—
We always see the Skrova lighthouse when we’re out in the ocean, standing there so stalwart and erect. We pass close by, both on our way out and when we come back in. On the third day I have a feeling that the lighthouse’s deranged eye has begun staring at us.
We would have liked to go ashore to see it up close, but because of the currents in the sound, that’s easier said than done. It’s not so simple to moor such a small boat without hauling it up onto the wharf.
The Skrova lighthouse was built in 1922. During the first decades, two families lived at the station at the same time. That was probably a good idea, since it was well known that lighthouse keepers who spent long periods on their own sometimes lost their minds. Many couldn’t cope with the isolation. Perhaps in an attempt to promote mental health, the Norwegian Lighthouse Association had its own mobile book collection that was moved from one lighthouse to another. Some of these books happen to have ended up in my personal library, including a couple of volumes of Icelandic sagas. When I open one of them and see the logo of the Lighthouse Association inside the cover, I think about the book once having made the rounds of all the Norwegian lighthouses, back when they were manned stations. I picture the lighthouse keeper sitting inside, reading sagas from Iceland in the dark of winter, as the storms slammed against the windowpanes and life at the lighthouse was filled with longing and dreams.
Fog must have been an extra burden, because then the lighthouses had to use sirens to warn of their position. From 1959, they used a so-called super-typhoon. It sent out deep, plaintive signals that could reach into your very marrow, even at a distance of several miles.
—
During the war, the Germans occupied the Skrova station, and a soldier by the name of Kurt supposedly hanged himself inside the lighthouse. That’s something people in Skrova have never forgotten, even though it might be nothing more than a myth.
Lately people have been talking about a much more recent tragedy. Not long ago the ferry Røst went out into the waters between the lighthouse and Skrova. The crew was trying to measure the distance to the high-voltage power line that stretches across the sound, and someone made a fatal miscalculation. From the top of the ferryboat’s mast a seaman tried to measure the approximate height to the line—using a fishing pole. The pole touched the power line, sending twenty thousand volts through the man’s body, killing him instantly.
—
Other countries have magnificent buildings in the form of churches, mosques, palaces, and the like. Skrova lighthouse stands on a little island, just off a somewhat bigger island, out in the ocean. It looks as if it had been airlifted there, all in one piece. Or as if it sprang from the ground on its own, like a plant made of stone, and then grew a little taller each year until it reached the height it was meant to have.
What really happened was far more labor-intensive. The lighthouse itself and the two lighthouse-keeper residences—because they built not one but two big houses on this islet—were brought ashore from boats, stone by stone, plank by plank, in spite of volatile currents and stormy weather. Everything had to be carried by the seamen, construction workers, and engineers.
The reflectors and lenses in the eye of the lighthouse are a happy marriage of several sciences combined. Originally only one demand was made of a lighthouse: it had to be visible from far out at sea, which meant it had to be tall. This functional requirement has created our most harmonious and erect of structures. Their very location—on exposed promontories, cliffs, islets, and small islands at the mouths of fjords—lends the lighthouses an aura of triumph and vigor, as if they were built by a civilization that spreads light in the darkness and is able to defeat the forces of nature. They look best from the sea.
There are two Skrova songs. One is about the lighthouse, as viewed from far out at sea by whoever wrote these words: “Have you ever seen a prouder sight / than Skrova’s lighthouse shoreward / gleaming like a bolt of lightning?”
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In Scotland, a single family is responsible for all ninety-seven lighthouses that were built along the Scottish coast between 1790 and 1940: the Stevenson family. Robert Louis Stevenson, who wrote Treasure Island, Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and other classics, was actually supposed to become a lighthouse engineer, in keeping with family tradition. Instead he became rich and world famous as a writer, but he was also considered the black sheep of the family. Unlike nearly all his male relatives—in particular his great-grandfather, father, uncle, and brother—he did not plan, design, or construct lighthouses. The Stevenson lighthouses were often built on reefs that were submerged at high tide, where the North Sea and the Atlantic Ocean collide and create foaming currents and violent swells capable of washing away nearly everything.
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For almost seventy years, before the Skrova lighthouse was built on the island of Saltværøya, a so-called fishing lighthouse stood on the islet of Skjåholmen, a little closer to the entrance to Skrova. This old lighthouse on Skjåholmen was the first to be built in northern Norway. The kerosene-burning lamps were lit only from January 1 until April 14, during the wintertime and the Lofoten fishing season.
The Scots have the Stevenson family. Here in Norway we have our suitably modest counterpart in the form of the Mork family from Dalsfjord, in Volda on Sunnmøre. Ole Gammelsen Mork worked on his first lighthouse on Runde in 1825. His son, Martin Mork Løvik (1835–1925) was already the building foreman on Skrova when the old lighthouse was constructed in 1856.
The Mork family produced four generations of lighthouse builders. Unlike the Stevensons in Scotland, they were not innovative architects or engineers. In the summertime, the Morks supervised the work teams that erected lighthouses and navigational markers, or built harbors and roads. In the winter, they fished. The early lighthouses were relatively short structures made of wood and stone, while the later ones were slender, sky-high towers of cast iron. Martin Mork Løvik’s son, Ole Martin, built the tallest lighthouse in Norway: the Sletringen lighthouse off the island of Frøya.8
The most famous lighthouse keeper at the Skrova station was Elling Carlsen (1819–1900), who in his day was a renowned inventor and arctic sea captain. He grew up going to sea with his father, who was a ship’s pilot. At the age of three, and in midwinter, Carlsen was taken along on a trip in a small boat from Tromsø to Trondheim.9 In 1863, he became the first to sail all the way around Svalbard. Over the next years, Carlsen discovered more islands farther east, in the Kara Sea, where he established good contacts with the nomadic Samoyedic peoples. And in 1871, on the northeast side of Novaya Zemlya, he found the campsite left by the Dutch navigator and arctic explorer Willem Barents, who had discovered Bear Island and Spitsbergen in 1596. Valuable maps, books, and chests filled with equipment, as well as other items, were brought back to Norway and sold to an Englishman for 10,800 Norwegian kroner, which was a huge sum at the time. The following year Carlsen joined the polar expedition of Julius von Payer and Karl Weyprecht as their ice master and harpooner. The goal was to find the Northeast Passage to Asia.
The expedition was sponsored by the dual monarchies of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. During the first winter the Admiral Tegetthoff got stuck in the ice. Slowly the ship began to break up, and was twisted into pieces. The crew endured hunger, scurvy, tuberculosis, madness, and infighting; some died. After two winters they gave up hope that the ship would ever come free, and they began dragging three small boats across the ice, in the hope of reaching open waters. Even the levelheaded Carlsen lost all sense of equanimity during this period. After three months of inhuman trials, dragging the boats toward the drift ice, they finally made contact with some Russian salmon fishermen on board a schooner off Novaya Zemlya. The Russians took the desperately exhausted men to the municipality of Vardø, in the extreme northeastern part of Norway.
The expedition is recounted in the historical novel The Terrors of Ice and Darkness by the Austrian writer Christoph Ransmayr. For his source material, the autho
r makes use of the Austrian participants’ diaries and memoirs. While their ship was frozen in the ice, Julius von Payer went out on dogsled excursions to the north. That was how he discovered Franz Josef Land, an archipelago consisting of 191 islands in the Arctic Ocean, Barents Sea, and Kara Sea. But when he arrived back in Austria, no one was willing to believe him. He painted landscapes of the icy desolation, but his paintings were not popular, and von Payer died destitute and alone in 1915.
As for Elling Carlsen, Ransmayr writes: “The old man, who has spent so many years of his life in the arctic seas, always wears his white periwig when invited to the officers’ table; on those feast days of martyrs whom he holds in special honor, he pins his Order of Olaf to his furs. (But when the waves and veils of the northern lights flare up in the sky, Elling Carlsen removes everything metallic from his body, even his belt buckle, in order to prevent any disruption in the harmony of their flowing figures and to ensure that the fire of the lights is not directed toward him.)”10
Carlsen was awarded an Austro-Hungarian order for his efforts. In a mini-biography written by one of his contemporaries, the polar historian Gunnar Isachsen, Carlsen is depicted in this way: “In his personal life he was not a happy man, and his two sons met with tragic fates. Those who traveled with Carlsen described him as a skilled seaman and hunter. When he was working on something, he was impossible to satisfy. Otherwise he was a pleasant person; he is even portrayed as unusually amiable.”11
In 1879, Carlsen was put in charge of the old Skrova lighthouse, and there he stayed for fifteen years. Carlsen must have been quite a tough guy. Yet he was also a vain man and deeply religious, even superstitious. He often sported gold earrings, although maybe not when the northern lights appeared.
At the lighthouse station, whenever the storms raged and he sat amid the kerosene fumes from the lamps, staring out at the sea near the entrance to Skrova, he undoubtedly had time to reflect on his life. He had experienced a great deal and seen lands no one had seen before. For him, the ice and the island realms near the North Pole were not a blank canvas but places teeming with life and marked by distinctive local characteristics, and almost no one on earth knew them better than he did.
—
It’s not Carlsen’s old lighthouse that is keeping an eye on Hugo and me. It’s the “new” Skrova lighthouse, which was built on Saltværøya in 1922. Like many other lighthouses from that period, the Skrova lighthouse is painted rust red with two broad white stripes. In my mind the structure looks like a slender, stern person wearing a sweater.
The new Skrova lighthouse was designed by Carl Wiig in 1920. He was born in the old Norwegian fishing village of Gjesvær on the island of Magerøy, far up near the Arctic Ocean in Finnmark, just ten miles or so as the crow flies from the North Cape. His father was a merchant in Leirpollen, a little southwest of the North Cape peninsula. Wiig was only twenty-five and newly hired by the Lighthouse Association when he designed the Skrova tower, although more experienced designers and engineers must have given him guidance and advice. In this instance as well, it was a work team from Volda that did the actual construction. The man in charge was Kristian E. Folkestad.12 His family, from Folkestad, on the other side of Dalsfjorden, had similarities with the Mork family. They too had built lighthouses along the coast for several generations. In the summertime, nearly every farm on Dalsfjorden sent men north to join the work crews.
The school records from Trondhjem’s Technical Institute show that in terms of grades, Wiig was at the very bottom of the class of approximately 250 engineers who took their exams in the period between 1910 and 1915. In other words, an academic loser from Finnmark designed the Skrova lighthouse.13 I myself come from a place in Finnmark that the indigenous Sámi people call Ákkolagnjárga, which, according to sources, means “Greenland shark promontory.” Even scholarly Sámis can’t tell me why. As far as I know, the seafaring Sámis didn’t go after Greenland sharks. Why should they? This type of shark has inedible flesh, swims at a depth of hundreds of feet, and is impossible to handle from small boats. It just wouldn’t make sense.
—
The eye of the Skrova lighthouse stares down at us as we move past at a speed of six knots, like two microscopic dots in the middle of a churning cosmic maelstrom. Whenever we get too far away and lose sight of the floats, Hugo starts up the motor, and we go back. But most of the time we sit in the boat, only half awake, occasionally chatting or else silently following the calm waves of our own thoughts and associations. Neither of us has begun to question our self-imposed task. On the contrary. We know the Greenland shark is swimming below us, and we’re confident that we’ll be able to bring it to the surface.
Seals and porpoises stick their heads out of the water. Maybe they’re starting to recognize us; maybe they’re wondering what we’re up to. We belong on land, they belong in the sea. Every time they’re in shallow water, every time they look toward shore, they see what for them must be a dangerous and unfamiliar element.
The sea shows us a gray-blue and unusually blank face during these days. The water is smooth and pale, almost lethargic, and the autumn is cool and clean. On both sides of Vestfjorden we can already see snow on the highest peaks. The silhouette of the Lofoten Wall looks as if it has been carved with a sharp knife, but otherwise the slopes are softly contoured, without contrasts or shadows. The sky in the southwest shows delicate threads between clearly defined clouds, reminiscent of marble. “Nothing is as spacious as the Sea, nothing is as patient.”14
Mostly we chat about what we’re experiencing at the moment, but when we’re simply waiting and everything is calm, our conversation sometimes switches to bizarre topics. One afternoon I describe how animals from the Middle Ages all the way up to the 1800s could be taken to court for breaking human laws. Dogs, rats, cattle, even millipedes were charged with and jailed for crimes ranging from murder to indecent behavior. Defense attorneys were appointed, witnesses summoned, and every legal procedure of the day was followed. Sparrows were accused of twittering too loudly during a church service. Pigs that had attacked young children were sentenced to death. In France, a pig was dressed in a suit, led to the gallows, and hanged. In 1750, a donkey was found innocent after an unfortunate incident only because a priest was able to testify that the animal had previously led a virtuous life. Today it’s difficult for us to understand why people took these sorts of actions. They may have feared chaos and anarchy and believed that nature was also governed by laws of morality.
Hugo asks me whether I’ve ever heard of Topsy the elephant. I haven’t.
“Topsy the elephant killed two animal handlers and was publicly executed in front of a paying audience in an amusement park in New York in 1903,” Hugo tells me. Pausing for dramatic effect, he then adds, “They put what looked like copper sandals on the elephant’s feet and sent seven thousand volts of alternating current through its body. The original plan was for the elephant to be hanged from a crane, but they ran into some practical problems. The whole spectacle was done for the sake of PR for the park, and the event was filmed by Thomas Edison’s film company. The movie is called Electrocuting an Elephant.”
17
The days of calm, flat water come to an end when a new autumn storm strikes Skrova. Once again we have to take special care to tie up our boat and floating dock securely and then wait until the storm blows over. It arrives from the southwest and sweeps right into the bay. Even the ferries and catamarans stop running. The bad weather keeps me awake at night.
The phantom of the sea howls out in the fjord as he rows his half boat through the darkness of the winter night. Beneath the station the sea slams against the rocks and wharf posts. The wind whistles around all the corners, and the building groans with every stormy barrage. Something—maybe it’s the whole roof—is emitting a deep vibration, sounding like a distant chainsaw heard from inside a cabin. Closed sliding doors are rattling on their tracks, and piercing echoes shoot from room to room throughout the station. Both the sea and th
e wind are blowing through the buildings because there are gaps, cracks, and small openings everywhere, allowing air to be sucked in and creating a draft.
The whole building is filled with sounds, the way a choir or a church organ fills a cathedral. And all the sounds merge in one rich, multivoiced roar. The bright, irregular splashing from under the wharf can be heard above the deep booming from the far side of the bay. The entire station is stretching and creaking like a wooden ship in the process of tearing free from its moorings.
I lie in bed, listening to all of this. Through the roaring outside I notice another sound. It’s closer, not as massive or orchestral; it must be coming from inside the building itself. Something or someone is up in the attic, making a sound that reminds me of sobbing. Did a bird somehow get inside? I try to sleep, but the plaintive sobbing doesn’t stop. For a moment I can’t hear it, and I wonder if I had simply imagined the sound. Then it starts up again. I really should go up there and check, but there’s no electricity or lighting in the huge, stumbling space of the attic. And, besides, I’m freezing. I get a sweater from my bag and put it on. I consider going upstairs, but then I climb back into bed and fall asleep.
Restless foam-crested waves wash through me. I dream that I’m standing at the foot of a steep cliff. Before me stretches the sea, swelling rapidly and about to rise up in a tsunami, which pushes in front of it a wall of things that have been brought up from the seafloor: old shipwrecks, dead whales, flotsam. Octopuses shrouded in seaweed and plastic flail their arms like furies. I see big snipefish and bloated, slimy creatures from the dark depths, along with beasts and monsters found only in old books…Everything is coming toward me. Since I’m standing on a ledge between the sea and a towering cliff, I can’t flee. Then, just as the tsunami is about to reach me, I wake up. Luckily it was only a dream. I suspected as much even while it was going on.
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