THE climb up to our cabin in the mountains somewhere east of Bergen was grim — at least I found it so — even with ski poles. It took some time to get the rucksack properly balanced on my hips, and, until then, the weight on my shoulders threatened to overbalance me. I could imagine myself spilling helplessly down the slope with the rucksack clinging to my back, so that it could bash my head against the rocks. Only deliberate reminders to throw myself against the side of the hill if I slipped cured that one.
But the stinging sweat, rough breathing, and the painful calves could not be cured by right thought. It seemed to me that we had chosen a deliberately difficult route up the side of the hill, even if the path climbs only about 110 metres in 800. It’s a long time since I have climbed any rock shelf on my hands and knees, or risen to my feet afterwards with a rucksack on.
But, at the top, I felt a short moment of triumph, and a note of gratitude to the surgeons who had stitched my heart valve together so well that it had grown back as good as it had been. I took one photo looking down the hill to send to them.
This was proper kalfjäll, with no trees in sight, and even the bushes only ankle-high. I felt, for the first time in a week of driving, that we had come away into the other country where everything is physical and every footstep must be thought about before it’s taken. None of the routines of urban life will work here. Water does not come out of taps: light isn’t made by switches on the wall. Your phone works only as a camera. You must watch every step on the irregular stone that underlies the pockets of thin soil.
All of the absences force your attention onto what is present. We were quite alone. There was one other, empty cabin about 100 metres away. The nearest cabin after that was five kilometres away. If there was no one staying in that, the next nearest human was 17 kilometres from here.
This is not friendly country. The sense that it is completely indifferent to human life presses on everyone who comes here. Some find it frightening and repulsive. I knew a woman once who called it “boring”, which to me was sacrilege.
These high-mountain wastelands are, I think, exactly what the Lake poets meant by “the Sublime”. But, even when they’re as pretty as a photograph, it is presence which lends enchantment to these views. They offer no entertainment, and demand complete attention.
The absence that we think has mostly blessed us is the lack of phones, but that’s not quite true. Without a mobile signal, a phone still holds the tools for productive solitude: a library of books, a camera with which to compose the view, and, nowadays, maps that will also magically show you where you are. What’s really missing is not just distraction but the need we feel for distraction: when it is imperative to do what you are doing, alternatives become unthinkable, and this is a marvellous kind of liberation.
STILL, the return to the world of noise seems, at first, like a further kind of liberation. Hot water comes from taps again, and need no longer be carried up from the lake in cold buckets and then heated on a fire. If things run out, we can replace them from a shop.
But with all this convenience comes the noise. It’s not just news, although our phones that were such friends up on the mountains now pour out gloom and nonsense. It’s not just the visual noise of advertisements, which mean that almost any printed text you see is going to be a lie; not just the physical noise of motors everywhere, petrol, diesel, and even the humming of refrigerators. It’s not just half-heard music. It’s the fact everything in the world of noise is watched or listened to less for its own sake than as a way of not hearing, or seeing, something else. We crave distraction as a form of isolation.
I need to be part of a congregation, five or six people gathered for morning prayer in an otherwise deserted cathedral, if I want to recall the life-giving emptiness of the mountains.
