afieldnotebook

I've been back in Tromsø for a week--long enough to have restocked my fridge not once but twice--but I had meant to write something about all the time I spent on trains and buses (and sometimes boats) while I was away. And then I try, and find there isn't much to say. I mean, you don't need me to tell you how to book a train ticket. It's no different from booking a ticket for anything else. And I bought all my bus tickets on the bus.

Here's something really obvious about bus and rail travel: you see a lot. I saw reindeer in the mountains. I saw people ice-fishing in fjords. I saw long stretches of Norway, basically. Sometimes I slept instead of seeing, because every landscape has the capacity to become ordinary.

Today I was reading some words from Robert Bly about Olav H. Hauge, whose poetry Bly translated from Norwegian into English. Hauge lived his entire life in Ulvik, which is somewhere I did not pass through on my travels. Still, I imagine I could have. This is what Bly has to say about Hauge's lifestyle: "If you have a tiny farm, you need to love poetry more than the farm. If you sell apples, you need to love poetry more than the apples. It's good to settle down somewhere and to love poetry more than that. Lewis Hyde, in his great book The Gift, discusses the nature of the old precommercial gift-giving society. The economy of scarcity, he says, is always associated with gift-giving. Olav H. Hauge lived in a gift-giving, pre-communal society all of his life. The richness in his small house lay in the handmade spoons and bowls, the wooden reading chair, and the bookcases to which the best poetry from many continents had found its way."

It's worth noting, maybe, that The Gift is one of my favorite books. But that's not the point I was trying to make by pulling this quote. I recognize something in Bly's description, something I spent two weeks staring out windows at. Sitting on the couch with my mother's cousin, she commented on how much I had moved around compared to her family. There's not much to say for it. It would be completely false to say people in Norway don't move and people in the U.S. do. No--it's just that there's something in the small towns here, the ones that are just a handful of houses between the ocean and a mountain, that feels hard-won.

There are towns like this in Saskatchewan, too. There are towns like this in the U.S. But Norway, to those of us who aren't from here, sometimes becomes a picture or a postcard, with everything directed to the picturesque and no thought given to what undergirds it. And sometimes the infrastructure is the most striking of all: this is a place, real and whole--no mere wilderness, no mere tourist destination. The richness, to borrow one of Bly's words, is what makes it worthwhile, is what keeps me from tearing my eyes from the window as the countryside slides past.