“There you go, Jimmy,” said his mother, easing his wheelchair in front of the picture window. Since crashing his motorcycle left him paraplegic, this was Jimmy’s domain—sitting at the window, passively watching life carry on—without him. Walking in the hills, fishing in the lochen, helping with the lambing and chatting up the girls in the village pub were off his agenda. I’m a stranger in my own village. He raged at his fate, but the gods who determine the fates of young men on motorcycles were unyielding. It would have been better if I’d been killed.
Through the window, Jimmy took in the broad panorama of the Scottish Highlands. Well above the tree line, the vista encompassed a hundred and eighty degrees of barrenness, where only heather and gorse survived, interspersed with patchy grass, punctuated by a few stumpy, straggly trees. Here and there, in dry-stane dyke enclosed fields, sheep grazed, but they were not many in number. The inhospitable view took in the craggy mountains on Scotland’s west coast, the distant Grampians to the south and the softer scenery of the east coast, but Jimmy could see only three houses.
The harshness of the landscape matched the bleakness of his mood.
#
He wasn’t looking forward to his birthday. Another bloody awful year to look forward to. On the day, his uncle arrived with a present.
“Happy Birthday, Jimmy.”
Jimmy unwrapped an expensive digital camera and a set of lenses.
“Wow! Thanks, Uncle Stewart,” he said, uncertainly.
“Well, your Mum said that you were getting frustrated. You know I’m a keen photographer and I thought you might like to give it a try. You should pick up the basics pretty quickly.”
Jimmy didn’t share his uncle’s enthusiasm. How can a camera make up for my immobility?
The camera sat unused on a shelf. But his uncle had spent a lot of money. I owe it to him to give it a try. Reluctantly, Jimmy pored over the instruction manual for days on end.
“How are you getting on, Jimmy?” Mum asked.
“Aperture? Shutter speed? Focal length? It’s all mumbo jumbo. I’ll never get the hang of it.”
“Perhaps Uncle Stewart could help.”
And he did. He enrolled Jimmy in an on-line course with a professional photographer. Jimmy surprised himself. Understanding what to do was hard. Doing it is so much easier.
Through his lenses, he became closely acquainted with the ever-changing world before him, absorbed by his new pastime. Without moving from his window, Jimmy documented the changing palate of the landscape—the yellow gorse that announced winter’s transition into spring, the bright blue skies and scudding white clouds of summer, the purple of the heather and the ochre of the stacked hay in autumn and the pure white brilliance of the winter snow that drifted up over the bottom of the window. Jimmy captured them all.
Not that the seasons could be distinguished so easily. They played little games and swapped places on a whim. It was not unusual to encounter two or even three seasons in a single day, such was the sway of the westerly wind that blew weather patterns in and out of the vista.
And of course, because it was Scotland, he became an expert on the rain that graduated from a soft drizzle through a steady downpour all the way to horizontal rain driven across the window by gale force winds. Rain that came at any time on any day. Rain that teased by exploding on the scene, dying away for a while and then, when people had put away their umbrellas, drenching them with a surprise squall—just because it could.
The constantly shifting skyscapes inspired his wide-angle landscape photographs, some of which were published in the Northern Times.
With the seasons came the birds. The pied wagtails left their nests among the heather to dash about on the road, frantically wagging their long tails, disturbing small insects that they gobbled up. The buzzard, who made its nest in Hughie’s tall pine tree, soared majestically over the high glen, stooping down to seize a mouse or, if it was lucky, a rabbit, to be carried back to the nest to feed the chicks. Crag martins nested under the house’s eaves and flew manic sorties like jet fighters crisscrossing, jinking, and diving in pursuit of the myriad insects that were their prey—sometimes crashing into the windowpane that they failed to see. His telephoto lens documented their behavior.
Occasionally, a thunderous roar would announce the arrival of Royal Air Force Typhoon fighters on low-flying, ground-hugging training exercises. They came in pairs, swooping over the hill behind the house and diving down into the valley below as if in a frenetic game of tag. Jimmy was amazed to be able to look down onto a jet in full flight. I bet there aren’t many photographs of a fighter in full flight taken from above.
Some of the crofters said that the jets frightened the sheep, but, as far as Jimmy could tell, the sheep didn’t seem to mind.
#
One Spring day he rang his Uncle Stewart.
“You’ll never guess what came in the post this morning. The lady who runs the Castle Gallery in Inverness saw some of my photographs in the paper. She’d like to put on an exhibition of my landscapes. She calls them my Signature landscapes. She wants to see my portfolio. I didn’t even know I had a portfolio! I’m to pick out my best photographs before I meet her next week.”
“That’s great news, Jimmy. An exhibition will put you on the map as a photographer. You might sell some photographs. And get some commissions.”
#
“Mum. Could you open the window for me, please?’’
The window creaked open, admitting the perfumes of the flowers in the border, the intoxicating headiness of the roses, hints of orange from the freesias and the summery scent of the honeysuckle. Honeybees feasted on the pollen. Rabbits played on the lawn.
And the unyielding gods had yielded, just a little.