Holiday Letter 2006
Thirty years ago I was handed a plank that moments before was holding back a great dammed up river of, lets just say, very ripe manure. Not knowing exactly what to do, I grabbed it knowing that Lars Brandstveit, the Norwegian farmer I was working for was all business. More planks followed and more manure flowed. We proceeded to fill the large rectangular steel bucket on the back of his 4-wheel drive tractor, and then Lars drove the bucket and me to the upper pasture.
Little did I know I was to spend the next week, pitch fork in hand, spreading bucketful after bucketful of sh-t in circles radiating out from the center of the piles that were regularly delivered from the barn below. My amazement at actually standing in piles of year old manure was tempered when I realized I was fertilizing next years hay crop and somehow that mollified my tormented soul.
Why am I telling you this, because this year on July 3rd, 2006 Charlotte and I were riding in that same bucket up past the high pasture in Norway. We used it to travel half way to Jonstal, the name for the summer cabins at the base of the local mountain call Vassfjora. This time Charlotte rode next to me with the late farmer's son Tore at the controls. His six-year-old grandson Lars, grandpa's namesake, was perched behind him in the cockpit of the rugged Italian four-wheel drive tractor.
It turned out that this was Charlotte's first tractor ride and you would think we were on a speeding roller coaster at Great America for all the hoop-and-hollering she was doing as we made our way up the steep rock strewn road. In 1973 we would have started at the back of the barn and climbed some 1000 meters up doing a fast Norwegian jog through fruit trees, deciduous forest, towering pines and firs, into larch and short scrub. Finally emerging on the mossy tundra above the tree line.
In forty-five minutes of relentless walking we would leave the well-manicured farms along this branch of the Hardanger Fjord, and walk high into the greenery, rocks and snow of the high summer pasture amongst the thirteen huts that belong to the farmers of Lekve. Though we are in Ulvik proper, every small grouping of farms has their own title and Lekve is where the Brandstveit's farm is located.
Once we reach the top we are surrounded by mountains, valleys and trout filled alpine lakes. It is here and in other similar areas that the citizens of Ulvik rode out the German occupation. And it is here that I spent every weekend but one of my three month stay on the Brandsteivt's farm in 1973.
The cows and their by-products are long gone, so the bucket is as clean as a farm bucket can be. Tore, with the urging of his wife Karin, has made us a comfortable seat of old pallets and cushions. It was a bit like riding in a Model A's rumble seat except we faced backwards. Once hearing protection was donned we started on our climb. Tore engaged the hydraulics of the tractor decisively lifting the bucket, and us, a meter into the air. This should have enabled us to clear most obstructions, but due to the severely rutted road did not.
I had been exhorting Charlotte for months with threats of Jonstal. We were to have started getting in shape for Norway at the first hint of spring, but as it worked out we were less active. To make matters worse Charlotte's ankle mysteriously swelled, turn blue and painful the beginning of May. Sticking to the adage to avoid treating one’s family, I directed her to the local Urgent Care facility with instructions to request an X-ray. Five hundred dollars later, not including an eighty-dollar ankle brace, a fracture was ruled out, ice applied, Celebrex swallowed and disaster averted.
I could count the cylinders firing as we slowly made our ascent. We passed through three or four fenced off areas: first rocky fields, then deciduous and coniferous forests that delineated the various pastures. Our Midwest sense of grazing land is turned on its head and as we break out of the tree line onto the tundra Charlotte exclaims, “The Sound of Music” and right she is.
But I am getting ahead of myself here. I have skipped over our final forty-minute hike up where no tractor could go. The rock out cropping where we drink sweet water from a glacial stream filtered through miles of rock and moss. Looking out over the Hardanger fjord and hiking past two special boulders: one named for an alcoholic berry that grows on its top and the other called the “Bride’s Chair” due to its distinctive shape.
Walk simply does not describe the slippery moss covered boulders, the stream beds traversed, the horse fly’s nipping at our heels, the cool of the dark canopy, the heat of the open mountain sun, and the effort we extend trying to follow the long stride of this tall Norwegian farmer with the new titanium hip and his skipping grandson.
For two out of shape, car addicted flatlanders we do not embarrass our country or ourselves. We arrived intact and were fed sunny-side up eggs with thin slices of smoked salmon on thick whole grain bread spread with sweet butter and washed it all down with quarts of instant ice tea.
We discussed gillnetting trout and skip stones while little Lars skinny-dipped in a clear glacial lake. To get there we walked through moss much drier than I remember. There has been little rain or snow in recent years. This is evident in the sparsely covered mountaintops and the disappearing waterfalls.
The decent, while more torturous and hurtful to feet and knees, was anticlimactic. If that can ever be said while catching views of Ulvik’s bowl shaped valley as it cradles the terminus of the great Hardanger fjord. As if the walk to Jonstal was not enough for one day, Tore peeled off at the upper pasture to turn the hay he cut earlier in the morning, leaving Lars to guide us down the steeply graded road to the homestead.
Below awaits a meal of whole baked salmon and boiled parsleyed potatoes that we ladled a delicate white sauce onto. We drank apple juice frozen since last years harvest and ended the meal with fresh strawberries covered in clotted cream and sprinkled with sugar.
Other than the coffee, all we needed was a crisp Riesling to top off this meal, but alas it is dry on this Norwegian farm. After dinner the four of us sat on the veranda over looking the orchards of the Hardanger valley and waited for the sunset that never came.
