Scotland is solace, and always has been. At least for us, at least this time around.
Scotland is the sea slamming wildly against the shore, it’s the Highlands and the fade of fern from green to russet, it’s the potholed single track roads snaking their way to a horizon you know will hold more beauty than your eyes can imagine. Scotland is open country and the Right to Roam and landscape that feels damn near endless. It’s space, it’s so much perfect space, enough to take a breath deep enough to refill all those you’ve hyperventilated yourself away from over the days you were waiting to return. At least it used to be.
Strange the emotions that tie themselves to travel, to the places we come to love and feel such strong solace for. Strange how we convince ourselves they are ours, and then feel such longing and ache when we go back only to find them overrun, to find all that space now filled.
Strange how we can be those of such juxtaposition, two opposite things all at once. How we can feel such a love that so many people are out in the world, so many people are broadening the horizons of their own minds, their own capacities for compassion, by learning how others live in other places not their own. Still, still though, it hurts when so many find the solace you’ve found, it’s harder and harder to find what you once found there. If you can, at all.
We were so lucky to photograph two weddings in Scotland last September, so lucky to return to a place we’ve loved more than any other after a couple years away. I say what I say today only in truth, not in a pessimistic light, not in one that brings any judgment, only honest appraisal, and I say it with a little bit of heartbreak. The places we travel to will never belong to us, but the ways they move us, the ways they change us, inspire us, elate us, and calm us, always will. This heartaching comes when they no longer feel like ours, and when those pristine emotions struggle harder to reemerge.
September is earlier than we’ve ever traveled to Scotland before, less shoulder season more mid-torso to be fair, and so I suppose we should have been prepared for what we found. What we found was not the place of quiet, serene, empty beauty, but a place of absolute sardines-in-a-tin packed crowded chaos. It’s one thing for the streets of Edinburgh to be inundated with wandering feet and excited eyes, but our experience has always shown that only a brave few venture to the furthest reaches of the Inner Hebrides, the outer edges of the Isle of Skye. Not so this time, friends, not so indeed.
What we found were more campervans than you could possibly imagine, filled with more people terrifyingly ignorant of how to drive them, especially there, especially on roads like Skye is famous for. We found endless sounds of shutter clicks and selfie sticks and the mud puddles of a million feet going to the same exact place for the same exact Instagram photo. We found lines upon lines, even for the most remote coffee shops in the middle of nowhere, we found parking lots filled to the brim, even at the end of single track roads that were mostly destroyed in the most desolate areas. We found exhaustion, where we once found solace. Beauty too, always beauty, but a strange fatigue where once rejuvenation resided. I think we mourn this, to be truthful, but even stranger, we find ourselves feeling too late to see a version of a world we once knew, even though we’re also part of the group that’s causing others to feel the same. The group that most certainly causes those that live locally and call it Home, to feel that ruin most acutely.
I have long believed that travel, more than so many things, has the ability to teach us lessons that endure. This trip to Scotland was exactly this, although the lesson it taught was not one I expected. I think after I sunk into my seat to fly home, I thought I’d feel let down, I thought I’d come away with sentiments like “TRAVEL IS TOO OVERRUN” or that there has been some strange Disney/Instagramification of the world. More than anything though, it was not this. More than anything, it was simpler, and it was gentler, and it was this:
We’re moving too fast through everything now.
All of us. The collective We. We consume places like scrollable content now, we thumb over them fast as possible to get to the next hit, the next stop, the next post-worthy location. We check off destinations like some To-Do list no one ever handed us, instead of actually trying to inhabit them. Speed, quantity, collecting, has replaced presence, understanding, and mostly respect, when the big WE of us takes to the skies or trains, busses or rental cars.
16 years of travel has taught me that for us, as I will only dare to speak for us, we need to slow down. We just need to slow the hell down.
When we began travelling together, especially after the years and years we had to wait and endure to even do so, Sarah and I felt a sense of urgency, I think. We felt like we had to see as much as we could possibly see, we had to really take advantage of every moment we were gifted by our strange jobs photographing weddings and elopements all over the world, we had to make perfect routes and itineraries that maximized our short time away from home. We thought if we Saw more, we would Know more, absorb more, understand more.
We were wrong.
Now, older, hopefully wiser, I am so thankful for this previous September trip to Scotland for teaching me this. For showing me that perhaps it’s time to downshift our gears, to see less to learn more. Instead of cramming 10 cities into 12 days, what if we spent two full weeks in a single village or two, what if we learned the names of every dog on the walk to the pub, sat in the same seats in the same cafes every morning, investigated the way the same sun can rise in a million different patterns over the same Highland hills right around sunset?
Movement is often mistaken for meaning, and we’re building our Bucket Lists all wrong. We return home worn out and bewildered, and we wonder why. Perhaps, just perhaps, the cure for this crowded world isn’t new destinations away from it all, it’s a longer, more intentional stay, wherever we wind up.
Sixteen years of constant travel has shifted me, rearranged my atoms, poured the concrete of my soul into a new foundation. I know, if lucky enough to receive them, the next sixteen will probably change me again. I don’t have the answers to the questions of How, but I know I’ll seek them. I’ll ask more, I’ll talk less, I’ll listen. I’ll listen to the infinite everything, and I’ll slow and I’ll slow and I’ll slow. I don’t think the world really did get any louder, I think we all just stopped truly listening. I think we started collecting, started showing it off, I think we replaced the love of wonder with the lust of wander, and I think the ache we felt once touching back down on Montana soil was not one of Loss of Place, but lack of patience.
We do not own the places we love, we only borrow them for a time. We are guests to the solace we once felt, the solace that belongs to all those that seek it. Aim a camera at a crowded scene for a single second, and the entire frame will be filled with people. Open the shutter, let it linger longer, and all those humans blur into invisibility. Perhaps this is the way, perhaps it’s always been the way.
I think we’ll move towards a year of the long stay. I think I’ll seek lasting truths over ephemeral elation. I think I’ll slow.
I think I’ll slow.
