Dark Skies
Page 5
As a result, I was now crammed into a budget-airline seat on the runway at Gatwick airport, wearing salopettes, leggings, three tops and a ski jacket – all essential Arctic clothing I was unable to cram into my tiny hand-luggage case. Sweltering, I managed to awkwardly remove the jacket, waggling sleeves in my neighbour’s face at least twice, and squeezed it onto the floor in front of me. Settling in for the rest of my journey, I started to relax as I drank a fresh coffee and enjoyed a big, jammy pastry. I was flying to the city of Tromsø in northern Norway in the Arctic Circle – an escape from British December where everyone was full of joy, spending time with loved ones. I usually love Christmas, and I wasn’t feeling so miserable that I would begrudge other people’s happiness, but this year I wanted to escape and decided to spend five days alone at the top of the world where the sun ‘shines’ for only two hours a day.
Polar night is a phenomenon that occurs inside the Arctic and Antarctic polar circles when the sun doesn’t rise for several weeks, and a blue veil of twilight lingers over the land for three months. Afterwards the polar regions experience night and day the way more southerly regions do, but then in summer there is a switch, almost overnight, when the season of the midnight sun begins and the region is cast instead into 24-hour daylight. These extreme shifts throughout the year have triggered research by numerous psychologists who study the effects of Seasonal Affective Disorder, and it had sparked my interest too. I had started to spend more time outdoors at night – going on night walks, listening to migrating birds, looking for foxes – and it had given me a taste for exploring the darkness. But what would it be like to spend almost an entire week in the dark without the reassurance of sunrise each morning? How long would the idea remain enchanting?
I’ve never been particularly drawn to one season or another, but I am interested in the natural rhythm of the year and, no matter which season it is, I find myself longing for whichever is coming next. By March I am fed up with the cold and damp, then by September I long for fireplaces and thick jumpers again. In Britain, we are subject to such a variety of weathers that, while the summer can be warm and bright, in the depths of midwinter it can seem like the sun barely rises at all. But in Tromsø, located at 69°N and 350km north of the Arctic Circle, the polar night – and the weather and temperatures that come with it – last from November to January. That’s three whole months of darkness without a break. I was only visiting Norway for a few days in December, but I was interested to see how the lack of daylight might affect people who live through it each year, and whether, as a few locals had suggested online, one could even learn to embrace it.
It wasn’t only the endless night I had come to experience, however. When I was 10 or 11, I read Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy, a work of fiction so raw and shimmering that it has remained my favourite ever since (followed closely by The Lord of the Rings and Jurassic Park, naturally). As I read and reread this trilogy growing up, I slowly absorbed the compelling ideas within Pullman’s writing but, as a child, it was the setting that stuck with me. The bleak, white landscape of Svalbard, the armoured bears, and those Nordic ports smeared with oil and spirits, and then a natural spectacle so enchanting it has waltzed through my mind ever since: the Northern Lights. Also known as the aurora borealis, they are natural light displays that occur in Arctic regions when the magnetosphere is disturbed by solar wind and charged particles collide to release red, yellow, green, blue and violet lights. I had waited my whole life to witness this phenomenon, and now here I was, finally flying through freezing December skies and into the Arctic Circle. As I looked out of the window, I could see snow-covered islands half-hidden in shadow, the frozen landscape of Norway’s northern coast.
I touched down in Tromsø airport that evening, and I took the Flybussen into the city centre – a small, glittering place. The city of Tromsø is home to around 75,000 people, similar to the population of Cannes in France, but it feels far removed from the chaos of Europe to its south. Disembarking at the end of the bus route, I walked the last few hundred metres along the harbour, where a gang of eider ducks were floating around in the water. It was dark, but it was late so the darkness felt natural. Lights sparkled across the water, glowing against the sheets of ice frozen to the pavement. I was well wrapped up, but at -9°C this was one of the coldest temperatures my body had ever been exposed to, and by the time I reached the hostel my nose hurt. Through the glass door of the reception, I could see a rotund terrier sleeping on the sofa, but I had arrived too late to meet the owners. The security code was written in felt-tip pen on a piece of paper by the door, and I let myself in around the corner to find a snug dormitory, shared kitchen and bathroom.
I love hostels. They’re cheap and friendly and full of the ghosts of past guests, immortalised by the culinary delights abandoned on the ‘shared-food’ shelves or in the happy messages scrawled in guest books. As long as there are a kettle and a hot shower, a hostel offers all you need for a small adventure. I dropped my luggage in the corner by my bottom bunk and waved hello to the Argentinian guy sitting on the bed above me, warning him apologetically, as is my custom, that I may shout in my sleep. In return he shared a few helpful hints about the city with me and pointed me in the direction of the cheapest supermarket. I wandered into the kitchen to poach a cup of coffee, where I met a friendly Taiwanese man named Frank who was travelling around Europe before pursuing a career in car mechanics. We chatted over coffee before Frank invited me to hike with him to a nature reserve called Prestvannet (‘priest water’). He had heard the sky was unpolluted there and you could often see the Northern Lights. I accepted his invitation, pulled on my snow boots, and a few moments later stepped out of the hostel and back onto the streets of Tromsø.
This was my fourth visit to Norway, but my first to the Arctic Circle. My sister lived in Bergen for more than three years, a beautiful city on Norway’s west coast that’s surrounded by seven mountains. While she lived there my family would visit every year and we’d go hiking, eat waffles and get drunk in the snow.
In July 2015 we went white-water rafting with a large group of her friends in the Voss fjords, north-east of Bergen – an unforgettable experience, notably when I fell into melted glacier water and almost froze. Southern Norway is one of Europe’s rainiest regions so its mountains are malachite green and the air there is fresh and dewy. Within its forests lie boundless carpets of moss-coated mounds that make it feel like you’re in a troll kingdom, and in summer the trees are full of the thrushes that, come autumn, will abandon Scandinavia to head further south. The summer landscape was fiercely beautiful; at that time of year there are no aurora displays, but instead the nights are short and people spend as much time outdoors as possible. The summer we went rafting, we also experienced one of the most surreal nights I could have hoped for in such a magical setting: a night in the fjords with the Gudvangen Vikings.
The fjords of western Norway may look like sapphire lakes but they are actually narrow saltwater inlets from the North Sea, formed by glaciers that had cut deep into the land to produce vast, steep mountains and cliffs on either side of the water as they receded. Individually they can seem separate from one another; however, some of Norway’s fjords are intertwined, making it possible to sail from one to another and onwards as far as the sea. In the summer, melting glacier water escapes down the mountains and pours from the cliffs in endless, glittering torrents. Norwegian legend has it that the fiddle-playing spirit Fossegrimen lives beneath the waterfalls and he will teach others to play the fiddle in return for an offering of food, although if your offering is deemed too small he will only teach you how to tune his fiddle.
After Hollie’s friends and I had all thawed from rafting the Voss fjords, we drove east to a remote spot just outside the village of Gudvangen where the Nærøydalselvi river empties into a fjord. Here we set up our tents in the bottom of a vast valley, ate crisps and had a few drinks while we waited for darkness to close in and the night to begin. We were tired from a lo
ng, active day in the sun, but it was far from over yet.
My middle sister can be described as many things, but there is no one in the world as fun as her. The Queen of Good Times, Hollie always has a bottle of prosecco cooling in the fridge and can arrange a party at the drop of a hat. You’re guaranteed a good time with her, even if you also end up lost with a broken liver. So when she informed the rafting group that we were going to attend a Viking re-enactment festival called Gudvangen Vikingmarknad (‘Viking Market’) in the fjords, we acquiesced. The festival was an annual summer celebration of all things Viking, with battles, concerts, storytelling, archery, games, lectures, food and even a slave market.
We would be arriving on the final night of the festival when Hollie had heard a great celebration for all the re-enactors would be taking place after a long day of Viking activity. The problem was that it was only accessible to re-enactors, so between mouthfuls of crisps and beer, we helped each other transform into Vikings. Using a paper plate, I fashioned a 10-inch shield with a magnificent eagle drawn in biro on the front. One of the group members, Ole, was draped in a coral-coloured blanket, while Hollie and her boyfriend, Haakon, were decorated with random tufts of fur and scraps of plaited leather. The overall effect was pretty weak; fortunately, two Canadians in our group had prepared outfits that were just about good enough to pass as re-enactment garb, and we hoped we might make it inside if the rest of us shuffled in quickly behind them.
It was now ten o’clock in the evening, and the mountains that engulfed us on either side of the valley had disappeared into the darkness. We could hear water flowing down the river, but otherwise the valley was quiet. We took a last swig of beer then left the campsite and wandered down to the Viking market entrance, doing our best to appear as Norwegian as possible. At the gate, Haakon spoke with the attendant, and I hid my terrible shield behind Ole’s coral cloak. After a few anxious seconds, we were admitted and stepped forwards into the festival.
We walked through the grounds and found empty stalls that had been filled with trinkets that morning: carved wooden pendants, cow-bone dice and thick woollen blankets, all bought by visitors who had attended the festival earlier in the day. The visitors were gone now, and the place was quiet. The sky loomed over us like dark slate, and the stars shone in a thick mist, smeared across the ether like glitter glue. There was nothing to disturb the silence except the muffled thump of a drum in the near distance. As we drew closer, an oak longhouse appeared out of the gloom, heavy with timber beams and dovetail joints. The walls were solid, and spilling out the door came a vibrant, tangerine glow and the aroma of woodsmoke. On entering, we found a hall full of men, women and children seated in rows along solid wooden benches, their faces lit by the naked flames of candles, and cats and dogs curled at their feet. Everyone wore shaggy furs the colour of heather and oat grains and they were singing in low, slow voices to the irresistible sound of the quartet playing flutes and lyres in the corner.
There was a space at the end of a table, so the group of us sat down and looked around. There were Vikings everywhere – and they looked beautiful. Many of the women had braided their hair into long, twisting vines, and most of the men were bearded and draped in tunics of grey and moss green. We didn’t hear anybody speak English, yet we were immediately offered drinking horns and tankards filled with ale and mead. I befriended a handsome Viking sitting next to me, exchanging three or four words of broken Norwegian. Someone else handed me a kitten.
For hours we all drank mead by candlelight, the quartet performing Scandinavian folk songs that brought several people to their feet, swinging between the tables in an intoxicated waltz.
We were giddy with drink. One by one our group broke off and returned to the campsite until only Haakon and I remained with the Nordic marauders. Candles flickered in the early-dawn wind that swept through the mountains and into our timber hall and I felt my eyes closing against the music. Then suddenly the key changed and the players began a new tune. I opened my eyes and looked at Haakon, and in our drunken haze we were overcome by the realisation of what they were playing: it was the Game of Thrones theme tune!
The combination of mead and good cheer had heightened our senses, and we exchanged joyful cries at the beauty of a song, already evocative for anyone who watches the show, played on flutes and lyres at a Viking gathering in the crevice of a mountain in Norway. We danced and swayed with the others until eventually, defeated by sleep, I left Haakon in the hall and sauntered back to the campsite. The handsome Viking I’d been chatting to offered to accompany me back to camp and, unable to share more than one or two words, we ambled back in contented silence. Above us, the stars were strung across the sky like pearls, and the moon hung between them, an ivory pendant. I reached the tent and waved goodbye to my new friend. Settling down to a peaceful sleep in a nest of cushions beside my sister, I was awoken ten minutes later by Haakon setting off the car alarm.
Back in Tromsø, I was walking with Frank along Storgata, a busy street that runs from north to south along the western bank of the city. From here we turned right and followed a sequence of curved roads up a steep slope, all the time climbing and gazing up in the hope of spotting a sliver of blue or green. The pavement below our feet was buried under snow and ice, a crunching pathway to the summit that caused us both the occasional wobble, despite my lovely new snow boots. Frank told me about his travels as we walked. He was from Taiwan, an island country situated in the South China Sea between Japan, China and the Philippines, where he had trained as a car mechanic and salesman with the aim of one day running his own factory. With his last days of education behind him, he had wanted to see the world before committing to a career, and Tromsø was his final destination before returning to Oslo for the last flight home. I asked him if he was sad to be leaving, and he nodded but added that he was looking forward to seeing his mother.
We reached a more suburban area of the city, with fewer shops and more wooden houses painted in shades of rich blood red, almond butter and slate grey. Norwegian homes are beautiful. Ikea, although founded in Sweden, has become a beacon of Scandinavian design and functionality, and when my sister first moved to Norway and wanted to decorate her flat with vintage furniture she’d collected from travels in exotic lands, she soon learned this was not the Norwegian fashion. Instead their houses are clean, colourful and koselig (cosy), replete with plants, handwoven throws and underfloor heating that is almost obligatory in such a cold country.
After a while, the road cut through a cluster of pine trees so thick that, even in daylight, we could not have seen through the gaps. Through here we would find our nature reserve, according to Frank, so we left the road to descend along a pathway. The path had been completely smothered by snowfall except for a boot-width trail that had been compressed by walkers some time earlier. We crunched along into the forest for a few minutes, the world beyond the trees blocked out by gnarled branches and mounds of snow that looked like iced buns. I wondered how many birds and mammals were still here, and how many had migrated away to milder places, or were hibernating below ground to escape the painful cold of the snow. A forest always feels alive, but I couldn’t avoid the feeling that it was quieter than it might be during the warmer months, asleep rather than awake, lacking the vivacity of summer. While the woodlands of Britain are often grey and damp in winter, you can always smell the leaves from autumn decaying underfoot; here there were no smells, only the blank brilliance of snow and ice on every twig, every frozen puddle.
Emerging from the gloom, we found ourselves standing on the bank of a small lake. Frank told me this area had been protected due to the populations of birds that nest here in summer. Enclosed on all sides by a crown of winter trees, the lake stretched out before us in a sea of midnight blue. Above our heads, the cloudless sky looked like an ink stain that has spread all the way to the edge of a sheet of blotting paper, so the only way to tell where the lake finished and the sky began was a cluster of lights on the horizon, shining from a row of
houses filled with people sleeping through the night.
I’d heard that more tourists visit the Tower of London than Londoners themselves, and I wondered if something similar applied here. Did the residents of Tromsø still go outside every night the aurora was displaying and watch the lights from beginning to end? Was it a vital part of surviving the polar night, to admire the beauty of the aurora and forget about the winter darkness for a few hours? Or was it something the residents had grown used to, a display for tourists, an ordinary part of everyday life that didn’t justify leaving the warmth of home?
The aurora was not displaying, but a group of Spanish travellers were laughing and drinking at the water’s edge, their cameras and tripods arranged defiantly in the snow. We approached and asked if they had seen the lights, and they nodded excitedly that ¡Si! They had! Frank and I decided to wait by the lake to see if the aurora would return. Our new friends shared a beer with us and we all sat on the snow talking for a while until, suddenly, someone shouted and pointed to the sky.