THE PLACE OF TIDES

Journey to a new way of being.

Searching for relief from depression and his “manic, rushing-around life,” British writer and sheep farmer Rebanks spent four months on an island in Norway’s Vega Archipelago, a remote area he once had visited briefly. Shortly after that first trip, his father died, and so did others in his community whose counsel he often sought. Intensifying his sense of loss, his work as an environmental researcher took him to places where “the world was breaking.” “I began to feel unmoored,” he writes, “like a piece of timber drifting on the current….I was a poor husband, father, brother, and son. I began to lose faith in the certainties that had sustained me. I was growing less sure, and more confused.” In this serene, reflective memoir, Rebanks chronicles his stay on the archipelago, where he lived with Anna Masoy, an aging woman who made her living by collecting eiderdown, the fragile feathers that remain after ducks leave their nests. Sixty nests, he learned, could yield enough feathers to form one duvet. Rebanks worked with Anna and her friend to clear out around 300 old seaweed nests, air nest boxes, build new ones, and collect—and painstakingly clean—feathers. They lived in a house with no running water, an outdoor compost toilet, and a generator that Anna used only for bread baking. Much of the memoir recounts Anna’s stories about her family, the islands’ history, and her determination to forge an “extraordinary form of independence from other people, their values, and their noise.” At the edge of the coastal shelf, on an island 900 miles from Iceland, in a place dictated “by the coming and going of the tides,” Rebanks learned, above all, a new rhythm for the rest of his life.

A quiet memoir of profound change.