Some of us find relief from what James Rebanks calls our “dark and chaotic world” in physical activities, others in hobbies and various forms of entertainment. Reading is my favorite handy escape hatch, and these days I find stories about people who engage with the natural world and the critters that inhabit it – hares, hawks, crows, octopuses, ducks – particularly soothing. Rebanks’ “The Place of Tides” fits the bill.
The book is a departure for Rebanks, a farmer in northwestern England’s Lake District and a bestselling author. His previous books, which include “The Shepherd’s Life” and “Pastoral Song,” express love for the land where his family has lived and worked for 600 years. The books also express concern over the damage wrought in the push for cheap, mass-produced food.
“The Place of Tides” initially finds Rebanks, after years of a “manic, rushing-around life,” as depleted as his farm was before he began to restore it. “I could no longer see the point of trying to mend our fields when everything around us was so broken,” he writes.
Why We Wrote This
Many of us fantasize about getting away to a remote island. For one writer, a summer spent helping with duck-breeding season on a remote island teaches him the importance of slowing down.
Rebanks felt he was losing touch with what was important and needed a radical reset. With the go-ahead from his remarkably patient wife, Helen, he arranges to spend 10 weeks on Fjærøy (pronounced “Fi-aroy”), a tiny island in the Vega Archipelago halfway up the Norwegian coast, just below the Arctic Circle. He hopes that immersing himself in a slower, more thoughtful way of life will teach him where he has gone awry.
Years earlier, during a visit to the Vega Archipelago to learn about Norway’s conservation efforts, he was fascinated by a fiercely determined, independent older woman he met briefly. Anna Måsøy was one of the last practitioners of a tradition of building and protecting nests for eider ducks, and then harvesting the precious eiderdown after the mother ducks returned to the sea with their newly hatched broods.
Courtesy of James Rebanks
In a letter, Rebanks explained to Anna the impetus behind his trip and expressed his eagerness to lend a hand. He is invited to join Anna and her assistant, Ingrid, for what will be Anna’s last summer working on the island. “The Place of Tides” – which takes its title from what the locals call Fjærøy – is a paean to this inspiring “duck woman,” as these caretakers are called, and a heartfelt account of how Rebanks’ time under her wing profoundly changed him.
Anna, who was born in 1948, comes from generations of farmer-fishers and coastal gatherers who prospered in the 19th century from lucrative eiderdown harvests – “islander’s gold.” Unlike most islanders, she was unwilling to leave Vega for better job prospects in Oslo. Instead, she married, had children, and cooked for the local nursing home.
But when she was 50 years old – roughly the same age as Rebanks during his summer on Fjærøy – Anna decided to revive an island tradition. She also wanted to rebuild the eider duck population, which had plummeted in the second half of the 20th century due to predators and the overfishing of the ducks’ food supply. During duck-breeding season, Anna left her two daughters in her husband’s care in Vega.
In simple storytelling cadences, Rebanks braids Anna’s story with vivid evocations of waves cresting like “white horses above the green-blue ocean” and lashing rains that trap him, restless and homesick, for days on end in their small cabin, which sleeps three but has no running water. (There’s a compost toilet in a shed, and a generator they turn on periodically to recharge their phones and crank up the oven when Anna wants to bake. Ingrid’s husband, a fisher, occasionally drops off groceries from Vega.)
At the core of this tender, contemplative book are descriptions of the painstaking, repetitive work involved in cleaning out and repairing more than 100 nests tucked under barns, between rocks, and in huts, and then relining them with fresh, air-dried seaweed. “This was Anna’s world,” Rebanks writes, “and, once I tuned in to her cares and her jobs, there was a plainness to it that I loved.” He found working alongside the two skilled women “settling and calming.”
The importance of paying attention is one of many life lessons Rebanks learns. He notes how much of Anna’s time is spent keeping a sharp eye out for intruders – whether humans, hawks, minks, or seagulls – who might spook or harm the nesting ducks. “We do not think of watching the world around us as work. Work is usually muscular and rushed at,” he comments.
Another lesson concerns forgiveness. Anna, despite disappointments from the men in her life, doesn’t harbor regrets or grudges. On one of Rebanks’ calls home, his wife laughs “at my being schooled on a daily basis about the flaws of men by two militant Norwegian women,” he writes.
After reading Herman Melville’s “Moby-Dick” while on Fjærøy, Rebanks realizes that he “had been a little too much like Captain Ahab, a little too desperate to catch my whale, and everyone else had been dragged across the seven seas behind me.” His conclusion: “I needed to listen more, slow down, and make space for Helen and my kids.”
“The Place of Tides” washes over readers gently, refreshing us with its moving portrait of a quietly purposeful way of life.
