I wish I could spend a summer on a remote Norwegian island, waiting for ducks to arrive.
James Rebanks describes the months he spent with Anna, a ‘duck woman’ in his memoir, The Place of Tides.
I use ‘memoir’ lightly because it’s also a biography of sorts, about Anna and her work to reestablish the populations of wild Eider ducks and the centuries-old tradition of gathering their down –
What had once been mocked as backwards was now admired and respected.
Although Rebanks clearly states that it is neither biography or history (because he hasn’t supplied sources and footnotes), the book reads as a mixture of his own reflections, observations of Anna and her craft, and an account of the very personal history attached to the islands and the ducks.
There are many reasons why I enjoyed this book. Firstly, the writing about the landscape – the tides, the seaweed drying on rocks, the summer light – was beautifully spare, yet incredibly evocative. The words were like a lullaby: I could close my eyes, imagining waves washing over rocky shorelines, ducks bobbing on the water, and kelp swaying with the current.
The clock on the wall had stopped and no one cared. We were now governed by the rain, the clouds passing over, whatever the seabirds were doing, and the endlessly changing light. But above all it was the tides that dominated our waking hours. The island breathed beneath us, giant sighing breaths: in, and the water fell away, out, and the water rushed back.
Secondly, I love a book that has me deep-diving into something I previously knew nothing about. The long history of the care of Eider ducks, and how that has been threatened (you might immediately think climate change, however, their decline began with WWII when the ducks became a food source for German soldiers) was fascinating. Related, the bits about the role of duck-women and their duck-stations during the Resistance was equally interesting.
At the beginning of the Occupation, the Germans had noticed the thousands of half-tame ducks swimming around the islands. They didn’t care what kind of ducks they were. They didn’t care about eiderdown. And they didn’t care what the locals said about them. To the Germans, a duck was a duck. The eiders were chalked up as food supplies for the Third Reich.
After the War, Eider populations faced other threats, notably the introduction of mink, which were originally caged and farmed for their fur, but eventually escaped and bred on the individual islands. Mink can swim for miles and have no natural predators, so the ducks stood no chance.
She said an ancient tug-of-war took place here each day between those that would bring their young into the world, and those that killed them to live. The whole sea estate was like a watery Serengeti.
The complex history associated with ownership (or rather, guardianship) of the islands also had me hitting the internet.
This – the rocky plateau we were pulling towards – was one duck station. Beyond it lay another, the one we were travelling to. The ocean and islands were, she said, divided into a series of vær like these, each one a little cluster of islets. Ingrid tried to find an English phrase for this and struggled. We settled on ‘sea estate’, but Ingrid said there was something that wasn’t quite covered by those English words. The Norwegian word emphasized that these were places that things could not be taken from without permission and, in a country where roaming and harvesting from the wild is usually allowed, this was an important distinction.
Lastly, all of the detail associated with the nesting of the ducks (the duck-people build them individual shelters) and the harvesting of the down demonstrated the incredible symbiotic relationship the ducks and humans have. This beautiful documentary describes the duck islands.
There are clear messages that Rebank wants the reader to take away, all related to conclusions about his own sense of purpose and the meaningfulness of his experience –
A story is rarely as simple as it seems. We are all a bundle of virtues and vices, strengths and flaws, hopes and fears.
We cannot be what we are and what we aspire to be at the same time, something in us has to die for something else to be born.
All very true but what will stay with me is the exquisite sense of place.
I was learning that our dreams of islands as places of freedom and escape are fanciful – an island is defined by constraints and limits.
And I think there is safety to be found in ‘constraints and limits’.
4/5
She served us folded flatbreads – soft, pancake-like things layered with butter, sugar, and cinnamon – which she called lefse.
