The next day the sheriff appeared on the scene. Someone must have phoned him. The long arm of the law forced the three men to shake hands and ordered them to split the bill for the burned-down tent. All three quickly agreed to the terms, and with that the matter was closed.
—
Mette joined us at the skrei-fishing festival at Ankas Gjestebud. She has strong nerves and always enjoys a festive scene. But the boisterous and slightly barbaric energy of that place, crammed as it was with drunken people who normally don’t drink a lot—prompting them to collectively enter a sort of bacchanalian state in which just about anything was permitted—proved too much for Mette. She quickly made her exit.
Hugo and I stayed seated at our table, a bit defiantly because the mood of the place made us nervous. It wasn’t immediately obvious whether this was the world championship in skrei fishing or in drinking. Everyone’s normal reticence had been replaced by an uninhibited, blunt style, which isn’t easy to deal with unless you’ve personally been part of building up the energy level from the start. To cope, we drank a lot of red wine. Fortunately, the festival ended at four in the afternoon, without anyone falling off the dock or getting chased into the water.
I remember the last thing Hugo said as we walked back to Aasjord Station, our shoulders hunched against the snow and wind.
“We’re never holding that festival at our place. Never in a million years!”
—
So it’s that very same festival that is going to be held at Aasjord Station five days from now, and for which Hugo had built his fish-crate bar. The Ankas Gjestebud restaurant has closed down. Mette and Hugo were then asked to hold the championship festival on their property. Because of its size, it’s the most suitable location on the island. When offered this opportunity, they couldn’t say no. They’ve invested a lot of money in the place and desperately need to generate some income. Much more work has to be done on the station before everything is finished, all of which requires huge sums, and the banks also need to be paid. Maybe it’s a bit premature to be organizing such a big festival, but that’s what they’ve decided to do.
Three years ago, Aasjord Station was a real eyesore for anyone coming to Skrova. Practically a stain on the whole island’s reputation. The disintegrating walls and the wharf were in terrible shape, rotting and on the verge of collapsing into the sea. It was a clear signal to the world that Skrova, like thousands of other small communities along the Norwegian coast, was about to go under. Aasjord Station was not a picturesque ruin like an ancient castle. Instead, it was an uncomfortable reminder of the relentless advance of “progress,” which always seems to walk hand in hand with loss of population and general decay. Those who had stayed had their backs against the wall. It was just a matter of time before they would have to admit defeat. The future was definitely not here. Well, maybe that description is not entirely true. The point is, that was the impression broadcast loudly from the grand old fishing station rotting on its poles smack in the middle of Skrova.
Now the new Aasjord Station is going to open its doors for the first time. It’s meant to be a memorable day, not only for Mette and Hugo, and not just for the station itself, but for all of Skrova. The goal is for Aasjord Station to become a community and cultural center for the whole island—in other words, Skrova’s “living room.” Over the years the old fishing station has received countless millions of skrei. What could be more appropriate than for the first event at Aasjord Station, now that it has risen from the dead, to be a festival celebrating skrei fishing?
—
The last days before the big event are very hectic. Hundreds of guests are expected, more people than live on all of Skrova. Folks will come over from Svolvær and Kabelvåg in big RIBs, fishing boats, and even by helicopter. All the hotels in the region are fully booked, because people travel long distances to take part in the world championship. The goal is not to win but to enjoy the whole setting: the beautiful landscape, the hundreds of boats on the water (weather permitting), and the lengthy skrei dinners. Companies from all over Norway bring their employees or business associates to encourage team spirit and enthusiasm. All that said, the parties, and not just the one to be held at Aasjord Station, are the main focus.
—
Mette and Hugo have already been working practically 24/7 for weeks to handle all the planning, ordering, permits, and thousands of practical matters that need to be in place—everything from extra electrical power to applications for a liquor license and permission from the local fire department. Walls need to be whitewashed, more bars constructed, railings put up, rooms cleared and decorated. They also need to put in a kitchen, because they plan to serve whale meat and fish burgers. They borrow a lot of things from everyone on the island, but other things have to be brought over from Svolvær.
Hugo has even managed to get hold of an old boiler, weighing several tons. It took a crane to deliver it to the wharf and then it was rolled through the double doors into the area once used for putting bait on hooks. Since there is no drivable road to Aasjord Station, anything over a certain weight and size has to be brought by boat. The Havgull, formerly owned by the Aasjord family, lowers a pallet with 1,512 cans of beer, plus a tank holding 260 gallons of diesel oil for the heaters, from its deck down to the wharf.
—
It’s obvious that all of Skrova wants the celebration to go well. Mette and Hugo notice that the island’s most influential residents have taken the event under their wings, secretly pulling strings if the municipal bureaucracy proves to be unnecessarily obstructive. Huge men arrive, dragging heavy items. People I’ve never seen before—since Hugo usually keeps to himself here on Skrova—are running around everywhere. It’s almost as if everyone has an innate understanding of what has to be done. Watching Aasjord Station preparing for the party, with people eager to help practically popping out of the floorboards, makes me think of the Disney film Cinderella.
Even the weather is showing its best side, with clear skies and the perfect dry conditions for the skrei. The sea is blue and white, like in a beer commercial. By the time the hired musicians arrive by ferry from Bodø on Friday afternoon, almost everything is ready.
27
By ten in the morning small groups of people are already drifting into the rooms. Some of them probably haven’t been inside Aasjord Station in forty years, and they’re curious to see what it looks like now. All day long steady streams of guests arrive. Several restored old fishing boats, manned by youthful retirees who have hung skrei to dry from the masts and rigging, tie up along the newly restored wharf.
Over the years, some of the guests have developed a certain reputation for showing off their brawling skills at parties. Big guys with hands that make a pint glass look like a small water glass. Many drink heavily; some had been hitting the bottle for days. But no fights seem to be brewing. The atmosphere is friendly, if not deferential.
Most of the guests who stay for a long time are from the local area, meaning both sides of Vestfjorden. Hugo spots a man he hasn’t seen in fifty years, not since he was on summer vacation, visiting his great-grandmother in Fleines up in Vesterålen. Hugo tells me that when it was hot, the other boy would wear brown long johns under his shorts. And the boy had a pet crow. When they end up standing next to each other, Hugo suddenly turns to him and says, “Do you know someone who used to have a pet crow?”
The man gives a start. He’d almost forgotten about that.
Out on the wharf I happen to fall into conversation with a fisherman from Hamarøy. He does a lot of halibut fishing, and he tells me that it’s so frustrating when Greenland sharks get into the nets and tear them to shreds. If Hugo and I don’t have any luck on our own, we can go out with him, because there’s certain to be plenty of Greenland sharks where he is. I take note of his name but tell him that Hugo and I probably need to do this our own way.
—
Everyone is eating and drinking. The supply of hard liquor disappears so fast that you’d thi
nk this was Great Liquor Day. We have to order more from Svolvær. The most frequently heard comment all afternoon is “The booze is coming on the ferry.” When the ferryboat finally enters the bay, many alert pairs of eyes follow its progress toward Aasjord Station. An elderly man wearing a captain’s hat orders fifty shots of aquavit with a sardonic grin. He and his small group slowly down every single one, then go out to board their boat. In the meantime, the tide has gone out, so they have to climb down from the wharf. Those guys have done the same thing so many times before that they hardly need to be conscious at all.
As they leave, a sixty-five-foot-long Viking ship, built in the traditional manner, comes sailing into the bay, docking at the Aasjord wharf. It’s a newly built vessel with a dragon’s head at both ends of the symmetrical hull.
—
There’s a milder, more positive mood spreading through the crowd than last year. Just like before, the mood is self-propagating. The difference is that now it’s on an upward swing.
Almost all evening the sky is starry and clear over the Lofoten Sea. As the party winds down, I go for a walk along the wharf. A few snow crystals drift slowly down over the dark rooftops, over the docks and the rocky shoreline of Skrova. The blues music coming from the old saltery makes its way into the most distant crannies of the station; the thump of bass guitar rises up to the attic and sinks down among the wharf posts. The sound hovers over the water in the bay, where the current is constantly moving, and continues out into Vestfjorden.
Skrova is usually completely silent in the evening. With the exception of the wind and a refrigeration unit or a fan that’s always going outside the Ellingsen station, there’s rarely a sound. The seagulls hardly ever make much noise, since they rarely have to fight for food. Right now the music and laughter inside blend with the airy snowflakes slowly drifting down to melt in the sea. On the bottom, the skrei are swimming, waiting to spawn.
The windows of Aasjord Station are glowing faintly, and a lantern hanging from the mast of a boat casts a gentle light over the white façade of the buildings. Is this the first time in history that a dried fish warehouse has been artificially heated? After so many decades of silence and decay, the resurrected station emanates a new energy, like when a new year settles in, driving out the previous one. I think of the whole Aasjord Station as a huge invisible clock that stopped decades ago. Tonight it has started to tick again.
28
It takes us two days to clean up. After that we can focus on our hunt for the Greenland shark. The fourteen-footer is now in considerably better shape, since most of the ice in the double hull has melted, and the boat has been pumped out. But in the morning an icy gale blows in from the east, and Vestfjorden turns white. We can forget about going out. A steady wind creates sharp ice crystals, which glitter in the low winter sun.
We’ve had a Greenland shark on the hook before, and it will happen again. But not this time. The weather doesn’t improve before I have to head back south. During my stay here, the shark hook didn’t even touch the sea. But the skrei sway in the cold wind. And that is a satisfying, even beautiful, sight.
Spring
29
Spring arrives, and once again my internal compass points north. As the Norwegian author Rolf Jacobsen writes in his much-quoted poem: “Long is this country / Most of it to the north.” But when you arrive in the north, most of it is actually south.
Of the four directions, north has always been the one most enveloped in mystery. Until recently, the extreme north was a place that lay beyond the horizon and way out of reach. How it was depicted was limited only by the imagination. The story of the mythic north began early with the prominent Greek astronomer and geographer Pytheas of Massalia. In the fourth century BC, he sailed from the Mediterranean to what is today England. He continued northward along the British Isles to the northern tip of Scotland. From there he set a northerly course for six days, until he came to an unknown land—a place that was completely dark in the winter, while in the summertime the sun shone round the clock. The people were friendly and had a number of peculiar customs. It was foggy, and the sea was frozen over. Pytheas called this land Thule.
Everything Pytheas wrote has since disappeared. Fragments of his annals have survived only because they were mentioned in other works. But people have continued to discuss his travels for more than two thousand years. Where exactly was this place that Pytheas visited? Was it the Orkneys, the Shetland Islands, the Baltic, Iceland, Norway, or maybe Greenland?
In the opinion of the Greek geographer Strabo, the whole story was pure fiction and Pytheas was a charlatan. Everyone knew that the British Isles constituted the northernmost inhabited area in the world. Only Ireland was more barbaric. There men lay with their sisters, and they ate their own parents when they got old. Therefore Pytheas’s mysterious land of Thule had to be mere invention.
But the myth of Thule only grew bigger over the centuries. The Roman poet Virgil used the name Ultima Thule—meaning the most distant and farthermost Thule, a shadowy world in the far north. The land on the way toward the night.
The famous Norwegian explorer, scientist, and diplomat Fridtjof Nansen didn’t have the slightest doubt. Only one place or region fit all the details we have from Pytheas’s description, and it wasn’t the Shetlands or Iceland. It had to be northern Norway. Although maybe not everything matched, because the frozen Arctic Ocean that Pytheas described in his account did not fit. But then again, the North Atlantic could have been significantly colder twenty-four hundred years ago. Nansen also suggested that the Norwegians could have told the Greek about the Arctic Ocean, possibly when Pytheas traveled along the coast of Helgeland or even farther north. There he might have experienced the midnight sun. Maybe Thule is the island of Værøy, which Hugo and I can glimpse far out at sea when we take up position near the Skrova lighthouse.
Nansen also wrote about the Hyperboreans. According to Greek mythology, these people lived north of the north wind, near the northernmost sea where the stars went to rest and the moon was so close that you could see all the details on its surface. The Hyperboreans would sometimes invite the god Apollo to attend a dinner and a dance. Some claimed that an enormous temple existed in that land. It was shaped like a sphere that hovered in midair, borne by the winds. The Hyperboreans were also very musical, and they spent most of their days playing the flute and lyre. They knew nothing of war or injustice; they never got old or fell ill. In other words, they were immortal. When they grew weary of life, they would throw themselves off a cliff, with garlands adorning their hair.
Thule, the Hyperboreans, and other mythic stories about the north are not marked by desolation but rather by beauty, purity, silence—and a great longing for all these things. The unknown north was a sort of haven or refuge for something exalted, something we could not exploit, something virginal and pure—as in innocently virtuous.
Thule is no longer a dream of somewhere beyond everything else in the world, but it’s still a place for which we long.
—
In mid-May I find myself once again on board the catamaran that will take me from Bodø to Skrova. Cold, mineral-rich water has been stirred up from the depths by ocean currents and winter storms. The sun has given the sea new life, and the ocean flora and plankton are blooming in vast numbers.
Outside Skrova the water is a milky light green. Many seas are named for their characteristic color. The Red Sea probably got its name from the reddish algae. The White Sea is covered with ice most of the year. Storms transport sand particles from the Gobi Desert to the surface of what is called the Yellow Sea. No one can say for sure how the Black Sea got its name, but it originated in Roman times. Maybe the Black Sea is actually blacker than other seas because it contains more freshwater. Today the waters of the Baltic Sea, the North Sea, and many Norwegian fjords, in particular, are becoming darker as they are being overfertilized by organic matter that absorbs light. A rise in temperature reinforces this development. If the water gets too da
rk, many of the ecosystems will be damaged or destroyed, but the jellyfish will thrive.1
What is the real color of the sea? Over the years, some cantankerous people have tried to dispute the commonly held view, especially among artists, that the sea is blue. They have admitted, almost begrudgingly, that the water does look blue from a distance, under certain circumstances. At least when the sun is shining. Early in the morning the sea is usually a uniform pearly gray. And in the evening, when it’s calm, the water reflects the blood-red sunset. Otherwise the color of the ocean changes with the depth, the conditions at the bottom, the salt content, algal growth, pollution, silt from the big rivers, and light from the sky overhead. Various combinations of these factors can lend different hues to the water. The old arctic sea captains knew that the ocean currents from the south bring water that is blue, or bluer than the waters of the Arctic, which is often green.
—
Right now, the green color of Vestfjorden is caused by the year’s first blooming of coccolithophores, a type of flagellate, which are single-celled, chalk-forming plankton propelled forward by a whiplike tail or flagella. They can be found by the thousands in every drop of water. Under a microscope, the body of flagellates look like round pebbles with filigree patterns and structures. Normally these types of algae don’t appear in such abundance before later in the year, but the sea around us is changing.
Just as most animals on dry land feed on grasses and other plants, most organisms in the ocean live on plankton. Plankton does the same thing that plants do on land, that is, bind enormous amounts of carbon and produce oxygen through photosynthesis. A particular type of blue-green algae is so productive and abundant that scientists have estimated that this organism alone produces 20 percent of the oxygen on earth. Its existence wasn’t even known to scientists until the 1990s. Plankton plays a major role in making the earth habitable. We owe an immeasurable debt to something we can’t see—something that most people know almost nothing about.
Shark Drunk Page 18