by Brit Jones
I think I hit it off with Per better than the others did. He had a family. He was very much a 2.4 kids kind of guy, which I found really sweet and endearing. That was what I think he thought us Anglophones would expect of him, to be more British than the British, and he didn’t seem to mind playing up to it. As a design engineer he was fantastic, really technically knowledgeable, but quite (small-c) conservative. He could be quite negative at times, as well. He had a habit of ‘blocking’ a lot of Wyatt’s ideas with small-scale practicalities and nit picking
Still, though, I don’t want to criticise. It is Per that I am in touch with to this day, not Wyatt. He likes the outdoors just as much as I do. That’s what matters.
Per’s son died in November. I’m not sure exactly what happened. I didn’t want to ask. It seems inappropriate, somehow, just to dwell on the gory details. I know it was quite sudden. I can’t imagine anything worse.
I haven’t spoken about it to Per, but I insisted that we’d do our walking holiday this spring, like always. I don’t know whether he’ll want to talk, or not. I don’t know how deeply ingrained that Scandinavian stiff-upper-lip has become.
Back to the taxi ride—we’re about twenty minutes out of the airport and just coming into Bergen itself. The driver is a proper local. Very gruff and Nordic. A real character. He’d probably be quite trendy in London at the moment, with his big beard and Christmas jumper all year round. I’m considering telling him.
We’re heading east. I can see the forest on either side, above the Bergen suburbs. I’m always fascinated by how landscapes and living interact. I love the way the industrial buildings nestle here amongst the boulders and mountains. The trees are green and gold in the sun, and between the trunks I can see flashes of dazzling water. I’m so excited.
Dylan’s Journal: 07/05/11, Evening, Bergen Sentrum
I flew out a day early and I’m not meeting Per until tomorrow. I wanted a night to myself in Bergen first. I love this city. The fjord, the harbour and the mountains shape the landscape of the city like the canals in Venice do. In fact, that’s what Bergen most reminds me of: A Nordic Venice. From the city centre, Bergen looks like a tiny village. The mountains around the harbour are steep, sparsely populated with little wooden cottages, and undeveloped and densely forested at the peaks, even within walking distance of the city centre. The houses rise up about five or six deep and then peter out into what looks like wilderness. It’s a city developed with a mind for nature, I think, or possibly just for tradition. The big industrial and population centres are out of sight, behind the mountains. I know it’s a UNESCO heritage city, so possibly there are laws in place about what can and can’t be built within sight of the old town.
I’m staying at the YMCA, a street away from the harbourside fish market and the stall that sells reindeer hides that always seems to be there whenever I visit. I haven’t stayed in a dormitory since my gap year. I remember a few older travellers then, but now I feel a little self-conscious to be sharing a room with all these cool young things. I suppose times have changed.
I’m sat writing this by the harbour. Speedboats are criss-crossing the water. Out in the harbour mouth, in the distance, a few huge tankers are looming in over the smaller boats like parents watching their kids running around. It was hot today, like an English summer, but now the sun has begun to set (at just after midnight!) you can feel the cold air coming from the harbour and it chills under the skin, and you remember just how far north you really are. I think about the arctic water under my feet, imagine it lapping over my skin, icecap cold.
Dylan’s journal: 08/05/11, Morning, on the bus.
I used to think Norway didn’t have a smell at all. Even the forests themselves smell clean, efficient and Scandinavian, but that’s partly to do with the sheer content of water and the strong winds. There’s a slight salt smell—crisp, and slightly bitter. The main body of trees are coniferous. They’re either fir or pine but I don’t know the difference. I’m so used to the pine air-fresheners we have at home that walking into the woods almost feels like going indoors.
The forests around Bergen seem sort of tame. Mount Ulvik is like a child’s drawing of a mountain. It’s nearly triangular, sheer-sided in comparison to the flat harbour basin, as if someone had just put it there. The other mountains around Bergen are similar. They’re pointed triangles, like the picture on a Toblerone packet. I can’t wait to get out into the proper wild.
I caught the tram to somewhere a little bit suburban-feeling (although still at the foot of a mountain, naturally) and then got on a bus from there. Per has told me the driver will take me straight to the campsite to meet him. We’ll spend tonight at the campsite, and then tomorrow a car will meet us and drive us north to the start of the trail.
The road follows the edge of a fjord. I watch the sea stretch away between the angular peaks. Ahead of us, the fjord peters out into a flat, forested basin that seems to glisten with surface water like a marsh, although whether this is an island or a delta I can’t tell at first. When I get closer I realise that the water has been forced into a channel through the boggy basin; a narrow bottle-neck of what seems to be fresh water, speckled with massive, cartoon-style lily pads. Beyond this channel is a fresh water lake, a few miles across. I look back, and suddenly the salt-water fjord behind me looks vast and bleak by comparison to the little lake. The bus window is open, and I’m beginning to shiver. The wind coming in is bitter with salt. Together the ocean and the mountains fade into the mist.
A little sickness in the air...
* * *
Diary
If found, please return to ___________
I don’t want to write anything.
I don’t want to
This is stupid pointless
I’m waiting for Dylan, and I’m thinking about Yngve. My therapist told me to write things down to express myself. I’ve read the studies and it’s a sound theory, although under-evidenced, like so much of this person-centred psychology is, but I can’t help feeling like the practical application here was a little over-zealous. There, now I’m writing. The therapist’s suggestion left me feeling angry, and patronized, as I left the clinic clutching this little notebook to myself. It was as if someone had tried to stick a plaster over an amputation. I’m not an expert, but I don’t think that’s the aim of the exercise. I’d rather someone gave me pills.
Is that what you wanted?
I’m supposed to write every time I think about Yngve. Well, I’m writing now. Not because I’m thinking about him, but because I can feel him. His presence is here even though he’s not consciously in my thoughts. What I am thinking about is my new hiking boots, Google Maps on my phone, how much water we will need to bring, and whether or not I can get Dylan to carry the tent, but what I am feeling is melancholy, in spite of the trip we’ve got planned, and it has to be Yngve that’s making me feel like that. Why am I thinking about Yngve? It started as soon as I opened the car window on the trip out of Voss, and smelled the woods in spring; I suppose it’s nostalgia. Yngve used to play in the woods as a kid.
It’s the smell that brings it all back. It smells dusty, and sweet and rotten. You can see nature on the TV and it’s just so many moving colours, but it’s the smell that tells you that you are really there. Dylan says the same thing, every time we come here, and this time it will cut me up to hear him say it because he knows it, but he doesn’t understand what that means to me. It’s the smell that brings back my loss. Just for an instant, the feeling is so strong that it makes my knees buckle and I choke back tears.
So, I’m just going to write. Later, someone can read all this and try and put the pieces together. Maybe I have a nightmare every time I see someone wearing blue, or something. That’s the problem with the subconscious; you need a professional to read it for you. Not very person-centred, is it?
I’m starting to enjoy writing this, now. I’m stood at the gate of the campsite, leaning this notebook on the gatepost. It’s a round wooden stake the wi
dth of the spread of my hand. Underneath my notepad, the wood is crumbling away like it’s been gouged out. There is dry moss peeling away like scabs. The wood underneath the moss is a lighter shade than the rest of the post, and smooth.
There’s a track down to the campsite. About fifteen miles away is the main E-road out of Bergen. Dylan will be coming down the track soon, with that big stupid grin on his face and all these reductive little comments about ‘Scandinavia’ and how quiet and empty and quaint it all is. I’m going stand here in the woods with my wireless headphones and watch The Thick Of It on my iPad, or read Wolf Hall on my Kindle, or something, and maybe I can make my own little assumptive remarks about ‘Britishness’ as well. He’ll love that. I can speak his language better than he does.
So the campsite... There’s a clearing in the woods and a small, rocky beach that stretches down towards a lake. There’s a row of log cabins on the shore of the water, and a jetty with rowing boats tethered to it. There’s several incredibly expensive, silver, American-style camper vans, the size of yachts, with Danish or German or Dutch licence plates. We’re staying in the cabin tonight, and probably drinking, and maybe getting a boat out onto the water so Dylan can look at the late-night sunset.
I’m being unfair on Dylan, but I’m not looking forward to seeing him. I know he’ll try and talk to me about Yngve. If he doesn’t, I’ll spend the whole trip waiting for him to. I feel almost nervous, waiting for him. I’m so tired of talking about Yngve. I never even talked about him this much when he was alive. My therapist told me that she understood what I was feeling because her mother died when she was a teenager, although she didn’t say it in so many words. Part of me thought that that doesn’t count. I’m angry all the time at the moment. Even in the woods, I feel bitter. I’d get angry with the trees if I had an excuse to. I’m frustrated, as if things are crawling on me. I didn’t want to come along on this stupid trip. It was arrogant of Dylan to make me. That’s why I’m pissed at him really.
At the edge of the water, there are thick fronds of bracken and tall grass growing nearly to my waist. The greenery is thicker and richer this year than ever before; great explosions of wet, glistening bracken burst from the undergrowth like frozen fountains. I find it slightly unsettling, these unnatural displays of fertility, distorted to the extreme, like women with oversized, fake breasts.
People talk about brain sicknesses, like Yngve’s, as if they were actual diseases, and this is useful because it helps alleviate blame from the individual. Simply put, they can’t help cutting themselves or shooting themselves any more than people can help sneezing or having diarrhoea. But when Yngve died I was so angry with him I felt like having him thrown into the sea.
Yngve cut his wrists a lot, but the first time I think he tried to kill himself was two years ago when he tried to drown himself in the fjord at Arna under the shopping centre. I heard the door close in the night. Yngve slammed it so loudly that I knew he wanted me to follow him, to try and stop him. I stayed in bed because I was sick of his stunts by that stage.
He had a bike lock with him
The police phoned me and brought him home about 5 in the morning. They said he’d been stood by the water’s edge, in the horseshoe ring of mountains, just behind the petrol station opposite Arna bus terminal. He’d just been stood there looking out at the water, watching all the big boats drifting around in the misty distance. The police searched him, because he was stoned, and found his backpack was filled up with bricks, and then one of the police looked out into the harbour, looked down in between the little speedboats moored at the jetty and realized why Yngve had a backpack full of bricks.
He was going to fix the bike lock around the two straps and fasten it across his chest so that he couldn’t take the bag of bricks off his back once he was in the fjord, and then jump in—I mean, that was the idea. I’m not sure whether at that stage he would have gone through with it or not. It was like he knew he didn’t want to die. Why else would he have to lock the bag onto his back? I thought it was like he had to make himself die somehow, to prove a point or as some sort of punishment or because he thought he should.
Yngve was beaten up in school once and was taken to hospital and he was clinically dead for a minute or so. He told Greta once he thought he was still dead. It was like a preoccupation of his. One day I was cooking on the hob and Yngve walked right past me like he didn’t even see I was there and put his hands in the flame.
In one sense it was like a sickness in that there was a long decline, and gradually Yngve dying began to feel inevitable. But again, it’s about blame. We started to imagine an irreversible, terminal deterioration because we couldn’t see what we ourselves could do to reverse it. I don’t believe you can cure people like that. Yngve wanted to die too badly.
* * *
As I walk’d in a stilly wood...
Dylan’s Journal: 09/05/2011, Early morning, camp site, by the lake
The woods are ancient and rotting. The water is massive, blank and unreadable. The rock is jagged and tumbling, and huge, the way a parent looks to a tiny child.
Oh god, Per’s done it again. I realized why we’ve been friends for so long now. As much as he plays this hard-nose cynic, I know he has a romantic side for nature in the same way that I do. This spot he has picked is perfect. I’m stood here now, waiting for the taxi to pick us up, unable to take my eyes off the scenery and gawping like a kid in a toyshop. The campsite is on the shore of the lake that I saw from the bus yesterday morning. The lake is utterly still and as clear as a mirror, and the mountain at the far side is ridged with three great big glacial gouges out of it. It looks like a clenched fist, pulling the flat shimmer of the lake and the valley taut. There are children swimming; tiny figures in the vast, flat, cold water, and there is a forested island that seems like a mile away in comparison. The jetty stretches out into the water like a finger, pointing. And the huge, squat peak on the far side is reflected in the water as an exact double. But beyond the lake is the fjord; I can’t see it but I can feel its presence. This is hard to explain, but the fjord seems to represent a concept that has been forming in my mind as much as a physical thing—the idea of ‘North.’ There’s an occasional cold wind that suddenly howls out of nowhere, although there are no clouds in the sky, and chases away the still, hazy late spring air.
I met Per here at the campsite yesterday afternoon. God, he looks bad. He’s thin, and looks like he’s not sleeping at night. We hugged, a little awkwardly. I’m sure he noticed the surprise on my face.
Last night we stayed at the campsite, in a cabin, which Per had hired out—very quaint. I’m sure ‘Log Cabin, Norway’ holds enough visual connotations as a phrase that I don’t need to describe it. It was just as you’d imagine, even painted red with little yellow window frames.
It was a strange evening, sort of awkward. I don’t know whether this is because of what’s happened to Per, or because meetings between old friends who haven’t seen much of each other often are a little awkward at first. Per was quiet most of the evening, and just as I was thinking of going to bed he suddenly, out of the blue, suggested that we should take one of the rowing boats out into the river. It was quite a strange suggestion, and Per seemed so keen to do so that there was almost a hint of desperation about him. I told him I wanted to get an early night so we could be off early today. I’m glad I did now; I’m glad I’m not too tired and hung over to appreciate this.
The camp site is roughly four hour’s drive south from the start of our trek, and then thirty mile’s hike from there to the fjord that will eventually be our base camp for the next week. Per said we would make the trip over two days. He said he chose a spot where we can pitch our tent overnight, roughly half way to the fjord. At the campsite, now, waiting for the car, I feel like I’m at the last bastion of civilization on the edge of a frontier. Norway’s a huge, empty country. Even to me, thirty miles seems like a long way. We’ll be thirty miles away from the nearest other humans, most likely. This is ex
actly what I was hoping for, being able to walk for days and see no signs that humans were ever here. Wilderness like this doesn’t really exist in the UK. This is why I come here every year.
I woke up in the night, as well. I’d forgotten about these northern nights. I woke up at about two in the morning and for a moment I was completely disoriented. It wasn’t fully dark, there was just this grey, twilight glow throwing long, dark shadows across the cabin from the western horizon. At least, I assume it must be west. It’s hard to tell when you’re so far north.
There was this noise, a sort of croaking sound. It took me a while to persuade myself to get out of bed. I just lay there, looking at the light and listening to this noise. It would be silent, and as I was falling asleep I would hear it again. When I looked out of the window there was a fox sat on the windowsill. It looked thin, and small, but then I’m never sure how big foxes are supposed to be. It was staring through the glass at something on the far wall of the cabin, behind the bed.
Dylan’s Journal: 09/05/2011, Afternoon, the first peak
The road north from the campsite was empty. I think by car is not the best way to see Norway. It’s hard to get much of a sense of the landscape through the thick trees and sheer rock faces that hem in the mountain roads. You can’t see much except the odd flash of blue-grey water through the gaps in the rock. The driver hardly spoke as he unpacked our bags and left us, in the middle of nowhere. I think he thought we were crazy.