My trip to Norway to see my lover in March of 1991 ended up very different than I had pictured.
I met him when he was a foreign exchange student at my high school in Utah, and we had backpacked together and I had gone to visit him in Norway a few times. On this particular trip, I arrived in Oslo for two weeks of romance in the deep winter. Of course my he immediately booked the lead role in his university play and started all-day rehearsals, leaving me on my own. Because I love children and I always needed money, I decided to spend my days working at a nearby kindergarten owned by his friend. Every day of my two-week visit, I bundled up in a wool sweater and puffy coat and headed out into the cold dark morning to walk to the preschool. The Norwegian babies arrived with their rosy cheeks and bright eyes, layered in at least five different sets of clothing. We played games, sang songs, snacked, then stacked them in baby buggies and pushed them around the island for fresh air.
My jet lag was overpowering. I would work all day, have dinner, and fall asleep till midnight, when I would spring to life. I read all 940 pages of Brothers Karamazov by Dostoyevsky on this trip, which ended up changing my life, so it was an excellent use of my time. I guess I didn’t need to go all the way to Norway to read a book, but that’s exactly what I did. I barely saw my lover, but I did learn three very important Norwegian phrases: “ikke spis:” (don’t eat that) “ikke bit” (don’t bite) and “jeg elska deg (I love you).
And really, those phrases cover nearly any situation.
On the last weekend, my lover, his friends, and I all piled into a small car and drove several hours up to a remote part of Northern Norway. The guys were speaking Norwegian the entire time, and playing Leonard Cohen on the stereo, so I spent the trip looking out the window at the little fairy-tale houses with lit-up windows and smoke coming out of their chimneys. I liked to imagine the people inside the houses and made up stories about what they were doing. Were they dancing around their kitchen, making dinner for the children? Or did they just have a fight and weren’t speaking to each other? Were they sitting by the fire reading, or sitting down to play the piano? Were their hearts singing because they had just had a dream come true? Or were their hearts breaking because they had just lost someone they loved?
We were nearly out of gas and all the stations were closed, so we pulled into one and put the nozzle into the car and the guys jumped up and down on the hose to try to get the last bits of gas out of it. We continued deeper into the woods, and finally stopped in the middle of some trees. It was dark in this part of Norway, the sky lit only by crisp starlight. Two guys pulled cross-country skis off the top of the car and strapped them on to their shoes. They disappeared into the woods with a flashlight. The other four of us sat in the car, huddled together for warmth, as we couldn’t turn on the car due to our lack of gas. The guys eventually came back carrying a few more pairs of skis. There wasn’t enough for me, so I had to ride on someone’s back through the forest to get to the cabin.
So now, it was 2am in the middle of a remote forest in Norway, with snow so deep it could swallow me whole, and I’m riding on the back of a young man, surrounded by thick pine trees soaring straight into the sky. It was cold, and a little scary, but the adventure of it all outweighed the fear. The cabin door was frozen shut, and we had to pry it open. We turned on the heat, immediately lit a fire, and gathered in front of it like a pile of puppies. I went to the sink to get water, but I was told I’d have to eat snow. The guys would go to the river in the morning and drill a hole through the ice and bring back a bucket of water for drinking. Okay then, snow it was.
One of my favorite feelings in the world is when my cheeks get hot in front of a crackling fire, and I fell asleep on the floor. In the morning, we all stumbled outside to a glittering whipped cream world. We strapped on downhill skis and headed through the frothy trees, emerging onto a hill with skiers and a chair lift, so I guess the cabin was not as remote as I thought. My strongest memory of the ski day was the last run. The fog had rolled in so you couldn’t see in any direction. Everyone else had skied down, and I sat down in the snow. I dug my mitten into the powder and let it melt on my tongue while I thought about this moment.
It should have felt surreal, but I actually felt just right. Here I was, a girl from a little town in Utah, on the other side of the world, alone in the fog on a snowy mountain in Norway, listening to the quiet hush of falling snow.
I lay there for a while and thought about how memories are like snowflakes. Some melt before you can even see their shape, and some stick to your lashes and land lightly on your coat, so you can see their exquisite shapes before they dissolve. Then, thirty years later, you can close your eyes and savor the delicate memory before it disappears.
