The Cabin in the Mountains

by Robert Ferguson

  After breakfast I decided to let the fire go out and drive down to the café in Veggli for my morning coffee. As recently as the 1960s, Veggli was still a remote village on a country road with a petrol station on one side and a kro or bed-and-breakfast on the other. I had finally managed to track down the Rollag Bygdebok at the National Library and spent an hour scanning the pages pertaining to Veggli and the central section of the Numedal valley. The cabin-building boom of the past twenty years was showing no signs of abating and the heart of the village was now the recently extended shopping mall opposite the old kro.

  At the northern end of Numedal is the small town of Geilo, where my wife’s family had rented a cabin every winter in the 1960s. One day in the spring, we drove the hundred kilometres up the Fv 40 to see how the place had changed since Nina’s childhood days there. Geilo has developed into one of the country’s major centres for winter sports, with slalom slopes and cross-country skiing tracks extending in all directions. Dr Holst’s Sanatorium, the magnificent white castle-like walls of which used to dominate the town, was now hidden behind a series of commercial terraces. Every other shop sold winter sports clothing and equipment. This boom is the most obvious manifestation of Norway’s post-oil affluence, these endless racks of brightly coloured anoraks made of the latest lightweight, windproof fabrics. We left after an hour, vowing not to return. With the overdevelopment of Geilo, pressure on space means that Norwegians are now quite happy to buy an apartment in one of the new blocks that have been built in or near the town rather than build or buy a cabin further out. The overcrowding of Geilo and its environs has opened up opportunities for landowners further down the valley. While places like Veggli and Blefjell couldn’t offer the downhill facilities of Geilo, their height above sea level meant they could guarantee snow, and that is enough for most winter-sports-mad Norwegians.

  As a result, Veggli had changed and expanded dramatically, attracting buyers interested in cabins not just from Oslo but from other regional population centres like Tønsberg and Kongsberg. The cost is the loss of privacy and remoteness traditionally associated with the cabin in the mountains. As of 2019, about 80 per cent of the cabins built in the Østfold, Oslo and Vestfold regions in the last two years have less than seventy-five metres separating them from their nearest neighbours. In the spacious and remote north of the country only 15–20 per cent of new cabins are built in these concentrated groupings.

  A giant troll at the Coop in Veggli.

  The local Coop in Veggli was one of the largest supermarkets I have ever shopped in. Over the last ten years its turnover must have increased several hundred per cent. During particularly busy periods like Christmas, Easter and the vinterferie (corresponding to the English half-term holidays) it can even be hard to find a parking space. On this particular Friday morning, however, it was still pleasantly deserted as I drove past the giant, blue-trousered troll who welcomes shoppers from his sentry-post beside the road, turned in and parked.*

  The Coop took up most of the ground floor of the new, extended shopping mall. It now also boasted an ‘interior’ shop selling small items of furniture, ornaments, candles and such-like, as well as a coffee bar. I bought an Aftenposten from the supermarket and spent a few moments puzzling over the alien terminology of the coffee menu before deciding on an ‘Americano’. Norwegians drink a lot of coffee. They have embraced the new ‘barista’ culture wholeheartedly, without wholly abandoning their fondness for the more traditional and – to me – scarcely drinkable kokekaffe, in which coarsely ground coffee is brought to the boil in a pan, removed and left to brew for a few minutes before drinking; and the slightly more civilised filterkaffe, coffee powder in a conical paper filter through which water drips from a percolator into a glass jug. Every time a shop closes down in Norway, be it a shoe shop, an estate agent’s or a hairdresser’s, the odds are that it will reopen as a coffee shop. Norwegians do drink tea, but it’s a minority taste. And you will often find that the tea you are offered in a coffee bar or restaurant is not tea at all but instead a choice of finely packaged herbal or fruit drinks. Ask if they have any proper tea and they might offer a lemon-yellow packet of Earl Grey, and be surprised when you explain that what you want is a cup of tea you can put milk in.

  I took my coffee and newspaper and settled in a bench seat by the window looking out onto the almost deserted car park. The café was on the ground floor, which in Norwegian is very logically referred to as the første etasje (first floor). This is a crucial difference and a fruitful source of misunderstandings for English visitors. An even richer source is the difference between ‘half-ten’ in English and ‘halv-ti’ (half-ten) in Norwegian. You may think, when your Norwegian friend suggests that you meet at halv-ti, that she’ll be there at ten-thirty. She won’t. She’ll have been there at nine-thirty, waited a quarter of an hour and then given up and gone. The reference is always to the next hour.

  At the table in front of me a middle-aged delivery-van driver, pot-bellied in a grubby orange boiler suit, was talking to two young checkout girls from the supermarket on a break. They were talking about ‘Lothepus’, a reality TV star in the news lately because he had just revealed to the press that he had recently recovered from throat cancer.

  Before starting on the newspaper I turned on my phone to check my emails. A real one arrived as I was busily deleting the threats from PayPal scammers and ‘the Microsoft team’. It was from the builders, formally notifying us that the plot of land adjacent to ours had been sold. If we had any objections these should be addressed to the appropriate authorities within the appropriate time span.

  So we would be getting neighbours.

  The new cabin would be sited in front of us, but slightly to the left, and so far below us that, in terms of view, we would lose only a rather uninteresting pine-clad hillside in the south-east. From the start we had been reminding ourselves regularly that this day would come, and that the privacy we had enjoyed during the first three months of occupation could not last, so the disappointment was not too great, nor the news a real surprise. Like our own cabin, the new place would have an open and unimpeded view across the valley to the Blefjell peaks in the distance, unimpeded because both cabins were at the eastern limit of the permitted development. As I closed the mail programme I felt a sense of relief. We had told ourselves repeatedly that the longer the plot remained unsold and undeveloped, the more difficult it would be to adjust to the cabin’s ‘new’ reality. The quick sale meant that within a few weeks the experience of our mountain cabin would be a settled and realistic version of the dream. There would be marginally less privacy, but Nina and I had already talked about the need to extend the terrace around the cabin and have some kind of fence put up.

  I put the phone away in my inside jacket pocket and spread the newspaper out next to my coffee. Aftenposten is a national institution in Norway. It was the last of the mainstream broadsheets to go tabloid, and for some time afterwards had retained its historical conservatism. Inevitably, however, the paper has moved with the times, a fact of which I was reminded on page 12, when my eye fell on a story headlined ‘Forsker fant korthåret og glattbarbert Jesus i ørkenen’ (‘Scholar found short-haired and clean-shaven Jesus in desert’). The story recounted the discovery of a sixth-century mural in the ruins of Shivta, in Israel’s Negev Desert, which the researcher advertised as ‘the oldest known mural depicting Jesus in the Holy Land’. Whether Jesus had a beard or whether he wore his hair long or not were matters of no consequence to me. The catalyst of my dismay was a Fakta (‘Fact’) box that broke up the central text of the article. The box held four bullet-point sentences. The first read ‘Jesus fra Nasaret eller Jesus Kristus var en jødisk forkynner og religiøs leder’ (‘Jesus of Nazareth or Jesus Christ was a Jewish preacher and religious leader’). The second added the information that ‘han er den sentrale skikkelsen i kristendommen’ (‘He is the central figure in Christianity’). Even before reaching the third I had turned the page, frantically searching for the footb
all section and news of whether Stabæk were any closer to escaping automatic relegation. But I was too late. Already I found myself floundering in a familiar despair. Was it really possible, I asked myself, that there was an adult Norwegian reading this story who needed to be told in this Wikipedia fashion that Jesus of Nazareth was a Jewish preacher and religious leader? The thought was almost unbearably dispiriting. Or was there some hopelessly misguided egalitarian instinct at play here? Another possibility: was the dogged dullness of the biographical note in its way a typically ‘safe’ and conventional piece of politically correct provocation of the kind that characterises so much of the culture of Norwegian public debate? Within certain strictly defined limits, an ability to provoke strongly, and a capacity to be strongly provoked, are regarded as intrinsically laudable social qualities to possess. Some years ago the mass-market daily Dagbladet ran a series of interviews that always concluded with the celebrities answering the same short series of questions. Among these was Når ble du siste provoserte? (‘When was the last time you were provoked?’). I waited in vain for someone to answer that it was so long ago they couldn’t even remember.

  As I closed the Aftenposten and pushed it to one side, I reflected that I should have bought Klassekampen (‘The Class War’), the newspaper of the far left in Norway and nominally the polar opposite of Aftenposten in its editorial stance. I rarely agreed with the Marxist spin the journalists put on their stories, but they had the supreme virtue of treating their readers as adults. I drank up the rest of my Americano – just ordinary black coffee in a slightly bigger cup – and slid out from the table, leaving the Aftenposten behind. From a farewell glance at the back page I learned that an eclipse of the moon was due that evening. It was probably the only piece of unspun news in the whole paper and brought me an unaccountable feeling of relief. I made a firm resolution not to miss it.

  *

  Some train of association from the story about the mural depicting Jesus led me, as I left the café and headed for the car, to think about another religiously themed story that had been preoccupying the Norwegian newspapers recently. Norway had been governed by a coalition of right-wing and centre-right parties under Erna Solberg, leader of Høyre (the Conservatives) since the election in 2017, but without an absolute majority in the Storting (House of Commons). This left the Kristelig Folkeparti (the Christian Democrats), one of the smaller parties, in so-called vippeposisjon, meaning that it could overturn the government should it choose to vote with the Opposition Arbeiderpartiet (Labour Party). In 2018, for the first time since the formation of the Christian Democrats in 1933, its leader, Knut Arild Hareide, had proposed a change of direction, from its traditional alignment as a borgelig (‘bourgeois’) party to a new and unprecedented political alliance with the Labour Party. Hareide’s proposal was founded on an unwillingness to persist in an alliance that included Fremskrittspartiet (the Progress Party). The Progress Party had attracted many of Norway’s working-class voters away from what had become, increasingly since the 1980s, a Labour Party led by middle-class personalities. The Labour leader, Jonas Gahr Støre, was himself the wealthy son of a shipbroker.

  Hareide’s difficulty with the traditional alliance was that he found the values of the Progress Party, notably its sceptical attitude towards mass immigration, incompatible with his Christian beliefs. He had come to believe he could take the Christian Democrats with him, and he had gone public with his suggested change of direction. It was political dynamite, and had to be discussed before the party could make this historic change of direction. After weeks of intensive campaigning for and against, at the annual party conference Hareide’s proposed new direction was rejected by the narrowest of margins. The Christian Democrats were then formally invited to begin negotiations with a view to joining the sitting government.

  It emerged that the party’s deputy leader, Kjell Ingolf Ropstad, who was not in favour of Hareide’s realignment proposal, had already had confidential discussions with Erna Solberg from which he had felt able to take back to the faithful the prospect of minor changes to the abortion law should they agree to be part of Solberg’s government. As one would expect, a belief in the need for reform of Norway’s liberal abortion laws has long been one of the party’s central tenets, and Solberg’s offer had been enough to decide the vote, by the narrowest of margins. Hareide had staked his political future on taking the party with him into the unprecedented alliance, and promised to resign once discussions about which ministerial post or posts the Christian Democrats could take up had been concluded.

  Turning left out of the car park onto the Fv 40 I debated briefly with myself whether or not to drive the thirty kilometres further up the valley to the town of Rødberg. The nearest ‘pol’ or vinmonopol (‘state-run off-licence’) is there, the only place in the area where you can buy wine and spirits (supermarkets like the Coop are not allowed by law to sell anything stronger than beer). Recalling the impending eclipse of the moon, it occurred to me it might be a good idea to take a half-bottle of Gammel Opland akevitt onto the vidda with me, in case a Li Po mood overtook me after the eclipse was over and, like that hard-drinking Taoist poet of the eighth century, I felt like drinking by moonlight.

  Aquavit is Norway’s national spirit. It’s distilled from a potato base and acquires its characteristic flavour from the caraway seeds introduced into the process. There are a number of competing brands on the market, but for many years I had been loyal to Gammel Opland, a rich, dark drink, ideal as a chaser with a glass of ice-cold Frydenlund’s beer. Recently my brother-in-law had introduced me to Fjellvitt, a brand produced locally in Numedal, which I had enjoyed enough to want to try it again. I was curious to see the pol at Røldal, since it was reputedly the smallest in Norway, but at the last moment I remembered I was trying to cut down on my drinking and so took another left at the roundabout and began the fifteen-minute drive back up the mountain to the cabin.

  On the drive back up, still thinking about the Christian Democrats and their diminishing influence on Norwegian society over the eighty years of the party’s existence, I found myself pondering the party’s origins; why had Norwegian Christians felt the need to express their values in this secular form back in the 1930s? On the surface of things, weren’t the values of socialism so similar to those of Christianity as to make such a party redundant from the outset? It seemed illogical, until you realised that it was precisely the increasingly secular nature of public and political life in Norway in the 1930s that was the problem, with both Communist and Labour Parties adopting attitudes of unrelenting hostility towards Christianity. One of the most urgent catalysts for the formation of the Christian Democrats in 1933 was the trial, in the same year, of Arnulf Øverland, on a charge of blasphemy. Øverland was one of Norway’s most famous poets and a passionate proselytiser of his communist beliefs. On 21 January of that year he delivered a series of three lectures to the Oslo Students Union that were subsequently published as Tre foredrag til offentlig forargelse (‘Three lectures intended to outrage public sensibilities’). The lectures were a sustained attack on all branches of Christianity, Norwegian Protestantism as well as the much rarer Norwegian Catholicism. The rite of Holy Communion, so important to Roman Catholics, was dismissed by Øverland as ‘cannibalistic hokum’, a typically scurrilous jibe. The blasphemy laws had not been invoked in Norway since a successful prosecution in 1912, and when Øverland was summoned to appear in court and face charges over the three lectures, the case attracted considerable attention. Øverland was found Not Guilty, although only by the narrowest of margins; six of the ten jurors voted for a conviction, the required number was seven. Øverland was free to go, but his acquittal was seen as a sign of the times and hastened the formation of the Christian Democrats as a political party dedicated to defending and promoting the values of Christianity in an increasingly secular age. The blasphemy law became a ‘sleeping paragraph’, until it was finally repealed in 2015.

  The party’s opposition to abortion is probably now
the only arena in which it is seriously out of step with the secular majority. As I progressed up the side of the valley, I reflected on what an extraordinarily emotive issue this remains. No sooner had the Christian Democrats made their decision to join Solberg’s government in exchange for a promise of two reforms to the existing abortion laws than large and well-supported demonstrations against the proposals were held in towns and cities across the country. The reforms involved removing a paragraph that allowed one of a pair of twins to be aborted, and amendments to a paragraph permitting abortion after twelve weeks in cases where the foetus is diagnosed as suffering from a serious illness or disability. The Christian Democrats argued that these provisions served the needs of what they termed a sorteringssamfunn, a society that is actively engaged in a process of birth-selection. Of the nearly 13,000 abortions carried out in 2017, 287 women had invoked this option. In sixty cases the reason given was Down’s syndrome. Other cases involved a club foot or a cleft lip. Between 2016 and 2018, thirteen abortions were carried out on one of two otherwise healthy twins.

  Alongside the abortion law reforms the Christian Democrats requested as the price of their support for the Solberg government, the press also reported that once the party was officially in government it would be pressing for a reduction in the amount of wine and spirits returning travellers were allowed to bring into the country. For public health reasons – in earlier times couched in the language of religious disapproval, later as a socialist measure to improve productivity at work, and finally because successive governments have become dependent on the money it brings in – alcohol is taxed at an exorbitant rate in Norway, whether bought at the vinmonopol for consumption at home, or in bars and restaurants. One result of this is that buying alcohol at airports is a very big business indeed, and the size of the traveller’s quota a matter of life and death importance. No matter how late the plane touches down, Norwegians will make a ritual detour through the duty-free shop to load up a trolley with the full quota of wine and spirits to take home. So it was hardly a surprise when the Christian Democrats’ proposal to reduce this was greeted with a howl of outrage that almost, if not quite, equalled the response to the proposed changes in the abortion law.