Sightlines Read online

  PRAISE FOR SIGHTLINES

  “A lyrical work of profound insight.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “Kathleen Jamie’s Sightlines, a collection of brilliant and enticing essays about natural phenomena, tingles with life. John Berger called her a ‘sorceress,’ and so she is.”

  —DIANA ATHILL, author of Somewhere Towards the End

  “The dance of Jamie’s words enacts the mind in motion as it moves between the shifting, shimmering processes of nature and art.”

  —The Guardian

  “Jamie’s prose is exquisite, yet never indulgent. . . . This is a book that will stay with you, as its sights and sounds have stayed with its writer. [A] work of intense purity and quiet genius, and we’re lucky to have it.”

  —The Sunday Telegraph

  “A haunting new collection from one of our finest nature writers. . . . Immensely beguiling. There are piquant descriptions that stop you in your tracks . . . but the real power of the writing derives from the steady increment of detail and the honesty of her responses to the natural world.”

  —The Sunday Times (London)

  “Her written words make readers see with a clarity bestowed by only a few most gifted writers. . . . It is not often that the prose of a poet is as powerful as her verse, but Jamie’s is. There are people uninterested in books about remote places and wild creatures; but to the rest of us [this book] will be a treasure.”

  —Literary Review

  “There is such a precision, of both thinking and seeing, displayed in these works that you would have to be a very obtuse kind of reader not to realize that Jamie is a poet.”

  —The Scotsman

  “At which point I put the book down again and thought: ‘I wonder if I would actually kill to be able to write, or think, like that.’ It’s like this pretty much all the way through.”

  —NICHOLAS LEZARD, The Guardian

  FURTHER PRAISE FOR KATHLEEN JAMIE AND HER PREVIOUS BOOKS

  “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

  “A book of unparalleled beauty, sharpness of observation, wit, delicacy, strength of vision and rare exactness of language.”

  —The Daily Telegraph, on Findings

  “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. This is as close as writing gets to a conversation with the natural world.”

  —RICHARD MABEY, on Findings

  “[A] remarkable collection of essays about sites where nature and non-nature intersect. American readers can now meet a sensibility who attends to the living world, and the world as made in language, with wily intelligence.”

  —Boston Review, on Findings

  “Whether writing about darkness and light playing in the Neolithic ruins in the Orkneys, human body parts displayed in glass jars at Edinburgh’s Royal College of Surgeons, or gardens that grace that city’s rooftops, Kathleen Jamie is a clear-eyed and lyrical witness.”

  — Orion magazine, on Findings

  “Utterly luminous.”

  —The Independent, on Among Muslims

  “The leading Scottish poet of her generation.”

  —The Sunday Times (London)

  | ALSO BY KATHLEEN JAMIE |

  Surfacing

  Findings: Essays on the Natural and Unnatural World

  The Overhaul

  Among Muslims: Meetings at the Frontiers of Pakistan

  Waterlight: Selected Poems

  The Treehouse

  Mr & Mrs Scotland Are Dead

  | EARLY WORKS |

  Jizzen

  The Queen of Sheba

  The Autonomous Region: Poems and Photographs from Tibet

  The Way We Live

  A Flame in Your Heart (with Andrew Grieg)

  Black Spiders

  Sightlines: A Conversation with the Natural World

  Copyright © Kathleen Jamie, 2012, 2013

  The permissions acknowledgments are a continuation of this copyright page.

  All rights reserved. Except for brief passages quoted in newspaper, magazine, radio, television, or online reviews, no portion of this book may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or information storage or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  The Experiment, LLC

  260 Fifth Avenue

  New York, NY 10001–6408

  www.theexperimentpublishing.com

  Sightlines was first published in the United Kingdom by Sort Of Books in 2012.

  The Experiment’s books are available at special discounts when purchased in bulk for premiums and sales promotions as well as for fundraising or educational use. For details, contact us at [email protected].

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Jamie, Kathleen, 1962–

  Sightlines : a conversation with the natural world / Kathleen Jamie.

  p. cm

  ISBN 978-1-61519-083-6 (pbk.) -- ISBN 978-1-61519-175-8 (ebook)

  1. Jamie, Kathleen, 1962---Travel--Scotland. 2. Jamie, Kathleen,

  1962---Travel--Arctic regions. 3. Natural history--Scotland. 4. Natural

  history--Arctic regions. 5. Scotland--Description and travel. 6. Arctic

  regions--Description and travel. I. Title.

  PR6060.A477S54 2013

  914.11’0486--dc23

  2013014023

  ISBN 978-1-61519-083-6

  Ebook ISBN 978-1-61519-175-8

  Cover design by Jason Gabbert

  Cover photograph © Bryant Austin | studio: cosmos

  Text design by Pauline Neuwirth, Neuwirth & Associates, Inc.

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  Distributed by Workman Publishing Company, Inc.

  Distributed simultaneously in Canada by Thomas Allen and Son Ltd.

  First printing August 2013

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  On the cover: Detail of Bryant Austin’s Minke Whale Composite Portrait 1186.

  On the title page: Lichen.

  For the island-goers

  CONTENTS

  Aurora

  Pathologies

  The Woman in the Field

  The Gannetry

  Light

  The Hvalsalen

  Moon

  Three Ways of Looking at St Kilda

  La Cueva

  Magpie Moth

  On Rona

  The Storm Petrel

  Voyager, Chief

  Wind

  * * *

  Acknowledgments

  Permissions

  Photo Credits

  About the Author

  AURORA

  THERE’S NO SWELL to speak of, just little lapping waves, so landing is just a matter of running the Zodiacs up onto the stony beach, allowing us to jump ashore. Not jump exactly: we swing our legs over the sides of the inflatable, and drop down onto the land, ideally between waves. You don’t want to get your feet wet, because they’d soon freeze.

  All along the shoreline lie trinkets of white ice, nudged up by the tide. A shore of ice and bones—people still come hunting here; the top of the beach is strewn with the bleached, butchered skulls and spine
s of narwhal and seal. Where the beach ends and the vegetation begins, an outboard engine lies abandoned, rusting violently.

  While the Zodiacs are being secured, Polly and I take off our lifejackets and dump them beside the abandoned engine. Polly—I won’t give her real name—is from central Europe, and is my cabin mate. I’m fortunate in her, enjoy her company. She speaks always with a sad or wistful laugh in her voice, or maybe it’s just her accent.

  We’re part of a group who’ve chosen to leave the ship and come ashore, to walk up onto a low rocky ridge, for the sake of the view. Though ‘view’ is too benign a word for the vast, unnerving scale of this land, its clarity of light. I want to try to come to terms with where I am: a whole new world, a world with ice. We are in a bay; eastward, out on the open sea, icebergs are glowing a marshmallow pink in the morning sun. They’ve escaped the confines of the fjords and float free; the currents will bear them south toward their slow dissolution. Another iceberg, white and dazzling, guards the entrance to the bay where the ship is anchored.

  Polly and I are both wearing old goose-down jackets—mine patched with gaffer tape—and hats, and gloves, and boots. When the party’s assembled we begin trudging inland over crisp plants quite new to me. I’ve long loved the word ‘tundra’, with its suggestion of far-off northern emptiness, and I guess these must be tundra plants, under my feet. The plants are in their autumn colours, russets and fawns and mustard yellow. They spill between the rocks, dwarf willow and dwarf birch, and maybe bearberry. Among the trees’ mazy horizontal branches grow lichens, and a kind of reed which curls at the end, like singed cat’s whiskers. It’s September. When we tread on the plants they release a dry herby smell into the crystalline air.

  ‘Feather for you,’ says Polly. Although I’d been looking down at the plants, it wasn’t until I saw Polly bend and pick one up that I realised there were feathers scattered all over them. Goose feathers, caught on the dry leaves and twigs, frittering in the terse breeze. Droppings, too. The geese must have been gathered here so very recently, maybe only yesterday—hundreds of them, ready for the off. To my mind, geese only travel north, to some place beyond the horizon. But this is that place. From here, they go south. Involuntarily I look up and out to sea, where the icebergs shine, as if to catch sight of the last flight departing toward Iceland, toward Europe. But the sky is cold, blue and empty.

  We cross the hummocky goose-plain, and begin the climb onto the ridge. There’s about a dozen of us, from Europe and North America, tourists, still strangers to each other, beginning to get to know each other through polite conversation, getting to know the world a little, if that’s what we’re doing, such is our privilege. We’ve been instructed to ‘stay behind the gun’. We have a guide, a young Danish biologist, who carries flares to scare them, and a rifle as last resort, in case of aggravated polar bears, but there are no polar bears. ‘Polar bears?’ one of the ship’s Russian crewmen had shaken his head. ‘Huh. They ate the last one years ago.’

  With an outcrop of smooth bare rock to shelter us, we take off our rucksacks, set aside our cameras and the gun, crouch or sit down, out of the breeze. It’s a stern breeze, blowing from the land, insouciant now, but, like everything here, it carries a sense of enormous strength withheld. Once everyone is settled, the guide makes a suggestion: why don’t we keep silent, just for a few minutes, sit still and keep quiet, just listen?

  We have the sea, deceptively calm and blue and serene with icebergs, stretching away eastward under an ashy sky. Below in the bay our ship rides at anchor, looking overcomplicated among the smaller, white tufts of ice which drift soundlessly around it. Though white, the ship looks dirty, too, the way sheep suddenly look dirty when it snows. Behind the ship, the far side of the bay rises to a low brown ridge similar to this, and beyond that ridge is arranged a row of white pinnacles—the tips of icebergs grounded in a hidden inlet. Westward rises a range of brown jagged mountains, and beyond the coastal range there are hints and gleams of something I thought at first was a band of low cloud, but it’s ice, maybe the edge of the inland icecap. The air is extraordinarily clear.

  That’s what we see. What we listen to, though, is silence. Slowly we enter the most extraordinary silence, a radiant silence. It radiates from the mountains, and the ice and the sky, a mineral silence which presses powerfully on our bodies, coming from very far off. It’s deep and quite frightening, and makes my mind seem clamorous as a goose. I want to quell my mind, but I think it would take years. I glance at the others. Some people are looking out at the distant land and sea; others have their heads bowed, as if in church.

  A minute passes, maybe two, maybe five, just the breeze and this powering silence—then a raven flies over. I knew Polly likes birds, so glance to see if she’s noticed it and she has; her head is tilted back and quietly she’s raised her gloved hand to shield her eyes. The bird, utterly black and alone in the sky, is heading inland on steady wings. It, too, keeps quiet.

  They used to navigate by raven, the Vikings, there being no stars visible at such high latitudes in summer. The old sagas say that the Viking settlers of Iceland took ravens. Out of sight of land, wallowing at sea, they would release a raven and watch it climb the air until it was high enough to sight land. Where the raven headed, they followed in their open boats. Maybe ravens had brought them here, too, in their Greenlandic voyages, a thousand years ago. A thousand years. The blink of an eye.

  Be quiet, I tell myself. Listen to the silence. I take my eye off the raven for a moment, and when I look back it’s gone.

  How long we sit there I don’t know. I know only that I’d never heard anything like it, a silence that could dismiss a sound, as wind would dismiss a feather. Five minutes, ten, minutes in a lifetime.

  Some people say you can never experience true silence, because you come to hear the high whine of your own nerves. That is to say, you hear the very nervous system which allows you to hear at all. Nerves because we are animals, not ice, not rock. Driven by cold and hunger. It’s cold, our animal bodies say; best get moving. Keep warm, keep hunting. So, after maybe ten minutes, by some unspoken assent, a movement, a cough, our experience of deep silence is over, and life begins to whip us on our way. We all begin slowly to stand. Polly catches my eye, gives me the little smile and shrug which I already know are characteristic of her. We begin to move downhill, back toward the waiting boats. It’s a while before anyone speaks.

  * * *

  Now it’s mid-afternoon and hardly silence, there’s too much excitement. We’re back on the ship, we’re underway and icebergs are coming. They appear ahead, one after the next, conveyed from a great manufactory, the distant Daugaard-Jensen glacier at the top of the fjord. A dozen of us, much the same dozen who had sat on the hill this morning, are leaning out over the ship’s white metal bow as far as we dare, the photographers with their cameras, the birders with binoculars, shouting above the wind and engine drone. The wind is no joke; it would flay you alive, a katabatic wind, they say, which flows downhill off the icecap, and we’re heading into it. You could go inside, of course, and view the ice through glass, but what’s the point of that? You have to be out on deck, despite the cold, because of the cold, if you are to feel the white, deadening presence of the icebergs. Someone calls, ‘They’re so . . . organic!’ But organic is just what they’re not. Their shapes and forms are without purpose, adapted to no end. They are huge and utterly meaningless.

  The icebergs come on down the fjord in a slow cavalcade, one by one, higher than the ship, closer and closer, and every time I think ‘Surely, surely, this time, we’re going to collide,’ but always the ship turns aside gracefully, by just a few degrees, and the iceberg glides away to port or starboard. As they pass, they rear above like a building does, all sculpted and white, with fissures of deepest blue, but also they plunge on down underwater, in tilting levels of sapphire, down into the mile-deep waters, where they have their greater existence.

  The fjord water is choppy and grey, and between icebergs
smaller morsels of ice bob along, now a rocking boat, now an angel’s wings. These little pieces look like Christmas decorations but when the ship hits one it bangs like an oil drum beaten with a stick. And there are the mountainsides, the fjord walls. I realise I have the scale completely wrong; the scale is vast. On either side of the fjord, mountains rise to pinnacles of 6000 feet. They look as lifeless as cathedral spires, but I know now there are plants on their lower slopes, leading fugitive lives—animals, too. Small glaciers, some shrivelled far uphill, leave trails of moraine and gravel reaching down to the water. There’s a lull, the wind, the engine, and then another iceberg appears, approaching with the hauteur of a huge catwalk model.

  The next iceberg offers to the ship a ramp as smooth and angled as a ski jump. Just slide right up here, little ship, it seems to say, but the invitation is declined. It passes astern. Then the next appears down the fjord—a preposterous cake, with ink-blue shadows. Then another, the size of a three-storey house, with walls knapped into smooth, hard facets, like flint. Under the water’s surface they are a blue you could fall into, as you could have fallen forever into the silence of the morning. It’s like some slow delirium, a fantasy you can’t shake, but with an undertow of menace. Although we shout when they appear, it’s different when they glide past; no one speaks then. The cameras click, but the icebergs give nothing, suggest nothing but a white nihilism.

  After a while the wind and cold become unbearable, so I leave the others out on deck and make my way along the port side, shoving open the heavy sea door under the lifeboat, into the blessed, slightly food-and-diesel-smelling warmth of the ship’s interior. I shut the door; the wind stops. Then two flights of stairs take me up to the bridge. It’s the same for all of us: we’re like cats, always on the wrong side of every door, meeting each other always at the doors. Not everyone, the same dozen diehards: the huge German doctor with his huger camera, the Finnish birder, the Dutch photographer, Polly, myself. Desire to behold the icebergs, a fear we might miss something drives us out onto the deck, into the noise and scouring wind, until desire for a few moments’ warmth drives us inside again.