“The sun was close to the horizon now, not the source of light but the point to which all light was gathered, as if the day were going home. I leaned back against the car, on the brink of geese, my ears tuned, my eyes alive to the slightest movement. Ducks muttered on shallow water. Red lights glimmered like cigarette tips on the radio masts.”
More years ago than I care to remember, my partner and I went for a week’s holiday to a place called Toscaig, a tiny collection of cottages and a somewhat droukit harbour at the end of many miles of twisting single-track on the Applecross peninsula in Wester Ross. I’m sure Toscaig is a paradise when the sun is out but, for a cold week in April, it was the sort of place that makes you question whether the Highlands really are beautiful and maybe we’re all the dupes of some crafty Victorian tourist propaganda. The rain was constant except for the day when it snowed. We went for walks, splashy tramps across heather and moor, gazing in the direction of mountains hidden by cloud. On the days we didn’t brave the outdoors, we stayed in the dusky cottage, kept the fire blazing, and read. The cottage was blessed with shelves of the sort of books I’d always meant to read but never got round to, as well as many books I’d never heard of that looked interesting. One of these was William Fiennes’s, The Snow Geese.
Fiennes’s book was a welcome step into the unknown. I was becoming interested in nature writing - when we weren’t on damp Highland holidays we lived on a farm in Lanarkshire - but hadn’t really known where to begin nor had I realised there was such a world of beautiful travel writing out there, new and real places to discover. The Snow Geese opened my eyes and I’ve never looked back.
It’s a book borne of suffering, of going home, and of the need to embrace the new. After a serious illness, Fiennes returned to his parents’ home in the English countryside to convalesce. There he walked the fields and woods, found his strength, and developed a fascination for the birds he saw around the house. As he enters deeper into their world he learns about the migration of massive flocks of snow geese from the Gulf of Mexico to Baffin Island. With his physical recovery all but complete, Fiennes heads to Texas to follow the geese on their journey; home, for all its healing comforts, has become too familiar - it’s time to immerse himself in the strange.
Part of this book’s brilliance is how it makes the quotidian intriguing. Fiennes invests a poet’s rhythm in everyday stuff: sunsets, snacks in a gas station, brands of chewing tobacco, stops on a Canadian train line, or ‘the music of tools and techniques’ needed to build a cabin:
“the bull points and scutches, the tin shears called snips, the augers and gimlets for boring holes in logs, the splines for window-frames, the lug hooks and peaveys for holding logs firm when sawing, the India oilstone for honing an axe’s blade, the cleaving tools called froes for splitting tough shingles or shakes from billets of timber.”
There are moments, perfectly captured in elegant but unshowy prose:
“An oarsman moved silently beneath us, sculling upstream, feathering the blades as if they were his own palms held above the water, his seat rolling back and forth on greased coasters and rails, the dips of the oars leaving a series of paired circles like a shoe’s eyelets in his wake.”
Somehow these details connect with Fiennes’s theme of home, what that means, and where we find it. He has, after all, left the comfort and security of his parents’ house for this journey north across the USA and Canada, patterned by the movement, sight and sound of the geese as they shift from Texas and South Dakota, to Winnipeg and across Hudson Bay to the Foxe Peninsula. Each stop he makes is its own temporary home with its own passing family, memorably the two wooden cabins he stays in while in Mantiboa. The first, at Riding Mountain, has a wicker chair, a single lamp illuminating a cat pattern on the wooden walls, and the sounds of coyotes howling outside. The second is near Churchill, owned by Ruth, an almost pathological knitter, embroiderer and seamstress, with a dog named Saila, “three-quarters wolf and quarter husky”, lame, deaf and almost blind who lifts her head from her water bowl as the snow geese arrive, “their wings thrumming like voltage.” At the same time, the people he meets illuminate the journey in unexpected ways: Marshall, who spends his days travelling the railways of North America; Paula and Natsiq, the Inuit hunters who take Fiennes with them across the snow of Foxe Land in search of the geese; Jean, the tennis-loving former nun.
And then there are the snow geese who, despite their constant presence and bewildering number, remain oddly enigmatic. While we get to know the humans in the book, the geese are inscrutable in their enormous quantities, though no less profound:
“Thirty thousand geese lifted off the ice in front of us, wingbeats drumming the air, goose yelps gathering to a pounding, metallic yammer, the sound of steel being hammered on anvils, in caverns. The ice thrummed and sang with it. The exploded flock filled our fields of vision, a blizzard of birds.”
While Fiennes spends much of the book considering the science of migration, these reflections are more about our own experience of movement away from and towards our next moment of rest. This isn’t so much a book about birds as about how nature moves us, about what happens in the spaces between the geese arriving and leaving, the flight of the birds a distillation of Fiennes’s journey. Just as they are compelled to move from feeding ground to breeding ground, so Fiennes is compelled to follow and to be constantly departing, moving, and finding new places.
As he goes, Fiennes gently takes you along, sharing his awe while letting you consider the significance of what you’re reading without telling you what to think, all kept aloft by the simple, passive tenor of his voice. This is never more palpable than the book’s motif of nostalgia for a sense of belonging. In his calm, reflective way, Fiennes relishes the freedom of following the geese, but just as the geese are always arriving, leaving or roosting around him, so a nostalgia for belonging and of home is always whispering in his ear: “It was as if I existed between two poles, the known and the new, and found myself drawn alternately from one to the other.” At times, the lure of that belonging is too much, when after so many months of being out in the distant world, separate yet connected with thousands of unheeding snow geese, the familiarity of his parent’s house calls to him. But the journey has changed what home might be, taught Fiennes a valuable truth about returning:
“Somehow I had to turn my nostalgia inside-out, so that my love for the house, for the sense of belonging I experienced there, instilled not a constant desire to go back but a desire to find that sense of belonging, that security and happiness, in some other place, with some other person, or in some other mode of being. The yearning had to be forward-looking. You had to be homesick for somewhere you had not yet seen, nostalgic for things that had no yet happened.”
Maybe it was the effect of reading it for the first time in that cottage in a damp corner of the Highlands, but the book’s theme of travel and return, of each step in the voyage from a place of safety to somewhere new where home must be remade, seemed appropriate. The dreich weather encouraged us to coorie in our temporary Highland home, surrounded by the hidden enormity of the landscape, but without the frustration of being stuck. The depth of my experience - of sitting by the fire in the Toscaig cottage, reading this book - created such a feeling of peace, that I felt what I can only describe as a pleasing nostalgia for the present moment, a sort of gentle, reassuring feeling that this was just right, that it would pass into memory, but always be a still point that I could reach back to. Unlike Fiennes’s recognition that “yearning has to be forward-looking”, my yearning was in knowing that the simple joy of the present would itself pass into nostalgia. Still, his is a salutary lesson in not allowing the backward glance to impede our forward motion. While we understand that need for places of safety, we need to know there are other places of equal belonging waiting for us in our future.
I’m aware this might be the voice of lockdown speaking. We’ve all been trapped lately in some way or another, stuck at home, unable to wander off. Despite the abnormality of what we’re going through, maybe we’re suffering from a surfeit of belonging, bound to the familiar, and can’t wait for new adventures, homesick for somewhere we have not seen. As I write this, the days are counting down to further easing of restrictions. Soon we’ll be able to travel up North again, and sit by new fires, reading new books, and looking out new windows at the rain.