Fire and Water

1.30pm, 11th December 2011

The Mountain

Behind our house is a mountain.

Last week, at the Storvik Christmas party, a man told Marthe that there are certain checkpoints spread across the local area, with a book and pen in each. People hike to these places and sign the book, then at a certain point the person with the most signatures might win a prize. One of these checkpoints is on the top of the mountain behind us. Another is a type of hut a bit lower down, and this man told us it was somewhere directly behind our house. Take the tractor track on the left, follow the path, just carry on straight up the mountain and you can't miss it.

This morning we decided to spend the two-and-a-bit hours of light before lunch time in search of this hut. We found the tractor trail and headed up towards the mountain, but before long the path seemed to disappear. For a time we followed the line of the electricity pylons, where they clear their way through the trees, but soon decided that our hut wouldn't be situated below the power cables. We broke away and headed into the woods.

Neither of us has done much hiking and it was difficult work making our way up the snow covered slopes. We kept stopping for breath far more than is really respectable. I thought for a while I was going to collapse, until I realised the problem was simply that I was too hot and needed to shed a jumper. With the exception of a few days last week, when freezing winds blew through the region, it is yet to reach what you would think of as arctic temperatures up here.

We never came across another path, but we crossed animal tracks several times. The paw prints of a single large dog. I've never heard wolves at night here, but something lives on the mountain. We kept going upwards and eventually we saw what we took to be the hut, so we decided to keep going until we reached it. When we reached it, however, it turned out to be a rock. The hut was there though, in the distance, at the top of the part of the mountain we were climbing. We pressed on. Unfortunately, what we found at the top was simply a much bigger rock than before. Still, we had reached a plateau and from there we could see for miles on either side. The few houses that make up our little village were visible by the fjord down below. The light had already begun to turn blue when we sat down to drink our hot chocolate.

We walked a circuit of the plateau, then giving up on the hut we decided to take a different route down. We headed for where we thought our house was, through the woods, down the side of the mountain. Before long it was too steep to walk down and we had to slide on the snow. Then it grew too steep to slide down and we started to climb.

In a clearing in the forest we found a massive standing stone in the middle of some marsh-like land. I climbed on top of the stone to look across the trees. From there we followed the river and headed towards the road until we came over a ridge and found ourselves directly behind our house. Marthe said she was sorry to be home so soon, but it was around midday and twenty minutes later there was no light left.

Winter Trees

by Sylvia Plath

The wet dawn inks are doing their blue dissolve.
On their blotter of fog the trees
Seem a botanical drawing-
Memories growing, ring on ring,
A series of weddings.

Knowing neither abortions nor bitchery,
Truer than women,
They seed so effortlessly!
Tasting the winds, that are footless,
Waist-deep in history-

Full of wings, otherworldliness.
In this, they are Ledas.
O mother of leaves and sweetness
Who are these pietas?
The shadows of ringdoves chanting, but easing nothing.

Darker Still

Driving back from town today at around 2.30, the road was nearly invisible beyond the falling snow. As we rounded a bend the house on the left hand side of the road suddenly disappeared. I looked across in time to see the lights in the windows of the house opposite turn dark orange before that house too fell into darkness.

Power cut.

The streetlights were gone, the porch lights were extinguished and the moon was hidden behind the snow clouds. The only light then was what came from the headlights of our car. Any houses close enough for our lights to hit them looked uninhabited, abandoned and cold as we passed. Like humanity had disappeared with the electricity. It was the first time I'd thought about how people might have dealt with polar winter not so long ago, before electric lighting and under-floor heating in the bathroom were common.

My computer tells me it has thirty minutes of power left. I don't know how long the battery on the modem will last. It's actually quite nice sitting here in the candle light, listening to the fire burning. 

Outside very little is visible: The streetlamps far away on the other side of the fjord, where the power must be on another part of the grid. Out on the water a small boat is scanning the shore with its search light, maybe trying to make its way in to land.

Marthe in the dark

The view from my house now

Dark Times

As far as I know, the Norwegian word mørketid doesn't have a definitive translation. It means dark-time or time of darkness. This period began just after we arrived here, and for the first week or so it seemed to include a surprising amount of light. Each day the interval between sunrise and sunset grew shorter though, and now the sun no longer rises. There is still a small period of time around lunch when the sun hides just behind the horizon and the land is lit up but drained of colour. By early afternoon it's gone again.

This situation hasn't been helped by the fact that the weather turned mild last week and melted the snow which serves to make everything visible here in the winter. Only this evening has it started to snow again. Those remaining fools who still need convincing that the world is heating up should have been in Nord Troms last Tuesday when it was ten degrees centigrade. To add to this apocalyptic vibe, a storm is making its way up the coast, a storm bad enough to have been given a name. Bevit should be with us tonight.

Living in a wooden house by the waterside is an interesting experience in high winds. It sounds and feels like a part of the building is certainly going to come loose, as if it's only a matter of time and the best you can hope for is that it won't be the roof. I know this because some days ago we began to get the first intimations that a storm was on the way. The house made so much noise that both Marthe and I had problems getting to sleep. I woke up again at 2.30 and I was not too happy about it. When I got out of bed and looked out of my window the sky above the mountains opposite was beginning to turn a luminous green. I went downstairs to get a glass of water and by the time I came back up there were two large blocks of rough-edged glowing lines of green light in the night sky. I went back to sleep feeling as happy as at any time since I arrived here. 

Small events take on great significance. Our neighbour and her children came by to give us eggs from their hens. Our wood supply arrived and we spent two afternoons carrying it in bags up to the barn. 

In defiance of the darkness the Christmas celebrations have begun, or Solstice celebrations for those of us who observe an older calendar. Marthe has put a glowing star in our kitchen window. Tonight we're going to a local Christmas gathering, which follows Marthe's work-party yesterday. That party took place in a Lavvu - a giant tent with a fire in the middle, used by the Sami people up here in the North - and today that same Lavvu was the site of a Christmas market. It strikes me that all these things are just excuses to bring people together and remind them: Don't worry, it's only a month and a half until the sun starts to come back, until there will be a little more light each day.

Storslett (after the snow)

The snow came last Sunday in the form of a storm, blowing in over the fjord, obscuring everything, coming down throughout the night and well into the next day. In the morning we drove into town, where Marthe and I now both have jobs. At times I think Marthe was really just driving blind into a chaos of white streaks and wind. Then a day or two later the weather turned mild and it started to rain. The snow began to melt and our roof started to leak. I put out two bowls and a towel out to catch the drops.

Yesterday the snow came back again. This time it was gentle but steady. Christmas movie snowfall. It's covered everything for a second time and I hope this time it will stay, because it really is true that it makes everything lighter. For the few hours in the early afternoon when the sun is properly up it's as bright here as any daylight you've seen. The sky is another colour too. This morning it was a kind of bright blue I've never seen before. It looked backlit. If you saw a postcard of it you would say it had been Photoshopped. As I had hoped, the snow even rescued our garden.

This morning we drove into Storslett, which is where we both work and also where we go to speak to the police or the tax office, to visit a cafe, to use the library, post a letter or buy some food. It's around thirty minutes away and by the standards of the region it's a sizable town, though it's only as big as an English village. We have driven this route almost every day since we got here, but this time I had a very different feeling. It's not easy to explain, but I think that if you come from Swindon it's difficult to see somewhere that looks like this part of the world does at this time of year without feeling that in some way you don't deserve it.

 

Storslett library

The local cafe

The view from the middle of Storslett

Once we were finished in Storslett we drove just a little way out to a place between two mountains, where a Christmas market was being held in a small museum on a farm. We thought we were early, so we hesitantly opened the museum door, only to find it fairly busy inside. People were browsing knitted goods, drinking coffee and eating cake. We joined in and took pictures of each other like the out-of-towners we are. 

Marthe in the News

Playing in a band in London, however fantastic it was in most ways, was like swimming in a pool of anonymity. You play a series of good shows, you get continually better, yet you watch your audience shrink. The people who know you have all seen you and hardly anybody new ever hears about you. The thing to do in a place like that is to focus on the experience you can create for whoever is in the room with you at any given time, just forget about any egocentric idea of your work becoming well known.

When you're in a small place, on the other hand, people quickly learn who you are.

We had been in Nordreisa for something like a week when a journalist called Marthe to ask for an interview. This was for the newspaper Nordlys, which is a regional paper rather than a local one. It's one step down from the nationals. The journalist wanted to write a story about how difficult it was to get a house in the area, and somehow she knew that we'd had some problems finding a place to live. I went straight upstairs to hide. Around fourty minutes later the journalist turned up at the house, spoke with Marthe and took her photograph.

At work two days later, at least five people told me they'd seen my wife in the newspaper. They told me where they lived and asked me about my house. Today we got a text message from somebody offering us a flat. The article, which explains who Marthe is, what she does and who she is married to, serves as much as a notice of our having come to the area as it does an investigation of housing problems.  As one of Marthe's colleagues told her, "I've lived here all my life, and I've never had that much space in the paper."  

Storvik (before the snow)

So I'm writing this from a house in the arctic. Well north of where it begins. Not even a town - just a house below a mountain, a walk away from a small village where the road ends. A place called Storvik. It hasn't yet snowed, in fact it's surprisingly mild out, but they say that when it does snow the nights will be lighter. Right now we get around five hours of sun, many of them more of a blue dusk than anything you would really call daylight. By mid-December there will only be ten minutes of light a day.

Marthe in the landscape

The house is massive, but it was designed in such a way as to waste a great deal of the space. Around the house there is a large amount of trash too. I don't think the owners were really prepared for anyone to answer their rental ad. There's a boat, a lorry and a petrol pump in the front garden. There's a huge barn full of horse manure, broken things and firewood. Opposite sits an eyesore of a boxy windowless grey building which might be some sort of pump house. Next to that there are massive white bags of rope lying around too. I have a feeling that when all that crap is covered with snow it won't matter anymore.

The house was full of decorations and books in German, but we moved most of them all into a single room and closed the door on that. Water comes from a stream on the mountain behind and there's an incredible wood burning stove which heats the whole place. I spent a lot of yesterday starting and tending a fire, although I'm fairly sure some of the tending was unnecessary. There's a near-derelict basement with a freezer almost full of crabs, and there is a really big veranda which won't get much use in the coming months. We chose a bedroom in the top of the house, with sloping walls and big windows looking out.

The front of the house overlooks the fjord, on which a solitary fishing boat can be seen most days. On the other side of the water orange lights glitter. I think they're street lights along a stretch of the road up into the mountain there. I walked down to the water today and yesterday. Right by the edge there is a tiny little house where an old woman once lived. She died over thirty years ago. Nothing much has changed in there, except that over the years the weather has smashed in the windows, faded the wallpaper and scattered the lighter pieces of furniture. That, and the man who owns all this land, the man who rented it to us for the winter and left his truck and his boat outside, who owns the big white bags of ropes and the ugly pump house, he's put his orange life jacket in the old woman's house, along with a mess of fishing wire.

The Northern Lights will come and hang over the water. I don't really know what that will be like, nor when they will come, but they will. The landscape here is dramatic in a way that I've only really seen in paintings or in Westerns. Going through it in the car is a bit like being in a PJ Harvey song. I expect to see a woman in a tattered white dress coming over the ridge at any time.

 

Hurtigruten

Hurtigruten is a company which runs a fleet of boats along what used to be the Norwegian postal service route, up the coast of the country from the bottom to the top and back. It's always taken passengers too, but in recent years tourism has become its main source of business. A little earlier this year there was a reality TV show in Norway which showed Hurtigruten staff and passengers 24 hours a day for five days in real time. It pulled in record viewing figures and attracted some overseas interest. Last month, or the month before, a foreign broadcast of the same programme was due to go out somewhere in South America, when one of the Hurtigruten ships caught fire off the coast of Norway. If I recall rightly it didn't actually sink, but it was touch and go for a while and I think a few people died.

Still, we've been on here nearly three days and have seen neither TV cameras nor flames. Our cabin has a window, which is not far above the water, and last night when there was a storm we could see the waves breaking beneath us into the darkness. 

Although the older boats are still pretty functional, the newer ones are essentially small cruise ships. Our boat is called MS Midnattsol (Midnight Sun) and it's one of the newer ones. You can tell this from flawless contemporary-retro decor and the twin Jacuzzis it has on the top deck, separated by a sculptural glass water feature doubling as a shower block. There is also a sauna, from which you can look out across the ocean or coast. We decided to take the boat because we needed to transport a car to our new home and it was actually less expensive and far less stressful than it would have been for Marthe to drive us all the way up (at thirty years of age I still can't even start a car, let alone operate one), but sitting in the Jacuzzi outside on our first night on the boat, looking out at the dimly perceptible passing mountains, I had a distinct feeling of guilty luxury. Like this really wasn't what I was supposed to be doing. It reminded me of my favourite moment in a documentary I once saw about Andrei Tarkovsky. He is scouting locations in Italy in the 1970s. After spending several days travelling around, viewing beautiful Italian countryside, Tarkovsky turns to his guide, an Italian poet, and says, "I'm uncomfortable because I have the feeling I am on holiday, and it is not a sensation I'm used to."  

All this being said, the main attraction of this route is the landscape. It is so beautiful as to defy description. In the middle of our first day we passed through a series of tiny islands dotted across an area of water almost as calm as a lake. In amongst the islands there was a little red lighthouse standing on a piece of land no bigger that its base. Apparently, before it was mechanised two families actually lived there.

 

That same first evening, after the sun had set but before its influence had totally disappeared, I was standing on the deck as we moved through a fjord. I watched the moon line up with a blue-lit mountain above a kind of inland cove. It looked for all the world like an imaginary landscape, something that would only appear in a painting. I wanted so badly to be able to remember how it looked and not forget the details, as I have forgotten the details of every other incredible view I've ever seen.

Last night at around 12am we passed through Trollfjord, thought to be one of Norway's most spectacular areas of coast. Despite a force nine gale, the staff of the boat invited us up on to the deck and gave everyone free fishcakes. They played a recording of Peer Gynt and lit up sections of the Fjord with the boat's fog lights. It wasn't really possible to make out much more that the circular sections of lit-up rock, but mountains and Fjords do stand out blacker than the sky, even at midnight.

We're well into the arctic circle now. Not too much longer and we'll be disembarking. We stopped for dinner tonight in Tromsø. That's where you can find the polar institute, which houses the photos Marthe has been writing her MA thesis about. In a record shop there I bought the new Tom Waits record, although I'll have to wait some weeks for my turntable to arrive before I can play it. Marthe and I agreed that we would come back to Tromsø for Christmas shopping, either drive down and spend the night or go by plane, so I'll write more about the town then. It's the place where the first English person I knew who moved to Norway went. John from my evening course. He moved there a couple of years ago. He had a job lined up in the bike shop. We all told him he was mad.

Marthe working on board

Me in Midnattsol's Knut Hamsun room

A brief interuption in our scheduled broadcast

This is just to say that Internet has been scarce of late. We're in Nord Troms now. Marthe started work today and I've been trying to negotiate Norwegian bueracracy without resorting to the English language. The tax office were less helpful than the police. The police were less helpful than the library.

I've written a post about the boat trip here which I'll put up in a couple of days when we get the house hooked up to the web. So there will be a kind of time lag on what's actually happening. When I claim to be on a boat I'll really be in my livingroom. Think of it like in those films where people go into space and they send their loved ones messages as video broadcasts which are received on the earth days later. Or think of it like traditional post. Either way, it's coming soon.



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Turning 30, Leaving England

On Halloween this year I turned thirty years old. I held a ceremony in Jon Trayner's back garden, where I burnt the notebooks I'd been keeping for the past fifteen years. It marked half a lifetime of learning to be a writer. Before burning each one I spoke a little about the period in which it was written and I read an extract from all but one of them.  

Two days later I left England for Norway, to spend at least a year living in Nord Troms in the arctic circle. A place I have never been before and have difficulty even imagining. Latitude 69.23.

In the weeks before my birthday I had quit my job, sold most of my CDs for around a penny each, and watched two men carry my books, vinyl and furniture out of my South London flat. It all felt uncannily normal. It wasn't until I was on the plane yesterday that any unfamiliar feelings crept in. I looked down at my open hand luggage, half-stuffed beneath the chair in front, and I saw the purple spine of my only remaining notebook. And then for some reason it occurred to me that I didn't have any keys in my pocket, because I had yet to see my house.

Marthe and I spent last night staying with my in-laws in Trondheim. I couldn't sleep, and some time after midnight I was looking out of the window at the pitch darkness, trying to figure out what it will be like to know the sun isn't going to rise in the morning. Tomorrow at midday we'll take the boat from Trondheim, and around three days later we'll arrive in Nordreisa. Then we'll begin to learn about life in the far north. That's what this blog is going to be about.