The Cabin in the Mountains

by Robert Ferguson

  I’d had access to a Norwegian cabin before. Shared between my wife and her brother, Paul, it was a single-storey wooden building with a separate garage on a wooded promontory overlooking the Oslofjord, near a tiny settlement called Torød, just south of Tønsberg, on the Nøtterøy peninsula. Nina took me to see it one January day in the winter of 1985, not long after we met. It was snowing heavily. As I later learned, those first five winters I spent in Norway, between 1983 and 1988, were among the coldest and snowiest the country had known since the early 1940s and the years of the German occupation.

  The drive from Oslo to Nøtterøy took about two hours. It was one of those journeys where the roads seem to get gradually narrower all the time, as though the car itself were having to concentrate ever more fiercely on reaching a tiny and obscure destination. After leaving the main E6 we passed through Tønsberg, then drove over the bridge to Nøtterøy. Tønsberg was a centre of the Norwegian whaling industry for much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and just outside the village of Teie we passed a monument to Svend Foyn, inventor of the harpoon cannon. With the snow falling ever more heavily we entered a narrowing maze of lanes that finally brought us to Torød, with its single not-very-main street and small supermarket at the end. Beyond that the road turned into a track with a view of Vrengensund, actually a part of the extensive Oslofjord. Except for the small humps of snow-shrouded skerries and islands dotted about, the sea was hardly distinguishable from the sky.

  ‘On a clear day you can see across to Sweden,’ said Nina, changing down through the gears as the Polo followed the road up a small hill and past a few newish-looking apartment blocks built up the side of it, balconies jutting out like open drawers in a dresser. At the top she turned sharp right into a track that led through a stand of pines and continued along for about a hundred metres until the track ended in a small, cleared space. She stopped the car, pulled on the handbrake and turned off the engine.

  ‘Are we there?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘That’s it up there.’

  She leaned forward and pointed. At the top of the short, uphill drive on our left, through an obscuring fringe of white-coated branches, I saw my first Norwegian cabin. Or rather, I saw the draped form of it, sleeping beneath a dense white cocoon of snow. It looked like a Christo sculpture. A pine tree taller than the cabin itself leaned down towards a window through which the silver loop of a tap was just visible.

  Ours was the only car there, and there were no lights showing in any of the four or five cabins I could now see, looking through the trees. A shower of powdery snow outside the passenger-side window drifted down from the branches of a pine. Looking up I saw a large magpie swaying clumsily about on a small ball of fat in a green net someone had hung out there.

  The approach lane had been visited by snowploughs fairly recently, and you could still just about see the outlined tracks of the large tyres as the tractor shunted in and out of the parking space; but the snow on the driveway up to the cabin lay so thick that it would have been impossible to turn the car up there, and difficult even to walk the few metres. Perfectly cloaked in thick white soft snow, the cabin looked so poetic, so dreamlike, so perfect that I asked Nina the same question every foreigner probably asks when seeing a Norwegian cabin for the first time: why don’t you live here all the time?

  ‘You can’t,’ she replied. ‘We close it down in the winter. The pipes are just half a metre below ground. We turn the water off at the mains or the pipes would freeze and burst.’

  I was a little disappointed: ‘So we can’t go in?’

  ‘We could, but there’s no point. We couldn’t even make a cup of coffee. I just wanted you to see it.’

  We sat in the car eating sandwiches and drinking coffee from a thermos she had prepared and she told me the history of her family’s association with the place. Her father had bought it from a local landowner in the early 1960s, and since the age of five she had spent every summer there with her mother and younger brother, from early July until the end of August. At weekends her father, who worked in shipping, would join the family, sailing up the fjord from Oslo every Friday with dozens of other working dads looking forward to seeing their wives and children again. For obvious reasons these special Friday evening ferry departures were known as pappabåter (‘dad-boats’). She told me how a community built up among the other families with cabins on the hill, summer friendships, visits from relatives, weekend cruises at sea in the cabin cruiser that was moored for the summer at the jetty down in the bay. As she talked to me about it I began to be able to see it, she and her little brother playing hide and seek between the trees with the other children, always in their swimming costumes, the sun always shining, always in the background one or other of the Fred Olsen or DFDS ferries on its way to Denmark, or to Kiel in Germany, majestically slow and massively reassuring as they glided across the fjord in the half-distance, the view now and then obscured by floral baskets dripping with red petunias that hung from beam hooks on a sun terrace, which I could just see on the far side of the cabin, the seaview side. All of this I invested with a fabulous sense of timelessness and happiness, even knowing that, as we spoke, Nina’s mother lay dying of cancer at the Oslo Radium Hospital, so doused in painkillers she scarcely recognised her own daughter when she visited.

  After about half an hour we turned the car around and drove back to Oslo. The snow was so heavy it was often difficult to see where the side of the road was. Nina’s Polo had the studded winter tyres that were standard on every Norwegian car in those days, before environmental concern for their effect on the air led to the more widespread use of studless tyres that were thicker and wider and gave better road-holding than summer tyres. Occasionally the car waltzed slightly as it came up out of the wear-pattern of waves and troughs ground into each side of the camber by the studs. It was a distinctly unnerving sensation and as we crossed the bridge that connects Nøtterøy with Tønsberg I remember wondering why she had gone to the trouble of making the long journey in such dreadful conditions. I think it was only later I realised that for her the trip contained an element of ritual of which I could have known nothing at that time, when the status and significance of the cabin in the life of the average Norwegian family were unknown to me: that the purpose of the drive was to tell herself – and me, had I but known it – that she was considering sharing her life with me. And that meant sharing her cabin.

  28 April 2018

  Less visible than the skjærgårdsidyll* of the Swedes, less exportable than the social customs conveyed by terms like Swedish lagom,† Danish hygge‡ and even Finnish kälsarikännit,§ Norwegian hytta culture is more profoundly rooted than any of these in the history of the people. All of this was explained to me one evening by a man named Sverre Tangstad as we sat together in the stern of Ole’s snekke and drank beer while we sailed along the Årøysund. We were on our way out to Ole’s island cabin on Skrøslingen. There were ten or twelve on board, and a dozen more in another snekke belonging to Ole’s brother-in-law, Iver, that was chugging along some fifty metres away on our starboard side. Boats are like cabins in Norway. They don’t have anything to do with social class. Norway was historically a maritime culture, and for much of the twentieth century the Norwegian merchant marine was one of the largest in the world, a heritage that has persisted on into the twenty-first century in the form of a small-boat culture. Most of these will be some form or other of snekke. These are clinker-built boats with overlapping planks and an external rudder. For decades the wooden snekke was the most common type of boat you would see on and around the Oslofjord, although in recent years the plastic snekke, which requires less maintenance, has overtaken it in popularity. Ole’s boat, named the Gry Helene after his wife, was the half-open type, with a protective windshield at the front behind which Ole was standing, the fingers of his right hand twinned around two spokes of the wheel, occasionally drinking from the tin of Pripps Blå beer he held in his other hand.

  Ole and Gry Helene were throwing
a party. A lot of other guests would be making their own way in boats out to the island. For us the evening had started with a concert at the little arts centre of Gamle Ormelet at Tjøme, further down the coast from Torød, where Odd Nordstugu played and sang with his guitar and his group. Odd is one of those singers who disdains the shot at world fame that singing in English might give him and goes on singing and composing in his own language. In his case the cultural loyalty is even more profound since he sings in nynorsk – New Norwegian – Norway’s second official language. Nynorsk has had a special literary and patriotic status ever since it was codified as a written language from local dialects by Ivar Aasen in the nineteenth century. Aasen travelled the valleys and mountains of Norway in search of a language that was authentically Norwegian, and not the inherited ‘status’ language of the Dano-Norwegian (Bokmål) that was one legacy of Norway’s more than four hundred years as a Danish colony, from the union of Kalmar in 1397 to the end of the Napoleonic wars. Performers like Odd have longer careers and are more likely to survive into old age as national treasures than the anglophone singers.

  Sverre was an old friend of Ole’s. I’d never met him before, but he had a melancholy seriousness about him that I found immediately attractive. In the course of our conversation I had mentioned to him that we had recently bought a plot of land – in Numedal, on the eastern rim of the Hardangervidda – and were having a cabin built on it. I had forgotten my own observation, that at the slightest opportunity a Norwegian will embark on an informative lecture on virtually any aspect of his or her culture in which a foreigner shows an interest, and with almost no preamble I found myself listening to what turned out to be a rather jaundiced lecture on the history of the Norwegian cabin tradition.

  ‘You must understand,’ said Sverre, ‘that to a Norwegian, a cabin, whether by the sea or in the mountains, is so much more than just a piece of property or a possession. A cabin in the family is part of the soul of any Norwegian. It’s a deep part of Norwegian national identity, one that is hidden and difficult to catch your eye on from the outside. It’s to do with our roots. Norwegians are farming people, not really urban people. You know, at the start of the nineteen hundreds, there were about a hundred thousand cabins in the Norwegian mountains. Sætre, we call them. Summer mountain farms. I think you have them in Scotland, someone once told me the word…’

  He fumbled in his jacket pockets, patting each one as though looking for the word there before bringing out a small round tin of chewing tobacco. He snapped open the lid, took out one of the little dark brown pellets, wedged it down onto the gums between his lower lip and front teeth with the tip of his middle finger. A lot of Norwegians still use snuff in this way. Often it’s a habit acquired in the military while doing national service. Mechanically he offered me the open tin and when I rejected it with a shake of the head he snapped the lid back on and slipped it back into his pocket.

  ‘Shielings?’ I suggested.

  He frowned and looked upwards.

  ‘Yes, I think that was it. Places of work, not holiday homes. Summer farms, where the cattle and sheep and goats were driven up into the mountains in the summer to graze on the mountain pastures. A hundred thousand. Today there are maybe nine hundred of them that are still places of work.’

  He stopped, adjusted the wad of chewing tobacco, folded his hands and said: ‘Am I dreaming?’

  The non sequitur came so suddenly that I turned in surprise. It was a starry evening, the moon was not yet up, and the stars shone bright and clear. In the faint green glow of the starboard light I saw that he was frowning. He caught me looking at him and seemed puzzled for an instant. Then, with a wry smile, he explained that it was a technique. He was reading a book about lucid dreaming. How to train yourself to have waking dreams in which you can control what happens. You can fly if you want to. Walk through walls. Breathe underwater – do anything you want, because it’s all a dream. Every now and then, he said, you have to surprise yourself. In the middle of your ordinary life, even when you’re awake. You have to ask yourself: Am I dreaming?

  As though it were another part of the exercise or reality check or whatever it was, he reached out a hand and lightly touched my cheek. First my cheek, then his own.

  ‘Don’t you find it hard to tell whether you’re dreaming or not? On a night such as this, for example? With other people, some you’ve never met before, some you see all the time, some you haven’t seen for years. You’re on the water, gliding past these little islands with the little cabins with the lights on. Through a lit window you catch a glimpse of two heads leaning across a table. They’re talking. But out here it’s dark. The stars are out. You’re in a motor boat sailing towards Skrøslingen in Ole’s boat. You’ve spent the evening at a concert at Gamle Ormelet. I mean, how would this be any different if you were dreaming? In Numedal, did you say?’

  It was another unnervingly abrupt turn in his conversation.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Do you know the area?’

  ‘I should say so, I grew up there. My grandparents had a farm in Traaen, between Lampeland and Veggli, and they had a sæter up on the Hardangervidda. We used to spend our summers up there, my sister and brother and I, when I was a little child. Of course, it wasn’t really a working sæter by then, my grandparents were too old, we were just on holiday there. That’s what happened to most of the sæter, they were either abandoned or converted into holiday homes. And of course, the good thing about a cabin, being made of timber, you can take it apart and transport it wherever you like and put it up again. Fit it together like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. The same house, with the same knots in the wood. Even the same smell. My father moved it, when my great-grandmother died. We helped him, me and my brother and sister. Tell me about your cabin.’

  ‘There’s not a lot to tell. It’s a Fjellstul 2.’

  ‘Hva behager?’

  ‘It’s called a Fjellstul 2.’

  ‘That’s the name of it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Describe it to me.’

  I described it to him. I told him it was a two-storey building made of dimension stock, with notched and finger-jointed timbers on the ground floor, wood panelling on its upper floor. A gable roof overhung a front porch that was supported on three cinched pillars. I said that the builders had purposely included elements of the cabin architecture unique to the Numedal valley, such as these three pillars, and the characteristically oval face on both sides of the timbers. On a visit to the open-air Folkemuseum on the Bygdøy peninsula just outside Oslo, where you can walk around an artificial village of log cabins from all the different regions and periods, I told him, I had seen for myself, in the Numedal section of the museum, that these elements of our new cabin really did echo the characteristic building style of the region for much of the past three hundred years.

  Sverre nodded sagely at this.

  ‘I see,’ he said. ‘So you’ve bought yourself an IKEA cabin. I sincerely hope my directness does not offend you. What you’re getting up there in the mountains – I hope you don’t mind me saying this – it isn’t really a proper Norwegian hytta. Let me tell you, something happened to our Norwegian culture after the oil came. It happened quickly. Almost overnight it felt like sometimes. You wake up one morning, everything’s the same, but the world has changed. Do you know that feeling?’

  I said I didn’t think I did, but please continue.

  ‘There’s a narrative to the change, I’ve traced it. I thought tracing it might help. Go back to the 1950s, first point—’

  He broke off, leaned forward and, rummaging inside the battered black rucksack wedged between his feet, pulled out another can of Heineken, snapped back the ring-pull, cursed under his breath, dabbed beer from around the opening with his finger and then sucked his fingertip before taking a long swig and resuming:

  ‘First point – you need a car for mountain tourism. By the end of the 1950s, when wartime rationing came to an end, it meant a lot of Norwegians were suddenly able t
o afford cars. Where are they going to drive in these cars? To hotels. Big hotels in the mountains. That was the first entrepreneur dream of the Norwegian future. These big hotels that would spring up all over the mountainsides and in the valleys. But this, this was before feminism. Norwegian women didn’t work any more, not like they did on the farms in the old days, like my great-grandmother did. They were housewives. That was their job. Working at home as housewives, doing the cooking, washing the children, cleaning the house with a vacuum cleaner. So all these hotels were supposed to be a great gift to the wives and mothers. No cooking for two weeks! No dishes to wash! No beds to make. No whatever it would be. Instead it would be just sitting in the hotel bar with a martini, going up into the local mountains for walks, going out for a drive while someone else makes your beds, cooks your meals, serves you drinks at these big mountain hotels.

  ‘Like all rational attempts to predict the future, which are actually attempts to create the future, things didn’t work out that way. You know, this is so typically Norwegian. We are always trying to plan the future, so that nothing can go wrong. No one believes in God any more, so now everyone believes in Reason. This is something that came over the border into this country after the Russian revolution. Social engineering. Plans. Five-year plans. Seven-year plans. The Labour Party had a three-year plan in the 1930s. Laws, plans everywhere you look. Laws for what you can and can’t do, even in the mountains. The naturvern law in 1954.** The friluftslov in 1957.†† And then the new laws for planning and building in 1965. The old building law from 1924 only applied to Norwegian towns; the new law applied everywhere. Not just to towns and cities but even to tiny little settlements far off in the mountains and the countryside. They took the Norwegian countryside from the farmers and the peasants and they sold it to the tourists and the cabin people.’