In The Sand County Almanac, Aldo Leopold warned a time would come when Americans must suffer a change of mind, and action. Our frontier ethos, which inspired such outdoor sports as hunting and fishing, would have to inspire a new one in their place: “wildlife research.” It would include bird-counting and photography, banding eagles and botany. From taking to observing—the future of the frontier might depend on such a change.
I thought of Leopold when I finished The Place of Tides, which recounts one spring shared between the bestselling author of The Shepherd’s Life, James Rebanks, and one of Norway’s last “duck women.” ‘Anna,’ as Rebanks calls her, is a woman in her seventies going about her last season of watching ducks. She comes from a long line of Norwegian islanders who safeguard eider ducks nesting on tiny islands of the Vega archipelago, just south of the Arctic Circle, for their breeding season. As payment, the ducks leave behind their down feathers, which the duck women collect, clean, and sell as luxury stuffing for duvets. I can’t think of such an arrangement in American history. We would have just shot as many as we could. (American, admit it, you’re more offended that I cast a stereotype than that it’s true.)
But while Anna’s people have been tending eider ducks for a thousand years, she didn’t get her start until middle age. Like most of her generation, the rural life was almost finished by the time she was born. Lands were sold, jobs moved to cities, weather started changing, the fishing was already more than decimated, and the ducks had lost their half-domestication thanks to hunting by German occupiers in WWII. The eider ducks and their keepers were close to extinction. But a job wasn’t working out for Anna, her father’s health was failing, and an island inheritance needed caring. So she volunteered.
Rebanks had been going through a rough spot of his own, as he confesses. So after learning of the eider-keeping tradition and meeting Anna, he thought a spring on a remote island might help. He was right, but the balm doesn’t come until he learns the cold and stillness of a way of life quite different from his own.
Rebanks is famous as a defender of his own rural tradition. A farmer and shepherd of England’s Lake District, his activism is especially prescient as Britain’s Labour Party plans to further regulate English rural life out of existence—all for the good of The Climate, if not the patches of earth under their care. The controversy is an ecological version of the philosophical dispute of the ancient Greeks over motion, in which one argued with brilliant eloquence and logical rigor why there is no motion, while the other rebutted by taking a few steps back and forth. Rebanks has been the one to rebut the ecomodernist ethic—which, using the greatest command of the holy trinity of science, technology, and academia, prizes regulation and urban consolidation to satisfy the equations demanded by the Climate carbon calculators—by taking his steps, both on the farm and onto the activist’s stage, to show why the rural life is much more attuned to Nature and more ecologically responsible than the various charts and spreadsheets justifying its oblivion.
Farm work demands constant, well, work. Something’s always trying to break or die. Rebanks expected much the same from island life. But when he joined Anna and her friend Ingrid on a tiny, isolated island with little more than a cabin, a barn, and a rowboat, he found most of the work was in waiting, watching—women’s work, of a sort. It was hard for a shepherd and activist, and a man, to learn to sit still.
Yet learn he did, and his learning makes for delightful reading, if sometimes a tad boring—but maybe that’s a lesson for those of us prone to impatience. Waiting and watching turn often to storytelling and listening. Rebanks learns the history of the eider people of the Vega Archipelago, the decline of the harvest, the jobs on the island—cleaning, weaving, shooting or shooing off mink and sea eagles, etc.—and finally, Anna’s life. As it happens, this is not the family island they’re guarding. She doesn’t talk about that much. He also learns she is the first to have attracted eider ducks back to the islands, years after they had left. As slow and steady as waters brushing forward and crawling back while mists ruminate above, Rebanks reveals the mystery of this woman who seems cool and hard as the shoreline rock.
The mystery is that there isn’t much of one. Island life is simple, quiet, bare. Anna didn’t see her work as some grand act of preserving the past, or saving the world’s future, or perfecting her own present. She just came to love the ducks. And she loved and loves many people, including divorced husbands and a brother who took her island away. She holds no grudges. Rebanks finds in her the embodiment of varntid—the Norwegian word for the seasonal quiet demanded to let the ducks have their way—in all matters of her life, not just with ducks. He could have also used the German word Gelassenheit, which escapes translation. He uses an English word all might understand—if not as deeply as I should, given my surprise at how it fits here: “forgiveness.” Island life, he concludes, did to him what he can only describe as being “born again, to use that strange Christian phrase.”
I leave the reader to find out for himself what Rebanks means by that. I discovered in Anna a woman who was so firm, founded, because she had given up the pretense to find herself. “Human life is full of projection,” Rebanks warns, as “we endlessly shape and reshape our own stories to make ourselves feel relevant or seen.” We fail. So Anna chooses not to be seen but to see, looking to the birds of the water as they are coming and going.
As I read, I could only imagine Anna as the most beautiful old woman I could conceive, gracefully aged, each wrinkle a small mark of the depths a foregone love carved into her. Upon reflection, I can only think the reason why is that she opened herself fully to the future. I do not mean that she oriented herself toward her future, set with plans of what to do next. Quite the opposite, she had no plan at all. She would accept the future, as the future, whatever it brings.
And that is odd, because by Rebanks’ account Anna seems a traditional woman. In that respect, she resembles Leopold, who by no means hated hunting or fishing. He was an expert at both, having hunted and fished since he was child. And his love for the American frontier always betrayed a wonderfully traditional American love for the wild. What motivated his counsel to change our outdoor habits was simply an attunement to what the time needed. (As it happens, many regions in America now suffer from a lack of good hunters, as deer overpopulate, overfeed, crowd out other species, and suffer diseases due to monoculture. Along with reintroduction of predators, Leopold would likely advocate for Americans to pick up their rifles again.) Only by attuning ourselves to the future, and by willing to set limits on our own sense of action by what it demands, would our beloved frontier remain, along with the best of what we have inherited from the past.
Today in ecology we talk much about the future. How will we stop the climate from changing? Or how will we ‘adapt’ to Climate Change? Both of which really mean, most often, how will we manage to keep doing what we’re already doing without facing real consequences? We hatch plans to build wind turbines and levees, or to protest new factories from being built. Most of that talk is not about dealing with the future itself, of opening ourselves to whatever it brings, but about keeping ourselves from the future, blocking its worst and shielding what remains of our past and present habits from rusting away or having to change.
Progressives and conservatives alike suffer from this fear of the future. As the late modern West ages—unlike Anna, quite ungracefully and sometimes disgracefully—our politics have become obsessed with enclosure, be it from threats to democracy, migrants, or weather. I don’t think it’s a contradiction that, with such obsession over closure, neither left nor right is conserving much of anything, and certainly not the West’s most ancient traditions, like Christian faith or eider duck-keeping. For these traditions were devoted to the future, the next Coming or the next breeding season, not merely to the present or past, and certainly not to self-enclosures where we cling to crystallized moments we pretend to control and protect.
We treat ourselves much like we treat our politics. We rub ourselves with anti-aging creams. We break off friendships and loves before they will cost us commitment and change who we are and will become. We curate our online ‘presence’ and try to make enough money for retirement. All these are schemes to keep our pasts, or what’s left of them, from slipping back into time’s waters. We are busy, for we cannot keep the future from coming and breaking in and remaking the world and us, even as we try. So we must always work, always shaping, always enclosing, always spending more money and burning and digging up more of the Earth to put in front of us, always to stop and stem the tide.
Nature shall not be saved by such enclosure. For the natural life is one which is open, beyond the self’s control, to whatever happens, and whatever must be done to meet that happening. So Nature, like the eider ducks, needs varntid, and people willing to live the way of varntid.
But as Anna’s life proves, you can’t make or shape that life for yourself. As for her, life is something that happens to—something that’s given to—you. And often it’s painful, costing you not only the evils you try to hide but also the goods you hold so dear. So to be given that life, you must forgive.
And so you do. And in that moment, a miracle happens: You are still, letting “thine eye be single,” waiting, watching, for something, anything to happen. And it does. A light, or a lightness, is given to you. Whatever it is, it’s new, and it’s all the world enough. And you find yourself, “founded upon a rock,” as a preacher once promised, seeing the winds blow and the tide and ducks and the future coming in.
You’re forgiven, your future right here, given for you.
Image Via: DevianArt
