At some point in the cold beginnings of the new year, we in the districts enter a kind of rhythm with our days. Part of this is caused by our anticipation of the sun’s return. The temperatures tend to get colder. More snow falls. All the while, the sun swells closer and closer to the horizon. The sky changes, and we can see, if we look, a fresh palette of pastels filling our view of the world. Clouds turn the same golden color of sunlit wheat. The sky itself will turn the color of salmon flesh. Colors pass over the mountains and tint the sea and gift us with a light that we have not seen for some weeks. On the horizon there are distinct layers of pinks, blues, violets, all in pastel. Eventually, the sun returns. I saw it return on the morning of January 20th.
Locals have told me, though I have not seen evidence of this, that the chieftains from long ago lived very near where my house stands today. They kept small farms. They built boats. They weaved fishing nets. They raised livestock. They picked this location because of the sun. We receive the sun earlier than other parts of the island. On the mainland, people will need to wait a few more days before they even glimpse the sun. A few more days wouldn’t matter too much, except that the arrival of the sun can feel so essential. When it does arrive, when we do see it, our sun starved bodies want to rush carelessly into its magnificence. Now we are assured of warmer days. Our eyes rejoice. Our skin tingles. Perhaps more than anything else, we are relieved.
I do not know what the old chieftains believed about the sun’s return. I am not convinced of their having lived here—here being the exact location where my house stands. There were once villages thriving on either side of where I live. I have walked among their ruins. I have pressed my hands into the grooves where their houses and barns prospered long ago. I have seen the mounds of their supposed dead. I say “supposed dead” because it is thought (and proven) that some of the burial sites do not contain bodies. They never did. The reason for this is because burial mounds were another a way of claiming land. It is speculated that these mounds were intended as warning signs for passing ships and their crews. This land is taken, a ship captain might have read in the mounds, and a fight is assured if we invade. I am not certain, but perhaps these villages were raided at one time or another. To be a Viking was to enter a vocation, after all, though presumably no one wanted to raid or fight in subzero temperatures. Mostly what people did, and what was a necessary struggle until fairly recent times, was not to freeze to death and to keep their livestock alive. Not many of us freeze to death anymore, though it can happen, and the horses, sheep, and cattle are given comfortable lives here. Even so, what would the return of the sun have meant for our ancestors? I am not convinced this is knowable, though maybe there were rituals and mythologies attached to the event. I can think of no reason why not. Regardless of any ritualization, I suspect most of our Dark Age ancestors felt as we do, which is to say relieved, enchanted, and assured that better days or at least warmer days were coming.
The sun returns, and some of us recognize this event for the miracle that it is. Of course, daily life still happens. My garbage job ended back in November. I fulfilled the contract and moved on. That’s how those jobs go. You do the job. You pretty much stay invisible. Then you leave. But in January, I was offered a teaching assistant position at the local elementary and middle schools. The school nearest where I live has roughly 60 students from 1st through 10th grade. The other school, which is located on the mainland, has 16 students from 1st through 7th grade. I have never worked with children, other than with my own two sons, which, I’ve noticed, hasn’t been particularly helpful for working with other children. For every page I can help a child read, every math problem I can help solve, for every stroke of handwriting I can help improve, I am, for the most part, an observer. Who are these little people? Naturally, they have their own joys and sorrows and anxieties. It is a thrill for many of them to slide down the snow hill that has accumulated at the end of the parking lot. It is a joy to glide over ice. It is a joy to eat snow. Sorrow has many causes: We didn’t play the game I wanted to play today. The bigger boys don’t give the smaller kids a chance. My friend said she didn’t want to be my friend anymore. He hit me with a snowball, and now I hate him. Anxiety appears in an ever shifting variety: nose picking, pulling at clothes, eyes rolling, non-sensical blabber. In this way, humanity is ever present. These children are people, not rabbits, and like most teachers, I am curious if I am recognizing who some of them will become as adults. Will the girl who helps other students with their lessons continue to be helpful? Will the boy who is smart at what he likes but doesn’t like what is difficult ever appreciate that smarts rarely get a person to where one wishes to go? Who can say? And perhaps it is not fair to put so many expectations on a child, even when we do not give voice to them, knowing full-well, as we grown-ups do, that we go through many changes in life, some of which we cannot begin to reckon with as children.
While working with children, I am conscious of the obvious fact that I was also a child. I do not recall many sorrows. My body was broken, which meant there was pain. I found joy in the impressive blue of autumnal skies. I was thrilled whenever I could light on fire the plastic army men in my friend’s sandpit. I got suspended for fighting. I found pleasure in reading, and in 4th grade, I discovered the Ramona Quimby books by Beverly Cleary. During recess, I would sneak away to the nearest tree at my elementary school in Beaumont, Texas, to read about Ramona and her life in Oregon. As for anxieties, I scratched and picked at everything. I had a terrible temper. Sometimes I pretended not to listen to my teachers. Although whenever a teacher called me down for not listening, I repeated back to her every word she had spoken, verbatim, even using her inflections. That was usually enough to piss her off but also enough for her to leave me alone, which was the primary aim of my educational endeavors.
There is a balance for what a student needs to learn and what a student needs. I want these little people to have a good day. I am curious how much they think of their day as being “good” or “bad.” Perhaps those terms are too limiting for them—too limiting for many of us—but what is their criteria? Throughout a typical school day, I watch children fall into each other’s traps. I check their self-sabotaging as soon as I catch it, and, if possible, steer them in another direction. I am delighted when they solve problems. I am grateful when they do not crash their own experiences. Sometimes the worst thing that can happen to a child is knowing that another child is having a better day. Teachers try to level the field, but the field is never level. There are people who are stronger and smarter than we are, and these divisions show-up early. I say this as a man who cannot bench press 100lbs and who is unsure of his multiplication tables. But one child crushing another child’s snowball is a fact of life, albeit a nasty one. Mercifully, most kids are not nasty.
Their joy, like their play, reflects where we live. I asked a 10 year old girl who was skiing with me on a Thursday during uteskole, “What season do you like best? Summer or winter?” She thought about it a moment. “Winter,” she said. “Why?” I asked her. “Because it’s cold and dark and miserable. I love it!” “Not summer?” “Summer is okay. But it’s hot, and there are too many bugs.” Or take the other day, when a tremendous ice slick had formed in front of the school, the 1st and 2nd graders called me over to where they were huddled in front of the slick, “Look, Damon! Look, Damon! I am a penguin.” With that, a little boy made a short dash, dropped onto his stomach and slid on the ice with his arms behind him. He clinched his hands to his side and kept his legs slightly elevated. He was a penguin. Soon the other children, all dressed in their kjeledress, joined in, and off they went down the ice, sliding penguins all! On there was another day at uteskole when the children were taught how to build fires in the snow. The first lesson was given inside the lavvu, where one of the teachers, I think it was Anne, kindled a fire in the small box stove. Lars, the other teacher, explained to the children how to stack wood into the shape of a pyramid, fixing a kind of platform on top of the pyramid where they could set the birch bark—or næver, which is the paper like outer bark of birch. Lars explained that after the pyramid was built, the platform ready, the næver in place, they could hold a flame to the næver and slowly add the pinne—small twigs or sticks—as the flames grew. The children were then separated into four groups and sent outside to collect wood and find a place in the snow where they could construct their fires. Lars, Anne, and I wandered between them. We brought them extra wood. We demonstrated how the pinne should be used to build up the fire. The bigger sticks should be used after the fire is established. In a short time, all four groups had fires going. Later, they ate their lunches beside these fires. They had built them. They had nurtured them.
It should be mentioned that these schools are not outdoor schools. They are not offering a specialized education. We are not preparing children for a professional future. We are not training the future Mountain Guides of Norway. Rather, this is school. We learn our multiplication tables, our division problems. We learn who helps us in society and who we can help. Most of the girls are well-mannered and do their lessons. The boys can hardly sit still, and every implement has the potential of becoming a sword, a bomb, or a football. At the end of a day, at the end of every day with them, I hope they will remain decent people.
Day by day the sun will climb higher in the sky. Driving home, I sometimes see people stopped along the road. Most of them are tourists. They stop to take pictures. They are dressed head to toe in polar gear. They hold their cameras steady, waiting for some moment they believe will appear. I, too, sometimes stop. I remind myself not to take for granted a good view. Like everyone else who stops and gets out of their cars, I am met by a frigid wind and the sound of the hav. The cold is bitter this time of year. It’s a hard cold, but I try not to let it hurry me. The combination of snow and ice, the sea and mountains, and the reality that any of us can survive here feels like rare circumstances. I am reminded of the archeologist who told me years ago that we humans tend to live wherever we can live. The sub-artic is one of those places where we can live, though little here invites us to stay.
Along the seafront, the mountains and sky dance with the new light of the new sun. We can see again the limited space between ourselves and the world, if there is space at all. We can see what is beautiful. There is a strangeness to this beauty, to this cold, to this ice and sea and mountains. There is always a strangeness with beauty, not the beauty of the world alone, but of beauty in general. The knowledge that beauty is always passing is a part of its strangeness. This knowledge can indeed shake us when we discover it. What has sustained us, what has ushered us out of grief, what has for so long burst with life, cannot go on. I try to stay outside until I am absorbed into another silence. Afterwards, and hopefully something within me has been restored, I return to my car. I turn on the heater. I wonder why I tossed my coffee cup in the backseat. I debate whether I should scrape the rear window. I am less than 10 kilometers from home. The rear window shouldn’t matter too much. I shift into first and steer the car onto the icy road. I am trying not to think about dinner. Get home, I tell myself. Enjoy what is left of the drive. Dinner will happen when it happens.
Increasingly, I choose not to listen to music or a podcast while driving. As the landscape becomes more familiar to me, I have found more opportunities to experience its silence. Patrick Leigh Fermor in his book A Time to Keep Silence tells us that Trappists, a monastic sect recognized for their devotion to silence, sought flat landscapes for their monotony. It is this monotony that “impels the mind towards the contemplation of last things.” Monotony and familiarity share space. Likewise, the practice of silence, like the practice of prayer, is a method of inviting the more that is in the world to reach us. Since the return of the sun this year, I have been seeing the mountains as I have not seen them in previous years. The returning sun illuminates the mountains from below and behind them. When the sun starts its return, the edges of the mountains appear extra sharp. On windy days, whorls of snow blow from the summits. Sunlight flashes in the snow, and the exchange seems like a kind of drama. We can feel its power, but our part is small. We need only to notice that we are touched.
There are more subtle dramas at play in this world. I saw this recently while looking through a school window. The school happens to be one where the other schools make field trips. The school, the Big School, as the children call it, has a swimming pool. Once a week over the course of a couple of months, children are bussed to this school where they can swim. While half the class swims, the other half works on their assignments. I was in the classroom this particular week. The students stressed over their math sheets. At least, they were not breaking each other’s pencils or wadding up each other’s papers, which was just fine. Sometimes not causing trouble has to be good enough. While the students labored over math problems, I turned to the one window in the classroom. I was looking for reindeer. We saw several reindeer on the drive over from the smaller school on the island—several reindeer and one moose. The moose lingered a few yards off the road. He nibbled at the top of a birch tree. Looking out of the window, I didn’t see any reindeer. Rather I saw a distant peak, the summit of which commanded a scrim of mountains. Suddenly, this one peak was covered with sunlight, while the rest of the mountains stayed blue-grey and frozen. This one peak had caught fire. I felt as if another silence had entered the room. I stood there a moment looking, trying not to move or to suggest any indication of what I was seeing outside. And I know myself well enough to know that I could have abandoned the day. I could have called it quits then and there, dismissing the students from the room and wishing them good luck for the rest of the day and the rest of their lives. But instead, I turned away from the window and checked their math sheets. The students were waiting their turn to swim, growing more restless, losing more and more attention as the minutes ticked by, as a sun sunlit line of mountains gave more life to the cold.
I did not mention the peaks to the students. I did not. There have been other occasions when I have nearly begged students to notice the shape of a tree or the shape of a stone or some other thing, some other moment in nature. There was an afternoon when the moon was bright enough we could see its glow behind the mountains. There was another morning a couple of weeks ago when one of the peaks on the mainland emerged from an enormous milky blue cloud. This same cloud covered an entire range of mountains, yet this one peak—this one peak—rose out of the blue. No other peaks were visible. It looked like a fortress from some other Earth. All the light was blue. As this one peak held dominion over the terrain.
“Do you see the mountain?” I asked the girl. She is a second grader, and she seemed almost surprised that I should ask her anything. She looked in the direction I pointed.
“I see the mountain,” she said.
“It’s very blue, I think.”
“It’s REALLY blue! Damon?”
“Yes?”
“Could you come play with us on the swing?”
“The swing is covered in snow,” I tell her.
“Not that swing! The swing on the OTHER side of the school.”
“Okay. We can do that.”
She hopped up and down. “Come on! Come on!”
“You go ahead. Jeg komme snart.”
“Okei, Damon! Okei, Damon!”
Off she went. Off to the swing and to where her friends were playing.
In a lifetime of wandering, I have not seen a mountain appear as this one peak appeared, from blue to blue, from light to light into a place all its own. I stared at the mountain long enough to place it deep into my memory. I will need it someday. Still I went to the girl and pushed her on the swing. I had told her I would do so, and she was glad.