This week we conclude Elisabeth’s Norwegian Journal from 1993. Next week we feature Lars’ poignant memoirs of his Norwegian childhood.
Buffet breakfasts and lunches include the always wonderful homemade breads, cheeses, meats and sea gull eggs (slightly grayish, large as duck eggs, delicious as hen eggs); for dinner: reindeer stroganoff, salmon steaks. A lady tells what they ate during the war: cabbage, fish, potatoes. Sometimes just fish. (Lars, who grew up in Norway during the Occupation, remembers his grandmother sending him to the store to buy the rationed one-half-cup of milk. He and his cousin Bjorg had a little business going-picking up cigarette butts, emptying the tobacco into a can, and selling it. When he took a drag on a cigarette once his grandfather took him out to the woodshed and laid on the birch branch. It cured him.)
We sail into a fjord so narrow we nearly touch both sides. Deep, clear, black water, turquoise close to the rock. A thin, delicate veil of waterfalls over the face of the nearly perpendicular cliff. “
“Are we going east or west?” a man asks. “West,” says his wife, “there’s the sun.” “The sun means nothing in this country,” says he, “it just goes round and round.”
I would love to expatiate on each scene-the beautiful Lofoten with its islands, turquoise water, white beaches (the Gulf Stream keeps Norway’s coast open year-round), rich green fields and pastures, flowers, racks of thousands of fish being dried; Drivdalen, the quiet valley where my friend Kristin Lavransdatter lived, fictional heroine of Sigrid Undset’s Nobel prizewinning trilogy (READ it!). The distant tinkle of sheep bells, the fragrance of fir and hay, flowers newly planted on the graves of “The Green Howards,” British soldiers killed in 1940, still remembered by the locals. And then our three days after the tour ended with Lars’s beloved cousin Bjorg and her husband Sigurd, but you’ve had enough, haven’t you? More than enough? Forgive me! It was our first real vacation in nearly sixteen years of marriage and we can’t help wanting to share it.
**Excerpt originally from The Elisabeth Elliot Newsletter November/December 1993