Secularisation has left the Norwegian countryside dotted with beautiful little white wooden churches that are regularly used by almost no one. There is one at the first bend of the road up the mountain after it leaves Veggli, and as I rounded the bend I was reminded of Lars’s enthusiastic recommendation of the pre-Christian gravesite at Kjemhus and on the spur of the moment decided to pay it a visit.
I located the sign on the next bend in the road, obscured, as the roof-layer had warned me, behind the leaves of a wayside birch. I indicated left and turned off the road. Drawing up at the single parking space marked out in the small clearing at the edge of the forest, I stepped out of the car. The roof-layer had told me that there was a particularly well-preserved section of the Nordmannsslepe here, and in the trees a few yards away I saw a wooden post with ‘Store Nordmannsslepe’ carved onto its mossy finger. Following the grassy track up an incline through birches I presently came to a weather-beaten hoarding displaying a simplified map of the vidda, with the various slepe trails marked by dotted lines. Down each side of the map were paragraphs in Norwegian, German and English outlining the known history and use of the ancient tracks, but the protective plastic film covering the board had whitened with age and it wasn’t possible to read anything but the paragraph headings.
I carried on walking up the track and after about two hundred metres another sign directed the visitor to leave the slepe and head right. In another five minutes I came to a second, smaller hoarding with information about the grave field. Like the first one, harsh weathering over the years had made most of it illegible beneath the protective film.
A pre-Christian gravesite at Kjemhus.
The grave field had the same name as the farm lower down the hill, where the trains of traders and cowboys gathered after the rigours of the journey over the vidda, to rest their horses and cattle before moving on further down the valley. The graves themselves were visible a few paces further on, in a clearing. There looked to be about thirty mounds, none more than about half a metre high. Most were roughly square, constructed of medium-sized round-edged stones encrusted with dark green moss. The site was little visited and there was no obvious route between the gathered stones so I wandered between the graves in a haphazard way. After a few minutes, I sat down on a stone. A watery sun floated behind a veil of grey, featureless cloud. There was a slight chill in the air and I turned up the fur collar of the leather jacket I was wearing. Some magpies chattered briefly and noisily to each other in a nearby tree and flew off. Then came a silence so deep and palpable I closed my eyes and let it fall down over my shoulders, like a cloak.
*
Back at the cabin I spent the rest of the afternoon reading. I was halfway through Road to Heaven, Bill Porter’s account of the trip he made to the Chungnan mountains to explore what remained of the tradition of Chinese hermits after the ravages of Chairman Mao’s Red Guards. After heating up a packet of something called either Turkey Jerk or Jerked Turkey from the Veggli Coop’s unnecessarily well-stocked selection of globalised convenience foods, I set off in the evening to walk up onto the vidda in plenty of time to see the rising of the eclipsed moon.
The track winds up around a hairpin bend to pass through the ten cabins that make up the upper part of our settlement before narrowing to a footpath that leads through a small stand of pines. Being fifty metres or so higher up the mountain, these were the plots that had sold first. There was one left by the time we had decided to buy and build on Vegglifjell. But in winter that hairpin bend would definitely cause problems for a car without piggdekk (studded tyres). That was one of the reasons we chose to build on the lower arm of the settlement, which had the further advantage of a lack of visible neighbours either behind or to the side of us. The people living on the top had better views across the valley, but for most of them the view included near neighbours, jacuzzis, trampolines and all.
As I rounded the bend I saw that the cabin-owners up there were having some kind of street party. Fifteen or twenty adults and children were seated around a homemade langbord. It was about five metres long and had probably been knocked together just that afternoon. Faint wisps of blue smoke emerged from the two bålpans (‘fire-pans’) that stood a couple of metres away from each end of the table. These are tripods on long black metal legs with a deep pan suspended on chains from a hook. They can be used for barbecuing, and also function as log fires for sitting around. It looked like most of the party-goers had finished eating, though a couple of the children were still playing with their half-eaten frankfurters, squirting tomato sauce at each other from cone-like potato-cake wrappings. There were a few cans of Frydenlund beer on the table and a couple of open bottles of wine. Feeling as if I was intruding on something I walked past, nodding a greeting to a bespectacled boy of about thirteen whose eye I happened to catch as I passed by. He was wearing a black ‘I ♥ New York’ T-shirt. I recognised him. I’d met him a couple of times, out walking with the family’s dog, a friendly little dachshund called Stella.
‘Skal du gå forbi uten å hilse?’ I heard someone say.
The visit to the Kjemhus cemetery and then reading Porter’s book had left me preoccupied with the idea of death and I really didn’t feel all that sociable. Since turning seventy earlier in the year, I had noticed this increasing and suspiciously programmatic preoccupation with death. What was particularly frustrating was to discover that, after years of engaging with minds like Søren Kierkegaard and Arthur Schopenhauer, the older I became, the more did these monumental wrestlings with the meaning and purpose of it all dissolve into verbal dust. ‘You need the fish trap to catch the fish. Once you’ve caught the fish you can forget about the trap,’ Chuang Tzu writes in one of his chapters. ‘You need words to catch the meaning. Once you’ve caught the meaning you can forget about the words. Show me a man who’s forgotten about words; I’d like a word with him.’
I had always loved that sentiment. But in life it doesn’t work like that. Come what may, the mind goes on sprouting words with the same meaningless exuberance. A phrase from Porter’s book was preoccupying me as I made my way past the diners: ‘I was impatient to die’, one of the few female hermits he encountered in the Chungnan mountains had said to him. The phrase struck me as attractive. I was trying to work out whether it expressed a negative or positive attitude to death. I felt a curious affinity with this woman; I think it was she who interrupted Porter at one point to ask him, with a puzzled frown, Who is this Chairman Mao you keep talking about? It seems the whole Chinese revolution had passed her by completely.
For all these reasons I was slightly too late in realising that someone from the table had been addressing me, in a friendly-but-challenging way, asking if I intended to just walk by without stopping to say hello.
I looked up. At that precise moment I felt hardly capable of engaging with a crowd of strangers. I was certainly hoping to do my best when I opened my mouth to reply. But my old fear of being the outsider who says the wrong thing completely could not prevent me from replying Hvorfor ikke? (‘Why not?’)
The speaker was Jan Erik, the father of the boy in the T-shirt. He was sitting at the middle of the langbord on the far side. Seeming to sense my discomfort he at once stood up, stepped out from the bench and walked round the table to greet me privately.
‘Didn’t you get an invitation?’ he asked, perhaps thinking I was being deliberately unsociable on that account.
Relieved to have been put ever so slightly in the right as someone who obviously should have had an invitation to the langbord but never received one, I replied no, I hadn’t.
‘Aren’t you in the group?’
‘What group?’
‘The Facebook group.’
He explained what it was. I knew my wife regularly visited a page called Vi som bor på Vegglifjell (‘We who live on Vegglifjell’), which contained matters of interest to cabin-dwellers on the Veggli mountain (the weather; the impending beer festival at Veggli Fjellstue; why haven’t the roads been gritted? W
ill the person flying the drone please stop? etc.), but this turned out to be something even more local. It was a Facebook page confined to the interests of those of us living in that particular pocket of the mountainside development.
‘We’re in the process of forming a residents’ committee,’ he said. ‘We think there should be a representative from down below the bend. Someone like you, for example.’
A middle-aged woman wearing a black fleece jacket approached. She held an iPad in her hand and asked for my email address. She tapped it down on the keyboard and said she’d just sent me an email. That way we would be part of the new residents’ group. Before the thing got out of hand I had to tell them I wasn’t on Facebook, where news of the group’s activities would be posted, but that I would pass the invitation on to Nina. My bouts of unsociability are at times a source of regret to me, but I knew I lacked the strong sense of community that seems native to all Norwegians and that I was not the right man for the job. That sense of community is everywhere. On arriving in Norway back in 1983. I remember how surprised I was to discover that it was considered normal almost to the point of obligatory for writers to be members of one of the Forfatterforeninger, the Writers’ Unions. While living and working in England, I had not even been aware of the existence of such organisations.
Over time I came to a better understanding of the need for solidarity. Solidarity is the basis of Norway’s social stability and of the high degree of social and sexual equality that characterises Norwegian society at every level. Perhaps the absence of social and political arrogance, which is another aspect of the same quality, can be traced back to the four centuries the country spent as a Danish colony, and the century after 1814 as a junior partner under the Swedish crown. It may be that Norway’s experiences of an almost colonial subservience during this period created a mindset always wary of the possibility of abuse by authority and a determination never to let it happen.
Even so, I had not expected the solidarity imperative to manifest itself up here in the Norwegian mountains. But it was only another way in which the reality of owning a cabin deviated from my dream of it, now that the dream was coming true.
On an earlier walk I had seen, through the terrace windows of Jan Erik’s cabin, a Meade telescope mounted on a tripod and tilted upwards. At the time he was feeding branches into a twig cutter at the back of his cabin but turned it off as I walked by and stumped down the slope to say hello. I mentioned the telescope, and asked if astronomy was his hobby, since it was one of mine. He’d said no, not really. The telescope had been a surprise birthday present from his wife. Apparently he’d once said that astronomy was something he thought he might like to get into, now that they owned a cabin in the mountains, miles from the light pollution of Tønsberg where their regular home was, so she’d bought it for him. On a whim, and because I felt the need of company to lift me out of the trough of death-thoughts in which I had been sunk for so much of the afternoon, I asked if he wanted to walk up onto the vidda with me to watch the eclipse of the moon.
‘I’d like that,’ he said. ‘When is it?’
I told him just after a quarter to ten.
‘I’ll see you up there.’
And he went back to his seat at the langbord.
*
Ten minutes of steep walking later I passed the barrier that is brought down to close off the track in winter, and in another ten minutes I was on the top. I rested for a few minutes and stood looking into the west. The sun was roasting the mountaintops as it slid towards them, basting them in flames of fiery orange and yellow. It was a riot of colour, a carnival of bronze light and deep blue shadow, a sight to make you grateful merely for the privilege of being able to witness such a scene and to forget every cramped little complaint you ever voiced about life. Who can have made all this? you ask yourself in bewilderment. Who had the time and the imagination to put on a show like this?
I had suggested to Jan Erik that we meet at the fingerpost where the path to Lufsjå takes off, and I set out along the track towards it. It’s a pleasant forty-minute ramble. While painting the cabin, Nina and I had been in the habit of ending the day by walking up there with the dog. The section of path we usually walked, between Veggli and Lufsjå, followed the exact route of the Store Nordmannsslepe. In Fønnebø’s book I had read that the best time to see the tracks is when the sun is low in the sky, and bending down now I could make out in places as many as fifteen or twenty ruts worn into the grassy ground by the long poles dragged along by the horses.
On reaching the signpost I lay down on a bed of crisp, hard heather and folded my hands behind my head. A light wind ran swift and rushing up the side of the mountain. Somewhere nearby I heard, as one always hears up there, the mournful monosyllabic cry of the plover. The sound of loneliness, as if it’s calling to someone. In another minute I heard the low, almost frog-like croak of the ptarmigan. I leaned up on one elbow and looked round for him. He’s hard to see, his brown and black mottled feathers against the grey, lichen-coated rocks and the heather, and the red tendrils of the dwarf birch that cover the ground above the treeline. He croaked again and this time I saw him. He was standing on the edge of a flat rock a little above me, his small head and large body silhouetted against the pale blue of the sky in the east. He croaked again and then abruptly flew off. Again the only sounds were the rushing of the wind through the mountain undergrowth and the sad, repetitive cry of the plover.
Still with my head turned, I now saw, on the side of the rock where the ptarmigan had been sitting, half-turned away from me, my wife’s face. I wondered where she was, who she was with, what they were talking about. I recalled, suddenly, one of the first times we had walked up there. It was about a year ago, before we had bought the land and the cabin, before we had even thought of doing such a thing. We had been visiting my brother-in-law and his family at their cabin. I was still on crutches after a hip-replacement operation in the spring. After three months I felt like taking the chance of walking in the mountains, using the lightweight metal crutches as a pair of gåstaver, or Nordic walking poles. It had been a day rather like this one, blustery and sunny, and the first time since the operation I had been in the mountains. The most depressing aspect of the arthritis of the previous two years had been the thought that this harbinger of old age might mean that this chapter of my life was now over for ever, and I recalled the ecstasy I felt as I humped and stumped along the track, so relieved to know that it wasn’t.
Not wanting to push my new hip too hard, we stopped frequently and leaned against rocky outcrops to rest up for a few minutes. Each time we stopped I had been puzzled by a low, musical, rather ghostly whistling sound. For some time I couldn’t figure out the source of it, until I worked out that it must be the sound of the wind whistling through the nooks and crannies of the small cairns that travellers in the past had built along the track, in the centuries before the DNT and the big red ‘T’ markings.
‘Listen,’ I said to Nina. ‘That’s the sound of the vidda. The vidda is talking to us in the wind.’
Nina listened to the eerie fluting sound for a few seconds.
‘It’s your crutches,’ she said. ‘It’s the wind blowing through the height-adjuster holes in your crutches.’
I listened again. She was right. I felt mildly deflated, and irrationally annoyed. I marvelled at a central and recurring paradox in our marriage, that she, who believed instantly and fiercely in the wildest claims of any clairvoyant and spirit-channeller of some long-dead Native American chieftain, should, in almost all other matters, be so consistently more level-headed and logical than I, who derided all such claims in the name of ordinary common sense.
As the sun finally slipped behind the peaks in the west, I felt the temperature drop immediately and wished that I had had the foresight to wrap up a little warmer. Looking around, I saw the pale silver slivers of seven or eight glow-worms nearby in the long rough grass and made a mental note to find out when I got back to the cabin exactly how it is th
ey glow like that, and why, following it up with an equally firm resolution not to do so and content myself instead with the undisturbed experience of wonder.
Several times I peered north along the track and wondered what had happened to Jan Erik. Perhaps he’d forgotten. Perhaps the social claims of the langbord and the new Facebook group had proved too strong. And did it even matter? Because now that the sun had set, when I turned and looked into the east I saw only a bank of blue-grey cloud on the horizon.
I looked at my watch. It was just past nine. Having drawn the eclipse to Jan Erik’s attention I felt burdened by an illogical personal responsibility to make sure it actually took place.
But suppose it didn’t? The wind was still blowing strongly from the west. Suppose it wasn’t strong enough to drive the clouds back over the horizon? I recalled the anxious disappointment of the Japanese poet Matsuo Bashō, described in melancholic detail in ‘The Visit to the Kashima Shrine’, when his pilgrimage to this mountain shrine to experience the rising of a full moon was frustrated by the presence of cloud. Through the greying light I could just about make out a yellow anorak, and Jan Erik’s stout figure hurrying along the path, still about half a mile distant. I crossed my fingers that we would not suffer a disappointment similar to Bashō’s.
When he joined me we walked on for a few more minutes, clambering off the path and up a nearby rise to a rocky outcrop that gave us a still better vantage point. We sat down next to each other with our backs against the rocks. I mentioned my worries about the clouds.
The Cabin in the Mountains Page 18