The Blue Place

twelve

The stave church of Urnes, the oldest in Norway, lies five kilometers south of the seter. We tramped along the grass and through the flowers, water glinting green and glassy below and to the right.

I pointed down the slope. “There, between that rock to the left and the treetops, that’s the spire. We can either walk round, which is another kilometer or so, or we can head straight down.”

We scrambled down like children before they realize they are mortal, when the worst thing they can imagine is falling down and someone kissing everything better, maybe the smell of antiseptic and a Band-Aid—or, even better, the glory of a white bandage—but nothing permanent, nothing real, and like children arrived at the bottom red-cheeked and feeling physical, in charge of the world. There was no one else there, not even anyone coming or going from the handful of village houses clustered west of the tiny churchyard.

“It’s smaller than I expected.”

The church, even without its spire, was taller than it was long. The churchyard, bounded by an ancient stone wall, was a lopsided rhomboid half the size of a soccer field. The grass was smooth, as if cropped by sheep, and two large birches shaded part of the northwestern wall. Three or four dozen headstones on the north and south sides were all very plain. One was quite recent. It was quiet enough to imagine the soft hiss of worms gliding under the turf and old bones settling. It was the perfect place for a church, high above a headland that jutted out into Lustrafjord, and before Christianity it had probably been the site of the village hov. In the ninth and tenth centuries, womenfolk would have gathered on the headland, looking south, eager for the boat bearing their menfolk returning from a-viking. They would have seen the sail first, a faded yellowish white where once it had been bold blue stripes, taking the left fork from Sognefjord and into Lustrafjord, perhaps parting from a companion boat that would go on up Årdalsfjord to the women of Naddvik and Ofredal. Then the whole boat would be visible, and you would count the shields, look for the familiar crimson boss or the green rim, and you would run with the others down to the jetty, hoping some brother or son would bring back a fancy armring, or a bolt of fine Irish linen, but mainly just that he would be there with his familiar laugh and smile, not the awful strained blinking and bloody stump like poor Unn’s son, the winter before last….

“Aud?” Julia, on the bottom of the five steps leading to the door. I joined her.

Urnes church smelt of wood, old but hale Scotch pine, beeswax, and fresh flowers. Light shimmered through windows three stories up, drenching the upper tiers of wood, turning them to gold, softening the second tier to rich honey, and dimming on the dark, massive uprights of the bottom tier. Here and there red or yellow or blue or green paint caught the light where centuries ago craftspeople had painted the carvings for the greater glory of god.

“I had no idea wood could be so beautiful,” Julia said. “So simple and pure. And it looks…well, it doesn’t look a thousand years old. I can’t see any cracks or woodworm.”

I laid my hand on one of the massive staves. “The people who built these churches understood wood, and they were not in a hurry.” Carpenters would have gone into the forest to select several Scotch pines, but they didn’t fell them, just cut off the tops and branches. While the trees still stood, the outer sapwood was scraped off. The trunks were left standing for five to eight years. The trees died gradually and the remaining heartwood became impregnated with resin—proof against damp and pests and aging. They built to last, which is why everything is made from wood. The brackets between stave and plank are made of birch. Most of them are taken from where the root joins the stem, so the curve in the grain is natural, and very strong. All the pins and other connectors are juniper, a dense softwood. There is no iron to rust and to rot the wood. I thumped the stave. “This church has stood for a thousand years and there’s no reason it should not stand for a thousand more.”

Julia looked at the flowers, at the new hymnal someone had left on one of the pews. “It’s still used.”

“Hjørdis brought me here to services several times.”

She sat at the end of a pew. “I can’t imagine how it must be to grow up with history all around you. To walk the same path your fifty-times great-grandmother walked, to baptise your child where you were baptised, and your mother, and her mother. To see life continue so clearly, to know that your child will see the same tree, fish in the same fjord, pick the same flowers at the same time of year.” She reached for my hand. “Most of us stumble along, making up the rules as we go along, but we’re missing so much…. When I was little, the Tutankhamen exhibit came through Boston and I went to see it. Wow, I thought, look, those pieces of jewellery are thousands of years old! I couldn’t even touch it, but it thrilled me to know that people whose bones turned to dust and blew away and was maybe reincorporated in some tree that died hundreds of years ago to make some boat or other, had made something I could look at. But this, this is something else. It’s part of the everyday, it’s part of ordinary life.” She turned my hand palm up, traced the lines there. “I’m beginning to understand, I think. All those things that make you you, your clarity and solidity and certainty, come from this. You can actually reach out and touch your past. It’s in the wood, in the cold, clear water of the fjord and in the hard rock of the mountain. And the wood and the fjord and the mountain are in you, clear and strong and massive.” She looked at me then, reached to trace the line of my cheekbone, my nose, my jaw. “Aud, Aud, Aud.”

A shoal of clouds, faintly violet on their undersides, swam slowly up the fjord behind us as we walked back to the seter. At this time of year I didn’t know if that meant rain.

Over a lunch of salad and cold cuts, Julia asked me what my name meant.

“Haven’t a clue. But I was named after Aud the Deep-minded, who was born not far from here, in Sogn, in the ninth century.”

“Oh, good, another story.”

The phone rang. We looked at each other blankly. There had never been a phone at the family seter. The noise was so alien it took me a moment to identify, and then another moment to find the phone. It was up in the loft, in my jacket pocket. I answered it.

“It’s for you,” I called to Julia, then walked it down and handed it over. “Edvard Borlaug. He sounds rather agitated—for Edvard.”

She took it. “Edvard, how are y—Slow down, slow down, I don’t understand. Wednesday? But—No, of course I can be there. Of course I understand.” What day is it? she mouthed at me. Monday, I mouthed back. “It will be—Edvard, take a deep breath, please. I’ll talk to them, I’ll be more than happy to talk to them. Once they understand the general concept I’m sure everything will be fine. I’ll drive in tomorrow and we’ll cook up a plan of action. Tomorrow. Yes. Oh, about two o’clock. Yes, I’ll come and see you then. Yes. Don’t worry, Edvard. Tomorrow at two. You’re more than welcome.”

She clicked off. “He was practically hysterical.”

“For Edvard.”

“For Edvard. The board met yesterday and he’s heard that his proposal might not get approval.”

“So I gather we’ll be going back to Oslo for a day or two for some hand holding.”

“You don’t have to come. I’ll drive down, see Borlaug tomorrow afternoon, stay at the hotel, have an informal meeting with one or two of the board in the morning, and be back early afternoon Wednesday.” She slid onto my lap. “Will you miss me?”

“No. I’m coming with you.”

“Don’t be silly. It’s an easy drive. I know the route, know the city and hotel, know my way to Olsen Glass, know my way back. I’ll be busy the whole time and all you’d do is sit around in waiting rooms. You’d be crazy to do that when you could be here. If you come with me I’ll feel selfish, spoiling your vacation.” She hugged me, then held me at arm’s length. “Is that okay?”

She was my hawk, built to soar above it all. You don’t chain hawks. At some point you let them go and watch them rise, and stand there with your fist out hoping they came back, that they don’t run into a keeper’s gun, or a bigger hawk, or a vast shadowy hand stretching across the ocean from Atlanta. No. A hawk’s job is to fly, not be afraid. I made my face smile. “I’ll just have to walk that glacier on my own tomorrow.”

“I’d forgotten about that. We could call Gudrun—”

“No need. I’ll go on my own, and when you get back, I’ll be able to show you the wonders of the ice. Just…come back quickly. And take the phone with you, just in case.” She felt so light on my lap. So precious.

“If I take the phone, I can’t call you.”

“Very true.” I kissed the side of her neck where the pulse fluttered. Skin was so thin, so fragile. One nick and her heart would pump that thick red blood all over the floor.

She arched and the pulse under my lips thudded. “Just think of the reunion,” she whispered, and outside the grass began to bend under fat raindrops.

Julia wore a grey-blue cotton dress and tucked her rich hair up behind a matching bandeau. I wanted to tear it off, let her hair fall over my hands, and carry her inside to bed. Instead, I held the door of the Audi while she climbed in, and closed it behind her. She poked her head through the window, kissed me on the cheek and started the engine. In two minutes, all that was left was a curling trail of dust up the track.

I shouldered my backpack and walked down to the farm. The veal calves in their wooden pens were fractious, and Gudrun when she appeared was distracted.

“I didn’t hear the car,” she said.

“No. Julia’s taken it to Oslo until tomorrow.”

“You’re still going to the glacier.”

“Yes.”

“I don’t know if I have the time to drive you—”

“I can walk to Nigardsbreen. It’s a lovely day.”

“Nigardsbreen?” She gave me a dubious look. “Walking tours have been postponed until June, because of the late spring.” When spring came late, so did the thaw, when the ice is at its most unpredictable. The small tongue of the great Jostedalsbreen glacier would be less stable and so more dangerous than its more massive parent. I just waited. Eventually she waved a hand towards the south sheds. “The equipment’s in the usual place. I looked it over.”

“My thanks. Don’t let me keep you from the work.”

She gave me a quick nod and disappeared in the direction of the feed sheds.

The south sheds were cool and dry. Skis, boots, ropes, ice picks, skates and a jumble of other equipment took up the whole of the north wall. I selected a coil of blue nylon rope—it smelled of must but was essentially sound—an ice pick with a bound handle, gloves, a folding ice probe, and crampons, and stowed them next to the water, cheese, chocolate, flask, and thermal compresses in my pack.

The rains of the night before had washed the whole fjell clean. Flowers poked through the glistening grass: bright gold, vivid red and lush purple; birds twittered happily from clean-scented aspen and birch as though it didn’t matter about the washed-out nests; even the stones that began to litter my path seemed fresh and new again, even though for some it had been tens or even hundreds of years since they were plucked from their beds and scoured clean by the glacier. I crunched over the silt and gravel of till washed out by recent melt and began to kick my way through the bare, fist-sized rocks still unclothed by moss, enjoying the solid chunk against my boots. Julia would still be bumping along the track towards the one-lane road that would take her to another track, and then the highway.

There were no trees now, no flowers, just hectares of sliding scree, the glacial moraine, a jumble of pebbles and stones and boulders; unsorted, unstratified rock of every colour and age, but all round, all smoothed by the action of ancient ice. Here and there moss clung bravely, and insects whirred over puddles formed in rock dimples that would be gone by late afternoon, but the barrenness overshadowed the life around it. I imagined the moors of Yorkshire when the Roman engineers first arrived: the heather and gorse, the pheasant, grouse and harebells flattened by the road builders who lay down a straight arrow of crushed stone in a straight path that sliced from one camp to another, the stonemasons following with the carefully cut limestone blocks, building so well that even today if you walk up to Goathland you can see a line in the turf stretching to the horizon, where nothing bigger than buttercups and daisies grow. Foss Way, the locals call it.

These stones had not been here that long. Most of them only dated back to the Little Ice Age, the deterioration in climatic conditions that had made Jostedalsbreen grow, sending its tongues, like Nigardsbreen, thrusting down the valleys, licking up farm and field and fjell. The Little Ice Age had culminated 250 years ago, and when the tongues shrank back, they had left behind ridges of the moraine deposited at the tips and sides of the ice. Every year the moss crept farther up the old path of the tongue; every year the tongue shrank back even farther. But now I had passed the moss and was among stone deposited thousands of years ago by the ice sheet that had covered the whole country, the ice sheet that had gouged out the fjords connected by the North Way, the sea path that made life possible in this part of the world, that had created Norway.

I could smell it now, the bite of green ice, sharp as the cut a blade of grass can make across an unwary tongue. The sun was bright. I took off my sweater, folded it into my pack, and scrambled up and farther up the scree.

Julia would have run the twelve kilometers of real road and be turning right to drive south and east along another track, passing the massive Skagastølstindane, one of the highest peaks of Jotunheimen. I wiped the sweat from my forehead and kept climbing.

Now my boots rang on bedrock, raw, bare, the colour of pâté, and there it was: the side of the glacier tongue.

Old ice looks like meringue, folded and layered by a giant’s wooden spoon over air pockets; fluffed egg white standing ten meters over my head and tinged here and there by different berries. But these weren’t the beautiful, true ice colours, just a surface layer of pollution, a grey pretending to be pink in the late morning sun, brought by last winter’s snowfalls.

I studied the ice. I wouldn’t need crampons yet. I put on gloves and began to climb. It was almost midday and I was sweating lightly, but when I bent low to the ice for handholds, my breath plumed. As I spidered diagonally up the side of the tongue, the only sounds were the crunch of snow like spilt sugar under my boots and the rush of air in and out of my lungs. Most years at this time there would be small parties of expert climbers training the less expert to be guides for the tourists who would arrive in droves at the end of the month, and the ice would be dotted with figures in bright red Gore-Tex and Day-Glo orange nylon, figures who sported lime-green and hot-pink plastic logos on boots and gloves as they planted flags to show safe paths; crisscrossed with ropes in designer colours, like brilliant, unnatural snakes. Today when I reached the top I was alone with the sky, the rock, and the ice stretching ahead of me like a photographic negative of a giant’s broken twelve-lane freeway.

Glaciers start from the snow that falls above the snowline and collects in depressions in the rock. Some of the snow melts and refreezes, recrystallizing to form a granular aggregate called névé. More snowfalls compact the névé to ice. The ice builds. Eventually the weight of the ice squeezes the lowest level out of the depression and gravity forces it downhill. It takes the path of least resistance, following valleys if there are any, forming them if there are not: gouging wide U-shapes from the rock, smoothing the huge chunks to vast round boulders, or crushing the softer sedimentary rock to sand that is washed out at the tip and edges, spilling out nutrients and fertilizing the lower valley, leaving behind strange rocks sometimes balanced precariously one atop the other. But the rock over which they grind is not uniform, and some parts rip out more easily than others. Over time, the moving glacier falls into pits it has dug itself and deep cracks form in the ice. These crevasses or sprekker are often hidden by recent snowfalls and most people who die on the ice fall down one of these cracks, especially in spring before the snow has melted. But the sprekker are why I come here, the sprekker and the ice caves and the lake.

Before the end of the Little Ice Age, the snow that fell would have been pristine, not like today, but if you find a fresh sprekk and the sun is at the right angle, you can look down through time and see the glacier as it used to be, the clean, brilliant colours deep in the ice.

Sunlight bounced off a thousand white and almost-white surfaces. I took off my pack, found my sun goggles, ice pick, a small bottle of water, a banana, and the ice probe. I put on the goggles, drank the water, ate the banana, put the peel inside the empty bottle and the bottle back in my pack, and shouldered it, then snapped out the probe. Probe in left hand and pick in right, I started walking. It had been nearly three years, but the automatic step, diagonal probe, two step, probe came back easily. It wasn’t foolproof, of course. That’s what the pick was for: if I started to fall, I would twist and swing it back at the ice and pray it held.

Sometimes the walking was easy, sometimes I had to put away the probe and use the pick to scale ice cliffs and, once, a sheet of ice like a frozen waterfall. When I started to step up the slope diagonally I sat down in the snow and clipped crampons to my boots. Judging by the sun, it was about one in the afternoon. Julia would be on E16, driving above the speed limit by the grey-green waters of Sperillen not far from the junction with E7, and Oslo, windows open and the radio on, slapping the steering wheel with her right hand in time to the music. I stood up and kicked myself another foothold on the glacier.