Aeolian Reminiscences

On the arctic coast summer is 10 degrees celsius. It rains all day sometimes. I once spent hours in it, trying to find a path and instead encountering unending fog, the kind in which you silently watch and wait, about the only thing you can do, silver mist and all. I learned many things: the name and taste of different berries, the types of plants and their associated geographies — cottongrass demarcates marsh, grey heath moss stabilizes rocks, et cetera — the importance of staking down my tent, because the wind lifted it up twice when I dismissed, naïvely, the quick temper of the weather.

Beauty is sincere and cruel. White sand makes the foot of a mountain, deposited by stormy wind ten thousand years ago. Shoreline drops, suddenly and vertically, hundreds of meters at a time. It has a name: true cliff. Glacial lakes descend from one to another, intensely blue on a sunny day, bluer than the ocean, and a swallowing black like the pupil of a loved one, when the wind and rain numb fingers and faces.

Our group of ten artists lived on a non-operating farm. Locals call it bunnen (the bottom) because it is next to a small rocky beach and a sand valley where wind gathers. If you hop between the rocks, you will find — among kelps, sea urchins, bones and feathers — turquoise nylon ropes and yellow and orange shreds of plastic, broken yet bright still, faded labels in Swedish, Latvian, Russian, English, languages you do and do not recognize. Once I found a red plate made in Korea.

For reasons that I would only be able to articulate later, I often gave up the comfort of the house and walked very far. One day I hiked to the north point, Talhasen, by myself, referred to as the Nordkapp, the claimed Northernmost point of continental Europe, that is well rid of tourists.

(Why is it so, the visits to ends and edges make one a hero in Tragedy?)

I stayed in a little cabin wedged on a beach filled with driftwood twice my height. I had been told their origin.

to stand in the Siberian forest and end
bone white on an arctic beach
a pine must know great distances
and a thing or two about death

I thought.

The sun strolled patiently above the horizon. It was setting, nevertheless. The continuous days had barely concluded before our arrival on the island. My devices all failed the task of keeping time: an old iPhone that turned itself off with almost full battery, a borrowed satellite phone with a time difference I forgot to ask about and a watch with a loose knob that placed the hour hand on the plastic plane a bit too freely.

I did not need time, I finally decided, watching the sky turning a pale purple. Then a shade darker, a shade darker. Who invented time and for what? I found myself theorizing civilization, and stopped to start a fire in the iron stove. To my chagrin, I only managed to have a lukewarm smoker.

I fell asleep without the fuzzy crackles, wind growling in the chimney.

For another trip I hiked up one of the taller mountains on the island at 605 meters. (Most mountains here are under 300m.) Two old men at the dock were surprised to see a visitor at all when I got off the boat at Slettnes. I started walking along the power line. One came after running and, in a dry Norwegian accent, asked me if I knew where I was headed.

“To this mountain,” I said.

I showed him the map. I had been using the map a lot more than in any other travels, and for the first time I carried with me a compass, which I learned how to use with youtube rather than my cartographic education or previous hikes. Marked trails, with their signs and cairns, never urged me to acquire the essential skills of navigation.

My breakfast reads on this island — 810 square meters, the fourth largest in Norway — always included a scan of the thin contour lines and place names in a foreign language. Without roads and little infrastructure, the only solace I had outside became the encounter of a lake glimmering with familiar curves, or a mountain extruding with the anticipated drama.

I was a geographer again.

“This area is nice,” he said, circling on the paper, “when are you coming back?”

“Wednesday,” I said, and showing off the little Norwegian I knew, “onsdag.” I had looked up the boat schedule, wrote it down and memorized it a few times. I must be back on Wednesday morning at 7:50 to make it back to Akkarfjord for the end of my residency.

“You come back on Wednesday.” He said, reminding me and himself again, and again, “Wednesday, you say.”

Tall grasses concealing gaps among rocks, my feet sunk regularly. “Hole-In-The-Ground, it’s called,” I suddenly thought of a voice from Oregon years ago. That summer I hitched a ride with a friend and learned about this point of interest.

“Really?”

“Yeah, it’s literally a giant pit in the ground.”

We drove past it and did not investigate.

“Now so many Holes-In-The-Ground,” I said to myself. For a moment I wondered how he was.

A reward from the terrain, I discovered the tallest blueberry bushes on the island so far and feasted on the ripe, dark, sweet fruit. These would make a good pie, I thought. (I had been foraging berries and making galettes, pies, and crumbles as one of my residency projects. It is named The Emotional Qualities of Pie, which I will relay some other time.)

That night I woke up at 11:52, turned off the alarm I set for mid-night and unzipped the tent. With no gasp but a definite gladness, I nodded to a sky full of Northern Lights.

A lot of people from our group had been hoping for them. One downloaded an app and became the unofficial light forecaster. One scouted every night as soon as the dusk ended, first at eleven and gradually at ten. We chewed pieces of Freja chocolate, the kind one would prefer in a ski lodge, over a conversation of poisonous snakes in Australia when he would return, declaring negative but never failing to add, “I have faith. I know it’s happening.”

They must be ecstatic now. I stood with the lights alone, wishing for a certain solidarity.

When I returned to the dock on Wednesday, I was early. I had woken up at 3am in order to give myself ample time to cross the treacherous ground. The sun had fully risen by now, the blush of five o’clock a far memory. I read the boat schedule again, in Norwegian, which placed an asterisk next to the stop. Understanding none of the words, I remembered something about calling the boat office before traveling. The place is so small that a boat can skip it if no one demands transportation.

I wondered if I should walk up to a house and inquire, but instead I sat on the dock with my feet hanging over the emerald ocean. I looked at the map to see if I could walk back to Akkarfjord. It would take two days.

I heard people talking. Eventually an old couple came and greeted me.

“Good morning,” I replied, and pondered adopting them as my grandparents. Green grass sticking to their black shoes, they looked like they were about to travel. The woman noticed the grass and nudged the man to clean it off like she did.

She asked me something. “I was hiking,” I said and, guessing she got none of it, pointed to the end of the fjord, “mountains.”

The man joined the patch of sun next to me, wool cap on his silver hair and a cigarette in hand. More Norwegian.

“Jeg snakker ikke norsk. (I don’t speak Norwegian.)”

More.

“I came from Akkarfjord, and I am now going back.”

A place recognized, yet more words unknown.

I did not know what else to say.

But I was relieved, in this incomprehensible communication, that the boat would come at last.

The man who wished me god tur two days before showed up with a suitcase. “You are back,” he said, and immediately took the job of a translator. I showed him the mountain I climbed.

“Sandvikfjellet!” Grandma knew it, and told me she was from the small village, maybe of ten people, on the other side.

“You are very strong,” the translator pat me on the shoulder. I thought he looked like Popeye.

Walking back to the house, I was astonished by the luxury of pavement. The sheep grazed and, as always, upon seeing a larger figure, stared unwillingly.

Muesli, yogurt, milk. I started thinking about the items on the table. It was still breakfast time. Bread, jam, cheese.

Spreading butter on toast is home. And I am coming home.

I never thought I’d find home in the tundra. If anything, I was entranced by the utterly foreign landscape and flora:

foliage the height of a thumb
waterfalls splitting bedrocks
the sharp silk of time
moss so soft and silent that
at touch
forgives all sorrows

We, the group of artists, made this our home. Wrapping ourselves in blankets, we sipped tea and shared knowledge gained in our walks, conversations and making: the fish factory that went under and up again, the Sami family who’d come to the island by chance and stayed with their reindeer, a plant called meadowsweet that, when infused in cream, brings lightness and dulce. Mushrooms. Stars. Permafrost in Mongolia. “The inside of a reindeer horn smells like a thousand nails,” said the sculptor.

Dinner time was all sorts of jolly. Our bodies responding to the climate, we were easily, if not constantly, hungry. It provided the best ingredient for any meal. From fish cakes to burritos, we loaded our plates full. Dietary preferences became secondary when the modern abundance of choices vanished with remoteness. Nothing was cultivated on the island, and our groceries came from a boat trip or the village general store that doubled as post office and library. There was fresh-caught pollock one night, and for a few days we sliced reindeer sausage to add to our open sandwiches.

Music flowed from the kitchen onto the dining table. We sampled Kumbia. We played the Argentinian version of Sweet Home Alabama. We listened to a 17-minute recording of joik, the Sami’s way of enveloping nature with the human voice. The same musician from Mazé also produced remixes of joiks —of wind, sea, mosquitos, all things big and small — in rock and roll, say, and other contemporary fashions.

We had as closeness, I felt, just as we had space for ourselves. Our studios scattered over the property: in the boat house with the chipping blue wall, upstairs where the dried fish hung from the beams, in the old chicken coop with a window facing the fjord. John Cage played in the loft at the writer’s desk, and the echoes of a handsaw —on the found skull of an animal, perhaps — reverberated from the basement.

I enjoyed writing in the velvet armchair. Intertwined with the hustle bustle was the quiet moments of sun.

My home in the arctic neatly disassembled when the residency ended. I continued on a solo trip into the next island. It was very lonely this time. There was no longer the gurgling coffee machine or fields of toughening rhubarbs to go back to.

I opened the door of a cabin against the wind and pulled it back with my whole body. Inside, my face buzzed from the sudden deprivation of the violence of air. Outside, it looked like the moon.

I read the map again, starting to roast a sweet potato in the stove and sift through passages from my small black journal. Pages had passed since the day of wide-eyed innocence.

Day one, August:
Walked the mountain on the North side of the valley (sandbar?). Walked in bare feet. The white moss is the softest thing my feet have ever met. Was freeing to be naked on top of the mountain. (Sheep.)

I read the thin copy of Jacob’s Room by Virginia Woolf that I had brought along with me and learned that a tree had fallen in a forest.

I thought of Brooklyn. There once was an apartment from whose window I watched the snow fall in the same warmth and, however unlikely, the same silence. I thought of Mexico. If that was the earth’s clay red belly button, this its iris, clear as dew on a blueberry.

I found white reindeer fur in my pocket and wondered if it should belong to the wind.