Autumn (Høst)

 

Spring came late and it lasted a week. Some time in June the whole landscape here turned green in a matter of days. Then fog hung heavy over the fjord for a lot of the summer until three or four months later the seasonal tide began to shift again. Patches of red and yellow broke through the green.

As amazing as all of this can look on a sunny day, it was the first time the seasons here felt harsh to me. The plants have hardly started to grow before they have to start dying all over again.   

Autumn seems a good deal longer than the spring, but each day there are fewer leaves on the trees. The streams in front of and behind our house have returned. Night falls earlier every evening. Moths appear out of the darkness and alight on our windows, drawn by our electric light.

I've started night classes for the equivalent of Norwegian A level. Unbelievably, I also passed my driving test, so I drive myself home in the dark listening to The Knife, judging my position on the road by the high-visibility markers the council put out.

The sheep have been herded home and most of the birds have disappeared from the water. Across the fjord, snow has started to fall on the tops of the mountains. It won't be too long before it comes down to ground level. Last week our winter firewood arrived and we stacked it up outside the house. It will be a shame to lose the sun, but in many ways I'm looking forward to the winter. 

Ancestors

Around 60 years ago, a man was out ploughing his field in Alta when he found a large rock with an ornate carving of a human female on it. Over the course of the next few years people discovered a massive amount of local rock art dating from between 7000 and 2000 years ago. Much of it is concentrated in a place called Hjemmeluft, right at the edge of the Fjord, where the creators congregated for thousands of years. There's a museum there, where you can walk out along a raised wooden causeway and see for yourself.

As ever, you can click on these images to enlarge them.

Up until quite recently the carvings were painted red to make them more visible. Now this is considered bad form, so any newly found carvings are being left untouched and there is a project underway to remove the paint on the others. Without the paint they look like this:

Many of the images depict animals, people and boats. Although some seem a little cryptic, it's amazing how easy it is to recognise many of the motifs. These people could communicate a lot of information with only a few lines.

My favourite was this image of a man catching a fish (below).  It has been suggested that the bear and the fish are meeting in another world, to which the water is the gateway.

When you think about how long this style of art was practiced in comparison to the later more "realistic" European style of painting and drawing, the latter seems like a tiny anomaly. Especially when you consider the return to abstraction in the 20th Century. That people were meeting up here in the same small area of the arctic and practicing this tradition right through from the late Neolithic period to the start of the Christian calender is mind-blowing.

Even weirder is that I drew those same stick-men when I was a child. You probably did too.