Three Ways to Capsize a Boat - Chris Stewart [36]
As we slipped behind the outer islands and entered the more sheltered archipelago, the sea became calmer, and Hirta churned along unimpeded by the waves of the open sea. We lay around on the deck oohing and aahing at the beauty of the place … the little green valleys, the cliffs and waterfalls and huge ranges of snowy mountains all reflected in the deep, still waters. But the serenity of the scene was, apparently, quite deceptive. According to Tom there were winds that could all of a sudden rush down the mountains and knock a boat like ours clean over. Katabatic winds, he called them, that could spring at you from the still and silent landscape like a wild beast breaking cover. And they could rush the other way, too (these were called anabatic winds), knocking boats like ninepins as they raced from the water straight up the mountainside.
We mulled this over silently. Fortunately neither wind made a showing that day, and we moved on uneventfully through the baffling maze of islands and fjords that hide the entrance to the port city of Bergen. And there we did what sailors do, which is go to a bar and drink beer, our faces full of wind and our bodies swaying with the memory of waves. Norway was ruinously expensive back then, and the beer was well beyond our modest means, but we had to have it and, believe me, it had never tasted so good. We felt special, in the way that you do when you come in off the sea, or down off a mountain, or out of the wild … we existed on a slightly different plane from those around us.
Not long after, we slipped our moorings and headed south, and after a day of cruising easily in the flat water of the fjords, we dropped anchor in the bay of Norheimsund, a little town on the Hardanger Fjord. It was apple blossom time, and there is simply nothing, as Tom had said, quite like the Hardanger Fjord in apple blossom time. The fjord itself is a place of heart-stopping beauty, with its sheets of deep calm water spreading inland for a hundred miles among idyllic valleys, backed by snowcapped mountains. In early summer this effect is heightened by the glowing mists of pure white blossoms that shine from the apple orchards as if bright patches of snow had lingered in the warm green valleys, and beneath the trees the meadows are a dense carpet of wild flowers. It made you wonder why anyone would want to leave such a place, especially to head out on the desperate sea route to Vinland.
We were in no hurry to leave the fjords, as we were waiting for the late summer melting of the ice pack, so we wandered, wafted by gentle breezes, from harbor to harbor and fjord to fjord, marveling at the beauty of it all. We ate pollock, because it was too expensive to buy anything to eat in Norway, and the fjords were alive with pollock. We kept a line trailing from the stern of the boat, and we lived off pollock stew and pollock curry and pollock fried and baked and boiled. To accompany it, we drank whisky from the ship’s stores as, after our first experence, we knew we couldn’t afford the beer. Pollock and whisky … well, you could do worse.
And then one night, moored to the fish dock in some wind-blasted town way out in the outlying islands, we were invaded by drunks who had smelled the whisky. The Norwegians have a weakness for this sort of thing; it’s the long gloomy Nordic winter coupled with a general Scandinavian propensity for the bottle, a hangover no doubt from the Vikings. The first inkling of the drunks’ presence was a crate of beer that appeared through the skylight and then was lovingly lowered on to the saloon table. After this display of good intent, we had to invite them down, and there they proceeded to make ruinous inroads into our whisky supply, while regaling us with incomprehensible stories in Norwegian. Eventually Tord, their ringleader, stumbled over to the galley to see what we were going to eat.
“Vot