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

our dreams of islands as places of freedom and escape are fanciful – an island is defined by constraints and limits.

However remote, islands aren’t outside history. They are deeply affected by it.

It wasn’t exactly exciting work, but real life often isn’t.

But she loved being there. It was different staying for an extended length of time – she was able to tune in to it all. And the world became spellbindingly beautiful when you thought you were dying.

Back home, everyone looked to me for the rebellion and the spirit, and over time that had sickened me of it. That’s why, I remembered, geese take turns at the front when they migrate, because the front bird is working the hardest, and the others ride in its slipstream. So, rather sensibly, they drop back after a while, to catch their breath, and are pulled along while they recover. Men are not so wise. I felt like I had been the front goose for too long. Worn myself out. But here I could simply be one of the foot-soldiers and do basic, practical things with Anna and Ingrid, to help the birds.

Anna reminded me that the first rule of living is to live. To see, hear, smell, touch, and taste the world. The more I tuned in, the closer Anna and I were growing as friends. I was beginning a journey back to the person I had once been – and needed to be again.

There is a point where hard work and striving flips from something noble, making the lives of the people around you better, to something too intense, making their lives worse, and for a year or two I’d been on the wrong side of that line. I needed to listen more, slow down, and make space for Helen and my kids. I wanted to be a better version of me when I went home.

I had assumed that Anna had always loved being alone on the outermost islands. But she told me, ‘It is not so great being alone, when you want to be with your people.’ She knew island life better than anyone else, and understood that escaping to an island to get away from other people was just a fantasy – and a lonely fantasy at that.

Perhaps islands are like farms, almost impossible to pass down the generations without someone getting hurt. 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.

The young woman in the picture looked defiant. Anna had hinted that men had always wanted her. Perhaps they’d sensed they couldn’t have all of her. She wasn’t anyone’s pushover. She looked tough, like she had her own ideas. Young men like that, until they get married.

I sensed, then, that in the early days of this season she had been wrestling with this ending, and had eventually found some kind of peace in it. It was almost like she had done a deal with the gods – ‘Let me be well enough to do this season, and I will leave with grace.’ The gods had let her recover and enjoy those weeks, and now she would keep her end of the bargain.

The more we talked, the more I saw how kind and good a father he had been. A story is rarely as simple as it seems. We are all a bundle of virtues and vices, strengths and flaws, hopes and fears.

It struck me that Anna’s life was full of people, mostly men, who had loved her deeply, but who had let her down or hurt her. As she’d told me their stories, I had assumed she’d cut them out of her life, been as savage as I was to the people that hurt me. But I was wrong. She had forgiven them all, both for being what they were and for what they’d done. She had woven her family and her tribe back together. She had a lasting impact on people, even on those who had gone their own way. Bernt had cared for those ducklings, and had come back to tell her.

I had been drawn to Anna because she seemed heroically tough – and she was tough, but her real superpower was forgiveness. She knew that a life full of other people meant accepting their weaknesses and still being there for them. I had mistaken Anna for a loner. I thought she had gone to the island for the same reason I had: to get away from others. And perhaps she had, but the truth was that she lived surrounded by people who loved and admired her.

I had been driven to the island by anger, I realized. I had been most angry at those closest to me – bitter that no one seemed to recognize the trouble I was in, that no one was helping me in quite the way I needed. 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.

Anna’s example was simple: if we are to save the world, we have to start somewhere. We just have to do one damn thing after another. Hers was a small kind of heroism, but it was the most powerful kind. The kind that saves us. 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.