Scrublands: Part One

We were not yet ghosts, though perhaps we were becoming shadows...

Photo by lucas Favre on Unsplash

There is not much you can do to prepare for a 12 hour drive. You can plan what you might want to eat or drink. You can plan where you might need to stop, to change drivers, to stretch, to pee. You might think about how exhausted you’ll be at the end of those 12 hours, because you will be exhausted. What I try not to think about is whether those hours are wasted or not. I sometimes think they might be, and I don’t want to think that way. They are hours spent on the road. They are hours when I have the chance to stare out of the windows of my friend’s car and think about the world I see outside and about how life has brought me here. I was making the trip with Tore. We were returning to his country, so to speak, to his landscape and to his home. Together, we have made a half-dozen drives to the far north, which is to say, a half-dozen 12 hour drives. It takes another 12 hours to get back home or to wherever you started.

We left town before noon. Tore drove. I hadn’t been in town a week, and here I was out on the road. I had returned from the United States after living there for a year. There was a lot I needed to shed from the past year. There were circumstances, conversations, scenes that I needed to put behind me. But what of this phrase, put behind me? Can we do that? We carry our lives with us, even those parts we wish to forget or that had never happened. I don’t know. It felt too early to be thinking about the past. We would be in good country, Tore and I. We would be sharing a large six-person tent. Tore travels with a woodstove that fits smartly inside the tent, and it is a wonder that stove. You will not be cold in the tent. The warmth from the stove is likely to make you sleepy and cause you to forget the weather outside. Tore brings beds, coolers, chairs, battery chargers, solar panels, plates, bowls, extra cups, a table, a strong box. Come evening, we were porters on our trip. As we carried gear from the car to where Tore wanted to set-up camp, I thought about books and articles I’ve read about the old safari days, when sports brought white table cloths, crystal glasses, magnums of champagne, hand-colored tableware, dinner jackets, gramophones, and lovers. I cracked the predictable joke about the kitchen sink. Tore said he had one, but he left it at home.

“I brought it the last time,” he said.

“The last time?”

“Yes, not on our trip, but on the trip I made with my sister.”

“Where did you put it?”

“The sink?”

I nodded.

“I put it closer to the lake, I think”

“No, I mean where did you put it in the car?”

“Oh. We brought a trailer for that trip.”

The 12 hour drive accomplished. The tent established. The gear transferred from the car to the camp. The stove fixed. The beds fixed. The sleeping bags spread out and airing. I stayed awake to scribble a few notes on index cards. I had made a few notes while on the drive. For instance, I wrote about a cloud that looked exactly like cartoon fishbones. I made another note about how Tore and I kept guessing where other cars on the road were from. It seemed like there were more cars this year—more cars, more motorhomes, more motorcycles. Every time we approached a vehicle, Tore asked, “Do you think they are from Finland?” I responded with my usual, “Probably,” and let further speculations remain silent. I made a note about the moonscape plateau and a place where we could park and walk to the upper end of a good salmon river. We both forgot the name of the river. I had made a note about a woman in blue. The note read, woman sleeping on her stomach in blue. Who was the woman in blue? I could picture her beside the ocean, on a slope, staring out at the sea with her chin settled on top of her folded hands. I wondered what she thought when she stared at the sea. I wondered what she remembered. Maybe nothing. Maybe that was her secret.

There were other scenes from the drive. At times the road curved along the coastline or cut across barrens of stone and abandon. There were points where we could see glaciers in the high mountains, wedged, as they were, in the steep valleys between peaks. There were rivers that vanished into birch forests and other rivers that emptied into the sea. We followed some of the rivers that ran into the sea. We knew there were salmon and sea trout in these rivers, and if we didn’t know this, it was easy enough to believe. There were farmlands and pastures where sheep and goats and cattle grazed, though not many cattle, not this far north. There were villages and one town. For me, these places exist on the borders or on the inside of what I to refer to as “edges.” In my usage, the word is probably trapped too much within my own metaphors. I suppose that when people think of the word edge, they think of a knife or something else sharp or pointed. But I am thinking of landscapes, cloudscapes, rivers, and mountains that are remote. The word does, in fact, accommodate this meaning in the sense that an edge can signify something remote or, as later I read in the Merriam-Webster dictionary, “a point near the beginning or end.” And I love that: a point near the beginning or end. There were points like this all along the way, all along the drive. You see them where the sea meets the horizon or where clouds meet the sea on the farthest horizon. You see them where the land meets the sea, where mountains meet valleys, where glaciers meet snow. There are edges everywhere here, and we camped along another of these edges.

I woke up early, the way you do when you sleep in a tent. My sleep had been peaceful and deep. I tried to recall the last time I had managed such good sleep, but I did not want to think about that. I heard Tore on his phone. He was on his own safari. He was also on the other side of the tent, and there was a hill of backpacks, chairs, a strong box, and groceries stacked between us. Ours was a six-person tent. I tried to assemble the geometry of where another four people could sleep. Tore got up and lit a fire in the stove.

“Do you want breakfast?”

“Maybe later.”

“I have bacon and eggs.”

“I may eat a piece of bread and peanut butter.”

“That’s all? Are you sure?”

“I’m sure.”

After he got the fire going, Tore returned to his sleeping bag. I didn’t leave my sleeping bag. I stared at the tent ceiling.

“Do you want to fish or pick berries today?”

“I’ll probably fish. What about you?”

“I will probably pick berries.”

Tore stretched.

“I am not in the right mood for fishing,” he said.

I don’t know what the right mood for fishing is, but I believed Tore. Does fishing require a mood? In my teens and twenties, I would have been out of my sleeping bag and packed for a long day in the field. I was in search of serious trout fishing in my youth, and there were trips when I walked myself into exhaustion and dehydration. No matter how many hours I spent on a river, if there was another bend ahead of me then I could not give myself permission to stop fishing. I don’t know if I wanted to catch a lot of fish or to prove to myself that I was the best fisherman. My guess is the latter. In my twenties, a mentor told me that the man who kills the elk or shoots the deer or catches the fish is the man who stays out the longest. I lived that way, and it is true what he told me. Stay in the woods longer than anyone else, and you are more likely to get what you came for. But not peace, I thought, not in the sense that your life will be packaged into some fixed narrative of stories that you might take comfort in or find peace in later in your life. I have learned some things. I know some things. But no, that container does not exist, and meaningful peace, for me anyway, stays more elusive than it should. I travelled north not long after returning to Tunheim from the States. There were moments when I wondered if I was trying to get away from my life. My father died in June. I stayed with my mother and my sister for weeks afterwards. I had also been ill. To go north so soon after arriving home, was partly an effort to return to what my life was a younger man. It was a return to remote landscapes. It was a return to fly fishing. It was a return to tent life and its inconveniences and demands and its quiet rewards. It was a return to exposure, to my hands being a little cold, to my face feeling a little windburned.

I started getting dressed. Tore fiddled with the fire. We did not talk much. We know each other well enough and know how to manage a camp without so many words.

“I think that I will definitely pick berries today.”

“I’ll probably fish. We’ll see when we get over there.”

It was two o’clock by the time we started walking to where we could fish and pick berries. Tore carried two buckets for the berries. I carried my trout gear. Where the berries grew there was a small lake, and it was there that Tore and I split up. Tore went over the hill beyond the lake and towards to the sea. He wanted to check the multebær in a valley that stretched all the way to the coast. We passed a few berries on the way down to the lake, but only one berry was ripe, and I ate it. The other berries were close to ripe. Given another two or three days of sunlight and rain, Tore suggested, then a big crop of multebær would be ripe.

I stayed by the lake with the intention of fishing, though I wasn’t in a hurry. The wind was constant. The sun was bright. The air temperature was much too warm. There was not a fish in the water that would take a fly. I already knew that, but I rigged up anyway. I wanted to cast in the strong wind. I wanted to validate that I could manage a line in the wind. I set tied on a fly, which was a Black Nose Dace, a small one, size #12. The fly is a streamer. In wind capped waters it might provoke a strike, which is what I would have told a client back in my guiding years. It would be true, too, but I would also feel certain no fish would bite on a day like this, not in these conditions, which I would not have said to client. I finished tying on the fly and then laid the rod off to the side. I wanted to leave a chance for the wind to slacken. I carried a traditional fishing bag. I had stuffed the bag with three fly boxes and a fly wallet. I also carried a water bottle, a journal, a raincoat, and a couple of protein bars. I sat the bag and rod together in the grass and arranged them into a kind of tableau. I appreciate seeing my fishing kit in places where it belongs. Your kit is part of the experience of being outdoors. I took a moment to see the fishing bag and the rod together. Then I fished. I made casts into the wind. I didn’t have a bite.

It wasn’t long before Tore returned from his trip over the hill.

“Did you find any berries?” I asked him.

“Just the one that you ate on the way down.”

“Really? That was the only ripe berry?”

He nodded.

“But I think tonight it will rain tonight. Then tomorrow it will be hot. Then hopefully there will be lots of berries.”

“How do you know that it’ll rain and be sunny?”

“I read the weather on my phone.”

I started to break down my fly rod.

“With rain and a hot day, there should be ripe berries in another day or two. How was the fishing?”

“What you would expect.”

He nodded again.

“Would you like to have lunch here or back at the tent?”

“The tent. We can get out of this wind.”

We went back to the tent and prepared our separate lunches. I ate a banana and a handful of cashews. Tore ate a banana and gluten free bread. I finished eating and crawled into my sleeping bag and fell back to sleep. I didn’t know what time it was.

It felt late when I woke up. Tore had been sleeping, but he was outside. I thought I heard him talking on the phone. I wasn’t sure.

He unzipped the tent and looked in on me.

“Let’s drive to town,” he said. “We can visit with Stein Viggo and pick up anything we might need from the store. They should be open. There are two shops.”

“Did you talk with Stein Viggo?”

“That’s who I was on the phone with.”

“How was he?”

“He’s fine, I think.”

We drove to town and to Stein Viggo’s apartment. We were met at the door by Stein Viggo’s dog. The dog’s name is Rajas. On his sire’s side, Rajas is a Flat-coated Retriever, and on the dam’s side, he is part Weimaraner and, to quote Stein Viggo, “A Greenland dog.” Rajas weighs close to 50 kg. We stuck out our hands for Rajas to either sniff us or bite off our fingers. But he was good spirited. He smiled a lot for a big dog. Stein Viggo came to the door. He also smiled and said hello. He invited us inside and offered us coffee. Tore doesn’t drink coffee. I asked Stein Viggo if he had any milk. He laughed and shook his head, “No milk.”

Stein Viggo is one of those Norwegians who you see and think this man could have been a Viking. He has a youthful face that he keeps shaved. He smiles a lot, laughs, but I look at Stein Viggo and feel thankful that he is slow to anger. He works for a local shop that services commercial fisherman. He’s had the job for six years. He talked about the different nets, lines, crab pots, and equipment they sell.

“How many people work there?” I asked him.

“Two,” he said, “Me and the boss.” “

“How long has the shop been open?”

Stein Viggo thought about it.

“About fifteen years.”

“That’s a secure business.”

“It is. My boss is a fisherman also, a commercial fisherman. That is how he makes his money. The shop does well, and I am in charge of the shop. It’s very nice.”

He said that while I was in town we should visit the shop. “But not today,” he said, “while you are here.”

Tore drove to visit his cousin and his cousin’s wife. Stein Viggo and I caught up on each other’s lives. Stein Viggo’s apartment is above his mother’s house. His mother, Hildur, rents the apartment to him for what he said was “not a lot of money.” He has a television that sometimes worked but mostly was broken. The kitchen was large, but he didn’t use it much. He told me that he ate frozen pizzas. He stashed gear on the dining room table, in the hallway outside the bathroom, in the tiny gallery between what must have been bedrooms. There were winter tents and summer tents, old and new packs, a ski sled, knives, old and new boots, snowshoes. As a young man I was envious of individuals who lived liked Stein Viggo. I was envious of their gear, of their knowledge about their gear, of how they were unafraid to try a new pieces of equipment or to replace something old with something new. I was envious, too, of their freedom or what I perceived to be their freedom. Their apartments, their houses, their storage sheds were like basecamps, and when they wanted to adventure somewhere, to travel, to hike, to catch a sunset, they had what they needed and what they needed was close at hand and could be counted on to function. Their water bottles didn’t leak. Their raincoats were tested. Their packs were mended. I admired their ability to be comfortable in nature and in situations they could not control. Stein Viggo showed me his gear, his new boots, his new fishing pack. He talked about the apartment and how he hoped he could stay there. He felt glad to be near his mother and to help her with whatever she needed. He wanted to stay where he was, but if he had to leave, he told me, then he could. There were other villages in the North. He insisted that he would not leave the North. “That was something I did when I was younger,” he said. “I lived in the south, in Oslo. I did that for a few years, and I don’t want to do it again.”

When Tore came back, he told us that his cousin’s wife, Sarah, had fed him corn and pork chops and potatoes. “That was supper” he told us. We visited a while longer. The dog wandered between us, sniffing us for food. He always returned to Stein Viggo, which obviously made Stein Viggo happy. A loyal is a loyal dog. We talked about family members and how they were doing and what they are doing. We talked about changes to the town and in the weather, in the fishing, in our lives. While we were talking, I was struck by a sense that our lives were in flux and that we wouldn’t be the same again. We were not yet ghosts, though perhaps we were becoming shadows. I hoped that neither Tore nor Stein Viggo saw these feelings cross my face. I could sense my own silence. I hoped that my face did not flush. Yet it was clear that the past had not aided us in understanding the present, and the future remained a myth. I sat and listened, as Tore and Stein Viggo told stories and talked about their families in Norwegian. My Norwegian is embarrassing, yet I can understand more than I can speak. I was careful not to make eye contact with either Tore or Stein Viggo. I remember that I frequently nodded. I nodded not in agreement or at what was said, but at my private recognition of what I was feeling. I was not lying to myself. I was not being sentimental. But nothing was quite the same. And I suppose nothing ever is the same, as bland as that is to admit. But was being here, being in this living room with two friends and a good dog and new stories already slipping away from me? Was I already seeing Tore and Stein Viggo and Rajas and the apartment as though I were already in a future and recalling this moment? I wanted to be here. I wanted to be present. Still I don’t believe that I re-entered the conversation until it went back to fishing. The three of us decided we would fish together tomorrow. There is a lake where Tore’s late mother used to catch large trout. Stein Viggo knew the lake. I cannot remember if he had fished there or not. Tomorrow we will try. Tomorrow. We shook hands and said our goodbyes, our see you tomorrow, our Ha det.

It was late when we got back to camp. Tore built a fire in the woodstove. Short minutes passed and the tent warmed. The wind didn’t stop. The temperature outside the tent started to drop, preparing a way for rain. I heated water on the stove to make a cup of tea. When I camp, I like to make tea in my favorite cup. I make a kind of ritual of the process. I check the cup for debris. I make sure it’s clean. I scoop water from whatever water source is available. In this camp with Tore, it was water from the lake. The cup is metal and holds more liquid than I can drink in one sitting, but I like the weight of the cup. It’s thick enough that I can pound tent stakes with it or leave it on the flamey edge of a fire to heat whatever I want to drink. The cup doesn’t bend and doesn’t burn. I have carried it with me for a few years now, which is what I like most about it. When I hold it and use it, I have memories of other fires and other trips. After the water was heated and the tea was steeped, I sat in my sleeping bag and placed the cup on the ground in front of me. The tea steamed, and I could smell the sweetness of it. I stayed cozy in the sleeping bag and jotted notes about how the fishing went, what berries were found, how our lives have changed. Tore was somewhere on the other side of the tent, and I fell asleep before the rain arrived.

---

---

Damon Falke is the author of, among other works, The Scent of a Thousand Rains, Now at the Uncertain Hour, By Way of Passing, and Koppmoll (film). He lives in northern Norway.

---

If you enjoyed this post, hit the ♡ to let us know.

If you have any thoughts about it, please leave a comment.

If you think others would like it, hit re-stack or share:

If you want to read more:

And if you’d like to help create more Juke, upgrade to a paid subscription (same button above). Otherwise, you can always contribute a one-time donation via Paypal or Venmo.