Surfacing Read online

  Praise for Kathleen Jamie

  Winner of the

  John Burroughs Medal • Costa Prize for Poetry

  Orion Book Award • Forward Poetry Prize

  “[Kathleen Jamie’s] essays guide you softly along coastlines of varying continents, exploring caves, and pondering ice ages until the narrator stumbles over—not a rock on the trail, but mortality, maybe the earth’s, maybe our own, pointing to new paths forward through the forest.”

  — Delia Owens, “By the Book” in The New York Times Book Review

  “A sorceress of the essay form. Never exotic, down to earth, she renders the indefinable to the reader’s ear. Hold her tangible words and they’ll take you places.”

  —John Berger, author of Ways of Seeing and About Looking

  “Whether she is addressing birds or rivers, or the need to accept loss, or, sometimes, the desire to escape our own lives, her work is earthy and rigorous, her language at once elemental and tender.”

  —2012 Costa Poetry Prize citation

  “Kathleen Jamie is a supreme listener. . . . In the quietness of her listening, you hear her own voice: clear, subtle, respectful, and so unquenchably curious that it makes the world anew.”

  —Richard Mabey

  “The leading Scottish poet of her generation.”

  —The Sunday Times (London)

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Kathleen Jamie, one of the UK’s foremost poets, is the author of four books of poetry and three nonfiction titles, including Sightlines. Her many honors include the 2017 Royal Geographic Society Ness Award, conferred upon Jamie “for outstanding creative writing at the confluence of travel, nature, and culture”; the 2013 Costa Poetry Book Award; and the Forward Poetry Prize of the Year. A professor of creative writing at the University of Stirling, she lives with her family in Fife, Scotland.

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  penguinrandomhouse.com

  First published in Great Britain by Sort Of Books 2019

  Published in Penguin Books 2019

  Copyright © 2019 by Kathleen Jamie

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

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  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Names: Jamie, Kathleen, 1962– author.

  Title: Surfacing / Kathleen Jamie.

  Description: New York : Penguin Books, 2019. | “First published in Great Britain by Sort Of Books 2019”—Verso title page. |

  Identifiers: LCCN 2019025260 (print) | LCCN 2019025261 (ebook) | ISBN 9780143134459 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9780525506256 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Jamie, Kathleen, 1962—Travel—Scotland. | Jamie, Kathleen, 1962—Travel—Alaska. | Jamie, Kathleen, 1962—Travel—Tibet Autonomous Region (China) | Life change events. | Scotland—Description and travel. | Alaska—Description and travel. | Tibet Autonomous Region (China)—Description and travel.

  Classification: LCC PR6060.A477 A6 2019 (print) | LCC PR6060.A477 (ebook) | DDC 824/.914—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019025260

  LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019025261

  While the author has made every effort to provide accurate internet addresses and other contact information at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  Penguin is committed to publishing works of quality and integrity. In that spirit, we are proud to offer this book to our readers; however, the story, the experiences, and the words are the author’s alone.

  Cover design: Donna Cheng

  Cover photograph: Wayde Carroll

  Version_1

  For Phil

  Contents

  Praise for Kathleen Jamie

  About the Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  The Reindeer Cave

  A Reflection

  In Quinhagak

  The Eagle

  Links of Noltland

  The Inevitable Pagoda

  Surfacing

  From the Window

  A Tibetan Dog

  The Wind Horse

  Elders

  Voice of the Wood

  Acknowledgements

  Photo credits

  The Reindeer Cave

  YOU’RE SHELTERING in a cave, thinking about the Ice Age. From the cave-mouth: a West Highland landscape in spring, in the early Anthropocene. On the hillside opposite, six red deer have bedded down in the heather. It’s raining, a soft Highland rain, a smirr.

  Not half an hour ago, you were walking beside the burn in a narrow ravine further up the glen. You heard something, glanced up to see a large rock bounce then plummet into the burn twenty-five yards in front of you. The echo faded but your heart was still hammering as you backed away.

  They call these caves the ‘Bone Caves’ because of all the animal bones found buried inside, animals long extinct in this country. You’re in ‘Reindeer Cave,’ where antlers rather than bones were discovered. An excavation in the 1920s produced hundreds of reindeer antlers, almost all from females.

  You sit at the cave-mouth, looking out at the rain, thinking about the Ice Age.

  You realise you haven’t a clue. We can wait, say the hills. Take your time.

  The ice came and went, is that right? Ice covered the land and froze the sea for thousands of years, but now and again, every hundred thousand years or so, came milder spells when the ice retreated, tundra formed on the land and reindeer wandered in. Glaciers in the glens, or what became the glens.

  To reach the caves, you climbed a grassy slope a hundred-and-fifty feet above the river. You try to imagine stepping from the cave-mouth onto ice and moraine.

  Some years ago, cave-divers entered into this same hill by an entrance higher on the moor, by the back door, so to speak, intending to explore a system below the Bone Caves.

  It makes you quail, the thought of crawling through darkness and passageways and underground streams. Echoes and falling rocks.

  Deep within, the cavers found the bones of a bear. What was that like? Like reaching the memory of the hill itself.

  Eventually, carefully, the bones were brought to the surface. In time they were carbon-dated. They were forty-five thousand years old. A long sleep, even for a bear: sixteen million days and nights had passed in the upper world. Long enough for the ice to return, then yield again, then return in one last snap, then leave for good – or at least for now.

  The cave-mouth the bear must have used has since been blocked by the rocky detritus of that last ice-grip, the one which ended ten thousand years ago and created the land we know.

  Ten thousand years – in the great scheme of things, we’re living through a warm bank holiday weekend.

  Warm and getting warmer.

  As to the antlers, they were found before carbon-dating became available. Then, excited speculation concerned us, people, humans! Might there have been Paleolithic humans here, to gather up all tho
se antlers and store them in a cave?

  But there’s no evidence for that. Female reindeer, caribou, shed their antlers naturally, up on the calving grounds, and some antlers must have fallen onto the glacier to be borne downhill and swilled into the cave-mouth by meltwater, and duly buried. That’s the surmise.

  The hoard of antlers is kept in the store of the National Museum of Scotland. They’re not as you might imagine, not majestic. Ancient fragments, they look more like broken biscuits. Also in the store, wrapped in a box, are the bear bones, including the brown-stained skull. The skull was in the cave and what was in the skull? Bear mind, bear memory – when autumn came and the nights began to freeze, he remembered where the cave-mouth was, so he padded across the glacier.

  Also stored away are the remains of other creatures of the caves – lynx, for example. Even the tiny bones of lemmings, saved for the nation in an old Cadbury’s chocolate tin.

  The world warms. Last winter was the wettest; no snow or ice to speak of, a flash of blue sky was rare as a comet, the nights were starless and lachrymose. The TV news showed floods and sandbags, householders weeping as they cleared the sodden mess. There were arguments about land management, flood-plains, deforestation. Commentators intoned, ‘Is it climate change?’

  Well, you thought sourly, if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it’s a duck.

  D’où venons-nous? Que sommes-nous? Où allons-nous?

  At your cave-mouth, you wonder if the ice will ever return, a natural cycle, or if we’ve gone too far with our Anthropocene. But who can answer that? We just can’t grasp the scale of our species’ effects. But the single falling stone which could smash our brains out – that we understand.

  Now the rain’s easing, and a small scruffy terrier appears at the cave-mouth. Following the dog come children. Their voices carry from down the slope: Daddy! Look! The caves!

  A Reflection

  ON A TRAIN, heading north. We’d crossed the Firth of Tay and stopped at the port city of Dundee, where the ship that took Scott to the Antarctic is berthed, and where oil rigs go to be repaired. Now we were out in the Angus countryside. Eastward, on the right, lay the North Sea but I was seated on the landward side where the view was of wintery fields.

  The sea on one side, fields on the other. I’d been daydreaming, but came to my senses to notice that a shining spread of sea had appeared in my window, superimposed over the fields of brown earth. Then it vanished. A moment later it flashed back again, a stretch of sea, silvery over the land, but only for a few seconds. By now I was sitting up, interested in this phenomenon. The fields on the left gave way to pinewoods, the train tilted a little and, yes, the sea’s reflection flashed on again, this time above the trees. If I narrowed my eyes I could see both sea and trees at once. And now there was a ship! A ghostly tanker was sailing over the pine trees.

  There’s an old ballad, isn’t there? ‘The False Bride.’ ‘How many strawberries grow in the salt sea? How many ships sail in the forest?’

  A woman nearby was on her mobile, loud and getting louder. ‘It’s just so stupid. That’s three times I’ve emailed her. They’ll just have to.’

  I watched the sea’s reflection come and go until the train entered a cutting. When we emerged, the sea was gone. There were fields on the right, and from my side, the left, the distant Grampian hills with a dusting of fresh snow.

  ‘I told her! I did! I told her!’ The woman was still on her mobile. Her fellow passengers were glancing at each other, rolling their eyes.

  There was ‘The False Bride,’ but the ship in the sky had caused something else to surface in my mind: it was an account William Scoresby had written. Scoresby was a whaling captain, and the son of a whaling captain. He had sailed north with his father every summer since he was twelve, and at the age of just twenty-one took command of his own ship, the Baffin. But slaughtering whales was a chore; Scoresby was much more interested in science and discovery. As he sailed north in 1822, he made maps and observations and detailed the strange Arctic phenomena he encountered off the eastern shores of Greenland. He wrote about snowflakes, refractions, rainbows and mirages.

  On one July day, a beautifully fine one when the winds were light and the atmosphere highly refractive, Scoresby and his crew witnessed a marvel: two ships appeared, sailing upside down in the sky. He recognised the ships and knew them to be lying at least ten miles beyond sight. It happened again a fortnight later: in the crystalline light of an Arctic summer evening, the image of a ship appeared in the sky. It was inverted but so well defined he could pick out every sail. He pronounced it the Fame, his father’s vessel, which at that moment lay well beyond the horizon. And so it proved to be.

  How astonishing, to see what lay over the horizon.

  My ship had been the right way up, sailing over trees.

  ‘I know! I bloody know!’ cried the woman on the phone. People had begun to glare at her by now.

  We were heading for Aberdeen. Back then, the nineteenth century, if whalers and fishing boats put out of such ports, when they were gone they were gone. The whalers might be away for a year. A last message shouted from the gunwales of a northbound ship to a homebound one might be relayed eventually, perhaps to find itself overtaken by events. No sailor knew what he might find on his return. Nor did their wives know what happened once the ships slipped away. But the crewmen brought home souvenirs. The museums of the east coast all hold Inuit items, carried back here by whalers. The Arbuthnot Museum, in Peterhead, just two rooms above the public library, has in pride of place a stuffed polar bear, which had been brought home alive.

  The polar bear has a stuffed musk-ox for company now, and a seal. There’s a display case with a painted backdrop – a dramatic scene of a whaler held fast to towering ice, and its crew ashore, dancing around a bonfire. And in the case: a narwhal tusk, Inuit snowshoes, a dogwhip – things that fascinated Europeans. Another little cabinet held a delicate drawstring bag, just ten centimetres long, in pale, off-white Arctic colours. It had been fashioned from the webbed feet of a bird, perhaps a goose, and stitched so neatly that the claws become part of a pattern. Doubtless the Inuit maker knew what species of bird was best for the purpose, and how to catch one.

  These Inuit things had been bartered for, the curator had said. ‘Bartered for what?’ I remember asking.

  ‘Guns! And there were a lot of bairns born there, to Inuit women and brought up there, and the wives at home had no idea!’

  False husbands, warmed by their icy fire.

  I’d liked that museum, with its Inuit objects and polar bear. There were model fishing boats too, with names like Fruitful Bough and Whinny Fold, as if they did indeed sail in a forest.

  Mary Scoresby died during her husband’s Greenland voyage, the one when he’d seen ships in the sky. He didn’t learn that truth until September, when he turned the Baffin home into the Mersey. There was something about a little boat making its way out toward his vessel, lowering its sail as it neared, the silence of its passengers, his friends.

  The woman had ended her call at last. What had she known?

  Now the North Sea was again visible on the right, with several ships riding at anchor, ships concerned with the oil rigs that lay over the horizon. I looked at once for their reflections, but it was noon, the light had changed.

  In Quinhagak

  TAKE AN ATLAS, or better a globe, and find the line that marks sixty degrees of latitude, then follow it west. If you begin in Shetland, you’re at once swinging out over the North Atlantic. You snip off the last few miles of Cape Farewell, Greenland, make landfall in Labrador but soon launch out over Hudson’s Bay. Keep going. The line demarks the northern border of Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta and British Columbia. Keep going. Now you’re in Alaska. Don’t stop until the line at last reaches the Bering Sea. Now stop. Cross the sea and you’ll be in Russia, beginning the long road home.

  For the fin
al hundred miles of Alaska, the imaginary line passes over the Kuskokwim–Yukon delta. The atlas will show no roads, just green scribbly waterways and melt-pools. The village of Quinhagak is right on this coast, tucked just under that sixty-degree line, just where the Kanektok River pours into the Bering Sea. In summer, that is. In winter the rivers freeze and snow falls deep.

  Around seven hundred people live in the village, almost all of them Yup’ik. Their river, the Kanektok, is a noted salmon river. ‘Kanektok’ means ‘New River Channel.’ The rivers change course readily, in this watery world.

  In summer, when the land is thawed, the only way to get there is by plane. Every coastal village has an airstrip. You can fly from Anchorage to the town of Bethel, the regional hub on the Kuskokwim River. From Bethel, six-seater planes skip back and forth to Goodnews Bay and Platinum, Sleetmute and Pilot Station, Russian Mission, Kongiganak, Quinhagak, Eek. In the aerial photographs that decorate the airport waiting room, these villages all look much the same: each photo features a braiding river with boats drawn up on muddy banks, and a straggle of small homes along a dirt road that begins and ends in tundra.

  I arrived in Bethel in late July. The airport had the atmosphere of a busy provincial bus station. Almost everyone in the waiting room was Yup’ik; there was lots of meeting and greeting by dark-haired, softly spoken people who wore sweatpants and hoodies. Infants played on the floor, teenagers slept on benches. The bush pilots were mostly white, young and louche-looking. They wore overalls or fatigues. When a plane was ready to go, its pilot would appear at the door and call the name of the village destination, then lead his or her passengers across the tarmac. Sometimes a pilot went and shook a sleeping teenager. ‘Hey, you going Eek?’

  At Bethel I was nervous, jet-lagged, afraid I’d miss the plane; afraid I’d mishear ‘Quinhagak’ for ‘Kongiganak’ and end up there instead. ‘Quinhagak’ is pronounced ‘Quin-ah-hawk’ and, though I did my best, ‘Huh,’ its people chided me later. ‘You say it like a white.’ In Bethel also, I learned the phrase ‘weather hold.’ Fog over the delta means no flights and for some hours that morning the cloud rolled in from the coast. When it lifted, and flights resumed, a pilot duly appeared in the doorway and called out ‘Quinhagak!’ Three people walked out with her across the tarmac and climbed into the tiny plane.