Sixty Degrees North (31 page)
Read Sixty Degrees North Online
Authors: Malachy Tallack
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 â past and present â 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 âYou 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
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agriculture, development of
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,
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,
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,
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Air Greenland
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Ã
land Emigrants Institute
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Ã
land Islands
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Alaska
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,
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,
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,
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,
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,
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,
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,
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,
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as âthe last frontier'
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bought by the USA
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land ownership in
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Alaska Highway
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Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act
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,
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Alberta
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Aleksanderovskiy Park, St Petersburg
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Aleksey (son of Peter the Great)
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Alexander, Tsar
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Algonquin Indians
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Amundsen, Roald
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animal rights campaigns
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Arctic Ocean
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Arctic skuas
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Arctic terns (
tirricks
)
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Asgard
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Athabasca tar sands
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Athabascan languages
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Atlantic Ocean
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,
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,
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,
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,
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Atwood, Margaret
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Australian Aborigines
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bald eagles
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,
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,
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,
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attacking people
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Bell, Shawn
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Bergen
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,
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,
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,
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,
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Berry, Wendell
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Bigton
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Billia Cletts
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bison â
see
buffalo
Black Death
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Bolsheviks
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boreal forest
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Bothnia, Gulf of
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Boym, Svetlana
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Breivik, Anders Behring
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,
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British Columbia
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Broch of Mousa
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Brodsky, Joseph
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Bronze Horseman statue, St Petersburg
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,
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,
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Brünnich's guillemot
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Burgi Stacks
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Burn of Burgistacks
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Burn of Maywick
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Camus, Albert
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Christianisation of native
gold mining in
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oil extraction in
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Quebec nationalism
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Canol road and pipeline
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Cape Farewell
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,
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,
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,
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Cape Morris Jessup
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Cape Verde (Fortunate Isles)
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Carson, Rachel
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Carta Marina
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cartography, development of
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,
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,
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,
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Cassette Rapids (Slave River)
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Catherine the Great
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Channerwick
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Christian V, King of Denmark
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Chuckchi people
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Churchill (Canada)
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climate cooling
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Conquest, Robert
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Cooper Landing
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cormorants
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Cornwall
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crop failures
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dachas
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Dalstroy organisation
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,
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Davidson, Hilda Ellis
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Davis Strait
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Decembrists' Square, St Petersburg
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Diamond, Jared
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dippers
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Disappointment River â
see
Mackenzie River
dog sledding
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Dostoyevsky, Fyodor
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Durrell, Lawrence
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East Greenland current
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Eastern Settlement (Greenland)
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Ehrlich, Gretel
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eider ducks
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Ekenäs
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,
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,
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,
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,
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Elizabeth I, Queen of England
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Enckell, Maria Jarlsdotter
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Encyclopaedia Britannica
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Erik Jedvardsson, King (later St Erik)
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,
ref2
Erikson, Gustaf
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Esso (Siberia)
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Estonia
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Eudoxia, Tsaritsa
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European Community
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European Union
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Evenk people
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Fagervik
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Fair Isle
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,
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,
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,
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,
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,
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Falconet, Etienne Maurice
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Faroe Islands
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ferry services
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,
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,
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,
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,
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,
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,
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,
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,
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,
ref10
Fetlar
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Finland
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,
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,
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,
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,
ref5
adopting the Euro
ref1
annexed by Russia
ref1
