Sixty Degrees North

by Malachy Tallack

  We drove from Bekkjarvik out over the bridge to Selbjorn and onward, over the next bridge, to Stolmen. Red-faced children in snow-suits filled the space with chatter and joy, and every so often a bundle of them would be released into the arms of waiting parents at the roadside. Stolmen was stern and beautiful. Boulders and low trees along the verges stretched out towards rough moorland and crags beyond, and small lakes, distorted by ice. I got off at Våge, at the far south of the island, the end of the road. There was a turning circle at the top of a slope, with a bus shelter on one side and several huts and houses on the other. I stepped out into a thin light and a familiar, salt-ridden breeze.

  Once the bus had departed, I could hear no cars, no voices and no machines of any kind – only the intimate whisper of the sea, just a few hundred yards away. It looked like a ghost village, yet at the same time I felt I was being watched from behind a curtain. Some of the buildings, I guessed, might be summer houses, so were probably empty. But others must be occupied. The island has a population of 200, which is not much, but enough.

  I had read that Våge was the ‘commercial centre’ of Stolmen, and I walked back down the road a little way in search of the evidence. So far as I could see, it consisted of a small shop with a petrol pump outside. I went in and browsed the shelves, not wishing to buy anything but just to be there. The shop was well stocked, as stores in out-of-the-way villages usually are, and it gave the impression of a place in which the exchange of words was as important as the exchange of goods and money. Besides me, there were two staff members and two customers. One of them, a woman of about forty with long, curly hair and a thick jacket, was talking quietly and fondly to an elderly man in a fur hat. He seemed to be struggling, as though confused about what he needed, and the woman touched his arm lightly. She was offering suggestions, I thought, and guiding him back towards certainty.

  The two women behind the counter then joined the conversation, and each of them spoke in an affectionate, familiar way, oblivious to the roles that elsewhere would define them. Though the words were unknown to me, the tone was not. These were neighbours and members of a community: a connection far deeper than the tenuous bond between buyers and sellers. ‘Commercial centre’ was a rather inappropriate title for a shop like this, but it was, certainly, a centre.

  Wandering those few short aisles, I felt a deep longing to be spoken to in the way those people spoke to each other. By then it was several days since I’d had any kind of conversation with anyone, and I was lonely. But it was more than that. My desire was not really to talk, it was to be known. I wanted to be enclosed and included within that thing of which these people were a part. I wanted to belong, as they belonged, to something bigger than themselves. I missed Fair Isle then, and I longed to go back.

  Once outside, I walked briskly towards the sea, over rough ground that crunched with ice at every step. Just above the shoreline I found a rock that looked almost comfortable and I sat down. There was little wind, and the waves unfolded onto the stones with an uncommon tenderness. Towards the west, the tell-tale streaks of a rain shower stained the orange horizon with blue. Everything here was as I knew it should be: the smell of it, the sound of it, the sight. Everything was familiar.

  Sitting there beside the sea, two hundred miles from home, I thought back to the traffic that had ventured west from this coast towards my own shores. To the Vikings who had sailed in the eighth and ninth century, and who had made their way ultimately to Greenland and beyond. To the refugees of the Second World War, who were carried in fishing boats and other vessels, in what became known as the ‘Shetland Bus’. And then to the oil tanker Braer, which left the refinery just north of Bergen in January 1993, carrying 85,000 tonnes of crude oil. She was bound for Quebec in Canada, but made it only as far as Quendale on the south east coast of Shetland, where she hit the rocks and spilled her cargo. It was a few years after my family moved to the islands, and a few miles from the spot where, later, I would find the parallel.

  I’d come to Stolmen by following that line around the world. Once there, I had nowhere else to go but home. I’d known all along, of course, that this was a journey with only one possible destination. But faced with that last stretch of water that separated beginning from end, I felt nervous and uncertain. Would the place I was going back to be the same place that I had left? And did I even want it to be? Perhaps I’d expected answers, but I hadn’t found any. I’d been left with only questions. Ahead, the sky was like a welt, blue and purple ringed with pink. A crack in the clouds brought sharp fingers of light down onto the blackening waves, and the cold chafed against my face. I sat for ten minutes more, perhaps fifteen, and then it was time to go. I stood and flung a stone into the water, towards Mousa, as though to reach as far as I could towards home, and then I walked away.

  HOMECOMING

  You can take a ferry north to Shetland almost every night of the year, leaving Aberdeen in the early evening and arriving at breakfast time the following day. It’s a convenient, if not always pleasant, way to travel. But on the day I headed home, having flown from Bergen to Scotland, there was no ferry. One vessel was in dry dock undergoing repairs, and the other was leaving Lerwick in the opposite direction. Instead, I booked myself onto the freight boat, which meant a longer and less comfortable journey across the North Sea. But at least it would get me there. And so at three in the afternoon I boarded the Hellier together with four other passengers, climbing stairwells and following corridors, each of which reeked of diesel, salt and cold metal.

  As the boat shuddered away from the dock an hour later, the five of us were served food: soup, roast beef, chips, cake. A few polite words were shared, but no one was very interested in talking, and as we cleared our plates one after another of us stood up and retired to our separate cabins. The sailing would take eighteen hours, with just a brief stop in Orkney after midnight, and almost as soon as we reached the mouth of Aberdeen harbour the ship began to rock heavily, to an inconsistent beat. The crash of metal on water seemed to shake time loose from its rhythm and drive it forward, confidently, into the night.

  Unlike flying, when the moment of arrival is clearly defined – that solid thud as the wheels hit the tarmac – arrivals and departures by sea feel less distinct, more negotiable. To be afloat is to be neither fully detached nor connected, neither here nor entirely there, but suspended, like the boat itself, between elements. I like it. There is something about the pace of the journey that puts me at ease: the sheer slog of it, and the boredom that unravels, wave by wave and roll by roll. Once at sea, I feel almost back where I’m going.

  The American writer Harry W. Paige said that ‘home is not a place only, but a condition of the heart’. That is to say not that home can be anywhere at all, but that the relationship between person and place is an emotional one. Like being married, being at home is not a passive state. It is a process, in which the heart must be engaged. That is as true for the reindeer herders of Siberia, whose home may be hundreds of square miles, as it is for the inhabitants of a tiny village on a tiny island.

  For many people this is not so. Home for them is nowhere in particular. It is the house in which their belongings are kept and in which they go to sleep at night. It extends no further than that. This is the condition of our time. It is a marriage without love, a relationship without commitment. And it is, surely, a kind of homelessness.

  But there is another kind of homelessness, too, one which has the opposite effect on its sufferers; and that is the ailment with which, from an early age, I was afflicted. For much of my life I felt myself to be exiled from a home that no longer existed, and which in some sense never really had. In her book, The Future of Nostalgia, Svetlana Boym described this feeling as ‘akin to unrequited love, only we are not sure about the identity of our lost beloved’. For me that feeling arrived with our move to Shetland, and was compounded by the loss of my father. It became a hole within which I tried, desperately, to find form. Like the north, home is defined in its absence,
in the distance between longing and belonging. But, like the north, it is only through intimacy, through love, that it can come to be known.

  The landscape that truly shaped me was that of Shetland. This is where I became the person I became. This is where the conflicts that would form me were fought out. That I came to love this place, having once hated it, is strange and yet entirely coherent. It was a process of understanding, familiarity and, I suppose, of forgiveness that brought me back here. In the end, I accepted the centre around which my world was spinning, and I turned towards it.

  When I woke in the early morning, the Hellier was pitching hard, swaying like a drunk heading for bed. We were somewhere around Fair Isle, I guessed, most likely in that stretch of water called the Roost, between the isle and the Shetland Mainland, where tides and currents and winds collide. The water here can be as wild as water ever can be. Something in the cabin was banging each time the ship lurched, a solid clatter against the wall. Hazy headed, I got up to find the cause, groping in the darkness at the end of the bunk. A ladder hung there by its top rail, the bottom half a pendulum swinging in time with the waves. I lifted it from the wall and wedged it at an angle, where it could neither fall nor slide, and I lay back down and closed my eyes.

  The lurching became more pronounced then, more violent and uncomfortable. Things that had previously been static were on the move, and each time we rolled to port the curtains remained vertical, inviting a wedge of grey light in to the room. I stood up again and rearranged the cabin, trying to prevent noise and damage. Anything that could move was put somewhere that would stop it; anything that could make sound was silenced. I knew that I wouldn’t sleep again, but at least I could lie in peace, rocking almost comfortably through the final miles, until we docked in Lerwick on a dull, wet morning. It was a day much like any other day, except my journey around the world was complete.

  It was while living in Fair Isle that I began to write this book. My fixation on the parallel and the idea of a journey around it had never gone away, and there on the island I realised that I might finally be able to achieve it. I abandoned the novel I’d started months earlier, but the ideas that had grown within that book spilled over into this one. What was most important in making this journey seem possible, though, was that I recognised and welcomed, for the first time, my destination. To travel around the sixtieth parallel was ultimately to return to Shetland. Going away was possible, then, because coming back was desirable.

  When I set out, I had no idea what I hoped to find, I just wanted to go. Curiosity, restlessness and homesickness: those were the things that had set me on my way, and those were the things that kept me going. Perhaps, somehow, I hoped to satiate those urges, as though by following the parallel to its end I could return settled and content. But things are never quite that simple.

  During my travels, I met people who were settled and who were content. Some had only ever lived in the place where they were born; they were shaped and defined by those places. Others had left one home and found another, in which they felt a deeper sense of belonging. Jeff in Alaska, Ib and Jacques in Fort Smith: I admired their certainty, and their commitment to the places they’d chosen. It was a commitment that, in each case, was renewed and reinforced by engagement, in thought and in action.

  But along the parallel there were also those – past and present – who’d been estranged: political and religious exiles; indigenous people whose cultures had been undermined. And perhaps in the north estrangement is more pronounced than elsewhere. For in the north, landscape and climate are uncompromising. They demand, of those who stay there, ways of living that are native to the place. And though it’s increasingly easy to ignore such demands, wherever you choose to be, estrangement is never without cost.

  A few months after I completed the journeys described in this book, something happened to me. It would not be helpful, perhaps, to put a name to it here, for such afflictions always feel distant from the labels we give them. It was, anyhow, a crumbling of certainties and a steady erosion of things I had expected to stay whole. An overwhelming sense of disorientation struck me then, and I felt myself sinking, much as I’d sunk to my knees on that day beside the window, sixteen years earlier. I don’t know whether the ending of my travels was the trigger for what happened next, though I can’t fully untangle the two things in my mind. Somehow my return seemed to bring me back to the very point at which I’d begun: to grief and to loss and to an absence of direction. Whatever the immediate cause, the result was a year in which I could barely write, and several months when I couldn’t work at all. It was a year in which I left yet another house, and a partner who cared for me very much. Turned inward as I was, I lost friendships I didn’t want to lose. I felt plagued, in that time, by a darkness I’d not known since my teenage years, and by a hopelessness I thought I’d long left behind.

  The most surprising result of this period of sadness and confusion was still to come, however. Since returning from Prague ten years before, I’d been certain I would remain in Shetland. I was stubborn in that certainty, and critical of those friends who, as I saw it, gave in to the appeal of elsewhere. The urge to move comes and goes, I’d told them. You just ride it out and commit to home. Yet at the end of that year, as I began to emerge from beneath my own shadow, I left Shetland and moved south. I left Shetland and I began, once again, to write. In The Idea of North, Wally Maclean declared that ‘You can’t talk about the north until you’ve got out of it.’ And perhaps he was correct, for in those months after leaving I found myself able to complete this book. I understood, finally, what I had to say.

  There are moments in life that are remembered quite differently from all other moments. They are replayed and replayed and replayed, as though in doing so the story might turn out differently. But it never does. The story always ends the same. The car always rumbles out of the car park, and it never comes back. I was sixteen when my father died, and I’ve lived just over half my life without him. In another sixteen years I’ll be older than he ever came to be. I couldn’t decide the ending on that day; nor could I change it later. But this story is different. Sixty degrees north is a story whose ending I chose.

  When I look back to the beginning, to that little boy beside the window in Lerwick, dreaming his way around the sixtieth parallel, I feel sorry for him. He is lost, grief-stricken and alone; or at least he thinks he’s alone, which is almost the same thing. If I could, I would reach out to him and take him by the shoulders. I would tell him that one day he will feel whole again. I would tell him that, impossible as it may seem in that moment, he will find his way home.

  Index

  Abramovich, Roman ref1

  Adam of Bremen ref1, ref2

  agriculture, development of ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4

  Air Greenland ref1

  Åland Emigrants Institute ref1

  Åland Islands ref1

  autonomy in ref1, ref2

  Alaska ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9

  as ‘the last frontier’ ref1

  bought by the USA ref1

  land ownership in ref1

  Alaska Highway ref1

  Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act ref1, ref2

  Alberta ref1

  alcoholism ref1, ref2

  Aleksanderovskiy Park, St Petersburg ref1

  Aleksey (son of Peter the Great) ref1

  Alexander, Tsar ref1

  Algonquin Indians ref1

  Amundsen, Roald ref1

  Anchorage ref1, ref2, ref3

  animal rights campaigns ref1

  Arctic Ocean ref1

  Arctic skuas ref1

  Arctic terns (tirricks) ref1

  Asgard ref1

  Athabasca tar sands ref1

  Athabascan languages ref1

  Atlantic Ocean ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5

  Atwood, Margaret ref1

  Australian Aborigines ref1

  bald eagles ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4

  Baltic Sea ref1, re
f2

  Basargin, Nikolay ref1, ref2

  bears ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5

  attacking people ref1

  Bekkjarvik ref1, ref2

  Bell, Shawn ref1

  Bergen ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5

  Bering, Vitus ref1, ref2, ref3

  Berry, Wendell ref1

  Bigton ref1

  Billia Cletts ref1

  bison – see buffalo

  Black Death ref1

  Bolsheviks ref1

  boreal forest ref1

  Bothnia, Gulf of ref1

  Boym, Svetlana ref1

  Braer (oil tanker) ref1, ref2

  Breivik, Anders Behring ref1, ref2

  Bressay ref1, ref2

  British Columbia ref1

  Broch of Mousa ref1

  brochs ref1, ref2

  Brodsky, Joseph ref1

  Bronze Horseman statue, St Petersburg ref1, ref2, ref3

  Brünnich’s guillemot ref1

  Buffalo (or bison) ref1, ref2

  Burgi Stacks ref1

  Burn of Burgistacks ref1

  Burn of Maywick ref1

  Calgary ref1, ref2

  Camus, Albert ref1

  Canada ref1, ref2

  Christianisation of native

  peoples ref1, ref2