by Bill Bryson
Beyond the high street, the road curved around the bay, leading out to a narrow headland, and after a half a mile or so it presented a fetching view back to the town, sheltering in a cleft of black mountains, as if in the palm of a giant hand. The bay itself was black and impenetrable; only the whooshing sound of water hinted at what was out there. But the town itself was wonderfully bright and snug-looking, a haven of warmth and light in the endless Arctic night.
Satisfied with this initial reconnaissance, I trudged back to the hotel, where I had a light but astonishingly expensive dinner and climbed gratefully into bed.
In the night I was woken by a storm. I crept to the window and peered out. Snow was blowing wildly, and the wind howled. Lightning lit the sky. I had never seen lightning in a snowstorm. Murmuring, ‘Oh, sweet Jesus, where am I?’, I climbed back into bed and buried myself deep in the covers. I don’t know what time I woke, but I dozed and tossed for perhaps an hour in the dark until it occurred to me that it never was going to get light. I got up and looked out of the window. The storm was still raging. In the police-station car park below, two squad cars marked POLITI were buried in drifts almost to their roofs.
After breakfast, I ventured out into the gale. The streets were still deserted, snow piled in the doorways. The wind was playing havoc with the town. Street lights flickered and swayed, throwing spastic shadows across the snow. The Christmas decorations rattled. A cardboard box sailed across the road ahead of me and was wafted high out over the harbour. It was intensely cold. On the exposed road out to the headland I began to wish again that I had bought the Russian hat. The wind was unrelenting: it drove before it tiny particles of ice that seared my cheeks and made me gasp. I had a scarf with me, which I tied around my face bandit-style and trudged on, leaning heavily into the wind.
Ahead of me out of the swirling snow appeared a figure. He was wearing a Russian hat, I was interested to note. As he drew nearer, I pulled my scarf down to make some cheering greeting – ‘Bit fresh out, what?’ or something – but he passed by without even looking at me. A hundred yards further on I passed two more people, a man and his wife tramping stolidly into town, and they too passed as if I were invisible. Strange people, I thought.
The headland proved unrewarding, just a jumble of warehouses and small ship-repair yards, loomed over by groaning cranes. I was about to turn back when I noticed a sign pointing the way to something called the Meridianstøtten and decided to investigate. This took me down a lane on the seaward side of the headland. Here, wholly exposed to the pounding sea, the wind was even more ferocious. Twice it all but picked me up and carried me forward several yards. Only the toetips of my boots maintained contact with the ground. I discovered that by holding out my arms I could sail along on the flats of my feet, propelled entirely by the wind. It was the most wonderful fun. Irish windsurfing, I dubbed it. I had a great time until an unexpected burst whipped my feet from under me. I cracked my head on the ice so hard that I suddenly recalled where I put the coal-shed key the summer before. The pain of it, and the thought that another gust might heft me into the sea like the cardboard box I had seen earlier, made me abandon the sport, and I proceeded to the Meridianstøtten with prudence.
The Meridianstøtten was an obelisk on a small elevation in the middle of a graveyard of warehouses. I later learned that it was a memorial erected to celebrate the completion in 1840, on this very spot, of the first scientific measurement of the earth’s circumference. (Hammerfest’s other historical distinction is that it was the first town in Europe to have electric street lights.) I clambered up to the obelisk with difficulty, but the snow was blowing so thickly that I couldn’t read the inscription, and I returned to town thinking I would come back again another day. I never did.
In the evening I dined in the hotel’s restaurant and bar, and afterwards sat nursing Mack beers at fifty øre a sip, thinking that surely things would liven up in a minute. It was New Year’s Eve, after all. But the bar was like a funeral parlour with a beverage service. A pair of mild-looking men in reindeer sweaters sat with beers, staring silently into space. After a time I realized there was another customer, alone in a dark corner. Only the glow of his cigarette revealed him in the gloom. When the waiter came to take my plate away, I asked him what there was to do for fun in Hammerfest. He thought for a moment and said, ‘Have you tried setting fire to the telephone directories by the post office?’
Actually he didn’t say that, because just as he was about to speak, the lone figure in the corner addressed some slurred remark to him, which I gathered was something along the lines of ‘Hey, you dismal, slope-headed slab of reindeer shit, what does it take to get some service around here?’ because the waiter dropped my plate back onto the table with a suddenness that made the silverware jump and went straight to the man and began furiously dragging him by his arm and shoulder from his seat and then pushing him with enormous difficulty to the door, where he finally heaved him out into the snow. When the waiter returned, looking flushed and disconcerted, I said brightly, ‘I hope you don’t show all your customers out like that!’ but he was in no mood for pleasantries and retired sulkily to the bar, so I was unable to determine just what there was to do in Hammerfest to pass the time, other than set telephone books alight, insult the waiter and weep.
At eleven-thirty, with the bar still dead, I went out to see if there was any life anywhere. The wind had died but there was hardly anyone about. Every window in every house blazed with light, but there was no sign of revelry within. Then just before midnight, as I was about to return to the hotel, an odd thing happened. Every person came out of every house and began to set off fireworks – big industrial-sized fireworks that shrieked across the sky and exploded with a sharp bang and filled the night with colour and sparks. For half an hour, from all around the peninsula, fireworks popped and glittered over the harbour and drifted spent into the sea. And then, precisely thirty minutes after it all began, everyone went back inside and Hammerfest slept again.
The days passed. At least three times a day I went for long walks and searched the sky for the Northern Lights, and in the evenings I went out every hour to see if anything was happening yet, but it never was. Sometimes I rose in the night to look out of the window, but I never saw anything. Once or twice a day it would snow – fat, fluffy snowflakes, like the ones you see in a Perry Como Christmas special – but the rest of the time the sky was clear. Everyone told me it was perfect Northern Lights weather. ‘You should have been here just before Christmas – ah, fabulous,’ they would say and then assure me that tonight would almost certainly be the night. ‘About eleven o’clock you go out. Then you’ll see.’ But it didn’t happen.
When I wasn’t walking or searching the sky, I sat in the bar of the hotel drinking beer or lay on my bed reading. I tried once or twice to watch television in my room. There is only one network in Norway and it is stupefyingly bad. It’s not just that the programmes are dull, though in this respect they could win awards, but that the whole thing is so wondrously unpolished. Films finish and you get thirty seconds of scratchy white circles like you used to get when your home movies ran out and your dad didn’t get to the projector fast enough, and then suddenly the lights come up on the day’s host, looking faintly startled, as if he had been just about to do something he wouldn’t want the nation to see. The host, always a handsome young man or woman with a lively sweater and sculpted hair, fills the long gaps between programmes by showing endless trailers for the rest of the evening’s highlights: a documentary on mineral extraction in Narvik, a Napoleonic costume drama in which the main characters wear moustaches that are patently not their own and strut around as if they have had a fence post inserted rectally (but are trying not to let it affect their performance) and a jazz session with the Sigi Wurtmuller Rhythm Cadettes. The best that can be said for Norwegian television is that it gives you the sensation of a coma without the worry and inconvenience.
I began to feel as if a doctor had told me to go away for
a complete rest (‘someplace really boring, where there’s nothing at all to do’). Never had I slept so long and so well. Never had I had this kind of leisure just to potter about. Suddenly I had time to do all kinds of things: unlace my boots and redo them over and over until the laces were precisely the same length, rearrange the contents of my wallet, deal with nose hairs, make long lists of all the things I would do if I had anything to do. Sometimes I sat on the edge of the bed with my hands on my knees and just gazed about me. Often I talked to myself. Mostly I went for long, cold walks, bleakly watching the unillumined sky, then stopped for coffee at Kokken’s Café, with its steamy windows and luscious warmth.
It occurred to me that this was just like being retired. I even began taking a small notebook with me on my walks and keeping a pointless diary of my daily movements, just as my dad had done when he retired. He used to walk every day to the lunch counter at our neighbourhood supermarket and if you passed by you would see him writing in his notebooks. After he died, we found a cupboard full of these notebooks. Every one of them was filled with entries like this: ‘January 4. Walked to supermarket. Had two cups of decaff. Weather mild.’ Suddenly I understood what he was up to.
Little by little I began to meet people. They began to recognize me in Kokken’s and the post office and the bank and to treat me to cautious nods of acknowledgement. I became a fixture of the hotel bar, where I was clearly regarded as a harmless eccentric, the man from England who came and stayed and stayed.
One day, lacking anything at all to do, I went and saw the Mayor. I told him I was a journalist, but really I just wanted someone to talk to. He had an undertaker’s face and wore blue jeans and a blue work shirt, which made him look unsettlingly like a prisoner on day release, but he was a kind man. He told me at length about the problems of the local economy and as we parted he said:
‘You must come to my house one evening. I have a sixteen-year-old daughter.’ Gosh, that’s jolly gracious of you, I thought, but I’m a happily married man. ‘She would like to practise her English.’
Ah. I’d have gone, but the invitation never came. Afterwards, I went to Kokken’s and wrote in my diary, ‘Interviewed Mayor. Weather cold.’
One Sunday afternoon in the hotel I overheard a man about my age talking to the proprietor in Norwegian but to his own children in Home Counties English. His name was Ian Tonkin. He was an Englishman who had married a Hammerfest girl and now taught English at the local high school. He and his wife Peggy invited me to their house for dinner, fed me lavishly on reindeer (delicious) and cloud-berries (mysterious but also delicious) and were kindness itself, expressing great sympathy for my unluckiness with the Northern Lights. ‘You should have seen it just before Christmas – ah, fabulous,’ they said.
Peggy told me a sad story. In 1944 the retreating Germans, in an attempt to deprive the advancing Russian Army of shelter, burned down the town. The residents were evacuated by ship to live out the rest of the war billeted with strangers. As the evacuation flotilla left the harbour, they could see their houses going up in flames. Peggy’s father took the house keys from his pocket and dropped them overboard, saying with a sigh, ‘Well, we shan’t be needing those any more.’ After the war the people returned to Hammerfest to find nothing standing but the chapel. With their bare hands and almost nothing else they built their town again, one house at a time. It may not have been much, it may have been on the edge of nowhere, but it was theirs and they loved it and I don’t think I have ever admired any group of people quite so much.
From Peggy and Ian and others I met, I learned all about the town – about the parlous state of the fishing industry on which everyone depended in one way or another, about the previous year’s exciting murder trial, about accusations of incompetence concerning snow removal. I began to find it engrossing. Hammerfest grew to feel like home. It seemed entirely natural to be there, and my real life in England began to feel oddly distant and dream-like.
On my sixteenth day in Hammerfest, it happened. I was returning from the headland after my morning walk and in an empty piece of sky above the town there appeared a translucent cloud of many colours – pinks and greens and blues and pale purples. It glimmered and seemed to swirl. Slowly it stretched across the sky. It had an oddly oily quality about it, like the rainbows you sometimes see in a pool of petrol. I stood transfixed.
I knew from my reading that the Northern Lights are immensely high up in the atmosphere, something like 200 miles up, but this show seemed to be suspended just above the town. There are two kinds of Northern Light – the curtains of shimmering gossamer that everyone has seen in pictures, and the rather rarer gas clouds that I was gazing at now. They are never the same twice. Sometimes they shoot wraith-like across the sky, like smoke in a wind tunnel, moving at enormous speed, and sometimes they hang like luminous drapes or glittering spears of light, and very occasionally – perhaps once or twice in a lifetime – they creep out from every point on the horizon and flow together overhead in a spectacular, silent explosion of light and colour.
In the depthless blackness of the countryside, where you may be a hundred miles from the nearest artificial light, they are capable of the most weird and unsettling optical illusions. They can seem to come out of the sky and fly at you at enormous speeds, as if trying to kill you. Apparently it’s terrifying. To this day, many Lapps earnestly believe that if you show the Lights a white handkerchief or a sheet of white paper they will come and take you away.
This display was relatively small stuff, and it lasted for only a few minutes, but it was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen and it would do me until something better came along.
In the evening, something did – a display of Lights that went on for hours. They were of only one colour, that eerie luminous green you see on radar screens, but the activity was frantic. Narrow swirls of light would sweep across the great dome of sky, then hang there like vapour trails. Sometimes they flashed across the sky like falling stars and sometimes they spun languorously, reminding me of the lazy way smoke used to rise from my father’s pipe when he was reading. Sometimes the Lights would flicker brightly in the west, then vanish in an instant and reappear a moment later behind me, as if teasing me. I was constantly turning and twisting to see it. You have no idea how immense the sky is until you try to monitor it all. The eerie thing was how silent it was. Such activity seemed to demand at the very least an occasional low boom or a series of static-like crackles, but there was none. All this immense energy was spent without a sound.
I was very cold – inside my boots I wore three pairs of socks but still my toes were numb and I began to worry about frostbite – but I stayed and watched for perhaps two hours, unable to pull myself away.
The next day I went to the tourist office to report my good news to Hans, the tourism director who had become something of a friend, and to reserve a seat on the following week’s bus. There was no longer any need to hang around. Hans looked surprised and said, ‘Didn’t you know? There’s no bus next week. It’s going to Alta for its annual maintenance.’
I was crushed. Two more weeks in Hammerfest. What was I going to do with myself for two more weeks?
‘But you’re in luck,’ Hans added. ‘You can go today.’
I couldn’t take this in. ‘What?’
‘The bus should have arrived yesterday but it didn’t get through because of heavy snows around Kautokeino. It arrived this morning. Didn’t you see it out there? They’re going back again today.’
‘Today? Really? When?’
He looked at his watch with the casualness of someone who has lived for years in the middle of nowhere and will be living there for years more yet. ‘Oh, in about ten minutes, I should think.’
Ten minutes! I have seldom moved so quickly. I ran to the bus, begged them not to leave without me, though without any confidence that this plea was understood, ran to the hotel, threw everything into my suitcase, paid the bill, made my thanks and arrived at the bus, trailing oddments of
clothes behind me, just as it was about to pull out.
The funny thing is that as we were leaving Hammerfest, just for an instant I had a sudden urge not to go. It was a nice town. I liked the people. They had been kind to me. In other circumstances, I might just have settled down and stayed. But then, I realized, such thinking was crazy. It was time to return to Oslo and the real world. Besides, I had a hat to buy.
3. Oslo
I remember on my first trip to Europe going alone to a movie in Copenhagen. In Denmark you are given a ticket for an assigned seat. I went into the cinema and discovered that my ticket directed me to sit beside the only other people in the place, a young couple locked in the sort of passionate embrace associated with dockside reunions at the end of long wars. I could no more have sat beside them than I could have asked to join in – it would have come to much the same thing – so I took a place a few discreet seats away.
People came into the cinema, consulted their tickets and filled the seats around us. By the time the film started there were about thirty of us sitting together in a tight pack in the middle of a vast and otherwise empty auditorium. Two minutes into the movie, a woman laden with shopping made her way with difficulty down my row, stopped beside my seat and told me in a stern voice, full of glottals and indignation, that I was in her place. This caused much play of flashlights among the usherettes and fretful re-examining of tickets by everyone in the vicinity until word got around that I was an American tourist and therefore unable to follow simple seating instructions and I was escorted in some shame back to my assigned place.