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.

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.

Storslett (after the snow)

The snow came last Sunday in the form of a storm, blowing in over the fjord, obscuring everything, coming down throughout the night and well into the next day. In the morning we drove into town, where Marthe and I now both have jobs. At times I think Marthe was really just driving blind into a chaos of white streaks and wind. Then a day or two later the weather turned mild and it started to rain. The snow began to melt and our roof started to leak. I put out two bowls and a towel out to catch the drops.

Yesterday the snow came back again. This time it was gentle but steady. Christmas movie snowfall. It's covered everything for a second time and I hope this time it will stay, because it really is true that it makes everything lighter. For the few hours in the early afternoon when the sun is properly up it's as bright here as any daylight you've seen. The sky is another colour too. This morning it was a kind of bright blue I've never seen before. It looked backlit. If you saw a postcard of it you would say it had been Photoshopped. As I had hoped, the snow even rescued our garden.

This morning we drove into Storslett, which is where we both work and also where we go to speak to the police or the tax office, to visit a cafe, to use the library, post a letter or buy some food. It's around thirty minutes away and by the standards of the region it's a sizable town, though it's only as big as an English village. We have driven this route almost every day since we got here, but this time I had a very different feeling. It's not easy to explain, but I think that if you come from Swindon it's difficult to see somewhere that looks like this part of the world does at this time of year without feeling that in some way you don't deserve it.

 

Storslett library

The local cafe

The view from the middle of Storslett

Once we were finished in Storslett we drove just a little way out to a place between two mountains, where a Christmas market was being held in a small museum on a farm. We thought we were early, so we hesitantly opened the museum door, only to find it fairly busy inside. People were browsing knitted goods, drinking coffee and eating cake. We joined in and took pictures of each other like the out-of-towners we are.