Lofoten Story

“Let’s walk around that lake.” I said, or Dan said, or we both said. It was early evening in the endless arctic summer day on Å (pronounced: Oohah) an island in the Lofoten chain of islands/mountains in the Norwegian Sea. These mountains peak out of the ocean then run along its floor and don’t come up for air until Scotland. They are crumbling, and considered by some to be the oldest mountains in the world.

Å is an exotic vowel meaning “creek” in Norwegian, and there was indeed a tiny creek flowing out of the lake. I had a Nalgene™ water bottle 1/3^rd full, Dan had nothing, and we walked. No camera, how strange, no lens or screen to capture the world, instead it captured us, and nearly killed us twice. We tromped through marsh, mud, bog, and giant wet sponge moss, and so our shoes were soaked through. Four waterfalls fell around the lake, high and thin and misting. They seemed to say: “be wet with us,” and smiled, so we were, and did.

Our rations were depleted already, the water drunk, I filled my bottle with water seeping through a rock face, percolating there for centuries, the world’s most effective Brita ™. It was very cold and very good. The mud became a giant sinkhole, impassible. We hiked up above it, and walked a cliff’s edge, nearly fell (both of us) and crawled the remainder.

Beyond the cliff a stand of stunted pine trees stopped us for a while, we rested and went back to the lake-shore. There was a rock-pile like a castle there, we climbed inside and cannon fire seemed to ring out from an enemy fortress, in reality it was the sound of an enormous boulder trundling off a cliff, rolling faster than anything and splashing down in the lake. Enormous sounds! Enormous splash! Enormous boulder, rolling right through the place where we stopped to fill my water bottle… twenty minutes between certain death by rogue crushing stone, and play in an imaginary fort.

Four hours later the stroll we took on whim was complete... lake looped. The sun was up, as always, but the only restaurant was closed, so we bought slices of cake from a glass display and drank beers on the pier™ for dinner.