Reine

After our attempts to rent a car failed, Craig and I took a bus to Reine. It snowed off and on and the wind was sharp. I think I am having difficulty writing about it because it all felt so familiar somehow. This may be as a result of having lived so many places. The mountains on Lofoten looked similar in many ways to areas of the Scottish Highlands -ancient and stoic. The slate grey of the rock reminded me driving north from Vancouver to Hope. The smell of the sea took me back to Tofino and Ucluelet. And the cold piercing everything. The memories striking like flint, but instead of fire, the sparks are ice crystals.

Still, I would love to see Reine in the lushness of summer. Black and green. I think I would wear a skirt of deep purple. It would only be right.

Inner worlds inside Stamsund

I think I may have hit the wall. I’m clamming up. Perhaps it is because I am faced with writing about six days all at once and too many things are dropping into my mind. Perhaps because I can still see myself, nestled inside the cabin as each evening stretched into darkness, while around me 19 candles burned and danced. There is a lot of space that I feel I am still keeping to myself.

I read. A lot. And everyday I went for a walk with Craig. Also everyday I visited Craig and his beloved, Anne, at their flat, and we all ate together. The tiny moments that thread all these other larger ones together are the ones that I do not feel the desire to share. They are the dew on the spider’s web, which changes with the light.

My cabin is the one of the far left. Number 9, number 9, number 9. I adored my cabin, which I know I am supposed to call a rorbu, but I don’t. It had two floors and three bedrooms. On the first evening I explored all the bedrooms to decide which one would be mine. I first thought I would opt for one of the bedrooms in the loft, but instead I chose the largest bedroom, which was on the ground floor. It had two beds that filled the space between the walls, while the low ceiling completed the feeling that I adore, of being surrounded and cozy.

I had my own wee kitchen, where I ate brown cheese on homemade Craig bread (four seed type). Brown cheese: both salty and sweet, just as Craig told me it would be. It looks horrid, but it is surprisingly tasty. The cheese section in the supermarket is made up largely of various forms of brown cheese. I got some slices and mostly I kept thinking that this would be what Kraft singles would taste like if Kraft singles were actually good.

There were a lot of stray cats, many of which lived in the spaces underneath the cabins. I would often hear their meows coming up through the floorboards. This only frightened me on a couple of occasions, while I was reading a horror novel, Naomi’s Room. I became convinced that there was a cat upstairs, even though I had closed both the doors to the upstairs bedrooms. The cats were known to run into the cabins if you left the door open too long. What if one was locked up there? Dusk falling. I crept up the steep loft stairs to search the rooms. Even thinking about it now gives me the creeps. Of course there weren’t any, but it was the slowness of the experience – the slowness of my fear. Brrrr..

Each morning the seagulls woke me around 6am. Then I would lie in bed and read or just let myself drift back to sleep and hope to dream all the strange dreams I cannot dream when an alarm clock bats my consciousness awake before it is ready.

I wrote little, but what I did write I enjoyed. I borrowed books from Craig and Anne, like Stargirl, O Caledonia, and Japanese Death Poems.

More about the outside world next time. And here’s a wee poem from inside the glow:

There is not enough space
In the whole world
for me to spread myself out completely
The earth would have to spread out too
flat like a horizonless myth
Flowers would have to stretch their petals
against the ground
with the ceremony of slow sacrifice
The sky would have to
push
down
thefranticfrictionofminuteparticles
rolling out my body
until my pulverized bones
are s p a t o u t in a cloud
like flour
like cold ash
and even the tiniest breeze
could pick me up
spread me further than I ever thought I would go

I've often not been on boats

“What a colour!” Fyodor yelled over the steady growl of the engine. He lifted his arms out in front of him, as if to embrace the layers of pink and blue that had settled above the snow-covered mountains as the sun set behind us.
That blue. It was like a pastel, but thinner. Yet it wasn’t patchy – it was smooth and almost creamy. It wasn’t a blue that is made lighter with the addition of more white, which would weigh it down. This blue was infused with light reflected by the snow, then held by the cold, clear air.
We stared at it for a long time. For most of the journey we were the only ones on deck. Everyone else retired to the comfort of the ship’s lounge. But the Russian and the Canadian stayed out, running up and down stairs, pointing at this mountain or that, staring into the black sea and thinking up monsters, laughing madly.
We had to wait onboard for nearly three hours from when the ship first docked to when it departed. Almost all the passengers went straight for the dining room for lunch, which I found bizarre. Many town locals came aboard the ship just to have a look at it. It is the oldest in the Hurtigruten fleet that travels the route we were on. Built in 1956 the MS Nordstjernen is also the smallest, carrying up to 600 passengers.
Of course there weren’t so many that Sunday, but all the same most of the couches were soon taken up by slumbering travellers.
We spent those first few hours chatting aimlessly about travels, cameras, the evils of the capitalist force in relation to genetically modified mega-farms vs. the small family-run plots of years past.
Once we were moving I was forced to make only short forays into the ship’s warmth because the rocking and the sickly heated air made me feel ill. The smell in the tiny loo reminded me of Harzer Kase, a cheese Omi used to get that smelled so bad she would store it by hanging it on the clothesline.
The only time we stayed inside was to watch the half-hour video on the northern lights. We got there too late and all the seats were taken, so we sat on the floor in front of a wall of senior citizens. It was quite like being at school again, sitting cross-legged like that, looking up at a screen on the wall. Except I don’t remember my back aching as a child.
The most entertaining moment came when the sun had set and we were moving into a snow flurry. A Norwegian man with the red, round face of a seasoned drinker, approached us and started talking to Fyodor. The man, who at first had hurt my new friend with a poorly thought-out remark about the Moscow economy, soon redeemed himself by regurgitating several Russian folk songs he had learned on past fishing trips. I say regurgitated because that was how it sounded. When he opened his mouth he seemed to bear down to force out the sound, which was low and pebbled with saliva. As he sang he stared straight ahead of him and I imagined each word coming to him only the second before he forced it past his lips.
Fyodor and I both gawked in shock. It was cold; the darkness and the snow were falling. The sea had turned as black as ink beneath us. And in frozen dim a Norwegian man sang Russian songs, chuckling after he finished each one.
My father would say: “He’s what you’d call ‘a character.’” Indeed he was.
The last half an hour is a bit of a blur. I spent a lot of time laughing joyfully, having finally arrived at the realization that I would soon meet my friend.
I knew I would spot him when we pulled in, and I did. He loomed, motionless, in a lit doorway. I saw the outline of his long black coat, which I knew was lined with purple. I laughed and laughed into the soup of shadow and snowflakes and wondered if he could hear me.Next time, Stamsund, at last! It’s taking long enough, eh?

ps- A wee present shall be awarded to the person who can tell me from which play I stole the title of this post.

Bodø

Bodø was where the cold started to feel truly familiar. It was also where I experienced a small crisis in that I realized that I could not access my UK bank account and would have to rely on my Canadian visa card to see me through the rest of the trip. This was before I found my hotel and was told that they only accept Diners cards. I know Bodø very well; I spent a lot of time trudging through the snow trying to find a bank machine or a phone.

After I had settled into my hotel, I wandered to the other end of town where I found a phone box. I wanted to tell Andrew my sorry tale of financial stress, but I couldn't get the bloody phone card to work. 40 NOK later I also realized that I had used up all the credit on my mobile. So there was nothing left to do but to have a good cry in the phone box between sips of chocolate milk. I came to love the chocolate milk in Norway. The stuff in Britain is crap.

Returning to my hotel room, exhausted by my emotional outburst, I stared numbly at a Norwegian television show for nearly 30 minutes. It was some kind of reality show where the contestants voted each other off. To try and stay in the game two contestants had to name five different species of fish on a table. That's what British reality telly shows need - more fish identification challenges. Then I watched the Disney channel until I snapped out of it and decided that being unconscious was much preferable. So I went to sleep.

The next morning I spent some time looking out the window at the frozen world, and also at the lone crow who was sitting in the tree across the road. He jittered with black energy, a feathered jolt of joy in the white landscape. I went downstairs for my complimentary breakfast and was pleased to discover I had the entire dining room to myself. There was so much food, including a great many items consisting mostly of mayonaise. Aside from many glasses of grape juice and two cups of coffee, I ate two of the best soft boiled eggs I have ever had. While I ate the radio played My Name is Luca, which I found amusing. The announcers would come on after each song and jabber away in Norwegian. Of course I couldn't understand so I entertained myself by making up the conversation to match the tones of their voices:

-"It's 8:56 and that was My Name Is Luca by Suzanne Vega. A great song, don't you think Jenny?"

-"Sure is Bill. It's actually a song about child abuse!"

-"Well it certainly is catchy."

-"The kind of song that gets stuck in your head for days until you want to shove a pencil in your eye to make it stop."

-(laughs) "Don't I know it."

My plan to put my pack in a locker at the train station and wander the Sunday streets until I had to catch the coastal steamer at 3pm was abandoned when I mean Sean, a 20-year-old Canadian who was also hanging about until the steamer left.

This was when the journey started to look up. I love just being thrown together with interesting people by chance - it was one of my favourite parts of travelling. I sat at the dock waiting area with Sean, who was traveling around Scandinavia until his money ran out. Since he was planning to spend $1,500CAD staying at the ice hotel, I was guessing this would not take too long. Soon we were joined by Fyodor, a Russian reasearch student, who was taking a few days to get as far north as possible before he had to return to Oslo. Within moments of meeting Fyodor, a thin man with a long ponytail and a huge camera, he told me that a fellow researcher was convinced that vitamin C could repair DNA and was on a mission to proove it. He was so wonderfully unique that I knew the rest of my boat trip would be brilliant with him as a companion.

Sean got on the steamer in the photo, while Fyodor and I hopped another one. Fyodor bought a ticket to Tromsø , which would take him until the next afternoon. My journey would be only four hours, and it was only then that it began to dawn on me how close I was to finally meeting my dear friend Craig, with whom I have corresponded for nearly four years.

Next time - a four-hour journey condensed. And the start of the mountain photos.

Going North

I sat backwards on the train for nine and a half hours from Trondheim to Bodø. I ate terrible Norwegian chocolate and drank a strangely carbonated apple drink and was perfectly content. I love being places where I do not feel as if I can be expected to be doing anything. I just stare out the window and know that I can fill the time with the magic of my mind.

As we drove the snow fell and stopped and fell again and the soon white was swallowing the world. I saw a man standing next to a truck on a small road. He looked like he was filming the train. Bang! We hit something. The train stopped and backed up, then moved forward again. Strange that the man was filming just at that point. I wondered what the train had hit, and had he put it there in order to film the train, hoping perhaps that it might derail and he could capture the carnage for his personal joyful viewing? I was nearly famous. I was so nearly famous.

Later, just as we were crossing the arctic circle, the train hit a reindeer. Again we stopped and backed up, and this time I saw its crumpled body lying next to the tracks, legs hideously bent. I remember the shades of its fur and also the white snow, but little blood. Its two companions wandered the nearby hillside and it seemed they did not want to leave without the one they did not yet know was dead.

I took a photo of a funny marker that was sticking out of the snow and learned later that it signified the invisible line that says "you are now inside the arctic circle." If the train hadn't struck the reindeer I never would have seen it. And that would have been fine.