Norway, Arctic Light

Article by Cory Searcy
Photo by Lonely Planet Images\Ned Friary

It’s bright. While my alarm clock claims it’s two in the morning, my biological clock is scrambled. Up here, far beyond the Arctic Circle, it is almost as if time has stopped moving. There is no way to know what part of the day, week, or month I’m in. I am told it is now the middle of July, right around the official end of the Midnight Sun period, but the light doesn’t seem ready to fade away just yet. Like a boxer refusing to stay down, it keeps coming back for another round.

Lying on a small, hard bunk, I am desperately trying to catch some sleep here in A, a hamlet in Norway’s Lofoten Islands. On the last night of a weeklong trip, I can’t help but feel that I’ve been here forever. Shaking slightly, I pull my sleeping bag over my head and drift in and out of sleep. My mind wanders as I contemplate the bread, goat cheese, and cold cuts that await me at breakfast. Or would that be dinner? I’m confused.

From A to Borg and a dozen islands in between, I’ve been floating between slanted sunlight on the horizon and cold shadows of glacial fjords aboard the Kong Harald. It’s one of eleven steam ships servicing Scandinavia’s most famous voyage, the hurtigruten. Every night of the year, a hurtigrute ship steams north from Bergen on its weeklong coastal voyage to Kirkenes, a mining town near the Russian border.

Onboard, I had not rented a cabin, and along with two dozen other backpackers I scrambled to find a place to catch some shut-eye. Several of us spread our sleeping bags on deck and put on sunglasses: It was the only way to get some sleep.

The Kong Harald quietly wound its way through narrow straits occasionally so shallow I could catch a glimpse of sandbanks through the translucent water. On both sides, glacier-carved mountains towered over the boat. Above, the sun peeked between another chain of mountains to warm a few red-roofed houses in an arctic fishing village, leaving the port clogged with boats in darkness. In a place where the line between day and night, conscious and unconscious is often blurred, the unforgiving landscape abounds in myth and legend. In these islands, the spirit of the trolls endures.

Aboard a battered old fishing boat large enough to accommodate six tables of card-playing students, we threw down straight flushes and raked in pots of Norwegian kroners while one of the locals told us a legend: When struck by the light of the sun, trolls turn to stone. Moreover, some of the slower Lofoten trolls, unmindful of that truth, now make up parts of the surrounding mountains. All through the Lofotens, stunning peaks of this troll-bred granite knife straight from the sea. As an engineer, I think that many of the mountains straddling this narrow inlet slope up as though tracing a logarithmic curve. Not very much like the dwarfed, big-nosed Lofoten trolls the locals really seem to believe in. Then again, the sun-induced state of bewilderment just might make me believe I’ve seen a real one, instead of the hundreds of dolls for sale to tourists alongside cod-drying racks in the villages.

Kicking restlessly in my bunk, the brightness of the sun and the ever-present smell of fish overwhelming me, I begin to wonder if the trip might have been a dream. After all, only the cold stabs of the wind had confirmed I was ever truly awake. The Midnight Sun had removed the comfort provided by what might be referred to as “normal time” and imposed a state of prolonged, but softly beautiful jetlag. In doing so, it had taken me to another place, one shrouded in superstition and mystique. This groggy epiphany leads me to think that the true allure of the Lofotens isn’t the mountains, the water, or the fish. It is the state of mind that only a trip to 68 degrees north can elicit.

After a cold breakfast, I soon find myself on a boat back to the Norwegian mainland: drifting ever so slowly away from the light. About the only thing I didn’t get to see in the Lofotens was the sunset, but it is coming soon. It is hard to believe that a place so captivating could spend half its time in the dark.