Scoraig

The engineer artist's white canvas! Bottom up design principal with the bit of eccentricity.

7 years ago I was wisked through here as part of my education of where Rissas heart lay. Her love of the land and the cycle of life. At the time it felt like a test to just understand and escape hopefully with my to be wife and partner beside me.

This time we arrived with 2 small children and after 10 months of traveling the globe we stood on the small concrete pier feeling chilly, quickly dressing the children in everything we had. There was fresh snow on the hills, warm sun and a fresh stiff breeze for us to feel the freshness. The water was bright blue and crystal clear. Stunning, absolutely stunning.

As the boat arrived to pick us up, I remembered who it was going to be dropped off going the other way. The posty "Bill" whom 7 years earlier we had played a very funny game of drinking crocay on the side of a very lumpy lawn specialy cut by a lawn mower for the occasion.

This time he has cancer, well and truely riddled, they didn't expect him to last this long. His cheaks are puffed from to many steroids. I greet him with a smile and a warm double handed hand shake. I hold on to the grasp for a moment. I absorb the reality that I will never see him again and I feel distinctly human inside.

This feels like real life as we ride on the boat with my 3 year old son on my knee asking where we are going and why.

The water is only a few degrees as it splashes around the boat. This is life! This is real.

Scoraig has I think become an example of a white canvas for creative engineer type  people to solve their own problems of how to live here. With out the restrictions of building codes and rules. Its not that they want to go against the codes but the fact they take reonsibilty fpr what they create and do, and no one seems to care what they do. It is after all a hard cold remote place. Everything has been created from either what was here or what was cheap to get here and then work with it. From power generation to the toilet paper holder its all original. Some of it amazing,  some a work in prpgress and some a junk yard waiting to become something.

Its 1 am and I hear the quad bike coming along the peninsula with hope fully Clarissa on it after an attempt to save a sheep. Everyone helps everyone, everyone drinks with everyone. Its a tight community.

The house we are staying in has recently been filled with the late Andrew Kerr, s stuff. The man who started Glastonbury. There are books wriiten about him, photos of early Glastonbury events. We drink lots, eat dinner and tales of teenagehood memory's at Glastonbury escape in the conversation. I as what i thought a worldly New Zealander feels rather naive. Although it sounds like fun as a father now I feel New Zealand is a much better place to grow up in.

Rissa is back, the sheep is for now a success, its time to sleep. What will tomorrow bring? I cannot wait.

Boyd