Introduction
My favourite pages of this remarkable book have nothing to do with geese. They happen in a diner in South Dakota called Dally’s, which serves its coffee from a ‘stainless steel Bunn-O-Matic urn’, and houses its cinnamon rolls under ‘scuffed Perspex domes’. Stuck in Dakota for a week, the narrator becomes a regular at Dally’s. It’s where he waits, and it’s where he watches: the ‘slow-turning window fans’; the customers putting their shoulders to the ‘surprisingly heavy’ glass front door, then taking their seats at the ‘red leatherette booths, sprung like mattresses’; and the two waitresses in their twenties, Misti and Crystal, who keep the place ship-shape:
They wore green-and-white-striped work frocks. Crystal had black hair furled in a bun at the crown; Misti’s bleached-blonde curls tumbled off the escarpments of her shoulder-pads. They passed orders through a hatch to an invisible chef, and drank the dregs of milkshakes straight from the blender, priests knocking back the last of the communion wine.
Dally’s closed every day at six o’clock. Misti and Crystal began to clean up at about half past five. Instead of wiping the surfaces with cloths, they pulled on pairs of wide, padded cloth mitts. The mitts lent the cleaning an intimate character. Misti cleaned the red pommels of the stools as if she were walking down a line of boys, ruffling their hair. Crystal wiped the tables with long, smooth strokes, as if she were grooming ponies. They caressed the Bunn-O-Matic with such tenderness it seemed the prelude to an embrace, and rubbed the Silver King as if a genie lived inside it.
William Fiennes’s careful account of their work is itself a form of ‘tenderness’. He observes what most would miss: the dignity of duty done well, the consolations of habit, and the tiny perk of the milkshake dregs. Two young people on low-wage service jobs are given the same generous attention as the 250,000 snow geese he has recently seen on a lake of white ice.
Fiennes’s prose has been compared to that of Bruce Chatwin, but here is Chatwin killing time in a restaurant in Patagonia:
Spread over the . . . wall was an immense canvas of gauchos herding cattle into an orange sunset. An old-fashioned blonde gave up on the lamb and sat painting her nails. An Indian came in drunk and drank through three jugs of wine. His eyes were glittering slits in the red leather shield of his face. The jugs were of green plastic in the shape of penguins. I took the night bus to the Chubut Valley.
Chatwin’s looking is of a different order to Fiennes’s. It’s hard, itemizing, scrutinizing. Everything is surface – the ‘shield’ of the Indian’s ‘face’, the ‘plastic’ of the jugs, the nails of the ‘blonde’. Object and human are equally of disinterest. No attempt is made to enter the inner life of place or people. Chatwin jots down and then he gets out. His noticing of detail is acquisitive, where Fiennes’s is inquisitive.
The distinction is important – because The Snow Geese is above all a book about learning to see, and it is a book that changes the vision of its readers. We end it more attentive, not only in that the natural world is left freshly scintillated for us, but also because our ethical sense is subtly shifted. Pure description is a relatively simple trick for a writer: you scribble details down in the Moleskine, then line them all up on the page afterwards. Far more difficult is fusing these details with radiance and ethos. Fiennes’s attentiveness is so thorough-going and compassionate that it is, you soon begin to realize, ‘less a technique than a moral principle’.
That last phrase is Fiennes’s own, used by him in admiration of Joseph Mitchell, author of the classic McSorley’s Wonderful Saloon (1943) and Joe Gould’s Secret (1965). Mitchell’s subject was New York: its buildings and streets, its people, the sea that washed its edges, and the language that torrented through it. He hung out at the bars and docks of Manhattan Island, listening and looking. Everyday life consistently fascinated Mitchell. He believed, like his editor at the New Yorker Harold Ross, that it was possible ‘to write history about living people’, and he did so by lending those people his ear and letting them speak.
There is much of Mitchell in Fiennes. He sets out to write mostly about geese, but ends up writing mostly about the folk he encounters along the way. You’ll meet them yourselves soon: Eleanor, who collects tortoises; ‘The Viking’, who is ‘troubled by the attentions of widows’; Sam, who trains for a year to swim across a river mouth near the Arctic circle, and hears the submarine calls of beluga whales when he does. Gentle in manner, curious but unprying, Fiennes inspires candour in others. On an overnight Greyhound bus, he ends up sitting next to a chatty fellow passenger called Jean. Where others would have turned a shoulder or put their headphones in to discourage conversation, Fiennes indicates his readiness to listen. As the highway signs flit by and the hours tick past, Jean’s extraordinary life-story unfolds into that well-intentioned space.
Night buses, cars, train-carriages, roadside diners, airports, motel and hotel rooms: The Snow Geese can at times seem less a work of travel writing than one of transit writing. The cultural theorist Marc Augé influentially named such locations ‘nonplaces’ (non-lieux), and noted the power of these ‘transport zones’ and ‘temporary abodes’ to elide individual identities and histories. But to Fiennes such sites are as rich and strange as New Delhi or Angkor Wat, teeming with anecdotes and oddity. His accounts of them gleam with bright vignettes: the boy in the bus station at Oklahoma City who ‘gazed up at a wall of gunmetal luggage lockers in three sizes . . . and then went right along the bottom row, trying . . . the largest lockers’, until he found an open one, climbed into it and ‘pulled the door shut behind him’; or the man who walks with ‘an almighty crash’ through the glass front door of Dally’s, which has been polished to invisibility by the conscientious Crystal.
I still remember reading the first page of The Snow Geese for the first time, twelve years ago, in a pre-publication proof copy. Within a paragraph, I knew something rare was underway. An eerie clarity of vision stole over me. The world being described was lucid, but refracted. I could see the female golfers practising at the hotel driving range, their ‘hair furled in chignons that poked through openings at the rear of their baseball caps’, and their ‘sleek, tanned calves’ like ‘fresh tench attached to the backs of their shins’. Calves like fresh tench? What a high-risk simile that is, especially so early in the book! How easy it would be to get the comparison slightly askew – and lose the reader’s trust from the off. But it is brilliant, and its brilliance lies in its visual exactness (the shiny taper of the fish-backs mimicking the over-developed musculature), and in its sly hint of absurdity (for professional golf is, really, a ridiculous activity). Those tenched muscles are soon followed by other finely exact images: the golfers drawing ‘clubs from the bags with the nonchalance of archers’, the books that ‘lean together like hands in prayer’ when the narrator pulls a copy of The Snow Goose from between them.
More is at work in those clever opening paragraphs, though, than the establishment of a style. They also set in motion images that will return through the book. When Fiennes describes the ‘rinsed golf balls’ flying out from the tees and ‘soaring high above . . . the fairway’, it is the first of many parabolas of flight that will occur in the book: the migratory ‘arc’ of the geese themselves, of course, but also the howitzer-hurl of the potatoes that he and Sam will fire out over Hudson Bay, laughing for joy at the fun of it. The arc of the golf balls finds its first rhyme only a few sentences later, in fact, with the suspension bridge depicted in a colour print on the hotel library wall. The bridge is ‘rigged like a harp, with staunch arched piers and high support towers lifting the curve of the main cables’ – and the bridge’s ‘harp’ will itself re-appear as Eleanor’s brooch, ‘a gold harp with four short strings’, a chapter later.
This subtl
e weft of imagery is part of the art of The Snow Geese. Objects are allowed to be themselves, but they are also involved in larger symbolic patterns. The two great urges of the book – the urge to move on and the urge to return home – resound into its details. Midway through reading the book, everything and everyone seems somehow charged by these competing impulses: Matthew proudly showing Fiennes the house he is constructing at the foot of a radio mast (copies of Fine Homebuilding magazine strewn about the tent he sleeps in on-site); Marshall taking the Muskeg Express up into the Arctic nineteen times ‘just for the ride’, and teaching Fiennes the mnemonic for the names of the Great Lakes (‘Huron, Ontario, Michigan, Erie, Superior. Spells HOMES’); and of course Fiennes’s own lovingly particular memories of the ‘ironstone’ house he grew up in, recalled in steadfast prose, with proper nouns counter-sunk deep into the sentences. Meanwhile, above and through all of these incidents fly the geese, compelled by instinct on their vast annual commutes from feeding grounds to breeding grounds. The set-piece scenes in which Fiennes evokes their arrivals and departures are the most linguistically gluttonous passages in the book, gloriously gorged with relish for lexis: the ‘halliard yammer’ of the wings, the ‘turd squalls’ that sweep the ground beneath them, and the ‘wild lung-top gabble’ of their massed cries.
However much the narrator watches the geese, though, and however many words he lavishes on them, they remain mysterious to him. Binoculars bring the birds close optically, but not emotionally. They are the cause and rhythm of his journey, but following them for thousands of miles leads Fiennes to a finer understanding of himself, rather than of the geese. For this is a book about how nature provides us not only with ‘ecosystem services’, but also with self-perception, metaphor and new forms of imagination. Repeatedly, deftly, human beings are given avian characteristics: a man has eyes ‘like two small birds’; Eleanor sits on her tree-height balcony because ‘it feels like a nest’, and when she smiles the ‘crow’s feet’ at her eye edge wrinkle into sight. These are tiny migrations of language from one realm to another: bird-words that cross boundaries.
Here and there Fiennes allows the analogy between birds and words to take gorgeous flight. He writes of the ornithologist Stephen Emlen, who devised a superbly simple experiment in order to test the migratory instinct of indigo buntings when deprived of environmental stimuli. Emlen confined buntings ‘in migratory condition’ to special circular cages, in the centres of which he placed funnels of blotting paper mounted on ink pads. The buntings, stirred by the need to travel but unable to do so, would hop onto the funnels before sliding back, with each hop leaving a black print on the paper. In this manner, as Fiennes puts it, ‘the buntings kept diaries: footprints lettered their seasonal restlessness’. The Snow Geese is Fiennes’s migration diary – the lettering of his restlessness. Very late in the book, he is out on a skidoo with two Inuit hunters in the frozen land near Andrew Gordon Bay. Disoriented by the whiteness of the tundra, Fiennes briefly loses perspective and reference, such that ‘for a moment it was as if we were travelling across the middle of a page, with whiteness and black markings all around us, and geese lifting off the snow like letters becoming unstuck’. Letters are unsticking, writing is reaching its limits – and this exceptionally beautiful book is close to its end.
ROBERT MACFARLANE
FOR MY MOTHER AND FATHER
CONTENTS
1 : THE SNOW GOOSE
2 : AUSTIN
3 : GREYHOUND
4 : SAND LAKE
5 : RIDING MOUNTAIN
6 : MUSKEG EXPRESS
7 : CHURCHILL
8 : FOXE LAND
Author’s Note
Afterword
PICADOR CLASSIC
1 : THE SNOW GOOSE
WE HAD NO IDEA the hotel would be the venue for a ladies’ professional golf tournament. Each morning, before breakfast, competitors gathered at the practice tees to loosen up their swings. The women wore bright polo shirts, baggy tartan and gingham shorts, white socks, and neat cleated shoes that clacked on the paved walkways of the country club. Their hair was furled in chignons that poked through openings at the rear of baseball caps; their sleek, tanned calves resembled fresh tench attached to the backs of their shins. Caddies stood beside hefty leather golf bags at the edge of the teeing-ground, and the women drew clubs from the bags with the nonchalance of archers. Soon, rinsed golf balls were flying out from the tees, soaring high above the lollipop signs that marked each fifty yards down the fairway.
In addition to the golf course, heated swimming-pool and two tennis courts, hotel guests had at their disposal a peach-walled library, lit by standard lamps. White lace antimacassars lent fussy distinction to the dark red sofa and matching armchairs. Between the bookcases, in a simple giltwood frame, a colour print showed a suspension bridge, rigged like a harp, with staunch arched piers and high support towers lifting the curve of the main cables. Gold-tooled green and brown leatherbound books occupied the shelves alongside more modest clothbound volumes, the dye faded on their spines where light had reached it. The books were not for reading. Their purpose was to impart the atmosphere of an imperial-era country house. What the designer wished to say was, This is a place to which gentlemen may retire with cigars.
The shelves held arcane titles in strange conjunctions: an Anglo-Burmese dictionary next to a set of Sully’s memoirs; G. Marañon’s La Evolución de la Sexualidad e los Estados Intersexuales alongside Praeger’s Wagner as I Knew Him; Carl Størmer’s De l’Espace à l’Atome between J.R. Partington’s Higher Mathematics for Chemical Students and the second volume of Charles Mills’s History of Chivalry. An entire shelf was devoted to editions of the Dublin Review from the 1860s, containing such essays as ‘Father de Hummelauer and the Hexateuch’, ‘Maritime Canals’, ‘The Benedictines in Western Australia’ and ‘Shakespeare as an Economist’.
One morning, after watching the golfers at the practice tees, I found a familiar book, a thin fawn volume almost invisible among the antique tomes. When I pulled The Snow Goose from the shelf, the books either side of it leaned together like hands in prayer. I settled back into an armchair and began to read, remembering how I had first heard this story, aged ten or eleven, in a classroom with high windows, sitting at an old-fashioned sloping desk with a groove along the top of the slope for pens and pencils to rest in, initials and odd glyphs gouged deep in the wood grain. Our teacher, Mr Faulkner, was a tall man with scant hair, flat red cheeks, and teeth pitched at eccentric angles. He wore silk paisley neckerchiefs and cardigans darned with wrong-coloured wools, and he kept his sunglasses on indoors for genuine optometric reasons. He was approaching retirement and liked to finish term with a story. One of the stories he read us was Paul Gallico’s The Snow Goose.
I could feel, on the back of my head, the starched filigree imprint of the antimacassar. The library had no windows. Hotel staff wearing bold name badges walked briskly past the open door. I stopped noticing them. I imagined an Essex coastal marsh, an abandoned lighthouse at a rivermouth, and a dark-bearded hunchback named Rhayader, a painter of landscapes and wildlife, his arm ‘thin and bent at the wrist like the claw of a bird’. Fifteen years had passed since I’d listened to Mr Faulkner reading this story, but its images rushed back to me: Rhayader’s bird sanctuary; the October return of pink-footed and barnacle geese from their northern breeding grounds; Frith, the young girl, ‘nervous and timid as a bird’, who brings Rhayader an injured goose, white with black wing-tips – a snow goose, carried across the Atlantic by a storm as it flew south to escape the Arctic winter.
Rhayader tends to the snow goose. Time passes. The snow goose comes and goes with the pink-foots and barnacles. Frith gradually loses her fear of the hunchback; Rhayader falls in love with her but is too ashamed of his appearance to confess it. In 1940, startled by planes and explosions, the birds set off early on their migration north, but the snow goose stays behind at the lighthouse. Frith finds Rhayader loading supplies into his sixteen-foot sailing boat, p
reparing to join the fleet of civilian craft that would cross the Channel to rescue Allied troops from Dunkirk.
Much later, in a London pub, a soldier remembers details of that retreat: a white goose circling overhead as the troops waited on the sands; a small boat emerging from smoke, crewed by a hunchback with a crooked hand; the goose flying round and round above the boat while the hunchback lifted men from the beach and ferried them out to larger ships. The soldier compares the goose to an angel of mercy. He has no idea what became of the hunchback or the white bird, but a retired naval commander recalls a derelict small boat drifting between Dunkirk and La Panne, with a dead man lying inside it, machine-gunned, and a goose standing watch over the body. The boat had sunk, taking the man down with it.
Frith had been waiting for Rhayader at the lighthouse. He doesn’t return. The snow goose flies back in from the sea, circles, gains height and disappears. A German pilot mistakes the lighthouse for a military objective, and blows Rhayader’s store of paintings to oblivion.
I closed The Snow Goose, returned it to the shelf, and left the library for the fairways. But the tournament itself seemed lacklustre after the morning’s pageant at the practice tees: the streaked blonde chignons; the easy rhythm of the swings; the fine baize finish of the green. Each caddy attended to his lady with devotion that verged on medieval courtliness: if she complained of a dirty clubface or perspiring hands, he would take one step forward, offering a fresh white towel. Sometimes women swung at the same time, and you could see two or three balls sailing out alongside each other, coterminous, holding still above the trees before inclining, as if by common assent, towards the flag.
*
I FELL ILL when I was twenty-five. I was a graduate student, working towards a doctorate. I went into hospital for an operation two days before Christmas. The surgeon did his rounds dressed as Father Christmas while a brass band toured the wards playing carols to requests. Between verses you could hear the bleeping of cardiac monitors and drip stands. I longed to go home. I heard a doctor tell another patient she could go home: he seemed to be granting her a state of grace. A few days later my mother and father picked me up and drove me home after dark, and I slept in a little room adjoining their bedroom, a room my father had come to use as his dressing-room, but that had been my bedroom when I was very young. That night, I dreamed I was skiing. I was skiing on a wide open slope under blue sky, with no limit to the width or extent of the piste, and a sense of boundlessness, of absolute freedom. And then the snow had gone and a woman I had never met was leading me by the hand across a field, saying, ‘Shall we go to Trieste? We must go to Trieste!’ The window was ajar and a cold December draught blew through on to my head, and I woke up early, thinking my head was encased in ice. My mother swaddled my head in a folded blanket: I felt like an infant discovered in the wild and tended to by Eskimos.
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