The Last Day in America....

And since I've come back I've felt strange, maybe lost, a kind of restlessness, even a homesickness. Which is daft considering I'm home.

When I was a child, one of the only grown men who it was easy to be with was my Uncle Andrew, who told me all his stories of his times as a hobo in America in the nineteen twenties and thirties; jumping trains, walking the rail-tracks and dirt roads, living in hobo camps and having dangerous negotiations (if he won the game) with gun-carrying pool players. He only stopped his wanderings and came back in thirty nine to join the Army when the war started and then, for lots of reasons, he never managed to get back to America. Time passed, and although he was a very clever man, he spent the second part of his life as a civilian worker keeping the run-ways clear on the Navy airfield in Lossiemouth. I think the job suited him because he could spend so many of his days looking into the far distance.

And that's how I remember him; talking, laughing, dreaming and looking out across the Moray Firth to Ross-shire and Sutherland, to the mountains in the North.

He needed a lot of sky over his head, my Uncle Andrew. He needed to see without obstruction for at least eighty or ninety miles every day just to go on being who he was.

In the America that I found, all the stories that he had ever told me, all the songs I had ever heard him sing, turned out to be true: That the deserts and plains are so wide and the mountains are so high and the page that we write on is so vast that all our stories together for all these thousands of years can hardly even begin the first line.

And on the long dry roads water tastes so much better, and every small town you reach at the end of the day feels like you are coming home.