MacGougan at Large

Notes on A Trip to Norway - 2

Notes on A Trip to Norway - 2

“Brygge-doon”

My wife’s family used to own some property in Norway. It’s a sizable tract of undeveloped land, up in some rolling hills where sheep graze during the warmer months. The land is protected and can’t be farmed or built on - other than a very simple, old cabin (the Norwegian term is “hytte”). The cabin is accessible only by hiking trail and was used as a getaway and summer fishing spot spot by many generations of her ancestors. 

Family members - including us and our kids - would camp out in the hytte every five to ten years or so when making a trip to Norway. There wasn’t much to see or do there, but maybe that was the point. It seemed timeless and had a certain magic of embodying the family’s history and traditions.

The cabin has been used in the fall and winter by hunters, who are after either caribou or ptarmigan. I’m not sure what a ptarmigan is, but since it starts with “pt” I assume it’s some kind of flying dinosaur.

My father-in-law shared ownership with a couple of his cousins, who eventually wanted to sell. This was heartbreaking for him. The land is now owned by a rich oil executive, who presumably needs to hunt for caribou and ptarmigan in order to feed his family.

When my wife and her sisters decided to take a hiking trip in Norway, they budgeted in a seemingly irrational amount of time and expense simply for the possibility of stepping onto the old family land. We all flew into Stavanger, which was not where we needed to be for the hiking part of our trip or the family visit part of our trip. We rented a car and drove an hour and half to get us to a hotel in the right area, where we spent our first night. The next day, the sisters chatted up locals at the hotel and a convenience store to pinpoint the right road to take. We packed ourselves lunches from the hotel breakfast buffet knowing it would be a long hike.

After a few wrong turns, we found the correct road. As we expected, the road was blocked by a gate for which we had no key. So we parked our rental car, put on our backpacks, and hiked the eight miles of road from the gate to the trailhead. Hiking on a road in some ways is easier than hiking through the woods, but a road is a hard surface and it gets to your feet after eight miles.

Getting to the property from the road involved crossing a stream and climbing a ladder up and down over a fence. And there we were, standing on the edge of the ancestral homeland, blanketed in fog. We walked around for a few minutes. We took a few pictures. We sat on a rock and ate lunch. A token from my late father-in-law was tossed into a pond. Note that, under the Norwegian “right to roam”, we weren’t trespassing.

The property’s given name is Heien, but my informal name for it is Brygge-doon - a play on Brigadoon, the fictional Scottish village that appears out of the mists once every hundred years. “Brygge” is the Norwegian term for a wharf. Every town on the coast (and Norway is mostly one long, crazy, back-and-forth coastline) has a brygge neighborhood, usually old and quaint, a living symbol of the town’s history. 

It was a long way back to the car (even with the lucky help of a hydroelectric worker and his truck), then back to Stavanger, and the next day a multi-stop plane trip to get us to the city where our hiking tour would start. As I say, the whole thing was a seemingly irrational detour. 

I, for one, feel very lucky to have married into such history-affirming irrationality.