The Cabin in the Mountains

by Robert Ferguson

  ‘Yes. Don’t you?’

  ‘No. I’m an architect.’

  Without another word I bounded up the two steps to the house and removed the pullover I had borrowed from Petter and tossed it onto the sofa. I got my coat and woollen hat from the cloakroom, Nina and I said goodbye to Hanne and Petter and whoever else’s eye we caught, and we walked down the slope to the car. As we drove back down the forestry track I told her about the case of mistaken identity. I had assumed she would focus on the strangeness of the misunderstanding, but instead she began asking a series of questions clearly designed to work out how such a misunderstanding could possibly have arisen in the first place. This aspect of the story didn’t interest me at all, and rather than laboriously trying to trace the cause of the mix-up I changed the subject, asking her whether she knew that, as of the present moment, eighty per cent of Norwegians were city-dwellers, and that this represented a massive and near-complete reinvention of Norway as a rural country? It was a statistic I had picked up from Christian’s conversation.

  She didn’t answer. I glanced across at her, and in the pale glow of the dashboard digitalia saw that she was sitting unnaturally upright in her seat, fingers gripping the steering wheel fiercely as she peered at the night through the windscreen, concentrating hard on navigating the sharp bends in the forestry track as it twisted downwards, light from the headlamps flashing in a series of vanishing and reappearing arcs across the dense wall of dark pines. Loath to disturb her intense concentration, I continued the conversation inwardly with myself, now thinking of Knut Hamsun’s famous novel Markens Grøde (The Growth of the Soil), for which he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1920, and of how he articulated in that novel a dream of a world in which people would of their own choosing turn their backs on urbanisation and return to the simpler ways of the past. To a Europe still reeling from the horrors of the 1914–18 war and wondering how on earth to make a fresh start, and whether it was even worth trying, that book must have seemed like the most beautiful beacon of hope. But then how quickly that dream became bound up with the violent völkisch nationalism of the Nazis in the 1930s. I recalled the penultimate chapter of the Tao Te Ching and its calm disdain for the invention of all labour-saving devices, its vision of a world of small societies living in easy and incurious isolation, so content with their lives that the urge to travel never troubles them. The neighbouring village is so close they can hear the dogs bark and cocks crow, yet they live out their whole lives without ever visiting it. Not for the first time I found myself wondering how I could find that vision so appealing, for on its own terms I had not only visited the neighbouring village but stayed there, and looked like spending the rest of my life there.

  * Riksmåls Ordbok defines the word (in Norwegian) as ‘voluntary and unpaid work done by neighbours, club members etc in carrying out a specific project’.

  † In a letter to a Swedish aristocrat, Henrik Ibsen once described the relationship between the three Scandinavian peoples in terms of social class: ‘We three peoples have all the qualities needed to form a spiritually united single nation. Sweden provides our spiritual aristocracy, Denmark our spiritual bourgeoisie, and Norway our spiritual working class.’

  6

  14 July 2018

  We pick up the key to the cabin – fault-finding tour – painting the cabin – different ways of thinking about mountains – Ibsen the collector of folk tales – Carpelan’s mountain painting trip – Olsen’s auction of Scream – secret fears of working up a ladder – W. C. Slingsby and Therese Bertheau climbing ‘Storen’ – Norwegians adopt mountaineering as a sport – Johannes Heftye – Emanuel Mohn’s unpatriotic failings – Amundsen’s dogs

  We picked up the key from Norske Fjellhus’ head office in Kongsberg on the drive up. I had no idea what my reaction would be on entering the completed cabin for the first time. As we opened the front door, painted in darkly beautiful ‘Røros red’, we entered a dim hallway paved in dark grey flagstone. There was a hønsetrapp (‘hen-ladder’) staircase leading up to the two bedrooms on the first floor. Stepping past this we stood in the combination living room and kitchen. Sunlight flooded the room through the four windowpanes on the far wall and my first thought at the sight of all that radiantly warm blonde wood was that I did not want to sully it by the application of even a single brush-stroke of paint, never mind the intrusion of a roomful of furniture.

  As we waited for the builders to arrive we made a brief, fault-finding tour of the cabin. I was so thrilled by the beauty of all the wood I was not really minded to dwell on the small but palpable imperfections: the bedroom door that didn’t quite close; the work-surface top that angled slightly inward on its way from the kitchen sink to the fridge; the glimpse of bare wood from the small gash low down on the shed door; and the dishwasher having been installed in the wrong place, two cupboard sections away from the sink and the water supply.

  ‘There’s a draught here.’

  Nina was squatting in a corner of the main room, moving the back of her hand up and down against the wall. Squatting beside her, I made a fist of my right hand and held it up to the spot. I felt a steady stream of quick cold air blowing across the back of my hand. I stood up. It was like a warning. A whispered resolution from the mountain to take back and reclaim these few acres of terrain we had had the temerity to appropriate.

  Reidar, the builder, was a tall young man. He looked to be in his mid-thirties but had an authoritative way about him that made him seem older. He spoke the simple but good English necessary to communicate with the largely foreign workforce whom Norske Fjellhus employed to carry out their building projects. At about two in the afternoon he arrived with Marek, whom we had met several times previously, and a Latvian, who was not introduced and whose name we never learned.

  Almost alone of the imperfections on our list, the draught had made me uneasy, and this was the first thing we drew to Reidar’s attention. He bent down, held the back of his hand to the joint where the timber from the living room and the bedroom intersected, then stood up and told the Latvian to take some sheep’s wool, dip it in something that sounded like tirilolje, and wedge it into the gap on the outside.

  Tirilolje was the only Norwegian word in the whole exchange. Otherwise they had spoken in English. I had no idea what it meant. While the Latvian was outside I took out my phone and surreptitiously googled it. But no matter how I spelled it, Google couldn’t answer. At the point at which it tried to introduce me to the singing of an Albanian named Tiri Gjoci I almost gave up, but then hit the jackpot when I tried spelling it tyriolje, and learned that it means ‘pine tar’, a substance long used in Scandinavia as a preservative for wood exposed to harsh conditions.

  And then the little party of builders was gone, and the place was ours, and for the next ten weekends we made the three-hour drive up from Oslo every Friday evening, spent all day Saturday and Sunday painting, slept over at Paul and Trine’s cabin, and drove back to Oslo on Sunday night. The paint we chose came from a Maxbo concertina catalogue that offered up to thirty different shades of brown, each described individually, each with its own unique name. We had spent long hours pondering these entries but, try as I might, I could see no significant differences between them. They seemed so similar to me that an act of choice was hardly called for, but in the end I had voted emphatically for a shade called ‘Lys Varde’, meaning ‘light cairn’.

  We spoke of it as ‘paint’, but a voice within me longed to call it creosote. It was brown, and thinner than ordinary paint, and I had distant memories of applying something very like it to garden fences while working as a builder’s labourer on a house-refurbishing project done by Laings on a council estate in the Elephant and Castle in South London in the 1970s. On trying to discover a suitable translation for the Norwegian term for the paint I was using (beis), I discovered that creosote was now an illegal substance in the United Kingdom, apparently on health or environmental grounds, or both. I googled ‘creosote’, hoping to discover exactly why i
t had become illegal, and came upon a promising discussion of the matter; but with the strange rapidity typical of internet groups the discussion descended into an exchange of abuse and I abandoned my search.

  *

  We began working indoors, and downstairs, where the main bedroom was. The idea was that once we were finished and began work on the outside we would be able to sleep in our own cabin.

  A ‘branched knot’ creates a beautiful dragonfly shape on the cabin wall.

  For the most part it was monotonous and straightforward work. Nina likes to talk as she works, while I prefer to sink into a deep and seemingly morose silence when involved in any project such as this. I was working on the long, east-facing wall, working around the two windows. I began to notice for the very first time how the staining of the wood revealed certain beauties in it of which, in my devotion to work and to the practice of a free and easy mental wandering, I had not previously been aware. Sitting back on my haunches I suddenly found myself savouring the dragonfly-like beauty of the ‘branched knot’, in which two splayed or spiked knots appear to originate from the same central source; or the mysterious lens-shaped hollow of a resin pocket, like a lenticular galaxy glimpsed at the remote limits of the Hubble telescope; I noticed the ‘heart shakes’ on the stacked ends of the supporting quarter-walls that marked the division between kitchen area and living-room area; fissures; end shakes, radiating from the pith; the way the staining process enhanced the delicate lines of the undulating grain in tight and irregular curves. All of these esoteric observations, I now realised, were vestigial memories from the time spent translating Mytting’s book into English, a task that had quite incidentally furnished me with a degree of knowledge about timber that I would never have acquired in the normal course of events.

  The work was hard on the back, and hard on the hips, and presently I stood up to stretch. Idly looking through the windows, I saw the jagged line of the seven peaks on the Blefjell range. My thoughts rambled off in their direction, and I found myself thinking about the Norwegian mountains, and the changing ways Norwegians have looked at them over the centuries. To Norwegian heathens the world was a flat circle divided into three distinct regions, each with its own characteristic set of inhabitants, and sharing a common centre. The innermost world was Asgard, where the gods, known as the Aesir, lived, each in his or her own home. Odin lived in Valhalla, Thor in Thrudheim, Freyja in Folkvang. Odin’s work was to inspire poets, wage war and give fighting men courage in battle. Thor was responsible for natural phenomena such as wind, rain, thunder and lightning. Beyond this inner region was Midgard, the domain of the humans. The word meant ‘home in the middle’ and conveyed clearly the humans’ sense of being located midway between the gods in Asgard and the giants of Utgard – the outer rim of their discworld, an untamed region of mountains and plateaus inhabited by elemental beings associated with wildness, danger and chaos.

  The vertical axis of the flat, round world was an ash tree named Yggdrasil, connected to the sky at its crown, and at its roots penetrating to a subterranean realm that included a well, known as Urd’s Well, where the gods held their assembly meetings and where three female beings, known as the Norns, spun out the destinies of humans and gods alike. Yggdrasil represented an assurance to the inhabitants of Midgard that there was indeed a centre to the world, and that all things were connected, despite appearances to the contrary, despite the ceaseless struggle between a will to order, represented by the gods of Asgard, and the entropic lure of chaos, represented by the giants and creatures of the mountainous Utgard. And although Utgard was a threatening and frightening place to be, even for the gods, it was understood that in the chaos within its borders lay the raw materials necessary for the learning of new skills and the creation of valuable treasures, which the Aesir could hand on to the inhabitants of Midgard. The story of how Odin forced the secrets of the art of writing runes from the reluctant terrain of this mental region is a dramatic illustration of the view that learning, knowledge and progress had to be fought for and suffered for.

  There were, I reflected, echoes of this idea of the mountains as fearful, threatening but also valuable in the folk tales that survived in oral form until well into the middle of the nineteenth century, when Peter Christen Asbjørnsen and Jørgen Moe produced their collection of Norwegian Folk Tales, the fruits of trips through the Norwegian mountains and countryside in the summers of 1843 and 1844. In 1862 a hard-up Henrik Ibsen applied for and was given a government grant to make a folk-tale collecting trip in the Hardanger and Sogn regions of the country, a task for which this taciturn and introverted man proved ill-suited, requiring as it did someone with a friendly and sociable personality able to persuade storytellers to relax and open up to him. Indeed, it seems the roles were reversed: ‘The visitor was silent and unapproachable,’ one potential source recalled, ‘and all our efforts to get him to open up were in vain.’

  In the end Ibsen departed with a ready-made collection offered to him by a local man named Peder Fylling, and once he got back to Kristiania he boldly offered several tales as the fruits of his own labours in the pages of the magazine Illustreret Nyhedsblad, without so much as a mention of the man who had done the actual collecting. The stories also hugely enriched Peer Gynt, which Ibsen wrote some five years later. Nina and I had recently attended a performance of Peer Gynt at the Oslo Nye Teater, in an adaptation built around and for Toralv Maurstad, the greatest Norwegian actor of his generation, then in his ninety-first year. For many native Norwegians Ibsen is as uninteresting a phenomenon as Shakespeare is to the average Englishman, and the sheer size of his reputation a bore. But of late Nina had evinced an interest in Peer Gynt, prompted by Peer’s dialogue with the Button Moulder on the subject of reincarnation. The Nye Teater production turned out to be a ‘best-of’ Peer Gynt, with twelve different actors playing Peer at various times of his life under the largely silent scrutiny of a very old Peer, as played by Maurstad. The decision picked up nicely Ibsen’s image of a human being as an onion, to the heart of which no amount of peeling and stripping of the outer layers will ever penetrate.

  As usual when I visit the theatre I drifted in and out of attention. On one particular occasion, with eight or nine Peer Gynts crowding the stage, I found myself recalling an outdoor performance of Peer Gynt on the shores of Lake Gålå that Nina and I attended in the autumn, during which ice-cold rain fell unremittingly for the entire three hours the performance lasted. It was not far off midnight by the time the performance ended, pitch dark and still pouring with rain. The hotel we were staying at was a forty-minute drive away in the coach. There was nothing to see through the windows, and after about fifteen minutes I tried to start a conversation with the man sitting beside me, and asked what he thought of the way old and young Peer had been played by two actors who were father and son, Nils Per and Jakob Oftebro? For a few moments he stared at me in dazed bewilderment, then he smiled and, with a note of triumph in his voice, pointed out that Peer’s claim to have encountered a flock of seagulls while flying down the Besseggen scree on the back of a goat was wrong, because you don’t get seagulls in the mountains. He said it showed how little Henrik Ibsen actually knew about the mountains. I enjoyed the non-academic nature of the objection, but suggested an alternative explanation: wasn’t it possible that the reference might have been deliberate, and an example of Ibsen’s talented slyness in undermining the credibility of Peer’s tale? He said he supposed it was possible, and then turned and stared fixedly out of the window, leaving me alone with the further thought that what Ibsen really knew about mountains was empathic, and derived from the perspective not of the climber but of the miner, with whose labours, toiling deep underground in darkness to bring riches into the light of day, he could identify as a writer and explorer of the shadows and hidden depths of the human soul. It was a perspective brilliantly summoned in Bergmanden (‘The miner’), written in 1851 when Ibsen was only twenty-three:*

  Rock-face, crack and boom and go

 
Crashing to my hammer-blow;

  I must clear a way down yonder

  To the goal I dare but ponder.

  Deep within the fell’s still night

  Treasures rich and rare invite,

  Precious stones and diamonds blazing

  Midst the gold’s resplendent mazing.

  In the depths here all is peace,

  Peace and night that never cease; –

  Soon earth’s very heart shall clamour

  To the smiting of my hammer. (tr. John Northam)

  The identification with stone ran deep; for much of his life Ibsen lived in fear of a kind of self-petrification, clearly expressed in the long early poem På viddene (On the heights), where he writes of a feeling of turning to stone in the vault of his chest. Oddly enough it is in that same poem that he coined the word friluftsliv (‘outdoor life’), which has become the standard term used by Norwegians to convey the idea of the mountains and the Vidda as positive and liberating places, arenas in which to soar temporarily free from the trivia of everyday life.

  But rather than the poets and the collectors of folk tales, it was the painters – men like the Danish-born Johannes Flintoe, and native Norwegian masters like J. C. Dahl, Hans Gude, Peder Balke and Thomas Fearnley, with their working expeditions into the Jotunheimen mountain region, Hurrungane, the Hardangervidda and the mountains of northern Norway in the early years of the nineteenth century – who announced the end of the fearful fantasising about ‘Utgard’. They replaced ‘fear’ with an aesthetic response that was at times ecstatic and almost religious in its nature. One of the earliest of these aesthetic explorers, the Finnish-Swedish adjutant and painter Wilhelm Maximilian Carpelan, crossed the interior of Norway twice, from Christiania to Bergen, in 1819. As the cataclysm of the Napoleonic wars drew to an end, the Swedish crown had acquired Norway in a personal union, by the terms of the treaty of Kiel in 1814. Carpelan’s brief was to ensure that the route across the mountains was navigable for the Swedish king’s newly appointed governor-general August Sandels, who planned to make the trip to find out more about exactly what it was the king had acquired. The route traversed central southern Norway, via Valdres and the mountainous region of Filefjell to the village of Lærdalsøyri, and continued by boat along Sognefjord, Norway’s longest and deepest fjord, and south towards Bergen. There had been major flooding in the spring of that year, and rumours that the road via Lærdal had been swept away. The immediate purpose of Carpelan’s first trip was to ascertain whether this was in fact the case. Once he was able to confirm that the route was navigable, the main party set out for the inland crossing. It was in the course of this trip that Carpelan produced a number of watercolour sketches and drawings of the Norwegian mountains for which his status as a pioneer of the new genre has long been recognised.