Journey to the Unnamed Lake

A hazy Sunday.

In the morning I got up, took a group photo, hugged my friends who were leaving the house, toasted myself a slice of bread and laid two pieces of salmon on it to tide myself over, and swallowed a few feelings down along with it. I tried to work on the couch and failed, too sleepy for it. Heavy with drowsiness, I decided I simply hadn’t slept enough, and napped again for more than three hours.

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By the time I woke it was already four in the afternoon, the daylight bright, no different from morning. I toasted two more slices, spread on some salmon, drank a little water. As I sat down at the big wooden table, F suddenly asked whether I wanted to go with I to look at a lake. The lake had no name and no particular meaning. It was just a lake.

The tiredness in my body made me hesitate, but the view beyond the window rippled and shimmered, and I had no choice but to journey out across this earth.

Around six thirty, with the sun spread over the land, the three of us set off just like that, each with a water bottle in hand. Taxi service in Norway still keeps to its old ways, reservations made by email, so F wrote one asking whether we could book a car for the way home. By the time we left we still hadn’t heard back, but we set out anyway. We talked on and off along the way, like a dotted line slowly making its way through the twists and turns. We tried a few times to cut a shortcut, but in the end we followed that blue route on the map.

Along the way we passed several mountain springs, streams, waterfalls, and a rainbow that showed itself only from a certain angle. We came upon a little self-service shop selling jams, ice creams, sausages, and liquor, all made from wild berries. I bought a small jar of honeyberry jam, looked the item up on the machine myself, and checked out.

Mailboxes of every shape stood along the road. A mailbox always carries this lovely feeling, that any distance at all can be crossed. Halfway there, F got word that the eleven o’clock taxi had been booked.

Heading downhill like this, we soon reached Hafjell. First we stopped at a grocery store, bought some peaches and a face cream, and tried without success to buy postcards.

After some deliberation we settled on a Spanish restaurant. We ordered roast beef, wonderfully tender. We asked the waiter to bring it as quickly as he could, and he replied, what’s the rush, there is no night.

Full, we set off for the lake. Following the map, we walked onto a path that seemed untrodden, leading to a field thick with flowers that lay stretched between us and the water. We wanted to turn back, but on the way out we met two cyclists heading up the very fork we had just left, so we doubled back and took another path instead. We kept walking, on and on like that, until we reached a spot nearer the lake, where the far shore came clearly into view. The three of us gazed into the distance without a word, as if wanting to say something, or bring something up, yet each of us falling silent by unspoken agreement. Then I noticed what looked like another trail worn through the field, narrower, running straight to the lake. And so we finally came to the water’s edge, which alone made the two hours on foot worthwhile.

The three of us squeezed together on that narrow little path, unable even to stand in a single straight line.

We watched the ripples move, saw the stones on the bed near the shore, and tried to work out how long it would take to swim from this bank to the other. And just like that, both our bodies and our hearts had arrived at the lake.

We went back to the pickup point we had agreed on, only to find it was far from us, so through F we tried to reach our taxi driver. By the time we had walked to a McDonald’s and waited about half an hour, there was still no answer. We sent five more emails, and not one came back.

We tried calling the company number listed and heard a busy tone. So we turned to the young guy at McDonald’s for help. He tried calling for us, and still couldn’t get through. He said that if we were willing to wait an hour and a half until his shift ended, he could drive us home.

We were already worn out; two hours of hiking uphill would have been hard. So I began downloading every Norwegian ride-hailing app I could find, but it seemed Norwegians don’t work at night at all, and the requests we sent went unanswered.

Just as the three of us were losing hope, Uber suddenly showed that a driver was on his way to pick us up, though we could see his car wasn’t moving toward us. Unwilling to give up, I tried yet another app, and at last got a car on Taxifix.

Five minutes later we were in it. On the way from McDonald's over to that Toyota, we saw the two cyclists doubling back. Once inside, a strange feeling came over me. Even though it was the dead of night, even though we had imagined every kind of way home, even though by the time we got in we had already crossed into another day, I felt no anxiety at all, none of that “what do we do now” or “what am I supposed to do.”

Fifteen minutes later we were home, and as usual we sorted the dishwasher together, washed up, said goodnight, as if the lake had never remembered us at all, and we, too, seemed to let it go unmentioned.

Written in memory of the unnamed lake that, in truth, has a name.

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