“My thanks. Don’t let me keep you from the work.”
She gave me a quick nod and disappeared in the direction of the feed sheds.
The south sheds were cool and dry. Skis, boots, ropes, ice picks, skates and a jumble of other equipment took up the whole of the north wall. I selected a coil of blue nylon rope—it smelled of must but was essentially sound—an ice pick with a bound handle, gloves, a folding ice probe, and crampons, and stowed them next to the water, cheese, chocolate, flask, and thermal compresses in my pack.
The rains of the night before had washed the whole fjell clean. Flowers poked through the glistening grass: bright gold, vivid red and lush purple; birds twittered happily from clean-scented aspen and birch as though it didn’t matter about the washed-out nests; even the stones that began to litter my path seemed fresh and new again, even though for some it had been tens or even hundreds of years since they were plucked from their beds and scoured clean by the glacier. I crunched over the silt and gravel of till washed out by recent melt and began to kick my way through the bare, fist-sized rocks still unclothed by moss, enjoying the solid chunk against my boots. Julia would still be bumping along the track towards the one-lane road that would take her to another track, and then the highway.
There were no trees now, no flowers, just hectares of sliding scree, the glacial moraine, a jumble of pebbles and stones and boulders; unsorted, unstratified rock of every colour and age, but all round, all smoothed by the action of ancient ice. Here and there moss clung bravely, and insects whirred over puddles formed in rock dimples that would be gone by late afternoon, but the barrenness overshadowed the life around it. I imagined the moors of Yorkshire when the Roman engineers first arrived: the heather and gorse, the pheasant, grouse and harebells flattened by the road builders who lay down a straight arrow of crushed stone in a straight path that sliced from one camp to another, the stonemasons following with the carefully cut limestone blocks, building so well that even today if you walk up to Goathland you can see a line in the turf stretching to the horizon, where nothing bigger than buttercups and daisies grow. Foss Way, the locals call it.
These stones had not been here that long. Most of them only dated back to the Little Ice Age, the deterioration in climatic conditions that had made Jostedalsbreen grow, sending its tongues, like Nigardsbreen, thrusting down the valleys, licking up farm and field and fjell. The Little Ice Age had culminated 250 years ago, and when the tongues shrank back, they had left behind ridges of the moraine deposited at the tips and sides of the ice. Every year the moss crept farther up the old path of the tongue; every year the tongue shrank back even farther. But now I had passed the moss and was among stone deposited thousands of years ago by the ice sheet that had covered the whole country, the ice sheet that had gouged out the fjords connected by the North Way, the sea path that made life possible in this part of the world, that had created Norway.
I could smell it now, the bite of green ice, sharp as the cut a blade of grass can make across an unwary tongue. The sun was bright. I took off my sweater, folded it into my pack, and scrambled up and farther up the scree.
Julia would have run the twelve kilometers of real road and be turning right to drive south and east along another track, passing the massive Skagastølstindane, one of the highest peaks of Jotunheimen. I wiped the sweat from my forehead and kept climbing.
Now my boots rang on bedrock, raw, bare, the colour of pâté, and there it was: the side of the glacier tongue.
Old ice looks like meringue, folded and layered by a giant’s wooden spoon over air pockets; fluffed egg white standing ten meters over my head and tinged here and there by different berries. But these weren’t the beautiful, true ice colours, just a surface layer of pollution, a grey pretending to be pink in the late morning sun, brought by last winter’s snowfalls.
I studied the ice. I wouldn’t need crampons yet. I put on gloves and began to climb. It was almost midday and I was sweating lightly, but when I bent low to the ice for handholds, my breath plumed. As I spidered diagonally up the side of the tongue, the only sounds were the crunch of snow like spilt sugar under my boots and the rush of air in and out of my lungs. Most years at this time there would be small parties of expert climbers training the less expert to be guides for the tourists who would arrive in droves at the end of the month, and the ice would be dotted with figures in bright red Gore-Tex and Day-Glo orange nylon, figures who sported lime-green and hot-pink plastic logos on boots and gloves as they planted flags to show safe paths; crisscrossed with ropes in designer colours, like brilliant, unnatural snakes. Today when I reached the top I was alone with the sky, the rock, and the ice stretching ahead of me like a photographic negative of a giant’s broken twelve-lane freeway.
Glaciers start from the snow that falls above the snowline and collects in depressions in the rock. Some of the snow melts and refreezes, recrystallizing to form a granular aggregate called névé. More snowfalls compact the névé to ice. The ice builds. Eventually the weight of the ice squeezes the lowest level out of the depression and gravity forces it downhill. It takes the path of least resistance, following valleys if there are any, forming them if there are not: gouging wide U-shapes from the rock, smoothing the huge chunks to vast round boulders, or crushing the softer sedimentary rock to sand that is washed out at the tip and edges, spilling out nutrients and fertilizing the lower valley, leaving behind strange rocks sometimes balanced precariously one atop the other. But the rock over which they grind is not uniform, and some parts rip out more easily than others. Over time, the moving glacier falls into pits it has dug itself and deep cracks form in the ice. These crevasses or sprekker are often hidden by recent snowfalls and most people who die on the ice fall down one of these cracks, especially in spring before the snow has melted. But the sprekker are why I come here, the sprekker and the ice caves and the lake.
Before the end of the Little Ice Age, the snow that fell would have been pristine, not like today, but if you find a fresh sprekk and the sun is at the right angle, you can look down through time and see the glacier as it used to be, the clean, brilliant colours deep in the ice.
Sunlight bounced off a thousand white and almost-white surfaces. I took off my pack, found my sun goggles, ice pick, a small bottle of water, a banana, and the ice probe. I put on the goggles, drank the water, ate the banana, put the peel inside the empty bottle and the bottle back in my pack, and shouldered it, then snapped out the probe. Probe in left hand and pick in right, I started walking. It had been nearly three years, but the automatic step, diagonal probe, two step, probe came back easily. It wasn’t foolproof, of course. That’s what the pick was for: if I started to fall, I would twist and swing it back at the ice and pray it held.
Sometimes the walking was easy, sometimes I had to put away the probe and use the pick to scale ice cliffs and, once, a sheet of ice like a frozen waterfall. When I started to step up the slope diagonally I sat down in the snow and clipped crampons to my boots. Judging by the sun, it was about one in the afternoon. Julia would be on E16, driving above the speed limit by the grey-green waters of Sperillen not far from the junction with E7, and Oslo, windows open and the radio on, slapping the steering wheel with her right hand in time to the music. I stood up and kicked myself another foothold on the glacier.