On Goats (An Interview)

Marthe has a full time job as a photo-curator, but has started working part-time on a remote farm looking after goats. I decided to find out more about why she wanted to do this and what it is like. 

You already had a full time job, so what made you want to start working with goats in a barn?

I think there are two reasons. The first one is that although I like my job and I enjoy what I'm doing, it's quite nice to do something completely different. With the goats, I go in there and I'm working 100% the whole time. It's very physical. I have to constantly make sure that all the goats are alright.

Apart from wanting a job that was more active, I remembered that a few years back I actually applied to become a budeie for a summer job. Traditionally, a budeie used to be a young girl working up in the mountains for the summer, living alone and taking care of the cows or goats on summer pastures. I went abroad that summer instead, but there's obviously been some interest in me to work with animals.

Can you give a quick description of what the job involves?

In the summer, when the weather is good, I come to the barn and the goats are all outside. So I go up in the mountains where they're roaming around, and I've got a bell I can ring so they can hear my bell if I can't see them. I also yell for them to come. Sometimes there can be a bit of walking involved, but so far, this early in the summer, they haven't been walking so far away from their house.

It's a really gorgeous feeling when I spot the goats and they start running towards me with their "baaah"s and the bell going "ding-ding-ding-ding-ding." We're both really happy to see each other. I'm happy to see the goats, that I don't have to go trekking to find them, and they're ecstatic that someone has come to collect them.

Then we go back to the barn and it's the milking with an automatic milking machine. I get 12 and 12 goats up to be milked. I have to make sure I don't milk any goats that are ill. If they're on medication I can't mix their milk in with the others', and I also have to make sure that none of the goats have become ill or got hurt whilst they were out. I give them some "power food" whilst they're being milked. It takes quite a long time because I've got 87 goats that I milk. Obviously, there's that little bit of excitement when I get to the end of the shift and it's like, "Have I got the right number of goats today, or did I leave some in the field?"

I also have to make sure that the barn is nice and clean. I feed the hens and rabbits, clean equipment and so on.

How would you characterise goats as animals?

Cute! They're really trusting. They are possibly not the most clever animals in the world, but they certainly know what's going on. They've got their habits. When I milk, I know which goats come first and which are the last ones, and it's always the same ones; my three last goats are always the same three. There's one that likes to run up to the milking ramp first, but then she gets really confused because she always stands there second, so she has to run back and forth a bit so that she can be second. So they're animals of habit, but they're also very trusting and quite cuddly. 

Has working with goats changed your relationship to this place or the animals around us here?

I'm not sure that it has. I guess I'm more conscious of how few people there are left that keep farm animals. There used to be loads of barns here where we live, but now there are only two that keep goats and a couple of sheep farms. There's room for many more.

I think the first time I went into the barn I was afraid that they might bite me or run me down, because 80 animals: there's quite a lot of power there. And they have sometimes crushed me a bit, but I'm not afraid of them. I think in the beginning I was kind of nervous about how they would treat me and how I would treat them, but not anymore. They nibble a bit but they don't bite.

What's your favourite thing about the job?

My favourite thing is when I see them coming towards me, running down the mountainside, all happy. But also, just being physically active and taking care of someone who's dependent on you for their wellbeing.  

Anything else to say?

Only that I would recommend to people to work on a farm for a summer if they could. It's hard physical work, but you learn a lot that you never thought you would learn about, and it's really fun. 

 Many thanks to Marthe for the photos, video and interview. 

Riddu Riddu

Riddu Riddu takes place in Kåfjord, in a valley between two mountains but well above sea level. It's a festival of Sami culture and aboriginal art and music from around the world. This year it was 21 years old. Riddu Riddu is small. It's one of the most important festivals of its kind, but is spread out across only three fields and has just one stage. The main event takes place at the weekend  but throughout the preceding week there are workshops, films and performances.

In a money-raising exercise for the local choir, Marthe and I agreed to volunteer as night security for the festival on Saturday. We started work at 6pm and worked through until 10am. Everyone took turns doing different jobs throughout the night, including watching a roundabout and providing backstage security. Marthe and I were lucky enough to end up working together in a group with one other person.

The first band to play were a Chinese (I think) three-piece who played an intense, repetitive gothy music in weird time signatures. I got the chance to watch some of their set, which was performed to maybe 150 people. They'd come a long way up into the Norwegian mountains for the show and there was something quite wonderful about being one of the few people to see it. On the whole their performance seemed to create quiet confusion, but I really liked what they were doing. 

Harpal, Bill, if you're reading, I miss you gentlemen.

Later there were a group of rockers from Greenland, whose vibe I couldn't get with, and a high-profile Sami band who mixed their folk music with 80s romcom soundtrack stylings. These acts were followed by Narasirato, a band from the Solomon Islands, whose instruments were all made of bamboo. Wearing what looked like traditional tribal dress, they played a lively dance music in which all the notes came from different sized panpipes and tuned percussion. It rained while they played and at that point it was our job to watch the VIP bar, where I was given a dressing down from one of the organisers for not recognising a famous Sami singer who wanted to come in, but that job didn't require three people so I got to see half of the Narasirato performance. They had the crowd with them all the way. I felt happy that I had earlier let one of their members into the backstage area even though he'd forgotten his pass.

Mist settled over the valley for the last act of the night, a group called Totalteatret. I get the impression that these guys played Riddu Riddu around 10 years ago and this performance was something of a homecoming. They mixed storytelling with punk, rap and agitprop, something like an arctic Chumbawamba. Some years ago they had regional hit with a tune about people shooting holes in Sami street-signs. This reminded me of similar battles in Wales, so I guess street signage is often a major issue in areas where a language has been suppressed. The song shared its drum beat with Walk This Way by Aerosmith and Run DMC, and the audience liked it so much that the band played it twice. 

Totalteatret

After Totalteatret were finished there was an exodus from the main stage to the camping area and we were unlucky enough to be stuck on the gate checking wristbands for entry. Marthe was good at this because she's good at smiling, but I struggled somewhat. It's interesting to me that it was mostly older drunks, those of my own age and beyond, who needed to make a point of such mini acts of rebellion as refusing to show their pass and just scowling at me while walking on into the camping area. It was past 2am and I was beginning to get irritable. "Fine, ignore me," I shouted after one of them. "I don't know what you're so proud of. I've been to better gigs on a Tuesday."

But our night was still young and the sun doesn't set here, as you know. We were yet to go litter picking in the camping field, where people played drums and tried to make conversation. Later, around 5am, we were sent up the hill to check any coming cars for festival passes and watch people wandering lost, one foot at a time, out of the gate and down towards the village. Two people found themselves a car to make love in. One man called a taxi and when it arrived he climbed into the front seat and just said, "Drive me home." 

By this point time was like syrup we were swimming through. Minutes expanded while mosquitoes made endless attempts to suck our blood. The end of the final shift found everyone gathered in or around the lavvo, a large tent with a fire in the middle and smoke in the air. Marthe went to sleep and I wandered round in circles.

When it was all over I felt too tired to sleep. The music and festivities seemed a long time ago. On the bus home I tried to jot down a few images in my notebook, but the bus entered a tunnel, I lost my reading light, and that is as much as I recall of the journey.

Backstage Security

Lars

My driving instructor has a moustache. His name is Lars. He drives me out to the edge of town and then we get out and switch sides. I start to drive a car for the first time in my life.

How did I get to 30 without learning to drive? Something to do with an accident I was in, a dislike of motor vehicles, a lack of cash or time, a love of train travel, rather a lot of drinking, a lack of necessity, a deep disinclination...

Lars wants me to drive up into the valley. He says we don't worry about what others are doing. He tells me I need to practice shifting gears. He says I should take my foot off the break just before the car stops. He seems surprised at the way I keep killing the engine. He doesn't enjoy it when I start driving in the left lane.

Oh, you drivers. Are you aware how difficult it is, this thing you do in open traffic?

Lars says I need to demonstrate independence. He wants me to gear up and gear down of my own free will. I can't do it though. I don't like it. I want to focus on keeping the car in the middle of the road. We are driving through a cutting at 80 kilometers and hour. He tells me I'm too close to the edge of the road, that my wheels are on the white lines. I look in the wing mirror to try to straighten up, but instead I start swerving off to the side. Lars grabs the steering wheel and gets us back on the road. He tells me never to do that again.

We drive across a small bridge and up some country roads. I grip the wheel and look straight forwards. There are times when I seem to have total control, then others when I suddenly start driving like a drunk. My driving instructor is singing a song. He's building a cabin somewhere around here.

Lars has had many jobs in his life. He drove long distance lorries, he's worked as a plumber and as a mechanic. He didn't learn much English when he was at school. I doubt whether he knows much English at all, which is reassuring in some strange way. He's nearing retirement and firmly believes that it is important to be happy in the morning. He's talking on his mobile now and I shift gears carefully, as if he might not notice. I still don't really understand what the point of it is, this shifting of gears.

Back at the driving school Lars asks me how I feel. We've finished our sixth lesson and I'm still living in fear of the car. I talk for a long time in my patchy Norwegian. I tell him I think I finally learnt how to use a clutch. "You did do that," says Lars.

Lars says he has plenty of time, so long as I have plenty of time.

Fragments

In London, if I ever felt wound up by my lack of time, my lack of creativity or by my own apathy, I used to cross the street and wait for the first bus to Brixton. I might make my way into town and wander around, get lost in art galleries or browse bookshops or sit in the dark of the Renoir and watch a film.

But here the strategy has to be different. Here you focus on small moments and tiny changes. Taken together, they might start to build a picture of peace which you can wrap around you.

You might focus on the way the seaweed seems to fling itself upwards inside the bulge of a wave, flailing wildly, as if to make itself known, then falling back and disappearing into the break. Or the small flowers, whose names you don't know, which have started growing from the soil and in the cracks in the rocks. Or the colour of the light through the trees' new leaves. Or the sheep and their lambs which congregate around your house some time after midnight and decide to sing you awake. They jump between the trees in the absurd late-light.

In my case, it helps to write these things down. In some strange way, that's when they become real. This week I wanted to show you some of these details.

The World Wakes Late

Some weeks ago we moved to a new house. It sits between two streams at the bottom of a slope. We used to have the evening sun, now we're on the other side of the mountain and we get the morning sun. Not that it ever gets dark anymore.

Our house sits in amongst some trees down near the edge of the fjord. One wall of our livingroom is made almost entirely of windows. Sometimes the water out there is calm and clear and gently rippling. It is as if it could absorb your pain. The mountains opposite are almost perfectly reflected in its surface. Later in the same day the water might be streaming past the house until it seems for all the world as if you were standing on the deck of a boat. Today the weather has jumped back a season. While I write this the fjord stretches out like dull grey paint into a mist of snow.

I've starting getting up at 5am. Around that time, some days ago, I watched a heron fly by just metres away. A few days later, while we were getting ready for work, a massive white hare came loping down the hill and around the outside of our house. There were flecks of brown across his back where his fur was starting to catch up with the changing colour of the landscape.

The snow took a long time to melt. Even once it was gone the earth took a long time to recover. It's only in this last week that the grass has started to turn green again, and now suddenly everything seems to have come alive in a matter of days. Rocks have changed colour with moss and lichen, dandelions have appeared near our old house and reindeer have returned to the area. For the moment they're grazing in a field nearby, but soon they will disappear up into the mountains.

The trees are finally growing leaves, and soon our house will be hidden from view. We'll still have a view of the water and the sky, but no longer a view the mountains. We'll walk down to the water when we want to see the landscape. We'll walk the stone beach when the tide is out. 

Draugen

Tromsø art museum has some beautiful landscapes of the North, painted in colours which brilliantly capture the light up here. The permanent exhibition on the second floor houses a really impressive collection of oil paintings. Yet the first time I visited, a month or so ago, I was more struck by a small drawing in the show on the ground floor. It was an image of Draugen - The Ghoul of the Sea - and it was done by Theodor Kittlesen. 

Kittelsen, who died in 1914 at the age of only 55, is famous for drawing scenes from Norwegian folk tales, most notably images of trolls. Whenever I'd seen his work before it had been a bit more cartoonish than this Draugen (slightly different from the one above) and seemed a bit lighter. Not only was this image skillfully done, it seemed to have in it all the feeling of a man lost at sea. Or just the feeling of a man lost. It made me question where Draugen came from, whether he had been something else once, a long time ago.

Not so far from here there is an Island where Draugen is known to have surfaced and taken a man down into the water. The place bears his name.

Once you've lived through a north-Norwegian winter you can start to understand where the stories of trolls came from. Everything is on such a vast scale that it seems reasonable to believe humans share the land with something much bigger. In the darkness it seems very clear that certain stones used to be something else. In the days before electricity and motor transport, how many animals and people must have simply disappeared?

As for Draugen; the first time I stood beside the fjord I felt certain I was waiting for something to surface.

Are any of these things real? That seems like the wrong question. I'm not sure we should be so concerned with what is literally true.

Thaw

When everything is covered in snow it's sometimes difficult to remember that snow is made of water. In Nordreisa snow and water are each as much a part of life as the other, but in my mind, until now,  they have been two separate things. Water is what lies between us and the mountains opposite. It's what comes down from the spring behind the house for us to drink and wash in. It's what turns to light-blue ice under the bridge or on the road into town where your car goes into the ditch. Snow is what falls from the sky and paints the landscape white. It's what you hike through or ski on. It's the thing that sometimes hides the whole world behind a wall of falling fragments and settles on the roofs of houses and the branches of trees.

We're well past the equinox and the sun makes itself known around 3.30am, setting some time after 10 at night. There aren't many clouds up this way at the moment and the snow is starting to melt. Most of the ice is already gone, but months of snowfall takes longer to thaw. It turns into a blanket of brittle glittering crystals before it finds its way back into being water. Where days ago I could walk on the surface, I now fall through to my knees. Sheets of snow which have been hanging like awnings over the edge of houses fall away. Massive clumps come sliding down off the roof and thump on the wooden boards of the house's veranda, where I sit writing this, wearing a jacket, a hat and fingerless gloves.

Everywhere there is the sound of running water and falling droplets. In the distance I can hear sea gulls laughing. These last two weeks there have been birds everywhere. Snow sparrows have appeared, little black and white birds which flit around in groups, and there seems to have been an increase in eagles. All types of water fowl have appeared in the fjord, including some mallard ducks of the kind I used to feed as a child in Swindon's Queen's Park. In the fjord last week we saw either some kind of small dolphins or very large fish which kept breaking the surface of the water around sunset. There was also a theory that they might have been otters, because our neighbours have seen an otter making its way through our garden. So I guess I'm not much of a naturalist if all I can tell you is "there was something down there in the water," but it was quite a sight and that night I dreamt of porpoise and otters the size of sea lions. 

All this and the light constantly refracting on the water tells you winter is truly over. We've made it through our first arctic winter. And you know what? It really wasn't that bad.

Easter Skiing

Skiing at Easter is a kind of tradition in Norway. Outside today there is a constant heavy snowfall, but yesterday the sky was cloudless. We went 13km, give or take. That's not too bad considering I've never gone cross country skiing before.

Alta: Finnmarksløpet

Finnmarksløpet is the world's northernmost sled dog race and it ran for the first time in the year I was born. There are two routes, both starting and ending in Alta, the longer of which goes across to Kirkenes, a town which lies north of Finland and just west of Russia. People come from all over to take part in the race, and this year we were in Alta to see it start too.

We booked a suite in the Park Hotel, a place so nice we decided to stay an extra night, and it turned out that our hotel room had its own roof-terrace overlooking the main street. On Friday night and Saturday morning people brought in and laid extra snow, cordoned off the street and made a track for the dogs with a big inflatable starting gate. Just around breakfast time the race officially opened and a warm-up man came out and did a set of weird and unfunny, somewhat adult oriented jokes to the child-heavy waiting audience.

At around 11 the sledges and dog teams made their way out from the nearby car park, crossed a road and lined up along the track. One thing was clear: while the atmosphere was pretty good on all sides, nobody was quite so excited as the dogs were. These dogs really wanted to start their running. I was surprised at how normal they seemed. Some of the dogs looked like you might expect a husky to look, but many others looked more like a dog I would expect to meet in a local recreation ground than in the pages of Call of the Wild.

For much of the afternoon the competitors took off one by one. I can't claim we saw them all, but we watched a fair few. The longer race went on for around a week and was won this year by Inger Marie Haaland. This made her the second woman to win. You can see a couple of pretty amazing images from one of the chekpoints on Jan Georg Svane's Flickr.

Alta: Borealis

Alta town centre looks a bit like the buildings have been dropped in by air-lift. Around it the residential areas are hidden amongst trees or over small hills, leaving in view only box shaped shopping centres and car parks which give the impression of a kind of sci-fi wild west in the northern wastelands. In the main square between all these blocks of glass and concrete, Laila Kolostyak had built an ice garden. There were strangely shaped snow-penguins with glowing eyes, a dragon which children could climb inside, an igloo and a massive ornate stage made of snow and ice.

After night fell, local children and teenagers put on an abstract movement piece, the story of which was (and I have since read a suggestion that this interpretation is completely wrong, but trust me dear reader, this is how it was...) a tale of a young warrior from the orient who travelled around the northern areas of the globe, collecting elements of the northern lights in a magic cake tin and braving dangers, such as wolves and belly dancers. At the end the warrior opened the cake tin and released the aurora borealis, at which point the rest of the cast came back on stage for their bow, creating a complex tableau in the process, and at the same time people at the back of the crowd let go of a large number of coloured helium balloons with glow sticks hanging from them which floated up into the sky. I told myself not to worry about the plastic, we're in the middle of nowhere up here, it's a drop in the ocean.

The whole thing was a great example of what can be achieved when amateurs and professionals get together to produce something for the community. My personal highlights of the performance were a large bird puppet, the symbolism of which I couldn't fully grasp, but which looked great on the two occasions it circled the action, and the music which accompanied the final section of the performance. This was a kind of Sami joik (a form of traditional singing not too far from yodeling) with a seriously banging beat and bass line underneath it. I would love to know what this piece of music was, so if you know, please get in touch!