Read Sixty Degrees North Online

Authors: Malachy Tallack

Sixty Degrees North (31 page)

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 – past and present – 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 ‘You 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
ref1

Adam of Bremen
ref1
,
ref2

agriculture, development of
ref1
,
ref2
,
ref3
,
ref4

Air Greenland
ref1

Åland Emigrants Institute
ref1

Åland Islands
ref1

autonomy in
ref1
,
ref2

Alaska
ref1
,
ref2
,
ref3
,
ref4
,
ref5
,
ref6
,
ref7
,
ref8
,
ref9

as ‘the last frontier'
ref1

bought by the USA
ref1

land ownership in
ref1

Alaska Highway
ref1

Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act
ref1
,
ref2

Alberta
ref1

alcoholism
ref1
,
ref2

Aleksanderovskiy Park, St Petersburg
ref1

Aleksey (son of Peter the Great)
ref1

Alexander, Tsar
ref1

Algonquin Indians
ref1

Amundsen, Roald
ref1

Anchorage
ref1
,
ref2
,
ref3

animal rights campaigns
ref1

Arctic Ocean
ref1

Arctic skuas
ref1

Arctic terns (
tirricks
)
ref1

Asgard
ref1

Athabasca tar sands
ref1

Athabascan languages
ref1

Atlantic Ocean
ref1
,
ref2
,
ref3
,
ref4
,
ref5

Atwood, Margaret
ref1

Australian Aborigines
ref1

bald eagles
ref1
,
ref2
,
ref3
,
ref4

Baltic Sea
ref1
,
ref2

Basargin, Nikolay
ref1
,
ref2

bears
ref1
,
ref2
,
ref3
,
ref4
,
ref5

attacking people
ref1

Bekkjarvik
ref1
,
ref2

Bell, Shawn
ref1

Bergen
ref1
,
ref2
,
ref3
,
ref4
,
ref5

Bering, Vitus
ref1
,
ref2
,
ref3

Berry, Wendell
ref1

Bigton
ref1

Billia Cletts
ref1

bison –
see
buffalo

Black Death
ref1

Bolsheviks
ref1

boreal forest
ref1

Bothnia, Gulf of
ref1

Boym, Svetlana
ref1

Braer
(oil tanker)
ref1
,
ref2

Breivik, Anders Behring
ref1
,
ref2

Bressay
ref1
,
ref2

British Columbia
ref1

Broch of Mousa
ref1

brochs
ref1
,
ref2

Brodsky, Joseph
ref1

Bronze Horseman statue, St Petersburg
ref1
,
ref2
,
ref3

Brünnich's guillemot
ref1

Buffalo (or bison)
ref1
,
ref2

Burgi Stacks
ref1

Burn of Burgistacks
ref1

Burn of Maywick
ref1

Calgary
ref1
,
ref2

Camus, Albert
ref1

Canada
ref1
,
ref2

Christianisation of native

peoples
ref1
,
ref2

gold mining in
ref1

oil extraction in
ref1

Quebec nationalism
ref1

Canol road and pipeline
ref1

Cape Farewell
ref1
,
ref2
,
ref3
,
ref4

Cape Morris Jessup
ref1

Cape Verde (Fortunate Isles)
ref1

Carson, Rachel
ref1

Carta Marina
ref1

cartography, development of
ref1
,
ref2
,
ref3
,
ref4

Cassette Rapids (Slave River)
ref1

Catherine the Great
ref1

Channerwick
ref1

Christian V, King of Denmark
ref1

Chuckchi people
ref1

Churchill (Canada)
ref1

climate cooling
ref1

Conquest, Robert
ref1

Cook Inlet
ref1
,
ref2
,
ref3

Cooper Landing
ref1

Copenhagen
ref1
,
ref2
,
ref3
,
ref4

cormorants
ref1

Cornwall
ref1

crop failures
ref1

dachas
ref1

Dalstroy organisation
ref1
,
ref2

Davidson, Hilda Ellis
ref1

Davis Strait
ref1

Decembrists
ref1
,
ref2

Decembrists' Square, St Petersburg
ref1

Dene people
ref1
,
ref2

Diamond, Jared
ref1

diamond mining
ref1
,
ref2

dippers
ref1

Disappointment River –
see
Mackenzie River

dog sledding
ref1

Dorset people
ref1
,
ref2

Dostoyevsky, Fyodor
ref1

Drammen
ref1
,
ref2

Durrell, Lawrence
ref1

East Greenland current
ref1

Eastern Settlement (Greenland)
ref1

Edmonton
ref1
,
ref2

Ehrlich, Gretel
ref1

eider ducks
ref1

Eirik the Red
ref1
,
ref2

Ekenäs
ref1
,
ref2
,
ref3
,
ref4
,
ref5

Elizabeth I, Queen of England
ref1

Enckell, Maria Jarlsdotter
ref1

Encyclopaedia Britannica
ref1

Erik Jedvardsson, King (later St Erik)
ref1
,
ref2

Erikson, Gustaf
ref1

Esso (Siberia)
ref1

Estonia
ref1

Eudoxia, Tsaritsa
ref1

European Community
ref1

European Union
ref1

Even people
ref1
,
ref2

Evenk people
ref1

Fagervik
ref1

Fair Isle
ref1
,
ref2
,
ref3
,
ref4
,
ref5
,
ref6

Falconet, Etienne Maurice
ref1

Faroe Islands
ref1

ferry services
ref1
,
ref2
,
ref3
,
ref4
,
ref5
,
ref6
,
ref7
,
ref8
,
ref9
,
ref10

Fetlar
ref1

Finland
ref1
,
ref2
,
ref3
,
ref4
,
ref5

adopting the Euro
ref1

annexed by Russia
ref1

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