The Place of Tides: A Journey to the Land of the Eider Duck and a Life-Changing Encounter with the Women Who Gather the Birds’ Precious Down on Remote ... the acclaimed author of The Shepherd’s Life

by James Rebanks

Anna had lived a rebellion against modernity.

eiderdown

Being on the island was affecting me more than I thought it would. I had always had a lot of control over my life and my days. But here I was, in their hands, working at their speed and as they saw fit. I was having to learn to be smaller and more malleable. This slow day by the fire, a day of listening, was quite unlike my normal life. 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:

She served us folded flatbreads – soft, pancake-like things layered with butter, sugar, and cinnamon – which she called lefse.

Anna’s life here was, I was coming to see, devoted to paying attention to – or, more than that, being completely committed to – the beauty of the world before her. She seemed to have done it by cultivating an extraordinary form of independence from other people, their values, and their noise. She used every ounce of her wilfulness to shut out the world and concentrate on these simple things.

It took a certain kind of person to stay on a duck island in the quiet times, Anna told me. Silence bothered people. They were so used to noise and babbling on that they couldn’t wait to fill it.

Men, she said, wanted to come to the island and tell her what to do. They couldn’t help it. They wanted women to do what they were told. And, when women refused, they went and got themselves a younger model.

but you can’t bottle everything up inside. If something needs saying, I say it, no matter what anyone thinks.’ Perhaps I should have felt offended for all the men on earth, but in truth I was delighted that Anna and Ingrid were now treating me as part of their sisterhood, someone they could say whatever they liked to. I asked Anna how long she had been single, and she said nineteen years. She was standing on a chair filling a cupboard and declared that she still had ‘admirers’. ‘The trouble is, they aren’t exactly top quality.’ They were, I learnt, all over eighty years old, and, as she put it, ‘half dead’.

By paying attention, I began to see what men and women do to one another, how we trap ourselves, and each other, in certain roles. And the truth is, it was embarrassing to see it clearly for the first time. When I remembered how the men spoke over Anna, or assumed she needed them to do things for her, I cringed inside, because I knew I must do those things too.

Human life is full of projection, like we are constantly being filmed in the movie of our own lives. We endlessly shape and reshape our own stories to make ourselves feel relevant or seen – desperate to be the major character. But we don’t end up feeling seen, we end up drowning in noise, because everyone else is as desperate to be heard as we are. The world has become a mad shouting match, making us distracted and anxious. I’d done all these things as foolishly as anyone else, and it was exhausting. I was just another male duck huffing and puffing on the foreshore.

She said you could be braver than a rough night in a storm, but ageing was relentless, like the waves wearing away at the rocks.

I hadn’t slept well for days. The blanket I’d hung as a curtain against my bedroom window could not keep out the Arctic light. Strange fears rose inside me. Minutes took hours to pass. My brain seemed unable to stop racing, so much so that I became scared of it.

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.

I had been drawn to Anna because she seemed heroically tough – and she was tough, but her real superpower was forgiveness.

She was showing me that a good life was about forgiveness – accepting others’ flaws as we hope they might in turn forgive ours. Anna showed me how much we all need each other, and how empty it is to be alone.

But Anna had worked out that letting go of anger was not just an act of kindness to the other person, it was kindness to yourself. Holding on to hurt eventually burns a hole in you. Forgiveness gives everyone a chance to do better next time.

We all have to go to work in our own communities, in our own landscapes. We have to show up day in, day out, for years and years, doing the work. There will be no brass band, no parade. And we have to accept and keep the faith in each other, and somehow work together. It is the only way we can make our own tiny deeds add up to become the change we all need.