by Brit Jones
Per was awake most of the night, with the light from his phone on, writing in his notepad. We’re sharing a two-man tent, and he kept us both awake. I can’t help but feel like it was a little bit inconsiderate of him. I think he thought I was asleep.
We’ve just ‘broken camp,’ as it were. I’m sat on my rucksack writing this while Per is using the Google Maps app on his phone to try and find us a route. I think I preferred all of this when it was a bit less hi-tec. I was constantly trying to get this across on the design board for Photovolt—we needed to come up with ideas that were simple enough that local people could afford to maintain it, not just have to buy a new one every year. Otherwise, sustainability goes out of the window and we just become another unethical brand name. Besides that, Per’s techno-stuff spoils the ambiance. There’s so much beauty in these Scandinavian forests. I don’t know how Per can stand to just stare at his screen all day.
I found something this morning. We were packing up the tent and underneath it, on the flattened grass, laid this thing. It’s made out of twigs, tied together with some sort of metal wire that’s rusted and started to dye the wood underneath it a reddish colour. There are four twigs in total: two forming a sort of crude crucifix shape and the other two, which are shorter, intersecting at either end of the crosspiece.
I don’t know how we didn’t see it last night when we were flattening the grass down. It was right underneath where we were sleeping. I’m not sure quite what it is about it, but I find it completely transfixing. It seems to me to represent a human form, or, from the other way up, a tree, or some amalgamation of these two entities: man and nature. There’s just something captivating about the style in which it’s made; that raw, lo-fi folk-art style that puts me in mind of something utterly ancient, especially because of the subject. People must have made models like these tens of thousands of years ago. It’s the root of all art, in a way. Humanity’s attempt to recreate its own image, to come to terms with itself, at the very dawn of human self-awareness. This must have been made and left here by the loggers. It’s just really poignant; that same unconscious need for identity and self-analysis felt throughout history, still felt today by ordinary working-class people the world over, when faced with the wilderness. It’s made of wood, and tree shaped; humanity emerging from nature— or perhaps regressing?
It’s tiny, about 4 inches high, but it feels quite sturdy. I’m not going to tell Per. I think he’ll think it’s stupid. I’ve put it in my pocket. I want to take it home with me after the trip, maybe frame it or mount it at home.
I’ve just looked up to check on the weather. It’s cloudy, but warm, and a little muggy. There’s a bird wheeling overhead. It looks like the same bird as the one above us yesterday, but I can’t be sure from down here. It’s behaving similarly, circling overhead, above the clearing where we are. The sight of the sky above and the little, moving speck makes me feel momentarily dizzy.
* * *
“I mark the flowers, ere their prime...”
This is almost funny. I got so sick of Dylan glaring at me disapprovingly when I looked at the map that I gave up and went off without a route. We’re at the river now, in the valley. It’s about twelve metres wide where we are, and so fast-flowing that it’s like being stood next to a motorway. The nearest bridge is on the main E-road, twenty miles southeast, a day’s walk there and a day’s walk back in the wrong direction.
Dylan is furious, but of course he won’t admit that he’s angry with me because he has to be so fucking reasonable all the fucking time. He got more and more frustrated as it dawned on him that we’d lost two days walking, until he finally gritted his teeth and said ‘I think we should have a break.’ So here we are, both sat down on rocks, angrily scribbling in our journals and not talking to each other. I wish someone else were here to see this.
In the valley itself, the ground is boggy and there are pools of green surface water under the knots of undergrowth. It took about four hours to walk five miles to the river, with t-shirts over our mouths, snorting midges out through our noses. They’re everywhere; dancing in front of my eyes like a concussion, and making the air in the distance look discoloured. When we were teenagers and we used to camp out by the lake at home, we used to smoke cigarettes and try and ward the midges away with the smoke. I can’t remember if it ever worked, although I can remember discovering that you can still inhale smoke even with a t-shirt pulled up over your mouth.
The undergrowth is thick enough to fight back against us as we try and shoulder through. Everything is over-grown, wet, hot and over-fertile in the stinking air. The tip of some sort of flower brushed past me and left sticky pollen on my shoulder, and it made me shudder like some great big glistening phallus had just touched me. Ah, the great outdoors.
I don’t even know why we’ve stopped. We’re going to have to wade across the river. Both of us know it. In a minute one of us will have to say it.
I’m thinking about Yngve, of course. That’s why I’m feeling so bitter.
I remember Yngve once cut his wrist so deeply that he passed out from blood loss. I remember all of us lying to the hospital staff, and now I wonder what would have happened if we’d told them the truth.
I remember Yngve was sacked from his Saturday job because he told a female customer that he would go and masturbate in the stock cupboard after he had finished serving her. The woman told his manager and he was dismissed on the spot. After the woman left Yngve followed her home and pissed through her letterbox and tried to start a fire but it kept going out. I was so ashamed that I wanted to beat him in front of the woman just so she knew that I hadn’t brought him up like this. Except, of course, we did bring him up. The police phoned me to bring him home and I had to stop myself from lying about him and saying I didn’t know him. It was completely unprovoked. She had just walked into a shop, and because of the way she looked he had followed her home.
I remember Yngve getting beaten up at school by a group of boys, so badly that both his arms were broken and his lung collapsed. We thought he was going to die.
Yngve left us a list of instructions along with that delusional note, but most of what he wanted couldn’t be done. We buried him in a non-denominational memorial ground because we didn’t think he’d want a church funeral and, as far as I know, there are no burial grounds anywhere for racist, heavy metal fans. He probably would have wanted a fucking longship, or something. I sat in my living room with Greta, and the celebrant sat opposite us, and I gave her Yngve’s list and watched her chewing her lip as her little boat began to sink. The she said:
“Mr Åadland, I know this is incredibly difficult for you, but I don’t think we can have the... the flag that Yngve wanted. I’m sorry. I’ve never had to refuse anyone’s requests before...“
“Can you suggest to me any other organizations that would be prepared to comply with my son’s last wishes?” I said, defiantly, because Yngve’s note was right there in his own handwriting, and because I didn’t know what else to do. I hated the celebrant.
“Umm...” she actually considered my question for a moment before realizing exactly what it was that I was asking. Then her face-hardened and she said, “No, Mr Åadland. I don’t think there is anywhere, and if there were then I wouldn’t know about it. Perhaps the best thing for your family to do, if this is how you want to remember your son, is to hold the funeral with us and then hold a private wake at your own home, with his own choice of decorations there...” And then I began to laugh, at the idea of the secret Nazi-themed wake, all of us goose-stepping around in SS costumes like that British Prince, Yngve’s Swastika flag draped over the coffin and the luger, or the copy of Mein Kampf, or whatever the fuck else Yngve had stashed away in his locked bedroom, like something out of an eighties sitcom.
“Is there a particular piece of music that... that Yngve would have liked to have played?”
“Yes. It says right there.”
“Oh. Chainsaw...”
“Gutsfuck. It’s called
Chainsaw Gutsfuck.”
Greta got up, weeping, and said “For fuck’s sake, Per” as she slammed the door.
I remember Chainsaw Gutsfuck buzzing out of the speakers under the stacks of flowers in the non-denominational chapel. It sounded like road traffic, and I turned around and found that nearly all the mourners had got up and left the funeral. There was no-one Yngve’s own age at the funeral to have shared his last joke with. I remember thinking how much Yngve must have hated us.
Dylan is staring into the distance, but at least he’s not trying to talk about the view or Vikings or something. I’m actually glad his mood has soured a notch. I don’t want to talk about fucking trees. Occasionally he pulls that little bundle of twigs out of his pocket and looks it over, and then squirrels it away again when he notices me looking. It looks like a little wooden doll. The way the wires cut into the soft wood and leave behind red rust looks unnervingly like something that’s been tied up and bleeding. I wish he’d throw it away.
* * *
...that such a sable track
Lay along the grasses green...
Dylan’s Journal:10/05/2011, Evening, the second peak
We reached the second peak today. Per has barely said a word to me all day. I really feel like he should have apologized for making that mistake with the map earlier. It would have cost us the whole holiday if we had had to turn back. I’ll try and talk to him about it. I know he’s had a terrible time recently with Yngve, but he needs to realize that this attitude he has got into recently isn’t going to help him to move on, especially not if it ends with him pushing away his friends like this. It’s not his fault. He must be in a very selfish place at the moment.
The walk today was more of a chore than anything else. We hit some sort of marshland in the valley, which I don’t think either of us was expecting. The trees thinned out a little, but what seemed like mossy ground was actually waterlogged and slippery underfoot. The midges were so thick that I didn’t want to breathe.
I am dehydrated, despite all the damp. My eyelids feel heavy, as if I was drunk. We stink, which I suppose is not surprising, but for some reason it’s really annoying me. It’s like there’s this stench following us around, and every time we stop I begin to smell it again and have to keep moving. It’s making me really irritable. After wading across the river my clothes were heavy with the water and began to rub away at my waist and knees and where my rucksack straps cross my chest. I had a look under my t-shirt just now and my skin is red and beginning to blister in places. I’ll feel a lot more positive when we manage to reach our base camp and relax a bit
But the peak... my first view of the fjord took my breath away. At the very sight of it, the temperature seemed to drop noticeably just from the sheer volume of cold water sucking the heat out of the air. The sides of the cliffs and the slope in front of us are bare of trees, black rock, jagged where they look as though they’ve been gouged. After the thick forest, seeing the empty water is like coming through the front door after a long commute. It’s cold and refreshing, like turning over the pillow in the night.
The water is the sky, blank and unreadable, and the rock is jagged, and huge, the way a parent looks to a tiny child
But I’m so tired. I look back at the forest, and ahead, north, at the next mountain, and I can’t help feeling like we’ve come too far. We’re stranded. My legs ache. I can’t imagine the effort it will take us to walk all the way back. I feel like I could just lie down here forever.
I’m still thinking about my little stick sculpture. I was thinking about putting it in the garden when I got home, sticking it into the lawn or maybe building some sort of little plinth to put it on under one of the trees. It seems more appropriate somehow, rather than bringing it into the house and domesticating it. The best thing to do would be to bury it, under the lawn. I know that might seem a little bit eccentric, but it just feels so perfect. I feel a certain sort of empathy with whoever made it. Burying it in the ground feels like the ultimate sort of return to nature—I know it’s just empty symbolism, but then symbolic is what the object is. I took it out of my pocket just now and held it upside down and it looked like a little model of a tree. Planting it would be like allowing it to grow. It would feel wrong, unappreciative, not to do the right thing.
* * *
...and the flowers he had tied
As I mark’d, not always died
Sooner than their mates, and yet...
I saw Yngve, up at the peak. Dylan turned to look at me, but didn’t say anything, and just for a moment Yngve was stood behind him, leaning over his shoulder, his white-blonde hair in his eyes, smirking at me. I feel sick.
* * *
...their fall was fuller of regret
Dylan has gone.
I’m sat under
I don’t
I don’t understand what has happened.
I’m writing this in my journal and then reading it back to myself. I’m waiting for it to fall into place, and then, click, I’ll get it.
I’m sat down trying to
I need to
I’m sat down on the shore of the fjord and I have to write this before I forget it. People will ask me what happened and I need to know.
Dylan is gone d
I didn’t see him surface from the
I know that what happened can’t
Just write the words.
Dylan is dead.
Dylan has disappeared. I’m calmer now. I don’t think he is dead, really. Realistically. I’m going to write this before I forget to see if I can figure it out, and to keep myself calm. Then I’m going to call mountain rescue.
This is what I saw. We came down the second peak, towards the fjord, and the temperature dropped so severely that I could see my breath in the air. The southern slope we had hiked up had been wooded, but for some reason the northern slope was completely bare. It was silent, too, in the valley. I hadn’t realized how noisy the forests had been, with the rasping and buzzing of insects and shudder of moving undergrowth and screams of crows, until we reached the peak and began to climb down. It was so quiet that when rocks tumbled down the mountainside in front of us we could hear them crack apart, and echo from one cliff face to the next.
Like I said, there were no trees on that slope. The rock and soil are so loose it’s like walking on ash. Below us, as we slid down, the water seemed impossibly deep even at the shore. The shoreline itself is pitted with wide, flat stones that the water, deep water, runs between like veins of fat in meat, slate grey against black rock. From above, this almost looks like a honeycomb pattern, although less regular. Then the rocks grow less and less frequent, out into the open water. At the edge of the fjord were a small jetty and a few little wooden rowing boats, stretching out into the sea.
The water was painfully cold, not like a southern spring at all but like Tromsø in winter. In the valley, we could no longer see the sun.
Dylan rowed us out into the water. I don’t know why, but we argued, and somewhere out on the boat, he said something to me about how I had failed Yngve as a parent. I thought we had reached the far edge of the water, we had been rowing for hours, but when I looked around we were in the very centre of the fjord, between the two shores, over the open water itself. When I didn’t respond to Dylan, I didn’t know what to say, he began to shake me by my shoulders and scream. I remember trying not to look at him, looking past him, and suddenly I saw that the great, jagged rocks of the cliffs were so distant that I could scarcely make them out from the clouds. Dylan’s screams echoed around the silent water, the return echo coming terribly slowly, as if it knew I was waiting for it, from a distance far, far larger than the fjord had looked from the land.
I fell and cracked my ribs on the edge of the boat. My face hung a few feet from the water. I looked down.
The water was a void, like space, bigger than planets. The dark sea seemed to me, in that moment, to be horrifically clear. My stomach lurched, as if I could see down hundreds of metres, miles ev
en, as if I was being suspended over some chasm and I was about to fall. My head span, and I was sick into the water. Then Dylan grabbed the back of my jacket and hauled me back into the boat.
I saw something drifting away on the water. It was Dylan’s wooden doll that had been hidden under our tent. It must have slid out of his pocket into the fjord, and it was moving away from the boat, drifting, a little faster than wood should drift on water without waves. On that huge fjord, it looked tiny, insignificant, like something dead.
Dylan cried out when he saw it. He took off his jacket and backpack. I grabbed his waist but he fought me off. He shouted out again, furiously, at me, as if it was my fault, and said something like “I have to bury him.” Then he threw himself into the water.
I saw the soles of his feet turned up towards me, kicking limply and pushing him deeper down, under the water, further and further until he had become part of the murk beneath the still surface.
I feel calmer for writing that. Dylan may have swum to shore somewhere. I know I am scared and it’s hard to think clearly in situations like this. I am assuming the worst here by jumping to the conclusion that he must have drowned. He might have swum back to the far shore. After all, there’s no way I would have seen him if he had. He could have washed up anywhere.
I’m sat on the shore, on the pebbles, on the roots of a tree. I can’t tell if I am looking up at the sky or back down into the still sea.
It seem’d so hard, and dismal thing
Death, to mark them in the Spring
* * *
Greta,
Once again, I’m sorry to have had to send these entries to you. I hope that you feel that it was right for me to have done so, and not that I have meddled unnecessarily and reopened old wounds that you had hoped were healed.