The Cabin in the Mountains

by Robert Ferguson

  In a gap in the crowd I catch a glimpse of one of the young Roma men with a broom in his hand, busily sweeping up the cigarette butts that litter the pavement outside the little tobacconists on the corner. He must have come to some arrangement with the proprietor. I often buy my scratch cards there and I know that the shop is owned by a man named Bjørn Sand, who is now in his eighties. In his prime he was one of Norway’s best-known and most popular comedians. Using the format of the radio phone-in, he created a figure called ‘Stutum’, an articulate and opinionated reactionary hostile to every new development in Norwegian public life and discourse, from feminism to Pakistani immigration to the environmental movement.

  For some twenty years this wickedly well-caught caricature delighted Norwegians, most of whom recognised the satirical thrust behind the act. By the 1990s, however, Sand was alarmed to discover that his Stutum had become a hero in some quarters to people who felt that at last they had been given a voice, and he retired the character forthwith. Clips of the act can still be seen on YouTube, but the Oslo public libraries hold no copies of his one and only CD, a 1995 collection entitled Stutums verste (‘The Worst of Stutum’).

  Thanks largely to the impact and influence of Henrik Ibsen and Edvard Munch at the end of the nineteenth century, Norway has acquired an enduring cultural reputation as official purveyor of melancholy to the rest of Europe. But the country has also had its share of great comedians, from the George Formby-like goofiness of Leif Juster to the avuncular bluster of Rolv Wesenlund. Comedians like Harald Heide-Steen, Grethe Kausland, Øivind Blunck, Hege Schøyen and the Dizzie Tunes group all made their names on the stages of such theatre-cum-nightclubs as the Chat Noir on Klingenberggata, in central Oslo, a venue that for decades nurtured a peculiarly Norwegian form of the theatrical entertainment known as the ‘review’. The rise of the cheeky, anti-establishment young stand-up comedian marked a break with this tradition, although recent developments seem to suggest a peculiar grafting of traditional Norwegian seriousness on to the comedy. Some of the best-known of the current crop of Norwegian stand-ups now offer their audience confessional acts that come close to the ‘misery-memoirs’ familiar from the world of book publishing: Rune Andersen, Bjarte Tjøstheim and Else Kåss Furuseth have all recently put on shows of an overtly therapeutic nature built around apparently un-comedic themes such as childhood with an abusive father, angst and suicide.

  It may be that the pervasive influence of Ibsen and Munch explains the absence from Norwegian literary history of a single humorous novelist of note. Mark Twain was one of Knut Hamsun’s crucial influences and there’s a strong touch of Twain in Hamsun’s late trilogy featuring the wanderer August; but beyond that there’s never been any writer with a body of work comparable to a P. G. Wodehouse or even a Tom Sharpe. And with the historical exception of the Enlightenment writer Ludvig Holberg, whom the Danes like to claim as their own, and the now largely forgotten Helge Krog, there has never been a Norwegian playwright writing in the same vein as an Oscar Wilde, a Noel Coward, a Tom Stoppard or an Alan Ayckbourn.

  Glancing down Bogstadveien I saw a violently orange, fan-shaped cloud occupying the sky at the far end of the road. It seemed to rise up from behind Ekeberg, the hill to the south of Oslo where Edvard Munch had the vision that led him to paint Scream. Looking up I saw in the awning lights that snow was falling, the flakes so well-spaced, their descent so slow and sedate, you could have almost counted them as you walked around between them. Looking straight ahead into the street, however, I saw nothing. It was strange, disturbed weather. Time to head home.

  But as I bent down and picked up the Clas Ohlson bag with the tarpaulin and the twine, the snappy tones of Miles Davis’s Milestones came tripping out of the café’s street-speakers and I put the bag down again to listen. Just then the Baker Hansen delivery van pulled into the delivery bay outside the wool shop next door to the café. I watched the driver jump out and walk round to the kerbside of the van, open a metal flap on the side and pull a lever that released the lock on the back doors. He opened the doors wide, pulled out a little metal ramp, walked past me and placed it up against the step in the shop doorway. Then he walked back to the van, unhooked a remote control on a coiled cable and pressed a button on it. He watched intently as the tailgate slowly slid down to ground level, stepped onto it, hoisted himself up and stepped inside the van. At once he set about releasing the Acrow props that prevented the towers of food cages from rolling around the floor of the van, wheeling one tower out of the way so that he could get at another, shunting them about with an inspired and practised efficiency. Next he unhooked a box-cart from the side wall of the van. Slipping its long metal tongue in under one tower, he tilted back on the handles, wheeled the cages to the tailgate and pressed the button on the remote control. The moment the tailgate brushed the ground he trundled the load of pastries, cakes and bread past me, up the ramp and into the shop.

  It was a pleasure to watch a man so good at his job and I was tempted to stick around for his second run, and even wait for the conclusion of the whole delivery. I had seen him go through his routine many times before and was always curious about how it would end. I knew that the turning circle of his van would in principle allow him to turn and join traffic heading the other way, up into Bogstadveien. But if the queue of cars at the lights in Slemdalsveien was more than three or four vehicles then his luck was out and he would have to slip into the traffic stream going his way and take the first right into Harald Hårfagres gate. This was a much quieter road with an especially wide turning circle in front of the big wooden doors to the tram museum. A couple of minutes later I would see him heading past on the other side of the road.

  But Milestones came to end just about then and I knew I had run out of excuses for not starting work. I picked up the Clas Ohlson bag and headed towards Harald Hårfagres gate. Passing the newsagents I glanced at the headlines on the pavement display rack. Dagbladet and VG both had front pages about the trouble the coalition government was having with the demands of the Christian People’s Party for a change in the abortion laws as the price of their support.

  I passed under the arched gate that leads into my block. Simen was on the central grass enclosure, playing with Aina, his Yorkshire terrier. He was holding a red, long-handled plastic tennis-ball thrower in his hand. Raising the cup and twirling it a couple of times around his head, he sent the bright yellow ball spinning up into the air. We watched as Aina scampered off round the privet hedge in search of it.

  I enjoyed Simen’s company. He was about half my age, and in spite of the fact that he had grown up in what seemed to have been some sort of Scandinavian post-family commune – or possibly because of that – he showed a vestigial respect for the elderly. Simen was the only person from whom I would accept man-hugs instead of a handshake. He was free and fluid and unpredictable in his opinions, and confounded most of my ancient prejudices about what an accountant should be like. He was an anarchist, he told me, and from his learned references to Kropotkin and Proudhon I knew he was serious about it. I asked if he had heard of Stuart Christie, the Scottish anarchist who served jail time in Spain for plotting to kill General Franco, and to my great surprise he told me that not only had he heard of Christie but that a friend of his, a fellow anarchist, was writing a book and that Stuart Christie was giving him editorial advice by email.

  As Aina returned and dropped the tennis ball proudly at his feet, I suggested I go upstairs to my flat and get Alex and that we take our dogs for a walk along Hammerstads gate to Tørteberg. This is a large open green space that occupies the space between Slemdalsveien and the science department buildings of Oslo University. It’s where the juniors from Frigg, a lower-tier Oslo football team, train. We could let the dogs run free there in the autumn and winter, when the båndtvang (leash-law) was not in force.

  We crossed Gydas vei and the passage between the musical academy and the premises of STAMI, and by the time we got to Tørteberg the slight, misty snowfall had turned in
to drizzle. A gaggle of twelve toddlers in bright orange vests were being shepherded diagonally across the grass towards the nursery school at the far end by three young men. Well away from them, a middle-aged man was standing beside a pole fixed in the ground. It had what looked like a bag or basket mounted on top of it. At the man’s feet lay a pile of brightly coloured plastic discs, and he was mechanically bending down, picking the discs up and throwing them as far as he could across the field, where another, similar pole had been planted. Once he was through the pile he trudged over to the other side, gathered the discs up, and started throwing them back in the direction of the first pole.

  I’d seen him doing this before and stopped to talk to him about it. He told me he was practising Frisbee golf. It was a sport I had never heard of before. The ‘golf’ part of it involved getting the Frisbees into the container on the top of the pole. In fluent but heavily accented Norwegian he told me he was originally from Spain, and that he had been responsible for bringing the sport to Norway. Quite naturally, he had also been captain of Norway’s first national Frisbee golf team and was now the manager.

  For about fifteen minutes Simen and I chatted and watched as Aina and Alex chased around after each other, and after these brightly coloured Frisbees. We spoke of cabins. He and his Swedish wife, Helene, had recently taken possession of a cabin in the Romsdal valley. Helene had just passed her driving test at the third time of asking, he told me. It was good news. Travelling would be a whole lot easier now for them and their three young children, August, Juni and Oda. Simen himself didn’t hold a driving licence, and had no interest in getting one. His phone pinged and he took it out and read the text message. I’d noticed before that he didn’t use a smartphone but one of those old-fashioned flip-open phones. He texted a reply, called Aina to heel and said it was time for him to get back to work. His mother had a flat nearby in Hammerstads gate and he had the use of a room there as his office.

  On the walk back I asked him about his record – was it out yet? He’d made a CD of songs for children, which he’d written himself and recorded in a studio on St Hanshaugen, accompanying himself on guitar with a few musician friends helping him out. He’d once been in a punk band. He told me they’d even played a gig up in Veggli, at Veggli vertshus, the little wayside kro opposite the petrol station, just before you turn off to drive up to our place. People tell me that if you flipped Norway over a hundred and eighty degrees on the map it would reach all the way down to Rome, but when Simen told me that his band had played at Veggli I thought, for about the thousandth time, what a wonderfully small country this really is.

  No, he said, the record still wasn’t finished. He never seemed to have the time…

  Back home, after the obligatory five minutes of ferocious play with the dog, kicking a special bite-proof, cloth-coated balloon I had bought from the local pet shop around the flat, I stopped, totally exhausted. Alex muttered a few mysterious schnauzerian oaths, then stepped inside the round grey dog’s bed at the end of the sofa, lay down and immediately fell asleep.

  I stood panting, hands on hips, looking out the window and waiting to get my breath back. Above the white stone turrets of the tram museum on the other side of the road I could just see the station forecourt in Majorstuen. Willy the Jesus Singer, briefly neither singing nor raising his arms to the sky in praise of God, the guitar hanging loose around his neck, wearing as always the same frayed, pale blue denim cap, was talking to the Klassekampen vendor. The mood looked warm and friendly. Both men laughed frequently. Both wore faded red anoraks. From that distance it was hard to be sure, but it seemed to me, as they parted company, that they handed each other a gift. Willy gave Klassekampen a Bible tract, and Klassekampen gave Willy a free copy of the newspaper. I knew that Willy would now return to the kitchen of his little flat nearby to prepare matpakker (‘packets of sandwiches’) with the help of his wife, Randi. He’d pack them up on his blue Jesus trolley and then wheel it down to the lower end of Karl Johans gate and the area around Oslo central station to hand them out to the rough sleepers and junkies who sit or lie on the pavement behind handwritten notices asking for help. Turning from the window I wandered into the kitchen to put the kettle on and thought how that simple scene, had you witnessed it, might have explained a great many things about Norwegian society that had been puzzling you.

  11

  12 October 2018

  We arrange for a terrace to be built – architecture of a mountain cabin – Kåre the carpenter – on the Norwegian lusekofte (‘louse jacket’) – the NOKAS robbery – puzzling Americanisms in British English – Norwegian fans of English football – the plan to hang the cupboard on the wall – on the English lakselords (‘salmon lords’) – history of Anglophilia in Norway – clearing a salmon river – the Fjordmog Club – nostalgia – in the footsteps of the lakselords – a musical entertainment – on Lady Arbuthnott – Knut Hamsun, an Anglophobic Norwegian – hanging the cupboard on the wall

  The news that the plot next to ours had now been sold reminded us that it was time to get moving with our plan to extend the terrace around the cabin and have the cabin property fenced before the winter arrived. Privacy was one reason, but sheep had always been our main concern. The local farmers’ rights to graze sheep on the mountainside during the summer months remained unaffected by the decision to develop the land for cabins. It meant that almost from the moment you passed through the barrier halfway up the mountain you had to keep a sharp lookout to avoid sheep resting or sleeping in the middle of the road. Arriving at your cabin in the summer and autumn, you would often find sheep relaxing on your wooden terrace. Their droppings and urine penetrated the wood and once the smell was established it was impossible to get rid of it. Weeks could pass between visits to the cabin so finding a way of dealing with this was one of the first problems cabin-owners had to deal with.

  The terrace of the Fjellstul 2 ran along the front of the house and extended outwards for about a metre and a half, just beyond the three pillars that link the house to the traditional architecture of the region. The most popular alternative design is the so-called Numedal cabin. There’s nothing particularly cabin-like about it. It’s about the same size as the Fjellstul model but it looks more like what it is, a second home that happens to be in the mountains, without any attempt to suggest a link with the regional past. The Numedal design doesn’t use the heavy timber of the Fjellstul cabin. It’s all wood-panelling and a rough-edged planking called vildmarkspanel.

  There are a lot of improvisational possibilities within the two basic designs – a storage extension can be incorporated into the main body of the cabin itself; changes can be made to the height of the windows; there is an option for extra windows that most people take up in order to maximise the wonderful views – but you soon notice that the styles tend to occur in similar groups, creating Numedal and Fjellstul neighbourhoods. It’s as though as buyers we have unconsciously been attracted to the visual symmetry this creates.

  Both designs featured the same short, aproned terrace at the front and both faced the same problem with sheep. For most of the summer we had dealt with it by fastening twine in parallel strips between the pillars and anchoring it to hooks at the sides of the cabin each time we left. It was effective enough, but it didn’t look good, and it was a fiddly job taking this improvised fence down when we came back. The small wooden platform-steps outside the main entrance and in front of the shed were easier to protect from the sheep by simply placing seven or eight medium-sized rocks spaced across them. But that wasn’t a long-term solution either.

  Our plan was to extend the existing terrace to something like three times its original size, and surround it with a stepped fence, high at the front, where it would obscure the view of the neighbours’ parked cars, and lower along the valley side so that the view would remain unobstructed. Enjoying this view one morning with a cup of coffee I noticed something that had escaped my attention previously, that from the rear corner of the cabin there was a superb view
of an otherwise hidden pyramid-like peak holding up the sky at a point just east of the pine knoll. It was not especially high, and to this day I don’t know if it even has a name, but the mere sight of it was pleasurable, and the prospect of being able to look at it while eating breakfast on a sunny summer morning irresistible. As soon as I pointed this out to Nina, she agreed that the terrace should extend all the way down to the end of the cabin on the valley side.

  We decided to get started straight away. Nina posted a message on the community Facebook page that evening asking if anyone could recommend a good carpenter in the area. Kåre’s wife posted a reply the same day saying she couldn’t recommend her husband highly enough. She added a link to his website. We followed it, read the few testimonials it contained and decided that this was our man. I gave him a call and he said he would drive up in the morning to take a look at the job.

  About three in the afternoon the next day Kåre’s maroon Subaru pickup turned up the lane and headed towards the cabin. I stepped outside to greet him. He was a tall, white-haired man who looked to be in his late fifties.

  A traditional knitted cardigan or lusekofte (‘louse jacket’).

  The afternoon was bright and cold, and before showing Kåre the job we had in mind I went back inside and shrugged on a lusekofte (‘louse jacket’) for warmth. This is a traditional knitted woollen cardigan, usually in black, with a pattern of small white markings across it that supposedly resemble the lice that give it its name. Originally a garment worn by people in rural districts, the lusekofte retains a central status in Norwegian public life. It is often worn by politicians anxious to stress their commitment to social democracy, the country’s rural heritage, and their own absolute normality.