An update of sorts

Sorry I've been away so long.

Arctic Dusk

This is proper winter now. The sun has gone. No more sun this year. We still have some hours of light each day, but the sunrise bleeds into sunset which fades into darkness. 

I was driving home at 11.30 and looking at the unreal light-blue of the fjord and pink wash of the sky. I thought to myself that these were colours which ought really to have their own names. I never saw them before I moved here. I went outside with a camera to photograph what I could, slipping twice on the ice at the edge of the fjord. From next week until spring all pictures will come out in shades of blue.

By two o'clock the moon was high in the sky, reflecting in the fjord and lighting up the snow. Streetlights reflect in the water opposite us, making our cabin feel a little less remote. 

We've been burning up a good deal of our wood supply. Last night we lay in bed with the door open, watching shapes from the flames in the living room dancing on the bedroom ceiling.

When most of the day is dark it often feels much later than it is. You keep thinking it must soon be time to go to bed, but then you look up at the clock and discover it's 6.30 in the afternoon. Still, you get very little done. People go into semi-hibernation at this time of year. Life gets quieter. Sleep is your friend.

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. 

Spildra

From the island port,

The gravel road curves

In the cliff's embrace

To where the clouds kiss the mountains

In a Conan Doyle world

And three birds swim silent

On a hidden lake. 

Through brush and tree branches 

We choose to fall

And fight our way downwards

In an endless dusk.

The beach is empty 

Save for us.

Crows cry our coordinates from above.

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. 

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.

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.

Djupvik

This week it has been light. No sun yet, but light still. And this has changed where we live.

On Wednesday I went and took a biology course in Norwegian at the adult education centre. I found out I knew woefully little about the workings of the human heart. Walking back into town, I saw an eagle circling up above the mountain and I stopped to watch it for a time. They can move such a distance in such a short time. I felt very earthbound for the rest of my walk. 

Living out here, you would think we would be surrounded by wildlife, and we probably are, but we've seen very little because of the time of year. Even the reindeer are elsewhere for the winter. I fully expect to meet more animals as the spring comes.

Today we drove to visit a woman I work with and her husband in a small village called Djupvik. When she was giving me directions to her house she said, "You just follow the road and keep going until you come to a sign which says Djupvik. It's the last house on the left." There is only really one road here. It's called the E6.

We stopped a couple of times on the way to take pictures around a place called Rotsund, which seems like a fishing village. I was using a broken camera and could barely get it to work. In the end it didn't matter so much that I hardly had the chance to take any pictures, because it's difficult to make an ugly photograph there.

Boats Outside Rotsund

Mountains Outside Djupvik

Then we drove a little further down the road and found the people we were heading to see. They live in a place where the tourists always stop to take pictures. They have a boat and they go out on the water, where whales swim over to inspect them until they switch off their engine. Moose live behind their house. (I am jealous of anyone who has seen moose in the wild, but everyone assures me I'll see one soon.)

They come from Alaska, but lived in Finland for many years. They welcomed us to their house and gave us coffee and soup. It was a good way to pass a Sunday afternoon.

Alone in Storvik

Marthe went to England a few days ago, to attend a conference on Arctic photography. It's the first time I've been alone here. Without her I'm reliant on the school bus to get to and from town. I'm usually the only adult on there, watching Daffy Duck and getting carsick with the kids. On Thursday I missed it and had to get a taxi home, which cost 500 kroner (50 pounds). Yesterday I skipped a meeting at work and sprinted to the bus stop as fast as I could. There is no bus at all at the weekend.

I went a little way up the mountain this morning. Not far, because nobody knew where I was. I found a place on top of a rock where I plan to have lunch tomorrow before dark. It's not such a bad thing having no sun when you have a few hours of cold blue light.

Tonight I went out for a walk again, down to the water, to look at the stars in the clear night sky. With the snow on the ground and the lights from the road above, it was bright enough that I could see quite well, but I decided to steer clear of the Ghost House by the shore anyway. I started to wonder why it is that we are automatically scared of old and empty houses, in the same way as we have an instinctual aversion to rats. And why, if ghosts don't exist, do people of all cultures have some concept of them? Basically, I started freaking myself out. I think this is because I'm aiming to write a ghost story soon. Anyway, I started heading up towards the road and just as I was nearing the fence I came across a sheep's skull, half buried in the snow.

The Ghost House in lighter times.

It feels really remote here now. It would take me a day to walk to the nearest shop. Since I have more than enough food, that's quite an enjoyable feeling.  I tend the fire, read, catch up on emails and letters and play the guitar. I've written a simple piece of music to try to evoke the place where we're living. You can listen to it below.

Storvik by Vince Stephen

Christmas and New Year in Tromsø and Trondheim

I don't intend to take prolonged breaks from posting here. My aim is to update this blog approximately once a week, because otherwise experiences stack up and it becomes impossible to know what to write about. This is exactly what has happened now.

Before and over Christmas I was probably as busy as I've ever been. But also, one of the reasons I didn't write here was that I had promised to say something about Tromsø, but I had no idea know what to say.

Marthe in Tromsø

My impression of Tromsø as a town is very positive. Small as it may be, it's the largest town in this bit of the world. It has a fantastic library and it's a place I could imagine moving to in the future. The problem is that when we visited in December we spent the whole day trying to do all our Christmas shopping in one go.

My energy for consumption wanes after something like an hour and a half, regardless of where I am or how much shopping might yet be to come. As a result, my main impression of that trip was a revelation which came to me in a shoe shop in a shopping centre. The PA was playing Last Christmas by Wham. I was sitting down for a minute, far too hot in my coat and woolen hat, and I was listening to the part where this incredibly bad lead keyboard line enters the song. I was listening to the bells jingling in the background, and focusing for the first time on the truly idiotic lyrics. I was wondering what on earth they thought they were doing when they made it. Then I realised: it was always intended to be a bad song.

This probably seems obvious to other people, but somehow I had always thought that musicians, singers and producers who made bad records did it by accident. Late last year in a shoe shop in Tromsø, it finally hit me that people make records like that because they hold their audience in contempt. Listen to that song and you can't help but imagine them in the studio, bent over laughing at how shit that synth sounds, cracking up at how nonsensically inane those words are. And you can't help but shiver to hear George Michael's cynical laughter echoing down the years.

But there were beautiful moments none the less. There were street decorations. There was a little contemplation room outside the church, and a snowlady with large breasts and her very own snowcat. One of the best things was the way, for a couple of hours, the sun still lit the skyline from behind with wonderful colours. Where we live it was constantly dark at that point.

Contemplation Room

Snowlady and her Snowcat

Light!

For Christmas I went back to England for a brief but pleasant family visit. It somehow felt colder there than I expected. For New Year I flew to meet Marthe in Trondheim. It seems that for Norwegian New Year almost every individual buys an amount of fireworks which would be considered appropriate for a good sized official display in England. We stood on a bridge and watched the sky above the town fill with coloured sparks and streaks in every direction. Then the air around us grew thick with smoke. I caught some falling ash in my eye, but there was no lasting damage.

Flying back to Nordreisa in a storm was somewhat terrifying. Below is an aerial picture of the village where we live, taken on that journey. If you look at the water, normally quite still in all weather, you can start to get an idea of what the wind was like.

Storvik from above.

We landed unharmed, but the wind speed was such that the plane could not approach the building and it was too dangerous to walk. We were shuttled in groups of four to the terminal. On our journey home I opened the passenger door and the wind blew it out of my hands and back off its hinges. I jumped out to close it again and I could hardly stand up in the storm. The door was mashed and the wing was bent. Weather like that demands a certain level of respect.

Back in Storvik, each day grows slightly less dark. I think it's less than a month now until there will be a minute or two of direct sunlight. The snow is falling and I'm beginning to think about what I will write this year and how the landscape might affect it. I wish anyone reading this a happy 2012.



PS. I made a list of the books I read in 2011. You can find it here. I would love to exchange views and impressions with anyone who has read any of them too.

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.

Dark Times

As far as I know, the Norwegian word mørketid doesn't have a definitive translation. It means dark-time or time of darkness. This period began just after we arrived here, and for the first week or so it seemed to include a surprising amount of light. Each day the interval between sunrise and sunset grew shorter though, and now the sun no longer rises. There is still a small period of time around lunch when the sun hides just behind the horizon and the land is lit up but drained of colour. By early afternoon it's gone again.

This situation hasn't been helped by the fact that the weather turned mild last week and melted the snow which serves to make everything visible here in the winter. Only this evening has it started to snow again. Those remaining fools who still need convincing that the world is heating up should have been in Nord Troms last Tuesday when it was ten degrees centigrade. To add to this apocalyptic vibe, a storm is making its way up the coast, a storm bad enough to have been given a name. Bevit should be with us tonight.

Living in a wooden house by the waterside is an interesting experience in high winds. It sounds and feels like a part of the building is certainly going to come loose, as if it's only a matter of time and the best you can hope for is that it won't be the roof. I know this because some days ago we began to get the first intimations that a storm was on the way. The house made so much noise that both Marthe and I had problems getting to sleep. I woke up again at 2.30 and I was not too happy about it. When I got out of bed and looked out of my window the sky above the mountains opposite was beginning to turn a luminous green. I went downstairs to get a glass of water and by the time I came back up there were two large blocks of rough-edged glowing lines of green light in the night sky. I went back to sleep feeling as happy as at any time since I arrived here. 

Small events take on great significance. Our neighbour and her children came by to give us eggs from their hens. Our wood supply arrived and we spent two afternoons carrying it in bags up to the barn. 

In defiance of the darkness the Christmas celebrations have begun, or Solstice celebrations for those of us who observe an older calendar. Marthe has put a glowing star in our kitchen window. Tonight we're going to a local Christmas gathering, which follows Marthe's work-party yesterday. That party took place in a Lavvu - a giant tent with a fire in the middle, used by the Sami people up here in the North - and today that same Lavvu was the site of a Christmas market. It strikes me that all these things are just excuses to bring people together and remind them: Don't worry, it's only a month and a half until the sun starts to come back, until there will be a little more light each day.