ONE of my earliest memories is lying in bed as a child listening to the wind howling through the hut where we lived. On quiet days it whistled, and the fun was in making harmonies with it, but when a proper nor-wester blew in your only option was to coorie in and believe that though the giant might huff and puff, the house would not be blown in. After all, my father was a joiner and the house would therefore stand forever. Which it does, in the magic of time.
Gaelic tradition tended to give names to the wind and to storms long before the current fashion of naming them Henry or Gertrude. We had the Balg-Buill, which was the bag in which the witches kept their worsted wool for raising storms. The great witch Gormshùil Mhòr na Moighe, at the bidding of the Lady of Duart in Mull, raised a storm and sank the Spanish ship at anchor in Tobermory Bay because her husband’s Spanish lover, Princess Viola, was on board. The body of the poor princess was recovered and buried in the beautiful burial-place of Kilchoan. Storms are consequences as much as causes.
When I went to primary school I was astonished to learn about gravity: that things fell down. There I was in Primary 3 and the teacher told me that a boy about my age had lain down under a tree and an apple fell on to his head and he shouted "Eureka" (or something) and discovered gravity. I wondered three things: what a tree was (Uist had none); what an apple was (I’d never seen one); and why nothing ever fell down where I lived. For everything came at you horizontally, straight from the North Pole: the wind, the rain, the hail, the snow. If we’d had trees (or if the sheep hadn’t eaten them or if the Norsemen and our ancestors hadn’t cut them down) we too would have discovered gravity.
So I take the weather seriously. In fact, nothing is probably taken more seriously than the weather where I come from. You are (or at least were) dependent on it. For crops, for travel, for services. The ferry might not sail for days. And you know the terrible damage it can cause, so you take precautions. Which is why it’s so astonishing to see some of the hype surrounding weather in the media. When a few inches of snow causes chaos, or where a wind which would literally be a breeze in Barra is treated as a hurricane in Hampstead.
It has as much to do with history as with geography. Communities learn to deal with the specific circumstances they’re in. Our great Nordic neighbours know how to deal with snow, while our friends down in Greece still know that only mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the midday sun. So within the Gaelic tradition you knew the seanfhacal (proverb) "Breac an rionnaich air an adhar; latha math a-màireach" – "A mackerel sky today; tomorrow will be a good day". Long communal experience taught you to read the weather signs.
Global warming and climate change and environmental damage have confused our traditional compasses however. From the Arctic Circle down to Antarctica, every community is now dealing with an existential threat. Even the penguins are perplexed and having to shape out a new environment for themselves: whole ecologies and centuries-old communities are being destroyed by man-made activities ranging from logging to carbon emissions.
Closer to home to we are all dealing one way or the other with serious flooding. I know good folk in the north of England who’ve suffered terribly over the past few months, and communities in Aberdeenshire and Perthshire in particular have also had to deal with it. Friends down in Cumbria tell me that part of the problem is simply that houses have been built in the wrong places with inadequate water and flood structures and defences. You can’t build a bothy in bog without needing wellies, as the other man said.
Most of us have become urbanised and lost touch with the feel of grass under our bare feet. Probably like you, I too read the weather on the internet, not in the sky. I still yearn for the rhythm of the old seasons in my life, even while enjoying all the benefits of electricity. So here’s the weather forecast:
Geamhradh reòdhta,
Earrach ceòthach,
Samhradh breac riabhach,
Foghar teth, grianach,
Agus le toil ar Dia-ne bheir sin dhuinn bàrr.
Winter, frosty,
Spring, misty,
Summer, variegated,
Autumn, hot and sunny,
And with the will of our God that will give us crops.
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