The Place of Tides

Welcome to February! We made it, the last month of winter. It’s already getting lighter and oh it’s raining but I can feel it, spring is just around the corner. I wanted to write this week about a book I read recently and which caught me by surprise with how hopeful it made me feel.

The book is by James Rebanks, a sheep farmer and author who lives in Cumbria, and it’s the story of the season he spends in Fjærøy, a remote island in Norway’s Vega archipelago, just below the Arctic Circle. The island is uninhabited except for this season, when the eider ducks (famously, of eider down) come to nest. Rebanks joins Anna, a “duck woman” in her seventies, who goes to live on the island to prepare it for the ducks, to protect them as they lay their eggs and to gather their down as they leave.

The work is ancient, dying work, entirely anachronistic to an era of post-industrialisation. Anna is fearsome and more than a little independent. As she, her friend Ingrid, and James, embark upon the dangerous journey across the archipelago and bed down on the storm-swept island, she begins to tell James stories of her family, her ancestors, stretching back through a history of eider-gathering, of sea-fishing and their resistance to the Nazi occupation, and the many myths that have long shaped the islanders’ relationship with their islands and the seas.

The history is a fascinating one, and the story is transporting. It made me feel like I was a child again, listening to tales of far-off, enchanted lands, and dreaming myself there. This, I think, is what I liked so much about the book, and what it was about it that gave me hope. I felt, reading it every morning over my breakfast, that I was experiencing that very oldest enchantment that has to do with a connection to land or indeed ocean.

This is a connection, living on the second floor of an apartment building in a busy city, that can feel very deeply buried, but it’s one, when accessed, that makes me feel calmer about whatever little catastrophes might be happening in my life, or the larger catastrophes might be happening in the world. The same eider ducks keep on returning, year on year, to nest on the same island. In one of my favourite scenes, a fisherman tells a story of having fallen asleep on a boat, and waking to find a the eye of a humpback whale just level with the rim of his boat: pods of whales travel the same routes for whole lifetimes, led by their grandmother, for upwards of seventy, eighty years. The whales surround the boat for a little while, and then they move on.

This book made me that I am small and that the earth is large and full of mystery. That, I think, is sometimes a cause for hope.

With love,

Rosie x