The Cabin in the Mountains Read online

  The phone vibrated in my jacket pocket and I took it out and checked the email. It was from Ståle, our contact at Norske Fjellhus in Kongsberg: Hytta blir kjørt ut i dag, it said: ‘Your cabin is being delivered today.’

  So it was an IKEA cabin after all, I said to myself as I drank the last of the flat white and slid the phone back into my pocket. Maybe I had been missing something here. Maybe we were supposed to assemble the cabin ourselves, with one of those little L-shaped metal keys?

  *

  When Nina returned from work that evening we discussed Ståle’s news. It was exciting, and even though we didn’t expect to see much we decided to drive up to Veggli at the weekend to take a look. It might only be a pile of timbers, but at least it would be our pile of timbers. As she headed out into the kitchen she asked if I’d had a chance to look at the cupboard in the Normisjon shop and I told her I had, and that I had liked what I saw. I said it might be interesting if we could find out precisely where in Norway the cupboard was from. I suggested we check in the book Jørgen had given us, but it turned out she had lent it to a friend at work.

  Later, after we’d eaten, I pulled up the photos of the cupboard I’d taken on my phone and we did an internet search of rosemaling sites that showed examples of the different regional styles. It wasn’t easy, especially as the pattern on the cupboard was faded and my photographs a little out of focus. After about twenty inconclusive minutes the dog appeared in front of us, announcing his presence with an all-body shake then walking to the hallway and staring fixedly at the array of leads, halters and collars hanging from the hooks on the wall.

  ‘I’ll take him,’ said Nina. ‘I feel like a walk anyway. You’ll keep looking?’

  She fastened the click-on halter around his chest, stuffed a roll of black plastic waste bags into one pocket of her parka and a bag of treats into the other – ‘Grass Fed Lamb’, I noticed it said on the packet – and as they headed off down the stairs I closed the door behind them and went back to the living room to resume the internet search. Very quickly I became distracted from the immediate goal and found myself engrossed in an article on the general history of rose-painting, from which I learned that the fashion for decorating interior walls and ceilings and furniture with bright flowers in primary colours developed in the eighteenth century, that its centre was the country of Telemark and the surrounding regions of south central Norway, including Numedal, and that the art only became possible once the smokey central hearths of the old houses were replaced by the enclosed chimneys of modern, iron wood-burning stoves. It was, wrote the author of the article, a way Norwegians had developed of cheering themselves up during the long and dark winter days with the memory of bright summer days gone by, and the promise of summers to come. Well off track by this time, I then clicked more or less at random on a link and came across a reference to the fact that, as early as the 1890s, at least two Norwegian firms had been in business selling prefabricated cabins for export around the country. It brought a strange relief to realise that Sverre had been wrong, and that there was nothing disappointingly modern and mass-produced about the arrangements we had made with Norske Fjellhus. On reflection it made sense, for the great advantage of a timber house over a building made of stone is that it can be dismantled with the same ease as it was assembled and moved to another location, where it can be rebuilt in exactly the same way, as Sverre had told me his father had done with the old mountain sæter that was now their family’s summer cabin.

  After about forty minutes Nina returned with Alex. As she knelt to unhook his halter she asked if I had managed to find the location of the rose-painting pattern, and seemed slightly annoyed when I confessed that I had allowed myself to be distracted. In my own defence I pointed out that it seemed to me a waste of money to buy organic dog treats made from ‘Grass Fed Lambs’ that cost over a kroner each, and on that stalemate I closed down the laptop and we went to bed.

  *

  Early on Saturday we set off for Veggli, enoying the unusually quiet drive out of Oslo on a weekend morning. We were beginning to get used to the pleasures of the journey. Once the rather dull stretch of E18 motorway between Oslo and Drammen is out of the way, you follow the Rv 134 along the southern bank of the Drammenselva (Drammen River), through Mjøndalen and Darbu to Kongsberg. There it crosses the Numedalslågen river on a graceful, arced bridge, which gives a thrilling view of the great river as it comes rolling down the valley from the Hardangervidda and bursts exuberantly into a wide white waterfall before hurrying on towards Larvik and the Skagerrak. In winter the drifting ice can freeze the fall into the most fantastical shapes and sculptures, but on a summer morning like this the waters pulsed calmly below us as we crossed the bridge and then turned right off the roundabout and joined the Fv 40 into Numedal.

  The local tourist information office promotes the valley as Middelalderdalen, the Medieval Valley, for its numerous old wooden farm buildings, and in particular the many well-preserved stabbur or loft that you pass on both sides of the road with such frequency you almost forget to appreciate their strangeness and sheer architectural beauty. In former times the stabbur was the farm’s storehouse and, as such, its treasure house. As a tribute to its importance the facades are often decorated with the most intricate and beautiful designs.

  Past Kongsberg the road becomes ever more narrow and twisting as it passes through first Flesberg and then Svene before reaching Lampeland. Lampeland is a settlement of fewer than four hundred inhabitants, but it has a petrol station and small conference hotel. We pulled in, and while I took the dog for a short walk Nina headed off to the petrol station shop to buy two coffees and two pølser med lompa. This is a classic Norwegian street-snack consisting of Frankfurters in mustard and ketchup rolled in a flat potato cake. We ate them seated on a bench behind the conference hotel facing a grassy area with a small and rather forlorn playground. After a couple of minutes a small boy wearing a Neymar football shirt emerged from one of the crescent of houses on the far side of the grass, approached a faded red plastic rocking horse and stood eyeing it dubiously for a few moments, as though weighing up the risks involved, before deciding against a ride and returning to the house.

  A traditional stabbur in the Numedal valley.

  Presumably in tribute to its name, the street lights in Lampeland are an unusual feature of the village, strikingly large and rust-red. Having finished my sausage, I googled ‘Lampeland’ and found that its origins were both more ancient than electric street lighting and more prosaic. The name turns out to be a corruption of a fifteenth-century reference to the settlement as ‘Landbu land’, meaning ‘land belonging to the archbishop in Oslo’, an explanation that made a cartographic corruption to ‘Lampeland’ easy to understand. In the same Wikipedia entry I read that the village’s modest claim to fame was that it had been home to the father of an astronomer named Carl Otto Lampland who, like so many Norwegian emigrants, had adopted the name of his native village after emigrating to America in the nineteenth century. Two craters, one on the moon and one on Mars, are named after Carl Otto.

  I had to go to the toilet before we drove on and went back to the petrol station shop and headed for the narrow spiral staircase that leads down to the toilets. The staircase is next to an area at the back of the shop reserved for gamblers who follow trav, a type of horse-racing in which small jockeys ride in tiny lightweight wagons drawn by horses that are constrained, by the rules of the sport, to proceed around a circular track in a sort of tormented and high-stepping near-run. Trav is especially popular among men in rural parts of Norway, though on this occasion there was no one at either of the two round tables strewn with coupons and the discarded pink sports pages of VG‡ and Dagbladet, and the two television screens, permanently tuned to a channel showing nothing but trav, carried on unobserved.

  On my way back out of the shop I stopped briefly to watch the last stages of a race, which, I gathered from the Swedish commentator, was taking place in Sweden. As I did so I felt, as I always use
d to feel when watching competitive skiing in the early days, after I first came to Norway, that the act of overtaking – such an important part of the attraction of any kind of race for those watching – was more or less impossible in the case of this sport. The beauties of trav have never revealed themselves to me, though in time I came to appreciate the subtle excitements involved in watching competitive langrenn (‘cross-country skiing’), the skill in the timing of a crucial lane-change, the sudden injection of pace by a Bjørn Dæhlie, a Petter Northug or a Johannes Høsflot Klæbo that leaves opponents for dead.

  *

  As we turned off the Fv 40 at the roundabout just past the petrol station and the road began to climb up the side of Vegglifjell, I could feel my excitement mounting. I had been looking forward so much to following the building process, from its beginnings here today to the scarcely imaginable moment of its completion at some point in a distant but hopefully not-too-distant future. A whole house made of wood, with windows through which one could see, on fine days, at least three and sometimes as many as five blåninger, a lovely Norwegian word used to describe the slate-blue waves of successively fainter mountain ranges visible on a horizon. I recalled the bitterly cold February morning five months earlier when we had driven up to meet Ståle and Reidar, the builders’ foreman, to discuss exactly where the cabin should stand, and at what angle to the landscape. Certain restrictions had to be taken into account. All new cabins had to follow the natural contours of the mountainside, and there should be at least four metres between any of the walls and the edge of the plot. External dish aerials were prohibited, and there were stipulations governing the range of colours that could be used when the time came to paint the cabin. All of it was within a band of black, browns and near-browns designed to ensure the cabin merged with the natural colours of the mountain.

  We had parked on a bend in the road, and waded through thigh-deep snow to where Reidar, Ståle and two other men stood waiting for us. They were gathered beneath a stand of tall pine trees. Reidar was holding a pole about two metres tall, hooked at the top like a giant walking stick. He introduced the two other men. Odd was the digger-driver, he would be clearing and levelling the site. Marek was the firm’s Polish chargehand.

  To my untrained eye, the angle of the slope we were standing on looked to be not far off forty-five degrees, and on that freezing and overcast February day, with so much snow and so many tall pines laying what looked like irrefutable claim to the land, I remember thinking it inconceivable that one man, with a digger, would not only manage to clear and level the rugged terrain but that on some clear, blue, warm day in the summer a team of men would be able to build a cabin there. According to the contract we had signed a couple of weeks previously, the handover was in the first week of July, weather and other unforeseen hazards permitting.

  I had always taken the inclusion of that ‘unforeseen hazards’ to mean that things would very certainly be delayed, for the idea that a cabin could be built and ready for habitation in a matter of a few short weeks seemed out of the question. But we had Ståle’s almost brutally prosaic email to confirm that work was about to start: hytta blir kjørt ut i dag. For all these reasons I was expecting, as I looked northwards and upwards from the final bend in the track, to see nothing much more than a pile of logs to one side of a cleared rectangle of mountain dirt. I intended to take pictures of it, to document how my dream of a cabin in the Norwegian mountains was about to come true, however late in the day, and however far it might be from the dream I had started out with so many, many years earlier. I intended to touch the logs, to sit down on them and drink instant coffee from the thermos we had brought with us. I looked forward to meditating on how these sticks, these timbers, these old bits of tree would, at some indeterminate future time, magically spin themselves up into the shape of a home, a place where my wife and I could cook, eat, talk, sleep and wash.

  Instead of a pile of mythopoeic timbers, what I actually saw was the entire structure of the first floor of the cabin, already in place atop a rectangular foundation of concrete, whitely glowing in the May sunshine. A sixty-metre access road – our driveway – had been cut into the land, and we left the car at the head of it and started walking.

  Four men were hard at work. One was standing on a ladder behind a wall of pale yellow logs wedging a lintel log above a door-opening into position. Like some troll from Asbjørnsen and Moe’s collection of Norwegian fairy tales, a second man was standing below him holding a thick, wooden mallet in his two hands. A third man was at work behind them. The fourth man was preparing to feed a plank into a bench saw. As we approached he leaned the plank up against the bench, walked towards the open door of the dust-grimed old Fiat parked close by, knelt on the passenger seat and turned down the car radio. I reached into my jacket pocket, took out my phone and started taking photographs of the scene.

  None of them had given any sign that they had seen us approaching. The man who had turned off the radio stepped back up onto the concrete foundation and disappeared behind one of the walls. I thought it strange that they ignored our presence so completely; were we making them feel uncomfortable? They didn’t look up from their work, not even when we walked right up to the building. The man who had disappeared behind a wall now reappeared with a length of bright orange webbing in his hand. He passed it up to the man with the mallet, who fastened one end of it over the top of the wall, then fed it back down to his workmate, who slid it under the bottom timber and set about tensioning it. As I glanced across at the car I noticed the number plate on the Fiat was Latvian, and suddenly their unease made sense to me.

  Building a door-opening for the first floor of the cabin.

  ‘I think they’re wondering if we’re from STAMI,’ I whispered to Nina.

  STAMI is the state’s arbeidsmiljøinstitutt, Norway’s National Institute of Occupational Health. The institute deals with ‘all aspects of Norwegian working life’. It pays special attention to health and safety practices and often visits workplaces to check that these are being properly observed. This concern for the health and safety of workers is a cornerstone of Norwegian social democracy, but it’s one reason why things cost so much in this country, and as a principle it is under constant threat as people look around or through its prescriptions for ways of getting a job done well, cheaply and quickly. In the earliest years of immigration from countries like Poland and Latvia the workers brought the added bonus, from a Norwegian perspective, of a 1950s work ethic that predated concerns about health and safety at work. Polish and Latvian workers would put up with a great deal for the chance to earn something approaching Norwegian wages. Some fifteen years ago the flat next to ours was sold after our neighbour, old Kåre Falkenberg, died at the age of eighty-six. He and his wife had lived there all their married life, and raised a family of four. A Norwegian builder bought it, and for a few weeks housed a team of eight Polish workers in it. We never heard a sound from them. Never a raised voice, never a midnight blast from a record player. The only sign of their presence was the pile of black work boots propped against the wall outside the front door each evening, and the smell of cigarette smoke that drifted into our bedroom through the wooden walls. Once we were woken by an enormous crash at about two in the morning. I got up, put on my dressing gown and opened the front door to see what had happened. Four men were standing outside, looking into the space where the door to their flat had been. The door itself lay on the floor inside the flat.

  ‘What’s going on?’ I asked in English.

  One of them turned. He raised his arm, pressed his fingertips together and gave a quick twist of the wrist.

  ‘No key.’

  No key, so someone had just kicked the door in. By next morning, though, it was back in place as though nothing had happened, and the only sign of the night’s disturbance was the starburst of splintered cracks in the pale blue paint at the foot of the door where the metal toecap of a Polish boot had struck with the precision of a karate blow.

  Sp
eaking English, I told the Latvians working on the cabin who we were, that this was our cabin they were building. I said I was very surprised at how quickly it had gone up and complimented them: they must have worked very hard.

  For a while they just looked at me. Then the one sitting on high with the mallet rested it on the topmost timber and jabbed his finger upwards.

  ‘Maybe roof tomorrow,’ he said.

  ‘I don’t believe it,’ I said, turning to Nina. ‘This thing is going to be up and complete in seven days’ time. It’s bloody biblical.’

  We wandered around for another fifteen minutes, took a few more photographs, took the dog for a quick walk and then set off back to Oslo. Maybe roof tomorrow. Unbelievable. I realised that I had understood nothing about cabin-building in twenty-first-century Norway. As per the contract, it really was going to be ready for us by July. I realised then that I had sleepwalked into this whole cabin business. Over the years I had picked up a lot of superficial knowledge about the status of cabins, why they mattered so much to the Norwegians; but of the heart of the matter I knew nothing.

  And the heart of the matter was wood.

  ‘I’m going to study log cabins,’ I told Nina. ‘I’m going to find out everything I can about them. In six months’ time I’ll be able to build one myself.’

  Easy, confident dreaming of this kind is something I’ve done a lot of. Offhand I can recall a resolution to become fluent in Chinese so that I could read the Tao Te Ching and make up my own mind what it means, and an intention to walk from Land’s End to John O’Groats. As proof of the reality of these plans I still had a small library of Chinese grammars, dictionaries and readers as well as two recordings in Chinese of the Tao Te Ching; and three paperbacks written by men who had done the walk from John O’Groats to Land’s End. I had realised neither goal and come to terms with the fact that I probably never would, at least not until I was dead, and at last had time to concentrate, as the great Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer once put it. Compared to those unrealised aspirations, the plan to find out more about wood and about cabins seemed distinctly feasible.