Glamaig Hill Race, July 14th, 2012
A YouTube Instamatic
This is a glimpse of the beginnings of history. It’s based on a YouTube clip and influenced in part by Instamatic poetry, a genre popularised by Edwin Morgan. The clip captures Finlay Wild’s first ever victory in the Glamaig hill race on the Isle of Skye (or a snapshot of his climb and descent, at least). It would be his first win there, and one of his early career wins on the whole. He would break a fifteen-year-old race record, and begin a streak of wins that would span the next ten years.
And so it begins with a font called ITC Bradley Hand. It appears white over a black background. It announces, simply: “Glamaig Hill Race, 2012” to the organ notes of Johann Sebastian Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor.
And through the primitive magic of Windows Movie Maker the text grows and expands towards us, then fades into the first still shot.
The music is ominous, spooky, like we’re walking into a cartoon haunted house. But we couldn’t be further away from cartoons or ghouls. This is a world of rock and grass and mud and water. Those tactile, solid things that bring you back to ground.
We are somewhere up high, on the side of a mountain.
A man is hiking towards us, over a ridge of green grass and shattered rock. Two thousand feet below him, a loch like blue asphalt. He hikes with hands on knees and we pan slowly down, creating the illusion of movement.
Cut to medium close-up of man. White vest with double blue horizontal stripes across the chest, red shorts riding high on muscular thighs, dark hair and beard.
Fade to our first moving shot. He is hiking upwards over a field of grey scree daubed with flowerless patches of green. The slope in the background slices an arcing line between land and sky at nearenough forty-five degrees, splitting geological chaos from puffy clouded blue. The camera shakes, echoing his straining gait, and Bach’s organ chimes and strains in response.
It has the grainy mystique of those videos of bigfoot, just an opaque creature on a hillside, maybe even just an outline of a shadow, but lumbering into the distance of our consciousness nonetheless.
Fade to the pursuing pack, led by a man in a red vest, black shoes, black shorts and, curiously, black gloves.
The rest toil behind, hands on knees, heads lolling from side to side as they ascend the green curve of moon that falls precipitously to the loch below. It looks like one slip might see them tumbling away into steel blue space.
The tempo quickens now, Bach’s fingers are dancing on the keys like little pebbles skimming lightly over water.
The man in the red vest comes close to the camera, and he is faintly smiling. He looks quickly over his shoulder at those behind, and then turns back. His face is full in the frame now as he passes close to the cameraman. Briefly, we see his eyes, and through the smile there is something else, something approaching bemusement.
A shaky pan over his hunched back and shoulders, up over the shattered grey screescape, up to the line of the sky.
Then we see it too. We see why he might be confused.
At the boundary between earth and air there is a figure at once tiny and gigantic. It is the man he is chasing but will never catch. And he is disappearing between the lines of white and grey, walking on the surface of the moon, serenaded frantically by Johann Sebastian Bach.
Even now you can see that he will never be caught. The men below with hands on knees are still rooted to the ground, and he has disappeared into the sky.
And Bach’s notes have a tone of finality, echoing how his pursuers must feel. Hopeless. This race has ended, though we are not even halfway through.
But there is still a crescendo to come, the reward for upwards toil, the ecstatic release of feet and mind, the rampant celebration of descent.
Then suddenly he is coming down, the man in the white vest with the blue stripes and the red shorts, small at first, but growing as he bounds, skipping over rock and rut.
He passes the camera, and Bach is instructing us in the marvel of this descent, and you know now that the music could not be better.
He is on his heels, and the valley suddenly stretches out below and he is falling towards it, more in air than ground, and Bach is going DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN, DUN, DUN, DUN, DUN and the tempo is rising, and each note is a footstep, a brief caress of the earth, feet flickering from earth to sky, from earth to sky, from earth to sky.
And then he is gone again, like the sweep of a squall.
We end on a montage of still shots, fading and moving across the screen. It is men and women descending scree chutes, and labouring home over bog, and behind them the Cullins of Skye are shadowy and bold and wondrous.
And then Bach stops very abruptly.
And it is the end of the video.
Though it is just the beginning of a symphony between man and landscape that will play for years to come.
This man is twenty-seven years old and just beginning to sense his strength, his talent for doing this rather odd thing, which is moving rapidly over chaotic terrain that seems alive with the purpose of stopping men from moving rapidly over it.
Rocks shift and fly and roll beneath your feet. They are the size of footballs, or wrecking balls, and yet those are weak analogies because they suggest a roundness and uniformity, when in fact they are jagged blades and granite shrapnel, and they explode around you as you try desperately to stab feet into solid earth but instead you are on an escalator of shattered rock and all of it is trying to maim you.
The man, Finlay Wild, will win this race. His time of forty-four minutes and twenty-seven seconds will break a record that has stood for fifteen years. A record some thought to be unbreakable.
He has only just begun to win races, but he will win many more. He will win this Glamaig race every year for the next decade. He will lower the record again. And he will do many astounding things on these mountains of Skye and beyond.
But he doesn’t know any of that now.
How could you? When you are immersed in something so instinctive you don’t stop to question it. A hawk does not question why it kills, it just knows it must, whether in hunger or sheer desire.
Perhaps he doesn’t even think of any of it. Perhaps he is simply doing it because he is already in love with mountains and moving quickly with them.
He is not yet aware of the power this will give him, but he is certainly beginning to feel it, like sudden light spilling and pooling into a cavernous darkness.