Sixty Degrees North (30 page)

The bus drove southwards, past villages and half frozen fjords, in a misty brightness like an English autumn dawn. The sun was uncertain, haze-hidden then bright – a game of celestial hide-and-seek. It seemed a good day to be moving. The route was southwards first, from Bergen to Haljem, where the bus boarded a ferry to Sandvikvåg. From there I took another ferry, northwest to Husavik, on the island of Huftarøy. It was all so easy and effortless, and after only a couple of hours I was most of the way there. At that point, though, the plans I'd made dissolved. There was no drama and no panic, they just dissolved. The connecting bus was due five minutes after the ferry arrived in Husavik, and so I stood and waited at the stop beside the terminal, enjoying the pace of the day. From that stop I had an excellent view of the bus as it appeared, right on schedule, along the road just adjacent to the terminal. I watched it drive along that road, carefully follow each curve, then continue on its way without taking the turn down to where I was standing. It was one of those static moments, like when you shut the door and immediately remember that your keys are on the other side. For a few seconds it seems that, if you regret it hard enough, you might just be able to turn back time. Only the click of that lock separates you from your keys; only a few steps separated me from the correct bus stop on the road above. I stood there doing nothing for several minutes, as though some unimagined solution might just fall from the sky in front of me. The next bus was not for hours – too late to get me to Stolmen and back by the end of the day. I had only two choices: return to Bergen or go on.

I hate hitchhiking. I truly hate it. Perhaps because I only ever do it when absolutely necessary, there is a deep sense of humiliation in me every time I am forced into that position.
And what increases that humiliation, what marks it like a scar upon me, is that I am terrible at it. In the half dozen or so times I've tried to hitchhike in Europe, I've been successful only twice. I have come to believe that somehow my face is unsuitable for the task. It must be a face that people just don't want in their cars, because nobody ever stops for me. They don't stop for me in Shetland and they certainly didn't stop for me in Norway. Following the road west towards where the bus had gone, I stuck out my thumb and smiled at every approaching car. And every car sailed on by, without so much as glance. After an hour or so of this repeated rejection I understood that my choices had been reduced to one. The least humiliating option was to ignore the cars and just keep walking.

I had no idea how far that walk would be, or whether it would get me where I wanted to go in time; and to begin with that absence of certainty only increased my fury. I took every passing vehicle as an insult and every magpie's cackle as a slight. I cursed my journey, and the sheer futility of what I was doing. I cursed myself for my own stupidity. I was looking for a line that didn't really exist, on an island about which I knew nothing. I was striding through a winter afternoon, cold, cross and dejected.

But as the walk wore on, an invigorating acceptance descended on me. I put one foot in front of the other and moved forward. I didn't know when I would get to Stolmen, that was true; but I knew that I would get there. And I didn't know if I could get back to Bergen that day, but I would get back sometime. Walking like that, blocking out the worries and the doubts, I barely noticed the places through which I passed. My thoughts were elsewhere entirely, and yet nowhere in particular. When I arrived in Bekkjarvik after two hours of walking, I was almost as surprised as I was relieved, and when I consulted a timetable at the bus stop by the harbour, I found that a school bus was scheduled to
leave the village for Stolmen twenty minutes later. It would give me just over an hour on the island before I had to make my way back to Bergen.

We drove from Bekkjarvik out over the bridge to Selbjorn and onward, over the next bridge, to Stolmen. Red-faced children in snow-suits filled the space with chatter and joy, and every so often a bundle of them would be released into the arms of waiting parents at the roadside. Stolmen was stern and beautiful. Boulders and low trees along the verges stretched out towards rough moorland and crags beyond, and small lakes, distorted by ice. I got off at VÃ¥ge, at the far south of the island, the end of the road. There was a turning circle at the top of a slope, with a bus shelter on one side and several huts and houses on the other. I stepped out into a thin light and a familiar, salt-ridden breeze.

Once the bus had departed, I could hear no cars, no voices and no machines of any kind – only the intimate whisper of the sea, just a few hundred yards away. It looked like a ghost village, yet at the same time I felt I was being watched from behind a curtain. Some of the buildings, I guessed, might be summer houses, so were probably empty. But others must be occupied. The island has a population of 200, which is not much, but enough.

I had read that Våge was the ‘commercial centre' of Stolmen, and I walked back down the road a little way in search of the evidence. So far as I could see, it consisted of a small shop with a petrol pump outside. I went in and browsed the shelves, not wishing to buy anything but just to be there. The shop was well stocked, as stores in out-of-the-way villages usually are, and it gave the impression of a place in which the exchange of words was as important as the exchange of goods and money. Besides me, there were two staff members and two customers. One of them, a woman of about forty with long, curly hair and a thick jacket, was talking quietly and fondly to an elderly man in a fur hat. He seemed to be
struggling, as though confused about what he needed, and the woman touched his arm lightly. She was offering suggestions, I thought, and guiding him back towards certainty.

The two women behind the counter then joined the conversation, and each of them spoke in an affectionate, familiar way, oblivious to the roles that elsewhere would define them. Though the words were unknown to me, the tone was not. These were neighbours and members of a community: a connection far deeper than the tenuous bond between buyers and sellers. ‘Commercial centre' was a rather inappropriate title for a shop like this, but it was, certainly, a centre.

Wandering those few short aisles, I felt a deep longing to be spoken to in the way those people spoke to each other. By then it was several days since I'd had any kind of conversation with anyone, and I was lonely. But it was more than that. My desire was not really to talk, it was to be known. I wanted to be enclosed and included within that thing of which these people were a part. I wanted to belong, as they belonged, to something bigger than themselves. I missed Fair Isle then, and I longed to go back.

Once outside, I walked briskly towards the sea, over rough ground that crunched with ice at every step. Just above the shoreline I found a rock that looked almost comfortable and I sat down. There was little wind, and the waves unfolded onto the stones with an uncommon tenderness. Towards the west, the tell-tale streaks of a rain shower stained the orange horizon with blue. Everything here was as I knew it should be: the smell of it, the sound of it, the sight. Everything was familiar.

Sitting there beside the sea, two hundred miles from home, I thought back to the traffic that had ventured west from this coast towards my own shores. To the Vikings who had sailed in the eighth and ninth century, and who had made their way ultimately to Greenland and beyond. To the
refugees of the Second World War, who were carried in fishing boats and other vessels, in what became known as the ‘Shetland Bus'. And then to the oil tanker
Braer
, which left the refinery just north of Bergen in January 1993, carrying 85,000 tonnes of crude oil. She was bound for Quebec in Canada, but made it only as far as Quendale on the south east coast of Shetland, where she hit the rocks and spilled her cargo. It was a few years after my family moved to the islands, and a few miles from the spot where, later, I would find the parallel.

I'd come to Stolmen by following that line around the world. Once there, I had nowhere else to go but home. I'd known all along, of course, that this was a journey with only one possible destination. But faced with that last stretch of water that separated beginning from end, I felt nervous and uncertain. Would the place I was going back to be the same place that I had left? And did I even want it to be? Perhaps I'd expected answers, but I hadn't found any. I'd been left with only questions. Ahead, the sky was like a welt, blue and purple ringed with pink. A crack in the clouds brought sharp fingers of light down onto the blackening waves, and the cold chafed against my face. I sat for ten minutes more, perhaps fifteen, and then it was time to go. I stood and flung a stone into the water, towards Mousa, as though to reach as far as I could towards home, and then I walked away.

HOMECOMING

You can take a ferry north to Shetland almost every night of the year, leaving Aberdeen in the early evening and arriving at breakfast time the following day. It's a convenient, if not always pleasant, way to travel. But on the day I headed home, having flown from Bergen to Scotland, there was no ferry. One vessel was in dry dock undergoing repairs, and the other was leaving Lerwick in the opposite direction. Instead, I booked myself onto the freight boat, which meant a longer and less comfortable journey across the North Sea. But at least it would get me there. And so at three in the afternoon I boarded the
Hellier
together with four other passengers, climbing stairwells and following corridors, each of which reeked of diesel, salt and cold metal.

As the boat shuddered away from the dock an hour later, the five of us were served food: soup, roast beef, chips, cake. A few polite words were shared, but no one was very interested in talking, and as we cleared our plates one after another of us stood up and retired to our separate cabins. The sailing would take eighteen hours, with just a brief stop in Orkney after midnight, and almost as soon as we reached the mouth of Aberdeen harbour the ship began to rock heavily, to an inconsistent beat. The crash of metal on water seemed to shake time loose from its rhythm and drive it forward, confidently, into the night.

Unlike flying, when the moment of arrival is clearly defined – that solid thud as the wheels hit the tarmac – arrivals and departures by sea feel less distinct, more negotiable. To be afloat is to be neither fully detached nor connected, neither here nor entirely there, but suspended, like the boat
itself, between elements. I like it. There is something about the pace of the journey that puts me at ease: the sheer slog of it, and the boredom that unravels, wave by wave and roll by roll. Once at sea, I feel almost back where I'm going.

The American writer Harry W. Paige said that ‘home is not a place only, but a condition of the heart'. That is to say not that home can be anywhere at all, but that the relationship between person and place is an emotional one. Like being married, being at home is not a passive state. It is a process, in which the heart must be engaged. That is as true for the reindeer herders of Siberia, whose home may be hundreds of square miles, as it is for the inhabitants of a tiny village on a tiny island.

For many people this is not so. Home for them is nowhere in particular. It is the house in which their belongings are kept and in which they go to sleep at night. It extends no further than that. This is the condition of our time. It is a marriage without love, a relationship without commitment. And it is, surely, a kind of homelessness.

But there is another kind of homelessness, too, one which has the opposite effect on its sufferers; and that is the ailment with which, from an early age, I was afflicted. For much of my life I felt myself to be exiled from a home that no longer existed, and which in some sense never really had. In her book,
The Future of Nostalgia
, Svetlana Boym described this feeling as ‘akin to unrequited love, only we are not sure about the identity of our lost beloved'. For me that feeling arrived with our move to Shetland, and was compounded by the loss of my father. It became a hole within which I tried, desperately, to find form. Like the north, home is defined in its absence, in the distance between longing and belonging. But, like the north, it is only through intimacy, through love, that it can come to be known.

The landscape that truly shaped me was that of Shetland. This is where I became the person I became. This is where
the conflicts that would form me were fought out. That I came to love this place, having once hated it, is strange and yet entirely coherent. It was a process of understanding, familiarity and, I suppose, of forgiveness that brought me back here. In the end, I accepted the centre around which my world was spinning, and I turned towards it.

When I woke in the early morning, the
Hellier
was pitching hard, swaying like a drunk heading for bed. We were somewhere around Fair Isle, I guessed, most likely in that stretch of water called the Roost, between the isle and the Shetland Mainland, where tides and currents and winds collide. The water here can be as wild as water ever can be. Something in the cabin was banging each time the ship lurched, a solid clatter against the wall. Hazy headed, I got up to find the cause, groping in the darkness at the end of the bunk. A ladder hung there by its top rail, the bottom half a pendulum swinging in time with the waves. I lifted it from the wall and wedged it at an angle, where it could neither fall nor slide, and I lay back down and closed my eyes.