The last nightwatchman in Scandinavia climbs 14 flights of stairs every night to his nook above the belfry of a 13^th century church in the Swedish town of Ystad. Roland Borg is in his mid-seventies, and for almost 60 years he has kept watch on Ystad, scanning its ancient streets for fires, its stores for break-ins and its houses to make sure lights aren’t on when they shouldn’t be. All being well, Borg blows a four-foot-long copper horn every 15 minutes between 9 p.m. and midnight to let the town’s 29,000 residents know they’re safe.

Borg’s is one of the ten stories told in BBC travel journalist Eliot Stein’s book Custodians of Wonder: Ancient Customs, Profound Traditions, and the Last People Keeping Them Alive. Each of its delightful chapters is the length of a solid magazine article, and in each, Stein introduces us to a man or woman who struggles to maintain a complex craft that’s at risk of being lost. 

He visits the last man in Peru able to weave an Incan-style rope bridge over a gorge that would otherwise separate the people of two farming villages. The last families on the Malabar Coast of India who know the secrets of crafting metal mirrors that reflect human faces without distortion. The last lector in Cuba, a woman who sits on a podium reading to workers in a tobacco factory as they silently roll cigars. 

These aren’t people making discoveries through world-beating genius, but the heirs of ancient traditions keeping them alive in the 21^st century. Ordinary people doing extraordinary things.

I picked up Custodians of Wonder after reading a review mentioning Roland Borg, the Swedish watchman. I’m half Swedish, and have come into genealogical records from both the Swedish and Scottish sides of my family that I want to write up. This means one of my ongoing projects is to research the lives of ordinary people in both countries, since with a couple of exceptions, my ancestors were ordinary folks spending most of their lives farming or–like Roland Borg–working two jobs to make ends meet, even if their second job has never involved blowing a copper horn into the nighttime streets of Ystad.

Ystad is a very old town on the south coast of Sweden, but it has its glitzy aspects. That’s partly because Henning Mankell set his Kurt Wallander detective novels there. Wallander is forever facing down murder and mayhem in Ystad and the surrounding countryside. Yet daily life continues in the real town as peacefully as it’s always done, even though dozens of episodes of various Wallander TV series have been shot in Ystad. Stein reports that in 57 years on the job, Roland Borg has only had to call in the police or fire department about 20 times. 

“There was the blaze he spotted down at the harbour when old cranes were lifting bales of hay, the band of thieves he saw breaking into a radio shop late at night in Stortorget square, and a recent SOS flare at out at sea.”

This mild list means you can argue that in an age of smoke alarms, cellphones and closed-circuit TV the watchman’s job has become superfluous, more a tourist attraction than a public safety measure. You could also say that’s the case with most of the jobs featured in Stein’s book, whether he’s writing about the Japanese man who tends 150-year-old cedar casks that brew an antique form of soy sauce, the last few women able to make an intricate style of pasta in Sicily, or the man who hand paints movie posters for a second-run theatre in Taiwan, the last in Asia to do so. 

Yet the residents of Ystad say that both Borg and his watchman’s role represent far more than a touristy remnant of the past, which is also true for many of the callings portrayed in the book.

Instead, it’s a question of identity.

Writes Stein, “Over pastries at Café Lurblåsaren (The Hornblower Café), Anna Röing, who owns an antique shop in a half-timbered building from the 1500s, put it bluntly: ‘Ystad without the night watchman wouldn’t be Ystad. It’d be just another old town.’

“Röing also helped me solve a mystery I’d been wondering about,” Stein continues. “As I wandered through Ystad each day, I’d often peer through the cottages’ closed windows to admire their suspended fireplaces, functional minimalism and sleek Scandi interiors taken straight from a design catalog. Then at night, as the temperatures fell below freezing and the wind screamed through the town, I’d note that nearly every home had cracked their windows open. Was this some bizarre Swedish sleeping custom I didn’t know about? ‘No, that’s something unique to here,’ Röing said, smiling. ‘Many people in Ystad open their windows to hear the horn better. They can’t sleep when they don’t hear it. It gives us a special feeling, a comfort. We get used to it as children, we love it.”

Here’s the thing: People tend to love what’s familiar. We long to nestle into the comfort of what’s always been, at least as we remember it, even though academic studies show quite confidently that we tend to remember it wrong. Stein could have lingered on a picture-postcard view of Ystad and presented it—condescendingly as well as incorrectly—as a quaint village boasting 300 half-timbered houses, some dating back to the 15^th century; a charming remnant with a medieval monastery and rosy-cheeked children helping their parents raise Christmas trees on the main street every December. 

But Stein is an excellent reporter as well as an elegant writer, peering through windows, asking questions, detailing the history of the night watch throughout Europe, listing the other cities that still employ civic watchmen—Lausanne, Krakow—while recording the way things slowly and subtly change, tradition pulling in one direction, modernity in another.

For one thing, Roland Borg is a diehard Elvis fan. His watch room above the belfry of the 13^th century church is plastered with Elvis posters—30 of them, by Stein’s count. On New Year’s Eve, Borg blasts Elvis songs to revellers in the town square below, and his dream is to go to Graceland. This presumes he gets up the nerve to fly, which he’s never done, being afraid of heights even while spending his nights 14 storeys up. (And his working days, by the way, as a fork-lift driver.) 

Then there’s the question of succession. Ystad has had a night watchman for about 500 years, and Borgs have held the position for more than 100. Roland’s grandfather got the job in 1921. His father took over 20 years later, and Roland started his watch in 1970. Next in line would be Roland and his wife Yvonne’s son, Robert, whose situation Klein addresses with characteristic empathy. 

“One night while he was on duty in 1985, Roland watched a (TV) report about a civil war in a country he’d never heard of, far, far away. Then government of Guatemala was massacring tens of thousands of ethnic Mayans, and leaving countless babies orphaned in the process. Unable to sit by, Roland told Yvonne about the genocide. The couple had long wanted children, but hadn’t had any luck. So, in the midst of a humanitarian disaster, Roland and Yvonne arranged for a nun to airlift an orphaned brother and sister from the Guatemalan Highlands to Sweden in order to adopt them—one of whom required an immediate operation to repair an inguinal hernia. ‘The nun didn’t tell us about his condition until we met him. She was afraid we wouldn’t want him,’ Roland said, wiping away tears. ‘But of course we would have. How could we not?’”

Robert Borg went up the tower with his father beginning in 2000, and apprenticed to him for six years. But after starting a family of his own, Robert had to concentrate on supporting his children. He now works, somewhat ironically, as a security guard. 

“’I still have a glimmer of a hope that he wants to follow in my footsteps,” Roland says, “’but you never know what the future might bring.’”

An ethnically-Mayan Swedish night watchman. Sweden has its problems with far-right anti-immigrant politicians and their rabid white followers. But on the local level, Klein reports no animus toward the Borgs, nor any pushback to Roland’s quiet hopes that his son might succeed him in his ancient role. Traditions are comforting, change inevitable, and the negotiations between the two are always fascinating.

I find them especially compelling as they play out at a human level, as they do in this book, away from the hype and screech of our modern obsession with fame, selfies, influencers, which together form a mist hovering in the air, a miasma that risks obscuring more grounded lives.

When I started work on my second novel, Drink the Sky, I was living in Rio de Janeiro and planned to write about a Canadian artist who came to Brazil with her environmentalist husband and their two sons. I wanted to introduce a famous American musician as a disruptor, a realistic scenario given the way musicians flock to Rio. One unforgettable week, I went to concerts by David Byrne, B.B. King and my favorite Brazilian singer, Milton Nascimento, all in small venues. Go out for a run along the seawall at Ipanema: Oh, look, there’s Terence Trent D’Arby. In the corner bakery: It’s Pat Metheny. 

And here’s the big name drop. We were living in Rio because my husband, Paul, was the South America correspondent for The Globe and Mail. One time, a celebrity tour came to Brazil, a good-hearted effort designed to coincide with a gathering of rainforest communities, Indigenous people who were protesting the planned construction of a hydro-electric dam on a tributary of the Amazon.

Paul flew up to cover the tour, and one afternoon, he found himself having a beer alone with the headliner, Sting, in a rooftop bar. When I asked what they talked about, Paul grew a little uncomfortable, saying Sting didn’t seem to have been properly briefed about the dam. “I would rather have spent the afternoon watching him work in a studio,” he said.

Another day, as Sting spoke to reporters at outdoor gathering, Paul found himself standing beside Gordon Lightfoot, and asked him if he planned to speak as well.

Lightfoot answered that he preferred to talk about stuff he knew more about. Eyes on Sting: “If you know what I mean.”

Back home in Rio, where Paul had his office in our apartment, I kept having to take calls from one of Sting’s hangers-on. I can’t remember why we were talking, just his petulant insistence not that Sting wanted something, but that Trudie did: Sting’s wife Trudie Styler, who was at home in England. Trudie wants to make sure. Trudie’s concerned. Are you in contact with the tour? Can you be? I’d regard it as a personal favour. 

All of which is to say, I got a ground-level picture of the distortions of musical fame and the flatulence surrounding it, and realized that a fictional star and his preening entourage would take over my novel. I made my musician lower-tier. Ordinaried him, and aside from writing about a couple of big names in a historical novel, I’ve preferred to write about normal people ever since: ones like Stein’s subjects, who find themselves called on to do the extraordinary.

I’ve lingered on Stein’s chapter about Roland Borg to show the tone and detail of his work, which you’ll find it in all ten stories. There isn’t a dud among them. 

Yet I also wonder if Stein might be telling the story of 11 threatened professions. 

When he flies to Kerala to meet the men and women who craft the world’s most faithful mirrors, Stein discovers a surprising degree of disorder. The craftspeople living around the small temple town of Aranmula have recently been battered by extraordinary storms and extreme flooding. Stein has arrived just as climate change disrupts a 500-year-old practice of combining copper and tin in secret proportions to make the mirrors, which people believe reveal the soul. Many of the craftspeople have been plunged into debt by the loss of their equipment, one of them facing such deep losses that he’s forced to sell the single mirror he has left after the flooding. 

That night, after hearing the man’s story of his loss, Stein writes “I was shaken awake again by the drumroll of thunder and the splattering of hail-sized raindrops outside my door. I shuffled outside to the balcony, only this time, instead of reaching for the rain, I recoiled from it and sat silently, peering through the inky black toward the banks of the (river)… I had come to Kerala to honor a tradition, but by travelling 8,500 miles on a fuel-guzzling jet to get here, I was directly contributing to the one thing that may soon wash it away.”

Perhaps the travel writer’s job is also on the endangered list. Or at least it will be, once writers take a hard look at the consequences of their work. 

Yet I’m glad we have Stein’s Custodians of Wonder, which is at once detailed, sympathetic and thoughtful, a lovely read that comes in self-contained chapters. I read each separately with an early-morning cup of tea and thought all day about the people featured. Bee-keepers. Musicians. A postal worker delivering sacks of love letters to a tree in Germany. (You’ll have to read it.)

Stein writes, “As the distances and differences between us continue to diminish, I can’t help but feel that we can learn something by looking toward these customs and custodians. Together, they remind us that culture is born slowly through a million tiny, personal moments; when one seemingly insignificant wonder fades, an irretrievable part of our humanity vanishes with it.”

Custodians of Wonder, published by St. Martin’s Press, is available through your local bookstores and libraries, and online here.