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.

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

Fire and Water

1.30pm, 11th December 2011

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.