E6 to Finnmark

Last weekend we drove to Alta, the largest town in Finnmark, which is the only Norwegian principality further north than the one we live in.

The first part of the journey took us over Kvænangen mountain. Marthe drives that way to work sometimes but I had never been up there before. It was a sunny day and once the road leveled out towards the top we stopped the car and I ran out into fields of snow. In no time I was almost knee-deep. There is no sound up there at all. There is wind all around, but somehow it seems noiseless.

Further on we found a small road which turns off towards Øksfjordjøkulen. That's a glacier which calves directly into the sea and which we saw on the map before we moved here. Until recently it was too dark to make the trip. We ran out of road and parked beside what appeared to be a fish factory closed for the day, then we walked along the side of a fjord until we came to a tiny collection of houses, some boarded up toilets and a sign telling tourists that they were a four hour walk from Øksfjordjøkulen. We climbed up to a natural observation point. The glacier was imbedded in the mountain on the other side of the fjord, a translucent blue under a cover of snow. You can see it in the picture below, up in the background to the right of the yellow house, though the light it holds is a little lost in a photograph.

And so we retraced our steps and drove on into Finnmark, but it was a busy weekend, so I'll follow this post up with two more soon.

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.

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.

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.

Winter Trees

by Sylvia Plath

The wet dawn inks are doing their blue dissolve.
On their blotter of fog the trees
Seem a botanical drawing-
Memories growing, ring on ring,
A series of weddings.

Knowing neither abortions nor bitchery,
Truer than women,
They seed so effortlessly!
Tasting the winds, that are footless,
Waist-deep in history-

Full of wings, otherworldliness.
In this, they are Ledas.
O mother of leaves and sweetness
Who are these pietas?
The shadows of ringdoves chanting, but easing nothing.