The Man from Dangerous River
Our friend from Norway takes us home
Roald Skøelv’s surname comes from the river that runs next to the house where he was born. Skø means “dangerous,” and elv means “waters,” but is often applied to rivers. Skøelv — the River Skø — flows into the fjord just a stone’s thrown from Roald’s family farmhouse, here in Norway’s western Arctic.
Teresa and I first met Roald in Washington DC in 2000. He was the manager of a media training program we delivered several times a year for the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Roald was a big bear of a man, tall and broad shouldered. It was easier to imagine him as a viking, rowing across the Atlantic, than supervising communications workshops for economists.
Roald turned out to be one of the most affable and easy-going professionals we ever worked with. He was one of those rare individuals who somehow managed to be his authentic self on the job. He really cared about the people he worked with; he wanted the best for them — it was never about his next promotion. After he left the IMF for a position at the World Bank, we kept in touch, met for lunch from time to time, and became good friends. Eventually he and his wife returned to Norway, and retired.
When we told Roald about our upcoming trip to Norway, he invited us to visit him in Skøelv, where he returns every summer. He promised to show us not only his family farmhouse, but the whole remote area where he grew up. We were able to book two nights at an air B&B in a village just ten minutes from Skøelv.
When we arrived at the cluster of homes where the river Skøelv meets the fjord, Roald greeted us and took us home to meet his sister, Toril. Toril lives just outside of Oslo most of the year, but she also returns to Skøelv every summer. Her daughter now works in the village as a teacher, and so Toril has grandaughters here, too. She stays for the whole season, keeps the house maintained, and fills the deck with a profusion of beautiful flowers.
The house sits right at the edge of the beach, giving them a sweeping view of the strait, and the island of Senja beyond. There are two mountains on the other side of the road, which means there was little land to cultivate — just enough sloping hillside to feed several sheep and a few cows. Roald told us one of the mountains was called “Dinner Mountain” — because when the sun was on top of it, that meant it was time to come home for dinner.
We sat out on the deck and drank coffee while Roald and Toril told us stories of growing up in this old wooden house, built by their great-grandfather, who came here from Senja over 100 years ago. He built the first house in Skøelv, and established the first farm. At that time, the government was encouraging people to forego the tradition of taking their father’s name as their surname (as in, Leif Erickson), and instead to choose a family name that could be passed on through generations, like most other European nations. So, when great grandfather moved here, he took the name of the river as his new surname. The small community of Skøelv bloomed around him. Still today, many of Roald and Toril’s relatives live within walking distance from their farm, and most of them are named Skøelv.
Roald remembers working the farm as a boy: leading sheep up the hillside to pasture, cutting fodder on the steep hillsides with a hand-scythe with his father, and the annual walk he made with the cow, upriver to the farm that owned the only bull. The farmers and their wives along the road would always tease the boy about what was about to happen!
He also remembers the beach, literally right outside his door, where he and his friends would play and swim during the long summer days.
Most vividly, though, Roald remembers the moment in his childhood when he realized he would have to decide whether to stay in the village and learn to integrate into this small world, or get out. Toril, for example, left when she turned eighteen and got a job in Oslo as a telephone operator.
For Roald, education became his route to the world beyond the farm. He scored top marks in middle school, and convinced his parents to send him to high school — the first in his family to get so much education. He then studied languages at the University of Trondheim, and went on to graduate school in Chicago. Seven years after he left Skøelv, he returned to Norway’s north coast (with a wife and small child) for a teaching job in a tiny town much like the one where he grew up.
I’m still not sure exactly how Roald ended up in Washington D.C. with his second wife. But if there is one thing the arc of his life demonstrates to me, it’s that no matter how far across the ocean a salmon may swim, it will still find its way back to the fjord where it was born.
It’s not just Roald and his sister. Many Norwegians who migrated south to the cities when young find themselves going back to remote areas for holiday as adults. Whether ancestral homes or modern cabins, there seems to be a national longing for connection to the wilderness. A half-million Norwegians, literally one-in-ten people, own a cabin or cottage. Which means virtually everyone in the country has access to one.
I did make one faux-pas at dinner that evening. Toril served us a hearty, homemade meat-and-pasta soup, which I couldn’t eat because I have a gluten allergy. Declining the soup was not the problem. No one minded when I brought in some gluten free bread from the car. Toril gave me some of her homemade cloudberry jam to spread on the bread. It was delicious! The berries are kind of like raspberries, but orange, and taste more tart. I her asked where she got the berries.
“Oh Tim!” said Roald, with mock shock (I hope it was mock). “There are three questions you must never ask a Norwegian: “What’s your salary?”, “Where do you fish for salmon?” and “Where do you pick your berries?”
We agreed to meet the next morning for a tour of nearby Senja Island. Toril declined to join us. She had plans to pick more cloudberries (we were definitely not invited).
Senja is where Roald’s great grandfather came from. His family lived there for at least four hundred years — that is how for their family records go back. Senja is the second largest of Norway’s 5,000 coastal islands. It’s about 1,500 square kilometres, but with fewer than 8,000 residents, that makes it sparsely populated, with most people clustered in a few coastal fishing villages.
We drove across the island in alternating rain and sun, arriving at the little cove of Hamn:
And then on to the fishing village of Gryllefjord, which sits at the edge of a sweeping long fjord lined with jagged peaks:
On our way back from Senja, we stopped for a photo of Skøelv, as seen from across the strait (below). Roald pointed out “Dinner Mountain” on the left side of the river valley.
We said our goodbyes that evening and thanked Roald warmly for sharing his home and childhood memories with us. He always seems a bit surprised when we hug him. It’s not very Norwegian, but he seems to like it anyway. Flamotoring around as we do, stopping here and there for a few days, it’s not been easy to make new friends. For us, seeing this land through Roald’s eyes has been such a gift.
We see beautiful mountains and fjords. He sees Dinner Mountain. He looks across the water at the island where his ancestors’ lived. The local bank is where his father worked later in life. The beach is where he and his friends played as a children. The cemetery — many of the headstones bear the name Skøelv. And the old school: that building is where he discovered that he was smart, and that education could be his way out. Out, yes. But never gone. And always coming home.
