Arctic Safari

   

Last Thursday some friends arrived on the Hurtigruten from Trondheim. We met them when the boat came into the harbour in Skjervøy at about 11pm. Skjervøy is an island town, and connecting it to the mainland is a bridge with a long single-lane road across it. I remember being in the passenger seat across that bridge in high winds on the day we first set out to find our new home in North Norway. That day it seemed we were driving insanely high up. This time I was driving, and though the bridge isn't quite as altitudinous as I recalled, you certainly wouldn't want to fall from it.

The weather is getting warmer now. The road surface is turning from a layer of ice to a blanket of slush, so careful driving is required. The sun sets late, but by the time we left Skjervøy it was dark out. A little after the bridge, I was rounding a corner when I sensed some movement out of the corner of my eye. To the right of the road, on a snow-covered slope, some dark shape was heading downwards. I slowed the car as a massive animal loped into the road just metres ahead of us. It's difficult to be objective, but this thing seemed bigger than the car (and we drive a Chrysler). Its head was enormous. Where antlers would normally be it had a pair of stumpy horns.

This was the first moose I've seen since I moved here a year and a half ago. Marthe reckons it was a young male. I've been waiting impatiently to see a moose for some time now, so any shock I might have felt evaporated with gladness. There are loads of them up here. 16 have died in car accidents on one local stretch of road alone since the start of this year. Yet somehow, until last week, they had always avoided me among the trees and out in the darkness.

The moose turned away from us and looked around. It seemed confused to be in the middle of a road. It was perhaps a little lost. Then, clumsily, it clambered off the other side of the road and disappeared into the night. I drove on, unsure if the moose's mother, brother or friend might suddenly throw itself in front of the car.

Another 20 minutes down the road and we saw two more! One moose was waiting for the other to climb out of the road and join it in someone's garden. Then the northern lights grew visible in a patch of sky beyond us, and the closer we got to home, the larger they grew. On the long road to our house, I pulled the car over and we got out. Two shifting pools of green light were visible above us.

On the final stretch of road, a bright white arctic hare jumped out and ran through the light cast by the car. It was close enough to clearly see, but far enough away that we were in no danger of hitting it. I have been wondering recently when the hare would come back. He used to visit our garden last spring, and turned from white to brown to suit the summer when the snow was gone.

If I hadn't been there to experience it with them, I could almost have been jealous of our two visiting friends. It was as if this whole place woke that night to welcome them.

From Sun-up to White-out

People in the arctic spend a lot of time looking forward to the midnight sun, so it can be tough when for half the summer it is obscured by clouds. The end of the dark time was an eagerly anticipated event this year. But when the sun first returned, back in February, it did so under cover of a snowstorm, and it stayed there for several days. When the weekend came, Marthe and I went out for a walk on the mountainside and finally saw the light return. I got my shadow back and the world went technicolour once more. Now the days are only a little shorter than the nights. It's incredible, how fast it turns around.

The weather has been serious of late. Whole weeks of near constant snowfall, broken up by wonderfully clear, cloudless days. Sometimes the wind and the snow together contrive to blot out the whole world. Last weekend we were driving home and the road disappeared completely. You were lucky if you could see as far ahead as the next roadside visibility marker. We drove into a couple of snow banks, but managed to make it home, unlike one unfortunate soul who had abandoned a car at the edge of the road. When we passed it, it was already half buried. 

The road on a good day.

One side of our house is now mostly hidden. The view from our kitchen window is a wall of snow that reaches up to meet the stuff sliding down from the roof. From above the porch hang icicles the length of swords. When the wind gets up it sometimes throws things at our metal roof, and they clatter across into the trees behind us.

Note: Since these images were taken, it has snowed a lot more.

My friend Bill came to visit recently, and I was hoping he would get to see the aurora borealis, but he mostly saw vast amounts of sleet, rain and snow. I haven't seen so much of the Northern Lights this year in general. This is partly because our house doesn't look out into an expanse of sky like the old one did. I've recently realised that on clear nights they are often directly above our house, so I need to go out and check more often. 

Bill Kenny and me cooking lunch with petrol.

I just finished a long Norwegian project on Knut Hamsun. Everyone has to do some self-directed coursework in the third year and I chose to write about three of Hamsun's early books: Hunger, Pan and Victoria. Although Hunger is the most famous one with English speaking audiences, and is an excellent book, I really recommend Pan. It's quite unlike any other book I've read, especially from that period. It was interesting writing at length about literature in another language. I'm hoping now that I've got that out of the way, I can update here more than once a month.

In other news, young goats are being born! Marthe doesn't work in the barn in the winter, but she went to visit the little ones. I suppose this means that spring is close at hand.

Snow and Time

It started to snow over a week ago. First there was a thin layer over everything and everyone said it would soon melt, but then there came snow storms so heavy I couldn't see a thing when driving home in the dark. Pretty soon everything was covered, the car was frozen shut and difficult to extricate from the driveway, we saw other people's cars in the ditches on the way to work and everybody started wearing their winter boots again.

The view from our porch now

After the first batch of snow

In this part of the world my relationship with the seasons is turned on its head. In England I love the autumn but fear the winter. Here the winter seems like the natural state of things and the summer a weird hiatus. Already the moon is massive in the sky, even in the daytime, and the landscape glows in a dark blue colour all night. As many challenges as the ice and frost bring, I'm glad that I'll be here for another winter cycle.

There are no street lights where we live now. To get to our house you have to leave the road and walk down a small hill to the waterside. If we don't leave the lights on it can be difficult spot our home in amongst the trees.

In other news, today is my birthday. That means it's one year since the events I talked about in the first post here on this blog, and very soon it will be a year since we moved here. If I think back to those days before we set off on this trip it feels like a lifetime ago. I think one way to make life seem a little less short is to make sure a lot happens between one birthday and the next.

Darker Still

Driving back from town today at around 2.30, the road was nearly invisible beyond the falling snow. As we rounded a bend the house on the left hand side of the road suddenly disappeared. I looked across in time to see the lights in the windows of the house opposite turn dark orange before that house too fell into darkness.

Power cut.

The streetlights were gone, the porch lights were extinguished and the moon was hidden behind the snow clouds. The only light then was what came from the headlights of our car. Any houses close enough for our lights to hit them looked uninhabited, abandoned and cold as we passed. Like humanity had disappeared with the electricity. It was the first time I'd thought about how people might have dealt with polar winter not so long ago, before electric lighting and under-floor heating in the bathroom were common.

My computer tells me it has thirty minutes of power left. I don't know how long the battery on the modem will last. It's actually quite nice sitting here in the candle light, listening to the fire burning. 

Outside very little is visible: The streetlamps far away on the other side of the fjord, where the power must be on another part of the grid. Out on the water a small boat is scanning the shore with its search light, maybe trying to make its way in to land.

Marthe in the dark

The view from my house now