MacKenzie’s Farewell

MacKay’s Reel MacKay’s Reel A two-part reel in 2/2 time. Composed by C. MacKay. Robbie MacKenzie’s earliest memory was of Loch Lomond weather. He would cower behind the deeply recessed window in his bedroom, hypnotised by both fear and awe, watching a blitzkrieg of black, jack-booted thunderheads march in from the north. Fierce Germanic gods withdrew spears of lightning from the quivers of the massed armies of Teutons and hurled them violently from mountaintop to mountaintop like javelins. Next came the explosions of thunder, the roar of battle that rattled the diamond-shaped window panes of leaded glass. Robbie was certain that someday they would shatter. The whitewashed walls of his room seemed to burst into flames. Stories he had been told about the German Luftwaffe bombing Glasgow fueled his imagination. Finally came the rain. It poured in uncontrollable torrents, drenching everything. It seemed as if nothing would ever again be dry. As the deluge continued unabated, mountain tarns and upland bogs became saturated, then overflowed, releasing sweeping waves of silted water cascading down the burns. The brae-sides looked as though they had been stuck with pins, water squirting everywhere with arterial pressure. Pastures, already soaked with their quota of moisture, became lowland bogs, flooded as overwhelmed vale rivers surged over their banks. Robbie learned from his mum, Fiona, the Scottish rainfall record was recorded at Loch Sloy, west of Lomond. More than nine inches in twenty-four hours had fallen, she assured him. It was only twenty miles from where he stood sheltered in his room. Contrary to Biblical mythology, the aggressiveness of the storms made Robbie believe the end of times, Armageddon, preceded Noah’s Great Flood.