When the tide recedes, great shards of frozen fjord shatter against the shore. The ocean leaves them there as it pulls back from the land, and they pile up in a jagged ruin that stretches all around the bay at Flekkefjord. When the sun is blazing and the tide is moving at its fastest, you can hear the cracking again and again, the fractures spidering, like ocean breathing.
The west coast of Norway is not usually in so tight a winter’s grasp. Snow usually comes and goes. Rain falls and melts it back. The ice begins to form, then fades as if it were not real. Only in a few special snaps of cold does the winter really settle on us here, sixty degrees north but bathed in the ocean’s more moderated climate. Minnesota winters were far colder.
In the mountains over our school’s campus, winter piles up. Sometimes, a gradient of white begins at the mountaintops and fades gently into brown here at sea level, as if we are watching the seasons change in one sweep of the eyes. On the mountain, it is Christmas, and down here, it is March. This January, there has been no gradient, only snow on snow on snow.
Between classes, I dip outside. I trudge across the pier, at first following the earlier footsteps of students, then striking my own way, until I can peer down over the edge. The water is gone, replaced by blank, flat, white, snow-covered now so that I must remind myself it is thin ice, the saltwater more reluctant to freeze than lakes. Nobody ice skates on the fjord. No footsteps, even of birds. Distantly, there is open water where our wide bay ends, and the fjord’s deeper channel cuts north-south, itself still only a spur off the larger Dalsfjord that opens to the sea.
On Wednesday afternoon, in fading light, I leave my grading, trek along the bay, and cross at the bridge to the two islands. Crowds have gone before me: students perhaps, or patients from the Red Cross rehabilitation center with which we share our campus. They have packed the snow down smooth, and someone has placed signs warning it is slippery. For the moment, I am alone.
On another pier, facing away from the school across the fjord, I stand in snow and cold and watch the dying light. Something about this beauty makes philosophy easier. My mind can contemplate more clearly in that broad space. What is winter? What am I? What story am I telling, and is it real? I am as real as winter. We’re pieces of the same whole. The ice is cracking in the tide, and it will freeze again tonight, crack, refreeze, on until it grows too warm.
Words like trees 