So he’d found it. It had begun in language and it petered out on a cliff in silence. All around him was quiet, green nothing. And within him, the same. Jonathan felt light-headed. He reached for his chocolate bar and took a bite, standing still and looking out to sea. The sharpness of the taste was so intense that he made a noise of surprise. It was like, it was like—he didn’t know what it was like. It was amazing. Too amazing to take a second bite, though at other times he’d eaten two bars in one sitting, he liked them so much. He wrapped it up and put it back in his jacket. It was eight o’clock. In half an hour, he figured, he would reach the headland.
Ornithology
The greater part of this world is water. Salt, cold, fresh, temperate, blue, brown, stagnant, or choppy, it holds another world, on which we prey. And we are neither its sole nor its most accomplished predators. Plovers and phalaropes skimming the sand, puffins and pelicans skimming the sea, kingfishers waiting by a stream, petrels, shearwaters, frigate birds, skuas riding the gusts above the swells, climbing higher as if height gave them an equal depth of vision down below the waves: all of them are fishers. Some fish algae and some fish herring, some snatch fish others have caught, some snag crabs and drop them on rocks, some eat eggs of other birds occupied, at that moment, by fishing. Some dive, some hover, some only wade in to their knees. Some spend most of their time ashore. Some never come home to land.
From Gander to Kap Farvel to Tromsø, and on all the islands, rocks, fjords, and straits of the subarctic seas, birds nest in the cliffs. A few homebodies like the puffin and the guillemot spend their whole lives on the cliff where they were born, perfecting a grassy cleft in the rock and feeding their young from what swims at their feet. But most are wanderers. Some do not wander far; gulls who breed in Greenland may winter at sea off the Faroes. Many, however, travel long distances to get precisely nowhere: pelagic birds, they spend half the year bobbing on the ocean out of sight of land, a thousand miles off Florida, Brazil, India. The arctic tern breeds in Alaska and heads in fall for the Antarctic; it never sees night.
The long days of northern summer teem with birds, and the Faroes’ rocky shores are one of the busiest breeding grounds in the world. One steep cliff may be home to many thousand adults and fledglings, different species and their different habits side by side. The puffin, whose Latin name means arctic brother, who looks like a cross between a parrot and a small goose, is a bad flyer but a good swimmer and feeds its single baby whole herring, which it brings up by the dozen laid crosswise in its orange beak. The Faroese hold it bad luck to catch the “herring bearer”—the puffin feeding its young. Only empty-beaked puffins are fair game for the butterfly nets of the bird catchers. A puffin baked and stuffed with cake is a summer specialty. The fledgling fulmar is even more prized and a good deal easier to catch than a puffin, no matter how awkward, on the wing. Young fulmars, fed to absurd stoutness by their parents, are pushed out of the nest into the sea, where they float, too fat to fly, until they lose enough weight to move—which takes at least a week. During this week Faroese men in boats thread their way through the water picking up the immobile young, which they boil and eat with bread to soak up the fat. The kittiwake fledglings, though they scream at intruders, can’t fly out of the nest; these too are taken home and baked. The adults, with their streak of black eyeshadow and their catlike cry, are the swallows of the north, darting and swooping in every boat’s wake, filling the sky as soon as land is out of sight.
And the skua, with whom Jonathan tangled briefly, who nests in the tundra and harasses smaller birds, dive-bombing them until they drop what’s in their beaks; the big slow gannet with its amazing jet takeoff; the Iceland gull, the ring-billed gull, the glaucous gull, Thayer’s gull, the familiar herring gull; the murre, the guillemot’s cousin, with its fine-featured head and its stumpy body: Faroese people number in the thousands, Faroese birds in the millions.
Sooner than he had expected—it’s hard to calculate how far away another world lies—Jonathan was among them. The natives: screaming and cawing, circling above him, smelling, in their scores, so sharply alien that his stomach turned. The air was white with them. The ground along the top of the cliff was perforated with their burrows and littered with their feathers. And in the lower air, the warm currents that grazed the top of the tundra, curling tufts of down hovered in a dance that duplicated the crisscross, dart, and soar of the birds above, whose breasts they had recently warmed.
Jonathan slid a few feet down the cliff to a rock that could serve as a seat. The sea wind and occasional spray diluted the smell. He was facing northwest, a lookout searching for sunset or for a gust of wind from home. But home lay south, far south, and the sun was nowhere near setting. At his feet a puffin popped itself into its hole; he heard the young one screaming its thin screams in the earth. Mom—or Dad; they were not dimorphic, so it was difficult to know—came out orange feet first and tumbled into the ocean, flailing stubby wings. A minute later it was back with a beakful of food. More screams, then the peace of dinner, then out again, down again—Jonathan realized that this was the totality of puffin life.
Like a puffin, Jonathan was an only child. In the animal world this meant that a species had few natural predators. But humans had so many: fear, doubt, boredom. From his parents he had learned to fear this last the most. He’s so boring; that’s a rather dull theory; I found that party tedious: dullness was the harbinger of mediocrity, the Medusa of academe whose touch could turn a career to stone. By the age of five Jonathan had learned to entertain and impress his parents. This had never before struck him as odd, but something about the repetitive caretaking of the puffins all around him made it seem so now. Listing the differences between his parents and these puffins did not stanch the sudden flow of memory. The facts were that there were two of them and he was their only child, that they had fed and sheltered him—but oh, how differently!
Jonathan had the distinction of having not one but two professors for parents. Gerda Brand, a sociologist, had been tenured at Wellesley when she was five months pregnant with what was to be Jonathan, who didn’t yet “show.” Had he been conceived two months earlier, perhaps Gerda would have been a high-school teacher of American history; or so Gerda speculated occasionally, with a fond look at her husband, Bear, and her child, as though she believed she owed her good fortune to a conscious sensitivity on their part—a sensitivity she counted on them to maintain.
In fact, it was all happenstance, as Bear the Realist explained to a first-grade Jonathan. “We’d been trying for two years, and we’d just about given up.” They were walking together to school, son to Buckingham, father to Harvard. Gerda had explained sex already. In Jonathan’s mind it was a version of cooking, with genes as the ingredients; he had images of his parents kneading each other’s bodies like dough. His mother had talked about people pressing together. “What makes it work, Bear?” Jonathan asked of his father’s thigh. This thigh was bigger than Jonathan’s torso and wrapped in itchy tweed. “Well, it depends on whether the egg has descended fully down the Fallopian tube,” Bear said. “Oh, I see,” said Jonathan. His mother had not mentioned the egg, but it fit in with his culinary understanding.
Not only both professors, both professors of sociology. Bear (originally Albert), despite his Marine-like bulk and Midwestern plain speaking, was highly regarded by his shorter, thinner Eastern colleagues for his work on closed institutions—prisons and the like. Gerda had made some suggestive correlations between voting behavior and buying behavior, long before anyone else had thought to link them.
Like the anthropologists Jonathan had now to deal with, the Brands put great stock in being scientists. Gerda especially brooked no foolishness about instinct, emotionalism, mysterious goings-on. Typical was a scene from his second-grade year in which Jonathan kicked the refrigerator in a rage over a birthday party he didn’t want to attend, while his mother relentlessly repeated, “But you must have some reason, what is the reason?” The reason was nothing but Jonat
han’s revulsion for the party giver, Paul, who smelled funny and liked to pick his nose and show Jonathan the boogers because he knew it made Jonathan feel sick. But seven years of life with Gerda and Bear had been enough to convince him this wasn’t a reason. “I hate it, I hate everything!” Jonathan yelled. To which Gerda, in an even voice, said, “I don’t think you really mean that, Jonathan.” Bear could be counted on to back her up. Ambling into the kitchen, he said, “If you could explain just what the problem is, perhaps we could understand.” But it was all, in retrospect, like trying to explain a joke; his parents seemed exempt from unwieldy emotions the way some people are exempt from humor.
They shared a study in what was meant to have been Jonathan’s brother’s or sister’s room, to which they retired after dinner and all day Saturday. Sunday was reserved for family activities: the Museum of Science, the flower-hung courtyard of the Gardner, ice skating on the flooded Common in the dark January afternoons, Gilbert and Sullivan at one of the Harvard Houses. Jonathan did his own studying in the evenings. Gods and Heroes, A Book of Discovery, children’s editions of the Iliad and the Odyssey were his companions as he listened to the rustle of articles being leafed through and the scratch of notes being taken on three-by-five cards. Soon enough he left Buckingham for Browne and Nichols and had real homework. He found it dull, but when he complained, he was told that this signified only his own dullness. “If you are bored by it, it’s because you haven’t made the effort to interest yourself in it. There’s nothing boring about history.” Or biology, or algebra.
What was amazing—and it had amazed him even then, he thought, sitting on his rock—was that they never descended to his level. He was always expected to reach theirs. Difficult enough; but more frustrating was that he could not irritate them, drive them crazy, make them whack him or at least yell something ridiculous the way other parents did. Nobody ever said those magic words, Because I say so! to Jonathan. Consequently, he never had license to say the child’s equivalent magic, Because I don’t want to. Jonathan twenty-six made a fist, thinking of Jonathan eight, nine, fifteen and always struggling to move beyond feeling into analysis or documentation.
His efforts paid off eventually. By the time he started college, he had perfected a veil of equanimity and maturity. Under these auspices, he graduated with a magna and sank immediately into a funk.
Was he still in it? Of course he was; he barely needed to ask himself the question, though he often did. But asking it in these circumstances—with homeward-bound birds trailing clouds in their wake, and clouds trailing intimations, finally, of evening—was odd enough to skew the answer off the expected. He was in a funk, but this fact didn’t seem as interesting as it had been for the previous five years. The real question was, How to get out of it?
The intermediate question, of why he was gloomy, didn’t interest Jonathan. That is, he had considered it and he knew why. He had read Freud; he had read Jung and Harry Stack Sullivan as well. He consigned all this to the mumbo-jumbo heap along with anthropology: pretensions to science. Perhaps from a sense of his similar troubles with the need to describe, Jonathan had detected the problem with psychology and its terms: no matter what you called it, misery still plagued people. Telling himself he had too effectively internalized his overbearing parents didn’t change a thing; it was just a title for some aspect of despair: codification of the ineffable. Ornithology—that was real science.
From a bird’s-eye view of his present situation, Jonathan told himself with amusement, he certainly looked like an ornithologist. But despite local attempts to cast him as such, he wasn’t. Nor could he be, he knew; looking at the activity on the cliff provoked him only to wonder if these birds were happy living on the Faroe Islands. It would be even harder to pinpoint the marks of unhappiness in a bird than in a human. And ignoring that question entirely was what gave ornithology its purity.
He made his way back up to the rim of the cliff, legs stiff from sitting for so long. It was bird bedtime; heads and tails were disappearing into burrows, bigger, whiter birds were squatting on the grass up top, ruffling and reshuffling their feathers in preparation for sleep. It was probably his bedtime too. The sun was now level with the edge of the sea, which meant that it had nowhere to go but up.
Jonathan felt he also had nowhere to go but up. He trudged back to the village fingering his funk, poking his sore spots and telling himself to get going on anthropology. Armed with his note pad, he could pursue the question of whether the Faroese were happy living on the Faroe Islands and, if so, how they managed this in such a “drear” place. And ask as well the inevitable next question: Could he learn to do the same?
Labors, Herculean and Other
Sigurd, proprietor of the store with the salami and occasional language instructor, would be a good informant, Jonathan decided. He chose a balmy afternoon when he hoped there would be few customers for the initial interview. His audience was indeed small, but it was rapt: a toddler whose hand was held by a girl too young to be her mother; two eight-year-old boys in hip boots who leaned together and giggled at everything Jonathan said; and Tobacco Man from the post office, whose secondary headquarters seemed to be a box in the corner of Sigurd’s store.
It began badly.
“My name is Johan,” Jonathan said.
Sigurd contradicted him immediately. “Your name is Jo-Na-Than.” He gave each syllable equal weight. “Jo-Na-Than Swift,” he added. Then, to clarify further, “Gulliver’s Travels.”
Not far from true, thought Jonathan, though he wondered if he was being mocked. He looked into Sigurd’s eyes for disdain or distance; he saw only curiosity. Everybody in the store was waiting for him to say something else. He had a little speech prepared, so he gave it. “I am here to study the way people live, and the history. I hope you will talk to me about these things.”
“I don’t know any history. You should talk to Jón Hendrik.” Sigurd leaned his head toward the box in the corner. “Jón Hendrik,” he yelled, “tell this man some history.”
“The way you live now is more important,” Jonathan said quickly. He didn’t want to deal with Jón Hendrik and his dribbly brown mouth. Luckily, it appeared Jón Hendrik didn’t want to deal with him either. He spat and growled and chewed and mumbled, “Another time, another time.”
“Too bad,” said Sigurd. “He knows everything.” He leaned over the chipped wooden counter and said softly, “If you bring him some brandy, he’ll talk to you.”
“I can’t get any,” Jonathan said. “I don’t know how to get it,” he amended.
“Yes,” said Sigurd.
Yes, what? Jonathan scowled. But scowling wouldn’t help, was, in fact, just the sort of thing he’d resolved not to do. “Can you—” he began.
But Sigurd, who’d been staring out the small window beside Jón Hendrik, started talking rapidly to the young woman about, as far as Jonathan could tell, a boat of her father’s that was currently under repair in Sandur, the town on the other side of the island. The word brenevin—Faroese for liquor—cropped up occasionally. Jonathan stood on one foot, on the other foot, put his hands in his pockets, leaned on the counter. Was his conversation with Sigurd over? Was he supposed to leave? Nobody else was leaving; Jón Hendrik was chewing comfortably, the little boys had their heads together and were discussing Jonathan—he supposed—in frantic whispers. The toddler had not taken her eyes off Jonathan’s face from the moment he’d walked in, and she still stood gaping at him, her head lolling back on her short, soft baby neck. Sigurd and the girl talked faster and faster, the boys’ whispers got louder and louder, and Jonathan felt himself being obscured by a cloud of words—two of which popped out distinctly: “potato head.”
Sigurd heard them too. He turned around and put his face right between the little boys’ cheeks. “Don’t you talk that way about a stranger.” The boys’ eyes widened and blinked. “Ever,” he added. He straightened up and brought both hands down on the counter with a thump. “So,” he said, and smiled abst
ractedly at a point above Jonathan’s head.
Cast in the archetypal role of Stranger, Jonathan saw the interview in a new light. He was being humored, perhaps played with a little, mostly being checked out—but all under the protection of an ancient code of hospitality. Like all fierce, combative peoples, Vikings had had strict rules about how to treat foreigners, interlopers, ambassadors. You couldn’t kill your enemies while they were in your house. A sort of Bronze Age Geneva Convention. He sighed. He wasn’t going to get very far as long as he remained a stranger. But what else was he? He looked at the six faces around him, which ranged over the whole life span, and despaired of knowing what animated them. Their blue eyes, which daily saw sea and clouds and one another, had never seen what Jonathan considered the world. To know them, he would have to know a world in which this was the world—- and that was impossible. He might as well have been a visitor from another planet.
This same thought must have been in the girl’s mind, for she let go of the toddler’s hand and poked Jonathan gently in the arm, as if checking his substantiality, then asked, “You are from America?”
“Yes,” said Jonathan, noting that she’d used the polite form of you, which he hadn’t mastered.
“What is the name of your village?”
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