My latest plan was to start in southern Norway, see some old friends, and then hitchhike north, avoiding Lillehammer. For the first few nights, I stayed with Natasha in Oslo. Natasha had a fancy apartment and a Portuguese boyfriend. We drank absinthe and watched a reality television show in which participants painted themselves to look like undersea creatures. A human turtle submerged himself in a tank and all his makeup came off.
Natasha was still skeptical about Norwegians. “Do you want to understand them?” she said. “They’re the kind of people who, if you call them because you’re not safe and you need a ride, they’ll say yes, but only if you pay for gas.”
Maybe, I thought, my problem was that I didn’t like Norwegians.
I felt more comfortable when I left the city. Farms spotted the green valleys and forests shrouded the mountaintops. Everything was green; it was late May. I took a bus, and then another bus, asking the driver for directions. “I’m not from here,” I explained.
The driver sighed. “Obviously.”
It was nice to sit on the bus, watching out the window, moving forward without doing anything at all. I could have ridden for days. But after three hours, I came to the end of the line: a brown-and-yellow log building on top of a hill, Valdres Folk School, where the former principal of 69˚North now worked with his wife. The principal’s house was traditional—too traditional, the neighbors muttered, with its black-painted log walls and grass roof, its reindeer-fur boots by the doorway. But it reminded me of northern Norway. I knocked on the door. I’d sent a note to say I was coming.
The inside of the house was entirely birch: walls, floor, ceiling, cupboards, table, chairs, like some sort of elaborate sauna. It was disorienting. The principal, who looked like a happier version of Brad Pitt, put some joik—Sami throat singing—on the stereo. He scooped vanilla ice cream into bowls and sprinkled nuts on top. This was his favorite brand of ice cream, he said—very creamy. He closed his eyes when he took the first bite. I liked how much pleasure he took from the ice cream.
I asked him if it was different, running another folk school. “Look,” he said. “It doesn’t matter where I am. The most important thing I can teach my students is how to be cold.”
How to be cold?
“How to live,” he said.
I thought of him in leather pants, with binder clips on his nipples.
At 69˚North, every student had been required to complete an årsprosjekt, a yearlong project that they designed themselves. Something they’d always wanted to do. One girl had knit a sweater. Another built a dog agility course. Several students made knives. Several students learned to play the guitar. One boy taught himself to hunt. Three years later, he died in a hunting accident. The other students went to his funeral, but I didn’t, because I was in America.
For my årsprosjekt, I wanted to write a book, but I didn’t have a computer. So the principal gave me the key to his private office. Every night, when I wasn’t dogsledding, I’d enter the teachers’ wing of the school building, which was locked and smelled like lemonade. Students weren’t allowed in the teachers’ wing, let alone the principal’s office, which had a small window overlooking the common room. Every night I sat there. I loved opening the file, typing the first words, my thoughts filling the quiet space. The book was about a girl from California who discovers that she’s a changeling, and that her true home is in northern Norway, and that everybody knew it but her. So she goes to Norway and learns to dogsled. Along the way, she solves a centuries-old murder involving an evil identical twin. The twin part was based on a ghost story that Tallak told one night around a fire. Since Tallak said it, it was obviously true.
“That was huge for me,” I told the principal now. “The fact that you let me use your office? It made me want to work harder to deserve it.”
He took a bite of ice cream.
“You were an interesting case,” he said.
He was as much a psychiatrist as an administrator. Analyzing each student, trying to figure out what they needed. Folk schools, he said, traded less in puffed-up self-esteem than in uncomfortable self-awareness. Students learned that they were bossy, that their outspoken confidence was obnoxious, that they were too selfish with money, that they collapsed under physical discomfort. “You liked yourself because you were good at things,” he said. “But your challenge was to like yourself for just being. Because one day you were going to fail at something big, and if you’d based your self-worth on accomplishments, you were going to be shattered. You were brave but you didn’t trust your own instincts.”
I thought of Alaska. Failing and leaving.
“You’re teaching people to be happy,” I said.
“I don’t care if they’re happy,” he said. “I just want them to be successful in all things.”
That night, I slept alone in the empty folk school. It was raining. I read a book that the principal lent me, about animals eating each other in the darkness. In the morning, before I left, he asked my schedule. I didn’t know. “The soul of a Northlander,” he observed. “Don’t know where you’re going, don’t know how long you’ll be.”
I thought I knew where I was going. I was going to see Oda, with whom I’d once dogsledded across Finland through a blizzard. She lived in a village about thirty miles away called Bromme. There was no bus. I started walking. I held out my thumb.
A few cars slowed, but none of them stopped. A woman in a red Volvo met my eyes and accelerated. I watched her car shrink away down the road. “I’m Norwegian,” I said aloud. “I’m in my car. I don’t like strangers.” But it didn’t make me feel better.
I walked all morning and all afternoon. A river joined another river. The road joined a highway. By midnight my thighs were twitching, and the wind of each passing RV caught me like a shove.
That was the point at which my trip changed.
In fact, it was exactly the situation I had imagined: traveling by whatever means available, sleeping wherever I stood when night happened to fall. That was the kind of freedom I needed in order to come back to myself, to really figure out how I fit into this country. A wanderer—no, an adventurer, following nothing but whims. How exciting, I told myself, to be spending my first night on the road, even if that road was a highway shoulder. It was still light. I waited until no cars were passing, then ducked through a thicket, passing into a clearing on the other side that looked suspiciously like a backyard. I pitched my tent on a pile of moose droppings and climbed inside.
It was cold, a sharp cold that came up through the ground and wracked my chest with shivers. The sound of each passing car rose and fell as if it were swooping overhead. In the yellow half-light of the subarctic night, shadows played across the tent fly. Swinging branches, birds that wouldn’t sleep. I didn’t know where I was. Nobody knew where I was.
I didn’t realize I was panicking until I tried to take a deep breath, and tried again, and choked.
I remembered stories I’d heard from other women who camped alone: men who circled their tents, pressed the dark outlines of hands to the fabric, whispered threats like sweet nothings or else loudly considered their options. And those were the stories that ended well. There was no limit to the ways in which someone could hurt me.
I would not see them coming.
How could I sleep? Surely a driver had seen me duck through the bushes, had seen that I was alone, was even now standing at the edge of the clearing with his hands in his pockets. I lay with a hat over my face, blocking the twilight, but with my eyes open; I held a great tight balloon in my chest and sensed that if I gave in to just one whimper or tear, it would explode. And I realized, with a certainty that was almost comforting, that I could not travel like this. I had tried my plan and it had failed. I shook and shook, waiting minute by minute until the sun rose and caught me in its glow. By 3 A.M. I was back on the shoulder with my shadow stretched before me.
As long as I was walking, I was safe. The only vehicles were trucks, driving the night shift from Oslo to Bergen
, and a traveling carnival that passed, piece by piece, over the course of several hours—now a Ferris wheel, now a stack of bumper cars, trembling slightly under colorful ropes.
Later, describing the night to Quince in a letter, I’d summarize it in three words: I got spooked. I didn’t tell him how, to calm myself, I’d imagined his arms around me, his voice in my ear. I love you. I’m proud of you. I love you. I’m proud of you. Repeating for hours. But he must have understood, because soon after that he e-mailed that he was sending me a package. “Please open it privately,” he wrote, “as you would any, um, intimate thing that you might not want immediately seen by others.” I thought it was probably a vibrator or a gun.
It was still early when I reached Bromme, which had a single gas station. I bought a hot dog for breakfast. “How did you get here?” the cashier asked me, and when I told her, she gasped. “Heavens!” she said. “You’re a tough girl.”
I swallowed my hot dog and asked if she knew where Oda Evensen lived. But she shook her head. “There’s no Oda Evensen here.”
As it turned out, Oda lived in the opposite direction from where I had come. But there in the well-lit gas station, my stomach full, talking with a woman who was determined to help me, I couldn’t bring myself to care. All that mattered was that last night was far behind me, that the cashier knew a trucker I could hitch a ride with, that I was no longer on my own. I felt so infused with community that, as I waited outside for the trucker, I asked an old woman in her garden if she wanted help weeding. “Uh,” she said. She squinted at me, and I saw her eyes register my face: a stranger. “I prefer to do it alone.”
That night I stayed with Oda. She had forsworn her lesbianism to become a Jehovah’s Witness. She was between homes. We drove switchbacks up a mountain with guinea pigs in our laps, looking for a place to sleep, while two border collies moaned in the backseat. Oda missed having a girlfriend, but she didn’t have long to wait before the end of the world. “I have the animals,” she pointed out. We stopped at an abandoned barn on top of the mountain and ate store-bought almond cake for dinner. The dogs licked our fingers clean.
Oda would have welcomed me to stay longer, but despite the fact that all my plans so far had fallen through, and that I had been back in Norway less than a week, I itched with the odd sensation that I was running out of time. I didn’t want to stay in the Southland. I wanted to go back to the Arctic.
Still, I couldn’t quite puzzle out why it felt so vital to me. I loved the language of the north, and the remoteness thrilled me; the nearest gas station could be not just a few hours’ but a three-day walk away. But then I imagined walking along a road and a car pulling up beside me, a man inside, and I felt a flash of panic that made me want to just cash in the trip entirely, stay in Oslo with Natasha, lie on a towel in the sun. That’s what I had wanted during that panicked night on the roadside: I wanted out. I wanted to be done with the whole thing. It didn’t seem worth it. And then I had kept going and people called me a tough girl and I was so comforted by that, like I could almost believe it, although I hardly knew what it meant.
I had intended to hitchhike to the top of the country, but I bought a plane ticket instead—a concession I allowed myself—and flew to Tromsø in a late-May blizzard. “We are now descending into Troms—” the stewardess announced, snow whipping against the windows, and then she caught her breath and cursed, “Oh, fucking cunt. Cunt!” With a scrabbling sound, the microphone clicked off. I looked around. The other passengers were reading, or else leaned back with their eyes closed. No one acknowledged the outburst. Nobody seemed to have heard it. The plane landed smoothly. I got off with weak legs, hoisted my backpack, and walked out of the airport, into the parking lot, where the wind nearly knocked me over. I turned around and walked back inside.
At least the airport was warm.
It was early afternoon, which gave me plenty of time to avoid my next decisions. I bought another bag of sweet rolls at a 7-Eleven and set up camp on a bench by the baggage claim, reading and rereading a stack of brochures that seemed unchanged from when I had first encountered them six years before: Arctic Jeep Safari. Arctic Sea Cruise. Arctic Kayak Day Trip. Arctic Yoga. Arctic Plumbing. Arctic Sex shop.
The Northernmost Water Park in the World.
The Northernmost Tea Shop in the World.
The Northernmost Burger King in the World.
Arctic, I knew, meant nothing to the people who lived here. Arctic was for tourists. But northern Norway—being nordnorsk—ran in the marrow of their bones.
Planes landed one by one. The small airport emptied, then filled, then emptied. Outside, trees bowed, snapping upright between gusts; the snow didn’t fall so much as rearrange itself in midair. In every direction, sharp white mountains faded into dark sky.
After all the buildup, after all the significance I’d assigned to this trip, it was hard to admit to myself how lost I felt. I was a planner by nature; in the past, I’d always traveled with a mission, or at least a role—to be a daughter, a student, a guide. Now, I didn’t even know where I was going, let alone what I would do when I got there. I looked into the coming weeks and recognized nothing. I wanted to keep moving until an answer presented itself, making my way toward Kirkenes, the northernmost town in mainland Europe—because if north was good, then as north as possible was even better. But what if the answer never came? And how would I sleep? I wasn’t eager to relive my tent experience. I would gladly have taken a job, but I wasn’t sure where to find one. Maybe I could find a dogsledder who needed help.
It was Sunday and, although I didn’t know it, a national holiday. Everything was closed. The snow hardened into sleet. After several hours of stalling in the airport, I wrapped myself in a garbage bag and walked alone through the downtown, crossing empty streets, catching my hunched reflection in the dark storefronts. The only thing that seemed alive was a cruise ship at the dock, its windows bright through the storm. It looked dry. I walked toward it without really thinking, then, in a burst of purpose, strode up the ramp and through the open doorway. “Hold on,” the guard said, and I froze. But she just gestured at a dispenser on the wall. “Be sure to sanitize your hands.”
With a mumble, I sanitized my hands. Then, heart pounding, I climbed three sets of stairs, hid my backpack behind a chair, borrowed a book from the lending library, and found my way to a communal sitting room with pillowy armchairs. Outside, sleet thudded on the window, and waves rose against a dark sea. Inside, two women were knitting. I tucked my legs under me and tried to read.
An announcement, a captain’s voice: the ship would be leaving port in forty-five minutes, at 7 P.M.
One of the knitters glanced at me.
“Do you know if this room closes at night?” I asked her. I grimaced, as if trying to remember. “I’ve been up weird hours. You know, with the jet lag.”
“Oh, no,” she said. “It’s open all the time.” She was American. I wondered if she took a lot of cruises, if she’d ever cruised through Juneau.
Thirty-five minutes.
I knew myself well enough to know that to pull off a stunt like this, I’d have to trick my own conscience. I couldn’t just wait here, counting down. But I could fall asleep, wake up—regretfully—at sea, and spend the night reading in the sitting room that never closed. Sneak off in the morning. I didn’t care where I ended up; I just wanted someone else to make the decision for me. I lay back and closed my eyes, thinking about what a good place I was in. How dry it was. How safe.
How much trouble I would get into if I was caught.
Two minutes before the ship closed its doors, I grabbed my backpack and walked back out into the storm. The guard tried to stop me but I broke into a run.
The dock and the streets were empty. The bus yard was closed.
How could I stay in a hotel? Hotels in Norway, especially in the city, are exorbitantly expensive; one night would have used a third of my budget for the summer. But my reluctance went deeper than money. Staying in a hotel woul
d have forced me to acknowledge that the trip, as I’d conceived it, had backfired. I was already failing at every hope I had brought into the journey: that I was brave, resourceful, tough in solitude. That I could, by some combination of will and fate, force myself to belong.
So I went to the only place that I knew was open, because Oda had told me it would be open: the Kingdom Hall of Jehovah’s Witnesses. Inside, the hall was bare and clean, a large room with rows of seats before a low stage. A few men and women looked up at my entrance. The women wore lace; the men, three-piece suits. I wore baggy pants, greasy hair, and a face full of mosquito bites from my night on the mountain. “Come in!” they said. “What’s your name? Where are you from?” They brushed the snow from my coat and I let myself be tended. During the service I sat in the back row, pressed between two soft, smiling women as the storm throbbed against the walls around us. Afterward, an older couple came over and took my hands in theirs. “We’ve been discussing it,” they said, “and we’ve decided you should stay in our spare room.”
In fact, I stayed with the couple for almost a week, each day that the snow lasted. They gave me a small room with a cot, a stationary bicycle, and blackout curtains, and I was sure I had never slept anywhere more luxurious. My rent was to wash the dishes and ask questions about Jehovah. I paid it gladly. I’d like to believe that the deception of my stay—the fact that their religion, though interesting, did not move me in any spiritual way—was what finally drove me out. But my reasons were simpler: the sun broke through the clouds, and I had a package to pick up.
It seems strange in retrospect, but I had not really thought about going to Malangen. The way I saw it, everybody I knew there had already left: all the students, and even the teachers, because the folk school staff turned over regularly. I figured that going there alone would only be depressing. But Quince had asked for an address and, at a loss, I’d given him the address to 69˚North. It wouldn’t be hard to swing by and pick up his package. Now that I was headed there, though, I felt more optimistic the closer I got—I figured I could hang out with the dogs, chat with some current students, and open the mystery gift. Quince always gave thoughtful gifts, and whatever this was, I had a feeling it was good. Sexy or funny. Physical proof that somebody knew what I was doing, and cared. Maybe it would be just what I needed to get my mojo back. I thanked the Witnesses, left them some maple syrup as a gift, and caught another bus.
Welcome to the Goddamn Ice Cube Page 18