Enough weather posts for a while. I’ve read some great books lately. One of them is James Rebanks The Place of Tides.

My first Rebanks read was The Shepherd’s Life: Modern Dispatches from an Ancient Landscape, a paean to the placed life. Rebank’s family has been raising sheep on the same parcel of Cumbrian land for six centuries, and he uses this deep attachment to muse on the importance of rootedness. Like my fellow Kentuckian Wendell Berry, Rebanks is both a farmer and a writer. One role sustains the other.

Rebanks expands his horizons in The Place of Tides, which chronicles the work of Anna, a Norwegian “duck woman” who preserves the ancient tradition of housing eider ducks on remote islands near the Arctic Circle. Rebanks spends a season with Anna and “a new calmness began to settle over me. It was a feeling I had not known since I was a child following my grandfather round his fields.”

Rebanks admires Anna’s fierceness, her devotion to the eider ducks and the ducks’ trust in her. Anna’s efforts are helping keep a tradition alive. In Anna, Rebanks finds a way out of his own confusion and doubt.

“Anna asked me if I would write a book about her and what kind of book it would be. I answered that I wasn’t sure, but that if I did, I would write about her work, her island, her family’s story, and her own life. I told her I could never know the whole of her, another human entirely, a woman, and someone from another culture to my own — such a thing was probably impossible, but if I did write an account, I would try to make it as true as I could. I explained that I was trying to see the world through her eyes. I would probably try to make of her life a kind of fable. I asked if that would be OK, and she said yes.

I am only the storyteller. She is the story.”

(The North Sea viewed from the Orkney Islands, about 300 to 400 miles from Anna’s home on the west coast of Norway.)