KELS · 20.15 · Elsewhere · essay · September 24, 2026

Three Times

Scotland in 1986, 1987, and 2015, with college friends, a sister, and a husband, and the same feeling at the door each time.

I have been to Scotland three times, with three different sets of people, and each time the same thing happened somewhere between the border and the first night. Something settled. I felt at home, in a country I have never lived in, and the feeling did not care who I had brought with me or what I had planned. The trips were nothing alike. The feeling was the same one every time.

1986: the train

The first time was a weekend in the fall of my exchange year at Lancaster. Five of us went: Mike, Anna-Barbara, Courtney, Jennifer, and me. The letter I wrote home about that term gives the trip one line, Scotland by train with some friends for a weekend, and the line is accurate. What it leaves out is the train. The line north runs through the hills of northern England before it crosses into Scotland, and I had never seen anything like it, and we drank some beers on the way, so we arrived in Edinburgh in good spirits and stayed that way.

We saw the castle. We went to the big hill behind the city and had a picnic on it and then rolled down it, because the grass was there. We had rented a flat with a living room the size of a lecture hall and more couches than we could use. Mike and I shared a room and the women took the other. At some point Jennifer noticed that my soap, my shampoo, my conditioner, and my hair clay were all Aveda (they still are, and the fact that Aveda is in salons all over the world is the only reason I can leave the house), and she was impressed. These were kids from Vassar and Bates. Aveda was from Minneapolis. It is the only time the East Coast has been impressed by something from Minnesota on my account, and I still chuckle about it.

I have four photographs from that weekend and I am in none of them, because I took them. Mike and the three women on a bench against a sandstone wall, low sun, a newspaper open on a lap. The four of them in the gardens below Princes Street with the Old Town stacked up behind them and the crown of St Giles' in the sky. Three of them at the top of the Scott Monument with the North Bridge below and the hill we rolled down in the background. Jennifer alone in the flat, in a chair, next to a sink in the corner of the room. The photographer is always the one you cannot see, and the trip was mine, so that is right.

1987: the left side of the road

The second time was that summer, when the year ended and my sister Val flew over. I met her at the airport and we spent a few days in London, then took the train up to Edinburgh, spent a day or two, and rented a car. We drove north to Loch Ness. I had not been there before.

That is where it kicked in. I had liked Scotland the first time. This time, somewhere on the road north with my sister in the passenger seat, it turned into something else, a sense that the place was right and that I was right in it. I think Val felt it too. We stayed in small bed and breakfasts, one after another, each one lovely. We hiked through fields and up hills and along the water. We looked at the loch from as many angles as the roads allowed.

The comedy of the trip was the left side of the road. I had never driven on it. It was hard. Every turn onto a new road was a small negotiation with instinct, and instinct kept losing, and we laughed about it for a week. Val drove a lot of it too. I have no photographs from this trip. I have the fields, the loch, the B&Bs, and Val, and the feeling, which I can still find without a picture. From Scotland we went on to Paris and then Vienna, and they were wonderful, and they were somewhere else.

2015: the abbey

The third time was the first year of the two years Aldo and I spent going around the world. It was late summer, 2015. We came up from London, where I had planned one thing six months ahead, the Audrey Hepburn portraits at the National Portrait Gallery, and it was as lovely and dear as I had hoped. The train to Edinburgh again. We caught the last day or two of the Fringe. The thing I remember best from the city is the Roy Lichtenstein rooms at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art. I love his work. I took a photograph of the print of the blonde with the microphone, the melody haunts my reverie, and when I looked at it later there was Aldo, reflected in the blue behind her, standing in the room like a second speech bubble.

Then we rented a car, a silver Mercedes that made us feel like a better class of tourist, and set out on the plan. The plan was seven distilleries in seven days. Two days in, after packing up and driving and unpacking twice, Aldo said no. That was the end of the plan. We tasted a little less Scottish whisky than I intended and gained a week, and the week had to go somewhere, so I scrambled to cancel the lodgings I had booked and find something new near Loch Ness.

What I found was the abbey at Fort Augustus, at the south end of the loch. St Benedict's was a Benedictine monastery from 1876 until the last monks left in 1998, and the buildings had been turned into apartments, ninety-seven of them, with an indoor pool and grounds that ran down to the water. Owners rented their places out. We got a posh one. For a week it was home, and we walked down to the loch from it every day. There is a photograph of the two of us on that shore, grinning, with Nessie photobombing, and it is the truest picture of the week.

From there we went everywhere the loch let us. We hiked up onto the moor where the heather was in bloom, purple across the whole hillside, with a loch shining below and the mountains going on in blue ranks to the edge of the sky. Aldo walked ahead of me on a gravel path toward a small rocky hill with contrails crossing above him. We saw Urquhart Castle on its green slope over the water, in a light that made the grass look lit from inside. We drove all the way west to Eilean Donan on a gray day and stood under the tower. We stayed a few nights in an inn with a library, leather Chesterfields, a globe, and tall windows onto the garden, the kind of room you want to be rained into. We did the Loch Ness museum and watched the film of every sighting anyone had ever claimed, and it was so much fun.

Then we were late. We are always late, because we stop for things, and we had a flight out of Glasgow. We took a shortcut. The shortcut had a rut in it, and the rut had mud in it, and the Mercedes went in and slowed, and we punched the gas and held our breath and plowed through the muck and came out the other side, barely. Thank Nessie! We made the flight.

The feeling

I do not have a theory for it. Three trips, three companies: friends I had known a month, a sister I had known all my life, a husband. A weekend, a week, and most of a month. Edinburgh in a flat full of couches, the road to Loch Ness in a rental with the steering wheel on the wrong side, a monastery with a swimming pool. Nothing about the three trips rhymes except the country and the feeling, and the feeling arrived on schedule all three times, at the border or soon after, and stayed until I left.

It is a settling. The shoulders come down. The landscape looks the way a landscape is supposed to look, and I stop comparing it to anything. I have felt at home in a lot of places on this station, and I will write about them, but Scotland is the one where the feeling has been tested three times against three different lives and held. There will be a fourth. The only question is when.