful sensory images to associate with places. The vastness of the Cuillins rising above the narrow roads. The open grey of the Sound of Sleat as you travel "over the sea to Skye". The mountains towering over Loch Ness. The huge expanse of the silvery North Atlantic, with a single tiny fishing boat chugging out into it, as seen from the cliffs of northeast Cape Breton. The immensity of the Rockies, looking across from the trail ridge road at Iceberg Pass towards Arrowhead and Inkwell Lakes. The golden sunlight dancing on the waves off Monterey, California.

Or just the amusement I can get from being familiar with a name that before would have meant nothing. My mum is charmed by Alan Cumming, who has taken over introducing Mystery! programs on PBS; when I looked him up on IMDB, I found he was from Aberfeldy. I instantly had an image of a small, grey town, an old stone bridge, a handsome regimental monument, and a wet and leafy walk Chris and I took around the "birks of Aberfeldy". I could feel the charm and history I associate with it, and I could also imagine how a young person with grand dreams about a career in theatre and film would want nothing more than to begone from it as soon as possible.

Comments

[magaidhbhan.livejournal.com]

I found it funny, too, to watch places I only knew in song -- and the songs themselves -- change for me as I got to know them better (and, in some cases, learned a bit more of the history behind the songs -- like, for example, that Tearlach Òg wasn't coming "over the sea to Skye" from the mainland, but rather from Uist, which rather changes the voyage!).

Take, for example, the children's rhyme I heard my whole childhood as I bounced on my father's knee -- "Goin' up to Boston, goin' up to Lynn; Careful, little [insert child's name] that you don't fall IN!" falling through dad's knees on the last syllable. It occurred to be a little while ago that a) I've been through Lynn and b) What's in Lynn? Why would I want to go there? Now that I'm living in the Boston area, it's just strange to me that these places seemed so exotic and far away when I was wee.