Baptism at the Arctic Circle

June 4, 2010
We started off our last day in Fauske with a lavish breakfast set out by our host, Rolf. I wanted to write about breakfasts in Norway since they are so different than what we are used to at home. Every morning at both of my host families to date, we’ve had a breakfast tray set out on the table. This tray includes the staples of at least two varieties of fresh bread, wasa crackers, butter, homemade jam (this morning we had three varieties including cloudberry and mixed berries), brown butter, brown butter jelly, cheese, salami, shrimp salad, mayonnaise, caviar, salmon, liver pate, beet whipped spread, milk, homemade honey, hard-boiled eggs, tomatoes, cucumbers, instant coffee and sugar. Most of this stays on a tray that is just left in the fridge as is, to make it easy for the next breakfast meal. Most Norwegians do start their day with a hearty breakfast that starts with the bread on the bottom and then different toppings are added. Rolf said that if he has to take lunch with him on the go, he’d make a brown cheese and bread sandwich for later in the day. What is brown cheese? Well, brunost as it is called is a whey cheese native to Norway first made in the Gudbrandsdalsost Valley. Traditionally, the cheese is made from goat’s milk but has been known to be a combination of both goat and cow’s milk, depending on the brand. It is a strong, sweet yet sharp flavor somewhat like caramel and goat’s milk. Brunost is made by boiling a mixture of milk, cream and whey carefully for several hours so that the water evaporates. The heat turns the milk sugar into caramel which gives the cheese its characteristic taste. It is ready for consumption as soon as it is packed in suitable sized blocks.

After breakfast, we packed our bags and said goodbye to Fauske as we headed out into the mountains toward Rognan. Our first visit today was to a cable company called Nexans and our tour guide this morning was Ronny Pettersen. Nexans is a Paris-headquartered French company with over 120 plants and 125,000 employees worldwide. In Norway, there are five branches, with the Norwegian headquarters being in Oslo. In Rognan, which is the northern cable factory in the world, the company focuses on producing telecom cables. Established in 1952, the company has 175 employees and is the largest industrial company in the Saltdal community. Amazingly, the company boasts more than 80 percent of their employees as certified skilled workers and is home to 20 engineers. The three main production lines include telecommunication cables, special telecom (STC) cables mainly for submarines and remotely operated vehicles (ROV) cables. In 2008, Nexans Rognan had revenue of 750 million NOK and the goal is to increase that revenue to 1 billion NOK in the next five years. Today, all the production is custom ordered. During our tour of the facility, we saw clear fiber optic cables bought primarily from East Asia and then dyed or striped depending on the use and the recipient. The cables are then wrapped with rubber, steel and other materials to form cables via a series of heavy machinery and eventually, the end product is wrapped around wheels. Nexans Rognan has manufactured a pulley system to allow the sometimes 150 tonnes of cable to travel alongside the trackline for 500 meters to then wrap directly on the ship for transportation.

From Rognan, we continued driving south to the Nordland Nasjonalparksenter (National Park Centre) in Storjord in Saltdal. Saltdal is located in the heart of Nordland County along the E6, which is the highway that connects all of Norway. The Nasjonalparksenter features an exhibition introducing visitors to the wildlife and history of the surrounding park lands. Along our hour long trek, we took in waterfalls, the majestic mountains and the rich plantlife on this protected land. Interestingly, archeologists have found permanent settlements dating back from 3000 BC to 200 AD, or the Stone Ages. Some of the finds include charred remains, stone objects, animal traps from as early as 2400 BC and several examples of shelter from the 1800s. We saw two replications of houses of the Sami people over the years and the knowledge and forethought was so impressive. For example, in one of the huts, there was a fire pit in the middle of the hut with a raised roof in the center to allow the smoke to escape and a bar hanging across the hut to tie up the meat or anything else that needed to be slow cooked over the fire.

Next stop: Polarsirkelsenteret! The drive from Storjord to Saltfjellet was about 20 minutes but difference in scenery and landscape was night and day. We left behind the green forests and lush waterways behind in favor of barren trees, overcast weather, lingering snow piles and huge forbearing mountains. There was no greenery in sight and as we drove closer to the Arctic Circle Center, the weather dropped from 7˚Celsius (44.6˚ Fahrenheit) to 3˚ Celsius (37.4˚ Fahrenheit). The center is really one small building with a gift shop, but the Arctic Circle is said to run through the building. The center opened on July 13, 1990 and is approximately 680 meters above sea level. The Arctic Circle is the southernmost point where you can see the Midnight Sun and here, in Salfjellet, the Midnight Sun is visible for about a month while the sun is visible for at least six months a year. Although it is the wrong time of the year for us, it is also an amazing place to see the Northern Lights! The Arctic Circle is located at 66˚ 33˚ north. Outside of the center building, there are Russian and Yugoslavian war memorials from World War II. These were prisoners of the German Nazis that were held captive in the area and forced to hard labor and made to pave the way from the Ragnon to Saltjellet.

After playing tourist at the Arctic Circle, we said goodbye to our Fauske hosts and switched cars to head about 80 km south to Mo i Rana. The scenery once again became lush and full of green spruce trees as soon as we moved a little way outside of the Arctic Circle boundary line and after passing several mountains and fjords, we met our new hosts – Vigleik and Arna (pronounced Ana) Haga. Vigleik is the city’s kultursjef (civil culture officer) while Arna is a pensioner (retired teacher). Over a delicious homemade meal, Vigleik and Arna introduced us to their part of Norway. Arna is a Sami from an island in Finnmark while Vigleik came from a city in the south. They met in Oslo while Arna was studying at the University and Vigleik was working in the dorm cafeteria and now 40 years later, they are married with twin boys (one married with two children in Trondheim and one single in Oslo). Arna also has an older daughter, who is married and lives with her three children outside of Oslo. It was interesting talking to Vigleik and Arna about their differing views on the United States (Vigleik fears we are losing the freedom the Constitution was founded upon, while Arna fears the United States being a world power that doesn’t necessary think of other countries while making decisions) and their opinions about Norway today. One of the most interesting stories of the night was Arna sharing her own history as one of the Sami people living in Northern Norway before the Nazis entered the country.

Arna was a two year old living on the coast of a fjord in Finnmark when her family heard news of the German Nazis crossing through Russia and Finland to enter the northernmost region in Norway. At the time, she was the only child so her parents packed up their necessities and decided to leave their village and cross the fjord to wait out the German invasion. They assumed this would take at most three weeks. This was October 1944 and the beginning of the winter months. Three weeks came and went and there was no sight of the German invasion or of the horror stories they had heard of the Germans coming into town and burning down villages, livestock and people. A majority of the other families that had fleed the hometown with Ana’s family decided to go back to their houses, believing the stories were exaggerated or perhaps the Germans had decided to skip the island. Only three families including Arna’s decided to wait longer even though the hours of light were rapidly decreasing and the brutal winter winds were about to start blowing. In January 1945, the Germans did make their way to Arna’s town and her family, still across the fjord in safety, could see the entire village burning and the people being taken into captivity. Arna turned to her mother and said, “Mom, now we have no house.” They feared their own safety but more importantly how they could survive a winter without the proper necessities. As Arna says, it was likely the Sami blood and the Sami ways that kept them alive. It also helped that the winter was particularly kinder than many others of the past. Almost five months after they first left their house, the Norwegian troops found Arna and the three surviving families. The Norwegian army , during those five months, had been setting up a base in Verde, Finnmark and were engaging the Nazis to push them out of the area. While Arna had been evacuated by boat around the tip of Norway to Verde, the troops did see that nearly 500 other Sami people had been hiding in the caves and mountains of her home island and needed rescuing. However, taking those people by the small boat they had was not practical so the Norwegian troops created a convoy and within two hours of reaching the island, had managed to rescue and evacuate all 500 remaining people. A couple months later, Arna’s father had managed to find a boat in Verde which he used to sail back to their home island and with the aid of the government, the islands of Finnmark were repopulated and rejuvenated.

I asked Arna why there seems to be such a division between the Sami people and the Norwegians. Unlike the Native Americans in the United States, the Sami people and the Norwegians all came to the area around the same time and co-existed for many years. When the glaciers started moving, the Noregians followed the reindeer and the fish further south while the Sami people decided to stay up north. However, it wasn’t until the Europeans decided to draw boundary lines between Finland, Norway and Sweden that problems between the two groups started developing. The Norwegians wanted to create pride in Norway and wanted the Sami people of Norway to give up their language and allegiance to Sami culture and adopt Norwegian customs. The Sami people refused and in fact, the Sami people of Finnmark now speak a language that is closer to Finnish than Norwegian because of how close they are to the border. Both Arna and Vigleik remember growing up hearing negative things about their respective cultures but when they met each other and introduced each other to their families, there was no anxiety about their intercultural relationship.