Environmental philosopher John Muir wrote that when we connect with the natural world, then “nature’s peace will flow into you like sunshine flows into trees”. A similar feeling is found in reading James Rebanks. His sensitive writing captures nature’s exquisiteness with an unshowy essence on one hand, while with the other he quietly captivates the human heart by guiding our emotions to that most fundamental of states.
Rebanks’s words flow into you again with his new book, written at a time when the author admits he was in a state of flux. Feeling “unmoored” from family, home and work in the rushing tide of life, he grasped at the memory of an older woman he had met on a remote Norwegian island some years before, wondering if her way of life would hold some clues in shaping his own.
Contact was made, and what’s relayed in The Place of Tides is a transfixing, tender and open-hearted account of a spring spent with two remarkable people, Anna and Ingrid, on the tiny island of Fjaerøyvaer caring for wild Eider ducks and gathering their down as part of a centuries-old trade.
Anna is the woman Rebanks met previously, and is the centre of the story (She was “the island’s eyes”, he writes) revealing an intelligence and independence matched by defiance and fealty; Anna could sit comfortably in a Sam Peckinpah film. Friendships grow slowly and organically, and as satisfying as nature itself, and the tough yet delicate work across ten weeks in sparse surroundings strengthens these bonds. At one point Rebanks watches Anna figuratively rebloom despite niggling health issues, just from being transplanted once more into this old way of life.
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“I was learning that our ideas of islands as places of freedom and escape are fanciful – an island is defined by constraints and limits,” writes Rebanks.
A period of silence (“varntid”) prefigures the ducks visiting the island and brings the humans such a sense of peace, while the ducks’ subsequent arrival creates a joy that might be compared to the boyish rapture of Tony Soprano, wearing his dressing gown, afloat in his pool with his own raft.
By the end of The Place of Tides, Rebanks’s anxieties about his place in his own world, to borrow from Muir again, have dropped off him like autumn leaves. It is a beautiful journey back to himself.
NJ McGarrigle is a critic
