-Chapter 14-
As a child, I’d drawn maps idly in class, or at least it had seemed like idle distraction to my teachers. In reality I was an astute young geographer, coloring bold rings of topography that always rose precipitously from some fantastic looking island whose edges intertwined in strange tangential arcs with surrounding land. They framed the type of lost paradise where a Robinson Crusoe or Huck Finn might have spent a silent forever. Little did I know that the Lofoten Islands were precisely this improbability, their mountains rising from smooth crescents of white sand in such unbelievable precipice that it was hard to take them seriously. They cascaded in great green chasms into the sea, pausing for nothing, little stone pinnacles dotted around the few places flat enough for actual human habitation. As part of the handful of foot passengers on the ferry, we got to depart first, and Max strode down the narrow gangway ahead of me and onto the docks. The village was both a genuine Norse fishing port and a polished tourist trap- even in the offseason, if hid its assortment of vaguely lowbrow gift shops and gaudy cafes poorly. I was feeling slightly derailed and vulnerable to our lack of plans at this point, and I asked Max somewhat plaintively if we would be renting the car here.
‘Nonsense, it’s still sort of tourist season, we’ll hitch rides out to Setermoen or Heggelia, where we can reconsider’, he quipped assertively. ‘He always has to be so certain, like any diversion from the expected course of events is unthinkable’, I thought, envying his blind confidence. We did catch a ride inland after only a few minutes passing, an older German couple on a ‘Trans-European road trip’ offered us what might have amounted to a seat and a half in the crowded back of an old Volvo wagon. The car looked like it has survived the better part the world, its filthy rear window crowded with flaking remnants of bumper stickers proclaiming various liberal German causes. They were pleasant and smart; the German’s- retired liberal arts professors pursuing their own brand of ‘traveler’s nihilism’, as the woman, Hilda, proudly put it. The roads were predictably empty- lonely strips of fading asphalt whose hold on the earth here seemed tenuous, their paths so circuitous and improbable. We stopped for a roadside lunch near the ancient Norse settlement of Flakstad, whose remains constituted a ramshackle collection of questionably active fishing buildings. Beyond this lay a round, grassy knoll on which a sign proclaimed several stone and earthen patterns to be the remains of an ancient church. A few cabins, which were likely now expensive summer homes of urban professionals from the south, sat watchful beside the beach.
Certainly the loveliest aspect of Flakstad was a giant sweeping comma of golden sand that stretched incongruously from one set of craggy, hostile peaks to another. It was a respite from the harsh Arctic geography so sudden and unexpected, it begged you to stop and let the angular quartz grains fix themselves stubbornly between your feet. The German’s generously shared a bit of their lunch, and we devoured humble bits of meat and cheese and bread. We washed it down with some sort of cheap apertif Max had procured on the train from the pastry lady, who apparently had a little side business of questionable legality. The sky was a dull aquamarine, filled with the silent zephyr’s song of passing clouds, the moon apprehensive and low to the east. The way the sun played on the water at these latitudes, nothing was ever truly apparent- color and depth were cautiously overt, something only seen at the last minute. The sea in the little cove was unimaginably transparent, and I told Max I thought this ought to our own little isle, here in the Arctic tropics. The distant cawing of seabirds seemed to signal nature’s approval, I thought.
At the end of the beach, smoke rose in sullen blacks curls from behind one of the little red summer cabins, and Max said we ought to go investigate it, as it was November and all great plans started with an anomaly. We bid farewell to the German’s, who seemed a bit surprised at our early departure. They seemed to understand the youthful restlessness however, and wished us luck. The walk down the beach rang out with the cries of crushed sand grains under our feet, rocks ground down into nothingness by the sheer passing of time. Our steps echoed dully across the void between the mountains and the sea.
Max took my arm in a way that made him feel both small and strong. He was wonderfully equal, matched in power and intellect but loved instead of challenged, having nothing to prove to me, or so I hoped. I wished all friendships had the truth of purpose ours seemed to bring- the motivation to please someone, a stranger, a parent, a sibling, a strong character admired at a distance, because you respected them beyond just love. Love was respect, to be certain, but it was also blindness, faith; the way the poor, urban, sweltering masses clung to the senseless dogma the church taught them, because it was easier than equality. Equality between them wasn’t handed; it had been earned. Earned since his warm embrace with the old woman in Kleppevik before buying the gold, earned in the way he never retraced his steps, never recanted his sentiments, and never ceased to be present.
If we were brothers, then our journey was already closed and complete in a sense. If we were lovers, it had just begun. Even as strangers, it felt as if we had surmounted the awkward tendencies of early love already, grown mutually such that not everything had to be vocalized. We reached the end of the beach, the sand closing in like a cloth sack whose drawstring is pulled by invisible hands from above, the edges all wrinkled and oddly-lit. The smoke was in fact coming from a small bonfire lit under a homemade platform, assembled from odd bits of flotsam and beach detritus. Fiberglass boat pieces and what appeared to be several whale ribs, their bleached, shiny edges refractive in the flames, greeted us across the sand. Atop this sat a round metal tub, perhaps 3 meters across, seemingly hewn by hand out of scrap metal. The rivets held the pieces together like round bullets in the steel, lined up along rough stitches. I turned away from the strange tub and observed a couple, a man probably in his early 40’s and a woman slightly younger, skipping down the beach from the edge of the little Cabin’s plot. They moved purposefully, towards a series of endless gray ledges and tidepools that spilled from the confluence of the rising mountain and the ocean. The woman turned and saw us, waving warmly. Her hands flapped in silly, animate sincerity, as if we had been old friends in on some mutual joke.
Max, forever championing the absurd possibility of the moment, shouted several greetings in Norwegian, and the man now turned and smiled reservedly our way. His hand were not as enthusiastic as hers, rising in a more cursory wave, their profile huge and worn. Oversize, fleshy mitts joined arms hidden under a ratty wool sweater, his torso twisted in observing the inside of one of the little tidepools. We approached them, and soon stood over the rocky circle, which was almost entirely filled with crabs. Red and white and angry in their new confinement, fighting for space under rocks, their strange gills whirring with unseen energy. ‘We collected them!’, the girl said excitedly, to which her partner added in warm but measured tones, ‘No, Anna, we caught them in a trap out on the docks, and then you realized you had no idea how to cook them and thought the idea of boiling them rather inhumane, so we brought them here.’ ‘Gentlemen- Johan the realist!’, the woman named Anna sighed, but she tugged at his ratty sweater playfully all the while. I saw that theirs was the kind of affection that seemed almost obsolete these days. I asked what the fire was about and the man, Johan, replied that they had built a hot tub for their cottage and this was to be its inaugural usage. The metal had been salvaged from ‘unwanted bits of old ships that seem to litter the coast around here’, he informed them with vague excitement. When he listed his profession as ‘amateur treasure hunter’ later in the afternoon as we sat naked in a little semi-circle in the warm water of the steel vessel, I was hardly surprised.
It was Anna who clearly paid the bills and financed his ‘treasure hunts’, as she called them. She said it without any hint of malice or regret though, and I imagined her back at the university in Oslo where she taught humanities, her face warm and inquisitive in the sharp academic light of worn brick buildings where students milled with the energy of half-natural learning. She’d met Johan a year earlier when her car broke down in Leknes, a larger town on a nearby isle. ‘He is from here’, she told them proudly, the way a tourist in some distant paradise might brag of their friendship to some wild native. ‘Anna loves to romanticize life if Leknes’, Johan said, in a curious, slightly lilting provincial accent. His speech was not arrogant or self-conscious, just inflected with the isolation of a people removed even from their fellow countrymen. ‘Before I met her, I fixed diesel boat engines and drove the town snow plow in the winter.’ ‘He also studied Proust and Nietzsche at night with the cat in his lap’, Anna chimed in. ‘Oh, stop… you’re so hopeless’, he chided her, and she wrapped her thin, almost hollow self around him in the tub such that they appeared as some pale Hindu god, arms and legs intertwined and appearing at strange angles. The murmur of faint contentment stirred on his lips, which appeared a fleshy prism set in the blond stubble of his chin. I never understood how people managed like this, managed to dissolve all the superficialities of mismatching or outward incompatibility and just make thing work.
Johan asked him what my boyfriend did for work, if it was as silly as the diesel mechanic who studied 19th century reason, and I blushed slightly, replying that Max was just a friend, an accomplice, actually, and I proceeded to tell them about the past, not the whole story, just fragments and important pieces that often lacked context or connection. I don’t know why I told them Max was just a friend. Max didn’t look hurt of surprised at my lie, and his expectation of this almost hurt more. That this possibly hard, calloused man should accept our love, or the possibility of our love, with such impartiality warmed me yet also pushed against what I thought I knew. I knew that while Johan was indeed remarkable, he was also a product of a culture that valued tolerance without pretense, and it saddened me to think of the inequality in the States, the stubborn dogma so many people clung to. I felt like even in some insular Appalachian hollow or wild western zip code, a man and a woman could practically start fucking in the street, and the worst fate that could befall them is someone might good-naturedly asking them to ‘get a room’, or ‘get a hump in for me’. To be a homosexual in the United States in the mid-20th century was to be forever watchful, forever on edge, the ties that held you to a perfectly normal, productive existence were tenuous, questionable, and ‘immoral’. The Norwegians seemed to think nothing of immorality, only in bold definitions of good and bad, strong and weak, the aspects of character overlooked in the land of toxic capitalism, I thought cynically. I put these thoughts out of mind for the moment, and instead drew Max closer the way Anna had pulled Johan in needy restlessness, and he smiled self-consciously before relenting, his back strong and knotted in concentration, softening against my touch. Johan went inside the little cabin and returned with 2 liter bottles of hard pear cider, the ubiquitous drink of these parts it seemed. It was more sweet than alcoholic; infused with a flavor that recalled childhood holidays, a half-glass served on Christmas Eve by his grandmother, covert and coveted. Anna asked what our plans were for the evening, and Max laughed raucously, ‘See, we have plans, Clark!’, which earned him a quick jab in the ribs and an embarrassed grin- I was forever playing both the role of organizer and conspirator, it seemed.
‘They can stay in the guest room tonight, right, Johan?, she offered cautiously, to which Johan scoffed harmlessly and informed us that the ‘guest room’ was little more than a large closet housing several shabby couches and a collection of beach items, ‘mostly whale bones and colored glass pieces’- as if this was the most typical furnishing for summer cottages. So, we slept that night in the tired down sleeping bag Max had brought from Haugesund, the two of us breathing, iconic entities in a small room covered in round, shiny bits of beach glass, in great piles that invited you to step across them, to cover your feet in man’s castaway art, the whole bizarre space enclosed in a cage-like ring of whale ribs. Max dubbed it their ‘surrealist beach castle’, which I could hardly argue. We slept well, at least I did- Max always hummed slightly with the noise of anticipation, even in sleep, and it seemed he was plotting the dots of the future, connecting the past pieces, his mind arguing out all the logical fallacies of life. I awoke early, the sun had not crested the jagged ridge to the east, its glow was just beginning to creep around the edges of the hills, and the green, tumbledown slopes fluoresced softly under its arrival.
We packed silently and left a note one the worn Formica kitchen counter for our hosts, who breathed soft and irreverently in the next room, their world seemingly condensed into this little cabin, the beach, and the sun beyond it. I wanted them to understand that part of me yearned to stay here on the beach in Flatraker, to become part of the strange Arctic tropics, to study the pale teal water from various angles, to climb the tired, glaciated peaks and from their rounded precipices declare the land my own, but I had to go. We walked back up to the highway from the beach, across a low bog whose edges were black and salty, crusted over with fallow grasses and impenetrable-looking bushes, their gnarled branches not daring to break the invisible windline of the low dunes beyond. Once back on the unnatural asphalt again, Max turned to me and told me we would not make it to Tromsø- fate and the appointment with Hakan Skelvik would not allow it. I nodded appreciatively and told him I really hadn’t wanted to go to Tromsø anyways, it was inevitably going to be functional and cold and disappointing. The journey was better when truncated by coincidence and not preordained constraints, I decided. Max figured we should turn south once back on the mainland, past Hinnøya, a sprawling, undecided place, Norway’s largest isle and an enduring mystery in local saga, where lost souls spoke in the Aurora Borealis and people moved to be forgotten.
We caught a ride soon thereafter in the back of flatbed truck hauling salted fish down the coast to Trondheim, and we sat in between smelly boxes bearing various red stamps and seals proclaiming their quality and value. The driver sped along the little road with expert recklessness, his tedium our adventure. We made it to the eastern edge of Hinnøya by noon, and the mountains of Møysalen appeared to the north, imposing and grand. Snow clung to purplish cliffs and water cascaded in bright sheets down distant ramparts, a fortress unequaled on the entire north coast of the country. Max had a small tent stowed in his pack, along with a rusty kerosene stove and a few packets of rice and potatoes, and he offered the idea of a mountaineering expedition to me, that we should spend a few days climbing the namesake peak of Møysalen, then head immediately south to Bodö, where the train would carry us in its serpentine metal arms home. That this plan relied on a degree of timeliness and luck we where hence incapable of did not bother Max, as always, his plans were perfect and chiseled from stone, the flawed bits his handiwork cast off the rock to be picked up by me. The peak Møysalen stood proud and imposing some 1200 meters overhead, its higher slopes ending abruptly in steely gray cliffs that fell haphazardly into the sea, little grass tussocks where seabirds nested dotting their faces.
I wanted to tell him to stop, to exercise some reason, that setting off with nothing more than a few thin dreams and a knapsack amongst mountains whose shadows covered the whole of man was foolhardy and dangerous, that next Wednesday would come and we would be nowhere near Haugesund, but instead I raised my head in weary challenge and followed Max into the thicket beyond the road. The bushes proved deceptive- beyond the roadside agglomeration, the vegetation thinned into a pleasant moor of sorts, the hillsides seeming unnaturally rounded and smooth, having rescinded their wintery coat not long ago. We climbed the slippery green slopes in great bounding steps, foolish and hungry as ever. The sea shined silently below- great masses of interfering sine waves; their edges difficult to distinguish the higher we climbed. Max had to be ahead, not significantly, but a few competitive steps further up the hill, his eyes fixed on some distant unseen horizon line, until his lungs cried out in mercy and he stopped on a boulder or grass mound, heaving deep chasms into the mountain air. We climbed towards a bright interface of sky and rock, the ridgeline deceptively steep and sinuous, and upon reaching a small meadow framed by a little glacial tarn and a thoughtful stand of dwarf willows, Max declared this to be ‘base camp one’.
I set off towards the western edge of the meadow, climbing the pale granite blocks, which spilled from the mountainside until I could view the grainy edges of the horizon where they pierced the sea. Tears welled unconsciously in my eyes as he turned to see Max, my Max; he’d set up the little tent so diligently, and sat on a rock nearby looking out over the valley. I wanted us to disappear from the fucked miasma of late 20th century life, to fall into the warm earth until we reappeared on the other side, the mythic ‘tunnel to China’ all kids knew about now real and tangible. We didn’t have to face the authorities, didn’t have to return to societies spiky confines, I thought glumly, but I knew how necessary completion was for Max, and this renewed me. I wanted him to be happy, to be proud of himself- when I found Max, I knew I’d found someone worth forgetting myself for. The sun was now low and critical of us, a tired golden orb eyeing our little campsite acutely. Max called for me, in a way that invited me to either stay put or come down to the meadow- I lifted myself and climbed back down the mossy slabs to the tent. He’d begun to heat some water, mixing a few packets of the rice and dried vegetables ineffectively with a wooden spoon, the ancient camp stove sputtering and struggling to keep a steady flame.
The sight of Max’s earnest struggle told me to be useful, to put aside all this dull sentimentality to create warmth, shelter, perhaps food, and I set off towards the low bushes beside the pond. The bushes did not give up their branches easily, they scratched by arms stubbornly, the gnarled undergrowth pulling me into its heart, to become part of the warm, dark thicket. I kept at it though, the thought of a fire was so lovely, and soon I’d collected a respectable pile of tinder, which Max arranged in a sort of ersatz teepee in the little stone ring he’d built near the tent. When he held the fragile flame to the little nest of bark and twigs, the flames crept cautiously and unsteadily outward, and I turned away from his creation, hating to see it fail. I felt the growing warmth though, and turned to see the building orange tendrils licking the sky boldly, as Max hooted and did a little dance around the fire’s edge. The mixture simmering in the pot turned out to be wonderful, and we ate in grateful gulps beside the fire, looking into the heart of the inferno as one does when around a campfire, curious as to what exactly drives the whole mechanism. The night was cold and clear. I spread the edges of the old blanket I’d packed along around Max, who reclined against me, snug and fixed between a boulder and his companion, his one perhaps.
I kissed Max’s neck, rubbed his chest where it met his neck in strong, humble curves, and thought us such an even, enigmatic pair that nothing could invalidate this love, neither separation nor pluralism could break the spell. I knew you weren’t supposed to kiss your possible brother, weren’t supposed to hold him like everything else was dead and broken, but such was our attraction, it was a pairing of forces both equal and opposite. I knew now he wasn’t my brother anyways; why this had so transfixed me earlier was a mystery. I felt no sexual lust for him because he transcended lust, he dwelled in a place high and tranquil where sexuality was always ambiguous, framed by circumstances and not overriding want. Touch was important, it took the place of words between us now, and we watched the thin gibbous moon ascend over the icy ramparts of Møysalen, its shadow sly and deceptive.
I asked Max about his past loves, partly because I thought him impenetrable, and partly because I wanted to see him uncertain, vulnerable- human in the light of that great equalizer. He said he had none, and he believed him because he said is so simply, a single breath of honesty that I didn’t dare respond to. We slept in the single sleeping bag under the weary gray canvas of the little tent, the night infinite and black. The next morning was frigid and slow, the sun weary of its role, wanting to break below the ledges to the north, it seemed, to begin its annual leave of absence from these parts. I made coffee; strong, black coffee mixed with grounds and little flaky bits of last nights dinner stuck to the pot. It was hot and delicious, a sort of wilderness elixir, I thought, removed from the urbane experience of coffee in some warm nightscape of the city. I’d never felt self-conscious here as the mountains demanded too much. Even self-awareness wavered hesitantly; bowing before more immediate needs like shelter and warmth. We set off towards Møysalen at a little past ten; it stood lone and melancholy to the north, its flanks receding under icy cover of glaciers whose breadth was indistinct in this alpine mono-scape, devoid of reference points like trees or roads.
Max eyed the peak critically and estimated they’re distant from the summit to be about ten kilometers, and perhaps a thousand meters above. I felt cold and clammy, conscious of too many ragged, poorly-suited layers clinging to him, clad in a strange mélange of urban synthetics and scratchy wool garments. My one indispensible item was his navy-blue down jacket; it was sharp and functional, made of the stiff New England climate. My temperament was becoming more patient and resilient as I wore it. I bounded now in big steps, the thought of the summit so filling and alone that I almost forgot about Max, forgot about the trip back to Haugesund, the boat, the plans everyone else seem to had for me. Now was the moment from which things would evolve, here on a distant mountain in the far north, and my feet sprung with excitement from the soft reindeer moss and brown lichen. Max now ran, his arms comically beside him, and when he caught me, he tackled me into the mushy alpine carpet, the ‘whoosh’ of his boots slipping on the dirt mixing with their boyish laughs. The silent valley seemed to approve sternly, its distant ramparts noble and watching. The land fell away in great cascades of rock and stubborn grass as we crested each ridgeline, its spine woven into the next such that the whole range appeared some strange serrated conflagration. When we finally reached the summit, it was shortly after 3 and the sun had already begun its terminal decline, wavering slightly as it ducked below peak after peak.
He procured a tired camera, which surprised me; I’d never thought him the sentimental type, but he said these would only be for the sad times of the future, and as there were to be none of those, they would never be seen, only thought of in passing. We yelled and hooted and carried on in a nonsensical but deliberate fashion until the wind licked me sharply behind the ears, the sting of a passing snowflake like a strangers glancing touch, alarming but harmless. The fjord we’d crossed the day before stood in stark relief to the west, its whole length now visible from our grand vantage. I thought somewhat distantly of the long, cloudy days skiing in Vermont as a teenager, my friends always abandoning me for easier terrain or something more social like harassing the townie girls or taking covert liquor sips behind the crusty snowplow tailings in the parking lot. Their minds seemed cued to the rigid social mores of late adolescence, never quite as distracted from it all as I seemed to be. I wanted only to be swallowed by the cold snow drifts, to disappear into the muddy northern Vermont fog in the birch trees, great fluffy mounds of snow exploding silently as I descended the silent corridors. I’d stop sometimes, alone in these crystalline tunnels between gnarled old-growth hardwoods, and once I’d found a branch of a large beech had bent into a seat, the tree behind it cradling my back as I sat there, thinking of nothing more than the feeling of silent conspiracy with the snow and trees and mountainside, white like the inside of my mind felt now.
I never expected to be vindicated, to learn in the end that my isolation had been necessary and significant, however when the memories sustained me I knew all this was self-evident. I saw it in Max’s approval of me though; in the way strangers approached me. I took his hand and held it tight, his warmth flowed like water, and I felt his pulse steady and perhaps in line with the pattern of my own, as I felt that strange brothers should feel this kind of kinship, their blood removed only a fraction of a person. When we reached the campsite again, it was dark, and Max was exhausted. His hands shook slightly and his became steps distressingly staggered, eyes fixed on the ground only to prevent him from tripping. I wrapped the ratty blanket around him, and hurried to start the half-burned pieces of last night’s fire, piling fresh branches on in hushed panic once they had lit. The flames seemed to understand, they pulled at the cold, dry air, they just wanted a little space to breathe and succeed like the rest of us, I figured. When I’d warmed Max to where he was no longer shivering, he sat next to me for what felt like a long time. We sat back to back; equal forces balanced on the precipitous edge of tension, the kind of tension I hadn’t wanted. It surfaced anyways like an empty lifejacket from the icy depths of the sea, whenever I knew Max was getting ready to talk about the future. ‘You can’t forget about me when I’m gone’, he started, and I pushed him down angrily, interruptin in stuttering earnestness. ‘You know, I’m going to wish I could, goddamnit… your going to bother me, Mr. Lundgren, till my dead days, I’ll see little scattered pieces of you wherever I turn, the ideas never quite real, because I won’t be able to guess your reaction.’ ‘You’re a strange cat…’ he countered. ‘What if I hadn’t worn that scarf, what if I hadn’t stopped for coffee and a shot of aquavit at that café, huh?’ ‘Why are you doing this?’, I asked. I wanted to be fierce, to be right, but instead I was only half-acknowledged, half-lit ideas crowding Max’s head; they needed his approval to be right. I was his.
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