In Lofoten the weather is the main event, and it turns faster than you can plan around it. The E10 runs the whole length of the islands, a little over a hundred and seventy kilometres of narrow, wind-buffeted road strung on bridges and undersea tunnels, the Arctic Ocean pressing in from both sides. I drove it north to south over four days, starting at Svolvaer with the forecast open on the passenger seat, and it promised rain, then a break, then rain again, so I built each day around the breaks. A clear hour here is worth arranging the whole day to catch.
The mountains are what you notice first, and they do not behave like other mountains. There are no foothills. A thousand metres of bare rock comes straight up out of a shoreline you could touch from the car door, and the road, with nowhere else to be, keeps to the water at the foot of it. The Norwegians call this the Lofoten wall. I drove under it one afternoon in cloud so low that half the range had gone into the grey, and the half still showing looked provisional, as though the mountains were waiting to see whether I would leave before they committed to being there.
I stopped the first night at Henningsvaer, five hundred people on a knot of rock half an hour off the main road, and ate at a place on the harbour with the boats knocking against the pilings outside. Fish soup, then cod, pulled out of the water more or less below the window. The man on the next stool had caught it, or fish like it. He had been on the boats since he was sixteen, he said, and this had been a thin season: the skrei coming late and staying deep, the drying racks up the road only half filled. He asked where I was headed, and when I said A, the last village, he told me there was nothing past it but water. He said it the way you confirm a fact, not the way you sell a view.
Reine, when I reached it near the end of the drive, is where you climb. The view the whole road keeps promising has to be earned on foot, up the Sherpa stairs cut into the flank of Reinebringen: close to two thousand stone steps that gain four hundred and fifty metres more or less straight up, and in high summer they are less a trail than a slow queue. I went up in the rain, near the back of a line of strangers, and the top handed me the archipelago whole, every island and channel of it, for about as long as the weather here hands you anything. Then it closed, and I climbed back down to the car.
The racks are the reason any of this is here. Every winter the skrei run down from the Barents Sea to spawn, and for more than a thousand years the whole of Lofoten has turned out to catch them, split them, and hang them over poles to go hard in the cold wind off the sea. The dried fish, torrfisk, has been an export since the Vikings, and it now carries a protected name like champagne or parma ham. You smell the racks on the road before you see them. At the very end, at A, there is a small museum in an old fish landing station that is only about this, the whole journey of a cod from the sea to a crate bound for Italy, and it is better than that sounds.
The light did what the fisherman promised. It came without warning, a summit clearing, a low sun laying the channel out in beaten silver, and then, before I was done with it, gone. I was there in the long days, when the sun barely sets, and I will not pretend I saw the other Lofoten. In December it does not rise at all, and the sky holds a flat pink noon that is neither day nor night; the boats go out into it, and the light people cross the world for is the aurora, moving green over the same black water. The fisherman said the cold season was the better one. He also said the roads were murder in it. I had no reason to doubt either.
The road gives out a little past Reine, at a village called A, a single letter, the last of the twenty-nine in the Norwegian alphabet. Fill the tank before you go, because there is no fuel for the final sixty kilometres, and I coasted the last of them into the village on the warning light. I parked where the tarmac stopped, in a wind that would not let me stand still, a drying rack on one side and on the other nothing but grey water going on to nowhere. It is a long way to drive to run out of road. I would turn around and do it again tomorrow, in worse weather, for the twenty minutes of light.
