The Caravan of Lossiemouth
If you're not from Britain, and if you have never had anything to do with the RAF, you'll probably not have the slightest idea where Lossiemouth is. If not knowing that is going to bother you, take your National Geographic Atlas, go to page 143, and look up G22. There it is, in all its Highland splendour, sitting perkily at the edge of the land where the fresh water of the Lossie River flows down to dilute the salt of the North Sea along the Moray Firth.
Picture quiet roads through flat farmlands; picture brightly painted fishing vessels and seine nets, and you have a pretty good idea of what it's like coming into Lossiemouth. If you're driving your own car, and are heading west from Aberdeen, and if you don't mind a strong sea-breeze, about two-thirds of the way to Inverness, a few miles before Elgin, take a fork northward on the B903, and about fifteen minutes later, not long after the gorgeous pine forest, you'll be in Lossiemouth.
At certain times of the year, the pretty seaside village is a popular destination and yes, that was where my husband was heading on his holidays. You will probably be wondering why anyone would want to go all the way from Kingston, Ontario to Lossiemouth, Scotland. Since you must know: he was going to see airplanes. And thousands of grown men do the same each year, men who are as crazy about airplanes as he is.
All my married life, you see, I had heard Carrick dream aloud about making it to Lossiemouth one day; so, by the time he hit forty, seeing that he hadn't been there yet, I bought him, as a birthday surprise, a ticket to his native Scotland. Then, since he prefers trains to cars, I slipped a Britrail pass into the envelope with the ticket.
When I mentioned Lossiemouth, Carrick assured me he would definitely find a way to wend his way there, and, at the same time, visit his cousin in Drumnadrochit, a small village near Loch Ness, south of Inverness.
"Don't worry about me back home, I'll be all right," I told him. "As long as you can stay in touch once or twice a week, I'll have a pretty good idea of where to find you, should I need you."
The standing order was for him to just go and enjoy himself, to forget about us back here, for a while.
After a mandatory visit to his parents in Bishopbriggs, near Glasgow, he headed north on trains and buses that would eventually take him to Lossiemouth and his beloved airplanes.
Ever since Carrick was ten years old, he has been plane-spotting, a hobby that is little-known here in North-America. A young person (in those days, boys only) would go to the airport, note pad and pencil in hand, and, if he could afford them, binoculars and camera. For hours, the boy would watch the air traffic with fascination. He would record in his note pad the type of each airplane taking off or landing, its number (painted on it in large characters and which, like a car license plate, indicates, amongst other things, its country of origin), the airline it belonged to (if the boy knew it), and the time at which it had taken off or landed. Just like collecting baseball cards, rugby scores, or license plates, in a way. The more registration numbers a boy had in his little pad, the prouder he was. Eventually, he met other boys doing the same thing; they compared notes, and a great camaraderie evolved.
In those days, it was possible to see kings and queens and prime ministers and movie stars climbing up or down the steps of an airplane and trotting elegantly onto the tarmac. When a boy caught sight of one of the celebrities, he became a hero for a few days. Through word of mouth, the spotters would eventually know that such and such a plane was the private property of such and such a magnate. When another boy saw that particular airplane somewhere else, he would know to expect such and such a famous personality to emerge from it.
Plane-spotters have their newsletters and their magazines and now, of course, they're all over the Internet. Carrick even has his own www.DHC-2.com website now and it gets hit by thousands of viewers weekly. A pretty serious thing, you'll have to admit. Some of the more artistic plane-spotters have become famous aviation artists. Other boys were train-spotters. Carrick's father had been a train-spotter in his youth.
An enthusiast will soon get bored with his local airport; he will beg for a newspaper route, mow lawns, walk dogs, carry groceries, or do any odd job to make enough money to buy a bicycle to get himself to other airports. By the age of fifteen, that boy will be dreaming all year long about his summer holidays and as soon as the last day of school is over, he will head to some busy, far-away airport on his bicycle and do his absolute best to get a job, any job, there. All his waking hours will be spent at the airport. On weekends, he will set off on his bicycle to explore neighbouring airports or airfields, or to attend air shows.
The young British plane-spotter might save enough money in one summer to be able to take a part of the next summer off, in which case he will cross the Channel on one of the large ferries from Dover to Calais and head off to the European Continent on his bicycle. He will ride from one airport to another until the start of school, sleeping sometimes in a youth hostel, but most of the time setting up his tent in an open field. Carrick often came across French and other European farmers who showered him with their hospitality, insisting on feeding him and filling his backpack with tartines, patés, cheeses and fruit for the road.
Like many other seemingly innocent pleasures, plane-spotting has its dark side. In some ways, unfortunately, some plane-spotters are like gamblers: after a few tries at spotting, they become totally addicted. Apparently plane-spotting has become a terrible disease ravaging parts of Britain and Europe, and scientists suspect the epidemic has been spreading unchecked especially amongst middle-aged men of many nationalities. It has been known to cause divorces and husband-beatings. The disease starts innocuously, but in no time at all, it can take over a young man's life, take away his thirst for sport, women or even television. While normal young men sit at home watching Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? or Survivor, our aeronumerologist is out there, at the airport, secretly noting Alpha Bravo Charlies into his pocket-sized notebooks. (One of the first requirements for being a spotter is the memorization of the universal aeronautical alphabet: Alpha is for A; Bravo is for B; Charlie is for C...) I have heard it said, but I personally don't know if it's true, that forced withdrawal can lead to severe depression, sexual dysfunction, apathy and a myriad of other symptoms.
A few years before I met Carrick, the summer before he went to Art School, he struck lucky and discovered an inexpensive, open ticket that allowed a student to travel all over the United States, including Alaska but excluding Hawaii, for a one-month period. For a young man who had already visited hundreds of airports all over Europe, this was the opportunity of a lifetime. He slept and washed in airports and ate airplane fare for a whole month. He visited all the airports he could, all over the United States. He went to Anchorage where he lived through an earthquake and stayed put for one day to do sketches of native children. He loved his summer so much that he did the same with a spotter friend the following year.
Now that he had travelled to all possible airports in Europe, done all that globe-trotting in America, but somehow never made it to Lossiemouth, he just had to get there! At Lossiemouth, from what I have heard, an airplane-spotter's journey will be rewarded with an incredibly varied and fascinating military airplane collection.
Alas, more than airplane spotting happens in Lossiemouth and Carrick arrived in the small village on the eve of a very important golf tournament. When he had knocked at the doors of five or six Bed and Breakfast establishments, only to watch the owners apologetically shake their heads, and to be told they were all booked for the whole weekend, he knew he was out of luck. The sun had already set and there was a fine mist clinging to him now. Like walking through clouds at five thousand feet of altitude.
The humidity had started attacking him through his wool sweater. He was shivering with cold. He had no choice but to head back to a village nearby. As a fine drizzle started to come down, Carrick wearily retraced his steps to the bus stop. If he could make it back to Elgin, he would just need to return here to Lossiemouth the next morning, and all would be fine. Having now dragged his luggage all over the village from one B & B to another, it seemed to have doubled in weight, like a sponge in water.
He waited for twenty minutes without any sign of a bus. A woman came by. She stepped into the shelter with him.
"Excuse me," he said, trying, as much as possible, to bring back his Scottish accent, "would you happen to know if there'll be another bus to Elgin tonight?"
"Och aye!" said the woman. "It should be here in about ten minutes. Is that where ye're headin'?"
To be polite, Carrick supposed, she asked him where he came from and she continued with the same mundane sort of questions. To pass the time away, he told her about his coming all the way here from Canada and his terrible disappointment at not finding one single bed in the village here.
"So yee think yee'll find a place to stay in Elgin?" she asked, almost mockingly. "Yee'll no find a bed anywhere within a hundred miles o' here tonight." She shook her head. "You see, we're havin' the biggest darn golf tournament here this weekend, and everything's been reserved months ago, all the way to Inverness and even Peterhead and Aberdeen. Even Montrose. And I hear they're charging just about double the usual! There's no tellin' wi' the greed o' some folk."
Carrick nearly dropped his camera bag on his toes. There are times when even a grown man wishes he could bury his head in a woman's breast and bawl his eyes out. He figured the woman must have sensed his dismay because, immediately, she added, "but I'll tell you what: I'm off to Elgin to baby-sit my grandchildren but you just go over to my house, and tell my husband you can stay in our wee caravan tonight, and he'll let you in. Then she proceeded to explain how to get to her house from the bus stop. It wasn't very complicated: a couple of streets over and then left towards the shore, and it would be the house with the purple door and the black dog. "You can't miss it. And the front of the caravan is visible at the side of the house."
"Are you sure this will be alright with your husband?"
"Aye."
"By the way, I'm Carrick. Who shall I say sent me?"
"Just say Irene did."
"Aye." He couldn't thank her profusely enough; this was just too good to refuse.
A few minutes later, he arrived at the house with the caravan. As he climbed the two steps to the purple door, he heard the dog's loud bark. He knocked, and a tall man came to the door and opened it a few inches, holding back the frantic Alsatian.
"Aye?" he said in a rather unfriendly voice, which made Carrick wonder if he had made the right decision in accepting Irene's offer.
"Irene said I could sleep in the caravan tonight," he said bravely, hoping the man would not invite him into the house.
"Is that right! Well, if Irene said so, then you can sleep in the caravan."
The man took a couple of seconds to examine him from head to toe; he reached for some keys on a small shelf near the door.