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. 

Country Folk Are Great

It became clear that our water was not coming back of its own accord. We called our landlord and he called our neighbours. Two local men arrived at our house and set to work trying to defrost our pipes. After a time they realised that the problem lay with the well up on the hill, where we get our spring water. It was frozen and so was the pipe that leads to the house. Lack of snow and temperatures of below -20 will do that.

They called in a third man, busted up the ice with a massive metal stake and set to work with what looked like a home-made defrosting machine. After several hours we had running water again and we were given the job of shoveling snow over the well for insulation, which meant that we didn't feel totally useless. When we thanked them, one of them just said, "Vann må man ha." (One must have water). And off they went into the night.

I don't have any pictures of this process, obviously, but I did get out to take some of the fjord yesterday when it was freezing over in places.

The Ice The Sun The Horse and The Dog

We woke up in the morning and the pipes were frozen. The temperature outside was -18, and the snow hadn't fallen for some time, so it shouldn't really have come as any surprise, but as a child of the late 20th Century I never fail to be appalled by a lack of hot running water on demand. We did all we could to heat up the cellar, where the pipes enter the house. We left all the taps on and we headed out for a walk. Our neigbour, whose husband is away with work, had invited us on a trip up to the frozen lake where the kids go skating at this time of year.

Our neighbours live on a farm with a horse and many goats. When we got over there we found that they had also temporarily adopted a dog. One thing that worries me about farm animals is the way that their faces are like human faces but arranged a little differently; in the case of a horse the head seems much too big and bent out of shape with the nose pushed forward and the eyes to the sides, but basically there's a clear resemblance to a human head. About dogs I only know what I have read in books by Konrad Lorenz, which includes the idea that there are two types. One type is related to the wolf and will accept only one human master in its lifetime (the husky is of this type). The other will naively accept anyone who seems friendly. Our dog, Sheba, seemed to be of the second kind, and she nominated me as her master for the day. With our neighbour's daughter on horseback and with a dog running around me, we set off into the hills. 

When we were walking through the the small valley behind our house, Marthe called to me to stop. "Listen to the mountain," she said. It was true that you could hear it. Shortly afterwards the sun broke over the horizon for the first time this year. The first thing I noticed was that I got my shadow back. The next thing was that there were colours I didn't know had gone missing. I had noticed that throughout the dark period all photographs came out looking blue, but I hadn't realised quite what a limited palette I'd been seeing. Yellow and orange were were suddenly everywhere, but also red, some pink, about half the green spectrum, most shades of brown... and that was just looking at the heather on the ground. There was colour everywhere; it was like I'd had my sight partially restored. 

When we got to the lake it was a light frozen blue. There were deep cracks in the ice, but I wasn't worried about it breaking, because the horse was walking across it. Other neighbours came with their children and built a fire in a circle of stones. Kids skated, people cooked sausages and we looked out at the view. 

The sun was soon gone and it grew colder. I decided to go a little further up a nearby slope and look out across the fjord. The dog, Sheba, came with me. She was faster than I was over the snow, but patient with me. When we got to the top she sat by my side and looked out across the landscape and I understood why it is people go walking with dogs.

The journey back down was not a success. Somehow I took a lot of the slope head-first and after falling for a few meters I hit a tree. I was lying in the snow, the dog was jumping on and around me worriedly, and I heard myself saying, "Man, that really hurt." When I stood up I was pretty dizzy and there were different shades of pain in my jaw, my neck and my back. I found Marthe and we decided to head back to the house and to take our neighbour's daughter with us, as she was crying from the cold.

It wasn't until we got back to the house that I became aware I was missing my glasses and my house keys. I don't think there's any need to lock your house if you live where we live, but city anxieties are hard let go of. We'd left the place intruder-proof. Marthe took our crying six year old friend home while I headed back up into the forest.

The fire was still burning, but the others had left. I made my way up to where I'd hit the tree and I found my glasses sticking out of the snow. I think I might have made a deal with God on the way up without realising it, because the glasses were what I was more worried about. The keys were nowhere to be seen. Marthe arrived and we searched some more, but it was too dark.

We stayed the night at our neighbour's place, where she gave us porridge, we had showers, Marthe drank red wine and I slept for around twelve hours. This morning there were icy gales blowing in across the water and the temperature had dropped to -21. We went up to look for the keys one last time. The winds pushed us across the frozen lake like hockey pucks, we could hardly stand up when searching around the remains of the fire, and the slope where I had fallen was frozen hard.

Back at the house we smashed a window and let ourselves in, just as any self-respecting thief would have done, door locked or otherwise. The pipes were still frozen. We nailed some cardboard over the hole we'd made in the glass.

The winds are still tearing across the fjord. The fire is burning in our stove. They say that the temperature will rise to around Zero on Wednesday, so we hope the taps will then start working.