Just shy of the Arctic Circle, Norway’s Vega Islands are stark and elemental, home to otters, sea eagles and a diminishing population of eider ducks. They are also the seasonal home of Norway’s “duck women,” who protect the ducks from predators during nesting season and then gather their eiderdown feathers for human use once the ducks return to the sea. This symbiotic relationship between humans and ducks has persisted for centuries in Norway, only to be in grave danger of vanishing due to modernization and the climate crisis.
James Rebanks is an acclaimed writer and shepherd, whose work has previously documented his life on a traditional family farm in England’s Lake District. In his beautiful The Place of Tides, Rebanks leaves the farm, attracted to Norway by a brief meeting years earlier with an elderly duck woman. Apprenticing himself to the no-nonsense Anna and her equally staid assistant, Ingrid, James joins the two women for a season tending ducks on the island of Fjærøy. The fierce, angular beauty of the island and the Norwegian Sea is mirrored by Anna and Ingrid, who initially seem like Norwegian elemental folkloric beings called huldra—tricksters who “tangled fishing lines, hid tools, and caused accidents,” especially targeting men—to James.
Anna and Ingrid’s lives are real, however, not mythical, as James discovers over the course of 70 days of hard work tending to the ducks’ seaweed nests. Anna was drawn to the vanishing craft of duck-tending in her 50s, after marriages, child-raising and work. She then reestablished an unprecedented 60 nests on her family’s island of Måsøy and inspired a revival of other traditional duck islands in the Vega archipelago, which is now protected as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The season James joined her was her last, and Anna’s stories are a precious and elegiac harvest from a vanishing way of life.
The Place of Tides reminds readers that small acts of care for our environment can result in great things when done over time. Quietly enchanting, this book offers readers an oasis of calm in our turbulent world.
