Sunday 4 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.