The Yew Tree

I may have jinxed myself with my last post, because instead of staying one day in Edinburgh, we stayed longer.

This was thanks to Storm Eowyn. When we went to pick up our rental car to drive out to the Highlands, a man with a slight bushier version of a Poirot mustache told us we couldn’t do it. “You’re taking your life into your own hands! The Prime Minister got on the telly and told everyone to stay home. That never happens. They’ve closed all the bridges anyway, so it will be impossible to get to the Highlands.”

As we scrambled around figuring things out, the guys at the car rental agency kept telling us how bad the weather was in Scotland this year. “I’ve never seen anything like it! Big storms every other week! So much rain and even snow! It’s never been like this before!”

Unprecedented weather is rather, well, precedented these days. The acceleration of the climate crisis crystalized for me about seven years ago, in my role helping newly unionized charter school teachers negotiate their collective bargaining agreements. Teachers could see that “fire season” was becoming a permanent fixture of the California calendar, so I started writing contract language addressing wildfires, poor air quality, and public safety power shutoffs, hoping this language would never actually need to be used, but knowing it probably would be.

While not as dramatic as California wildfires, the climate crisis is showing up in the UK as well, through wilder winter storms and hotter summers. A few months ago, I interviewed a man who runs a walking tour company, called Dragon Trails, mostly along the Welsh coast. I asked what changes he’d seen over the 25+ years he’s been leading walks — I figured it would be something about coastal erosion and rising oceans, but I was wrong. He said the impacts were inland — more flash floods but also drier weather. Streams and ponds he’d walked past for years had shrunk or dried up altogether. Rivers weren’t as big as they used to be. To me, Wales seemed so verdant and wet. But to someone who’d been walking the same paths for decades, the landscape told a different story.

This turned into a common theme. As an outsider, from a land of hardy succulents and windblown trees clinging to rocks above the ocean, Wales seemed a mossy marshy paradise. But to the people who lived there, who knew the land and the birds and insects and flowers, they saw a landscape devastated by climate change, factory farming, and foolish governmental policies. But they also saw hope - people working in nature to rewild it, farm sustainably, revive old and more harmonious ways of working the land (I recommend the excellent book Tir: the Story of the Welsh Landscape by Carwyn Graves for more on this). For all the human-made tragedy, there is also the knowledge to reverse course — there are hundreds of examples of this in Wales alone. The question is will we invest in these solutions on a larger scale?

Wales

Luckily, Storm Eowyn wreaked relatively minor havoc on Scotland, so the next day we got our car and headed out. Exiting the multi-lane highways out of Edinburgh, we drove on progressively smaller roads, ending in a one-lane lane through a valley. The pictures of the rental cottage showed distinctive blue paint accents, but it turns out that there must have been a sale on that paint color at the hardware store, because all the houses along the lane used that same color.

The correct cottage.

After some momentary confusion, we found the right house and went in, only to discover the power was out. We saw a lot of toppled trees on the drive in, and power was out for many parts of Ireland and the UK. Luckily there was a wood stove and candles, so I pulled a duvet from the bed, Andy built a fire, and we got nice and cozy.

The next morning, snow was falling. The temperature was right on the edge of freezing, so the snowflakes were fat and wet. By midday, the snow had stopped and I decided to take a walk on the track at the back of the house.

Unlike in England and Wales, Scotland has a Right to Roam, which basically means you can go anywhere as long as you aren’t a jerk about it. This freedom made hiking a bit less stressful — no worries about trespassing or taking a wrong turn and getting in trouble. I could just crunch through the snow.

Behind the house, the hills were white with snow, melting into the clouds and making land and air almost indistinguishable. The snow was melting a bit and the streams were flowing rapidly down the hills. Occasionally, a few birds would startle and flap away. Otherwise, silence. That special silence that comes after a snow fall - as if a damper has been placed on the world.

A mile in, I came upon a loch with a small sheet of ice bobbing in it. I was closer to the hills; they looked tall and foreboding. I decided to turn around. The walk had put my new waterproof hiking boots to the test (they worked!) but it was also my inaugural use of them, and I didn’t want to chance any blisters.

The next day, I headed out the front door to walk around Loch Freuchie, which according to the excellent website walkhighlands.co.uk is Gallic for “the heavenly place.” It’s a fitting name.

The heavenly Loch Freuchie

The soft snowy muteness of the day before was gone. Instead, the sky was blue and a sharp wind blew across the valley. The animals all seemed to be in a bit of a tizzy. Not to brag, but I’ve been around quite a few sheep in the last couple of months; I’ve rarely heard them make a peep. Yesterday, they were practically bellowing, their chorus of baaas joined by a cacophony of caws and clucks from flocks of birds.

I came to a farm gate that welcomed walkers and crossed over an old stone bridge, with warnings against fishing from it due to the high tension power lines overhead. I followed a track that undulated up and down the hills next to the loch; toppled and bent trees from the recent storm dotted the land. It was just me and the magnificent landscape, with the exception of two walkers and a tractor.

I followed a river leading out of the loch to the village of Amulree, where Bonnie Prince Charlie stayed in the 1700s with the Jacobites. The inn where he stayed has been out of operation for a while, but is currently under renovation as part of a redevelopment scheme for the town. I turned at the edge of the village down the one lane road. After eight miles, I’d completed the loop; I was hungry and cold and grateful for a hot bowl of soup.

Later that day, we went to see the Fortingall Yew, said to be Europe’s oldest living tree — between 2,500 - 5,000 years old. Yews are fascinating trees with huge spiritual and religious significant from pre-Christianity onwards. New growth begins out of a yew trunk that’s split and decaying, making yews extremely hard to date but also symbols of everlasting life. Their branches can put down roots when they touch the ground, leading to even more growth and a sprawling tree that can be difficult to measure. These evergreens with a seemingly endless ability to regenerate have made them symbols of resurrection and rebirth for millennia.

The yew is perhaps a heavy-handed metaphor for my own hopes for our future, but it seems too fitting to pass up. Capitalism and oligarchy are rotting the heartwood, but that doesn’t mean the tree is dead. We have the opportunity to be the new shoots of life growing through the dead trunk, the branches that touch the ground and make something new.