The Cabin in the Mountains

by Robert Ferguson

  A long grassy descent now lay before me, leading in the far distance to the road. I saw cars passing along it in a steady stream and already I dreaded the last leg of the walk, the five kilometres along the roadside back to Haukeliseter. I passed sheep grazing. The last hour seemed interminable, but finally I crossed a stile onto a small track that led from a farm onto the Fv 11. One effect of the adventure had been to make me stoic, and as I headed for the small road bridge that led to the main road I was mentally prepared to accept the last hike along the side of the Fv 11 as a just punishment and a sort of final – and actually quite unnecessary – warning to me never again to attempt such a trip with so little preparation and forethought.

  In the farmyard I saw a small Hyundai truck pull round a corn silo and turn onto the road behind me. I stepped to the side of the road, without turning round. The truck stopped beside me, the engine still running. Through the open window a young farmer in a check shirt asked if I wanted a lift to Haukeliseter. When I said I did he told me to throw my rucksack into the back and climb into the cab beside him.

  Half an hour later, fresh from a hot shower, I was seated at the same window as the day I started out, but now facing the opposite way, looking south across the waters of Lake Ståvatn, with a plate of the day’s special (reindeer stew again), and an ice-cold half-litre of Hansa beer in front of me. Two little girls and a boy were climbing on the wooden roof of the sauna down by the lake. To the right of them a young couple in swimming costumes held hands and surveyed the cold water, daring themselves to dive in.

  I took the timetable of the Haukeli express, the Oslo-bound bus, out of my wallet and unfolded it. I was lucky. Only forty minutes to wait. Definitely time for another beer. I stood up and stumped across the floor on concrete legs, lurching from side to side like Dr Frankenstein’s monster. In a mirror on the wall behind the counter I caught sight of my reflected face, red and glowing. My whole body ached.

  Seated back at the table, after another long drink of the ice-cold beer, I sensed, like reluctant homing pigeons, the slow return of the concerns of everyday life.

  On Friday the turf roof for the cabin would be delivered. I had to be there.

  On Saturday Nina was due back from France. I must remember to shop.

  On Sunday we’d visit my father-in-law and watch the football on TV. First division Stabæk – our team – against second division Ålesund. It was a relegation play-off. Henning Berg was manager of Stabæk now. He’d done well enough in charge of Legia Warsaw in Poland, but could he save Stabæk from relegation? I wasn’t too confident. And from there I began thinking about how, if I ever came to write about this mountain walk, I would definitely have to recast it as a Slingsbyan triumph that focused on the ecstasies and delights of a walk on the Hardangervidda, and not on how I had almost spoiled it for myself by hopelessly overloading my rucksack and failing to stick to the waymarked footpath.

  I would also need to find out whether those cylindrical brown stones I had seen up on the plateau really were petrified tree trunks. I recalled something I had read in Peder W. Cappelen’s book Alene med vidda (Alone with the vidda), a diary-type description of the spring and summer he spent fifty years ago at a remote fishing cabin at Skjerhøl, in the very heart of Hardangervidda. Cappelen writes lyrically about the field mouse that had moved in during the winter; about the pine marten, the fox, the golden plovers and linnets he sees and hears as he works at putting the cabin back into shape after the long hard winter. Suddenly, without any warning, he slips in a sentence about seeing a flock of cuckoos. I was no ornithologist. For all I knew it might be true that, in certain circumstances, cuckoos do gather in flocks. But I felt instinctively that it must be a mistake. And if it was, didn’t that undercut the authority of the whole account? Wouldn’t I, by even bringing up the subject of these petrified tree trunks, risk something similar?

  The more I thought about it, the more unlikely it seemed that what I had seen was petrified timber. There had been a series of articles in the Norwegian press recently about how global warming in the north would mean the treeline moving ever higher up the vidda. In time, the mountain plain itself would be forested. Geologists pointed out that this would be nothing new. Fossil finds of timber from the beds of lakes on the vidda showed that during the early part of the Stone Age, more than seven thousand years ago, much of Hardangervidda had been covered in trees. In some parts the treeline was about two hundred metres higher than today’s level. In the warmest and best areas, pine dominated. Where the soil was less good, and in the higher regions of the vidda, mountain birch thrived. The scientific explanation was that the summers were warmer back then. To add to the complications, summers on the eastern side of the vidda – the Numedal side, our side of it – are warmer than in the west. So while the treeline in the east can be as high as twelve hundred metres, in the west the range is between nine hundred and a thousand.

  I began to wish I’d never seen the bloody things in the first place. In all of the newspaper articles I had read on the subject, the timber finds came from the sediment at the bottom of lakes. I hadn’t seen any reference to petrified, pale brown trunks lying open and scattered on rocky heights. Instinct told me what I had seen and touched were large, fossilised tree trunks; common sense told me they couldn’t be. It wasn’t possible for an amateur rambler carrying an overpacked rucksack and in a constant state of anxiety about his exact location on the vidda to have made such a unique and important discovery.

  Someone pushed open the glass door of the otherwise deserted cafeteria. It was the woman with the blind dog. She stopped at the till and bent down and whispered something in the dog’s ear. The dog sat down. She saw me watching her and raised her hand in a brief gesture of greeting. The young Swedish girl appeared behind the counter and asked what she wanted.

  Now my attention was distracted by the shrieks and shouts of the couple I had been watching through the window. They broke into a run and dived head-first into the lake. Moments later I heard the mournful sighing of hydraulic brakes. I turned and saw that a white bus had pulled up outside the window on the far side of the cafeteria. By the time I realised I was looking at the Haukeli express I had forgotten all about the tree trunks and scarcely even knew whether it mattered or not.

  Drifting in and out of sleep on the long journey back to Oslo, I found myself rehearsing how I would describe the walk to Nina when she returned from France. I would touch only lightly on the sudden cold bite of panic, the sense of being lost and alone in the midst of a bewildering and malevolent vastness. There would be little of the mysterious dread of Peder Balke’s paintings from the Arctic north and none of the sense of threat so vividly conveyed by Theodor Kittelsen.

  Nordkapp (The North Cape) by Peder Balke, 1853.

  The Ash Lad and the Troll by Theodor Kittelsen, 1900.

  Instead I would dress the mountains in the ruggedly romantic light of a nineteenth-century painting by J. C. Dahl, with every step of the way offering some new enchantment for the eye. The dark magnificence of Nupseggi. The long, paradisal descent into Dyredokk. The wild mountain framing of Slettedalen, the bouncing, foaming rush of the Kvesso, the pockets of year-round snow high up on the mountains, the wind-polished brilliance of the waters of Valldalsvatnet. I was confident that, by the time we reached the bus station in Grønland in Oslo, the reinvention would be complete.

  Norske fjell (Norwegian Mountain Landscape) by J. C. Dahl, 1819.

  8

  Friday 7 September

  The ‘living roof’ arrives – country and western music in Norway – A. B. Wilse the photographer – construction and maintenance of the living roof – DAB radio in Norway – conversation about Norwegian national dishes – on the early trade routes across Hardangervidda – the pre-Christian burial ground at Kjemhus

  The lorry carrying the turf roof arrived at two in the afternoon. Watching from the windows it was easy to identify the dark green scarab crawling towards the sharp turn at the end of our lane. It was moving
so slowly I had time to walk out and meet him while he was still halfway round the turn. On arriving a couple of hours earlier I had discovered a hole about a metre in diameter in the middle of the lane, where the rock and rubble foundations had partially collapsed. I had called Reidar the builder and he’d promised to get it fixed as soon as possible. In the meantime, though, a lorry that size might easily collapse the whole track and leave it with its front wheels headed for Australia. It would also leave us a problem of access.

  As a hazard warning to the driver I had wedged an old ski pole into the hole, but I wanted to alert him in person too. Making my way along our drive to the main track I stood by the side of the road and held up both hands in a hang-on-a-moment gesture. Through the window I could see he was making a call on his mobile. He was wearing a cowboy hat. He braked and brought down the passenger-side window… by day I make the cars, by night I make the bars… I could hear the sounds of Bobby Bare’s old country hit ‘Detroit City’ drifting down from the cab.

  I stepped up onto the footplate:

  ‘Hei. Det er et stort hul midt i veien. Tror ikke det går an å kjøre her.’ (‘There’s a big hole in the middle of the track. I don’t think your lorry would make it.’)

  He nodded, the window glided back up. Even before it had reached the top I saw his hand go up to his ear and he was on the phone again. He released the handbrake and crawled on up the hill, disappearing round the bend by the Fjellstue.

  About half an hour later he was back. I was reading Melville’s short story ‘Bartleby the Scrivener’, in an old Dover Books edition I had taken with me from Oslo. Ever since the title had popped into my head on the walk I had been wondering if Bartleby’s enigmatic refusal to do anything at all really was an appropriate reference point for the mood that had overcome me as I made my way through Slettedalen.

  I put the book down. Stepping to the window I saw a forklift truck come bouncing along the track towards the house with a load of bulging sacks made of grey netting balanced on its extended prongs. Our levende tak. The driver was wearing a grey cowboy hat, with shoulder-length brown hair and a full beard. There is a wide city–country cultural divide in Norway, and it has always seemed to me that this particular look is part of the country-dweller’s rejection of urban fashions, whether conscious or unconscious I’ve never been quite sure. Taste in music out in what the Norwegians call distriktene – which basically means everywhere apart from Oslo – reflects the look. The musical heroes are American stars of the post-Hank Williams golden age, singers like Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings and the other ‘Highwaymen’. But there is also a rich subculture in which native performers like Bjøro Håland, Ottar ‘Big Hand’ Johansen and Claudia Scott are among the better-known names, although their record sales are largely over the counters of rural petrol stations. I can still recall my surprise on discovering the existence of this Norwegian version of American country-and-western culture, complete with singers who dressed the part in big hats and checked shirts, but sang in Norwegian. It seemed dream-like, but the more I learned about the close ties that link Norway and the United States following the huge Norwegian emigration to America towards the end of the nineteenth century, the less strange it seemed.

  For the next hour I listened, and occasionally watched, as the roofer – his name was Lars – went about his business of laying the turf roof. Technical advances had made the task of laying the levende tak rather easier than it would have been in days gone by. Starting at the ridge, over which he carefully draped the plump, pillow-sized sacks of turf, he worked his way down the roof, fitting the sacks neatly together until the whole of the black plastic underlay was covered. When he was done I invited him in and we sat on the sofa and drank coffee.

  ‘You live locally?’

  ‘Did do,’ he said. ‘Not for much longer.’

  ‘On the move, eh?’

  He nodded.

  He leaned forward and touched a book that was lying on the coffee table next to the Melville, reading the title out loud: ‘Leif Ryvarden. Hardangervidda: Naturen, Opplevelsene, Historien. (Hardangervidda: Nature, Experiences, History.) I haven’t seen this one.’

  He picked it up and began flipping through the pages.

  ‘Looks alright,’ he said. ‘Mind you, there’s so many of them.’

  He stopped leafing through the pages and rested the tip of his index finger on a black and white photograph that showed a group of men leading kløvhester, or packhorses, across a mountainous landscape. The group had stopped and appeared to be posing informally for the camera.

  ‘I used to do this,’ he said. ‘Before the roofing. My wife and I had a stables down in Veggli. We used to take tourists out on horseback along the old slep and the kløvhest trails. Stay out a few nights. Sleep out. It was a wonderful time. We had six horses.’

  ‘Why did you stop?’

  He shrugged. ‘Not enough money in it. Well, enough. But not enough, if you know what I mean.’

  ‘So then you started doing the turf-roofing?’

  ‘Well, I always had it as a part-time job. A fall-back.’

  He peered down at the photograph and read the caption out loud: ‘Driftene over vidda hadde til tider stort omfang med titalls hester og kløvkarer, som her ved Langedalen nær Hårteigen i 1919.’ (‘At times activity on the vidda could be extensive, involving dozens of men and horses, as here at Langedalen near Hårteigen in 1919.’)

  It was one of A. B. Wilse’s pictures. I knew about Wilse from research I had done for Knut Hamsun’s biography into the years Hamsun spent in America as an immigrant. Wilse was the great early photographic chronicler of Norwegian life. He left home at thirteen, emigrated to America in 1885, bought his first camera the following year and by the time he returned to Norway in 1900 was a master photographer. There’s hardly an aspect of contemporary Norwegian life that he didn’t document with his camera in a career that spanned over fifty years and produced over two hundred thousand photographs. In his way he was as important a part of Norwegian nation-building as writers such as Henrik Ibsen and Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson, the folk-tale collectors Asbjørnsen and Moe, and painters such as J. C. Dahl, Thomas Fearnley and Nikolai Astrup. It was no surprise to me that Wilse had been up on the Hardangervidda too with his camera.

  ‘See this man here?’ Lars said suddenly.

  I stood up and leaned over his shoulder.

  The figure his finger was resting on was a portly, middle-aged man on the left of the picture. He looked as if he had a black moustache but it was hard to be sure. Like the rest of the party the man was dressed in what looked like the normal, everyday clothing of the period: homburg hat and dark suit. No state-of-the-art waterproof fabrics or woollen beanies here. Part of a large bag slung over his shoulder was visible by his left thigh. He carried a stick in his right hand.

  ‘What about him?’

  I thought he was going to tell me it was his grandfather or something like that. Instead he said:

  ‘Would a man like that tell his troubles to another man? What do you think?’

  Activity on the vidda. Men and horses at Langedalen near Hårteigen, photographed by A. B. Wilse, 1919.

  ‘What do you mean? What kind of troubles?’

  ‘Any kind of troubles. Something he had on his mind, that was bothering him.’

  ‘This man here, in the hat?’

  ‘Yes.’ He turned from the book and looked up at me expectantly.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I answered. ‘You can’t tell just by looking at a photograph of someone what they’re like. Maybe he’d tell his troubles to his brother. Or his best friend.’

  ‘No,’ he said, a slight note of exasperation in his voice. ‘I don’t mean him specifically. I mean, would a man like that, like him, tell his troubles. To these other men, for example. When they stopped for the night.’

  I shrugged. I really couldn’t see what he was getting at.

  ‘Maybe,’ I said. ‘Maybe not.’

  He closed the book and put it back
down on the table.

  ‘What I mean is, people were different in those days, don’t you think? Husbands were different. Wives were different. A man knew how to be a man. A woman knew how to be a woman. Nobody had to tell them how to do it. But now nobody seems to know any more.’

  He fell silent for a few moments. Then he tipped the brim of his hat upwards and looked at me again.

  ‘What about you?’ he said. ‘Do you tell other men your troubles? Or do you think that’s weak?’

  ‘I tell my wife my troubles.’

  ‘No, other men. Do you talk about your troubles with other men?’

  I recalled having a similar conversation with an Englishman in a bar in central Oslo a few years ago. He was a jazz musician, an expatriate like myself, but younger by some years. Married to a Norwegian, which is almost always the reason the English will give when you ask what brought them here, he played the saxophone and had a day job teaching at the Music College. He had a very complicated private life. On that particular evening, after a few beers, he had started talking about some of the problems he was having at home. He’d met someone else, and now he was wondering whether he should leave his wife and two young children, or wait it out and see what happened. I didn’t know the situation nearly well enough to feel comfortable talking about it with him and shut him up rather bluntly by saying a person shouldn’t talk about their troubles, that a trouble shared is a trouble doubled. He gave a spluttering laugh into his beer and changed the subject. He’d just been reading Straight Life, the autobiography of the tenor saxophonist Art Pepper – Pepper’s life sounded at least three times as troubled as his own – and started talking about this instead.