James Rebanks. The Place of Tides. Mariner Books, 2025. $28.99, 304 pp.
Only 1,200 people live today in the Vega archipelago, a group of rocky islands in northern Norway on the 66th parallel, the southern boundary of the Arctic Circle. Over a millennium ago there, enterprising women cared for eider ducks each spring. They helped the ducks build their nests on tiny islands, kept the ducks safe from predators as they sat on their eggs, and helped them usher new ducklings into life—and into the sea—by the season's end in early summer. The keepers’ reward was a soft and airy gold—the expensive eider down that mother ducks would pluck out of their bodies throughout the spring to liberally pad their nests. The keepers collected it at the end of each season, cleaned it, and sold it for stuffing luxury pillows and duvets. These duck women’s craft, unchanged for the most part since the days of their Viking ancestors, has continued uninterrupted—until now. The ducks still outnumber the humans in the archipelago, but not by much.
In his new book, The Place of Tides, farmer, journalist, and award-winning author James Rebanks documents a recent spring he spent shadowing one "duck woman," Anna, during her final season stewarding eider ducks on a tiny island, Fjærøy. Its name, translated into English, means “the Place of Tides,” after the tides that sometimes allow the island and the tiny rocks around it to be a single landmass whole, and at other times make them seem as a grouping of unrelated rocks, separated by deep waters. In the process, the quest that began with curiosity turned into love—for this island, for the eider ducks, for Anna and those like her, living stubbornly in a world that no longer exists. The latter category includes, of course, the author himself.
Rebanks has written extensively about his own family farm in the Lake District of North West England, 600 years in the family and counting. Akin to Wendell Berry, the most famous farmer-writer of our age, Rebanks too left home for university studies. After receiving a degree from Oxford, he returned home to his ancestral farm whose history thrums deep within his soul. An oldest son of a shepherd, he knew he was called to succeed his father on the farm. There he still labors with his wife Helen and their four children—and labor it is, unrelenting and grueling, continuing season after season. Through it all he wonders how or if to adapt to modern practices that, he worries, demand unnatural things of the land and those who work it. Whether to stay or go was never a question that concerned him; the real challenge has always been how to flourish as a man rooted in a very specific place but increasingly restless in time. Why did simply living become so hard for him over the years, he wonders?
His spring at the distant Norwegian island requires Rebanks to desert his responsibilities to his own farm—and a desertion it is, he admits, recognizing the burden he put on his wife and kids. But at the time he impulsively made this choice, he could do no other. Exhausted, he had found himself disconnected from the work he once loved and to which he had felt called all his life. The time out on the duck island becomes a necessary hard reset for his weary body and soul. But while this book is a deeply personal memoir of a farmer’s midlife crisis, animating the book is the story of the elderly duck woman Anna—a story inextricably connected to the long tradition of duck women to which she seems to be a final exclamation point of sorts.
Early in his time with Anna, Rebanks listens to her tell the story of her own family, who had spent generations caring for the ducks and (at the time) living on their own remote island. A realization dawns: “She looked like a queen—not in her clothes or possessions, but in her defiant eyes. Anna had lived a rebellion against modernity. Her belief that it all still mattered was absolute, unshakeable—a gift from God.”
Anna’s rebellion against modernity is the crux of this book. It powerfully drew Rebanks to her as a fellow pilgrim. And yet, as he listens to her stories and works alongside her on the island, he realizes that what he is seeing is a pale reflection of what used to be. Since the German occupation of the archipelago during WWII, the duck population has declined significantly. New predators were introduced to the islands over the years since, further threatening the vulnerable ducks. More recently, the powerful pull of modernity, including a generous government buy-out, drew most people away from the islands and into the big cities. This is the story of Anna’s own kids, in fact. And so, contrary to first impressions, “This place hadn’t magically escaped modernity. If I had come for that, I had followed a fantasy. Anna was born, lived, and worked in a broken world.”
But this broken world still needs stewards. Indeed, the story of this earth and of every believer’s life since expulsion from Eden is the story of broken people trying to extend love and stewardship to other places and people likewise broken by the fall. Of course, people also repeatedly fail at this call for various reasons, including deep selfishness and outright disobedience. In Anna’s room on the island, Rebanks notices an icon with a Bible verse above her bed, “From Mark, I would later learn: Not what I will, but what thou wilt. Jesus was on his knees among the rocks, praying to his father, surrendering to his fate and God’s mercy.” Later on, helping Anna make the fresh nests in preparation for the ducks’ arrival, wreathing them with prickly dried seaweed, he thinks “of the crown of thorns that Jesus wore on the cross.” The work of stewardship is a work of love, but no less than that, it is the work of obedience and self-sacrifice.
While every stage of the season on the island requires much work, some of it quite physical and grueling, there is also much time to be spent in quiet observation, walking around, watching, listening, reflecting. This comes naturally to Anna, who seems to become one with the island. Rebanks, however, finds himself uncomfortable with such idleness at first—it seems so unproductive. As the weeks glide by, however, it dawns on him: This being still is a timeless part of faithful labor, of the work of loving a place and its creatures. And it is essential for human flourishing too. This realization allows him to finally diagnose the original distress that brought him here: It was, put simply, the disease of modernity.
He too once used to take the time to observe, reflect, simply love his farm and the natural world by being present in it. But the busyness of modern life squeezed out any such moments of reflection in favor of unceasing hard work with concrete outputs. The result for his soul was devastating: “I became responsible for boring, necessary things. At one point I had three jobs and worked most nights and weekends. D. H. Lawrence once wrote that the industrial age had created a new kind of human, a machine-like man with iron in his soul. I had become one of them.”
So many farmers today, like Rebanks, find that running the farm will not alone pay the bills. Among farmers I know in my local community, there are many teachers, repair people, businessmen, and more. Many modern farmers take on additional jobs, while still doing all of the tasks that their ancestors would have done. True, modern machines simplify those farming tasks and make them more efficient—but, as Wendell Berry has repeatedly warned, at a heavy cost. Efficiency, this practice of filling up all of one’s time with concrete and measurable labor, seems great on paper but is unsustainable for human persons, because such is not a natural human way of working or thinking. It took time away from the daily rat race for Rebanks to see this.
To work and live as a human, one must love one’s place, family, the beauty of all one has been given to steward. It is a simple takeaway, but then the story of stewarding mere ducks is a reminder that there is timeless joy in living such simple lives. After all, what is the point of caring for wild ducks for months on end for just a single duvet’s worth of down to show for it? But there is something saintly about Anna’s calm and prayer-like persistence in caring for these ducks, and the work of faithful saints has never made sense in the world’s economy.
“The age of humans will pass,” Rebanks reflects in opening the book. “Perhaps the end has already begun, though it may take a long time to play out… The last humans will, like many of the first, hold to the coast scratching a living from the sea and the shore, I imagine the last human on earth being a woman on a rocky shoreline.” A woman like Anna.
