Ben Washington and the Mystery of the Buried Treasure

Just over two weeks ago we had our first visitor from England. My friend Ben came to see us and to find out what it was like up here. It made sense to me that he would be the first person to come and visit, since he spends his life on little adventures. They often find their way into pieces of sculpture.

Ben arrived at night, and I was excited on his behalf that he would wake up alone in our house and step out into this landscape in the morning. Later in the day, when I was back from work, we spoke about the environment here. "It's not really anything you can talk about," he said. "You just go out there and you look at it, and you just get it. It's not something you can express." I said I thought it was something that changed with time, that when I had come here I hadn't really understood it at all, having lived so long in the city, but that I felt I understood a little more about it now, and that it was something I was constantly learning.

Ben and I hiked over the hills, from where you can see the mouth of the fjord to where Marthe and I live. The sun went down as we passed the place where I lost my keys and we walked the last stretch through the forest in darkness. We talked about England and how things are there; I felt very much that I might never move back. When I've lived in other places and people have come to visit me I have often seen my surroundings afresh, but that didn't really happen to me this time. Perhaps that's because I haven't been here long enough for it to feel normal yet. But I do feel very at home here now, so perhaps it's just not a landscape you can take for granted.

To celebrate having a visitor, Marthe and I decided that we should try to eat some of the many crabs which our landlord keeps stored in plastic bags in the cellar freezer. Until then I'd had an idea that they would be whole crabs, normal crabs, perhaps the size of a fist. When we got them out of the bags they turned out to be amputated king-crabs' legs, still connected to each other in groups of three - massive bright red monster claws the size of a human head. Frozen, they looked terrifying, like severed alien hands. Ben said they would give him nightmares, but once we'd put them in the fridge to defrost overnight, baked them and hacked our way in with knives, they turned out to make an incredible meal. If you come here, that's what we will offer you. 

The day before Ben left, the three of us went out for a walk along the shore of the fjord. At the high-tide point I found an empty bottle with a scrap of paper inside. When we got it open it turned out to be a map showing the location of some buried treasure. We decided to leave the hunt to somebody else, so we put the note back in, screwed the lid on tightly and cast the bottle back out into the fjord.

 

 

 

That night the Northern Lights came and lit up the cloud cover. We stood in the snow and watched the sky changing colour.