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.