Tricksters of the Northern Light
We entered a shimmering dreamworld created by the slanting rays of the evening sun.
In August we traveled to Senja island, 200 miles above the Arctic Circle in Norway. After the first night of our stay, I woke to morning light outside the window. I figured it must be time to get up. I looked out over the strait between the island and the mainland, and checked the time. It was 3:30 am.
I had an unnerving sense of cognitive disconnect. What I saw and what the clock reported didn't match. I had misplaced hours that I hadn't spent. Where in time was I?
It was beautiful and wrong. Why weren't birds wheeling, calling, fleeing in terror? Why weren't the waters surging from the sped-up rotation of the earth?
The water was calm, the mountain on the other side did not shudder. In the house down the hill, people still dreamt their dreams of night.
The normal was all mixed up with the strange. I had pretty much thought of summers in the far north as like living with the lights turned on all night. I wasn't prepared for amazement to blow the walls out.
I was also sleepless and cranky and frankly a little irritated at it being 3:30 in the morning. A miracle was getting in the way of me going about my business. That's the nature of surprises: they mess up your plans. They're tricksters who tug at your sleeve to look up, and then, if you insist on marching forward, stick a foot out to send you tumbling.
On Senja in August, the light never really leaves. In the late hours, it fades to twilight, but no darker. As morning approaches, the grey shapes grow brighter and more saturated with color.
Afternoons appeared to be nothing special. The same flat light could have been shining on any afternoon anywhere in the world. Until I noticed a grey sandbar that didn't use to be there. It resembled a sheet of pewter. The afternoon sun had somehow rendered the water's surface solid.
We went for a hike late one day in Ă…nderdalen National Park. We passed through a grove of ghost trees that had died long ago. Their white trunks were twisted in a mimicry of the earth's rotation. Deeper in the forest, we entered a shimmering dreamworld created by the slanting rays of the evening sun. The trees seemed to shift in place and move their branches.
The Greenland fjords are peculiar for the spells of completely quiet weather, when there is not enough wind to blow out a match and the water is like a sheet of glass. The kayak hunter must sit in his boat without stirring a finger so as not to scare the shy seals away. Actually, he can only move his eyes, as even the slightest move otherwise might mean game lost. The sun, low in the sky, sends a glare into his eyes, and the landscape around moves into the realm of the unreal. The reflex from the mirror-like water hypnotizes him, he seems to be unable to move, and all of a sudden it is as if he were floating in a bottomless void, sinking, sinking, and sinking.... Horror-stricken, he tries to stir, to cry out, but he cannot, he is completely paralyzed, he just falls and falls.1
Peter Freuchen, Book of the Eskimos