The Cabin in the Mountains

by Robert Ferguson

  *

  Norway was still, at the time of Slingsby’s conquest of Store Skagastølstind, a property of the crown of Sweden; but in retrospect there is an overwhelming sense of inevitability about the three decades that preceded 1905 and the achievement of full independence. Ibsen was already conquering the literary world on behalf of his countrymen, but there was always a feeling that the identity of the nearly-nation was intimately bound up not so much with its literature and its fine arts (though in addition to Ibsen the Norwegian contribution to world culture over these decades includes Edvard Grieg, Knut Hamsun and Edvard Munch) but to something more directly connected to the unique landscape of the country and the deeply rural heritage that all Norwegians shared.

  Rumours that Store Skagastølstind had finally been conquered preceded Slingsby and Mohn as they made their way back to civilisation, Knut Lykken having returned to his farm at Øystre Slidre in Valdres. It was said that Mohn and Lykken had reached the top, but not the foreigner; then that it was the foreigner who had reached the top alone; then that the hero of the hour was Knut Lykken. When at last Slingsby and Mohn arrived at the small tourist hotel at Røisheim and the truth was made known, Slingsby observes, though the congratulations and celebrations were warm and sincere, disappointment that the honour had not been claimed by a Norwegian was palpable. And, with the innocence of a true enthusiast, Slingsby continued to gobble up first ascents of some of the highest peaks in Norway on his subsequent trips.

  Perhaps unwisely, in a lecture on the ascent given later in the summer at the Norwegian Students Union in Kristiania, Mohn expressed the view that the sport of mountaineering in Norway was not as yet developed enough to produce Norwegian climbers capable of the ascent of a mountain like Store Skagastølstind. Provoked by this assertion, a young landscape painter named Harald Petersen made the second ascent of Storen in 1878, and the first by a Norwegian, claiming that he had done so solely to refute Mohn’s assertion and demonstrate that Norwegians were quite capable of such feats. As proof of his ascent he sent Slingsby the khaki handkerchief the Englishman had left behind at the summit, leaving behind his own red one, and a tobacco pouch containing a medicine bottle with his name on it and a few coins.

  Another who was stung by what he interpreted as Slingsby’s act of proto-cultural appropriation was a wealthy Norwegian lawyer and landowner named Johannes Heftye. The summer before Slingsby’s sensational solo climb, Heftye had made the first ascent of Knutsholstind, another peak in the Jotunheimen and at that time believed by many to be the highest in Norway. He took Slingsby’s triumph as a personal affront. Absolutely convinced that his own achievement was of greater significance, and that the ascent of ‘Storen’ was hardly comparable, he climbed the mountain himself in August 1880, with two others. Intending to follow Slingsby’s route, he lost his way slightly and inadvertently discovered a ‘chimney’ up which he was able to make the last part of the climb. This was dubbed ‘Heftye’s Chimney’. It remains to this day one of the most popular routes to the top, so much so that climbers proposing to make the ascent are advised that there may be a queue and a long wait at the entrance to it.

  Heftye had made the ascent only to prove how easy it was compared to his own ascent of Knutsholstind, and he made his point clear in a booklet published the following year, in 1881. Slingsby’s response was to climb Knutsholstind himself, with Johannes Vigdal and a budeie from Gjendebu named Marie Sølfestsdatter. In describing the climb afterwards he added, perhaps a trifle unnecessarily, that in the course of the climb they had hardly needed to use their hands at all.

  Heftye was a short-tempered man. Some years later, in a dispute with local people whom he found trespassing on his estate on Christmas Day 1899, he shot and killed a twenty-four-year-old fisherman with his revolver. He was duly arrested but released even before the young man’s body was in the ground, the court finding that he had acted in self-defence, and the newspapers lamenting the lack of respect for property laws among the uneducated of the countryside. It was the second human life Heftye had, or didn’t have, on his conscience; in 1881 a man named Henning Bødtker Tønsberg, having read Heftye’s booklet and been impressed by his misleading account of the ease with which Store Skagastølstind could be conquered, set out on the climb and fell to his death.

  Responding to Slingsby’s account, Heftye wrote a newspaper article in which he censured Slingsby most especially for having invited ‘a defenceless woman’ along with him on such a ‘dangerous expedition’, and expressed the fervent hope that the liberation of women would never reach a stage at which the ascent of Knutsholstind would become some kind of rite of initiation for women. Heftye continued to attack Slingsby in further newspaper articles, accusing him of being largely motivated in all he did by the wish to diminish his own achievement in being the first man to climb Knutsholstinden. He wouldn’t tolerate it, he wrote, especially not from a foreigner.

  Mohn’s failure to have made the top of Storen with Slingsby was not forgotten. In the late summer of 1876 he became the target of a number of hostile articles in Morgenbladet, in which he was accused of cowardice for allowing a foreigner to be the first conqueror of a national icon like Storen. ‘We are a mountain people,’ he was told. ‘It does not look good for us when foreigners beat us to the tops of our own mountains.’ He was advised that in future a man like him should avoid embarking on more trips with foreigners, ‘if in any doubt at all about one’s own courage and capacities’. Norwegian nationalism, nowadays such a notably benign, inclusive and child-centred phenomenon, was much harsher in these crucial decades, where every public act a man performed was reckoned up against its contribution to the creation of a Norwegian national identity, in accordance with an understanding that until this was demonstrably in place for all the world to see, only then would the demand for independence be irrefutable.

  So Emanuel Mohn had let the side down. He had failed to realise that ‘on such occasions’ he had become, whether he liked it or not, a ‘self-appointed representative of his nation’. Replying to the attacks he expressed indignation and bewilderment at the criticism, and rejected completely any notion that he, a private person on a private venture with an Englishman whom he considered a friend, was responsible to anyone but himself. To him the whole week they had spent climbing together in Jotunheimen was quite free of ‘irrelevant national jealousies’, and he expressed his astonishment at the way the question of national honour had been introduced into the discussion. Later on, Knut Lykken came in for criticism too, for his failure to have been something more and greater than a Norwegian working man whose view of the mountains was as a place of employment rather than an arena for the display of pride in his nationality. Young Henning Tønsberg, whose father had been Støren’s first victim, informed him that his reluctance on two occasions – with Slingsby and thereafter with Petersen – to continue to the top of the mountain was not, as he himself might have thought, a simple desire not to risk his life in an enterprise that had no interest for him, but the result of a typically peasant lack of imagination and initiative: ‘It’s worth noting’, wrote Tønsberg, ‘that this mountain farmer, this hunter, regarded the venture as a sort of blasphemy, a result of the view of mountaintops among that type of person as something ugly, forbidding and dangerous.’ Norway, although without an aristocracy since the abolition of titles of privilege in 1821, nevertheless preserved, as it does to this day, a subtle but distinct class system, and Tønsberg’s expressed contempt for the cautious farmer–hunter Knut Lykken was one example of it. So was the fact that Johannes Heftye’s killing of the trespassing young fisherman went unpunished.

  But maybe there is another, kinder way of looking at it, I thought. Here, in these heated debates and discussions of national identity, of what it means to be Norwegian and what it should mean to be Norwegian, are we not on the cusp of modernity, the watershed that divides old, rural Norway from the Norway of the industrial revolution and after, manifest in this urgent desire to lay claim to all of Norw
ay in this very literal sense, by clambering to all of its highest points? Could this not be seen as the last gesture of a rural people, asserting its final triumph over a landscape that had for so long overawed them, before leaving it permanently behind and settling in cities and towns?

  A cluster of three knots makes a face-like shape in a wood panel.

  Indeed, was it possible, I asked myself – noting at the same time the almost facial beauty of certain clusters of knots that seemed often to occur in triangular groups of three, in which the upper two together suggested the sad scrutiny of some dog-like animal gazing darkly out from within a parallel universe that passed through the wood – might it be possible to relate all of this to what is probably the most dramatic manifestation of Norwegian national identity, as an outdoor people, a people of mountain and ice, in the careers of Fridtjof Nansen and his protégé, Roald Amundsen? I thought of the cabin Nansen and Hjalmar Johansen built and lived in for six months during their heroically failed attempt to reach the North Pole in 1896; of how Nansen became a hero and a role model to a whole generation of young Norwegian men. Concerning Amundsen, something of the same may be said. Perhaps it was boyhood memories of those expressions of national disappointments verging on humiliation associated with Mohn, Lykken and Slingsby that had enabled Amundsen to lie so cold-bloodedly about the true goal of his expedition to the South Pole in 1912, knowing as he did that the Englishman Robert Scott was also planning an expedition? Did being first seem to Amundsen a matter of such consequence, both to him as an individual and to a newly independent Norway – the country was just six years old at the time of his triumph – that subterfuge and lying were justified in establishing once and for all in the eyes of the world that Norwegians were kings and queens of the snowy and icy regions of the world? That this was their world, in a way it could never be the world of the Englishman? Was the cruel and harshly personal nature of the attacks on Emanuel Mohn a sign of how desperately important it was, this ambition for a terrain that psychologically and physically belonged to them, and them alone? Did Mohn’s shocked realisation that he was somehow not a ‘proper’ Norwegian, that in his insufficiently communal sense of being a Norwegian before he was an individual he had ‘let the side down’ in a fundamental way he could never do anything to correct – did all of that have anything to do with his suicide on 26 April 1891, jumping overboard from a ferry on its way from Bergen to Utne, leaving behind only his hat, floating on the waters above him? A detail from Risen som ikke hadde noe hjerte på seg, ‘The Giant Who Had No Heart’, one of the folk-tales collected by Asbjørnsen and Moe in the early 1840s, now imposed itself on me. The tale concerns a king’s son named Ash who sets out to find what happened to seven brothers who failed to return from a journey made in search of seven wives. The brothers took all the best horses with them so Ash must use the only one left in the stables, a broken-down old nag. It serves his purpose well, until he meets a starving wolf who begs him for something to eat. In return he promises to come to Ash’s aid whenever he might have need of it. Ash can’t imagine a situation in which he might need a wolf’s help but nevertheless agrees and gives the wolf his own horse to eat: in all its bleak realism, its utter lack of sentimentality, did this detail not shed light on the mind and character of Roald Amundsen, who used his own huskies as food, eating them one by one as the journey progressed, until in the end only one was left standing, and then that too was killed and eaten? And what of the Andes survivors, I thought, jabbing my loaded brush furiously into the shadowed joints at the end of the terrace wall, the ones left alive after their plane crashed in the mountains, who survived for seventy-two days by eating the bodies of dead friends and relatives? The wolf and the horse, Amundsen and his dogs, the Andes survivors – surely some spiritual truth must link these dark stories? And perhaps it did. But as I discharged my brush into the last of the joints I stood up and called out my wife’s name, suddenly filled with the longing to hear her voice, to turn and see her standing in the doorway of the room by the staircase, wearing her white paper overalls and suggesting we break for tea.

  * The poem was published at a time when Ibsen was still using the pseudonym Brynjolf Bjarme.

  7

  Early September 2018

  Walkers’ cabins in the mountains – on using a tent – a triangular walk in the west of the Hardangervidda – Haukeliseter cabin – first night out – petrified trees – footpath marking – Hellevassbu – losing the way – up into Slettedalen – blood on the snow – Amundsen nearly freezes to death – the descent to Haukeliseter – how memory edits experience

  By the end of August we had finished painting most of the inside of the cabin. We had driven up from Oslo almost every available weekend since taking over the cabin early in July, sleeping over at Paul and Trine’s cabin, happy to crash out on their big sofa and, on the rare occasions when I was able to combine the two remote controls successfully, watching their giant, wall-mounted television. If I was feeling particularly lively I might chase the dog around the square wooden coffee table a couple of times. The dog would walk, I would run.

  A series of deep and critical sniffing sessions in the living room and the bedroom convinced us that the sharp smell of wood stain had cleared enough for us finally to spend the night in our own cabin, but when we did so it felt like a slight anticlimax. Although we had talked a lot about the kind of furniture we were going to buy, we were still eating off the small, rickety wooden table we had bought twenty years earlier at a school jumble sale in Abildsø. And when we broke off from painting we didn’t have a sofa to stretch out on but instead sank into two yellow folding nylon chairs with their seats about a foot off the ground. Nina had draped a sheepskin over the back of each one, presents from the time when Hanne and Petter kept sheep up on their smallholding at Siljuseter. But even with the addition of these pelts, the chairs didn’t provide much comfort when our legs and arms were aching from the repetitive and monotonous exercises of the day’s painting.

  The one permanent item of furniture already in place was the bed. This was a black wooden-framed IKEA bed with two storage drawers underneath on each side. The dog, still only a few months old and disturbed by the succession of different venues in which our nights were now being spent, sometimes at home in Oslo, sometimes at Paul and Trine’s cabin, now here at our own cabin, crept in between us and hardly stirred all night. Drifting off to sleep, I tried to itemise the main jobs we still had to do. There was the outside of the cabin to paint. And sometime within the next two weeks we were expecting the arrival of our levende tak, literally a ‘living roof’, consisting of grass and wildflowers and anything else that fancied its chances of surviving up there. Driving up through Numedal I had seen small trees and bushes sprouting from the roofs of cabins and stabbur, and I was looking forward hugely to the day our own ‘living roof’ arrived. Until it was in place, and the black, glistening membrane that was currently keeping the weather out covered up, the cabin would not be a hytta.

  While waiting for it to arrive, and before starting work on painting the outside, which would have to be done before the first snow fell, we both felt the need of a break. Nina arranged to spend a week in the Languedoc with a like-minded friend on the trail of the Knights Templar and the Cathars, and rather than just hanging around the flat in Oslo and watching repeats of Bonanza I decided it would be a good time for me to explore the western side of the Hardangervidda, which I hardly knew at all. I would get to know the terrain by spending a few days hiking there.

  Over the years Nina and I had been on many walking trips in the Norwegian mountains. We had explored Jotunheimen, Espedalen, Rondane, Aurland, the northern and eastern parts of the Hardangervidda, but never the west of the great mountain plain. These walks of ours, normally lasting between three and five days, had become sources of great joy to me. I discovered in them the most powerful sense of solace, peace, and most of all, relief from that endless and anxious background questioning of the purpose of it all, all this frantic act
ivity, all these jobs and tasks, all these obligations, these dreams and ambitions to pursue and fulfil before we die, as though we were born with a set of binding instructions in our pockets.

  My wife shared my joy in all this. Where we differed was over the use of a tent. She was very happy with the level of comfort provided by the network of cabins provided by the Norwegian Trekking Association (Den Norske Turistforening or DNT) stretching across the length and breadth of the country, and simply refused to entertain the idea of sleeping out in a tent. As there are 540 of these cabins, it was hard to muster purely practical arguments against her preference. But I longed for the independence and privacy that nights spent camping in the open would bring, and, as though engaging in a magical act, I had bought as many as four different tents to offer her over the years, including three- and two-person varieties. Finally, once all hope was gone, I acquired a one-person tent. It was as though I believed the mere possession of these, and their presence in the loft, might be enough to make her change her mind. But it didn’t, and so we had always followed the network of paths that wandered between DNT’s members’ cabins, following the red ‘T’ with which DNT volunteers marked the way, and had done so very enjoyably and successfully.

  But I still longed to embark on a more independent type of trip, something that required a greater degree of self-sufficiency, and this autumn break seemed to offer an ideal opportunity to do so. I would need to be back at Veggli on the Friday, when we had been told the turf roof would be delivered. That gave me four days and nights in which to take a look at the more mountainous and less-travelled south-western corner of the Hardangervidda. Simen and Helene, neighbours of ours in Oslo and dog-owners themselves, kindly agreed to look after Alex for the time I would be away, and early on Tuesday morning I took the Metro down to the bus station in central Oslo and boarded the 945 for the five-hour drive to Haukeliseter.