Live Blindly and upon the Hour

Live blindly and upon the hour. The Lord,
Who was the Future, died full long ago.
Knowledge which is the Past is folly. Go,
Poor child, and be not to thyself abhorred.
Around thine earth sun-wingèd winds do blow
And planets roll; a meteor draws his sword;
The rainbow breaks his seven-coloured chord
And the long strips of river-silver flow:
Awake! Give thyself to the lovely hours.
Drinking their lips, catch thou the dream in flight
About their fragile hairs’ aërial gold.
Thou art divine, thou livest,—as of old
Apollo springing naked to the light,
And all his island shivered into flowers.

-Trumbull Stickley

The Sign-Post

The dim sea glints chill. The white sun is shy,
And the skeleton weeds and the never-dry,
Rough, long grasses keep white with frost
At the hilltop by the finger-post;
The smoke of the traveller’s-joy is puffed
Over hawthorn berry and hazel tuft.
I read the sign. Which way shall I go?
A voice says: You would not have doubted so
At twenty. Another voice gentle with scorn
Says: At twenty you wished you had never been born.

One hazel lost a leaf of gold
From a tuft at the tip, when the first voice told
The other he wished to know what ’twould be
To be sixty by this same post. “You shall see,”
He laughed—and I had to join his laughter—
“You shall see; but either before or after,
Whatever happens, it must befall,
A mouthful of earth to remedy all
Regrets and wishes shall freely be given;
And if there be a flaw in that heaven
’Twill be freedom to wish, and your wish may be
To be here or anywhere talking to me,
No matter what the weather, on earth,
At any age between death and birth,
To see what day or night can be,
The sun and the frost, the land and the sea,
Summer, Autumn, Winter, Spring,—
With a poor man of any sort, down to a king,
Standing upright out in the air
Wondering where he shall journey, O where?”

-Edward Thomas, 1917

There are times when Norway seems difficult to explain. It's another place, but it's also where I live at the moment. I went hiking this weekend with the university outing club, and woke up this morning at Skarvassbu, a backcountry cabin I visited on ski in January. The landscape looks different without the flat coat of snow, but it's still familiar, in a fashion. The trail from Skarvassbu back to Tromsø curves around the shoulder of Tromsdalstinden, and from there on out everything is known. But this time there's a cluster of reindeer on the flank of the mountain, including one of the white ones that's sacred to the Sami. The reindeer herd undulates and flows uphill in the same way water flows downhill, but with none of the unwieldy implications of moving against gravity. They raise their tails like flags, the same way white-tails do, but they don't move like any deer I know.
That could be a metaphor, about the reindeer. People sometimes ask what it's like where I'm from, and suddenly my problem explaining Norway flips on its head: I try to describe how our mountains are different at home, but nothing seems to fully capture it the way experience does. Sometimes the mountains here seem more like the prairies, where you can see across distances greater than you can fathom, and trees are scarce enough that the sky is something live.

This morning at Skarvassbu I ambled across the rocks in the easy way you can when you've been walking for days with a pack and your body is suddenly light. Scattered about are lakes like perfect mirrors, some of which you don't notice because the reflections blend so seamlessly with the stones above. In that moment, it didn't matter one whit whether the landscape was like the prairies or my old New England mountains, whether those differences and similarities were something I could articulate. There were clouds rising from valleys in every direction. Someone came out of the cabin with two buckets to fetch water. I waved, and went to see if I could help.

Finding a Bible in an Abandoned Cabin

Under dust plush as a moth’s wing,
the book’s leather cover still darkly shown,
and everywhere else but this spot was sodden
beneath the roof’s unraveling shingles.
There was that back-of-the-neck lick of chill
and then, from my index finger, the book

opened like a blasted bird. In its box
of familiar and miraculous inks,
a construction of filaments and dust,
thoroughfares of worms, and a silage
of silverfish husks: in the autumn light,
eight hundred pages of perfect wordless lace.

-Robert Wrigley, 2007

Fog

The fog comes
on little cat feet.

It sits looking
over harbor and city
on silent haunches
and then moves on.

-Carl Sandburg

If you stand at almost any point in Tromsø and look east, Tromsdalstinden is the mountain you'll see. It presides over the skyline, and it looks definitive: the mountain, as if there isn't another one. In some ways there isn't; at 4,000 feet, Tromsdalstinden is the tallest mountain visible from Tromsø. I know some people who call it the city mountain.

It didn't seem like I could leave Tromsø without hiking Tromsdalstinden, but I held off in the spring because of the snow lingering at the summit. But yesterday it was sunny, so I packed a day pack with almonds and brownies and a Kvikk Lunsj bar (I should probably devote an entire post to Kvikk Lunsj, but basically, through some feat of marketing black magic, Freia has managed to transform a slightly malty Kit-Kat lookalike whose name translates as 'quick lunch' into an important provision which should be, and is, brought on every hike, skiing excursion, etc. There are even trip suggestions inside the wrappers) a water bottle and a thermos of tea (I meant to make sandwiches but my bread was moldy, which just goes to show), a sweater and a raincoat, caught my usual bus and rode it past all my usual stops and off the island to Tromsdalen, the valley that Tromsdalstinden sits at the end of (and is named for). And then I walked.
This hike is beautiful--there's really nothing else to say. You cross over the Tromsdalelva, the river that supplies the city's drinking water (if you're noticing a theme with the place names around here, you're right), and then make your way up through aspen forest until the trees melt away and there's nothing but bilberry bushes and scrub. The summit is comprised almost entirely of rock which has crumbled into rock fields. There's a hardscrabble stretch up a steep slump of rocks, but the valley below the mountain is vibrant green, and from the high ridges you can contextualize yourself within this landscape: to the south route E8 traces the crannies of countless fjords as it heads to Narvik, and west you can see past Tromsøya and Kvaløya to the open ocean, and east are the jagged peaks of the Lyngen Alps.

On the way down I stopped between two shining streams to sit and finish my thermos of tea. I have never hiked with a Norwegian who hasn't brought a thermos (usually with coffee), and I'm convinced that that's something they're doing right. Sipping a warm drink while the mountains spread around you adds just the right amount of civilization, as if this green valley could be your porch, your backyard. Norway's common access policy, Allemannsretten, literally translates as 'All Man's Right,' which means that, in a fashion, this valley is yours. So stop, pick these berries--their flavor is tart and pure. Drink this water. If you're like me, they'll be a dose of something you didn't know you needed, and you'll be better for it.