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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.