The Cabin in the Mountains Read online

  And yet, plan or no plan, as time passed and the afternoon began to grow dark, I felt the approach of a sense of satisfaction at the results: there was less snow now, and my visions of our picking our way about inside the cabin among the rubble of fractured roof-timbers, a snowed-under table and a sofa strewn with the sodden mass of the turf roof were less frequent. In this more relaxed frame of mind, with the job almost done, I began thinking about how I should have approached it. In particular I recalled a conversation with Jens, the pint-sized and dark-bearded caretaker at our block of flats in Oslo, a person much given to mansplaining and so finding the ideal audience in me, on the general subject of clearing snow from cabin roofs, in the course of which he had described a technique that, in its simplicity and manifest efficiency, struck me as genius. You need two people, he told me. And a length of three-ply rope about thirty metres long – they sell it at Maxbo. You need to tie knots in the rope, one about every half metre. Then you need to toss the rope over the roof, as close to the ridge as you can. One of you needs to stand at the front of the cabin with one end of the rope, and the other at the back holding the other end. Then you just walk the snow down. Five minutes and it’s all gone, the whole lot of it.

  Why didn’t you do that? I said to myself. Why didn’t you listen to Jens? Why don’t you listen when people give you good advice? Why did you just climb up onto the roof and start, with no idea of what you were going to do, without even changing your clothes? As so often before, my own inefficiency appalled me. But then – as so often before – I realised that the application of a technique to the specific version of the problem the technique was supposed to solve ran up against a difficulty unique to my version of the problem; in this particular case, the sheer impossibility of anyone manning the other end of the rope at the back of the cabin on account of the wall of snow surrounding it.

  My wife was saying something to me from the front of the house and I slowly plodded back up to the ridge and then along to the point of the gable to see what she wanted. She was standing between the parked car and the open shed door, looking up, shading her eyes against the glare of the snow with one hand. Below me I noticed for the first time what looked like a satisfyingly large quantity of snow piled in front of the terrace and the main door. It would have to be cleared away in due course, but at least it wasn’t on the roof any more. I leaned on my shovel, waiting. With all due modesty I would not have been surprised to hear a few words of wifely admiration: You’ve done a great job. It looks a lot better now. Something along those lines. She spoke again, gesticulating in my direction as she did so. I still couldn’t hear. With my head slightly to one side I pointed in the direction of my right ear: Please say again. Again she pointed, then cupped her hands to her mouth and said, with exaggerated slowness: ‘You missed a bit there. Hanging down over the front.’

  Somewhat deflated by this, I toyed briefly with the idea of pretending I still couldn’t hear, but then thought better of it.

  ‘I can’t stand that close to the edge,’ I called back irritably.

  And then, urging upon her the level of fear I had been living with over the past ninety minutes, added: ‘I can’t see where I’m putting my feet.’ Still, I took a cautious half-step closer to the point of the gable and, peering as far forward as I dared, saw the bulging overhang of snow she was pointing to, dangling from the junction of the gable boards like a swollen eyelid. Still mysteriously, after thirty years of marriage, concerned to impress her, I made a sudden lunge forward and stabbed sharply down with the blade of the shovel. The reward was instantaneous. A thunderous, powdery white whoosh, the most dramatic of all my avalanches thus far. Suddenly, a mere eighteen inches below and in front of me, I saw the scarred tops of the weatherboards lining the gable. Victory.

  ‘I’m coming down now. Put the kettle on.’

  *

  Even before I changed out of my drenched clothes I laid a fire inside the glass-fronted wood-burning stove. A crunched-up sheet of newspaper on the small grate of the Jøtul, then two handfuls of thick twigs sprinkled across it. I stepped outside again and, brushing the snow off the birch logs stacked along the nearside wall of the shed, picked out four, which I carried back inside and arranged into a small structure on top of the twigs, two longitudinally, two latitudinally. I then added a second layer of twigs on the top, nesting a single white firelighter within it, before crossing to the kitchen section of the open-plan living room, opening the drawer next to the sink and taking out a box of matches. Standing in front of the stove I opened the two dampers located immediately below the glass front, one to its left extremity, the other to its right, struck a match and applied it to the firelighter at the top, so that the fire would burn downwards into the logs, and the flames ignite the gases released by the logs on their way up towards the chimney and so maximise the heat potential held within them. I closed and fastened the heavy glass door, stepped back, watched and waited. For a moment there was no sign of life at all. Suddenly, the chamber was filled with a rapidly rotating ball of dense, milky-white smoke. It was a fascinating sight and, as the ferocity of the rotation increased, increasingly alarming. Abruptly there was a muted, whooshing explosion and smoke burst in swift, synchronised puffs from the top and bottom and sides of the door. Then the glass was clear, with rich tongues of flame licking across its surface. I realised the logs must have been wet, and as I headed towards the bathroom for a shower made a mental note always to carry in enough wood to start the next fire before closing down the place.

  After showering I changed into a pair of black fleece trousers and a warm, zip-up Bergans cardigan, pulled up a stool and sat drying my hair in front of the Jøtul. I was exhausted. My back was aching. I felt old, like those Russian rats I read about once on the BBC website that went through their entire lives without any illnesses and then suddenly, just before they died, all the illnesses they should have had fell upon them in an unremitting shower, as though they’d simply been waiting their turn. Thinking back over my adventures on the roof I found myself wondering whether to be proud of myself or dismayed at my own foolishness. I was nearly seventy years old: why on earth was I still trying to impress my wife? Hadn’t she urged, even as we sat in the car and contemplated the awesome dimensions of that quiff of snow atop the gable, that there were local firms, some based in Veggli itself, that advertised their services for jobs exactly like this, knowing that most cabin-owners on the mountain didn’t live locally and couldn’t follow such developments themselves? But I hadn’t built the place. I hadn’t driven the digger that cleared the site, I hadn’t chopped down the pines, I hadn’t sawn the logs, hadn’t raised a hammer in anger nor burned my skin on a screwdriver, I had done none of the jobs I had expected to do when, in my dreams, I imagined myself the owner of a cabin in the Norwegian mountains: surely the very least I could do was clear the snow off my own roof? It was a matter of self-respect.

  I switched off the hairdryer, checked the time, picked up my phone to check the Blackpool result. Lost three–two to Fleetwood. I put the phone down and regretted, not for the first time, that we’d agreed to internet access up here. It only left you vulnerable to idiotic and random sources of disappointment. It was part of a curious sense of guilt that had haunted me throughout so much of the process of realising this dream, at just how luxurious and comfortable the cabin had turned out to be. At how little resemblance it bore to the dream of a mountain cabin I had been secretly nurturing almost from the time, over thirty years earlier, when my interest in Norway and Norwegian culture turned into a passion.

  I enumerated the luxuries we had access to: as well as the internet there was a shower, an electric towel rail, hot and cold running water and a flushing toilet. There was underfloor heating in the bathroom and in the hallway, both of which could be controlled using an app called Ring Hytta Varm (Ring-the-Cabin-Warm). From a simple digital interface you navigate to a Control page that gives an option between two temperature settings for the bathroom and the hallway, one entitled
Comfort, the other Economy. About twelve hours before you intend to set out for the cabin you move from Economy to Comfort by sliding a digital bubble, and by the time you arrive, once you’ve dug your way from the car to the door and entered the cabin, there’s no need to rub your hands together and slap your shoulders, no shivering hurry to find the matches and light the log fire you hopefully had the good sense to lay before leaving on your last visit, no need to empty your luggage from the car at a brisk trot to raise your body temperature while you wait for the logs to warm the place up: from the moment you step inside you’re breathing in warm air that is in stunning contrast to the nostril-stinging pinch of seventeen degrees below that you’ve just shut the door on. You could almost walk around in a T-shirt. At times I feel this capitulation to comfort as a shameful and disheartening decadence, a betrayal. But of what? The cabin life I once dreamed of, with an earth closet twenty-five icy metres away that you have to put on thick, outdoor clothing to visit, with no electricity but only candles and oil lamps, no running water but instead water collected at physical cost, water carried in wooden buckets from a hole broken into the frozen surface of a nearby lake that can only be reached on skis, with logs the only form of fuel available not just for heating but for cooking too, with washing limited to a cold-water splash of the face first thing in the morning, and sleeping at night in a bunk bed with wooden slats for a mattress wearing a scarf, two pullovers and a woollen hat against the cold?

  This dream cabin life is still a reality, but for a dwindling minority of Norwegians. Despite the mountain views and the pine forests and scrawny birch trees, there is little sense of remoteness or isolation up here in Mykstulia. Planning restrictions, reflecting an enduring and almost elegiac concern for the integrity of what was once remote mountain pasture inhabited only by flocks of grazing sheep in the short summer months, insist that all new cabins follow the contours of the landscape. Along with the turf roofs and the forty shades of brown used to paint the exteriors, it means that the cabins disappear into the landscape during the day. It’s only at night, and on winter evenings in particular, when the lights start to go on, that you realise there are cabins everywhere.

  I stood up, opened the stove door and put another log on. My wife was still outside, clearing the track between the door and the shed that my avalanches had almost obliterated. I could hear the scrape of her snow shovel now and then as it struck the shingle beneath the snow. Then I heard the door opening and she came in, panting as she stamped the snow from her boots on the mat. Alex, our miniature schnauzer, ran past her to greet me in bustling enthusiasm, his little black tail wagging furiously.

  ‘Finished?’

  ‘Yes.’

  She sat on the bench by the front door and began pulling off her heavy blue snow shoes.

  ‘I need a shower. Is there any water left?’

  ‘Plenty of water left.’

  ‘I’ll give his feet a shower first. It’s wet snow. I should’ve put his bootees on but I forgot.’

  She picked up the dog and disappeared into the bathroom, closing the door behind her. As she always did on entering the cabin in the evening she had instinctively turned on the lights, and as I always did as soon as she had left the room I got up and turned them off again. There is something deeply restful about the fading of natural light within a room on an overcast winter afternoon such as this and I try never to miss it. I switched on the radio, turned the chair sideways to the stove, facing the window on the long, eastern wall of the cabin, and looked out across the valley at the view that was the real reason we bought this plot of land and this cabin in the first place: the seven Blefjell peaks in a jagged line that formed the furthermost limit of sight in that direction. From the radio came the sounds of Leif Ove Andsnes playing Vél Komne med æra, the first of Geirr Tveitt’s Fifty Folk Tunes from Hardanger. As I watched from the window I saw, as though conjured by the piano notes, the slow formation of three thin, pinkish bars of dusky light above the Blefjell peaks. The snow had stopped. Not a breath of wind stirred in the tops of the small stand of pines just visible low down the slope on my right. I heard a far-off bleat from one of the two goats the proprietor of the Veggli Fjellstue further up the hill keeps as pets. As though at a given signal, lights began going on in the valley below. First one, then another, then two, three more, more and more of them. It was like seeing stars appear in the sky for the first time. Quite suddenly I was overcome with an intense sensation of happiness. It was as though rain were falling inside my head. Closing my eyes, I abandoned myself to it.

  2

  Sunday, 31 December 2017

  Selling a dream – baptism in the mountain chapel – origins of the cabin dream – the dog gets bored – chance meeting with a landowner

  Later I was to realise it was a boom time for cabin building in the Norwegian mountains, and that similar hoardings could be seen all over the mountainside at Vegglifjell. But that December morning two years ago, as we left the cabin belonging to my brother-in-law, Paul, and his wife, Trine, and set out for the walk to the little mountain chapel where the christening was to take place, was the first time I had seen one:

  HER KAN VI BYGGE DIN HYTTEDRØM

  (We can build your cabin dream here)

  it said. I stopped a moment to reflect on the bold nature of the claim. In the midst of that dense white wilderness it was hard to imagine anything being built exactly where that sign stood. Then my wife was calling on me to hurry up, the ceremony was about to start in five minutes.

  An advertisement for cabin building services.

  In the vestibule I picked up a booklet on the history of the chapel. We took our seats, and as we waited for the priest to begin I glanced idly through it. The mountain chapel at Veggli, I read, is two thousand six hundred and twenty-five feet above sea level. It has seating for a hundred people. It was designed by Hans Halvorsen, of Sandefjord, built by Einar Eriksrud, and consecrated by Bishop Osberg in 1992. A large, wine-dark curtain bisected the nave from corner to corner, focusing attention on the altar in the corner on which there was a painting of a man looking out over the mountains. Beneath it was an inscription: I WILL LIFT UP MINE EYES TO THE HILLS. PSALM 121. To the right of it, the panels on the small pulpit continued the mountain landscape theme. Further round the right-hand wall, half-hidden by the curtain, there was a green wooden door, which could be opened by a thumb latch to give access, via a small ladder, to the wooden bell-tower attached to the outside of the church. The church was built of stone brought down from the Hardangervidda. In the area behind the partitioning curtain through which we had entered the church was a kitchen, a toilet, a small bedroom and an open fireplace serving a space large enough to accommodate a family gathering such as ours, consisting of some thirty people. It was slightly surreal to read that the organ of that tiny and remote chapel had been imported from Queen Elizabeth’s Chapel in Windsor Castle, although on looking round I couldn’t see an organ anywhere. The Ten Commandments had been inscribed in gold leaf on the green beams that criss-crossed the roof space above our heads.

  Almost all the guests that Sunday were from the father’s side of the family, our Norwegian side. Kelly, the baby’s mother, was Chinese-Mauritian. She and Marius had got married in Stavanger a few months previously. There was to be a second leg of the wedding for the benefit of Kelly’s family in six months’ time in July, on Mauritius. Mathias’ christening came in the middle of the two ceremonies, bridging as it were the two halves of the wedding.

  Alex was sleeping on the floor at my feet in my black Fjällräven rucksack. We’d only had him for about six weeks and I was far from certain his toilet training was complete. Each time he made a move I was afraid he might have weed, or worse, inside the bag. Or that suddenly he would become aware that Halvorsen, a sparky little Jack Russell belonging to one of Marius’s friends, was sitting on the other side of the aisle just two rows in front of us. Twice, during the arrival-mingling that had taken place before the baptism, Halvorsen had tried to mo
unt Alex. Unsuccessfully, I was pleased and even proud to note. But I knew that if either one of them got wind of the other now a barking match would ensue, which not even the wrath of God would be able to subdue.

  The priest looked to be no more than thirty and wore one of those presteskjegg you only get in Lutheran countries, a moustacheless beard that instantly imparted four centuries of Lutheran authority to the office that was a little compromised by the dark blue trainers visible below the rim of his white surplice. What with worrying about the dog and the unruly children I failed to follow the service for at least the first ten minutes, but from the printed order of service I know that things got under way with a rendition of a Christmas song, Julekveldsvisa, to a text by Alf Prøysen, one of the country’s favourite songwriters, long dead but still fondly remembered. This was followed by the baptismal psalm En krybbe var vuggen (‘A crib was the cradle’). Then came the baptism itself. Little Mathias, swathed in a white christening robe about three metres long, duly howled in protest at the sudden shock of cold water on his forehead. The priest then intoned the proclamation of faith: Jeg forsaker djevelen og alle hans gjerninger og alt hans vesen. Jeg tror på Gud Fader, den allmektige himmelens og jordens skaper (‘I forsake the devil and all his works and his being. I believe in God, the Father almighty, creator of heaven and earth’). This was followed by a reading from the Prologue to the Gospel of St John: ‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made. In him was life; and the life was the light of men. And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not.’

  The traditionally Christian nature of the proceedings surprised me. I had known Marius since he was born and neither he nor his parents had ever struck me as being religious. Perhaps it came from Kelly’s side. The baptism was followed by the sermon, followed by two rousing hymns. The Norwegian hymnal is unique to Norwegian culture and the melodies were unfamiliar to me. But long ago, when I first began attending the confirmation ceremonies that are still such an important part of Norwegian social life, I had made the decision to groan along anyway, as a courtesy, and because I found it strangely enjoyable. I respond in the same way when the priest says let us pray, and did so on this occasion too, bowing my head, closing my eyes, savouring the vacuum that briefly arose before my thoughts hurried off and I was once again outside and once again contemplating that sign we had passed on our way over to the chapel. The naked directness of the claim impressed me. My cabin dream was a secret: how could the company who were making it know what it was?