The Purple Cow

ZIGZAGGED, rock-studded, fjord-slashed, the coast of Norway scrabbles 13,000 devious miles from Halden in the southeast to Kirkenes up beyond the North Cape. Counting by length and ignoring the rattail width of the country, nearly half of Norway lies above the Arctic Circle. It seemed positively improvident to loiter through such a territory in June without seeing the midnight sun, although the midnight sun, unlike circular rainbows and the dance of the lyrebird, is a natural phenomenon I have never seriously hankered to view.

An unpatriotic Norwegian encouraged my doubts. “The midnight sun? Nothing to it. Gets up in the sky, hangs around for a bit, and starts back again. Does just what it’s supposed to do. Looks just the way you’d expect. And there’s no need to go to the North Cape. You may see it anywhere above the Arctic Circle.”

Considering his idiomatic fluency in English, I should have been warned by the word may, but I was not. The tourist office mentioned Stamsund in the Lofotens as a handy spot inside the Arctic Circle; a fishing town with a hotel whose manager spoke English, was resourceful about local transport, and liked alien visitors. And the name of this hotel? The office was mildly taken aback. They supposed it had one but had never really noticed, “because it’s the only hotel there.”

I thought it ridiculous to start for the Arctic without even the address of a renter of dog teams, but this was the local way. One boarded a plane, whirred north above clouds that resembled a layer of dirty soapsuds, and came down at Bodo.

Oslo had been all green and blue, the air sticky with the scent of lilacs. Bodo was brown and gray, its airport wedged into a flat spot chiseled out of the huddling bare hills; the town, treeless and nearly grassless, spread like a scatter ol boxes along the harbor. (They were neat, new boxes, for everything in Bodo has been rebuilt, of necessity, since the Germans burned it flat.) The wind blew cold out of the northwest, carrying a whiplash rain and the harsh iodine smell of the sea. At the dock, the coastwise jitney was whistling imperiously and needlessly, for passengers had already clotted about the gangway and the rest of the Bodo population stood in the lee of warehouses, supervising the loading of freight.

Stamsund, on Vestvagoy at the south end of the Lofoten chain, is only a short run from Bode. We bounced through the wind-swirled mist for four hours, evaded various large rocks, and slid into the smooth, narrow waters of Stamsund harbor. On the dock, the school band played a spirited welcoming march, for what or whom, nobody could tell me. The purser thought they might simply be rehearsing. At least, I think that’s what he thought, but there is no guarantee that either question or answer was perfectly understood by both parties.

Perfect understanding or not, the purser was my last contact with the reliably bilingual tourist world. Up the gravel road from the dock — there is no paving in Stamsund — I found the one hotel in turmoil. The English-speaking manager was departing, rather in the manner of one carried off the held of battle. His hands shook. Clearly the place had been too much for him.

It did indeed look like a discouraging spot to run a hotel. The town begins on a spit ol’land between the large harbor and a smaller inlet where the fishing boats come in, and runs inland along the narrow slope between this inlet and a ridge of steep, rocky, soot-colored hills jutting up to the west. I estimated the number of buildings at fewer than 200, including the oil tanks out on the point, dock warehouses, cod-liver oil plant, fish-meal factory, freezing plant, grocery, general store, post office, town hall, garage, seaman’s temperance lodging house with public cafeteria, hardware and ship supply outfit, a string of small board-and-batten houses for the use of fishermen temporarily in port, and a bookstore combined with the electrical shop. The bookstore carried marine charts, stationery, drawing materials, excellent art books on people like Picasso and Chagall, and a formidable assortment of reading matter in Norse, English, and French. The books ranged from The Light That Failed in translation to William Shirer’s Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, and the paperback department ran heavily to scholarly topics. No movie theater was to be seen in Stamsund, no television aerials, no bar, and very few people. The houses, small, square, and glossy with new paint, stood closely packed along the main, and for practical purposes, only, street. On a small round plateau at the far end of town, a church tower rose from a straggle of tree tops, the only trees in sight.

Back from the harbor and the town, a stripe of green circled the base of hills which rolled up, brown and empty, to dark, wind worn crags that vanished into the low-hanging clouds. Silence enclosed Stamsund like a glass bell.

Reduced to my own invention by the flight of the iiotel manager, I had lunch, beerless and baffled, at the cafeteria, which I did not recognize as a teetotal establishment. This was stupidity on my part. I should have known when I was offered water that I was in a temperance house, for the worst defeat I suffered in Norway was over a glass of water in an Oslo restaurant. The Oslo waitress, eager to please if she could only grasp what was wanted, hovered anxiously while I tried the word water in every form I could think of and several that I concocted in the hope of hitting an approximately Norwegian noise. No result except a bottle of lemon pop. Pantomime and picture drawing worked no better. At last, the Norseman at the next table, who had been listening with silent but unmistakable mirth, intervened and set the waitress straight. Then he turned to me and said, '‘You know, she really understood what you were saying. The trouble was that she couldn’t believe it.”

C^^UTSIDE, the overcast was breaking up. Spots of sunlight moved across the hills, turning the brown to a soft gold shot with sparks of green, copper, rose, and deep violet. Evidently there was something up there besides discouraged grass. I collected the sketchbook from the hotel and started for the farside of the harbor, which looked quite uninhabited.

Within four minutes, I was out of town on a narrow road that looped along the inner edge of the beach, following every quirk of the shoreline. A rough seawall supported the road, broken in one spot by a complex of battered arrangements in concrete. They seemed to have been dug into the road on the water side, and into the hill inland, and despite recognizable stairways and door frames, were loo small for any sane structure. Puzzled, I climbed on a broken wall which had once encircled some sort of window, and looked through the gap.

I had a neatly comprehensive view of the harbor entrance and Stamsund dock. Gun emplacements. Very thoroughly demolished.

There is no middle to northern landscape. It is designed for the telescope or the microscope, with nothing between the immense background panorama of monochromatic rock and tundra and the infinitely detailed foreground full of midge-size blossoms, stunted pebbles, dwarfish shells. The ground beside the road was crowded with infinitesimal dandelions, buttercups, Johnny-jump-ups, nameless wonders in the shape of white stars, magenta paintbrushes, Yale-blue bells. They flourished in a world four inches high.

Pursuing these plants, I worked my way up a slope toward a spatter of rose and blue patches which seemed to be five feet across. How big they really were I never learned, for the moss, soft as a feather bed under foot, was also treacherous. A sheet of it came loose from the underlying rock, and I skidded noisily backward into the roadside ditch. A couple of ravens rose from the higher cliff, screaming disapproval. Their cries bounced back from the surrounding crags like a series of gunshots. Some sheep up the hill skittered off in a tinkle of bells. It was altogether a most unseemly racket, and attracted the owner of a bicycle lying beside the road.

This was a boy of fifteen or so, who came down the hillside with the assurance, if not the speed, of a chamois. He was carrying a sort of cross between a knapsack and a portfolio, and cheerfully admitted to botanizing, not entirely for pleasure. The Bodo Gymnasium, where he was a student, tends to science and was demanding 150 botanical specimens.

The island maintains only primary schools, so this boy was living in Bodo in partnership with several other youths. I gathered that they subsisted on their own cooking, and that the trip home to Stamsund was made as often as possible and had some of the aspects of a foraging expedition.

The young man was a gift of providence. He translated the local names of flowers into English, calling the one with flamboyant magenta clusters “midsummer flower” and the delicate white blossom, exactly like one that grows in New England woods, “forest star,” although there has been no forest on Vestvagoy since the last glacier moved out. A neat black and white affair stumped him. The name was somehow untranslatable, but he made up for that by explaining that the actual flower was the black, fluffy center tuft; the greenish-white outer petals were mere wrappings.

I asked about the concrete structure and was told it had indeed been a German gun emplacement. “They had them everywhere,” he said, and launched into an amiably ironic description of his elders. “They’re all still bragging about what they did against the Germans. Maybe it’s true. I wasn’t born then.” He added that peace and quiet, while desirable, tend to encourage boredom, and skipped from that to history and berserkers. “Those fellows that went into battle without armor and couldn’t feel fear or pain. They did it on flea mushrooms.” Did he mean fly amanita? “No — the red pointed caps with white spots. I believe they are different. Poisonous, of course. I think the old — well, we call them the old ones — knew a lot about plants — how to use them for medicine, you see. But they were very wild.” The tone of voice betrayed guilty, admiring envy of the old ones.

This sheepish nostalgia for the wicked past, recent or remote, is not confined to the young. An otherwise sensible man, describing to me the outrages of the Nazi occupation, worked himself into a state of incongruous enthusiasm. It was exciting, he said; every day was full of surprise and suspense, everybody was passing news, snooping, maneuvering; just walking down the street was an adventure. Of course, he added hastily, the war was terrible. God forbid that such a thing should ever happen again. But — and his eye lit with a wild blue fire — “I wouldn’t give up the memory of it for anything.”

The young botanist had missed the show. I left him shaking his head over history’s lack of consideration and rambled on along the road to sketch some old sheds and a tipsy wharf. Down the bay, small islands came and went in the mist, lumps of angular rock like ruined castles, black against the gray-green water except when a stray shaft of sun struck both rock and water with peacock lights. The weather was definitely closing in, and by the time I finished sketching, the peaks across the inlet were blotted out by rags of cloud blown in from the invisible Atlantic. The air slapped against my face, wet and cold as a snowball, and the wind blew through my leather jacket as though it were so much gauze.

I walked back to town rather faster than I had left it. The hotel’s new management regarded me with despair and spoke in soft, lilting, incomprehensible syllables. So I settled in the dining room and looked hungry, and the cook, a hangover from the old regime, stuck her head through the door, asking “Steak?” Starvation seemed unlikely while this cook remained on duty.

Defying the effects of steak and salt air, I stayed awake, yawning, until twelve o’clock. The light dimmed to the shadowless, tarnished silver radiance of a dull November afternoon. I sat by the window and read a book while everything else in Stamsund slept except the wind, which whimpered in the empty square and gnawed at the corners of the hotel. But the sky remained heavily clouded, and as for the midnight sun — I might as well have waited for a giraffe.

BREAKFAST in a Norwegian hotel consists of a vast assemblage of cereals, breads, crackers, pots of jam, stewed fruits, five kinds of herring, thick sausages, thin sausages, and cheese. There are three kinds of cheese, a white one, a yellow one, and a block like a very large cake of naphtha soap which I mentally christened, for want of the proper name, old goat. Unless the waitress is caught and told to desist, a freshly boiled egg appears automatically.

Fortified by the egg, a great deal of coffee, and avoidance of the old goat, I wandered through Stamsund, which was suddenly full of girls in bright dresses, children throwing balls, and bicycle riders chattering as they passed each other. The sun was unequivocally out, and the air was warm. At the north end of town, away from the harbor, thin streams ran diamond bright along the roadside, and fat yellow ducklings splashed in little blue ponds. It was a very fine summer day, and it lasted almost live hours. During that time, Stamsund buzzed like a hive of happy bees. Then the wind shifted, and everybody ran for cover.

The town of Stamsund belongs almost entirely to the Johansen family. Mr. Erling Johansen, when I routed him out of his office over the bus station, proved to be a courtly gentleman of sixty or so, very willing to talk about the history of the place. The town, he told me, was virtually the creation of his father, who in 1901 acquired a small point of land on the harbor beside a lishing hamlet. Two houses and a dock about covered the inventory of the place. The senior Johansen, who must have been both imaginative and persuasive, then induced fishermen from all around the islands to bring their catch into Stamsund, and wheedled the coastal steamer line into making a stop there. As more and more fish were shipped through Stamsund, the town prospered and grew to its present size, which is, for the Lofotens, considerable. I he Johansens introduced a fish-meal factory, a codliver oil plant, and ultimately, a freezing plant. The original small point of land was extended down the harbor, the fill being granite from a nearby mountain, which when cut away made room for new houses in the town. Mr. Johansen pointed out his brother’s house, a building in simplified Palladian style, painted pistachio green and surrounded by a formal garden with clipped shrubs and white gravel paths, and explained that the spot where it sits, well into town, was once right on the beach.

We looked into the fish-meal factory, which smelt like a potato field in early spring, and then visited the five-story warehouse where stockfish — dried salt cod — is sorted into twenty grades, lied in bunches, and bagged for shipping. The best grade goes to Italy, but West Africa is a good customer for cod of slightly less distinction.

The warehouse consisted of enormous whitewalled rooms with rows of columns supporting the acres of ceiling. Fish, dried to the color and very nearly to the texture of split firewood, lay stacked, literally like cordwood, in long, narrow walls. The ends of these ramparts were carefully rounded, and neat lowers of fish circled the pillars. The grades offish were sternly segregated, as were the grades of burlap used for bagging. West Africa may not get the best cod, but it gets a fine grade of burlap, reused for all sorts of things, including garments.

The fish I was admiring were mostly from two seasons back, Mr. Johansen said. The last season had been very poor, producing no cod, but rather quantities of herring, which should have been down south between Bergen and Trondheim. Mr. Johansen spoke of these errant herring with resentment, a common attitude, I found, in Scandinavia, for the herring is an exasperating fish, always blundering about where it has no business to be.

Most of the buildings I was seeing were new. During the war, the British came in and blew up the cod-liver oil plant and everything else likely to give comfort to the Germans, and thirty-five young Stamsunders joined up and left with the commandos. Then the Gestapo appeared, fuming, and burnt live houses and took a number of leading citizens, including Mr. Johansen, off to prison. ‘’What were you doing?” I asked, for he had just regretted that age had prevented him from running off with the British. Mr. Johansen grinned. “They were afraid of what we’d do next.”

So the Stamsunders were hustled off to Tromso, where captivity was lightened by a view out the prison window of the blasted remains of the Tirpitz. The electrical cable to Stamsund had been moved, with great trouble, for the future convenience of this ship. “But she never came,” said Mr. Johansen, still tickled by the fact. “They got her up at Troms.”

The freezing plant dock was around on the old side of town, on the inlet, where stone seawalls and green-black piers supported the whole length of the waterfront. Men were extracting fish from a net floating in the harbor, and a flock of sea gulls, wildly excited, screamed as they crisscrossed in the air or rocked on the edges of the net, stabbing at dying fish. Most of the fish were actively alive, and were dragged out of the water thrashing angrily and glittering like glass in the sun. They met a quick cutthroat death, and we followed the remains indoors to the filleting machine. It turned out that Mr. Johansen himself had never before seen this contraption in action. He was much amused by it, and we stood in a swelling pool of fins, bones, blood, livers, and guts while the machine seized fish after headless fish, sliced off the fillets with a single quick slash, and tossed the debris on the floor.

Despite the sloppy habits of the filleting machine, the whole place was immaculately clean and smelt of nothing but fresh salty air. It also contained quite a percentage of Stamsund’s working population, a row of men and women in starched white caps and coveralls busy at a bench along the wall, where they were boning, trimming, and filleting fish by hand. The men did the filleting, and the girls handled the delicate job of removing excess bits of bone and skin. Hand-filleting, Mr. Johansen said, leaves less meat on the bones, but is slower. However the work is done, from live fish in the harbor to boxed fillet in the freezer takes about three hours.

“You know,” remarked Mr. Johansen as we scuffed our shoes dry on the gravel outside the building, “the cod is a wonderful fish. Every bit of it is good for something.”

Stockfish is salted and dried in the open air, on racks set up all over the district. Since I wanted to see the racks and the district too, I rode the island bus. Mr. Johansen warned me that it would be a dull trip, but he was probably prejudiced by overfamiliarity. It was not dull. The bus carried passengers, mail, and height, and the young driver was, in his own mind, either steering a war galley before the wind or taking the Dead wood Stage through bandit country.

The island roads arc narrow, winding, and rarely wide enough lor two vehicles to pass abreast because vehicles, other than bicycles, are scarce on Vestvagoy. We met one truck on a hill turn, and much backing and twisting was required to cope with it. Our driver was not discouraged in the least. We set off again very briskly, throwing gravel on every turn, scooted through fog in the valleys, and leaped through low-blowing cloud on the hilltops. Dogs fled before us, and cattle goggled reproachfully from the fields.

These cattle were pastured on short jade-green grass in a succession of valleys sloping down toward the water. The green fields were broken by occasional stretches of plowed ground and, now and then, a peat bog. Houses were widely scattered, usually set well away from the road, and quite often equipped with a small dooryard garden under sheets of transparent plastic. One enterprising householder had espaliered a pair of apple trees against his south wall. These were the only fruit trees I saw. Indeed, by southern standards there are no trees on Vestvagoy, for the Lofoten version of such things is undersized birch and rowan. These pseudo-trees, although small, are frequently very handsome, their trunks and branches twisted into gnomish, improbable shapes by the eternal wind.

Fish-drying racks, mostly empty, were thick all along the route. They stuck up on the beach, in fields and farmyards, out of rock piles, seemingly set down wherever space happened to be available. The thin poles of which they were built showed black against the sky, but at close quarters had the gray-white, old-bone color of salt-worn wood, and rather suggested skeletons of unimaginable prehistoric monsters. Some of the racks stood twenty feet high, but regardless of height, the first row of fish always hung five feet off the ground (animals), and the whole affair was covered with netting (birds).

Evidently the peat bogs provided considerable fuel for the countryside. In the little three-house villages, the air tingled with the smell, half coal, half autumn leaves, of burning peat. The bus delivered a great deal of mail to these small towns, piles of packages, and loose items ranging from a bicycle that traveled lashed on the front bumper to a pail of liquid grease, which rode, without a cover, under the front passenger seat. It was delivered without a drop spilled. On the return trip we picked up a ship’s carpenter whose gear, including a large sack of potatoes, spread throughout the bus and drew comment from the passengers.

The carpenter was going to join a fishing craft, possibly to rebuild it at sea, but I proposed to sail prosaically on the Rangvald Jarl at half past eleven, with visions of the midnight sun seen through a rainbow of flying spray. Because the ship was due, the hotel had a rush of business which utterly demoralized the staff. A contingent of crisp youngfellows from the Norwegian army ran up and down the stairs, hauling baggage. The fat little waitress, in a state of numb terror, hid in the kitchen while civilian guests in the lounge roared plaintively for food. The cook had left, carrying two suitcases. The manager leaned on the desk, looking pale.

In response to what looked like a minor Armageddon, I began to worry about the ship. Short of standing on the dock in the wind, which was now working up to gale force in my amateur opinion, how would I know when the Rangvald Jarl arrived? It was an idiotic apprehension; in small ports, everybody always knows when the boat comes in, and one need only follow the crowd. I began to badger the unfortunate manager with a question: docs this ship whistle when she docks?

I had discovered in the course of two days of semicommunication that the manager, who refused to speak a word of English, did understand the stuff if things were repeated often enough and with a lucky choice of synonyms. So I went at the problem, prepared to be as stubborn as Ulysses Grant. Will the boat whistle? Blank. Will the boat make a noise? Blank. Will we hear the Rangvald Jarl come in? Blank.

Norwegians have a strange trick of laughing loudly without making any noise or visibly moving a muscle. As I pestered the manager, the Norwegian army quietly gathered behind me in the hall. They did not make a sound, and their faces, reflected in the mirror behind the desk, were solemn as a row of tombstones. But the air vibrated with suppressed convulsions.

Finally they could stand no more, and a polite voice said, over my shoulder, what sounded like, “Tooty ship ykoomin in?” Toot was the magic word. The manager nodded luriously and actually collapsed into English. “Yes. Ship toots.”

No doubt she did, but the sound was whisked away to the south on the same rainy wind that churned up the harbor waters and rocked the Rangvald Jarl nervously against the mooring lines. The manager did his duty. He appeared in the doorway of the lounge, drew a long breath, and with obvious anguish, announced, “ The ship is here.” It was almost as satisfactory as seeing the midnight sun.