No matter what, tests of the Greenland sharks’ livers and blubber proved that the worst, most persistent environmental toxins circulating in the ecosystems accumulate in the northern regions, all the way up to the North Pole, and end up inside the polar animals, including Greenland sharks. Some of the poisons cause species to change gender; others can destroy their ability to propagate and lead to cancers and other diseases. The Greenland shark carries an even higher level of poison than the polar bear—and a dead polar bear is considered toxic waste.
—
Like so many times before, we drift across Vestfjorden in our rubber boat, floating above the seafloor’s unseen landscape of forests, valleys, mountains, crags, deserts, and plains. It’s a clear and calm day, with small ripples shimmering like fish scales. Usually we’re all alone when we drift like this, bobbing in the water. Occasionally we might see a modern little plastic boat fishing in the area. If it’s clear weather, we can see freighters with illuminated wheelhouses gliding soundlessly in or out of Vestfjorden, heading for Narvik along the shipping lane located six miles away. We never see any pleasure boats, but now an RIB is coming straight toward us. It’s hydroplaning and approaching as if aiming for us. Hugo and I exchange glances. The situation makes us think of the time we were on our way out of Flaggsundet between Engeløya and the mainland in Steigen.
It was a clear summer night with calm seas, bright with the midnight sun. We didn’t see any other boats on the water, so Hugo gave the good old fourteen-footer full throttle and headed for the fishing spot we had chosen. I sat in the bow, blocking Hugo’s view forward as the boat hydroplaned. But there was nothing to see except smooth water. We’d made sure of that when we started out. I sat facing Hugo, looking away from the direction in which we were traveling. After ten minutes or so, I saw his face contort as he suddenly twisted his whole torso ninety degrees and yanked the tiller of the outboard motor so the boat abruptly veered to port, while gravity threw me toward starboard. I barely managed to hold on. A hundredth of a second later, because this was the sort of situation that happens in slow motion, I found myself staring straight into the terrified faces of two men. They were so close I could have shaken hands with them. As we brushed past their little boat, both men were standing up, and when the waves struck the side of their vessel, they were in danger of falling overboard.
The two men had set out for the same reason we had. Ostensibly to go fishing, but mostly just to be out on the water on such a perfect summer night. For ten minutes they’d watched us coming closer. They must have grown increasingly anxious, exchanging glances and asking each other when we were going to change course. Maybe they assured each other that we must have seen them. The alternative was unthinkable.
If our small plastic boat had struck their small plastic boat, in the middle of the fjord, with perfect visibility and without even a gust of wind, it would have been the most idiotic accident to occur along these coasts in decades. All four of us could have been mown down, and the investigators would have had to consider whether we had deliberately struck the other boat.
After we had a good laugh over it, I asked Hugo, “What’s the likelihood that two boats would run into each other like this by accident? Zero chance, right?”
“You’ve got it ass backward,” he replied. “They were in the middle of the shipping lane, which is narrow and flanked by shallows. Since we failed to see them right off the bat, the chance of us running into them was not negligible. It was sky-high.”
When we were only a few yards away, Hugo had suddenly caught sight of two men running back and forth in panic on either side of my head, like in some frenzied puppet show. Then they stopped moving, and one of them tried to start their outboard motor.
The next day we ran into those same guys at a concert at Steigarheim. One of them came over to Hugo, looking angry, and asked him what the hell we were doing. They’d been just about to jump into the water. And they weren’t wearing life vests. “We were,” Hugo told him, adding coldly that everyone is legally required to wear life vests out at sea.
Now the RIB approaching us at great speed not far from the Skrova lighthouse veers off in plenty of time and continues around the island.
—
As usual, the strong currents carry us far away. Hugo starts the motor, and we head closer to land to catch some fish for dinner. As we go, he teaches me a few new words. He points toward shore, where a promontory sticks out in our direction and continues underwater, far out into the sea. Hugo says that the Norwegian word for this type of promontory is a snag. Many fishermen still have a rich vocabulary to describe various seafloor conditions—or, for that matter, significant nuances in the halo around the moon.
The landscapes on shore naturally continue underwater. If we drained the ocean, this would be much more evident. But where would we put all that water? I happen to think of a story from ancient Greece. If I remember correctly, an old king had made a wager, and if he lost, he would have to empty the sea of all its water. After a while the winner of the bet came to visit and asked when the king was planning to start emptying the ocean. The king replied that he was just waiting for the lucky winner to stop the water from running into the sea from all the rivers and streams, since that particular task had not been part of the bargain.
There’s a lot of fish along the sides of the snag, and after a few minutes we’ve caught two kelp cods for dinner. Like the skrei, they are in the cod family, but the kelp cod are stationary. They have a deep red color, making them very hard to spot by predators in the red, yellow, and brown kelp forests.
On a day like today, Vestfjorden may seem like a paradise of purity. That’s far from the truth. Even though these are open waters with such strong currents that little debris is left lying around, we do see discarded plastic items floating in the sea. Maybe from local communities, maybe from some distant coast. The world ocean is an interconnected element.
Twenty years ago a container ship on its way from China to the United States ran into a winter storm in the Pacific Ocean. Some containers came loose, broke open, and landed in the sea. Since then 28,800 plastic bath toys—blue turtles, green frogs, and yellow ducks—have been carried all around the globe by the ocean currents. One writer followed the yellow plastic ducks around the world and back to the factory in China where they were made. He titled his book Moby-Duck.9
Like all other types of plastic, the ducks don’t sink. At least not until they dissolve into microscopic particles. Plastic, and many of the toxins it contains, won’t break down for thousands of years. Some comes from the rinse water in washing machines when we wash synthetic fabrics. Because of the ocean currents, gigantic islands of spinning plastic collect at specific locations, where they whirl around in spirals. One such maelstromlike island of plastic in the Pacific Ocean is reportedly half the size of Texas. Another is piling up in the north, in the Barents Sea. There, even the crabs have plastic in their stomachs. When the plastic disintegrates into microparticles, it’s ingested by plankton, or it sinks to the seafloor, where the bottom animals eat it.
So this is not a cute story about yellow rubber duckies bobbing around in the big bathtub of the ocean. When scientists examine Norwegian seabirds, they find that nine out of ten have plastic in their stomachs. The birds can’t digest the plastic, and it prevents them from taking in nutrients. Every year more than a million seabirds die, as well as more than a hundred thousand marine mammals, because of plastic garbage.
Cod, which swim around with their mouths open, can also end up with their stomachs full of plastic. In the Mediterranean, young sperm whales sometimes wash ashore, and the cause of death often remains a mystery. But when one such sperm whale was examined, they found thirty-seven pounds of nondegradable plastic in its stomach. The most likely cause of death was big sheets of heavy plastic from the numerous greenhouses in southern Spain.10
—
Here in Norway, we too give the sea a good beating. In the fjords, the fish farms are allowed to relea
se as many toxins as they like. Trawlers drag steel dredges across the seafloor, leaving behind a desert. Until recently, we thought coral reefs existed only in the tropics, in relatively shallow water. But there are countless cold-water reefs off the Norwegian coast.
Way off the coast of Lofoten, near Røst, is the largest deep-sea reef ever discovered anywhere, so far. It’s close to twenty-five miles long and two miles wide, situated in rugged terrain at a depth of more than one thousand feet near Eggakanten, where the continental shelf ends. The Greenland shark is by far the longest living vertebrate, but no large organisms on earth live longer than corals. The ones near Røst (which belong to the genus Lophelia) may be eighty-five hundred years old—considerably older than the age assigned to the earth itself only a century ago. Fishermen have always known that coral reefs are teeming with life. Large numbers of fish and bottom animals find food and protection in the forests of coral, among the red or pink branches of bubblegum coral (Paragorgia arborea), which can grow to be sixteen feet tall. But when a trawler drags a steel dredge along the bottom, the coral is destroyed in a matter of seconds. Full trawling nets are hauled up from the reefs, but the method can be used in that spot only once.
The colorful spawning grounds are literally as fragile as porcelain. When the coral reefs are shattered, it takes several thousand years for them to be restored to the same size. It would be hard to think of anything that is more shortsighted. It’s like sawing down trees in orchards to harvest the fruit or nuts.
It’s true that today some of the big reefs off Norway are protected areas. But many have not yet been mapped, and new deep-sea reefs are regularly being discovered off the Norwegian coast and in the Barents Sea. By then they’re often badly damaged by trawlers, and the broken skeletons of coral forests are strewn all around. Oil companies have received, and will continue to receive, permission to drill for oil on and near protected Norwegian coral reefs.
The machine churns on. Many places are now being opened for kelp trawling, also off Skrova. This is happening despite recommendations from scientists and protests from coastal fishermen. Small fish spawn in kelp forests, and large numbers of species, including the kind of kelp cod we just caught, also live there. Nevertheless, the authorities are allowing this important and vulnerable ecosystem to be destroyed because someone wants to make money by selling kelp.11 The kelp is yanked up with big grapple buckets. It has become a billion-kroner industry. One boat can harvest up to three hundred tons of kelp a day.
—
Who wants to think about things like that after a perfect day on Vestfjorden? Not Hugo or me. After eating the kelp cod, we sit down against the sunny wall. Huge super-RIBs from Henningsvær, Kabelvåg, and Svolvær are passing in front of Aasjord Station at regular intervals, filled with sightseeing tourists.
The tourists come here because of the landscape, which is considered uniquely beautiful. People from other parts of the world pay big money to see the splendor with their own eyes. I can understand why. I think of the dramatic peaks sticking straight up from the sea, the eternally changing light in both summer and winter, white sandy shores, pale green grass on a narrow hat brim of land with a backdrop of vertical mountains and small glaciers, the ocean’s great wealth of life, and an old and relatively intact cultural landscape as well. Oh yes, Lofoten has so much to offer that I can see why one international travel magazine after another has described our island realm as perhaps the most beautiful in the whole wide world.
But such an appraisal is not a given. Our view of what is beautiful isn’t timeless. This becomes eminently clear when we read older descriptions of Lofoten.
In 1827, the Norwegian Gustav Peter Blom—district magistrate, member of the first national assembly at Eidsvoll, and later county administrator in Buskerud—embarked on a journey through northern Norway. When he returned, he described his impressions and experiences in his book Bemærkninger paa en reise i nordlandene og igjennem Lapland til Stockholm i aaret 1827 (Remarks on a Journey in the Northern Lands and Through Lapland to Stockholm in the Year 1827). Blom’s view of nature in Lofoten was not only tepid, it was bluntly dismissive. In his opinion, the Helgeland coast might be downright ugly, but Lofoten took the cake. There it wasn’t possible even to imagine any natural beauty, except in a yearning for the same. Blom writes: “Lofoten is as devoid of natural beauty as is possible. The steep, high cliffs plunge right down to the sea and only rarely allow space for a solitary house…That any of these places might be considered beautiful is out of the question, but the ugliest is undeniably the strait area in Flakstad parish.—It’s situated on a bare cliff near a narrow harbor, closed off by skerries and islands, providing little ground for buildings; and above looms a steep mountain wall, threatening to crash down upon both the houses and the harbor.”12
In places where I frequently see views of dazzling beauty, Blom saw only an eerie, barren, and desolate landscape totally lacking in appeal. Blom writes that the east coast of Lofoten, which is where Hugo and I are spending our time, is ugly. But for him, nothing surpasses the vulgarity of Lofoten’s western side. There treacherous winds blow, and nature is particularly hideous.
Blom most likely visited Skrova, since he mentions both Vågakallen, the highest peak in Lofoten, and the town of Brettesnes on Storemolla. Skrova is approximately halfway in between. Whenever we’re close to the Skrova lighthouse, we can see Vågakallen (3,091 feet), unless there is fog or snow. Blom writes that the mountain resembles an “old fisherman wearing a cap and carrying his sail under his arm, and hence its name.” (In Norwegian, kallen means an old geezer.) In the opposite direction, toward the northeast, are Lillemolla and Storemolla, where the mountains are only half as high, but closer to us, so their presence is more noticeable.
Unlike Blom, Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany was obsessed with the natural beauty of the Norwegian fjords and coastline—and especially Lofoten. Accompanied by an entourage of yachts and other marine vessels, he insisted on taking in the famed purple colors of the north, “the sea’s floating gold, unmatched by either the Alps or the tropics, either Egypt or the Andes Mountains.”13
Kaiser Wilhelm decided to visit Lofoten after seeing a painting in Berlin in 1888. Using photographs as the basis for his work, the exhibitor had created a panoramic painting, 377 feet wide. The photos had been taken from the village of Digermulen, right behind Storemolla. If the pictures were taken today, there’s a chance our little boat might end up in the scene.
The Kaiser’s favorite painter was the Norwegian Eilert Adelsteen Normann (1848–1918), who worked in Berlin and painted Lofoten. Unlike Christian Krohg, Normann managed to depict Lofoten in all its glory. He even succeeded in portraying the “floating gold” of the midnight sun, and without going mad from observing the flooding light, as Lars Hertervig had claimed happened to him. For an artist who wishes to paint Lofoten, it’s an advantage to have grown up in the area. All the famous realistic Lofoten painters from the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century were from the region. Normann was from Vågøya, near the southern entrance to Vestfjorden. Gunnar Berg (1863–1893) was from Svinøya, in Svolvær, as was Halfdan Hauge (1892–1976). Ole Juul (1852–1927) was from Dypfjord, near Henningsvær, and Einar Berger (1890–1961) was from Reinøya, in Troms.
As a boy, Hugo sometimes threw snowballs at the window of Halfdan Hauge’s studio on Svinøya. He remembers the artist as an elegant old man. Normann was the cousin of Hugo’s great-grandfather.
Hugo is an abstract painter, but he has a deep respect for tradition.
—
The Lofoten Wall is like rows of black shark teeth, one behind the other. For hundreds of millions of years, the sea has slammed against this barrier, to little avail. Even the ocean fails to make an impact when confronted by the Lofoten Wall. From a distance it may look like an impenetrable fortress of stone, and in many ways that’s exactly what it is.
Parts of the mountains that make up the wall are about three billion years old. Not the Lofoten Wall
itself, but the rocks forming the peaks.
—
As usual, I’ve brought along a small stack of books, this time several volumes about geology and the early history of the earth. When Hugo goes out to continue his carpentry work at the Red House, where the electricians and plumbers will soon be able to come in and finish the job, I stay behind to read.
One book is about the age of the earth, or rather about the history of our ideas on that topic. In 1650, the Irish bishop James Ussher calculated that God had created the world on Saturday, October 22, in the year 4004 BC—at approximately six o’clock in the evening. Ussher was widely read and admired. He based his theory on the chronology in the Bible, just as people had done before him and continued to do afterward. Today, such a notion may induce laughter, but in the bishop’s day no one imagined that the earth had existed before we did.
Over the next centuries, there were numerous indications that this calculation was completely crazy. Fossils from enormous sea animals were found far from the ocean, sometimes on mountaintops and in the very clay beneath Paris, which had apparently been underwater long, long ago. What had happened to all these strange creatures? Many species had evidently been extinct for eons.
Some sharp minds, such as the English astronomer Edmond Halley (the man behind Halley’s comet), attempted to establish the age of the earth by calculating the amount of salt the rivers carry out to sea. For the ocean to have become as salty as it is, the earth had to be considerably older than a few thousand years.
In the eighteenth century, philosophers and naturalists began to realize that the earth must be at least tens of thousands of years old. Many kept this notion to themselves, fearing the wrath of the church, but it was clear that Ussher’s calculations were seriously misleading. As geology slowly but surely became established as a science, more people understood that the earth had to be much, much older than the Bible claimed, maybe even by millions of years. Sedimentation, eroded mountains, and studies of volcanoes left little doubt. Eons ago, North America had been tropical, and India was covered with ice. Apparently most of the earth had been underwater at one time or another. This was difficult to deny, but how should it be interpreted? Couldn’t the discovery of shells and fish fossils on mountaintops be proof that the Deluge had actually taken place, albeit much further back in time than initially thought? Or was it proof that God could eradicate species that did not please Him?
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