The Cabin in the Mountains

by Robert Ferguson

  A trouble shared is a trouble doubled: had I really meant that? Or had I said it just to shock? I didn’t know then and I didn’t know now. Either way, I decided to say the opposite this time.

  ‘No, I don’t think it’s weak.’

  I must have taken too long to answer because in response he just grunted and looked away. Again he picked up his phone from the table, stared at the screen, cursed the temporary lack of a signal and stepped outside onto the terrace. He stopped, tapped a number onto the screen and then waited for a reply, face turned towards the sky, his lips moving and his head nodding as if he was conducting a silent conversation with himself.

  After a minute he closed the phone and walked slowly back in through the terrace door.

  ‘Where are you moving to?’ I asked.

  ‘Don’t know yet,’ he said dismissively. ‘Have you got a pair of binoculars?

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘In the spring next year, soon as the snow goes, get them out and have a look at the roof. Look particularly around the ridge, the chimney and the air vent pipe. Pay special attention to the area around the vindski.’

  He stepped out onto the gravel in front of the terrace and pointed up at the gable.

  ‘The vindski, that’s the planks running down either side of the gable there.’

  He headed off round the side of the house and I followed.

  A diagram showing how a turf roof stays in place.

  ‘And here,’ he said, stopping again and pointing to a long, faintly green-tinged plank running the length of the roof at an angle and fastened with a series of wrought iron fittings. ‘This is the torvhaldstokk. This keeps the turf in place. It’s got a lot of work to do. It’s impregnated, but you might have to replace it if the wood starts to rot. If you do, then take care and don’t let the turf slip down the roof. It’ll cause you a lot of extra work.’

  ‘Bør jeg beise den?’ I asked. ‘Should I paint it with wood dye?’

  ‘Some people do. I don’t.’

  ‘Any other maintenance apart from that?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘What about snow on the roof?’

  ‘The rule of thumb is, if it’s more than half a metre high, get up there and clear it. If there’s a lot of snow, clear it regularly. But not right down to the turf. Leave a layer of about ten to twenty centimetres. But don’t worry. This is a new cabin, it’s built to withstand a lot of snow. Cabins built before 1979 were only expected to withstand up to around a hundred and fifty kilograms of snow per cubic metre. But remember, when the weather turns mild you need to be especially careful. The snow attracts water, and wet snow can weigh as much as four hundred kilos per cubic metre. Once you’re up there, clear the snow from the top downwards, and clear the sides of the roof evenly, and gradually. That way you won’t get disproportionate weight. These new cabins are sinking anyway, and they’ll go on sinking for another two or three years. A lot of snow will speed up the process, but you need to make sure it’s evenly distributed across the roof. And when snow is wet, that’s when it lets go. And you don’t want to be standing underneath when that happens, believe you me. Several tons of snow falling on your head, or your car, and you’re looking at a new head, or a new car.’

  ‘And the grass just grows by itself? I don’t have to water it or put fertiliser on it?’

  ‘The bags are presown,’ he said. ‘And there’s a grass guarantee. If the grass doesn’t grow we come back and lay you another roof. But don’t worry, it’ll grow. It always does.’

  I very much liked the idea of the roof of the cabin looking like a meadow in the spring, with splashes of red and yellow and blue across the green, and had bought a packet of mixed seeds from the felleskjøpet, the farm shop down in the valley. I planned to sow them in the spring, but Norwegians have so many micro-rules governing things like that I asked about it anyway:

  ‘What about flowers? Is it okay to have flowers growing on the roof?’

  ‘Of course,’ he said. ‘Just make sure they’re native to the area.’

  He pulled the phone out of the breast pocket of his jacket and again wandered off a few paces, again tried to make a call. Again he failed to get an answer. I heard him swear quietly as he slipped the phone back into his pocket. It must have been the ninth or tenth time.

  ‘Not a very good signal up here,’ I volunteered. ‘It comes and goes. It’s the same with DAB. One day the radio works on the windowsill, next day you have to take it over to the kitchen work-surface. Next day it’s back to the windowsill again.’

  ‘Yeah, bloody DAB.’ It was a sore point with Norwegians, the peremptory haste with which the government had decided to close down the FM network completely and go over to digital radio. You heard people complain about the results all the time.

  We went back inside and sat down. He picked up his coffee mug, mechanically blew across the rim of it and took a sip.

  ‘So,’ he said, leaning back. ‘Now you’ve got a garden on your roof. You’ve got a piece of the great vidda draped across the top of your own cabin. It’s a hat to be proud of. A layer of peat across a lining of bark, the bark to keep the rain out, the peat to hold the bark in place and keep the heat inside the house. In the old days it was the only way. It’s just decoration now. In the old days they couldn’t have survived without it. You’d mow it, and trim it like a field. It was a part of the farm. I’ve seen goats grazing up on those roofs. So you don’t have levende tak in England?’

  ‘Not that I’ve ever seen. We have thatched roofs.’

  He nodded. ‘I’ve seen them,’ he said. ‘They have them in parts of Denmark too. In Fyn. Why don’t they have them in England?’

  Norwegians will often put me on the spot like that, as though being English made me an authority on matters as varied as the educational system, the rail network in the UK and why people who live in English coastal towns don’t eat more fish. In fact, after thirty years away from my home country, the sheer extent of the changes in almost every department of social and institutional life in England, coupled with my own inattentive nature, have left me knowing less about my own country than the average newspaper-reading Norwegian. And yet so deeply rooted is the idea of a nationality that I myself am still capable, after all these years, of treating Norwegians in exactly the same way, as though being Norwegian made them experts on their own history and culture, when very few of them are.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I replied. ‘There are so many things the English don’t do that seem odd when you come to think about it. Look at the winter and Christmas food Norwegians eat – ribbe, pinnekjøtt, fårikål – you’d think, with all the pigs and sheep in England, that they would be bound to have stumbled across the pleasures of eating ribs of salted mutton steamed over a layer of birch twigs, even if only by accident.’

  ‘What about lutefisk? What is that in English?’

  ‘I suppose it would be “lye fish”. Cod soaked in lye. But I’ve never seen it in England and I’ve never heard of anybody eating it.’

  ‘Do you like it?’

  ‘Yeah. I like the trimmings best. The mushy peas. The bacon bits you scatter over it. Do you like it?’

  He grimaced. ‘Fish I like. We always had fish for Christmas back home where I come from. But lutefisk? Can’t stand it. I feel ill just looking at it quivering on the plate.’

  ‘Where are you from originally? Bergen?’

  I knew that a lot of Bergensere typically ate fish for their Christmas meal, and the guttural way he pronounced the word for ‘dish’ (tallerken) was pure Bergen. It’s an accent thick enough to slice, like Brummie or Scouse or Geordie, and has the same singing tonality.

  ‘Long time ago.’

  ‘So you’re a Nordmann?’ I responded, glad of the chance to show off a bit of esoteric knowledge I had recently acquired.

  ‘You know about that, do you?’ he said with a little laugh. ‘Well then, you must have been here a long time.’

  I told him that Normann, spelled without the ‘d’, was
my wife’s maiden name, which accounted for my interest. A few weeks earlier I had bought a copy of Reidar Fønnebø’s 1981 book about the Nordmannsslepene from Ruud’s second-hand bookshop on St Hanshaugen, in Oslo. From earliest times the Nordmannsslepene were the trade routes across Hardangervidda for hunters and traders heading east for the great cattle and trade markets on the other side in places like Kongsberg, Drammen, Tønsberg and Christiania. They used packhorses, sometimes strapping the goods on to their backs, sometimes harnessing them to two parallel poles that rested on the ground but were curved at the ends, so they could be dragged across the terrain. They carried dried fish, hops, salt, the type of rough wool fabric known as wadmal, tallow for use in the Kongsberg silver mines. Over the years the passage of these trade trains ploughed three or four distinct, wide furrowed tracks over the vidda, as though God had leaned down and drawn his spread fingers across the land. The most southerly of the trails was the Søndre Nordmannsslepe. It came down off the vidda and into the Numedal valley at Veggli. For obscure reasons, traders arriving in the valley from the west seemed to those greeting them to have come from the north of the mountainous plateau, and were accordingly referred to as ‘Nordmenn’, men from the north.

  This great network of trails is now little used by walkers. Like me on my walk over in the south-west of the vidda, walkers prefer the security of the trails waymarked by DNT with the red ‘T’s. But for the adventurous and the independently minded, these great historical arteries are still navigable, and the waymarking cairns of centuries still stand in many places to guide the traveller. The Hardangervidda wasn’t a wilderness back then. It was used. I read somewhere that ten thousand place names have been known on the vidda over the centuries, although only a handful of these ever made it onto a map.

  ‘Me and my wife used to take tourists on horseback over the last part of the trail, up at the top here,’ he said, pointing vaguely upwards through the window. ‘From Lufsjå and down into the village where it comes down. Have you got a map? I’ll show you.’

  ‘There’s one in the back of the Fønnebø book.’

  I got up and climbed the steep wooden stairs to look in the little bookcase on the landing. Through the upstairs window I could see him standing on a rise in the land, phone in his hand, holding it up in the air and turning in a slow circle as he searched for a signal. He shook the phone, then hit it against the palm of his hand as though it were an old-fashioned mechanical object that could be made to work with a thump.

  As I reached the bottom of the stairs he was standing in the terrace doorway, in the act of slipping the phone back into the thigh pocket of his cargo pants. He seemed momentarily surprised to see me, as if he’d forgotten where he was and what he was doing.

  ‘What’s the point of a bloody phone if you don’t answer it?’ he said mysteriously.

  He sat down on the sofa again, still shaking his head.

  I handed him the book, open at the inside back cover where there was a line-drawn map of the vidda with the slepene marked.

  ‘Here,’ he said, pointing. ‘It comes down here at Kjemhus. It’s just down at the bottom of this hill. Kjemhus means “arrival place”, “destination”. Something like that. There’s a burial site there. People used to die on the way over. That’s where they buried them. In the days before churches and cemeteries. It’s signposted,’ he said. ‘You’ve probably seen it on the drive up.’

  I was surprised to hear about this and said I had never visited it, nor even seen the signpost.

  ‘You should go,’ he said. ‘It’s beautiful. No one ever goes there, of course. People nowadays don’t care about the past at all. They think the world began the day they were born. It’s a pre-Christian burial site. You can park your car there, then there’s a bit of a walk and along at the end of a track you come to a clearing surrounded by trees with all these stone-marked graves. It’s beautiful. Very peaceful. I go there a lot. Used to.’

  He took out his phone yet again, but this time it was only to show me an image of the burial ground. ‘Kjemhus,’ he said. ‘That’s where I’d like them to bury me. No name. Just a pile of stones. That’d do me.’

  He closed the phone and stood up.

  ‘Nei, jeg må se å komme meg hjem. I best be getting back home. Thanks for the coffee.’

  ‘Are you going back down to Veggli?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Any chance you could give me a lift down? I’d like to see Kjemhus. If you drop me off I can walk back up.’

  ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘But I’ll have to show you. The sign is overgrown, you can hardly see it from the road. Someone should do something about it. I’ll wait up on the bend for you. I’ll be about half an hour.’

  He gave a little wave of his hand, walked over to the forklift truck and swung up into the cab. I watched him reach out his hand to start the engine, then change his mind and sit back in the seat. He sat quite still for a few moments, then slowly and deliberately took out his phone. This time, instead of trying to place a call, he simply stared at it. He said something to it, shaking his head, then returned it to his pocket. Abruptly he put the fingers of both hands to his forehead and leaned all the way forward until the backs of them came to rest against the big steering wheel. He held the pose for just a few seconds then sat bolt upright again and slid the window open.

  He didn’t speak for a long time. Then he said: ‘This has got to be a rehearsal for life, ikke sant? (‘Right?’) This can’t possibly be the actual thing itself, can it?’

  The questions were rhetorical, and although he was looking hard at me I made no attempt to answer.

  ‘I don’t have time to take you,’ he said finally. ‘I have to get home. She’s not answering.’

  He turned on the ignition and the raucous rumble of the engine filled the air. He made a three-point turn in the gravel in front of the terrace then headed off at a slow wobble up the track, carefully rounding the jagged edge of the black hole in the middle. In the low sunshine the tough little vehicle looked suddenly fragile and almost toy-like. It was bright yellow.

  9

  Mid-September 2018

  Problems with the komfyrvakt (‘cooker alarm’) – morning coffee in the village – how cabin settlements rescue village economies – the neighbouring plot of land sold – on Norwegian newspapers – formation and political fate of the Christian Democratic Party – blasphemy laws – abortion law reform – the price of alcohol – visit to the Kjemhus burial ground – reading about Chinese hermits – a street party in the mountains – waiting for a lunar eclipse on Hardangervidda – food and fuel at walkers’ cabins – an idea from London – the Resistance and the Jews in Occupied Norway

  Friday morning. Nina was away for the weekend running an exhibition stall at the Alternative Fair in Lillestrøm. The plan was for her to pick up the dog on Sunday afternoon from her brother in Oslo, then take the train out to Kongsberg. I would drive down from Veggli in the car to pick her up at the station. It gave me most of the weekend to myself. It was chilly and I started a fire before breakfast. Even before doing that I had stepped outside and made a circuit of the cabin to admire the new roof. It seemed to me, or it may have been my imagination, that already I could see a faint, pale undershine of green coming through up there. It was probably just a trick of the light. Nonetheless, the blanket of turf gave the cabin a finished look. Where before it had looked naked and unprotected, exposed in spite of the stoutness of its timbers, now it looked ready for winter.

  For breakfast I decided on my usual porridge with cinnamon and brown sugar. As usual, the komfyrvakt started to peep, this time before I’d even turned the oven on to heat the porridge. It’s attached by a magnet to the back of the fan hood. According to the lengthy instruction book the electrician left behind it’s a ‘smart’ device supposed to ‘learn’ your cooking habits and not start peeping unnecessarily, but I swear it frequently began giving off its little chirps when the oven was turned off after use and sometimes, as now, even before I’d tu
rned it on. Once it even woke us up in the middle of the night. According to the booklet, if it’s a false alarm you’re supposed to be able to intercept the series of preliminary cheeps prior to the full bells and whistles alarm by a single, long thumb-press on the large button in the centre of its underside. It never works like that. It just ignores the thumb-press and then leaps ecstatically into full alarm register, at the same time as it cuts off the current to the oven. Naturally I had thoroughly investigated the possibility of disabling it, but no such possibility exists. Removing it completely from the oven doesn’t work either, since the oven can’t then be turned on. It certainly isn’t smart, and there’s nothing to be done about it because these things have been mandatory on all new cookers since 2015. A sort of relentless Norwegian egalitarianism means that everyone is treated as though they’re short-sighted, hard of hearing, or suffering borderline dementia and incapable of negotiating the hazards of everyday life such as boiling an egg or making porridge without help. Norwegian culture is a wood culture, of course, and fire is always a hazard, which is the main reason there are so few really old buildings in the country – most of them burned down before they could reach venerable old age. But even so, Norway is a bit of a nanny-state, and it’s dispiriting when the nanny inflicts beta-technology like this on a whole population.