That night, Anna told me many threads of stories. Some were about this little farmstead in Vega where she lived now, others were about strange-sounding islands across the sea. Sometimes the whole tale tumbled out of her, sometimes it would unspool slowly. Some of her stories were about ducks, some were about island life, and others were about trading. Some were about the early nineteenth century, others about the previous week, as if time passing changed nothing. It was a bewildering tangle, but Anna knew where each one belonged, like a weaver threading a loom. Unlike me, she could already see the beautifully crafted cloth. She wanted me to understand that her people were woven into the fabric of this place. She was the descendant of a family of ‘eiderdown kings’, folk who gathered and sold a rare and precious product – the feathers of the eider duck. From the north-western shores of Europe, her people had brought eiderdown to the world.
I’d read Rebank’s previous books – A Shepherd’s Life and English Pastoral – about his experience of farming in the Lake District of the UK, and so I knew of his passionate engagement with restoring balance to British agriculture. I can understand how his years of struggle and activism had left him feeling tired and despairing; ‘I could no longer see the point in trying to mend our fields when everything around us was so broken. I once had endless reserves of hope and self-belief, but they were beginning to run out.’
He had encountered elderly ‘duck woman’ Anna and her work seven years earlier; somehow he knew that he needed to go back to see her. Place of Tides is the record of the season spent with Anna and her friend and apprentice, Ingrid, on a remote island off the coast of Norway. Since the Viking era, islanders have gathered and traded the magically light and warm down of wild eider ducks. From when they start in the bitter cold, to when the down is finally gathered in the long flowering days of summer, the trio work to ensure the survival of this ancient tradition.
I enjoyed everything about this story; the rhythms of the work and weather and season, the evolving relationships between the two duck-women and Rebanks, the harsh island landscape of rocks, sea and sky, the gentle lessons in connection that helped heal the burnt-out Rebanks – and of course, the ducks.